However, their task was much easier said than done even on their home-turf. Courtesy of the X-Men’s very own southern belle, Rogue was able to access the power of telepathy from her catalogue of absorbed powers and implant a mental suggestion into each member of the Byron Agency’s search team. Their actions trigged by Wolverine‘s words, the search team immediately turned on their comrades and mindlessly provided cover fire for their enemies, the X-Men, with no apparent intention to kill but only distract and repel any perceived threat to the group.

To make matters worse, Wolverine had taken it upon himself to assassinate the third remaining member of the Hierarchy, the short and stocky Jeremiah Stell. When the resulting gunfight erupted between the two sides, the X-Man was hammered from all angles by bullets and though he had long ago learned to endure such pain, after a few moments of agony he had realized that something was wrong.

Wolverine spun around on the heel of his foot and darted out of the line of fire, diving over the hood of the jeep the X-Men were using as cover and rolling off of it to land in a crouch beside his teammates.

“What the bleedin’ Hell happened to our powers, Summers?!” he barked, clenching his fists and sheathing his claws. Blood gushing from the wounds on his chest smeared the hood of the jeep and was staining his combat uniform.

“I don’t know, but we can’t just stay here and do nothing,“ Cyclops said, taken aback by the revelation just as much as his teammates. “Everyone huddle up. I think I know what we can do!”

Wolverine growled lowly. “Screw that,” he said, turning around and leaping back over the jeep the X-Men were using as cover.

“Logan!“ Cannonball yelled as he looked over the hood and watched Wolverine take off into a sprint, running straight into the firefight. “What‘re you doin‘?!”

“Givin’ them something’ to aim at!” he yelled back, unsheathing his claws as the compound’s security personnel opened fire on him.

Cannonball bit his lip, tempted to run after his teammate, but Cyclops grabbed his arm and pulled him back down below the top of the barricade.

“Don’t worry about him!” the X-Men’s leader said. “He’ll be alright, but without his powers he can only keep them distracted for so long. We need to act fast.”

“But how’re we gonna keep ‘em from blowin’ each other’s brains all over the wall?” Cannonball asked, visibly frustrated. Domino cocked a customized Uzi that she had the search team sneak in with the X-Men for her.

“Heh, blow their brains all over the wall first?” she said with a playful smirk. Cannonball narrowed his eyes.

“Not funny,” he spat.

“Do you hear anyone laughing?” Domino retorted.

As if on cue, several of the Byron Agency’s security personnel ran past the jeep the X-Men were hiding behind, screaming horrifically and firing their rifles frantically. Wolverine, his entire body set ablaze by an enemy’s flamethrower, was chasing after them and laughing maniacally in the process.

“While I can’t say I appreciate her humor, Domino’s right,” Cyclops said, not missing a beat, as he drew up a fallen rifle and loaded it. “We have to defend ourselves.”

Cannonball was repulsed by the suggestion.

“With guns? Ya can’t be serious! We could end up killin’ them!”

Before Cyclops or Domino could convince Cannonball otherwise, one of the security personnel’s numbers rounded the rear of the jeep and drew up his rifle on them. On instinct, Domino let a spray of rubber bullets fly from her Uzi into his legs while Cyclops shot him once in each shoulder, sending him simultaneously sprawling to the floor and crying out in pain.

Domino took a deep breath and looked to Cannonball, clearing her throat.

“Would you settle for maiming and disfiguring instead?”

“Scatter, X-Men!” Storm commanded as she took to the air on a gust of wind and channeled electrical energy through her body. “Keep the Sentinels spread out across the field and draw their attention away from Cyclops’s position!”

The X-Men did as the team’s co-leader instructed, which wasn’t the least bit difficult as every instinct thriving in even the most hardened member’s body told them to run as the red and purple, mechanical harbingers of genocide reined down upon them from all sides.

It was Phoenix who shot into the air after Storm propelled by the full extent of her telekinetic might, quickly catching up with the Wind Rider and lining up behind her. As they flew across the sky together, they matched each other’s pace and speed in order to maneuver through the barrage of energy blasts and outrun pursuing Sentinels together in deliberate flying formation.

