People usually saw Eddie floating and flying his way across campus, so his powers of flight weren't really played up as anything particularly unique. And that was true, the power of flight in of itself wasn't particularly notable. But here's the thing – my boy could haul ass when he wanted to.
At top speed, he was the fastest person in the student body at this time. Without needing to temper his speed to follow someone else, Eddie made it back to school in a fraction of the time it took us to get to Westchester.
The three of us were lucky. Eddie brought us down to hide in the trees alongside the main road leading to Xavier's. Their attention was all on the school itself. Even the people posted outside were more concerned with handling anyone who seemed to be making a run for it than trying to keep anyone from getting in. We scoped out three of these 'containment units'. Two were made of militia-looking Sapien League fighters. One was made of the robed Purifiers.
Of course those two groups were working together. Why not? Both wanted to kill all mutants. What else did they need to get along?
Speaking of groups, why were the Avengers never around when this shit happened?
We got a head count of thirty. How many more were waiting inside the walls? Inside the school itself? I didn't want to risk Eddie having to fly overhead to try and do any recon. We could hear tons of gunshots from where we were.
"So? Any ideas?" Eddie eventually asked as we all hid, "We could probably fly over all of this and get to the buildings."
Perhaps, but no. We needed to provide some relief. If there were this many goons stomping around on the lawn, something was wrong inside and we would just be putting ourselves in the same position. If they needed some relief, we could at least provide a diversion. At best, if we played things right, we could put a huge dent in the enemy.
"Wolf, get in position to get the drop on those guys in the suits," I requested. His chances of taking on more than one of them at the same time was better than ours. He also had a better chance of finishing them quickly, "Eddie, Anyone in a robe with a big, white cross on it? Shoot first. Anyone in fatigues with a stupid Jason mask on? Shoot first. Shoot to kill."
Eddie didn't like it, but now wasn't the time to try and be the bigger person, "What about him?" He gestured to Jay.
A good question. Jay didn't have a weapon, and didn't really have powers that would help in a fight. He didn't even look like he wanted to fight, "Jay, you're our runner. Once we get their attention, get away and get inside to the others."
He wasn't as spooked as he had been at Stryker's church, but the kid was still rattled, whether it was by the danger ahead of us, or his part in what was happening. He listened enough to nod in understanding.
In a perfect world, he would get to someone who could fight back from the inside, and they would meet up with us outside before our luck ran out. Saberwolf might have been a war machine, but Eddie and I weren't.
Eddie and I moved a little ways away from Jay, so that when the shooting started, all of the bad guys wouldn't be looking in his general direction. There was a lot of wide open ground with no cover. We had to move.
"Dude, I'm so scared," Eddie revealed, his voice quivering slightly. He looked like he wanted to bolt, but he stood his ground, "I've been running my mouth for a year and a half about how good of an X-Man I'd be. Now we're here."
We all didn't have the benefit of having our mental wires telepathically adjusted like I did, "Wanna know a secret to keep from psyching yourself out? Stop thinking and go," I said to him, "Once you start, you can't stop."
I wasn't sure if I'd helped any, but Eddie had already made his decision. He was in it until the end, whatever that so happened to be. As far as I was concerned that made him braver than I was, "So, what's the play? We going with 'bug zapper'? How about 'scorched earth'?"
I started forming a Lux Bomb between my hands. Eddie's eyes lit up at the sight of it, "How about we start with 'death from above'?" He moved into position to pick me up, "Find a nice grouping. I don't want to waste this."
With that, we lifted off of the ground, over the walls and onto the grounds of the school. There were crater holes and fires all over the grass. There was fire and smoke visible from some of the buildings as well. It looked more like the battleground that it was than a place of education.
Eddie, eagle eye that he was, found me a fat, juicy target. Forget needing Wolf to take out any of the armored suits in the area. There were four of them gathered near the trucks that had presumably brought them.
I let the bomb drop, and Eddie didn't slow down a bit, knowing we needed to get as far away from the blast radius as we could. And what a blast it was. I couldn't turn around to look at it, but I could feel the shockwave and the heat.
Eddie let go of me, and I fell to the ground in a roll. He flew off to do his own thing as enemies approached the site of the blast. They were more focused on the explosion, which gave me a chance to wipe a few squads before they knew what hit them, thinning as many of the herd as I could before they got eyes on me.
"There he is!"
Luck couldn't hold out forever, and I heard the calls of people who had seen me. A hail of bullets soon followed from more than one direction, and I took cover by the recently created wreckage. It was something to protect me, at least. Thank goodness the trucks were armored. Now they were the ones caught out in the open. I waited for anytime I heard someone run out of ammunition and took a potshot at them. Still, they were closing in. The Purifiers especially, zealots they were, had little problem with putting themselves at risk to try and take me out.
