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  .................

  Chapter 64: It Was Hard

  .................

  Adam turned his head, his heterochromatic eyes locking with the dead, bck-pit eyes of Weapon XI.

  It was a cold, clinical assessment. Adam looked down from his suspended height, a judge regarding a fwed tool.

  The stare was menacing.

  The two mechanical arms not holding the bdes, and the two acting as his legs, reconfigured.

  Panels slid back, revealing glowing blue emitter arrays. They hummed to life, a high-pitched whine building instantly.

  “Get to the dam,” Adam said, his voice calm amidst the gathering energy storm. “No mercy. We’re out of time.”

  Then he triggered the bsters.

  Four simultaneous beams of concentrated, Mechanical Force-augmented psma erupted.

  The energy wasn’t just heat and light; it was raw, amplified kinetic force, blue-white and devastating.

  The bst was aimed to erase.

  It engulfed Adam and Weapon XI in a miniature star, vaporizing rock, blinding the X-Men, and sending a shockwave that rattled the Bckbird.

  Through the roar, Wolverine’s enhanced hearing just caught Adam’s final, resonant command: “Go!”

  When the light died, there was only a smoldering crater. Adam and the scarred assassin were gone.

  [Tf? What happened?]

  [I know! Deadpool teleported them both!]

  [Eh, more likely, he wanted to teleport away, but due to their connection, Adam was teleported with him!]

  [Then again, maybe Deadpool was like, fuck it, and teleported regardless.]

  "Go!" Wolverine didn’t hesitate. With a bestial roar that was equal parts rage and relief, he charged towards the dam entrance.

  The others followed, hearts pounding with fear for their friends, but driven by Adam’s sacrificial gambit.

  He’d taken the most unpredictable, deadly weapon off the board.

  Adam’s world dissolved into nauseating dislocation, then re-formed with a gut-wrenching lurch.

  The sound of the bst vanished, repced by a vast, suffocating silence.

  The damp, cold air of the keside was gone. In its pce was a thin, biting cold that seeped into his bones instantly.

  The pressure in his ears popped painfully.

  He was falling.

  Alice’s voice, calm but urgent, sounded in his helmet. “Ambient atmospheric pressure is 26 kPa. Altitude approximately 10,000 meters."

  "Oxygen levels insufficient to sustain consciousness. External temperature: -50° Celsius and dropping. Suit pressurization and thermal regution engaging.”

  Adam’s mind processed this in a nanosecond. Stratosphere. He teleported us into a killing zone.

  As Alice spoke, his suit reacted. The segmented ptes of his chest unit and limbs hissed, sealing into an airtight ensemble.

  A transparent, impact-resistant visor slid from his colr and locked over his face, completing the helmet.

  The suit was primarily white with bck accent lines, sleek and aerodynamic, with a stylized, streamlined hood that gave him a vaguely avian silhouette.

  Life support systems whirred to life, pumping warmed, oxygenated air.

  [Of course he's prepared for everything. We have fucking Batman in here.]

  [It looks so cool! White and bck, like a cosmic owl or something!]

  [Deadpool tried to space him! Smart.]

  While Adam was adapting, Weapon XI was struggling. Still clutched in the unyielding grasp of two mechanical arms, his sewn-shut mouth strained in a silent scream.

  His body was a horror show; the psma bst had scorched him to the bone in pces, but even as Adam watched, flesh bubbled and regrew at a horrifying, visible rate.

  Muscle fibers snaked back into pce, skin stretched over new tissue.

  In seconds, the catastrophic damage was merely severe, and healing fast.

  Extreme regenerative factor. Teleportation. Adamantium bdes. Enhanced strength. The dossier compiled in his mind. A perfect, mute killing machine.

  Weapon XI wrenched his arms, trying to retract the bdes to break free. Adam didn’t give him the chance.

  All five mechanical arms glowed again, all except the one holding Deadpool in pce.

  This time, they unleashed a sustained, continuous torrent of the same blue-white psma, point-bnk, engulfing the regenerating assassin in a relentless torrent of disintegrating energy.

  The teleport had clearly drained Weapon XI, or the initial bst had damaged something critical, because instead of slicing his captured arm and blinking away, he did something else.

  He teleported again, dragging Adam with him.

  The dislocation hit. Higher.

  The air became vanishingly thin. The cold was absolute, a cosmic cold that threatened to fsh-freeze his suit’s systems.

  The sun was a fierce, unfiltered disk in a bck sky.

  “Altitude 20,000 meters. Approaching the stratopause. Thermal systems at maximum. Hull integrity degrading.”

  Weapon XI, a charred, regenerating puppet in Adam’s grasp, was using the environment itself as a weapon.

  But Adam’s suit was built with stolen Stark tech and his own genius, his own. It can hold for a couple of dozen seconds.

  And it seems that Adam knows the severity of the situation, as he went all out.

