Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, and his personal favorite, the smartest man on Earth.
A hotly contested title, yet one that belonged to him.
And while some people claimed that the only reason he got that title was because it was given while Tony Stark was presumed dead, and before he revealed his miniature Arc Reactor and his Iron Man suits.
Reed personally thought he would still have gotten the title in a fair fight. Tony would maybe have won, but only because he was more famous, not because he was really smarter than him.
Still, Reed did accept that there were other bright minds out there, only slightly inferior to his own.
And while he didn't believe Bolivar Trask was among them, he had to admit that the Sentinel design was as beautiful as it was horrible.
Given that the others were all back home, Reed didn't go help deal with problems in Europe; instead, he went to America, which was both his home and the hardest-hit place.
So, here he was, sitting inside the fastest aircraft in the world, one of Wakanda's Talon fighters. Though calling it a fighter wasn't quite right, as it was more like one of SHIELD's quinjets, with space for passengers, but still able to run circles around conventional fighters.
Truly a marvel of technology.
Reed had spent the last few weeks absorbing all he could about their Vibranium. The metal was wondrous, though he did feel that their application of it was limited.
Shuri was a bright kid; he could admit to that, but having only a few bright minds wasn't nearly enough. Their scope was narrow.
He had already come up with dozens of amazing ideas and had lost track of time, lost track of the big picture.
He forgot, in his excitement, that the Earth didn't stop spinning just because he didn't pay attention to it, that other people still did other things, even as he was locked in a lab.
He knew he was bad at this. Susan always told him not to lock himself up in his lab, away from the world, but he had done it once again.
And because of that, he had forgotten all about the Sentinel Project, and before he realized it, it was too late.
Even with this Talon fighter, even with the fastest craft in the world, he couldn't cross the ocean in an instant, so he could do nothing but sit here and absorb the information he could find.
And thanks to the Illuminati, he could access a lot. Stark and his AI, another amazing invention he envied, allowed them to use every camera in the world.
With Jarvis also handling the filtering, he could see just how bad the situation was. The Sentinels were monsters that would not stop, and they had been designed to be unstoppable.
No off switch, no easy-to-destroy central control. They made use of Chitauri technology, and not the surface use many others did, but truly incorporated it fully.
"Damn it, these things just won't go down!" Johnny's voice came over the comms.
Reed focused on his point of view, watching what his friend saw, or at least what the camera he was wearing saw. It was rather blurry due to the flames, but there was no getting around that.
Just making one that didn't burn or melt was already as good as it got.
"Burning them is impossible with your flames; their bodies are able to withstand brief contact with plasma. Unless you can reach that level, there is no melting them," he advised, watching as Johnny flew around, dodging attacks while trying to burn his way through one of them.
"What, you're telling me my flames aren't hot enough? That's a load of bull, I can melt steel with these!" Johnny complained.
"That's because steel isn't designed to withstand it. These things are. Their outer armor is made from a special alloy using Chitauri metals. That stuff is nearly as hard to destroy as adamantium," he explained, though he simplified it a lot.
"Then how are we supposed to kill them? Sue can't hold them forever, Ben can't punch them to death, and my flames are just a light show." Johnny complained, with good reason.
The Fantastic Four had often struggled to find a good balance for their powers when working together, but even when they managed to, they had rarely run into something as tough as this.
"I'm working on it. In the meantime, try to aim for the joints, the armor is thinner there," Reed advised as he swiped through the data on the screen in front of him.
Despite his advice, he knew it wouldn't matter much. Flames just couldn't do much, not unless they were exposed for a long time, something that wasn't possible in a fight.
Unless one used plasma or lightning, there was no way to reach the needed temperatures.
He was looking at the city, which was in chaos. New York was burning, and so were dozens of other cities across the US.
Unlike in Rome, where the Sentinels seemed to have a higher density, here in America, they were spread thin, but still present, causing chaos everywhere, forcing the government to use its limited resources to try and fight them.
Yet they couldn't.
The tanks couldn't do much. The missiles failed. The only thing that had some effect was the special weapons designed by Reed and Stark and a few others, but those were still in limited numbers.
