The Ashes of the Phoenix [OPEN]

[thethirdspecies]

WHO: John Sublime, "No Girl", the U-Men, and their unfortunate target... The Insitute
WHAT: Sublime's U-Men attack the school. They're aiming for the sublevels. Stop them at all costs!
WHERE: Throughout campus
WHEN: Past midnight, Wednesday-Thursday
WARNING(S): Gonna get violent.


The time was now. The media attention over his followers actions was too much. And after all, Xavier's little henchmen in London had figured it out. He was sure of it. There was no more time to bide. No more room for hesitation. It was act now, or the revolution would end in a prison cell, festering away in the disgusting care of this unclean world. Sublime couldn't stomach it. Couldn't fathom it. And whatever god help those who stood in the way of him and his dream of Homo Perfectus.

"All units are in place," Sublime whispered, peering out over the immaculate green, covered in moonlight, staring a drilling, piercing hole into the mansion. "Martha... it's your turn now," another whisper, as the floating apparatus before him, holding a strange glowing orb, began to shine even more brightly.

Just like that, the security systems failed. And just like that, Charles Xavier gasped and sent out a short, psychic burst to all X-Men, perhaps to everyone in the school, before he was overwhelmed and silenced, collapsing from his bed to the floor, stunned into sleep by a psychic force even he was not prepared for.

"This is it, Martha... our dream... U-Men! Bring me the Ashes of the Phoenix!" And like that, dozens of the men from the blurred video that Glamour and Spy had managed to obtain swarmed the ground, organic and mechanical, using a plethora of stolen mutant powers, attacked.


[[ This is it! Our first major action post, and in X-Men tradition, it's a direct attack on campus. Feel free to start your own threads. The U-Men will be NPC'd by the mods. Their ultimate goal is the filed away genetic samples of Jean Grey in the sublevels. They must be stopped, before someone uses them to integrate Jean's powers into a U-Man. ]]

Comments

[tofudog]

"Got it," he agrees, willing to let the guy who knows what's going on take charge. And even if this guy isn't good at fighting, superspeed is nothing to sniff at. He thinks back to his experience with his team. "So, we can both move pretty fast. Hit and run tactics, maybe?"

He glances out the window to the moonlit figures, occasionally silhouetted by flashes of light from mutant powers. The quicker they get out there, the better. He wouldn't put it past the U-Men to drag off any injured mutants and cannibalize them later for parts. Beast Boy opens the window a crack. "Can you get through here, or should we go for a door?" he asks.

[windtail]

"Yeah. We'll distract them, then hit them from the back." He scratches the back of his head absent-mindedly, surprised that Beast Boy agreed so quickly. "Though some of them might have precognition, and we can't tell just from appearance alone. So we'll have to take out those that don't first, then maybe swarm those that do once we have more hands to spare." He's had experience fighting precognitive opponents in Xuchang, and it wasn't pretty.

"Oh, right. I'm Xu Shu. You can just call me Shu, if you want." Since his surname always gets mangled by someone who can't speak Chinese. He nods at the window. "I can make it through here. Let's get going."

He waits for Beast Boy to exit in... whatever animal form he prefers before hooking his dagger onto the windowsill and swinging outside. Once he is outside the building then it becomes a simple matter of using his dagger as a grapple and running along the walls.

In any case, they make it down to the lawn in no time.

[tofudog]

"Shu. Got it," he says, nodding even as he shrinks into a green tarantula and scuttles out the window. Once he's safely outside, he switches into bat form, squeaking at high frequency before fluttering off the windowsill. Echolocation, baby. Nothing better in the dead of night.

He joins Shu on the ground in just a moment, seemingly appearing out of nowhere when he shifts into normal form.

"I think there's someone trying to be sneaky that way," he says, pointing to a hedge nearby. "No idea if it's us or them." It would seriously suck to ambush some students by accident.

[windtail]

Xu Shu nods, falling silent at Beast Boy's words and indicating that the other should do the same. As they watched, the hedge rustles a little, and indecipherable murmurs come from it.

"Get ready." He keeps his voice as quiet as possible before disappearing and reappearing on the other side of the hedge. A U-Man had been hiding behind it armed with a sword, and the resultant yelp of surprise gives him entirely away. Xu Shu evades a slash before hooking into their opponent's crude leather armour with his dagger, and then flashsteps back out of the hedge.

