Just as Meyer cocked his fist back, the deadly crimson force field encircling his clenched fingers, another hand reached out and caught Meyer by the wrist. Meyer’s eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets as he turned his attention to whoever dared grab him.

“No, actually,” Lydia said, her own immense strength fighting Meyer’s, “you’re not.”

Throwing a right cross that could shatter bones, Lydia connected with General Meyer’s chin, sending him flying away from Wisdom. “But I’m sure going to enjoy this.”

Lydia ran passed Wisdom, who was desperately trying to stand up on his own on shaky legs. He had never felt so tired in all his days as a trained operative. Being blown up, beaten, shot at, and chased has that effect on a person. Now, the woman he cared about most in the world was fighting for both their lives.

Straining against every nerve in his body, Wisdom pushed off the wall and strode purposefully toward the sparring fighters. Concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other, Wisdom navigated his way around debris and shrapnel…before promptly passing out, smacking his head on a chunk of the wall.

“Peter!” Lydia yelled after chancing a glance over her shoulder.

Meyer, taking advantage of the distraction, pelted her across the face with a closed fist. Her teeth rattled and spit flew from her mouth as the pain enveloped her jaw. The General followed the attack up with a boot to her midsection, causing the female mutant to fall to her knees in a heap and short of breath.

“I’m nearly at my wits end because of you,” Meyer stated. “Do you have any idea of the damage you’ve caused to this country, this organization, and to me? You can’t even show your face in a post office and for what? To prove a point? Because you don’t like us? Because you can’t stand the thought of someone other than yourselves in control of the world’s largest military network! You’re arrogant, self-serving, repugnant muties!”

Meyer stomped across Lydia’s face, the force field adding to the hit and forcing her to hug the floor. A tiny drop of blood oozed out from between her lips.

“The world will be better off when you’re six feet under,” Meyer added as he readied his fist for the killing blow.

Meyer’s energy-laced knuckles flew, striking down on something round and hard that wasn’t Lydia Del Ruiz’s already bruised face. Maverick’s chest swelled as he absorbed the kinetic energy of Meyer’s assault, feeding his mutant abilities with his increased strength.

“Bad move, asshole,” Maverick said. “Back off before I snap your scrawny little neck.”

Meyer roared and continued to pound on Maverick with all of his enhanced strength. A right cross, a left jab, another right cross, an uppercut…Maverick took it all in stride as he allowed his mutant powers to absorb what they could. Even though the attack empowered his reserves, Maverick still felt shaken by the powerful impacts against his worn skin.

Slipping his right arm inside of Meyer’s left, Maverick pivoted and shifted his weight around to put the General in a strangle hold. Meyer may have had the edge in brute strength thanks in part to his exoskeleton but Maverick had decent leverage on his side. So long as he could keep his arm locked and his weight against the General, he would be able to hold him.

“Get up, Lydia!” the veteran mutant yelled. “Get to the others! Grab Pete and Terry, find Marcus, and get out!”

Lydia, still seeing stars in front of her from Meyer’s last kick, hesitated about leaving her friend behind. She wanted to help swat their tormentor down; the man who had one of their teammates killed and had caused so much trouble on an international level. As far as she was concerned death was an easy escape for what he deserved.

In the far reaches of her peripheral vision she saw something lying just above the rubble move. It was Wisdom, looking like the Grim Reaper had slapped him across the face. At that moment everything in her mind concerning Meyer was flushed away and replaced with utter concern for her lover.

Springing up and forgetting the grudge match unfolding behind her, Lydia bolted for the other side of the expansive room to try and salvage her teammates.

“I beat you before,” Maverick said matter-of-factly, “and I’ll damn well do it again.”

“I’m running on full intensity, you stupid little worm of a man!” Meyer shot back, his nostrils flaring and the crimson energy of his exoskeleton buckling around him. “Your powers can’t hold out forever. Sooner or later I’ll grind your bones in between my knuckles and then we’ll see what happens to your precious friends.”