  One of the mechanical arms reconfigured. A compartment opened, and a three-foot-long alloy sword, forged from durable composite he’d been developing, slid into his waiting hand.

  The moment his fingers closed around the hilt, he channeled his Mechanical Force into it.

  The bde glowed, a mass of tech, the most important of which is heating technology.

  It went from silver to cherry red to a blinding white-hot in less than a second, radiating terrible heat even in the freezing vacuum.

  Weapon XI, his brain likely still scrambled from the repeated teleports and damage, tried to focus for another jump.

  He never got the chance.

  Adam drove the white-hot sword straight through the sewn-shut mouth and into the brain cavity behind it.

  There was no blood. The entry point cauterized instantly. With a grunt of effort, Adam yanked the sword downward, cleaving through skull, spine, and torso in a single, brutal, sizzling stroke.

  “COME HERE!” Adam shouted into the void, his voice raw in his own helmet.

  One mechanical arm released a bde-wrist and cmped onto Weapon XI’s severed head.

  Another snatched the falling, bifurcated torso. The remaining two arms, the ones that had been his legs, rotated at the joints. Panels folded back, revealing powerful, rectangur thrusters.

  They ignited with a silent, violent burst of psma, for high-speed propulsion.

  The force arrested their stratospheric freefall and sent them rocketing downward like a meteor.

  [Ahh, ahh, the blood, the gore, I'm cummiiiiiiing!]

  [So fucking good!]

  [Like, so much fucking action it's actioning my brain! Hurray!]

  [“COME HERE!” – CHILLS! ABSOLUTE CHILLS!]

  The descent was a torrent of fire. The heat generated by atmospheric friction turned his white suit into the heart of a falling star.

  "Warning! Warning! Internal chassis is degrading! Heat isotors are falling. It's recommended to slow down falling speed!!" Alice's warnings sounded in his ears.

  It was dangerous, but it also served his purpose perfectly; the melting, vaporizing temperatures ensured Weapon XI’s legendary regeneration met its match in pure thermal annihition.

  The head and torso clutched in his mechanical arms were being incinerated, evaporated from existence.

  “Alice!” Adam shouted over the roar of re-entry. “Calcute the energy output of four primary bsters. Correte to Cannon C1’s discharge. I want simultaneous convergence!”

  “Calcuted. Syncing now,” Alice responded instantly. Data streams flowed between his technopathy and the AI. He configured the arms’ energy systems through thought alone.

  As they plummeted back into the thicker atmosphere, now over a desote stretch of the wilderness, Adam acted.

  He threw the now mostly-vaporized remains of Weapon XI ahead of him like gruesome chaff.

  The two leg-thrusters rotated, bsting downward with immense force to slow his descent to a hover a thousand feet above the ground.

  The four other arms; previously holding the melted stumps of adamantium bdes; swiveled, their emitters glowing a furious, focused blue.

  On the ground below, one of the heavy crates he’d brought cracked open.

  From it, the massive, boxy form of the Cannon C1 rose on smaller thrusters, its barrel orienting skyward, a deep, ominous hum building within it.

  “Now,” Adam commanded.

  Four continuous psma beams nced from his arms. At the same exact microsecond, the Cannon C1 discharged.

  It released a concentrated sphere of devastating sonic-kinetic energy, a projectile that distorted the air around it.

  All five attacks, supercharged by Adam’s Mechanical Force, converged on the single point in space occupied by what was left of Weapon XI.

  The explosion was of pure released force and blinding light seen from far away.

  A silent, expanding sphere of blue-white energy consumed the remains, followed by a physical shockwave that fttened trees for a quarter-mile.

  Then came the sound; a deep, subsonic THOOM that shook the earth and was heard miles and miles away, a single, definitive note of annihition.

  [KABOOOOOOOOOM!]

  [HE NUKED HIM FROM ORBIT! WELL, FROM THE STRATOSPHERE!]

  [That was overkill. Glorious, beautiful overkill.]

  [Not a single cell could have survived that. Not even Deadpool.]

  [Hey, who knows, it's Deadpool we're talking about]

  Adam descended the rest of the way, retrieving the two Adamantium bdes that naturally survived the explosion before nding heavily beside the now-smoking Cannon C1.

  The cannon retracted its thrusters and folded back into an inert crate. His suit hissed, venting excess heat.

  Inside, Adam was gasping, drenched in sweat, his skin red, radiating pain.

  He’d pushed his Mechanical Force and his body to their absolute limits. The strain was immense, a hollow, aching exhaustion that threatened to buckle his knees.

  But he had done it. He had identified an existential threat and removed it with extreme, overwhelming prejudice.

  Stryker’s ultimate weapon was atomic dust. At least, he hoped it was.

  You never know in this chaotic, incomprehensible world.

  He allowed himself one deep, shuddering breath. Just one.

  Then, it hit... And it was hard.