Emotions hit Magneto from every side. Meanwhile, back on the farm, Ernst and Chris sat in silence, letting the quiet hold.
After twenty-some minutes, Ernst exhaled and came back to himself.
"Don't sit with the bad things. You made your choice, so don't regret it. You'll see your mother again, and I think she'll come around in time. There's something else I need to tell you: you have a sibling now. A sister. The two of you should get on well."
"A sister!"
Chris's shout brought Tina, Kyle, and the others to the doorway to see what was wrong.
It took him a beat.
"Father, is she another accident, like me? How many more are out there? A few more and we'll field a basketball team. How has nobody looked into this?"
Ernst cuffed the back of his head.
"Don't talk nonsense. Your situation aside, I promise you there are no others."
By now, everyone had spilled outside, curious about this so-called daughter. Ernst saw no reason to hide it.
He laid out Eli's story for them all, then used Apparition to bring her to the farm.
When they saw her, they went still. Built from the fusion of countless mutant genes, Eli was the human idea of beauty made real.
She looked eight years old, but her awareness was that of a newborn. Even with everything Gaia and Alaya had left in her mind, her eyes held a clean, untouched purity, as if the human spirit itself could grow up out of them.
Everyone crowded in around her, lavishing attention, and Ernst found himself pushed to the side, suddenly beside the point.
It was too much, too fast. Frightened, Eli broke from the crowd and bolted behind Ernst, hiding there, plainly scared.
He worked at calming her, introduced her to Chris and the others properly, and trusted them to manage the rest.
Before long, he caught Eli and Chris talking and laughing together, and let himself relax.
, ,
The relief didn't last the afternoon.
Tina had heard the full story of Cairo by now, what her sons had walked into.
A god. A thirty-meter god is tearing the desert apart. And her two boys are in the middle of it.
She didn't raise her voice. That was the first thing Kyle noticed, and the thing that made his stomach drop.
"Kyle. Clark. Come here."
The air in the room changed before they had a chance to run.
It thickened, went still, the way a room goes still when every door has quietly locked.
Kyle felt the floor stop being optional. His feet left it. So did Clark's.
The two of them hung there, a hand's width up, turning slowly to face her, and not a muscle of theirs moved when they tried to.
This was the woman the masters of the mystic arts spoke of in careful tones, someone as strong as the Sorcerer Supreme.
Right now, she was using none of it to threaten and all of it to hold two children precisely where she could look at them.
"Do you know," she said, very evenly, "what I felt when I learned where you'd gone?"
The space behind her bloomed. Not a memory, not a vision exactly, a possibility, rendered in cold light: Clark spinning broken through the air, Kyle's grimoire dark and silent in the sand, both of them small and still under a giant's shadow.
She held it there long enough for them to see it in its entirety.
Then she closed her hand, and it was gone.
"That. That is what I felt."
Clark's lip went. He was ten.
"Mom, the general needed..."
"The general," Tina said, "is a weapon your father built. You are my son."
The light around them tightened a fraction, not painful, just absolute, the gentlest possible reminder of exactly how much power was deciding to be gentle.
"Weapons can be rebuilt. Try to grasp the difference between those two things."
Kyle, fourteen and never quite able to leave well enough alone, opened his mouth.
"We won, though."
The look she gave him could have grounded the Phoenix.
He shut it.
She let them down. Slowly. Their feet found the floor, and the air went ordinary again, and that was somehow worse, because it meant the lesson was over and the part he dreaded had arrived.
She crossed the room, took Clark's face in both hands, checked it like she didn't believe the reports that he'd come home whole, then pulled Kyle in by the collar and did the same to him.
"You will not do that to me again," she said, quietly, into the top of Kyle's head.
"Either of you. I will turn this whole farm inside out before I let it happen twice. Do you understand me?"
It wasn't a question, and they were smart enough not to treat it as one.
"Yes, Mom."
"Yes, Mom."
She held them a moment longer than the scolding strictly required.
From the doorway, Ernst watched, said nothing, and did not interfere. Some forces on Earth he handled. This one he knew better than to.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Henry Morgan, the farm's housekeeper, laid out a lavish dinner to mark Ernst's return.
Ernst ate his fill, the thing he'd missed most crossing the universe, and somewhere in the small hours fell asleep.
While the farm held its quiet, the world outside did not. Word of the Cairo war ran out through every channel, and it terrified people, world leaders most of all.
The scale of it and the nearness of the threat to Earth laid their helplessness bare.
Faced with the prospect of annihilation, men who held real authority found it bought them nothing, and fell back on prayer.
Then they poured money into weapons and hardened every defense they had against mutants.
