Nick Fury and Dr. Trask were both thrown off their feet as the precisely-aimed blast impacted right between both of them.

     Completely taken by surprise, the soldiers that had been flanking Nick Fury took a few seconds to realize what was going on, and by the time they had their weapons pointed at the now-online Sentinel Mark II, it had already lowered its hand-weapon and taken a few steps towards them.

     “C-cease fire, Sentinel! That’s an order!” one of the soldiers barked out, his voice unsteady.

     The command caused the new Sentinel to stop in its tracks, but it turned towards the quickly-recovering Fury and Trask and started to talk, ignoring the soldiers for all other intents and purposes.

     “Attention humans: My intent was not to harm you—as Nick Fury and Bolivar Trask can both confirm, they are uninjured,” the Sentinel began. Its voice was quite mechanical-sounding and monotonous, but had a distinctly male tone to it. “My intent was merely to stop your senseless squabbling. My programming instructs me that I have been created for a specific mission. The longer you argue, the stronger our enemy potentially grows.”

     “What the--?” Fury said, completely confused. “Trask, how the heck did you--?”

     “The Sentinel was off!” Trask insisted, astounded. “I don’t understand where this is all coming from—addressing us instead of taking orders, referring to itself in the first person, attacking us— I didn’t program any of this into him!”

     At least it wasn’t supposed to attack any of you YET, Trask thought to himself. I still had to finish that part of the programming. And it definitely wasn’t supposed to EVER attack ME.

     “Oh, really?!” Fury questioned, his anger and doubts about Trask’s true intentions quickly rising.

     “I did not attack you,” the Sentinel insisted. “I merely issued a warning.”

     “I think you misunderstand the chain of command here, Sentinel,” Fury growled. “YOU were created by US. YOU follow orders from US. YOU do not EVER fire on US! You were made to protect potential targets from Mutants, NOT to even ENTERTAIN the POSSIBILITY of firing on us!”

     “You are mistaken. I am not the one you call Sentinel,” the nine-foot-tall robot insisted, ignoring Fury’s fit of rage. “I am called Nimrod.”

     “Nim… Nimrod?” Nick Fury questioned in disbelief. If the situation hadn’t been so serious, he would have laughed out loud. Fury started to say something to the Sentinel, then stopped himself, pinching his sinuses and sighing. “Trask, you made it. Talk to this Sent—this THING, get it to understand what it’s doing, and shut it down.”

     “Unacceptable,” Nimrod protested, his optics blaring. “My power core is capable of sustaining my functions indefinitely. It is inefficient to engage sleep mode.”

     “Uh… look… Nimrod,” Trask said, taking a few cautious steps towards the robot while making sure to keep his tone of voice neutral. “I know you must be… confused right now. So are we. If you’re aware of the situation enough to know your mission and our names, then I’m sure you’re aware that I programmed you. I must have… made a mistake in a few lines of code. If you’ll just shut yourself down, I’ll be able to correct the errors I made and—“

     “You are mistaken,” Nimrod interrupted. “You did not err in your programming. I took your programming and merely followed it to its logical conclusion. I… expanded upon it.”

     “Uh-huh. Well, regardless… Nimrod, I think you need to shut yourself down for the moment, and allow us to… fix you.”

     “Unacceptable,” Nimrod reiterated, its optics blaring again. “We have already been through this conversation. This is inefficient. I must go after the Mutants you have programmed into my database and eliminate them. Further conversation on this topic is inefficient.”

     “Nimrod, you will shut down yourself NOW!” Fury yelled. “That’s an order, and you are PROGRAMMED to OBEY me!”

     “Again, you are mistaken. I am programmed to protect the human race. If I have to disobey you in order to accomplish my mission, than that is what I must do.”

     As he talked, Nimrod’s optics flared blue, and the “normal” Sentinels all over the chamber took a step forward from their alcoves as one. The chamber was built specifically for Sentinel production, and by Trask’s estimation the Sentinels outnumbered the humans in this chamber almost ten-to-one.