Maverick head-butted the General, sending him spinning away in a slight but all too brief daze. Meyer quickly recovered and used the distance between them to fire off a concentrated amount of red electrical discharge at the absorbing mutant. He diverted power from the strength augmenters to his gauntlets, doubling the output of his steady blast.

“They’ll hold out…long enough!” Maverick said over the bombardment. His muscles and bones felt like they were on fire from all the energy he was absorbing.

“Even if you manage to stop me you’ll still have to deal with the half dozen platoons awaiting orders outside to open fire on your worthless hides! You’re paddlin’ upstream, boy. Give it up!”

Instead of answering the smug Byron leader with a verbal retaliation, Maverick planted his feet firmly on the ground and raised his left hand to press against Meyer’s energy assault. His hand began to glow a bright yellow as his powers did their best to block the attack, while his other hand released a volley of kinetic energy back at the General. They were both now caught in a loop, the same energy running back and forth between them in a wide arc. Maverick knew this wouldn’t work forever since the electrical discharge couldn’t be absorbed the same way the rest of Meyer’s attacks had been.

For now, all he could do was buy his teammates a little more time to survive.

“Keep ‘em in check, Sergeant,” he told one of the commanding officers on scene. “They aren’t under arrest…yet. So far they’ve just been following the orders of complete morons.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” the agent replied, a wry smile across his face.

Fury glanced up at the complex towering over them. Smoke billowed out of some of the windows and one entire section had been leveled from an interior explosion. Now that the Indentures were in the hands of the right people, Fury was ready to finally make his move. If Shadowcat could do her part and lower the security grid that was miraculously still in place then Fury could do whatever he could to help X-Force.

It was time pick up SHIELD by its collective bootstraps and come to the rescue.

In between the smoke she saw something that stuck out like a sore thumb: bright, red hair. She raced over to Siryn, who saw her coming through barely opened eyes.

“Wake up!” she told the Irish mutant. “Come on, Terry, we need to get out of here before the whole place falls over!”

Siryn rolled her neck around in Lydia’s cradling arm and coughed up a mouthful of blood. Lydia was shocked and terrified to see that one of their most powerful members had taken a hit directly to her throat. The pain must have been unbearable, especially for someone like Terry.

Lydia laid her teammate down as flat as she could to administer first aid even though she knew how futile it all was. She checked over Terry’s body, pulling in a breathe as she saw what looked like a concussion swelling on the top of her scalp. Siryn was already barely conscious and if she slipped away now she ran the risk of falling into a coma.

Things were way beyond her control and she knew it. Lydia’s heart began to race as she tried to figure out what to do next. She looked around to see if any of her surroundings would inspire some miracle action to occur.

“Carry her…down the fire stairwell,” Wisdom managed to mutter from over her shoulder.

Lydia whirled around to see Wisdom hunched over a few feet behind her, clutching at his side with a spot of blood dribbling out of his mouth.

“Peter!” she exclaimed, relieved. “I almost thought that…oh my God…”

“Dead?” he finished for her. “You can say it, but this ol’ bloke’s still got some more fight left in him.”

The leader of X-Force tried to lean on the crumbling wall to stand up straight when a stream of electricity arced into the side of his body, knocking him up and over the pair of women.

“But not enough!” General Meyer growled as he continued his vicious attack on the helpless mutant.

Their adversary was limping and obviously fatigued from his showdown with Maverick but a quick glance at the fallen veteran soldier told Lydia everything she needed to know. Their team was falling apart one person at a time.

Lydia, grabbing a stray piece of water piping from the floor, charged the General in an attempt to break the excruciating circuit he had formed with her fiancé. Wisdom’s cries of agony ceased as her tackle took Meyer out of position long enough to stop the crimson assault. Reasserting her grasp on the slender pipe, Lydia wailed General Meyer across his protected face with all her might.

“That’ll be enough from you, Miss Del Ruiz,” Meyer stated as he blocked her second strike and reached for her throat. His speed surprised her as he easily clenched his fingers around her soft neck, squeezing the life from her. She fought back, flailing wildly against his force field, but a quick shock from his gauntlets sapped the brutality from her.

