The moment Apocalypse touched the blood, something happened: an awareness of its properties passed through him.
He didn't hesitate. Following the instruction, he closed his eyes and reached out with his mind, feeling for the rule fragments in the blood.
What he found startled him: a strong force inside it, dazzling, the power of lightning.
He drew the energy in, absorbed it, and memorized its information.
A breath later, his eyes opened, his finger lifted, and a flash of lightning leaped from the tip.
"Excellent. You've copied an electric mutant's ability straight from the blood. My hypothesis holds."
Ernst's excitement broke through.
Apocalypse stared at the arcs dancing on his fingertips, half disbelieving.
Gaining another's power this easily, it caught him off guard. His mind went to all the chances he'd let slip, and how much stronger he might have been.
The regret sat there, cold. If he'd known this sooner, he could have gathered far more and spared himself both the subordination and the heartache.
Ernst paid the contemplation no mind and kept feeding him blood from the tubes, one after another, the abilities copying across.
At the same time he turned the Reality Gem on the work, reading every change in Apocalypse's body and in how the soul took the information in.
In minutes, Apocalypse was folding the genetic information from the blood into himself smoothly, as if stamping it straight onto his soul.
Ernst watched it closely, marking each success in memory.
The early wins carried him on. He poured tube after tube into Apocalypse's hands, and Apocalypse, relishing the gains, cooperated all the way.
The fusion ran on until all twenty tubes stood empty.
"We'll stop here. You hold these abilities now, though you haven't mastered them on your own yet. Get a full grasp of each, integrate them, and forge something that's only yours. After a while, we'll move on to fusing the mutant genes themselves."
Eager to take the measure of his new strength, Apocalypse asked about that next fusion.
Merging the genes didn't just raise his strength; it hinted at a transformation, a higher tier of existence within reach if he fused enough.
"Come to me once a week. Each time, we fuse the rules and information from twenty mutant genes, and you spend the rest of the time understanding what you've taken on. You stay here until all of it is integrated."
Apocalypse agreed readily. He understood what this was worth.
Over the days that followed on Skull Island, he came to the lab each week, honing the abilities and, in the gaps, building a rapport with the other mutants.
It changed him. The more he moved among mutants, the less arrogant he grew, more willing to give ground.
He even took to playing games with the younger ones.
Meanwhile, Ernst's research bore fruit, and the methods it threw off for sharpening Apocalypse turned out to serve others too: his father, Chris, Kyle, and the Red Devils.
- - - - - - - - - -
One day, deep in the lab, a violent vibration pulled Ernst's head up.
Alarmed, he rushed outside and found two giants locked in a furious fight near the base of Skull Island, Apocalypse, and another, armored, twice the height the creature had stood a year ago.
The armored giant wore a cloak woven from condensed soul-bodies and armor built of nano-robots, and turned Apocalypse's blows aside without effort.
For a moment, the sight threw Ernst.
'Where had this opponent come from?'
Then it clicked. Only one mind could drive nano-robots like that, Red Queen.
So she'd joined the fight too.
Ernst came down fast and found a crowd of mutants ringed around the brawl, some laying bets, others calling out and pointing, the whole thing a lively show.
It told him at once this was no life-and-death struggle, a test, a friendly bout.
Relieved, he settled in to watch from the shadows.
The fight rolled on in front of him. The armored general landed a punch that drove Apocalypse back, then swept a long knife toward his chest.
Apocalypse stayed calm. He conjured an energy whip, the trick of a spirit-butterfly mutant, snared the blade with it, and tried to tear the weapon free.
The general answered by turning the knife into a spear, and the change caught Apocalypse off guard.
He gave up the fight for the weapon, let the whip go, sprang back, and floated up into the air.
A year of absorbing a flying mutant's genes had given Apocalypse flight of his own now.
The general, unbothered, triggered the cloak's shape-shifting, flowed the spear back into a long sword, and lunged.
Apocalypse's eyes snapped open, the whites gone red, and lasers tore out toward the general.
The armor on its left arm folded into a small round shield in time to catch the beams, while the long knife reshaped into a railgun and fired.
For all the Red Queen's computational edge, driving the general, Apocalypse used his energy absorption to swallow the railgun's electromagnetic shot whole.
It rocked him, but his super-recovery knit him back together fast.
The duel of giants tore the place up, wrecking buildings, much to Ernst's distress. Below, the mutants cheered them on, Chris, Kyle, Clark, and Eli loudest of all.
"Enough."
Ernst stepped in at last, appearing in the air, reaching out with gravity to peel the two combatants apart and put an end to the chaos.
The field went quiet, and admiration rolled through the crowd at the show of his power.
-------------
Author's Note:
Do you want to read 25+ Chapters ahead right now?
Stop waiting. Come over to the dark side. We have cookies, advanced chapters, and very, very detailed 'plot.'
patreon.com/
Dark_sym