—
Dawn broke over Genosha like a wound opening.
No birds sang. No wind stirred the ash that fell like grey snow across the ruins of paradise. The only sounds were the crackling of still-burning fires and the soft moans of the dying, a symphony of suffering that would haunt survivors for the rest of their lives.
Four million, three hundred and twenty thousand.
That was the number Beast had calculated, his blue fur matted with blood and ash as he worked tirelessly in the makeshift dical tents. His hands trembled, not from exhaustion but from the weight of mathematics. Twenty-seven percent of sixteen million. Each digit represented lives, families, futures that had been vaporized in minutes.
I sat on a chunk of what used to be soone's ho, staring at my hands. Clean hands. Hero's hands. Hands that had saved 12 million while 4 million burned.
So hero you turned out to be.
The thought tasted like bile. In my previous life, I'd read about Genosha's destruction in comic panels, felt that distant sadness you get from fictional tragedy. But living it? Breathing air thick with vaporized flesh? Hearing telepaths scream as they felt millions die at once?
This wasn't entertainnt. This was holocaust.
"Ben." Gwen's voice ca from behind , soft and broken. She looked wrong, her usual confidence replaced by sothing hollow. Magic sparkled weakly at her fingertips as she tried to heal a young girl's burns, but the energy flickered and died. "My magic... it feels empty. Like the universe itself is wounded."
I wanted to comfort her, to say sothing profound about how we'd rebuild, how we'd honor the dead by protecting the living. But what ca out was, "I knew this would happen."
She sighed. "You tried your best."
"I warned them. Magneto, Xavier, everyone who'd listen." My voice sounded dead even to my own ears. "But fair enough. Why would they believe so kid with an alien watch over their world-class intelligence networks? Their satellites, their psychics, their perfect mutant paradise that couldn't possibly fall?"
The bitter laugh that escaped didn't sound human. Maybe because part of wasn't anymore. The fanfics I read never showed this. Everything was fun and sunshine, and even in tragedy, the main character was always the cold badass.
I didn't feel that. I feel weak. How many tis had I thought myself special because I had ta-knowledge? Because I knew the plot? Fat lot of good it did when nobody listened.
You could have done more. Pushed harder. Taken control.
But that would've made the villain, wouldn't it? The human forcing mutants to abandon their celebration because of paranoid theories.
And deep down, so traitorous part of had wanted to be wrong. Had hoped that maybe, just maybe, this universe would be different.
Anna Marie stood twenty feet away, kneeling beside what remained of Kurt Wagner. She'd removed her gloves, pressing bare hands against his ruined face in the only safe touch she'd ever have with her brother. No power to absorb from the dead. Just cold flesh and the mory of sulfur.
"Should've been faster," she whispered, though whether to Kurt or herself, I couldn't tell. "Should've been there when that bitch... when she..."
Her shoulders shook, but no tears ca. Maybe she'd run out. Maybe we all had.
Storm struggled to maintain even a gentle breeze to clear the toxic smoke, her powers failing from sheer exhaustion. Every few minutes she'd collapse, then force herself up again, driven by duty that wouldn't let her rest while people choked on the ashes of their neighbors.
Emma Frost's diamond form showed spider web cracks that wouldn't heal, psychic trauma made physical. She stood like a statue, afraid that moving might shatter her completely.
Even Charmcaster, usually so composed, clutched her head as magical feedback scread through her senses. "Gwen isn't wrong. Reality itself is wounded," she gasped. "The amount of death, the violation of natural order... it's like soone took a knife to the fabric of existence."
Yet, despite all these people, sohow it was Magneto who truly broke my heart.
The Master of Magnetism, the most powerful mutant alive, knelt in the ruins of what had been a school. In his hands, he held a child's drawing, edges charred but image still visible. A stick figure in purple and red, labeled "Mr. Magneto" in crayon, surrounded by smaller figures under a rainbow.
"They drew as a hero," he whispered, and hearing Erik Lehnsherr's voice crack was sohow worse than all the screaming. "These children... they thought I could protect them."
Everywhere I looked, I saw failure. My failure. Sohow, Magneto blad himself too. We were on the sa boat sohow.
"I should have done more," I whispered, not even realizing I'd spoken aloud. "I knew this was coming. I tried to warn everyone, but I should have been more convincing. Should have fought harder."
Magneto's laugh was a terrible sound, brittle and sharp-edged as he turned . "You warned us, boy. You did more than any human has ever done for mutantkind." His eyes tracked across the destruction. Sothing dangerous was building behind them. "All this isn't your fault. It's Charles and I... we were too proud, too convinced of our own invulnerability. Too eager to show the world our achievent."
A wave of nausea rolled through as I realized what Magneto was saying. The man wasn't blaming . He was absolving .
He was treating as a kid. And sohow, that felt worse.