Placing greater and greater pressure on her windpipe, Meyer formed a vindictive smile and watched as he slowly murdered Lydia Del Ruiz.

“P…Peter!” she managed to gasp.

Smoke wafting from his person, Wisdom shot up just in time to see Meyer let Lydia limply fall to the floor. Her petite body slipped down to rest at his feet and the fire within Peter Wisdom’s soul was ignited once more. The aches and pains that riddled his own body were forgotten and the force that flowed through him was more powerful than a straight shot of adrenaline. Every color in the war torn room faded away, as the only thing Wisdom saw was red.

He wanted to bellow at the top of his lungs and swear until his throat was raw, but he couldn’t concentrate on anything other than killing. Forming two of his patented hot knives made up of solidified plasma into each hand Wisdom tuned out everything in the vicinity except for the tyrant turncoat that had chased them halfway across the world.

“I’m going to fucking rip your black heart out, you little sod of a man,” he said, to which the General only shook his head challengingly.

Wisdom covered the distance between them in a plethora of great strides as he screamed a battle cry filled with malice and deadly intent. Meyer expected the former Black Air agent to launch a ranged attack, as he knew Peter was accustomed to doing with his plasma shards. Much to his chagrin, Wisdom pumped energy through his hot knives and elongated them into two fluid energy whips. The tactic had worked wonders against the world-class assassin Elektra and now Wisdom planned to slash away at Meyer with them.

Wisdom yanked up hard with his left hand and one of the whips sliced into Meyer’s force field. The General stepped back to collect himself from the surprise maneuver but found another whip slashing at his other side. Again and again Wisdom hacked and slashed, forcing Meyer to keep losing ground. The pair leaned left and right as if they were participating in some kind of psychotic dance, with Wisdom obviously leading the foray.

One final slash sent Meyer tripping back over a damaged office desk chair and sprawled out flat on his back. Wisdom let his whips dissipate as he stepped forward and towered over the fallen General. He thought simply pressing his assault and unleashing his fury would be enough to calm him down when it came to this, but he still wanted to spill his enemy’s blood. Meyer, who’s exoskeleton had been too damaged for him to even sit up, was forced to sit and await what was coming.

“You’re what’s wrong with this world,” Wisdom spat out. “You say you’re doing one thing but you’re really doing the other. Bold, two-faced lies are the only way you operate so how could you expect to accomplish anything? You’ve made a total mockery of a once proud organization and because of that we are all involved in an international incident. And for what? So you can prove your dick is bigger than Fury’s? Or some pompous paper-pusher in the U.N.?”

“You wouldn’t understand…” Meyer said between breathes.

“The hell I wouldn’t! People have died because of your pissing contest! Good people that you aren’t even worthy to wipe the ass of!”

“I’m a soldier, you arrogant piece of shit! Maybe you forgot about what it means to have honor and respect. Maybe to you these words are part of a punch line but to me they’re they only reason this filth infested planet we were left on functions. Fury was weak before the Byron Agency ever stepped into the equation, letting garbage like you take the lead in his field ops. Don’t fool yourself, traitor. Without men like me you wouldn’t even be alive.”

The General’s reply sunk into the pit of Wisdom’s stomach, mixing with the anger and torment he had been going through for the last few weeks. The color red still hazed his vision as he made the decision to end it all.

Wisdom formed a package of condensed plasma in his right hand ten times the size of his normal shards. The enormous spike hummed with power as he heaved it over his head, Meyer’s eyes nearly jumping out of their sockets. Thinking of all that the Byron Agency had ripped away from him, Wisdom plunged the giant dagger down into General Meyer, easily piercing his metallic hide.

“Agent!” Nick Fury called out to him. “Stand down!”

Wisdom looked through the broken wall to see the Colonel and a dozen SHIELD troopers swarming around him, rifles raised and ready. Behind the troopers stood the last people Wisdom hoped to see: a very disgruntled Team X. He looked back down into Meyer’s eyes, the tip of his spike centimeters from his face.

“It’s over, Pete,” Fury continued. “We’ve extracted the evidence from their intelligence routing complex. We’ve got everything we need to shut the bastards down permanently. Stand down.”

