American comics: I am full of martial virtues and I love to be kind to others.

“My men—Jason, Pedro, Mike, and Diana—the four of us, plus myself, are responsible for the main building's first floor and the outer area. The seven mercenaries on the first floor, the technicians by the runway, and the one patrolling the outer perimeter—nine regular enemies in total—are handled by the five of us.”

"Nine to five." Mike adjusted his glasses. "If they're still asleep, it shouldn't be too difficult."

“Even if you wake up, there’s nothing to fear.” Pedro gestured with his chin toward Remington.

“Speed ​​is key,” Lynn said, his tone sharpening. “From the moment the lightning struck the communications antenna in Ororo, we have a window of chaos of about sixty to ninety seconds—the enemy doesn’t know what’s happening, communications are down, and the chain of command is paralyzed. Those ninety seconds are the deciding factor in the entire operation. We must take control of the first and second floors of the main building before they can react, seal off all weapon storage points, and cut off their ability to organize resistance. After those ninety seconds, even if they only have fourteen of them, they could potentially use the terrain to their advantage and wage a protracted war of attrition—something we can’t afford to lose.”

“How long can your blackbird stay on the ground?” Jason asked Scott.

"As long as the engines aren't hit, you can stay as long as you want. But I suggest keeping the operation under thirty minutes. Although there's no real-time communication with the outside world on the island, if the Brotherhood's mainland command doesn't receive the routine signal reports from Midway for an extended period, they'll send someone to check. It takes about four to five hours to fly here from Honolulu, so we have a safe window, but let's not waste it."

“Thirty minutes.” Lynn held up three fingers, then bent one. “Communications cut off: first minute. Control of the monitoring center and the first floor of the main building: first five minutes. Safety confirmation and transfer of subjects: first fifteen minutes. Search and cleanup of remaining personnel: until thirty minutes.”

He looked around at every face in the cabin.

Scott's jaw tightened slightly, his gaze behind his red-rimmed glasses unreadable. Jane quietly placed her hand on Scott's forearm, her fingers gently clenching together. Ororo stood beside the bulkhead, his hands folded in front of him, his white hair billowing like a flag. Logan sat in the shadows, his fists on his knees, each finger like a short, thick steel pipe. Taylor straightened his back, his hands resting on his thighs—his fingers were still human-shaped, but the knuckles had a faint gray tinge.

Jason nodded slightly at him. Pedro grinned. Mike remained expressionless, but his right hand was already on the magazine of his M4. Diana's gaze was as calm as a still lake.

"Is there a problem?" Lynn asked.

No one speaks.

“Okay. Scott, take us back to the landing site.”

The Blackbird climbed back to cruising altitude and headed towards an open sea eight nautical miles off Midway. Scott then made a sharp descent, eventually hovering about fifty feet above the water. The engines switched to hover mode, and the downward thrust from the thrust vectoring nozzles created a violent white spray that spread outwards, drawing an ever-expanding white ring on the blue sea.

"Hovering stable. Awaiting further instructions," Scott reported.

A tense atmosphere, typical of the pre-battle period, permeated the cockpit—not the panicked tension, but a static, wound-up tension. Everyone was making final preparations: checking weapons, adjusting equipment, and stretching. Pedro flipped the safety on his Remington three times, repeatedly running his thumb along the edge of the trigger guard—a nervous but effective stress-relieving action. Mike flipped up the iron sights of his M4 to align the front sights, then flipped them back down. Jason unloaded the magazine, counted the rounds to confirm all seventeen were present, then pushed it back in and tapped the bottom of the magazine.

Diana pulled the SIG P320 from its holster, ejected the magazine, pulled the slide to check the chamber, pushed the magazine back in, and released the slide to reset the carriage—the whole sequence of movements was as clean and efficient as flowing water, completed in two and a half seconds. Her gaze met Lynn's as she put the gun back in its holster.

Nothing was said. And nothing needed to be said.