It seemed like the Purifiers were serving as the elites, due to their training and resources, while the Sapien League were the rank-and-file due to their numbers. All brought together by their desire to kill off mutants. Heartwarming.
"Sol!" Eddie swooped down and lifted me up out of my position. He used the rising clouds of black smoke to cover our departure. Good man, "Are we winning?"
While we were in the air, I caught sight of Wolf. Watching him run a serpentine pattern into a group of desperately firing Sapien League gunmen before cutting them down was downright majestic.
"I sure as hell hope so," I said as I gawked at Wolf, "If we're still losing while all that's going down, I don't want to know what it'll take to turn it around."
"Shit! Sol, look!"
The area near the pool had been turned into a killbox, with three X-Men trapped; Cannonball, Wolfsbane, and Bishop. Somehow, only one of them, Bishop, was standing. He dragged the two others behind him, trying to get to some kind of safe place. He would periodically turn and fire, but it wasn't enough to get the Sapien League off of him.
I blasted the ones I could see from the air, which was a mistake. They turned their gunfire onto Eddie and I, and he paid the price for it.
A shot managed to hit me in the arm and side. Eddie took a bullet to the leg, which brought us both down to the ground hard, "Son of a bitch!" Eddie exclaimed, clutching at the new wound.
"Ugh," I grunted and pulled myself up. My right side was screwed, but I still had the left. With the one hand I had, I kept approaching militia off of us until we could get to Bishop and company, just inside of the nearest building. What a rescue.
Bishop roughly yanked the two of us out of the line of fire, "What are you two doing outside? Students in squads should be guarding the other kids!"
"We weren't even here when any of this started!" Eddie yelled, taking his shirt off to wrap around his leg as a tourniquet, something I neglected to do with my arm, "What happened to them?" He asked, referring to Cannonball and Wolfsbane.
They didn't have any bullet wounds, but both seemed right at death's door, "Stryker had some kind of glove. I don't know how, but it put Sam down mid-flight. Get 'em to the main mansion building!"
I knew how to follow orders from someone who outranked me. Even so, I still had concerns, "What about you? Are you seriously gonna take these guys by yourself?"
Bishop scoffed at me, hardly bothered at having to deal with six heavily armed assailants on his own, "The day I need two kids to save my ass..." He paused to fire a shot at a Sapien League soldier, dropping the number to five heavily armed assailants, "Go!"
I gathered up Cannonball and threw him over my shoulders. Eddie grabbed Wolfsbane. Thankfully, he didn't need full use of both legs to fly. Also, as a plus, he was quieter floating in the air than I was on foot. That was good, because it didn't take much longer to run into more trouble.
I peeked around a corner and found three militia and one Purifier working their way through the halls, the latter of which was equipped with a flamethrower.
"Okay," I whispered to Eddie as quietly as possible, "Our options are to go back outside and work our way around, or move straight through the dorms."
Eddie looked at me as though I were insane, "Why I want to go back outside to the killing field?"
I jerked my thumb in the direction of the bad guys, "Because there's a dude with a flamethrower clearing rooms."
Eddie's solution was simple, "So? Shoot him."
What a blunt and violent response, "And blow up the-?" From the look on Eddie's face, he no longer cared if our actions killed the people there to kill us. Getting shot probably did that to you, "Alright. Hold on."
The tank of the flamethrower was an easy target. I pierced it with a laser from barely peeking around the corner. The explosion was loud, fantastic, and destructive. As it would undoubtedly attract attention, Eddie and I quickly booked it then thereafter. Anyone we ran across from that point forward expected trouble farther away, so when they suddenly turned and found us, they were hardly prepared for my quickdraw blasts.
We eventually pushed our way into the main mansion. Once we made it to the open staircase in one of the great halls, we found ourselves trapped in a killbox by a force field, with fireballs then thrown our way, "Whoa-whoa-whoa!" I yelled, dodging the flames.
The sound of my panic voice must have been familiar to someone, "Holy shit, it's Solaris and Wing! Match, let up on the fireballs!"
"Yeah, stop trying to kill us!" I snapped, "Someone get down here and get these two off of us!"
Our attackers from upstairs were revealed to be Ben and Mark from the Paragons - Megan's teammates. I would have recognized Ben's flaming head from anywhere. If they had a negative opinion of me after the breakup, the dire situation the school was in set that aside.