The momentum is enough to drag the U-Man out of the hedge, as well as disorienting him greatly. This would give Beast Boy a chance to strike.

[tofudog]

Even with the warning, Beast Boy is taken by surprise when the U-Man stumbles forward. His reflexes kick in and he shifts into one his most used forms, a massive gorilla, and bounds at the U-Man, grabbing him by the sword arm and squeezing hard. The man screams and drops the weapon. Beast Boy wonders if he felt a bone break under his hands, but there's not time to hesitate now. He draws back and punches the U-Man's face, sending him crashing backwards towards Xu Shu.

If he was a normal human, that would be the end of the fight, but who knew what powers the U-Man might have up his sleeve.

[windtail]

Whatever powers the U-Man had, he wasn't given a chance to display them. Xu Shu had not idled while Beast Boy attacked, and he dived straight back into the flow of the brawl without missing a beat. Speed is key, of course - the faster they can take this one down, the faster they could go to the aid of the other students.

The U-Man quickly recovers from the blow, his sword arm at an unnatural angle - but before he can regain enough focus to prepare some sort of other attack Xu Shu had already scored a wide slash onto his back. Using the man's armour as an anchor point, he runs through the motions for this particular technique with ease. It's one of his signature moves, and he's had a lot of practice.

Hopefully that would be enough. If the U-Man somehow had a healing factor, they could still continue bouncing him back and forth between them.

[tofudog]

That seems to do the trick. Beast Boy flips back into human form and gapes at Shu's moves.

"'I'm not good at fighting'," he imitates Shu's statement from earlier in an approximation of his voice. "If that's not good, I'd hate to see the guys you normally deal with!"

He's trying not to look at the U-Man they'd taken down. He... might be okay? Beast Boy has been kept out of melee combat as much as possible by his surrogate family, and the idea of taking another's life still horrifies him. Odds are good that multiple people have passed away from injuries he's given them, but at least it didn't happen right in front of him.

[windtail]

"Oh, no. I'm really not." He replies quickly, a little embarrassed. "I can't fight against magic users, or psychics. And if I get hit, I'm down." Unlike his old friend Kongming, who could handle everything. Being an Omega-level psychic meant that he could be on the offensive, defensive, and support at the same time.

Xu Shu does notice Beast Boy's hesitation, though. "We can't show them any mercy. I don't like doing this either, but if we don't let up, they will just backstab us in return." A pause. "It was their choice to attack us, anyway. So it's their fault for landing themselves in this mess."

He unhooks his dagger from the U-Man's body and whips it back into his hands. "Let's move on."

[tofudog]

That's harsh, Beast Boy feels, but he doesn't say anything. This is what he signed up for when he committed to being a hero, and it brings to mind the oath he swore when he joined The Doom Patrol years ago. 'At all costs' is an obligation that weighs on his mind even now.

He grits his teeth and nods. "Right," he agrees, his strict training forcing him to respond to an order. "I'll scout, quickly." Better to keep moving.

He takes the form of a large owl and takes flight in tight circles overhead, peering around for signs of movement. There's a larger force headed for the main doors, and he sees at least a few signs of more stealthy mutants approaching the building from all sides.

What he doesn't see until it's too late is a dark cloud of some stinging particle enveloping him, driving him to the ground. There's no way of telling who's controlling the cloud, or perhaps it was a mutant itself. The substance burns his skin under his feathers until he turns into an armadillo to take advantage of the tougher hide. Tonight is not the first time that he's regretted all his transformations being green. There's no way a normal owl would've been seen in the dead of night like this!

[windtail]

Xu Shu isn't as hung up over the whole 'what if we killed him' concept as Beast Boy, but that's only because he has had lots of experience. Fighting against the Society of Wei in Xuchang often involved heavy casualties, and not everyone comes out of it alive. He has become hardened to the act of taking another's life - only because they would gladly rip away his own. After all, his mother had fallen the same way.

"I'm sorry."

It's all he can say to the other boy at the moment. It's a harsh truth, and it's something he really wants to change - but the situation here does not give any room.

He can't fly like Beast Boy can, so he waits until the other boy comes back with news. However, the mutant swarm is something he notices immediately - and he quickly scans the area, looking for the source of the disturbance. His gaze stops on another mutant hiding in the hedge - or rather, the source of some strange long chain of muttered words. Is it a spell? Most likely.

