This Must All Be Fake!
Annie finally pulled herself out of Xu Mo's embrace after nearly half a minute. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
"It's okay," Xu Mo said softly, trying to comfort her.
He rarely saw her like this. Normally Annie always wore a smile, carefree and unshaken—protected in both her career and her private life by his presence. But this time, she had been truly frightened.
Only now did she process how he had appeared.
"Wait… how did you get here just now? I swear I saw a hole in the air, sparking. Are you… a mutant too?"
"Uh… this is more like magic," Xu Mo replied, searching for the right words.
"Magic?" Annie blinked. "You're a magician? And you never told me? After all these years of dating?" Her tone carried both disbelief and hurt.
"Actually…" Xu Mo began, but then shook his head. "Forget it. This isn't the time. I'll explain everything when we're safe."
He turned his attention to the soldiers and Sentinels arrayed against them. "It seems you people will go to any lengths for your experiments."
Raven had once told him what little she knew of the Sentinel Services while she'd been their prisoner. Xu Mo had intended to wait until his psychic powers broke through to the planetary level before striking back. But he hadn't expected them to bring the fight to him first.
The soldiers wavered uneasily after seeing his dramatic arrival, though the middle-aged officer leading them regained confidence with five Sentinels standing behind him. They were familiar with teleportation powers.
They'd even had a test subject once—codename Red Devil. His teleportation was instantaneous, far superior to Xu Mo's slower portals.
"Damn mutant," the officer snarled. "We do this for the future of humanity. Abominations like you should not exist!"
Xu Mo didn't waste words. He flicked his hand.
A vast portal opened beneath the soldiers. Before they realized what was happening, they were swallowed and dropped thousands of feet into the sky.
They plummeted like paratroopers—except with no parachutes.
Only the Sentinels activated their thrusters and hovered in place. One caught the middle-aged officer, saving him from certain death.
Dangling in the machine's grip, he barked an order: "Help them!"
The other four Sentinels surged upward to intercept.
But Xu Mo's planetary-level psychic power seized them midair. Instantly, the machines froze, helpless.
He knew their designs intimately—their control cores were their weak point. Destroy that, and the rest was just scrap metal.
One by one, he drew the immobilized Sentinels before him and stored them in his space ring. With their cores replaced, they could be repurposed as loyal guardians.
The officer watched helplessly as his machines were taken apart like toys. When his own Sentinel support vanished into Xu Mo's ring, he fell to the ground with a sickening thud, groaning in pain.
"This has to be an illusion!" he wheezed.
"Yes," Xu Mo said mockingly. "An illusion. Surely you're not feeling this."
He strolled up and slapped the man across the face, knocking several teeth loose.
"How about now? Does that feel real?"
Then he stomped mercilessly on the officer's groin. The man shrieked like a butchered pig, blood bubbling from his mouth.
"This isn't real… it's just… an illusion!" he babbled, clutching himself in agony.
Above them, the soldiers Xu Mo had dumped from the sky hit the ground one after another with sickening cracks, blood blooming across the pavement.
Xu Mo's gaze shifted suddenly. On the horizon, small figures were approaching fast.
Within moments, another wave of seventeen or eighteen Sentinels descended, a young man in a white coat riding the lead unit.
He leapt down, rushing to the officer's side. "Captain Wayne! Are you alright?"
"Lyle…?" Wayne's eyes widened in disbelief. Seeing the Sentinels behind him, he realized none of what had happened was an illusion.
Pools of blood and broken bodies proved it all too real. Rage twisted his face as he glared at Xu Mo. "Kill him! Kill him now!"
The Sentinels moved to obey—but Xu Mo was faster. He dismantled their control centers in seconds, drawing them into his ring just as he had before.
Then he smiled at Wayne. "How could you possibly harm me… in this illusion I created?"
Wayne snapped, teetering between denial and despair. "Illusion… reality… no… no… ahhh!" His mind cracked under the strain.
Even Lyle, standing behind him, looked shaken. "Are we trapped inside some kind of psychic world?"
He knew how powerful Sentinels were. What Xu Mo had done to them was simply impossible.
Even Natasha and Annie exchanged glances, uncertain if any of this was real. Natasha studied Xu Mo's back, her eyes narrowing.
No wonder Fury was so determined to recruit him.
With powers this unpredictable, any enemy would be driven to madness long before the fight was over.
Visit patreon.com/Akeyno to get 30+ chapters