Hesitantly, Wisdom allowed his energy weapon to fade away as he stood up straight again. The SHIELD contingent swept forward to secure the area while Fury strode toward his former agent, catching Meyer’s eye in the process. Pure resentment passed between the two military figures as the Colonel ignored the impulse to unsheathe his own weapon put a round between the General’s pupils.

“Kitty got the grid down that a few of the Byrons erected to keep us from using HERMES to ‘port in,” Fury explained. “I guess once Meyer stormed in with that ridiculous tank he decided to shut SHIELD out. Have you all to himself. Looks like that was a big mistake on his part.”

“Peter!” Maverick yelled from the opposite side of the floor.

Wisdom turned to see Maverick and Siryn huddling around Lydia. He called out her name, fearing the worst as he bolted to her side.

“Hold on, luv,” he whispered to her as he held her close. “You’re still breathing…you’ll be fine. I’m here with you. Don’t worry…”

“We’ll teleport a damn doctor in if we have to,” Maverick said over his shoulder. “Just hang in there, Lydia.”

Lydia locked her eyes on to Peter’s and that was when he realized that there was nothing he could do. For his entire adult life, Peter Wisdom had been a man of action, someone who couldn’t stand to sit by idly waiting for the other shoe to drop. To sit and watch the love of his life slip away…

“Find him for me,” she muttered just loudly enough for only Peter to hear. “Find him for me and tell him how he’d be proud of me, of all of us for what we did today…”

“I will, luv, I promise. I love you.”

The last glimmer of life faded from Lydia Del Ruiz’s downcast eyes as Peter Wisdom gripped her as tight as he could. He gently rocked her back and forth and stroked her hair just as he had on so many of the their quiet nights spent together.

He had taken many lovers during his lifetime but none had captivated him like Lydia. As she slipped away from him like a bird in flight, so too did a piece of his very soul.

“As for the last point of order, I call on SHIELD Director Fury to debrief this council on the status of the defunct black ops team, Codename: X-Force.”

Fury made his way to the front of the meeting room, mixed emotions swirling inside of him ranging from somber to nostalgic. The men and women making up the council hated when he smoked his cigars during a debriefing but he didn’t give a damn. He puffed away as he took his seat, knowing full well that the cigar was one of the few things keeping him from screaming obscenities at the pompous bureaucrats.

“Colonel,” the same council member said, “where does SHIELD sit with its mutant operations initiative?”

“Team X members Bishop and Shard are maintaining their security positions, both now stationed in southern Canada,” Fury began after a brief pause. “Shadowcat resigned, as X-Force was her original reason for returning in the first place. She may be taking this harder than most.”

Irritated at the stares the council longingly gave him Fury finally swallowed his pride and stomped out his cigar on the oak desk before returning to his explanation. “The bodies of Marcus Raven and Lydia Del Ruiz are being held on one of our helicarriers until we can locate any family members. Given the limited amount of background information we have I’m leaning towards a motion that we bury them in Arlington.”

“Even though their suspicion of terrorism--”

“With all due respect, sir, the information we obtained from the Byron Agency’s intelligence routing center cleared all those charges. They deserve to be buried beside all the others that gave their lives for this country. Besides, Siryn will make sure that’s what happens when she returns from medical leave on Muir Island. I’m not entirely convinced she’ll be returning to active duty once she returns.”

“And what of Peter Wisdom?”

“Extended vacation,” Fury answered cryptically.

The board members murmured among themselves for a moment, casting wayward looks around the room. The various requisition reports before each of them had implied something more intricate than a mere vacation for the former Black Air agent, but the look on Fury’s face told them that part of the debriefing was over.

“That’s it then,” another representative said. “Thank you for your invaluable service and faith toward this organization, Colonel. Also, congratulations are in order for your return to SHIELD as full time director. Consider our relationship with the Byron Security Agency at an end for good, as their funding has been returned and their contracts scrapped. Do you have any questions before we make a motion to dismiss this meeting?”

“Just one,” Fury said as he stood. “What’s the future of the X-Force project?”