The XXX-Gene Ch. 50 (Marvel) (Patreon)

A/N: The girls come to a decision.

-x-X-x-

Laura huffs, crossing her arms over her chest.

“They are weakened and exhausted. There’s no need for subterfuge. If we strike swiftly with overwhelming force, they will not even have time to mount a proper response.”

Gwen shakes her head at that, the eyes of her mask squinting in a way that gives the impression of a frown.

“That’s no reason to go in guns blazing though. If we mount a distraction and have one or two of us get their attention at the front, it’ll allow the rest of us to slip in all the more easily from another angle, at which point the second group will have free reign of the place.”

Finally, Kitty interjects.

“Okay but stay with me here… why even bother with the distraction in the first place? Like Laura said, they’re tired, they’re exhausted. Perfect time for ALL of us to sneak in undetected as one, cohesive unit. Our true target is their boss right? We’re aiming to bring Harkins down and take him into custody, yeah? So really, there’s no reason to even let them sound the alarm.”

There’s a pause as all three of them digest one another’s plans. Then, they continue debating amongst themselves. Thaddeus… stays out of it. He recognizes that he has significant sway over all three women, and he also recognizes his incredible inexperience when it comes to things like this.

It’s not his place to step in and dictate what they should be doing when the trio in front of him were all far more experienced. He would be better served watching them and learning from their actions, over putting his nose in things and making a mess of it all in the process.

But most importantly of all… he just didn’t want to be responsible for coming up with the plan, especially when that plan would carry significant risk to all of their lives. Oh, he certainly didn’t mind risking his own life, especially for any of these women, but he preferred not to be the one telling them how he expected them to risk their lives.

As he stands back and lets the three women talk it out, a voice echoes in his ear, quiet as a whisper.

“Not going to interject, Thaddeus? Not going to lay down the law?”

It takes Thaddeus a second to realize that no, Cessily hasn’t developed psychic abilities. Rather, she’s speaking directly into his ear instead of from elsewhere on his body, the all-mercury mutant that’s currently turned herself into a suit of armor for him basically communicating with him and him alone right now. Since his head is covered by a helmet made of her, Thaddeus lowers his own voice and whispers back, confident he won’t be heard even with Gwen and Laura’s enhanced senses.

“… Not my place, Cessily. They know better than me, so I’ll let them figure it out.”

“Mmm…”

Now, up to this point Thaddeus HAS been listening to Laura, Gwen, and Kitty discuss tactics and the pros and cons of each of their respective plans. He’s been watching and learning. However, that becomes a mite more difficult when Cessily suddenly begins to grope him down below, wrapping a part of herself around his cock and stroking it up and down in a way that has him stiffening in response.

“Cessily… what are you doing?”

“Bored~”

Man, for all his smarts, for all his increased intellect… sometimes he was still the braindead jock he’d once been, wasn’t he? It hadn’t even occurred to Thaddeus that Cessily could or would do something like this when she’d first decided to ‘embrace’ him and turn herself into an armored suit for his use. He probably should have seen this coming a mile away, but he just hadn’t.

Still keeping his voice down, he nevertheless tries to argue with Cessily.

“This really isn’t the time…”

“Meh, if we’re not going to participate in the planning, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have our own fun. Besides, you don’t know Laura and Kitty like I do. We might be here for a while…”

Just as she’s saying that however…

“Thunder?”

Blinking as he realizes that’s supposed to be HIS codename, Thaddeus is pulled from Cessily’s VERY distracting ‘embrace’ and finds all three of the other women are looking at him curiously. As though they’re waiting for him to respond.

“Sorry… I got lost in my own thoughts for a second there.”

Cessily’s airy quiet giggle resounds in his ear at that, even as the others exchange glances before ultimately shrugging. In the end, Kitty is the one who speaks.

“Well, we’ve decided to go with my plan. We’re all going to infiltrate as one unit, and float under the radar while doing so.”

Thaddeus stares in surprise for a moment. Truth be told, he’d been expecting the three women, all with strong personalities, to take longer to come to a consensus as well. In the face of his surprise, Gwen huffs and shakes her head.

“Look, if I had known about Shadowcat’s powerset ahead of time, I would have gone along with infiltration from the start. I didn’t know she could convey her power to others through touch.”