Storm intuitively opened her mind to the telepathic X-Woman, allowing her access to every unspoken instinct and thought, and vice-versa. This made the two women an aerial-force to be reckoned with. Phoenix erected a telekinetic bubble around the two as they flew, dropping it for mere seconds at a time in order for Storm to launch powerful thunderbolts into passing Sentinels and then erect it once again before retaliatory blasts could strike either one of them.

This tactic disrupted the influx of Sentinels into the battlefield, breaking their flight patterns and distracting them from their intended targets, ultimately allowing the three X-Men on the grounds of the compound cover to battle the Sentinels directly.

Below the ensuing aerial battle, Beast was using his superhuman speed and agility complemented by his simian physique to bound across the blacktop of the compound, dodging and leaping over energy blasts, propelled grenades, and nets fired from the Sentinels that were giving chase to him. When he rounded the corner of the complex’s north wing, three of the Sentinels at his backside leapt into the air propelled by the thrusters on their feet and landed on the other side of the north wing, landing directly in front of the blue-furred X-Man…

… or where he should have been.

Their mechanical heads turned side to side as their optical lenses -- or ‘eyes’ -- scanned the blacktop below their feet. There was a figure standing before them, but like the concrete and debris that surrounded the area it lacked a significant heat signature in order to be the living being that they were pursuing. The Sentinels appeared as perplexed as emotionless, unthinking robots could.

Before the Sentinel could complete its order, the figure before the death-machines suddenly moved and raised its hands up to them, unleashing a powerful stream of ice several yards wide into their torsos. The Sentinels doubled backwards from the force of the blast, colliding into a barricade of ice that went as high as their knees and caused them to fall backwards, unable to correct their balance.

Appearing as instantaneously as the barricade that tripped the Sentinels was a bed of spikes made up of ice impaled the Sentinels through their backsides, destroying their internal mechanical system

At the head of the bed of ice that the twitching and sparking, immobilized Sentinels were impaled upon, the wave of an invisible hand caused the bended light around two individuals to dissipate. The hand belonged to the X-Woman known as Rogue, harnessing the light manipulating powers of a former teammate, and the blue-furred mutant beside her was the once thought vanished Beast.

“Three more down, only four hundred and ninety-seven more to go,” Iceman quipped. With the Sentinels dispatched, the three X-Men sprinted back out into the battlefield to draw the attention of furthermore Sentinels.

“Jeeze-Louise, how long are we ‘sposed t’ keep this up?” Rogue groaned.

“Don’t sweat it, Mississippi,” Iceman said through panted breaths. “Cyke and company just gotta find the mainframe, blow it up, and then we’re all home free!”

Beast, bewildered, shot a look to Iceman as he ran beside his bridge. “Erm… mainframe? Robert, I don’t recall Scott saying anything about a mainframe during the briefing…”

“C’mon, Hankster. How long have you been doing this?” Iceman retorted. “There’s ALWAYS a mainframe in these sort of places!”

“Mainframe?! I don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about!” the enforcer shouted, his helmet removed and his body quickly bruising from the rubber bullets he was showered with. “Please don’t kill me!”

Cyclops groaned in irritation and punched the enforcer across the jaw, knocking him unconscious. He let the man’s body fall to the ground as he turned to his teammates, still crouching while shaking out the pain in his knuckles.

“If there is some kind of mainframe that controls the Sentinels and their manufacturing then I don’t think this guy knows anything,” he announced, visibly frustrated.

“Couldn’t you have scared him a little bit more before giving up like that?” Domino half-joked, her tone of voice suggesting that there was some seriousness to her suggestion. “Y’know, cut off a finger or something?”

“Bea! Torture ain’t like in them spy shows on TV,” Cannonball chided. “People scream hysterically an’ pass out from blood loss when ya do stuff like that.”

“How would you know?” Domino asked, unconvinced.

“How would you know?” Cannonball shot back. Domino merely hunched her brows at him mischievously, indicating past experience. “Gah!” he spat in disgust.