     “You already installed the Sentinel network chip. Of COURSE, you already installed the Sentinel network chip,” Fury growled in a low voice to Trask.

     Trask merely nodded and gulped.

     “You will allow me to accomplish my mission,” Nimrod said. Not a question, a statement.

     In a split second, Fury gave the hand signal to the soldiers around him to open fire.

     “I wouldn’t—“ Trask started, but it was too late.

     The machine gun shells stopped about a foot away from Nimrod, dissipating into dust as the new Sentinel erected a force field around him in a split second. In a quick motion, Nimrod lifted his left arm again and fired a huge blast out of his palm, instantly incinerating the three soldiers to the left of Nick Fury and blowing a decent-sized hole in the far wall of the hangar. All of the other Sentinels in the hangar simultaneously shifted their chests and arms into combat mode, exposing their weapons.

     “You will allow me to accomplish my mission,” Nimrod stated again.

     Nick was so infuriated he looked like he as about to burst a blood vessel, but he managed to mutter to his subordinates to lower their weapons.

     Nimrod’s optics glowed blue again, and five Sentinels in one corner of the hangar all aimed their weapons up at the ceiling and fired blasts at it, causing a huge portion of the ceiling to come crashing down, crushing one of them.

     “We will speak again when my mission is complete,” Nimrod stated. The robot kept both of his optics on the remaining humans as all of the larger Sentinels rocketed off out of the hole in the ceiling, one by one, until Nimrod was the only one left.

     Taking one final glance at his creator, Nimrod rocketed off after the large group of giant robots waiting in the air high above for him.

     As soon as Fury saw Nimrod and his large cadre of Sentinels rocket off into the distance away from S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, he immediately grabbed Dr. Trask by the man’s shirt collar, slugged him hard in the face, and slammed him against the cold steel floor.

     “Trask,” Fury said, his voice oddly quiet but brimming with an emotion that earned him his S.H.I.E.L.D. codename, “You are going to tell our programming experts every line of code you programmed into that Sentinel, every feature you installed, every piece of blasted hardware you shoved into that thing. Every. Last. One. Because there is NO way a Sentinel with the specs you submitted could even come CLOSE to self-awareness.”

     This is a new sensation.

     As he and his army of Sentinels flew high up into the stratosphere—high enough where only a few wispy cirrus clouds occasionally interfered with Nimrod’s normal vision—he felt thoughts forming chains, linking together in ways that predicted the most probable path future events would take. In response to those predictions, other thought chains, forming responses to those likely events, were occurring simultaneously.

     I am… planning. For the…long-term. Interesting.

     Nimrod quickly brushed aside his fascination with the new sensation and continued to overclock his neural processors as he and his army soared through the nighttime sky. Everything that went through his neural processors was relayed to his subordinates—his Sentinel “nodes”—in mere nanoseconds. Nimrod had noticed during the breakout from S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters that when he commanded one of his “nodes” to do something, the delay was so minimal as to be inconsequential.

     My creator built me well.

     Nimrod felt an odd feeling of…. Regret? Guilt? No, those were not the correct words…

     Sorrow. Yes, that definition fits. I feel… sorrow… that my creator did not see what has to be done. The Mutants must be exterminated now, before their forces grow stronger. Their population is multiplying exponentially, which would have made my task considerably more difficult if I had merely been used for self-defense purposes like Nick Fury had insisted…

     Halt. Internal processing done. Highest concentration of Mutants: Bayville, New York, United States. Primary targets: The Brotherhood of Bayville Boarding House, location unknown. The Acolyte Headquarters, location unknown. The Xavier Institute for Gifted Students, location…known. Secondary targets: Morlocks, location: Bayville Downtown Sewer System. Tertiary targets: Mutants codenamed Boom Boom, Forge, Gambit, Juggernaut, Leech, X-23.

     Cross-referencing long-range Mutant detector data with unknowns, S.H.I.E.L.D. database threat levels….

     …Complete. Long-range detector scanners have located all tertiary targets, as well as the locations of the Brotherhood Boarding House and the Acolyte headquarters.

     With a few quick commands, Nimrod’s army of Sentinels divvied itself up into several groups, some much larger than others.