Laura, meanwhile, just scowls a bit and looks away. Obviously she HAD known, but still wanted to go with her all out assault plan. That… yeah, that all tracks. Slowly, Thaddeus nods.

“Right. And… I’m not sure if they’ve set another psychic dampener up yet, but they might not have. If they haven’t, then I could reach out into the minds of any guards in our path and make it seem like they’re not seeing anything as we sneak in.”

Kitty beams at his contribution, while Gwen nods and Laura just settles into a sulk. Cessily, meanwhile, lets out a disappointed sigh into his ear as she finally ceases the molestation he’d been ignoring while they all talked.

“Ah well… another time.”

Thaddeus doesn’t blush often, all things considered. But in that moment… he’s grateful for the all-concealing helmet Cessily has him wearing, because his face definitely feels hotter than normal.

Regardless, with their plan set, the five of them finally leave the treeline after a few seconds of Gwen and Laura checking the sight lines of the exhausted guards with their own enhanced sight. Once they’ve found an opening, they all move as one unit, quickly approaching the walls of the abandoned compound.

They make it through the first barrier with ease thanks to Kitty’s mutation. Her ability to share her intangibility with everyone touching her means that there’s no difficulty to be had in slipping all of them right on through. After that, Thaddeus reaches out and quickly ascertains that the psychic dampeners in use at the last laboratory are not in use here. Either they haven’t had the time to set anything like that up yet, or they simply don’t have the resources to replace the ones that would have been destroyed in the last facility’s self-destruct.

Regardless of which it was, the end result is the same. Once they’re within the compound’s perimeter, reaching out and making sure any guards who might look their way see nothing at all is child’s play for Thaddeus. This allows them to slip through the walls of one of the side buildings where Cessily feels the inert parts of her.

They wind up in a dark storage room, and under Cessily’s direction, quickly find the secure case where the remaining samples of her mercury are being kept. Breaking open the case is child’s play for Laura’s Adamantine Claws, at which point Thaddeus simply reaches out and lets Cessily crawl from his arm to the case, reassimilating those lost pieces of her.

“Mm… good. I feel… almost whole again.”

That’s said out loud for everyone’s benefit, drawing a smile from Kitty and a nod from Gwen. Thaddeus, meanwhile…

“What about the rest of you, Mercury? Can you feel where the parts that you said are moving could be located?”

Cessily hesitates for a moment, long enough for Laura to interject.

“We should take care of Harkins first. Hunt him down, take him out. We can’t risk him getting away again.”

Thaddeus frowns at that. On the one hand, Laura isn’t exactly wrong. On the other hand, it almost sounded like she cared more about taking down the leader of The Facility than she did about helping her friend and teammate. He wasn’t sure he liked that very much, but before he can take her to task, Cessily speaks up.

“Talon is right. If the psychic dampeners aren’t in place, that means you can locate Harkins, right Thaddeus? Take us to him. Regaining all of my missing pieces is meaningless if he escapes again, only to threaten us more down the line.”

Ah, well that settled that. Apparently, Cessily was just as eager for revenge as Laura was. Fair enough. It takes Thaddeus a second of focusing on the minds spread throughout the compound, but eventually he’s pretty sure he finds the man in question. Adam Harkins has a particularly twisted sort of mind, even among the sort of people that his organization has recruited to staff this facility. Indeed, even just skimming his surface thoughts leaves Thaddeus feeling dirty and unclean. Not to mention, what he picks up from them…

“He’s… that way. And I think he’s working on a weapon. Something that uses the pieces from Mercury, if what I’m getting is correct.”

“Thunder is right. Because the pieces of me that are moving of their own volition… are also in that direction.”

In the end, it seemed they were being led to kill two birds with one stone. Exchanging glances between themselves, they all nod after a moment before moving on with Thaddeus leading the way. Slipping through the compound undetected continues to be a breeze given the combination of their abilities. They make an excellent team when it comes to infiltration, even if they haven’t really been tested in any truly meaningful way yet.

