"What happened?"
Wanda noticed Peter's spine go entirely rigid. He had stopped looking at the spectacular light show over the amphitheater and was staring out over the dark Genoshan skyline.
"Something's wrong," Peter said, his voice losing all its casual warmth. He didn't bother hiding his urgency. "Something highly dangerous just woke up. We need to go—oh, wow!"
Before Peter could even finish his sentence, Wanda stood up. Her hands glowed with thick, dark crimson energy. The chaos magic enveloped them both, lifting them effortlessly off the concrete ledge and launching them over the stadium wall.
As they crested the perimeter, Peter saw it. Massive, unnatural, jagged blue lightning was violently tearing across the night sky, completely shorting out entire city blocks.
"Is my father fighting someone?" Wanda asked, her brow furrowed in deep concentration. She could sense the massive, shifting electromagnetic fluctuations in the atmosphere, but the magnetic signature didn't match her father's usual, overwhelming control.
"Drop us in that alley," Peter pointed down at a dark, secluded corridor between two high-rise apartments.
Wanda set them down softly. The second Peter's sneakers hit the pavement, he gave the mental command. The symbiote surged out of his watch, rippling like dark water over his civilian clothes. In less than a second, the red and blue symbiote suit locked into place. Spider-Man and the Scarlet Witch sprinted toward the epicenter of the lightning storms near the Magneto Palace.
Meanwhile, down on the crowded stadium floor, Kitty Pryde felt her specialized X-Men communicator vibrate intensely against her hip. It was a priority-one tactical alert from Logan. Kitty glanced up at Alison Blaire's dazzling light show, letting out a heavy sigh of profound regret. She immediately phased straight through the dense crowd and the steel barricades to rally Dani, Sunspot, and Cannonball.
The target Peter had been hunting all afternoon had finally shown his face.
Ten minutes earlier, deep in the subterranean vault beneath the palace, Max Dillon had opened his eyes.
He didn't just feel powerful. He felt like a god.
Six agonizing hours of intense Vita-Ray irradiation had completed the surgical splice. Miss Sinister had meticulously, flawlessly embedded the bio-electric generation protocols of the Oscorp eel directly into his X-gene. A perfect secondary mutation.
Max looked down at his hands. His skin was no longer a pale, human tone. It was a translucent, blinding blue, shimmering and rippling with raw, uncontained electrical energy. His entire skeletal structure seemed to strobe with the overflowing voltage. He didn't just walk out of the gene-editing chamber. He shattered the pod, ignored the laws of gravity, and blasted straight up through the reinforced steel ceiling of Magneto's impenetrable safe.
Bursting out into the night sky above Port Hammer, Max unleashed a blinding, omnidirectional wave of lightning. He hovered in the air, throwing his arms wide.
He took a deep breath. He didn't pull in oxygen; he violently inhaled the raw alternating current directly from Genosha's central power grid. With every breath, millions of volts surged upward from the city's transmission lines, feeding directly into his chest. He greedily savored the charge.
So good. So incredibly comfortable.
Max could physically feel every single electron flowing into his cells. The industrial-grade currents that used to burn his flesh and short-circuit his nervous system now only brought him absolute, unfiltered euphoria. He spun around in the sky, aggressively drawing in every stray megawatt he could find, instantly plunging the capital city into a massive blackout.
Down on the grand steps of the palace, Magneto and Logan marched out into the night air.
Logan clamped a half-chewed cigar between his teeth, looking up at the glowing blue human battery draining the city. "Foolproof subterranean vault, huh, Erik?" Logan growled, popping his six Adamantium claws with a metallic snikt.
Magneto stared up at Max Dillon, his aristocratic face twisted into a mask of cold, absolute fury.
"Take him down with your students, Wolverine," Magneto ordered, his heavy cape whipping in the electrostatic wind.
"And what exactly are you going to do?" Logan snapped.
"If the test subject has completed his genetic modification, then Nathaniel Essex is currently attempting to extract the gene-editing array," Magneto stated flatly, his eyes narrowing. "That device belongs to Genosha. Essex will not take it. Besides... hunting this fugitive was originally your mandated mission."
Logan glared at the mutant king for a solid three seconds. He let out a harsh, barking laugh. He tapped his comms, sending the rally ping to Kitty and the kids. Logan stretched his thick neck, cracking his vertebrae, and pulled his yellow-and-black cowl over his head.