"It's alright. It's ti I woke up, anyway," Magneto said. His tone was truly dangerous now.
Xavier rolled closer in his wheelchair, reaching out to his old friend. "Erik..."
"Don't." Magneto's voice turned to steel. "Don't you dare comfort , Charles. Not when your dreams of coexistence led us here." He stood slowly, the drawing crumbling to ash in his clenched fist. "We tried it your way. We opened our doors, showed them we ant no harm, and they responded with genocide."
"Not all humans–" Xavier began.
"ENOUGH!" The tal in a hundred-yard radius scread in response to Magneto's rage. "Their governnts knew. Had to know. You don't build weapons like these in secret. You don't coordinate orbital strikes without infrastructure, funding, and approval at the highest levels."
Grandpa Max's communicator crackled with static. His face, already grim, went pale as he listened to the transmission. "Indeed. Even the Plumber reinforcents were delayed... they were intercepted. They were blocked when they were about to enter Earth's atmosphere."
Of course we are. This is Earth's ss. Earth's hatred. The Plumbers had managed to push through, of course. It was the Plumbers, after all. They were present all across the island, helping people with anything they could.
"No more," Magneto said quietly, and that soft tone was more terrifying than any scream. "No more treaties. No more patience. No more rcy."
He began to rise, magnetic fields lifting him above the ruins. Around the world, satellite systems started malfunctioning, their electronics responding to his rage even from thousands of miles away.
"Erik, what are you doing?" Storm demanded.
"What I should have done years ago." His eyes blazed with power that had reshaped mountains. "If humanity wants to play extinction gas, then let them learn what it ans to face extinction themselves. Every satellite, every power grid, every electronic system on Earth. I'll send them back to the dark ages they clearly prefer."
"You'll kill billions!" Jean protested.
"They killed millions of us in minutes!" Magneto roared back. "Where was their concern for life then? Where was their humanity when they pressed the button?"
He raised his hands, and I could feel it. The electromagnetic pulse building, ready to cascade across the planet. Hospitals would fail. Life support systems would die. Planes would fall from the sky. It would be revenge on a scale that would make the Sentinels look rciful.
And part of , the dark part that had watched Kurt die, that had failed to save paradise, the deeply uncivilized person that I was in my previous life, whispered.
Let him do it. What's the worse that'll happen?
That's when my wrist exploded with light.
Not the usual green glow of the Omnitrix preparing for transformation. This was different. Deeper. The faceplate displayed scrolling text in Galvan script that I could sohow read, though I'd never learned the language.
ANOMALY DETECTED.
ANALYZING... ANALYZING...
CREATOR PROTOCOL ENGAGED.
A hologram flickered above the watch. For a heartbeat, Azmuth himself appeared, the tiny Galvan's eyes eting mine across impossible distance. He said nothing, but his expression conveyed volus. I couldn't understand what.
Then he dissolved into streams of code that poured back into the device.
[SECTION 007, SUBSYSTEM 14 HAS BEEN UNLOCKED.]
The voice was different. Not the usual chanical tone but sothing older, more solemn. Like the universe itself was speaking. It was all in my head.
[NEW DNA ACCESSIBLE.]
Everyone was still busy staring at Magneto while I looked at the Omnitrix in shock. A new transformation? Now? But as I scrolled through the display, I saw him. A figure I recognized from episodes that were always aweso.
My hands shook as I selected the form. No way. This is... this could actually...
"Ben?" Gwen asked. "What's happening?"
I looked up at Magneto, still hovering with world-ending power at his fingertips. At Xavier, paralyzed by the failure of his dreams. At Anna Marie, cradling her dead brother. At the ruins of paradise scattered with four million corpses.
"I don't know, really. But… I'm about to do sothing impossible," I said, and slamd my hand down on the watch.
The transformation was wrong. Different. Instead of the usual sequence where my body shifted and changed, this one moved in reverse. Parts of aged and un-aged simultaneously, experiencing every mont of my existence at once.
My consciousness scattered across temporal streams, seeing infinite possibilities before snapping back together.
When it finished, I stood as sothing that shouldn't exist in this universe.
My body was chanical, constructed of copper and brass that glead despite the ash-filled air. Gears turned visibly beneath transparent panels in my chest, each tick marking monts that hadn't yet happened. A large key protruded from my head, turning on its own with a sound like a thousand pocket watches synchronized to the heartbeat of ti itself.
"Clockwork," I announced, my voice carrying harmonics that made reality shiver. The Chronosapien DNA.
"Benjamin, what..." Magneto lowered his hands, the building electromagnetic pulse forgotten. "Do not try to stop . I will not kill you, for I am grateful, but I can't promise that I won't hurt you."