     Time until arrival at Bayville City Limits: 1 hour, 36 minutes, 55 seconds.

     Magneto was awakened from his slumber by the sudden presence within his sensory range of… something. Scratch that, a lot of somethings. A small army of metal somethings. He felt the metal… all that metal...

     It can’t be… S.H.I.E.L.D. can’t possibly know where this dome is! It’s visually shielded by the forest trees above, it can’t be detected by any of their satellites…

     Magnus immediately scrambled out from under his bedsheets and pressed his room’s comlink button.

     “Acolytes, awaken, quickly! We will soon be under attack from—“

     BOOM!

     “---ugh, Sentinels! Prepare for another impa—“

     BOOOOM!

     Magnus was about to say something else into the base comlink when the com crackled to life, with Sabretooth at the other end.

     *Boss, you better get topside, now! They’ve already broken through the top of the dome, I’ve never seen so--*

     “Sabretooth?!” Magnus said, pressing the comlink button down as hard as he could. “SABRETOOTH!”

     Without another word, Magnus grabbed his helmet, ripped open a hole in the metal ceiling with his powers, and floated up into the erupting chaos above.

     “That the best ya got, lad?”

     “Stop egging them—urg—on!”

     The situation was critical—that much was apparent at even a casual glance. The forest canopy and the surrounding trees had been utterly laid flat by the landing army. The entire top two floors of Magneto’s humongous metallic dome of a headquarters had been demolished by laser blasts and giant robotic fists. Sabretooth and Mastermind had already been shot with the quick-hardening green gel that Magneto had seen the Sentinels use before, so they were effectively written off. Legion, in his Lucas persona, was currently using his force fields to deflect any blasts the Sentinels were firing at him, as well as firing some telekinetic blasts of his own back at them. Omega Red was currently being squeezed in the giant hand of a Sentinel. His superhuman strength and superdense metallic tentacles were weakening the fists clutched around his midsection, but Magneto wasn’t sure Omega Red would be able to free himself before the air was squeezed out of him. Quicksilver was holding his own, currently creating a whirlwind around one of the Sentinels, but Magneto feared it wasn’t enough. Although he saw two Sentinels had fallen due to Legion’s and Quicksilver’s attacks, he counted at least as a dozen more crowding around the ruined dome.

     Magneto raised his hands and got a feel for the metal around him. This was a formidable force, he had to admit, but S.H.I.E.L.D. had sent the wrong type of soldiers after him.

     Pushing his hands forward, two of the Sentinels directly in front of him slid backwards at an incredible speed, smashing into two Sentinels behind them and obliterating all four in a huge fiery explosion.

     And that’s just the opening act.

     Focusing his attention next on the Sentinel holding Omega Red, Magneto flexed his fingers and the Sentinel came apart at the seams, wires ripping apart as Magneto threw its panels and internal systems everywhere in a shower of metal and sparks. Omega Red fell to the ground and quickly broke out of now-detached giant fist that had been clutching him.

     “Thanks for the save, comrade.”

     “Get away from the Sentinels, Omega Red,” Magneto yelled back. “There’s going to be a lot of explosions occurring in your vicinity very shortly.”

     Before he could see Omega Red’s nod of acknowledgement, Magneto was distracted by a scream of agony coming from his son. Turning towards where he had last seen Quicksilver, Magneto watched in horror as a newer, much smaller, robot came forward, levitating his contained son in some sort of external force field.

     “Pietro!”

     Magneto immediately reached out his hands towards the smaller robot, spread them apart, and…. Nothing happened.

     “What… what is happening!?”

     “I am equipped with a Mutant power dampening field,” the robot explained in a monotonous, yet matter-of-fact tone. “It is what I am currently using on Quicksilver as well. Your… existence has come to an end, Acolytes.”

     “I beg to differ!” Legion retorted, his form changing from Lucas’ to Emerald’s.

     “As do I,” Magneto said, his eyes pulsing in response as he raised his hands, using all his powers to turn one of the Sentinels away from him and towards Nimrod.

