Chapter 0158: Complacency

The feelings being conveyed from his Symbiotic suit made Captain America extremely wary. He trusted his suit's gut and wouldn't disregard it.

"Let's take a step back, shall we?" He asked as he held his hammer to the side and dropped it on the ground, seemingly as a peaceful gesture. However, Alex could tell that he was stalling for time. Even with all of the power that Steve Rogers possessed, he had never gotten complacent and was very meticulous with everything he did.

Just as Steve raised his hands up in the air as a show of trust, the sound of sparks was heard and Laura gave him the finger before saying, "You think I can't sense the crazy reality-bending mutant approaching our location?" With her words, Wolverine and Laura both fell through the ground into a mystic arts portal.

"No!" Steve instantly grabbed his hammer and hit it on the ground in an attempt to destabilize the portal. The ensuing explosion of lightning destroyed the entire building and Steve was the only one who emerged from the rubble. He had an annoyed expression on his face.

Moments later, a red-adorned flying witch descended in front of Steve, "You lost them?"

He didn't answer and asked another question, "Can you track them? They went through Strange's mystic arts portal." He asked 'Wanda'.

"Wasn't Doctor Strange stranded back in our original reality?" She tilted her head curiously, not giving him the answer he wanted.

"We've been infiltrated," Steve said with a grave tone.

"How fun…" Unlike Steve's solemn demeanor, 'Wanda' was incomparably excited, "Are we going to be attacking them soon?" She asked, "They both have gone to their base." She seemed to have already tracked the destination of the portal.

"Any traces of your main body?" Steve deflected the question.

'Wanda' gave Steve a fleeting side-eye and said, "None. It's like this reality's Cthon doesn't even exist. So no, all you get is the tiny wisp of my true power in this vessel."

…

Laura and Wolverine jumped out of the ground in front of the entrance of the base of the Underground. The organization was aptly located in an old underground Shield facility that was untraceable by any satellites.

Just as the father-daughter duo appeared at the entrance of the facility, multiple guards had their weapons pointed at them, "Halt!" One of them said while gesturing to the others to call for backup and surround the two unfamiliar faces.

Wolverine raised his hands up in surrender to calm down the panicked guards and asked Laura with a hushed tone, "How did you even know about the location of this place?"

"I just do," She said with a shrug, "They aren't as hidden as they think." The location for this base was present behind a relatively safe firewall in Hydra's servers. It wasn't that Steve didn't know where they were, he was just preparing for attack.

Laura didn't care for the guns pointed at her and calmly started walking toward the entrance.

"Stay right there, or else we will be forced to shoot you." The same man warned her again and the guards all pointed their guns at Laura's head, leaving Wolverine free.

Laura snorted and her eyes gained a hue of blue while red energy surrounded her whole being, making her hair float upwards, "Or," Laura gave them a better suggestion, "You can threaten me again and I'll wipe you off of the face of this planet. Would you like to try?" She asked with a harmless smile that terrified each and every one of them. Combined with a compulsion that Alex cast using Chaos magic, everyone was visibly spooked and dropped their weapons while stepping back shakily.

"Come on, pops." Laura gestured to a stunned Wolverine as she started walking past the guards.

He followed her while mumbling, "I'm getting too old for this…"

As Laura walked in the door, she was attacked by a repulsor blast to her face.

Her expression darkened and she directly summoned a bolt of lightning from the sky, uncaring of the damage it would cause to the facility. The Iron Man suit that attacked her got caught up in the blast and was destroyed as a large amount of rubble fell directly on top of Laura. A red barrier appeared above her and Wolverine making the debris fall to the side, not even touching them.

"I don't like Stark…" She mumbled as Wolverine barely stopped himself from jumping back from the blast radius. Laura was now in her symbiote suit as it pulsed with blue lightning arcs that were tinted with a red bue from Chaos energy. Wolverine now stepped back, giving Laura some space.

"Logan, can you please calm her down?" An aged voice sounded out and Alex felt goosebumps rising throughout his being. He knew who this person was. He knew that this person would be here, but Alex still didn't stop Laura from taking the hard-handed showboaty approach.

