"Spike, you got that flank secured?" A blast of ruby colored energy ignited half the Danger Room, and droids the shape of little cubes with treads, arms, and wide binocular eyes were tossed around like paper in the wind. "Spike!" Scott climbed atop the railing of the pirate ship and blasted a few more droids racing after him.
"Yeah, yeah, I got it!" At the rear of the ship, Spike was covered in thorny armor. Armed with two long-boney spears, he chucked them like javelins into the heart of a mob of droids. With each throw, he took out more than could appear to replenish the ranks. Still, the little droids shook their sabers overhead, eager to get a piece of him.
With a sweep of red energy, Scott cleared off the last of the robots pursuing him. "Nightcrawler, pop the ones hiding behind that top rail, would you?"
"You got it!" In a blur of blue, Nightcrawler swung by on a rope and grabbed a droid by the arm and chucked it in the air. Like a clay pigeon, Cyclops blasted it out of the air. On the return swing, the pair repeated the process.
"Think you can get that guy behind the wheel?"
"No prob!" In a puff of black smoke, Nightcrawler wrapped himself around the unsuspecting droid and reappeared high in the air, where he left the robot to its demise. In another blast of energy, the droid evaporated.
"Nicely done!"
It was difficult to tell if Kurt had even heard the praise as he was too busy swinging between the mast heads, cutting the air with a sword he took from one of the robots. "YAR!" He shouted. "Y'ALL BE CLEARING OUT ME SHIP YOU DIRTY ROBOT LAND LUBBERS!"
Anna watched the carnage unfold from the crow's nest above. "I don't know how many pirates were using 'y'all,' Kurt." She said over the communicators on their watches.
"YAR, CAPTAIN ZERZER THE BLOODLESS DOES! HE SUMMERS IN GEORGIA BETWEEN PIRATE RAIDS, YAR!"
Anna snorted, and a breath later, a sword was drawn across her neck.
"Yar… me… harties… avast." Droned a compressed digital voice in her ear.
"Avast this, nerd!" Anna pulled out her laser pistol from her belt and blasted the droid in the face. She felt its grip release and spun on the spot. This particular was dressed in a purple coat, a silk white ruffled shirt, and a broad black tricorn hat that was now barely clinking on its square head. It's klunky hand gripped its face a moment before pulling back and looking at Anna with a missing eye.
"You'll… regret that… sea dog." The droid drew a long cutlass from its scabbard. The little machined parts in its wrist groaned with the effort.
"I will?" Anna pointed her pistol at its face but had the weapon slapped out of her hand with the broad side of the sword.
"Don't bring… a gun to a… sword fight… nerd."
Anna grimaced, "Alright, fine." She pulled loose a board from the crow's nest, and the pair began to circle each other.
The robot lunged for her, and she swiped it to the side with her length of wood. She countered with a kick to its chest, but the captain dodged at the last second. It followed through with an overhead strike, and Anna managed to block with the wooden plank, but not without it getting sliced in half.
"Ha…ha… now you're without a weapon… you are all mine… sea dog."
"Is that what you think?"
The robot slashed across her flank, but Anna caught the blade between her hands. With trembling hands, the blade was suspended in the air between them. The droid's one good eye looked from her - to the blade - and back again. With a grin, Anna twisted the sword between her hands, and the metal shattered.
"Ut… oh…"
"Ut-oh, is right." Anna kicked the droid into the wooden railing of the crow's nest. The boards broke behind the droid's body, and Anna caught him just before his fated fall to the deck below. "Call off your men!"
"You think… this is over?" The captain droid held a pair of its fat fingers to its lips and emitted a shrill whistle.
A hush washed over the battlefield as all attention turned toward Anna and her opponent. The sound of wood snapping preceded a long crack forming across the center of the ship. The droids abandoned their fights and fled to opposite ends of the ship, leaving the X-Men alone at its center. Near the central mast, a great tentacle laced together with woven pulsing blue cables plunged through the deck and scattered planks like an explosion.
"Behold…" The captain raised its hands over its head, "The power of the Kracken!"
The tentacle coiled up the center mast, ripping apart the sails with the weight of its mass along its warpath to the crow's nest. Anna grabbed the captain by the chest piece and raised it over her head. "Wait… what are you -"
The tentacle finally crested the railing and lunged for them. Anna chucked the captain into the tentacle before ducking out of the way. The appendage punched through the captain's chest.
"No! Not me… you ingrate!" The captain pointed a trembling finger at Anna. "Get her!"
