The town was gone.

Not quiet. Not abandoned.

Gone.

Buildings lay crushed into splintered piles. Roads had buckled and melted into blackened scars. The air still trembled with the lingering heat of it, like the ground itself hadn’t finished remembering the blast.

At the center of it all stood a woman.

Her hands were shaking. Her face empty.

She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t run.

She had simply… reacted.

One mistake. One moment. One human who touched the wrong nerve, said the wrong words, hurt the wrong mutant child.

Now there was nothing left but ash drifting through the air and the sound of her breath catching in her throat.

Erik found her there, kneeling in the rubble, eyes fixed on the devastation like she couldn’t quite understand what she had done.

He didn’t flinch at the destruction.

He had seen worse.

He had caused worse.

But she wasn’t him.

Not yet.

“You lost control,” he said quietly. “They made sure you would.”

No answer.

No tears.

Just silence and shaking hands.

So he lowered himself beside her in the ruins—not to offer comfort, but to offer something far more dangerous.

Perspective.

“They will come for you now,” he continued, voice calm as iron. “With fear. With laws. With guns.”

He looked out across the wreckage of the town.

“Let them.”

For the first time since he arrived, his gaze softened slightly as it returned to her.

Because the moment the world turned a frightened mutant into a monster—

It created another ally.

And she was not alone anymore.