Currently, the three back home, Susan, Johnny, and Ben, were doing their best just to hold a few of them busy. Susan was having it the easiest; whatever tech there was used to deal with mutant powers clearly had no effect on Susan.
Which wasn't a surprise. Susan wasn't a mutant. Their powers came from a different kind of mutation, not the X-gene, and Reed knew all about the different X-gene suppression research out there.
Just locking onto the active X-gene and trying to lock it down was hard enough. To do that on all mutations, on all powers? That was just impossible. The current technology worked by a special mix of radiation and energy waves, highly complex and highly specialized.
So Susan could hold them. Her shields could block them, but destroying them was difficult, more so since the robots were clearly adapting.
To destroy them, Susan needed to focus, and they no longer gave her that chance.
Dozens of them were fighting her, and if she tried to focus on shielding herself while attacking one of them, they would all instantly target civilians.
Leaving her no choice but to give up attacking and make more shields to protect the innocent people.
It was an unwinnable situation, as she would grow tired in the end, and they wouldn't.
"Damned Trask," Reed cursed the man for causing all this.
Mutations of the X-gene were a problem, yes, they were too unstable, most awakening malignant mutations, but this wasn't the solution!
Genocide was never the solution!
But there was nothing he could do about it now. All he could do was try and find a weakness to exploit, and so far, he had yet to find one.
"Ben, try to aim for the neck. The connection there is weaker than the rest of the body," he advised, watching the fight of the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing.
He watched as Ben Grimm, in a show of raw, unadulterated power, tackled a Sentinel around its legs. The pavement buckled and groaned under the strain as Ben roared, veins standing out on his rocky hide. He heaved, and with a sound of tortured metal, the thirty-foot-tall war machine started to topple.
It was a display of strength that would have made headlines on any other day.
Today, it was just another desperate act in a losing battle.
The Sentinel didn't fall.
Halfway down, thrusters on its back and legs flared with impossible precision, counteracting Ben's momentum. It stabilized, its head swiveled, and a plasma cannon fired point-blank.
Ben didn't even try to dodge. He just crossed his arms over his face and braced himself.
The blast hit him like a physical blow, a storm of superheated gas that turned the asphalt around him to glass.
"Ben!" Reed couldn't help but shout, seeing this happen through the camera.
For a terrible second, Ben's outline was lost in the glare.
Then the light faded.
Ben stood in the center of a crater, his rocky skin scorched black and smoking in a dozen places. He was breathing hard, but he was on his feet.
"It'll take more than a cheap sunlamp to put ol' Benjy down, Stretch!" he growled, shaking a massive fist. But even through the bravado, Reed heard the strain. Ben had taken the hit, but it had cost him.
The Sentinel, however, seemed unaffected by the effort. Its cannons whined as they recharged.
Reed's hands flew across the holographic interface, calling up cross-sections, energy readouts, material stress analyses. He was looking for a pattern, an algorithm, a flaw in the logic of their enemy.
But there was none.
They weren't just machines. They were a distributed intelligence, learning from every microsecond of combat. Ben's brute-force attack wasn't a tactic; it was a data point. Now, they knew how much force it took to destabilize them. Now, they knew exactly how much plasma was needed to injure the Thing.
And all across the city, every other Sentinel now knew it too.
He remembered talking with Stark about making an army of robots to protect Earth. He called it Ultron; it had real promise, real potential.
The plan had been to repurpose the Sentinels, but then they had gotten sidetracked in Wakanda.
But he had to admit, it wasn't a bad plan. If they were in control of the Sentinels, using them as a global defense would be incredible.
Even an invasion by a force like the Chitauri wouldn't be too difficult to handle with something like that.
Sure, a full-scale invasion might be difficult. Tony had given some estimations on their numbers from what he saw past the portal, but a small one like in New York?
They wouldn't be helpless, at least.
And it would give them a proper defense against smaller interstellar forces, without having to rely on Asgard.
The Sentinels could have been a force for good, and yet now they were causing endless harm.
Given that he himself had been partly to blame, he did feel responsible, but even deeper down, he was blaming Wakanda.
(End of chapter)
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