Just then, a hail of bullets ricocheted off of the fender of the jeep the three X-Men were using for cover, causing them to flinch and duck down lower in fear of getting shot. A deep, piercing battle cry came from Wolverine across the receiving bay as his adamantium claws were unsheathed, cries of horror following.

“Focus people!” Cyclops yelled over the gunfire and screams, trying to regain the attention of his teammates. “I doubt any of these low-level foot soldiers know that much more about the layout of this compound than we do, so I suggest we stick to the original plan and either get searching ourselves or find someone a little higher up on the chain of command, or both if possible.”

Cannonball and Domino glanced to each other, hard pressed to disagree, and so Cannonball turned to take a quick look over the hood of the jeep and scan the battlefield in the receiving bay. “Ah don’t see those suits we saw earlier anywhere,” he reported, “but there’s an entryway to a hall or some-such to the far east of us and a large door to the left of it, just north of this room.”

Domino paused as she mentally went over the layout of the complex, then looked to Cyclops and Cannonball as the latter continued looking about.

“If I remember right, that east wing of the compound is the largest and leads to the Mastermold,” she said, nodding assuredly and drawing up her two Uzis. “That’s probably our best place to start looking.”

Cyclops seemed uneasy with the thought. “That Mastermold didn’t look active from the images we saw. It may just be a shell housing the manufacturing plant of the Sentinels. If that’s true then the mainframe isn’t likely housed there.”

Before Domino could rebuke, Cannonball shouted, “Guys! That door’s openin’!”

His two teammates sat up and turned to look over the hood of the jeep with him just in time to see several armed guards appear on the other side of the door. They appeared shocked at the ensuing battle between their comrades in the receiving bay, the Hierarchy’s escorts versus the search and destroy team, with Wolverine terrorizing both sides in order to create even more chaos.

“Someone’s with them,“ Domino muttered, squinting her eyes to better see the man in a ruffled and tattered black suit standing surrounded by the new party, hands apparently shackled behind his back with a collar around his neck. A gleam of light ran across Cyclops’s visor as his face turned to stone.

“It’s Banshee.“

At the head of the group, the lead guard began yelling orders and pointing at various areas of the receiving bay, prompting them all to split up and run for cover. The X-Men watched as all but one of the guards began taking positions to attack Wolverine and bring him down as the primary target, the last guard instead grabbing Cassidy by the collar of his jacket and running him behind a large bulk of metal shipping crates. He was tasked with protecting their captive.

Cyclops crouched back down under the jeep and waved for his teammates to do the same, all three huddling around each other.

“It looks like they were transporting him somewhere,” Domino remarked.

“I don’t understand why they got him all handcuffed like that, though,” Cannonball said, brow furrowed. “Maybe he turned on ‘em?”

“Or maybe they turned on him,” Cyclops said through gritted teeth. “Either way, I bet he would know this compound as good as any of the higher ups would so long as he wasn’t taken captive before being transported here.”

Domino nodded. “Let’s get to him and chop off a finger then.”

Cannonball glared at Domino, who was or wasn’t kidding, but Cyclops spoke before he could. “Wolverine’s keeping them off of us for the moment, but we won’t all be able to make it across the receiving bay in the middle of a firefight this huge.”

“What do we do then?” Cannonball asked. Cyclops grinned, grabbing the unconscious guard’s helmet and shoving it into his teammate’s chest.

“Can you run as fast as you can fly, Sam?” he said as Cannonball took hold of the helmet.

“Hell no!” Cannonball yelled.

“You’ll have to do,” he said, picking up the rifle loaded with rubber bullets and turning towards the firefight. “Go! Domino and I will draw their fire!”

As Domino turned back to the firefight with Cyclops and began opening fire on the guards with him, Cannonball leaned up against the end of the jeep and took deep breaths, trying to work up the courage to run across a virtual battlefield unprotected. Finding something deep down within, he quickly put on the helmet and spun around the jeep, ducking and running through gunfire towards Sean Cassidy.