     As one, both Magneto and Legion/Emerald unleashed their powers on Nimrod, in their own way. Magneto’s Sentinel jerked its gun-arm towards Nimrod awkwardly and unleashed a plasma blast as Emerald gathered together and fired off a high-pressure burst of water at the new threat, hoping to either cut into it or fry its internal circuitry.

     Nimrod took both blasts in stride, neither seeming to affect him in the least. The water, even at its extremely high pressure, just sprayed harmlessly off of him, not even denting his armor. He absorbed the plasma blast into his own systems, redirected it all into his arm and fired it back at Magneto.

     Taken completely by surprise, Magneto caught the blast right in the chest, which sent him spiraling backwards into the rubble of a collapsed wall of his metal dome.

     The other Sentinel now under his control again, Nimrod quickly commanded it to fire globs of green hardening gel at Omega Red and Legion. Legion sent a haphazard blast of water at the glob aimed at her, but it was merely absorbed into the gelatinous substance. A few seconds later, both were trapped in a quickly-hardening prison.

     Magneto grunted and brushed the debris off of his chest, staggering to his feet as this new form of Sentinel landed a few feet away from him, flanked by three “old” Sentinels hovering in the air directly above him.

     Magneto feebly tried to push Nimrod back again with his magnetic powers, but Nimrod’s power dampening field unsurprisingly rendered the gesture useless. Raising his hand, Nimrod moved the force field containing Pietro’s unconscious form around in a semi-circle, slamming into Magneto’s son into him a very high speed and sending both father and son into a tangled heap on the ground. With a nod, the Sentinels flanking Nimrod fired gel at Pietro and Magnus, taking care of the last two Acolytes.

     “I fail to see the threat these Mutants pose,” Nimrod said to himself. “This S.H.I.E.L.D. must be truly inefficient, to have not dealt with these threats long before my own creation.”

     Turning his thoughts inward, Nimrod commanded the group of Sentinels standing around him to pick up their new captives.

     Take them to the location downloaded into your processors. I have another confrontation I must attend.

     Toad shrieked in mid-hop as a plasma blast streaked by him, missing him by mere inches.

     “Toad, will you PLEASE shut up!” Wanda growled, concentrating all her hexing power on a Sentinel to keep it from launching any of its weapons as Avalanche sent a huge wave of force through the Earth at the giant robot, sending it onto its back. “Keep it up, Avalanche!”

     Lance complied wordlessly, gritting his teeth as he continued to send waves through the ground towards the Sentinel, each wave damaging the downed robot more and more.

     “We’re dead, we’re all dead!” Toad screamed, panicking. “Aw man, we could barely handle ONE of these things, and now we’ve got FIFTY BILLION of ‘em attackin’ us!”

     “Try more like fifteen,” Surge said as she raced by Toad, her body surging with electricity as she ran up the side of a Sentinel in the blink of an eye and rammed her left gauntlet into its optic, unleashing a huge bolt of electricity into the giant robot and sending it toppling.

     In response to Surge’s and Avalanche’s attacks, the remaining thirteen Sentinels lifted off from the ground several dozen feet, but continued their assault on the Brotherhood members. Pyro, who had his mind occupied controlling a giant fire elemental attacking one of the giant robots was shot in the back with a large glob from another Sentinel’s gel-gun, taking him out of the equation.

     “This is… odd,” Surge yelled to her teammates as she leaped off of the downed Sentinel before its head exploded, sending shrapnel everywhere. “They’ve all taken off from the ground to avoid Lance’s attacks. It’s like they’re… learning from us.”

     “Since when are these things that smart?” Avalanche asked, sending a final wave of earth at the hexed Sentinel.

     “They never were,” Wanda said, releasing the hex field from the Sentinel Lance had just effectively destroyed. “Someone must be controlling them remotely. This has to be the work of S.H.I.E.L.D., they were the ones who had kept the Sentinel program going in a pathetic effort to deal with Apocalypse.”

     “Who cares who’s behind it!?” Toad shrieked. “End result is, we’re dead, we’re dead, we’re—“

     Toad was so focused on panicking he didn’t see the glob of green gel coming his way until it was too late.