Ben was quick to recognized Wolfsbane as one of the two we carried in, "Miss Sinclair! What happened?" He asked, taking his squad advisor off of Eddie's hands.
"I don't know," I took the chance to set Cannonball down to try and nurse my own wounds for a moment, "We flew back and found the fucking place on fire," Mark changed the kind of music he played through his headphones and began tending to Wolfsbane's injuries, "...Huh. Didn't know you had healing powers, DJ."
"It's the classical tunes, man," Mark said with a grin, Beethoven blaring from his player. It was then he finally noticing that Eddie was bleeding through the shirt he'd tried to wrap off his leg with, "Whoa. You got shot."
Eddie nodded stiffly, a grit to his teeth as tried to manage the pain, "We both got shot. Sol's hit worse than me."
I shooed Mark away before he could waste time dealing with me, "Sol's also tougher than you. Heal your teacher and Cannonball, then Eddie," Mark went to Cannonball next, seemingly heeding my advice, "So, the Paragons are watching this part of the building. How's it looking so far?"
Ben scowled at the direction we had come from, "We fell back to the main mansion. All of the student squads were given a spot to hold if the Purifiers pushed through. We were assigned here and set up a defense in depth deal. Mark and I are the first line, Megan and Nicky are the second line, Hope and Jessie are our runners."
Speaking of runners... "Have you guys seen Icarus?" I asked, "We sent him ahead to send word that we were going to fight our way in," He had to have made it. We couldn't have made more noise on our way in than we did.
Mark looked at the two of us with wide eyes, "You guys are why the pressure from outside let up? Nice!" He congratulated with a pat on the back for Eddie before getting to work on his leg.
"It's probably Saberwolf," I told him. Our resident A.I. and security worker was likely hard at work taking a chunk out of the scum outside, "Guys, how did this start?"
Ben and Mark looked at each other before the latter explained "There were explosions in the dorms before the sun came up. Then guys just started storming the school. It was a mess."
Smoke began to pour off of Ben's flaming head, showing how angry he was, "By the time everyone got their heads together enough to realize what was happening, they were in one of the dorms, shooting the place up."
I didn't want to know how many kids had been caught off-guard and cut down in the process. We'd moved past enough bodies on our way to the main mansion.
We didn't have orders, and we couldn't sweep the entire attack force off of the field on our own. As far as what was next, Eddie and I were at a loss, "What now, Sol?" He asked, "Do we link up with our team?"
It was as good an idea as any, "I guess so. I mean, we're in here now," Finding the girls probably should have been a priority once we'd arrived.
I got up to leave, when Mark went to stop us, "Wait, what about Solaris? I didn't heal him yet."
I wanted to just go, but Eddie fixed me with a look that showed he would have none of me running my wounded ass any farther around the mansion, "Alright. Thanks, DJ."
I'd lost quite a bit of blood by that point. The side of my shirt and jeans were soaked in blood. Probably the inside of my jacket as well.
The doors to the great hall blew open, knocking all four of us to the floor. I looked up to find Reverend Stryker marching in with an entourage of two Purifiers in armored exoskeletons. Look who finally made it to the battle. If their side were losing now, he seemingly didn't know it by the way he walked in like he owned the place.
Both rightfully pissed, Ben and I got up and fired at them with both hands, only for a pink force field from Stryker to stop our blasts. Neither of us bothered asking what it was. The only thing that mattered was that our combined firepower did nothing. Ben and Mark grabbed Wolfsbane, while Eddie and I got Cannonball out of there, dodging bullets and pink blasts by the skin of our teeth.
"What the fuck was that?" Ben yelled as we continued falling back, "Stryker stopped both of our attacks!"
I remembered Bishop said something about a glove Stryker was wearing. Indeed, there had been a glowing pink gauntlet on the man's arm. That thing had enough stopping power to put down two pretty tough mutants and could protect him from my and Ben's best shot.
"Dude, you're still bleeding," Eddie pointed out as we continued dragging our respective X-Men through the halls.
So I was. At least Mark had gotten the wound that really mattered - the one in my side. I could deal with a hole in the arm for the time being. We weren't going to get another chance for Mark to patch me up. Not without dropping our troubles onto someone else who might have been less equipped to deal with it than we were.
I stopped walking ahead and gave Eddie the entirety of Cannonball's weight, "We can't just lead Stryker farther in."
Eddie leaned himself and the unconscious man against the wall, "We can't turn and fight either. We've got two half-dead liabilities here."
Ben interjected with his opinion, "You guys can get Miss Sinclair and Cannonball somewhere safe. Solaris and I can fight. We've got to try."