Only seconds into his trek across the receiving bay of the Byron Agency’s complex and Cannonball was already wishing that it was over with. Explosions and gunfire were rocking his senses from all angles, and he was only able to glimpse from side to side for microseconds. Bodies were falling, blood was being spilled, enforcers were dragging others to safety, and Wolverine was doing what he did best to run interference. It all left Cannonball with a feeling of dread and horror, but he had to push it deep down inside of him in order to get through the mission.

When he reached the metal crates that one of the Byron Agency’s security personnel had been taking cover behind with Sean, the former X-Man known as Banshee, Cannonball decided on pure instinct that he would have to count on the chaos ensuing in the receiving bay as a distraction. With that in mind, he rounded the corner of the crates and charged the first person in his sights.

“What the -- ?!” the enforcer gasped. He drew up his rifle to open fire, but Cannonball took off his helmet and chucked it into the enforcer’s face faster than he could open fire. “Agh!”

The enforcer stumbled back and instinctively grabbed at his face, letting his gun fall to his side hanging by its tactical sling. Cannonball tackled him before he could recover, dropping both of them to the ground, and he repeatedly punched the enforcer in the head where his helmet exposed his face.

“Samuel!” Sean yelled, but Cannonball continued his assault. Several punches later, he felt the enforcer’s body go limp under him as he fell unconscious, and the current X-Man began to stand, turning to face the former X-Man. When their eyes met, both men froze in apprehension.

Cannonball was huffing and heaving, the adrenaline in his body still pumping, and Sean felt himself overcome with a mixture of emotions.

“Boyo, am I glad t’ see you,” he said, leaning over to expose the shackles that bound his hands behind his back. “Get me out of these!”

“Not so fast, Banshee,” Cannonball grunted, jabbing his finger at the traitor to the X-Men‘s cause. “You got a lotta explainin’ to do, bucko.”

Sean clenched his teeth, angered and hurried as the explosions and gunfire in the receiving and storage bay grew more intense. “Are you mad, son? This is neither the time nor the place!” he spat. “Unshackle me and when we’re clear of this mess I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

“First things first! Where’s the mainframe at?” Cannonball asked. Sean looked confused and shook his head.

“Mainframe? What the bleedin’ Hell are ye talkin’ about?”

Cannonball gritted his teeth and opened his mouth to say something, but a loud explosion caused the two to instinctively flinch and duck. A loud cry roared over the receiving bay as a figure flew the air and crashed into the top of the metal crates Cannonball and Sean were behind.

The bloodied and battered body of Wolverine bounced off the top of the crates and fell onto the ground in front of the two, his uniform in tatters and portions of his body burnt and skinned.

“Logan!” Sean blurted. On wobbling arms and legs, Wolverine growled lowly as he raised himself up and glared at Sean.

“You an’ me before this is over, Irish,” was all he said. “You an’ me.”

Before either men could say anything, Wolverine lumbered off into a run out from behind the crates and back into the firefight. Cannonball watched him go, but then immediately turned his attention back to Sean.

“If you want out before he gets back you’ll stop playin’ stupid already!” he said, pointing towards Wolverine. “Ah’m talkin’ about the mainframe that controls the Sentinels and is keepin’ our powers from workin’.”

“Your powers…” Sean began to understand what he was getting at. “Aye, you were captured an’ brought in with power dampeners, right?” He asked. Cannonball nodded, leading Sean to explain what was happening. “It’s a side-effect of that. The Byron Agency designed them so that even if a mutant managed to get ‘em off, the effects lingered for a period t’ allow for recapture.”

“For how long?” the X-Man asked. Sean shrugged and sighed.

“Hard t’ say. It varies dependin’ on the mutant’s powers,” he said, considering the question further before deciding, “Half an hour at least, three hours at most?”

“A’right, that’s a start,” Cannonball said, rubbing his forehead uncomfortably at the prospect of being powerless for such a long time in the heat of battle. “Now, what about the Sentinels? If it ain’t some kinda mainframe that’s controlling them then what is it?”

