"Not like I was expecting them to win against him," Gojo muttered from his perch atop a distant, crumbled rooftop he had teleported a while back, his Six Eyes narrowing on the battlefield below, watching every single movement made by everything below him. Capturing every microscopic details with his eyes. "But what the fuck is this, he's completely—"
His words were cut off by the deafening crunch of steel twisting midair.
A blast of red-hot metal came screaming from the ruins of a demolished construction site. Magneto stood at the epicenter of it all—hovering a few meters off the ground, cape fluttering, his arms outstretched like a conductor commanding an orchestra of carnage.
Nightcrawler
flashed into view with a bamf of sulfur and smoke, attempting to flank him.
Magneto barely turned.
With minimal effort he flicked his wrist, the I-beam of a collapsed building twisted up like a snake, lashing toward Kurt. He ported out just in time—only to appear right in front of Logan, who was charging from the other side.
Scott Summers' optic blast roared toward Magneto.
Too late.
Magneto yanked Logan off the ground mid-charge pulling him magnetically by the adamantium in his bones and threw him into Scott's beam path like a living shield.
"AGH—DAMMIT!" Logan shouted, absorbing the full force of the blast. He was flung back into a mangled car.
"Utterly…" Gojo continued under his breath.
He watched as Iceman launched forward, unleashing a blizzard-like stream of frost across the field. Several jagged metal pipes and shards began to freeze in place. For a moment, it seemed like a breakthrough.
Magneto didn't flinch.
He simply raised a crushed sedan, bent it like paper, and hurled it directly toward Bobby. The teen skater barely skidded aside as the car obliterated the frozen terrain where he stood.
Rogue, having absorbed some of Logan's strength and healing, tried to rush him next her fists glowing slightly, cracking the ground as she sprinted in to touch magneto.
She got within five feet.
Magneto waved her aside like an annoying insect. A metal slab shot from beneath her, flipping her midair. She almost slammed into the ground where kitty was groaning.
Before she could hit the concrete again, Jean Grey's telekinesis caught her, lowering her safely as Rogue almost coughed blood.
Jean's eyes flickered crimson for a second.
Then came Storm her eyes white with lightning. The sky answered her call, and the wind howled through the battlefield. With a crack of thunder, bolts came raining down on Magneto.
He caught them.
Gojo's eyes saw the magnetic field shimmered like a bubble, deflecting the lightning into the surrounding ruins. One bolt veered sideways, hitting a building and sending debris collapsing into the street. Civilians screamed.
"Decimating them," Gojo finished, his voice tinged with a mix of awe and disgust.
Below, Beast leapt with a roar, his claws extended. Jubilee, from the side, launched a volley of sparking plasma blasts to cover him.
Magneto raised a hand.
A steel support beam shot like a javelin knocking both Hank and Jubilee off their feet in a brutal sweep. Hank tumbled into a wall, unconscious. Jubilee hit the ground hard and didn't move.
More than one civilian was caught in the chaos screaming bystanders trying to flee the outskirts of the confrontation. A parked van exploded as a loose piece of shrapnel embedded in its fuel tank. A small child stumbled in the smoke.
Magneto floated higher.
The X-Men regrouped, bruised and bleeding, surrounding him with their breathing heavy and their resolve cracking.
Scott's voice broke the tension.
"Erik, this isn't you. You're better than this. You don't have to—"
"Save your lectures, Summers." Magneto's voice cut through the air like steel. "You want to protect humanity? Look around. They brought this on themselves."
Jean clenched her fists, glowing slightly.
"You're killing innocents"
"No." He raised a hand, pulling every car within a block radius into orbit around him like meteors ready to launch. "I'm reshaping the world. And you're just in the way."
He looked down on them all, a god among ants.
And he wasn't even breathing hard.
Magneto brought his hand forward palm outstretched as his palm faced them, metal groaning under his control. A dozen crushed cars now orbited him like moons around a dying star before being twisted and turned into jagged projectiles pulsing with magnetic charge. His focus locked on Rogue,her body barely steady as she braced for the storm.
Then—
"Don't you think that's enough?"
The voice was calm. Flat. Almost bored.
Magneto's head snapped to his left, and for the first time in the battle, his expression shifted beneath the helmet
genuine surprise.
Floating just a foot away from him, at eye level, was a young man with radient-white hair that seemed to shimmer faintly under the sunlight. His posture was lazy, his expression unreadable, and his eyes, they were blue, they were deep and Unnerving. Like polished pearls.
Gojo Satoru.
'How??'Magneto's mind reeled. 'I didn't even feel him… and yet he's this close?!'
In a rare flash of instinct, Magneto's body twisted away retreating rapidly through the air to regain distance. His fingers clenched.
Without hesitation, he redirected the entire swarm of orbiting cars, magnetically crushing them into brutal, sharp-edged spears of metal and hurling them straight at Gojo with a scream of electromagnetic force.
The air ripped apart from the sheer velocity.
One of the larger hunks of twisted engine block exploded on impact, engulfing Gojo's figure in a fireball of twisted steel and black smoke.
From below, the X-Men stared in stunned silence.
"What the hell is Gojo doing here?!"Jubilee finally managed, shielding her eyes. "Did the Professor call him in for backup?!"
"Well, whatever brought him here…" Beast snarled, watching with narrowed eyes. "He got here at the right damn time."
Jean, Storm, and Scott remained silent, the shock still settling in. Rogue's gaze was fixed upward, her expression unreadable—but her eyes were full of cautious anticipation.
As the smoke cleared—
The remaining metallic shards, once aimed to impale him, now hovered frozen in the air, suspended less than a foot from Gojo's body unable to make contact with his body, glimmering in the sunlight.
Gojo stood untouched, his face still calm.
Then, he smiled—a sly, almost amused grin as he touched one of the sharp tips of a projectile.
"Ho~"he said softly, almost to himself. "I wonder what would happen to me if all this actually hit me, probably would've turned me into a pin cushion right?"
He raised one hand, casually snapped his fingers—
CRACK.
The metal around him shattered instantly splitting into tiny, harmless fragments that clinked as they rained down like silver shrapnel around his feet.
The battlefield went quiet.
Then Gojo turned his head toward Magneto once more, his smile fading.
"So now you try to kill one of your kind as well, huh?"
There was no anger in his voice. Just quiet disappointment, laced with a hint of something deeper.
Magneto hovered higher in the air, his cape billowing. For a moment, he said nothing. Then—
"…So you are the one Raven told me about."
Gojo's smirk returned, but his eyes remained cold.
"Well, I do hope she said good things about me."
He floated upward slightly, their altitudes now equal. His tone turned sharper as the smile vanished again.
"But I asked you a question, Magneto."
The air grew heavier.
"Don't you think this lesson has been dragged on long enough?"
Magneto remained still for a long moment.
Then the metal around the battlefield began to shift again.