In any case. he shoots his grapple into the hedge, feels its chain suddenly become taut in his grip, and flashsteps backwards.

Out comes a U-Man. The momentary distraction stops whatever foul incantation he had been chanting, and the swarm of particles abate for the time being.

[tofudog]

He probably should have realized that one guy wasn't alone. That's the problem with echolocation, though- beyond a certain, fairly small range, things get a little vague.

Beast Boy slips back into human form as soon as the attack abates, spitting and pawing at his face. "Gross! Id god in by mouf!" He can already feel blisters forming from the...whatever it was. This is going to put a serious kink in his banter.

He regrets dropping his guard immediately when a third U-Man rises out of the earth behind him and swings a baton crackling with electricity. It's all he can do to dive out of the way, shrinking into the form of a wasp in mid air and vanishing for the moment.

[windtail]

This isn't good.

Xu Shu grits his teeth and flashsteps to a good three metres away, assessing the situation. One U-Man had some sort of magic or spell power - it would be important to take that one down, but the other one had very high defenses and... some sort of electric weapon. Even with his speed, it would make going on the offense difficult.

His gaze settles on the magic user who had recovered and is now readying some sort of energy blast. And then an idea occured to him. Why not turn them... against each other?

The youth waits for the mage to charge up his bolt before flashstepping at the very last moment, hooking onto the U-Man's arm and yanking hard before letting go. The sudden movement makes the U-Man's whole body pivot, and the energy bolt goes off course - directly into the armoured one's face.

That was close. He hadn't expected it to aim so precisely, but hey, it worked.

[tofudog]

And then a small ankylosaurus crashes down on the magic user. Beast Boy was apparently unable to bring himself to crush someone to death with his own body, but even a young armoured dinosaur has a lot of heft when dropped several feet. The mage isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and in moments the dinosaur is a gorilla once more. A sharp rap to the face takes one more guy out of the running, and Beast Boy offers a private thanks to Toph, Leonardo, and the martial arts club for helping him with his strikes.

Still perched atop the downed U-Man, Beast Boy watches their third enemy warily. The earthy figure was seemingly blinded by the mage's attack, but he's lashing out wildly with his shock baton. He wonders how much electricity it takes to take out an elephant, a t-rex, or an argentinosaurus. More than that thing had charged? Probably, but he isn't sure he wants to push his luck. He opts for a more subtle approach, transforming into a rattlesnake and circling around to flank their enemy, his tail quivering to attract attention from what he hopes is a safe distance.

[windtail]

Two U-Men down, another one to go. Again, Xu Shu doubts that he has enough power to dent the earth-user's hide, but that didn't mean that he was immune to his own weapon. Okay, he might be, but it is worth a try.

He backs away for a running start, leaping at the last moment so that his flashstep trajectory is angled upwards. Madame Xu's ingenuity shows once again - the chain (string?) connecting Windtail to its accompanying dagger is in fact not made of metal, thus insulating the two blades from each other. However, his opponent knows what to expect, having seen what became of his mage companion, and holds onto the batons for dear life.

The youth doesn't manage to whip the batons out of their adversary's grip, but the backlash is forceful enough to tug the batons downwards.

And onto the man's face.

[tofudog]

For the second time in seconds, the third U-Man's face is blasted with energy. He's frozen in place as the electricity forces every muscle in his body to tense up, and it's only when he falls over that the current is broken by the batons hitting the ground. Beast Boy returns to his normal form, looking down at the twitching U-Man, then suddenly grins. Here it comes. "Now dab's whab I call grounded!"

Dang it. He can't believe his double pun is being ruined by a few lousy burns.

[windtail]

It takes a few seconds for Xu Shu to get it, but the pun manages to make him smile - if only a little. He isn't one to do this usually, but the battle had them all on edge and a little joking around did help to diffuse the tension.

"Hey, that was good." Definitely something he wouldn't have come up with himself, in any case. But his attention is quickly returned to their adversary - the U-Man is still spasming on the ground, but he can't be sure if it would work long enough.

With a flick of his wrist he hooks one of the batons with Windtail's dagger, flipping it over so that it shocked their opponent for a few more seconds.

"I can't hit people without possibly slicing them open, so if you could sock him in the head a little he should probably stay down."