The tentacle threw off the captain with a flick and redirected it, facing like a snake preparing to strike, but before it could make a second round, a blast of red energy threw it off course. "Try over here, you oversized cucumber!" Shouted Cycolps from the opposite side of the ship.
The creature turned its attention to him, and when it coiled back and prepared to strike, a long thorny spear snapped against its side and shattered. "Try over here, loser!" Evan prepared a second spear on the opposite end of the ship and threw it. He caught it near the top where the tip of the spear snapped off.
"Look out below!" Several cannon balls appeared over the tentacle in a puff of black smoke and dropped on its head. Most rolled off without much impact, but at least one got a good loud 'thunk' in that Anna could hear from the crow's nest. Kurt reappeared next to Evan, where the pair high-fived.
The tentacle writhed and flexed like a wave. Blue light pulsed up and down the coiled wires, and an other worldly hissing and moaning vibrated from somewhere below. Suddenly, three other tentacles appeared outside the ship and poised themselves to attack the group.
Anna felt for her pistol at her hip but only found an empty holster. "Well… shit."
The tentacles flexed backward before launching towards the ship at a speed that blurred their form. Anna spotted Cyclops roll across the deck to get out of the way of one of the tentacles, and just as it was going to tear through the ground next to him, it stopped. It wasn't only the one tentacle either, all the massive appendages of coiled wires and metal stopped inches above their intended zones of impact.
The captain spun his head to look at the ship below. "Where was… the earth shattering 'Kaboom'?"
A hatch to the lower decks was thrown open, and three droids were tossed out with the trajectory and speed of birdshot. Jean stepped out of the hatch in their wake with a single hand stretched over her head. Her fingers were curled, and her face was tight with concentration.
"Phoenix!" Cyclops called, but Jean didn't look at him; instead, she looked up at Anna.
With the help of her free hand, Jean brought all the tentacles together in a twisted mass only a few feet below the crow's nest. "Rogue, tear them apart!"
Anna rested a foot on the lip of the railing and cracked her knuckles. "I can get on board with this plan!" She grabbed the captain by the neck. "And you're coming with me!"
"Coming… with -"
Anna leaped off the side and curled into a cannonball. She plunged with the speed of a bullet through the mass and just managed to stop herself from falling through the other side by grabbing a broken cable. Something loud hissed below, and bubbles formed in the water around the ship.
"This… sucks." Anna spotted the captain dangling by another cable, not that far from her.
"And it's about to get a whole lot worse!" Anna snapped a little flintlock pistol from the captain's bandolier and curled herself back upward into the tentacles. Inside the hole of twisted metal and sparking wires of her own making, she stuffed the pistol in her belt and ripped at any hardware she saw. The cavern she created ignited in white light from sparks, and jagged metal jabbed her arms and legs, though they did little to stop her.
Soon, the tentacle she was in began to tremble and fall slack under her weight. Before the thing ultimately collapsed under her, she sprinted out of the hole she made and leaped with arms stretched for dear life. By the tips of her fingers, she managed to grab onto the treads of the captain, who was still dangling outside.
"You're… ruining my plan!"
"Yeah, I tend to do that." Using his head as a step, she leaped up into the next tentacle to repeat the process. Soon, it began to spark, smoke, and fall. This time, when she evacuated, she caught the tip of the last remaining tentacle.
"Parlay." Droned the captain in its monotone voice.
"What?"
"If a captured party speaks 'parlay'… the aggressor must take the captured… to their captain."
"Well, if it's the captain you want to talk to," Anna clapped the droid on its cheek, "you're talking to her." Anna was getting ready to jump into and tear apart the last tentacle when it suddenly shifted and flipped her and the captain upward. Both white-knuckled a bundle of wires to keep from being flung from the ship. "Jean?!"
A hiss, louder than the others, preceded the ship below rocking from side to side. From their vantage, Anna could see the massive head of a squid appear. Like its tentacles, it was covered in woven bands of thick steel cables and braided pulsing wires. Its great beak was sharpened to a honed edge, and its spiked head looked like it could easily impale a person.
The captain clung to her waist. "Now you've… done it."
The tentacle Anna shared with the captain was gently lowered till they were face to face with one of the squid's massive eyes.
"You want something to look at, jerk ass?" Anna drew the pistol from her belt and blasted it into the kracken's eye. In a puff of smoke, the squid recoiled and groaned. "Yeah! How'd you like -"
The tentacle suspending them snapped to life and wrapped the pair in an anaconda-like grip. Together, they were squeezed till Anna found it difficult to breathe.