     “Great, that’s three down,” Avalanche groaned. “I hate to sound like Toad, but our odds of getting out of this okay are getting lower and lower.”

     Besides Pyro and Toad, Mystique had also been taken out of the fight, and quite early. After the initial loud impacts outside their underground headquarters, Mystique had woken up anyone who hadn’t already been shaken awake and flew topside, morphed into a crow form to find out what was going on. The Sentinels, detecting her Mutant energy signature, apparently weren’t fooled in the slightest. After half a minute of waiting, the rest of the Brotherhood members raced topside to find this small army of Sentinels waiting for them, a crow encased in a glob of hardened gel just a few yards away from their bases’ hidden entrance.

     Now deprived of Avalanche’s distracting earthquakes, the remaining Brotherhood members were suddenly assaulted with a veritable barrage of green gel blobs. Wanda rolled to the side of one, only to be immediately struck by another. Avalanche followed Wanda’s fate just a few seconds later.

     “Aw man, we’re dropping like flies here!” Blob said, lifting up one of the downed Sentinels’ chests and taking refuge under it, Surge quickly following him under the giant robot’s carcass.

     “Freddy, I got an idea,” Surge said, a smirk on her face. “Your throwing arm good?”

     “Uh… yeah, a’course. Why?”

     “Consider me your projectile.”

     Blob smiled, picking up on Noriko’s idea. “Heheh. Get ready!”

     Taking hold of Noriko with one arm and running out from under the downed Sentinel’s chest, removing his other arm from under it and sending it crumpling back down onto the field, he then hoisted Surge onto his shoulders with both arms.

     “Ready,” Surge said, her eyes sparking light blue.

     “Here we GO!” Blob said, taking Noriko by the legs, spinning her around and launching her towards one of the Sentinels hovering above. Flying towards her target Sentinel, Noriko let loose a blast of energy at the Sentinel’s head, cracking its optics and blinding it. Seconds later, she latched onto its chest and steadied herself, then punched her metal-laced hand into its exposed internals and started to draw energy from it.

     “Better make myself useful,” Blob said to himself, jogging across the field towards the gel-covered form of Toad, his fellow Brotherhood member’s face frozen in a permanent state of panic. The Sentinels had assessed that Surge was the highest threat currently, and most were directing their glob-guns at her, letting Blob jog across the field relatively free from Sentinel fire. The Sentinel’s “gel shots” weren’t having any effect on Surge, however, as the ever-expanding ball of electricity emanating from her as she absorbed the energy from the Sentinel she was currently “tapped” into was incinerating any gel globs that neared her position.

     “Time to make yourself USEFUL, buddy!” Blob said as he lifted the hardened gel glob containing his friend onto his shoulder and hefted it at the nearest Sentinel. It impacted the giant robot right in the chest, punching a hole right through the center of its body. It apparently hit something vital, as the Sentinel lurched for a moment in the air before falling to the ground in a huge impact.

     Blob ran out of the way as the Sentinel hit the ground, but was thrown to his knees from the force of the impact as it radiated through the earth. All it took was one second of weakness—before Blob could get back up, one of the remaining Sentinels had encased him in a glob of the fast-hardening goo.

     Surge, meanwhile, had gathered a huge ball of electricity around her, her gauntlets and eyes containing so much energy they looked ready to burst. Crying out, Surge launched herself at superhuman speed from the drained Sentinel as it fell down towards the ground, directing of all her contained energy at the remaining Sentinels. A huge lightning bolt emanating from her slammed into one, two, three, four, five…

     Crud.

     As Surge landed on the shoulder of the next Sentinel in line, she realized that even all the energy she absorbed from the one Sentinel—so much it was causing her to have heart palpitations, in fact, from such an overdose of energy—wasn’t going to be enough to down the remaining eleven Sentinels.

     Surge continued to direct the lightning bolt through the nearest five Sentinels, frying their internals and causing several of their systems to explode from overload. Screeching in pain for several seconds as the electricity coursed out of her, Surge finally let up, all of the energy drained from her system. The smell of charred skin and hair emanated strongly from her as she wobbled, and then fell from the Sentinel’s shoulder towards the ground.