Lynn glanced at his watch. It was 6:42 a.m. local time. The sun was fully up, and the light on the sea had changed from a warm, low-angle gold to a brighter, pre-noon hue. In the direction of Midway, a pale line could be faintly seen—the outline of the atoll's white sand beaches against the blue ocean.

“Jane, do another quick scan. Confirm that there have been no changes in personnel deployment in the target area.”

Jane closed her eyes. This scan lasted very short time—less than ten seconds.

"No change. The people in the rest area are starting to wake up—four people have now switched from sleep to wakefulness. But there's no alertness or unusual emotional fluctuation. They don't know we're here."

How many people are awake?

"Currently, seven people are fully conscious. Three are in the monitoring center, two are in the communications facilities, one is by the runway, and the one on patrol outside. The remaining seven have just woken up or are still asleep."

“Okay.” Lynn straightened up. “Now. Half of them aren’t fully awake yet.”

He picked up the helmet—a light tactical helmet Mike had found in the Xavier's armory—and put it on, tightening the chin strap. The bulletproof vest's buckles were already fastened to the maximum. The Glock 19 was in the holster on his right leg, and the spare magazine was in the magazine pouch on the left side of the vest.

"Everyone, take your positions."

Ten people took their places in the cabin. Logan stood by the cabin door, his fist clenching and unclenching, the tendons in his forearm throbbing beneath his skin—as if something was stirring within his bones. Taylor stood behind him, his hands hanging at his sides, the tips of his fingers already showing that dark gray, stone-like texture.

“Taylor.” Logan didn’t turn around.

"exist."

"Stay close to me. Don't run ahead of me. Don't hesitate when you see the enemy, but don't act impulsively either. When I say 'Crouch,' crouch down; when I say 'Run,' run. Otherwise, use your own judgment—your judgment is better than you think."

Taylor swallowed hard. "I understand."

Logan's lips twitched—the movement was too quick and subtle to be a smile, but it wasn't any other recognizable expression either.

“Scott,” Lynn called toward the cockpit, “Takeoff. Destination: the beach at the northwest corner of Midway.”

"Received. Ororo, is your cloud ready?"

Ororo walked to an observation window beside the hatch. Her amber eyes changed in that instant—the pupils disappeared, and her entire eyeballs turned a pure white, like two pearls charged with lightning. Her short white hair floated slowly in the windless cabin, each strand sparkling with tiny static electricity. “Give me ninety seconds,” she said, her voice echoing, as if something older and more immense was speaking through her throat.

The Blackbird began moving towards Midway. The engines switched from hovering mode to low-speed propulsion, and the plane skimmed the sea surface at a speed of less than one hundred knots, maintaining an altitude of about fifty feet. The airflow from the sea swept past beneath the fuselage, drawing streaks of steam outside the windows.

The sky ahead is changing.

The once clear blue sky above Midway Island began to darken in Lynn's view—not the uniform darkening of an eclipse, but a localized, directional gloom, as if someone were using a giant paintbrush to smear gray paint across the sky. A cumulonimbus cloud materialized from nothingness, expanding, churning, and piling up at an unnatural speed—in less than sixty seconds, a storm cloud spanning two kilometers in diameter had spread out directly above Midway Island, its base pitch black, its interior shimmering with faint purple lightning.

The wind suddenly picked up. White waves rose on the sea, and the plane bounced slightly in the turbulence.

"The clouds are in position," Ororo's voice was calm and distant. "Lightning could strike at any moment."

"Okay. Scott, come on in last."

The Blackbird's engine roared up an octave. The plane lifted sharply from the sea to two hundred feet, its nose pointing toward the white sand beach on the northwest corner of Midway, beginning its final sprint.

Through the observation window, Lynn could see the island rapidly expanding in his field of vision—white sand beaches, green bushes, gray building roofs—everything rushing towards him at a heart-pounding pace.

