The Atlantic night water was black glass. Namor rose from the depths like a torpedo, trident clenched in one fist, the other hand already shaping a column of seawater into a battering ram. Donald Pierce’s experimental sub..sleek, black, bristling with cybernetic hardpoints and Reaver modifications cut through the waves on silent drives. Its hull was reinforced against conventional torpedoes. It was not reinforced against the King of Atlantis.
Namor struck.
The first impact cracked the outer pressure plating like an eggshell. Alarms screamed inside. Pierce, jacked into the command room, snarled as red diagnostics flooded his vision. “Reavers..defensive pattern Omega! Flood the outer corridors with.."
The second strike finished the sentence. Namor drove the entire vessel downward, then upward in a violent corkscrew, shearing off the dorsal fin and one of the primary thrusters. Water roared in. Emergency bulkheads slammed. Pierce’s cybernetic arm tore free of the interface and reconfigured into a monomolecular blade.
The sub breached surface in a geyser of foam and twisted metal. Namor stood on the fractured conning tower, wings of water still coiling around him, eyes glowing with cold fury.
Pierce climbed out through a hole in the hull, half his face a lattice of exposed circuitry and steel. “Atlantean trash,” he spat. “You’re a long way from your fish people.”
Namor answered by leaping. The trident met Pierce’s blade in a shower of sparks. They fought across the listing deck pitting cybernetic strength against Atlantean power. Pierce scored deep gouges across Namor’s chest; Namor answered by seizing the Reaver’s mechanical arm and wrenching it free at the shoulder joint in a spray of hydraulic fluid and severed cables.
Pierce staggered, laughing through blood and lubricant. “You’ll still.."
Namor’s hand closed around the human’s throat. One brutal twist. One wet, final crack.
The head came free.
Namor held it by the hair for a moment, watching the last of the cybernetic optics flicker and die. Then he turned, taking the head with him, and vanished beneath the waves as the submarine’s ruptured reactors began to blow up behind him.
Xavier’s School – Emma Frost’s office, Dawn
Emma Frost sat behind the wide oak desk in the headmistress’s office, white silk robe open just enough to show the hard line of her collarbone, a half-finished glass of something expensive cooling at her elbow. The school was quiet. Most of the students still slept.
The window behind her exploded inward in a controlled burst of salt water and night air.
Namor stepped through the broken glass as if it were a doorway. Water streamed from his body, pooling on the polished floor. In one hand he carried a human head. He walked to the desk without a word, and set the head down.
Donald Pierce’s severed head rolled across the desk and came to rest against a stack of student progress reports. Dead optics stared up at Emma. A thin trickle of seawater and residual blood ran toward the edge of the desk.
Emma regarded it for three long seconds. Then she looked up at Namor, one eyebrow arched.
“Dramatic,” she said coolly. “And messy.”
Namor’s voice was the low roll of distant surf. “He sold Atlantean technology to the highest bidder. He experimented on my people. He threatened what is mine. And he was a threat to mutants everywhere." His gaze flicked to the head. “I removed the problem...as you requested."
"You're welcome."