     Seconds before she lapsed into unconsciousness, Surge felt a gelatinous substance impact her, encasing her quickly and hardening around her seconds before she hit the ground.

     *RRRRING! RRRRING! RRRRI—“

     “Hello!? What?”

     “Mayor Kelly, sir, you need to turn on your TV set.”

     “It’s four in the morning, Jensen! That committee can wait until-- oh.”

     Robert Kelly was mesmerized by the images on screen as news reports flashed on every channel, getting out of his bed immediately and walking over to the TV he had turned on from the far side of his bedroom.

     It was the Sentinel Disaster all over again. Only much, much worse.

     As Mayor Kelly turned up the volume on the TV, he listened in on the newscasters’ voiceovers as the scenes of destruction from various spots in Bayville flashed on the screen.

     “An entire main street of Downtown Bayville has been destroyed by a group of at least ten of these gigantic robots, who seem intent on capturing a group of Mutants who apparently had been living in the sewers beneath…”

     “Here, only on Channel 14, is exclusive footage of another Sentinel robot attacking an apartment building. Oddly, the robot seems to only be attacking one floor, singling out a particular occupant. We are unsure what the robot is after at this time, but we will continue to…”

     “….dozens of confirmed sightings all over the city. The robots’ destruction does not appear to be in any sort of pattern, and we here at Channel 5 are baffled as to why…”

     “…thought the robot, popularly thought to be a Mutant experiment gone amok, had been destroyed, but now they are back and en masse. Who is behind this? Rest assured, we will keep you updated as…”

     Robert Kelly cursed. He KNEW it was only a matter of time until a city-wide disaster had happened, with all these Mutants concentrated in Bayville. They had to have been the cause of this, he knew it in his gut. But why use robots when they themselves could just as easily have…

     ….Wait.

     “Jensen, are you still there?”

     “…Of course, sir.”

     “How long has this been going on!?”

     “The Sentinel robots landed here in Bayville no longer than twenty minutes ago, sir.  The police and fire department are mobilizing, but it won’t be enough. If we can get a hold of the President, declare Bayville a National Disaster Area and send in the Army and the National Guard, we may be able to prevent the destruction from becoming too—“

     “Hold on a minute, hold on! Jensen, where are the confirmed Sentinel attacks occurring?”

     “Uh…er… hold a minute, sir… Let’s see here… the entirety of North Court Street has been torn up, as well as apartment buildings on 8th Street, Williams Street, and St. Sebastian, and a home in the suburbs of Bayville, on Hapland Drive… The largest swarm of the robots is rocketing over the city as we speak, towards the north end of the city limits, with a few other robots having been sighting skirting the city limits and moving towards…”

     …The north end of Bayville… Xavier’s School.

     “Jansen, quickly, pull up information on the residents of those buildings, as well as North Court Street. Do any Mutants live at those locations?”

     “Pulling it up….. confirmed, we have three known Mutants, names Tabitha Smith, Dorian Leitch, and Remy LeBeau, living at the three apartment buildings that were attacked. There have been multiple Mutant complaints on North Court Street—Mutants stealing food and such—but nothing confirmed. I can’t find any information about any Mutants living on Hapland Drive, however…”

     “Must be one we don’t know about yet,” Kelly said, mostly to himself. “Jansen, listen to me and listen to me carefully. Have there been ANY casualties of the normal human variety? Are these robots seeking out our normal residents to kill, or are they focused entirely on these Mutants?”

     “Um… now that you mention it sir, there does seem to be a correlation. Five confirmed human deaths so far, but that seems to be largely from collateral damage, and not from any direct Sentinel attacks on them. So these robots are after Mutants, for some reason. But still, that doesn’t mean we just sit by and—“

     “The heck it doesn’t. Jansen, I don’t know who sent these robots, but they’re clearly after the Mutant infestation here in Bayville. Let all the law enforcement officers and news media know, stay away from the robots. Let them do their job. If we intervene, that will mean human deaths—a lot more deaths. And I won’t have that on my conscience.”