I'd already made my decision. Whether someone was going to fight with me or not, I didn't care. I honestly would have felt better had no one backed me up. Then I'd only be responsible for myself. Ben was the leader of his own squad though.
The X-Men had their hands full. We couldn't count on them to save us when they were trying to protect everyone else too. Besides, I'd wanted to slap the taste out of Stryker's mouth since I first saw him on TV. I wasn't taking another step back without taking a shot at something along the way.
We didn't have to wait very long for more action. Styrker's entourage stomped through the halls, and Ben was good and angry. The moment he saw the metal frame of the exoskeletons, he let loose with fire blasts, "Raaagh!"
All this did was set them on us. The fire didn't do any damage by itself, but it did sidetrack them enough for me to throw a light blade down the corridor. I managed to nail it in an arm joint, less protected by armor to allow for mobility, cutting right through it... and the actual limb underneath.
"AAAAGGH! MY ARM!"
The man inside of the suit stumbled around wildly, swinging his stump of an arm around. Stryker had to move back behind the other exoskeleton who had to catch his buddy to keep from being knocked into. This immobilized him enough for me to throw a second light blade that destroyed the hydraulics in the first suit's legs.
Both exoskeleton suits went down under the sudden loss of stability. I grinned and moved in to finish the job, only to neglect one important thing.
When we had first come across them, Eddie had mentioned that we didn't know what they were armed with. Well, it turned out, they were armed with powerful laser cannons. The still functional exoskeleton lifted its cannon arm to fire at me. In a panic, I fired my own return blast as quickly as I could. Mine lost, exploding on contact with the enemy's, basically right in my face.
The positive was that their shot hadn't actually hit me, and I could endure being in the vicinity of my own explosive blasts. The negative was that Ben had also been nearby and had been affected by the blast as well. He went flying out of a previously broken window and out onto the lawn. I, on the other hand, bounced off of a wall. More accurately, I bounced off of a window frame and then off of the floor.
Why couldn't I ever get the gentler landing into nice, soft grass and dirt? No, I always had to fall into broken glass and chunks of brick and mortar. It was oddly comfortable to lay there though, once my body had gotten comfortable.
I turned my head to look at my enemies. The second exoskeleton was up and moving, while the first was still down and disabled. Good work, me.
"How is Cameron?" Reverend Stryker asked, standing over the downed exoskeleton as the still functioning one tried to tend to it.
"He's not going to make it, Reverend," The man said to Stryker, "The mutant nearly severed his arms and legs through the suit. He's bleeding out."
Stryker kneeled down by the man and opened the machine to reach the dying man inside, "Cameron, can you hear me? Son, rest easy knowing you've earned your place by God's side. You need not suffer any longer."
I took the chance to pull myself up and look out of the window Ben flew out of. He hadn't moved since his body had come to rest. I could see him breathing though. However, that left me alone. Stryker heard my feet crush debris on the ground and turned just as I took a shot at him. His damned glove protected him and his armored escort.
He blasted me with a pink beam that I was in no position to avoid. I then saw how it put down two fully-fledged X-Men with ease. Not only did it hurt like hell, it drained me of everything I had. It had been so long since I'd felt physical fatigue. My body just gave out, and that was that. No force of will was going to get me back up. Even trying to move my arms nearly made me black out.
...Did I just lose? It felt like I'd lost, because in my experience, losing usually hurt that badly.
Stryker calmly walked over, now seemingly unaffected by the death of one of his acolytes. Instead, he preferred to preen at the wanton destruction he had wrought, "I'm so glad you could make it back here to witness this. The devil's sanctum, brought down around the hellspawn army it was meant to raise. And you made quite the mess as well. You and your friend, Edward."
"It was a pleasure," I managed to say weakly. If I was going to die, I was going to be as annoying as possible about it.
Stryker chuckled, "As is this for me. There's always something to enjoy about doing God's work," He raised a clenched fist with his gauntleted arm, "My only regret is that your teacher couldn't be here to see this herself," He looked down at me with disdain, "A student of Katherine Pryde... the X-Man who almost cost Heaven its most important warrior."
"...And here I thought pride was a sin, and humility was a virtue," I held back a cry of pain as the Purifier in the exoskeleton grabbed me by the neck and threw me against the wall where I slumped to the floor and sat.
Stryker walked over and kneeled down in front of me, face-to-face, "I was a soldier. A crusader. One of God's chosen to fight in the war against Satan. But then I strayed. An X-Man caused me to doubt my role in this war," His breath was gross, and he kept spitting when he talked, "Your teacher convinced me to cast myself into Limbo, and worse, she convinced me that God was wrong."