Alex realized that in his complacency, he'd fucked up, 'Fuck fuck fuck…' He mumbled as he felt Charles Xavier forming a tether into Laura's mind to forcefully calm her down and 'inadvertently' read some of her memories. It would be an accident after all, and she wouldn't know. Plus, it's all for the greater good.

The problem was that that tether led directly to Alex. He was visibly enraged as he felt Xavier's mental probe getting through his defenses.

That rage was reflected in the suit as the Chaos Energy surrounding Laura's body formed a thin sheen over her suit that also had multiple tentacles extending out of it.

"I'll fucking kill you!" Laura shouted at Xavier as her emotions mirrored Alex's. Her eyes met with Xavier's even through Alex's 'head' that covered her head. Unlike a modification of her superhero suit, this time, she looked much more monstrous, similar to how a Venomized person should look.

Xavier narrowed his eyes as he felt Alex's presence within Laura and went even deeper into Laura's mind. In that instant, countless bolts of lightning fell down directly on top of Laura as Alex charged up his lightning crazily. He didn't hold anything back as he felt Xavier having touched upon his soul. Within moments, the older mutant would be able to read his memories and know everything about his existence.

With those falling lightning bolts, more of the facility was destroyed as Charles alongside most of the people was about to be buried in the rubble, but a translucent barrier surrounded him and some of the people who were in the blast radius and made the debris slide off, preventing anyone from getting hurt.

Due to Xavier's mental compulsion, Alex-Laura couldn't get rid of their eye contact with him. The maw in place of Laura's head opened and roared monstrously at him, mirroring Alex's current rage. It was directed both at himself for his complacency and at Xavier for directly invading his and Laura's mind without asking any questions.

As the monstrous howl reverberated through the facility and mixed with the clapping sounds of thunder, "Dieee!" Laura-Alex screamed at Xavier and everything instantly halted. The lightning stopped falling from the sky, and the pulsating of red and blue within Laura's Apex form halted in its place as if stopped in time.

The large white pupilless eyes narrowed at Xavier with cold rage and the bald man instantly fell to the ground with no more fanfare.

Everything returned to normal. The debris continued falling, the lightning continued crackling in the sky and the people started scrambling away from the site of the battle.

Charles Xavier was dead.

'I fucked up…' Alex panted tiredly as he hurriedly cast a portal under the unconscious Laura and disappeared. He also grabbed Xavier's dead body with him in hopes of getting some kind of mental defense ability by devouring the man. However, it was unlikely since he was already dead.

Leaving Logan to deal with the aftermath of her actions, Laura appeared in Farm Earth, inside the presidential suite in the White House along with the dead body of Professor X. The Apex outfit surrounding her receded into her body and turned into casual clothes as she slept on the bed.

As for Alex, his consciousness was extremely tired after the ability that he'd just forced himself to bypass many restrictions to utilize.

‹Synapse Collapse›:: The ability to halt all electrical impulses in the brain and cause instant brain death. Cooldown: 24 hrs

This was an ability that he'd unlocked after bonding with Jane and advancing his lightning manipulation to the advanced grade. There were many prerequisites for it. For one, he had to be in contact with the recipient. He couldn't just look at someone and kill them.

As overpowered as that would be, it was very impractical. He couldn't control the brain's electrical impulses through someone's skull without physical contact.

During the fight, he was under the immense strain of having his mental defenses broken through like they were cheap recycled paper. This was the main reason that he didn't want to get anywhere close to the X-Men in any of the variations of Earth. Because of telepaths like Emma Frost, Jean Grey, and Charles Xavier. They could invade his mind and he wouldn't even know. The only reason that he was able to take care of Charles was because the older man made the mistake of being close enough to Laura. Otherwise, Alex would have no way to kill the man and would be completely helpless.

The whole encounter with Charles had merely lasted for 4 seconds. Alex had to summon all the lightning he could so that he would be able to form a tiny path to reach Xavier through the flood of lightning that was in his control. He'd barely gotten through Charles' telekinetic barrier after exhausting himself to an insane extent.

Even though it was merely four seconds, it had taken enough out of Alex that he wanted to nap for a couple of days for the first time since he awoke as a Symbiote.

'I'll go back there in a few days…' He thought to himself.

***

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