"Should have… parleyed." Groaned the captain as his little visor cracked. Then… the squeezing just stopped.
"Nightcrawler!" Jean shouted from below.
"Got it!" In a puff, Kurt was on the tentacle and grabbed Anna as well as the captain. Another puff later, the three of them were on the deck. It was from there that Anna watched as Jean raised both hands into the air and the kracken slowly rose out of the water.
The behemoth floated in the air, writhing and hissing and flinging drips of water from its few functioning limbs. With shaking hands, Jean brought her palms together, and the kracken above was slowly crushed into a heap of gray till it finally stopped moving. Following its final full-body spasm, Jean allowed her hands to fall to her side, and the monster crashed into the water next to them.
The captain raised its little arms in the air. "I… surrender."
"Cancel simulation." The godlike voice of Ororo echoed over unseen speakers. In a wave, the ship, water, and any remnants that the fight had taken place aside from the robots vanished.
"Jean!" Kurt clapped her on the shoulder, "That was crazy! How'd you do that?"
"A lot of practice." Scott sat down on a piece of broken kracken and wiped the sweat from his brow. "She's been in here almost every night."
"But lifting an entire squid out of the water! That's insane!"
Anna noticed that Jean hadn't said anything. In fact, she hadn't moved since she'd thrown the kracken in the air like a bowl of spaghetti. Her eyes stared blankly forward without blinking. Anna was about to say something when she felt a tug at her pant leg. It was the captain looking back up at her. Two other droids were already around him, repairing the damage done to him.
"Good… game." He held up his little claw hand for a handshake.
"Oh, yeah. You got it, little man." The two did the little handshake she and the others had been working on with the droids.
"Till next time… when I kick your ass." With that, the little man snatched his flintlock pistol from her hand and rolled off with his entourage.
"Any broken limbs in here?" Logan appeared on the scene dressed in his battle gear. He carried a cooler of water, and behind him rolled in the auto doc.
"I got a booboo," Kurt showed his elbow where there was the slightest scratch. "Could you kiss it for me, Mister Logan?" Kurt got a water bottle chucked at his face in response.
Evan didn't wait for the cooler to be out of the man's hands before digging into it. "Got any blue Flavor-Town in there?"
"Of course I do, you damn animal! Will you give me just a sec?"
"Well done, team." Ororo strolled in after Logan. "Your communication was excellent, teamwork and coordination were effective, and you managed an unsuspected major threat well. You should be proud of what you accomplished today."
"I know I am!" Kurt dug out a blue flavored Flavor-Town and threw it Jean's way. She caught it mid-air with an unseen force before delivering it to her open palm. After cracking the top of the bottle, she finally seemed to return to reality.
"I agree," Jean said, "Anna's growth in power has been really evident as well!"
Anna propped her hands on her hips. "You're one to talk!"
"Well," Jean shrugged, "Like Scott said, I've been practicing."
"It's been difficult without, Kitty," Scott mumbled between sips of water. Following a stilted silence, he continued. "I mean, we've just become kind of accustomed to her being that left hook in a fight, you know?"
"Yes, well," Ororo sucked in a breath of air, "adaptablity is a usefull skill to learn as well. You may not always have everyone you'd like. You have to, as they say, 'go to war with the troops you have.'"
"Yeah…" Logan said, and let it simmer like an egg burning on a skillet.
Ororo brought her hands together. "I think it's time you all cleaned up, don't you, Logan?"
Logan bit his bottom lip and, with his hands in his pockets, stared at the cooler resting on the ground.
"Shotgun on the shower!" Kurt called and raced past everyone.
"Dude!" Evan raced after him, "I've got robot grease in my creases, man! I get first dibs!"
Jean and Scott soon follow, with Scott gesturing to some unseen thing that Anna couldn't hear the context for, as they were too far off. Anna was the last to leave, all the while looking over her shoulder at the adults.
"Logan -" She heard just before the Danger Room doors slammed shut behind her, "you need to let her go."
** AUTHOR'S NOTE
Hey there! I wanted to let you know that I've decided to publish the entire backlog of Rogue Evolution on my website, artoflupin.com. There, you will be A CHAPTER AHEAD and still be on the same upload schedule you've gotten used to here!
If you'd prefer to wait for uploads here, no worries, uploads will continue here as scheduled.
Thanks! **