I wished I had enough strength to rear back and headbutt him. As I was, it wouldn't even have been a decent hit, "She should have killed you."
"What she did was worse!" He gave me a hard shake, bouncing my head off of the wall, "I had questioned everything I knew to be true, and for my actions, the Lord punished me. I begged him for forgiveness, but he answered my prayers with silence. I was lost. I believed God had cast me out of his kingdom. But I was wrong. God gave me a second sign."
From how he held it up in my face, he meant his gauntlet thing, "...I love Nintendo too, but the Power Glove is the worst accessory they ever made," He didn't think I was very funny from how he grabbed my head and pumped pink energy into my face, "AAAAAAHHHH!"
It hurt, to say the least. It was the exact same feeling as the first time, only this time, the focal point was through every orifice in my head. I thought I was dead. I wanted to die. But he wasn't done taking out his frustrations on me that he couldn't on Miss Pryde.
Last time I checked, wrath was also a sin.
By the time he let go, I could barely hear the rest of Stryker's impromptu sermon, "This is but one part of a gift. One greater than I could have ever imagined," He said, "Mutants are growing in number, destroying the Eden God left for us humans before our eyes. This is just one part of the bounty God has bestowed upon his soldiers to fight back. The future will be restored to the Lord's chosen."
I was about to pass out. Probably about to die. The last thing I wanted to have rattling around in my brain for the rest of eternity was Reverend Stryker's voice, "Hey... really quick. What color are my eyes?"
I didn't care what his answer would have been. I didn't even wait for him to give me one, or to spout whatever mean-spirited remark he could think up. I channeled energy to my palms and fired an explosive shot.
The 'good' reverend gasped. He fell back away from me, missing his left arm and a good chunk of his right side. I couldn't move my arms, couldn't even feel them, but my palms had at least been pointed upwards. I didn't need to aim. I didn't care what I hit. He was a squishy human. Historically, whatever I blasted on baseline humans wasn't staying attached.
Moron. Why would you get that close to someone like me when I was still breathing? His little super glove didn't do jack if he didn't make it do anything himself.
"Good," I rasped, pleased with myself, "That means I had at least one more of those left in me."
Despite my vision starting to flicker, I could see him convulsing from shock and choking on his own blood. His legs kicked and his body writhed. It wasn't a very noble sight. Fitting for him. To be honest, the sounds of him thrashing and gurgling were downright therapeutic. Ringtone material, right there.
"REVEREND!" The last man standing in the exoskeleton cried once he saw his leader begin to die on the floor, "YOU DEMON!" He stomped over to squash me underneath his foot instead of just shooting me. My death was not about to be clean.
Well, if I was going to die, at least I blew the organs out of the guy who started it. I could be satisfied with getting killed after cutting the head off of this particular serpent.
I couldn't quite see, but I could hear the unpleasant sound of metal forcefully warping. The last time I checked, I wasn't made of metal, so it wasn't me. I tried to focus my eyes enough to see a few feet ahead of me.
If you've ever seen a busted can of biscuits; that was what this suit looked like. Only, instead of the raw biscuits popping out, it was circuits and machinery.
Wrapped around the middle of the ruined piece of weaponry were the mighty metal arms of Colossus. Arms I then found myself picked up into once the ruined exoskeleton was thrown aside. He was not a comfortable man to be held by, at least not when he was metal, "God... Bellamy, what have they done to you?"
Painful shit. That was what. But if it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else. In fact, there had been people before me, "...How'd you know where I was?"
"Ruth picked up on you when you arrived. I went to get you and Eddie," Mister Rasputin explained, "You two moved a lot. Had to fight way across the grounds."
So, we could have had help if we'd just hunkered down and stayed in one spot? Well I didn't know that at the time. And I'd made things harder for him.
"Sorry," I apologized.
Mister Rasputin brushed the apology off easily enough, "Eddie found me. And he sent me here, to you."
I loved that big Russian S.O.B. I don't care what anyone said. Mister Rasputin was the best.
I turned my head to try and look over his shoulder, "Ben is-."
"He will be fine," Mister Rasputin turned so that I could see that Ben was being tended to, "This is not your problem any longer."
The sounds of battle that had been so overwhelming when I'd arrived were notably more distant. Were the Purifiers and the Sapien League running away? I wanted to get up and go at them. Even if whatever was left of them hadn't fired a shot on school grounds, they were just as accountable as the prick with the biggest body count based off of intent.
But Mister Rasputin was right. I was basically an invalid, so I was no good in a fight. All I could do was lay back and let him carry me somewhere safe for the rest of the battle.