“Cerebro,” Sean stated. “Emma hacked the program an’ altered its personality subroutines back when she was workin’ for us.”

Cannonball‘s eyes widened in shock. “Cerebro? But Scott told me it was destroyed back when we first got captured!”

“Backed itself up in our network way before then,” Sean explained. “The chamber‘s in the east end of the compound. Cerebro knows all the X-Men’s weaknesses and the weaknesses of many, many more mutants. It’s the perfect defensive and offensive network to combat the likes of us.”

It took a moment for the information that Sean was providing and its implications for the X-Men’s mission to settle in, but Cannonball reluctantly knew what he had to do. He turned to the fallen enforcer and pulled a set of keys off of his belt, then turned back around and knelt down to face Sean.

“Ah should really just let Wolvie do ya in, all things considered,” Cannonball said as he unlocked Sean’s shackles and then unlocked the mutant power dampening collar around his neck. “Now go on. Get before ah change my mind!”

Sean rubbed his wrists and his neck as they were freed from the shackles that bound his hands and powers, searching for the words to explain his actions, to explain his remorse, to explain his confusion… but all he found was the desire to turn and do as he was told, fleeing the battlefield before he was the next casualty.

“Hold your fire!” Cyclops yelled to Domino over their gunfire, who did as she was told. “They’re backing off.”

Domino made a face, looking at the two Uzis loaded with rubber bullets in her hands. “I knew these things stung, but geeze. Wimps.”

As the Byron Agency’s security personnel retreated out of the receiving bay, leaving the X-Men and the mind-controlled search team alone, a figure came running out from behind a wall of crates waving an arm.

“Cyke!” Cannonball yelled as he ran towards his teammates, taking the enforcer‘s helmet back off of his head. “Ah just heard over the helmet’s comm line. Somethin’’s goin’ down. They’re evacuatin’ the complex.”

“Okay…“ Cyclops nodded, looking over the battle ravaged receiving bay. “Where’s Sean at? Did you leave him back by the crates?”

Cannonball shook his head and swallowed back a lump in his throat. “He vamoosed once ah got everything we needed outta him.”

“What?” the X-Men’s leader said in disbelief. “You let him go?!”

“Wolverine was going to kill him!” Cannonball yelled.

“Still am,” a gravelly voice said from several feet away. The three X-Men turned as they heard Wolverine groan and stumble towards them, cracking his neck. “Just gotta gimme a moment to get my bearings straight and that’s it.”

“Ignore him,” Cyclops said to Cannonball, glaring at Wolverine briefly before he crossed his arms. “What did Sean tell you about these Sentinels?”

“The sentient Cerebro program we thought self-destructed had backed itself up in their databases. It’s what’s runnin’ the Sentinels. He told me where the chamber was at, too. Mah guess is we destroy it then the Sentinels go with it.”

“What about our powers?” Cyclops asked.

“Side-effect of the power dampeners we clamped on ourselves. They ain’t kickin’ back in for thirty minutes to three hours he said.”

“So any time between now and when they come back to blow our brains out,” Domino remarked with the roll of her eyes. “Great.”

“Hang on then,“ Wolverine began, looking over his body as he realized that he was experiencing relief from his injuries. He lifted up the torn and shredded shirt of his uniform, exposing his torso for his teammates to see. “Looks like ol’ Irish is gonna be gettin’ it sooner rather than later after all…”

“Alright, priorities then,” Cyclops said as he took a deep breath and uncrossed his arms, putting his hands on his hips. “I think we need to split up. Domino and Cannonball, you two take the leftover C4 and blow-up the Cerebro chamber. You can find what’s left in our bags by the jeep.“ Domino and Cannonball nodded and ran for the jeep as Cyclops went on. “If Sean’s right, the Sentinels are under ’his’ command. Wolverine and I will split-up and track down the Hierarchy.“

“And Banshee?“ Domino asked as she slung a bag over her shoulder. This time Wolverine was the one who glared at Cyclops, whose face tightened in response.

“We’ll take care of him last.”