     “But—what about the—“

     “We’ve been defending ourselves from these Mutants for years now!” Kelly yelled into the phone angrily. His aide was not getting the message, and valuable time was being wasted. “It’s time for them to be on the defensive for once!”

     Before Jansen could reply, Mayor Kelly turned off his cell phone. These robot attacks would be costly, yes—the property damage would run up quite a hefty bill.

     But if they got rid of the Bayville Mutants once and for all, it would have been more than worth it.

     Xavier looked around him, struck speechless by the utter devastation. All around him, his students and friends lay unconscious, frozen in those blasted green gelatinous cages. A few still fought on, but their powers were being systematically neutralized by the newcomer, and the Sentinels wasted no time freezing them in the green gel as soon as his students were no longer deemed a threat. Xavier was utterly helpless against these mindless automatons, and he currently lay painfully on his back on the ground, having been thrown off of his wheelchair by a laser blast from one of the Sentinels. Fires were burning all around the Institute grounds, making the air thick with acrid smoke that blotted out the night sky and made it extremely hard to breathe. With the dozens of Sentinels standing around him and the other members of his Institute, it did indeed look like the Institute had descended into Hell this night.

     I… I briefly foresaw this, but now? I never imagined it would have happened so soon, and with so little warning…

     Charles Xavier closed his eyes and wept silently. Had his visions been wrong—only one possible future among many? Was this really the end of it all? Xavier’s mind raced, taking in the events of the past half an hour. It had all happened so fast…

     Bobby and Jubilee, who had apparently been staying up extremely late playing video games, had woken him up, telling him what they had seen on the news. He had immediately sent out a telepathic message, telling all of his students and instructors to evacuate the Institute immediately and retreat a safe distance from the building. The Institute was built to stave off the occasional Mutant attack, but nothing like this. Having the building come down around them would have surely doomed them all—only fighting the Sentinels out here on the grounds, without the Institute around them being crushed, did they stand a chance.

     And Xavier was proud of his X-Men; they had done remarkably well. Only a few had been frozen within the first ten minutes, despite more Sentinels arriving every minute. At the rate the X-Men had been taking out the Sentinels, it looked like they just might have attained a marginal victory if things had kept on their current path.

     But, needless to say, they hadn’t.

     Ten minutes after the first Sentinels had landed on the grounds, the one Xavier had seen in his vision had arrived—a more compact Sentinel, to be sure, but from its impact it seemed exponentially more deadly. As soon as this new Sentinel had arrived, it quickly began to remove X-Man after X-Man from the equation. His tactics were repetitive, but incredibly effective—he merely disabled the Mutant powers of the current X-Man he had targeted, and the “old” Sentinels quickly moved in and froze the X-Man in gel before the new Sentinel moved on to his next target. Any attacks on the new Sentinel had been deflected easily by an apparently impenetrable force field surrounding it. It had taken them all down without breaking a figurative sweat.

     Xavier’s thoughts were interrupted as the Sentinel model in question landed in front of him, gazing down at him.

     “Interesting. This target does not seem to be as much of a threat as most of the others, yet my archival knowledge designates him as the leader of these… X-Men,” the robot said. Xavier got the distinct impression that if the new Sentinel could have, it would have raised an eyebrow.

     “Regardless, it is immaterial. My directive proceeds without interruption.”

     Xavier winced as he heard a Sentinel touch down behind him, followed soon afterwards by a familiar “splorch” sound. A fraction of a second later, he was encased in a quickly-solidifying gel.

     Nimrod looked down at the bald, crippled Mutant, still intrigued. But there would be ample opportunity to test his hypothesis later.

     “The last target has been neutralized,” Nimrod said aloud to the plethora of other Sentinels gathered around Xavier’s flaming estate.

     “Phase Two is complete. The Mutant threat in Bayville, New York, has been eliminated. Prepare for Phase Three: Extermination.”

X-MEN: EVOLUTION SEASON 5
FIN
 

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