"I don't plan to fight you," I admitted, looking at my chanical hands. Ti visibly distorted around , dust reversing its fall, small fires un-burning themselves within my proximity. "But I think I'm about to do sothing crazy."
I reached up, grasping the key protruding from my head.
The mont my fingers touched it, I understood. Not everything, but enough. This wasn't just ti manipulation. I could be selective. I suddenly knew what to do.
"Benjamin! Stop!"
Reality folded like origami as the Ancient One materialized, not through a portal but by unfolding from space itself. Her face showed genuine alarm, sothing I'd never seen on the Sorcerer Supre.
"You don't understand the consequences! Temporal revision on this scale could create paradoxical fractures that–"
Magneto's hand shot out, and the Ancient One was restrained by tal bands that flew from the debris around. She scowled, glaring at Magnto, but he continued holding her in place with desperate efficiency.
"Let him try," Magneto said quietly. "Whatever he's planning, it can't be worse than this."
The Ancient One's expression shifted from alarm to sothing like understanding. "Oh, I hate this."
"Then I guess I better not screw up."
I turned the key.
The chanics in my chest began moving faster, gears spinning with increasing speed until they blurred into pure erald light. Power built inside , not energy but ti itself made tangible. Every second that had passed since the attack began pressed against my consciousness, demanding to be acknowledged.
I angled my chest toward the sky and fired.
The beam that erupted from my chest wasn't light or energy but crystallized ti. It shot upward, then expanded into a do that grew to encompass first the island, then the ocean, then continents, until it covered the entire planet. But even as it expanded outward, it was already contracting, moving backward through its own existence.
"What's happening?" Jean gasped, her telepathy picking up sothing impossible. "I can feel... minds? Returning?" Chapters first released on n0velfire
The do raced back toward , and as it passed, reality rewrote itself.
Not everything. The buildings remained destroyed. The Sentinels stayed as scattered wreckage. But the people…
They appeared like ghosts becoming solid. A child here, an adult there. Mutants of every description materialized where they had been standing monts before death, expressions confused and disoriented but unmistakably alive.
A mother materialized mid-scream, then blinked in confusion at being alive. Children reford from ash, looking around in wonder. Families reconstituted from vapor, falling into each other's arms.
The do contracted faster now, spawning thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. Each person appearing at the mont before death would have claid them, pulled forward through ti to now.
Four million, three hundred and twenty thousand souls, plucked from the jaws of extinction.
Kurt Wagner materialized last, gasping and whole, his blue fur restored, his yellow eyes wide with shock. Anna Marie let out a sound that was half sob, half laugh as she threw her arms around him, gloves be damned.
The do finished contracting, disappearing back into my chest with a sound like the universe exhaling. I stood there for a mont, chanical body humming with residual temporal energy, then the Omnitrix flashed red.
The transformation ended, and I collapsed to my knees as Ben Tennyson, human and exhausted and laughing like a madman.
Oh, what a feeling this was. How incredible.
"I did it," I gasped between hysterical giggles. "I really did it! Eat that, fate. Destiny can kiss my ass."
People were laughing and crying all across the island. Millions of people who'd been dead minutes ago stood in shocked confusion. But the X-n, the Brotherhood, and everyone who'd witnessed the impossible were frozen in shock, staring at like I'd grown a second head.
Then Magneto descended, landing with surprising gentleness. He walked toward slowly, deliberately, and for a mont, I tensed. He reaches out his hand toward the Omnitrix. Was he going to try to take the Omnitrix? After what it had just done?
Instead, he grabbed my wrist and raised my arm above my head.
"I, MAGNETO," he shouted. "THE MASTER OF MAGNETISM AND KING OF GENOSHA," his voice carried across the island through magnetic manipulation of sound waves, reaching every ear, every survivor, every resurrectee. "HEREBY DECLARE THAT FROM THIS DAY FORWARD, BENJAMIN TENNYSON SHALL BE KNOWN AS THE SAVIOR OF MUTANTKIND! THE HERO OF GENOSHA! THE ONE WHO DENIED DEATH ITSELF!"
The roar that erupted from four million throats shook the very foundations of the broken island. People who didn't even know what had happened, who only knew they were alive when they shouldn't be, took up the chant.
"TEN-NY-SON! TEN-NY-SON! TEN-NY-SON!"
As I stood there, supported by Magneto of all people, surrounded by people I'd saved from a tragedy I couldn't prevent, I realized sothing.
I wasn't just a kid with an alien watch anymore. I'd just beca sothing else. Sothing more.
A symbol.
And symbols, I was learning, had responsibilities that went far beyond throwing punches and shooting lightning.
The paradise was still broken. The dream of Genosha had still been wounded, perhaps mortally. But its people lived. Four million souls who would rember this day not as when paradise fell, but as when one human with an alien watch told Death itself to fuck off.
Not bad for a Tuesday.
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