At the same time, shadow powers went digging into Chris and the others, working every angle, courtship, seduction, threat, anything that might put a leash on them.
Ernst couldn't have cared less. Put plainly, he feared no one on Earth.
The power was his own, and the forces behind it were formidable.
In single combat, only the Ancient One could go against him.
What had once given Ernst pause now read, on the math, as a clean hundred-percent win.
In a pitched battle, he commanded thousands of mutants, Arno's enhanced mercenaries, the golden legions, and the various legions of magical beasts.
In a real conflict, he could erase the opposition inside of minutes.
Under Kerry's management, his business empire spanned the globe.
Hydra's scientific staff turned advanced technology into products built for Earth's conditions, and the wealth that came back was beyond rivals.
They called him the uncrowned king, and the name fit; a sneeze from him could move the whole planet.
For all the secrecy around it, Kerry split control of the industries across many hands, so none of it ever drew the wrong kind of eye.
Out in space, the Black Shadow mercenary group ran on its own and thrived, banking funds, acquiring technology, a real instrument of Ernst's that worked cleanly even when he never gave a word of direction.
So Ernst spent his gray days on the farm, finding his ease in nightly talk with Tina, venting everything the universe had piled on him, and studying Apocalypse's soul.
By the familiar method, he wrapped the soul in the red light of the Reality Gem and went looking for what was inside it.
It took the Gem a full day to spin a custom illusion out of Apocalypse's soul.
That was unheard of for Ernst, who was used to reading magical treasures far faster.
The environment the Gem built mirrored the real world, so insight won inside the illusion held outside it, too.
But the complexity of this particular soul demanded the long study.
He sank his consciousness into the illusion and came away richly paid. Apocalypse's soul had outgrown the ordinary understanding of what a soul was, sitting in a register beyond it entirely.
Ernst found the origin of the change in Apocalypse's own memory, the blood of a Celestial. A pity the Celestials' bodies had been gone for untold ages.
The soul had evolved into a weave of rules and information, past the limits of flesh. And yet, for all that height, Apocalypse had never come into his true abilities.
He kept himself going by wearing other mutants' bodies, his rule-governed soul automatically taking on the powers of whoever he seized.
That was how he held his original abilities even after changing hosts.
In some ways, he could outstrip beings like Odin and Thanos.
Where others labored to understand the rules, Apocalypse simply owned a soul made of them.
Ernst could see the inefficiency in his approach. Instead of grabbing bodies at random, copying the blood of one chosen mutant would have handed him complete genetic information.
Apocalypse was like an ordinary man who'd inherited a century of mastery and never quite learned how to use it.
Most beings are limited to a single elemental force, hemmed in by how much energy they have. Apocalypse, with godlike power and a regularized soul, reached instead for omniscience and omnipotence.
Every mutant ability he collected drew him nearer a god's shape. Gather them all, and he might truly reproduce the power of a Celestial.
Few in the universe walk the road of omnipotent rule. The cost is reckoned too high; the more rules understood means energy is spent at a punishing rate.
Ernst was the exception. He'd first used the Gem to crack open the channel of his own brain's evolution and start the climb toward omniscience.
Now Apocalypse's soul laid out a second route, one that, folded into his existing methods, promised faster growth.
Watching the soul lie there in its deep sleep, Ernst felt the contradiction. Both of them walked the same road.
Apocalypse, the better-born by far, had stalled for want of a super brain.
Ernst, short on innate gifts, had ground his way up through nothing but relentless work and was winning by inches.
Lifting the limits, letting his brain develop on its own, could carry him all the way to omnipotence. But that transformation would also be the end of Ernst as Ernst.
He sat with the soul and weighed his next move. With the Gem's analysis complete, he had what he'd come for.
By the cold logic of removing any future threat, killing Apocalypse was the right call. Still, he hesitated.
Apocalypse was a fearsome fighter, and controlled, he'd be an asset worth keeping. The trick was guarding against the backlash, a thing that could be unpredictable.
In the end, he found his answer. In the underground laboratory on Skull Island, he summoned a phantom and brought out a small cockroach from a sealed vault.
It looked like nothing, an ordinary insect steeped in a white substance like a silkworm in its thread. It was a Gu worm.
First refined in China, its genes were a fusion of countless insects, and infused into a soul it could grow, on its own, a body shaped to fit that exact soul.
Ernst had no intention of gifting Apocalypse a body tuned to his power.
He'd worked the worm the other way, into a cage, the final prison for Apocalypse's soul.
The insect answered to Ernst now, a fail-safe. If Apocalypse ever moved to resist, ever became a threat, Ernst could end him with nothing more than a thought.
-------------
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