"Fine," Logan grunted, dropping into a low crouch. "Mind giving me a lift?"
"Certainly, Logan."
Magneto didn't ask for clarification. He simply extended his right hand, locking his magnetic grip directly onto the indestructible Adamantium laced to Wolverine's skeleton. With a sharp, violent flick of his wrist, Magneto launched the two-hundred-pound mutant straight up into the air like a surface-to-air missile.
The legendary Fastball Special.
High above the palace, Electro was too busy gorging himself on the city's power to notice the yellow blur hurtling directly toward his blind spot.
Logan collided with Max mid-air. He drove all six razor-sharp claws deep into Electro's back.
Max shrieked. But the fatal wounds didn't kill him. He spun around wildly in the air, unleashing a point-blank, millions-of-volts discharge straight into Wolverine's chest.
Logan's muscles seized violently. The horrific smell of cooking meat instantly filled the night air. Both men plummeted toward the concrete plaza below.
A thick, highly insulated black web-line shot out of the shadows. It caught Logan perfectly around the waist, violently snapping him out of his free-fall just ten feet above the pavement. Peter swung down, hoisting the smoking mutant onto a nearby telephone pole.
"You doing okay there, Logan?" Peter asked, waving a hand in front of his mask to clear the pungent smell of burnt hair.
"Hard to say, kid," Logan wheezed. Plumes of gray smoke were literally rising from his gritted teeth. "I've fought a lot of spark-plugs in my life. This guy hits different."
Peter dropped down from the pole, walking toward the deep, smoking crater Max Dillon had carved into the asphalt.
Max slowly levitated out of the rubble. Where Logan's claws had pierced his flesh, he wasn't bleeding red blood. Thick, glowing blue plasma leaked from the lacerations, violently crackling and hissing as it reacted with the oxygen.
Peter stared in morbid fascination. What kind of insane biology is that? Is he even technically human anymore?
Max's glowing white eyes locked onto the telephone pole. He desperately wanted to fry the badger who had stabbed him. But he needed more juice to do it right. He was only at thirty percent capacity.
"I need more power!" Max roared, raising both hands toward a nearby high-voltage transformer.
"Yeah, how about we skip dessert?!" Peter yelled.
Peter commanded the symbiote to generate its thickest, non-conductive webbing. He fired two heavy streams, wrapping them tightly around Electro's raised wrists. Peter planted his boots, twisting his hips, and violently yanked Max's arms downward, pinning the glowing hands firmly to the asphalt.
"Electrified grounding!" Peter shouted, straining against the intense heat radiating up the web-lines.
Before Electro could burn through the restraints, a wave of dark crimson energy slammed into him. Wanda descended from the sky, her hands glowing brilliantly as her chaos magic tightly bound Max's legs and torso to the crater.
Just then, two distinct heat signatures arrived on the scene. Sunspot and Cannonball blasted out of an adjacent alleyway. Roberto da Costa unleashed a searing beam of pure solar radiation, while Sam Guthrie slammed into Electro with a localized kinetic force field, pinning the living battery completely to the street.
"Hey! You guys have a telepath on your roster, right?!" Peter yelled over his shoulder, struggling to hold the webs steady. "Can we just shut his brain off?! As long as he's conscious, he's going to keep pulling from the grid!"
Logan dropped down from the telephone pole, his severe electrical burns already rapidly knitting back together beneath his torn suit.
"It ain't that simple, bub," Logan grunted, popping his claws again. "Dani's telepathy doesn't work like Chuck's or Jean's. She connects with animals, or she pulls your worst fears out of your head to project illusions. She can't just flip a psychic off-switch on a human mind."
Peter gritted his teeth. He looked over at Wanda. Heavy beads of cold sweat were forming on her forehead. The raw, escalating voltage was actively fighting her magic, threatening to shatter the crimson binds. Peter quickly fired another thick layer of insulated symbiote webbing over Electro's chest to ease the strain on her.
Honestly, Peter thought, his muscles burning with the exertion. Magneto literally controls the entire electromagnetic spectrum. He is the absolute, ultimate hard-counter on the planet for this guy. Why the hell is he playing hide-and-seek in the basement?!