Indeed, it doesn’t take long at all before they arrive in yet another laboratory, where Harkins is bent over a monitor, tapping away at a keyboard and mumbling under his breath. The far side of the lab is dominated by a massive holding cell, with a huge vault door to keep whatever is inside of it contained. No doubt that’s where the moving pieces of Mercury can be found. What had the bastard done? What had he created?

“Harkins.”

Laura snarls as she reveals their presence by stepping forward. Her claws are out and she looks ready to kill. It’s probably only their presence that kept her from opening with a deadly attack on the head of The Facility.

Whipping around, they’re all treated to the somewhat gratifying sight of Adam Harkins’ eyes widening in shock and horror behind his glasses. The scientist is quick to school his expression, but it’s obvious he wasn’t expecting them… not even remotely. Still, a grin spreads across his face after a moment. A wild grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“You just don’t know when to give up, X-23! And would you look at that, you even brought friends this time!”

It’s an act, Thaddeus realizes after a moment. The crazed grin is meant to disarm, to make them think he’s off his rocker. But his mind… his mind is as cool, calm, and collected as ever. It’s racing a mile a minute as he looks for a way out… but doesn’t find it.

“It’s over, Harkins. There’s no escape. Surrender.”

As Harkins internally agrees with Laura’s words that it’s over and there’s no escape, he nevertheless refuses to surrender. Instead…

“Oh, you’re quite right my dear X-23… there is no escape… for YOU-urk!”

As the scientist whips around to try and slam his hand down on a particular button on his keyboard, Thaddeus reaches out… and stops him. He freezes Harkins in place with his psychic powers, effectively stopping all traffic from the man’s brain to his body. He cannot move, he cannot enact his final plan… which Thaddeus can tell was opening up the holding cell and unleashing the creature inside on them.

Before Laura can take matters into her own hands and end the problem more definitively, Thaddeus knocks Harkins unconscious, causing the scientist to slump to the floor bonelessly, hitting his head on the way down. He’s not dead, but he’ll have a nasty bump when he wakes up. IF he wakes up.

For a long moment, Laura looks down at him with anger in her eyes. At the same time, Kitty rushes over to the console that Harkins was working at, looking over whatever he was doing. Finally, the mutant woman curses under her breath.

“Shit… this is bad. This is really bad.”

“What is it, Shadowcat?”

“They… they made something. They call it Predator X. It’s specifically designed to hunt down mutants and kill them. Not just kill them… it consumes them and in doing so gains their powers. Like a biological Sentinel. It’s capable of reproducing asexually as well… we need to destroy this thing, asap.”

That did sound bad. Gwen clears her throat, before moving to Kitty’s side.

“Is there a failsafe maybe? A way of killing it in its holding cell.”

“There is, yes. But…”

Cessily speaks up, finishing Kitty’s sentence for her.

“But it’ll be total, won’t it? I’ll lose the pieces that were incorporated into it forever.”

Kitty winces and nods.

“… Yeah.”

Gwen looks between him and Kitty for a moment.

“I mean… how can we even be sure you could reincorporate those pieces back into yourself now that they’re in another living being? Is it really work the risk?”

“I don’t know.”

Cessily’s frank admission leaves them all quiet for a moment. Finally, Kitty speaks up.

“If we were going to try to get the last parts of Cessily back, I wouldn’t suggest we try to tackle this thing on our own. We’d need backup… we’d have to call in the rest of the X-Men or something.”

There’s some shuffling at that idea. Meanwhile, Thaddeus clears his throat.

“Could, uh… also call on the Avengers… or the Fantastic Four? I know a pair of gals.”

Though maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Or maybe JUST calling She-Hulk and Invisible Woman was the better idea, since they had a soft spot for him and might be willing to keep their mouths shut.

Everyone looks at one another, nobody willing to address the elephant in the room. The easiest, simplest solution was to just use the failsafe and destroy this ‘Predator X’ right here and right now. But it would come at the cost of Cessily’s last remaining pieces. Still, she didn’t seem like she was too beat up about the possibility. Or if she was, she was hiding her own feelings on the subject carefully.

Fighting this thing by themselves though seemed like a bad idea. But then, calling in backup ALSO seemed like a bad idea. It was funny… they’d done everything right. They’d performed perfectly. So why did it feel like they were losing here? Why did it feel like they were faces with nothing but bad decisions?