Thirty seconds later, the Blackbird reached directly above the landing site. Its thrusters rotated ninety degrees downwards, and the aircraft decelerated sharply with a deafening roar, hovering almost vertically twenty feet above the beach. The sand below was whipped into a violent white vortex by the airflow, spraying out in all directions.

At the same moment, a storm struck.

The rain poured down as if someone had overturned the entire ocean and poured it down from the sky. Raindrops pounded on the sea, the beach, and the skin of airplanes, creating a dense, almost white noise-like patter. The wind speed suddenly increased to fifty or sixty knots, blowing the bushes on the atoll almost to the ground. Thunder rolled from the depths of the clouds, one after another, each sound like the skeleton of the sky breaking.

In this chaos, the Blackbird's engine noise was completely drowned out.

The landing gear touched the ground.

The hatch opened.

The air, a mixture of salt water, sea breeze, torrential rain, and the smell of diesel fuel, rushed in.

Lynn was the first to jump out of the hatch, his tactical boots sinking half an inch into the rain-soaked sand. The rain instantly soaked him—helmet, bulletproof vest, trousers—visibility reduced to less than fifty meters by the downpour. He squinted towards the cluster of buildings—six hundred meters away, the gray rooftops loomed in the rain like a pack of gray beasts crouching in the storm.

Diana jumped down from behind him, drawing her SIG P320 as she landed, muzzle pointing downwards against her right leg. Jason, Pedro, and Mike followed closely behind, the three of them spreading out in a fan shape on the beach, each finding their own cover.

Logan didn't use the hatch. He jumped directly out of a side observation window—at least three meters above the ground—landing with a slight bend in his knees before straightening up, sand swirling around his feet. Rain lashed his bare forearms, trickling down the grooves of his muscles. His fists clenched, and three parallel, unnatural bulges rose on his forearms—as if something beneath the skin was desperately trying to burst forth.

Taylor nearly slipped as he rushed out of the hatch—the beach had turned into a soft muddy mess in the downpour. Logan grabbed his arm to steady him, the force so strong that it left five finger marks on his upper arm.

"Stay calm."

“It’s steady.” Taylor looked down at his hands—they had completely changed. Dark iron-gray stone-like skin stretched from his fingertips all the way up to his elbows, his fingers had thickened and lengthened, and his knuckles made a heavy, stone-like clattering sound when they touched.

But this time he felt no fear. Or rather, the fear was still there, but it was covered by something much larger.

Ororo was the last to leave the plane. She wasn't standing on sand—she was floating about a foot above the ground, her white hair whipping upwards in the gale, her body enveloped in a bluish-white aura of electric arcs. Rain evaporated the moment it touched her, forming a ring of continuously boiling steam around her.

She looked up, her white eyes gazing in the direction of the communications facilities.

“Ready.” Her voice cut through the wind and rain, clearer than a human’s.

Lynn raised his right hand. Rainwater flowed down his wrist through the red, blue, and white woven bracelet, carrying away grains of sand and salt.

His hand fell.

"action."

Ororo's body rose into the air during the downpour.

She rose vertically from the beach like an arrow shot from a bowstring, disappearing into the churning clouds within three seconds. Lynn looked up and could only see the blue-white arc of electricity surrounding her leaving a rapidly shrinking bright spot in the gray-black clouds—then even that bright spot merged into the belly of the storm.

Seven seconds later, the sky cracked open.

A bolt of lightning struck straight down from the lowest point of the cumulonimbus cloud, as thick as the trunk of a century-old oak tree, its light so white it was devoid of any color—a pure, almost scorching white that burned the retina. It struck the satellite dish on the roof of the communications facility, heating the metal structure above its melting point in a fraction of a second. The dish-shaped reflector of the antenna curled, glowed red, and collapsed like paper, while the steel support rod bent into an eerie arc in the intense heat. A second bolt of lightning followed closely behind—thinner but more precise, penetrating directly into the feed port of the antenna base and flowing along the coaxial cable into the communications room inside the building. (End of Chapter)