Chapter 815: Upgraded Power Armor

The U.S. military's operation unfolded exactly as Alexei had predicted. On this particular night, with the X-Men's main forces away from the school, several helicopters flew through the sky. Their dark green paint scheme allowed them to blend almost completely into the night, making them difficult to detect.

Although the tremendous noise of the helicopter engines was quite disruptive at such a late hour, the helicopters were flying at a considerable altitude and far from the urban areas. Most people sleeping below merely wrinkled their noses before continuing to snore.

The assault team didn't wait until the helicopters reached the mansion before deploying. To avoid waking the sleeping mutants prematurely, the helicopters began dropping the soldiers off in a small patch of woodland on the outskirts.

The highly trained soldiers carried weapons that fired tranquilizer darts and advanced toward the school's main building in a semi-encircling formation. The main building was a mansion dating back to the nineteenth century.

In fact, the buildings of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters had already been restored once. The mansion had been bombed in '73, although the damage had primarily affected the above-ground structures.

This time, the U.S. military had no intention of destroying the school outright with heavy firepower, allowing the building, which had painstakingly risen from the ashes thirty years ago, to survive.

At the same time as the U.S. military began its operation, Henry was driving a stolen heavy truck, hauling an empty cargo container toward the exit of the escape tunnel beneath Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

The earphones carried the loud chatter and excited shouting of the three people who had remained at the secret base.

Gilgamesh was using the Minotaur power armor, while Thena was wearing the Bonnie armor. Cassandra's Aetos armor, meanwhile, was a fully enclosed suit primarily based on Isu technology, supplemented by alien technology.

The Spartan warrior had actually preferred something more like her old equipment, with protective gear covering only her vital areas so she could preserve maximum mobility.

But after experiencing the auxiliary systems designed by the Kryptonian, she was pleasantly surprised. With the assistance of a basic artificial intelligence, the smooth transitions in both strength enhancement and agility were astonishing.

She could now wear the armor and effortlessly lift several hundred kilograms while performing a ballet leap.

And this was the Aetos armor, which wasn't primarily based on mechanical technology. The armor used by Gilgamesh and Thena could each produce more than a ton of force.

It wasn't impossible to raise the output ceiling even further. But when designing power armor, every system had to remain balanced. Simply increasing output wasn't necessarily beneficial.

It was like a car with a high-horsepower engine. If the tires didn't have enough grip, stepping on the accelerator would only make them spin. The car wouldn't be able to go anywhere.

Although the Aetos armor was relatively weak in terms of mechanical functions, its gravity-manipulating levitation system and acceleration jets allowed it to exceed Mach 1 in straight-line flight.

As for changes in direction while flying, that depended on Cassandra's personal tolerance to G-forces. They hadn't yet tested her limits.

It also had an extreme ejection acceleration system, giving the Aetos armor the ability to travel around the world in a short period of time.

Despite being named the "Aetos," the armor didn't actually have a pair of wings. Instead, it had a soft cape woven from silver-white metallic threads.

This seemingly inconspicuous white cape was actually the most difficult component of the entire Aetos armor to manufacture.

The Isu energy technology's "compilation" process began as soon as the alloy was drawn into fine threads. It was essentially the initial stage of programming, establishing one library after another.

During the weaving process, the metallic threads had to be crossed at precisely the right positions. It was like flexibly applying individual functions within a main program.

The result was a piece of fabric that had been "programmed" with multiple capabilities.

The cape's most important ability was to generate a distortion field around the wearer's body. When operating at full power, it could even distort light, causing the wearer to disappear from the perspective of observers outside the field and creating a form of sensory invisibility.

Ordinary kinetic bullets, shell fragments, and explosive shockwaves would also be distorted by the field and deflected in other directions, preventing them from injuring the wearer. The faster an object was moving, the more easily the distortion field could pull it off course.

When Henry first created the thing and obtained the test results, even he was shocked.

The cape had certainly taken a tremendous amount of effort to make, but its effects were genuinely powerful.

Basically, none of the firearms or artillery shells Henry had been able to obtain could penetrate it. Its ultimate defensive limit had yet to be determined.

The cape could even use its distortion field as an offensive weapon. When part of it was rolled into a rod-like shape, the tip could emit a powerful distortion field, creating a cutting effect.

The drawback was that this consumed a considerable amount of energy, and its effective attack range wasn't very long. At roughly ten meters or less, it could barely be considered a medium-range weapon.

But the cape's disadvantages were equally obvious.

The distortion field didn't distinguish between friend and foe. It blocked things from entering just as effectively as it prevented things from leaving.

Furthermore, once an attacker came within a certain distance, the distortion field became largely ineffective.

In other words, the cape could defend against most firearms and other modern weapons, but it also restricted the wearer's own attacks and offered little protection against slow-moving melee weapons.

Fortunately, switching the field on and off required no warm-up period. With the AI making the appropriate judgments and switching modes accordingly, the armor could achieve both offense and defense.

To prevent bullets fired from the Aetos armor's firearms from ricocheting wildly inside the distortion field, the weapons and field also had to be linked. When one was active, the other would automatically shut down.

As for the armor's weakness in close combat...

Who could possibly feel sorry for the other side when they were fighting a Spartan at close range?

To preserve its mobility, the Aetos armor wasn't turned into the bloated walking arsenal that the other suits were. It wasn't even equipped with conventional firearms.

The only dedicated ranged weapon built into the Aetos armor was an electromagnetic crossbow mounted on the wrist, capable of firing bolts with various types of arrowheads.

Of course, the advantages of modern firearms were obvious. If needed, they could simply be brought along. Thus, the Aetos armor's ranged attack capability could be adjusted according to the mission.

But the most important upgrade to these suits of armor was the modification of their helmets.

Their true opponents were mutants with extremely powerful psychic abilities, so they naturally had to prepare for attacks that could neither be seen nor touched.

When Henry had initially studied tiger brainwaves and developed the translator, his original purpose had been to create something similar to Magneto's helmet—something capable of protecting his brain against psychic mutants.

Whether it was mind control or memory probing, he wanted to prevent anyone from invading his mind.

During his cooperation with the Brotherhood of Mutants in 2000, Henry had also learned from Magneto that he had obtained the helmet from Sebastian Shaw, the Black King.

From a design perspective, there was nothing particularly special about the helmet. There was no obvious mechanism that allowed the wearer to block psychic abilities on Professor X's level.

The most likely explanation was that the effect came from some unknown alloy material.

It was similar to Captain America's shield: something a genius had accidentally created, making it effectively impossible to mass-produce.

That was also why, despite the helmet being destroyed several times, Magneto could simply repair it and continue using it.

Henry had proposed studying the helmet as one of the conditions of their deal, but Old Man Magneto had refused.

Not researching how to mass-produce the thing seemed to be an unspoken understanding between him and Professor X.

The fact that Henry later managed to take away the multifunctional electron microscope could also be regarded, to some extent, as compensation.

Therefore, when it came to protection against psychic abilities, Henry could only rely on his own ideas and the results of his previous brainwave research to upgrade the helmets of all the power armor.

He also openly told everyone that the helmets' psychic defenses had never been tested.

So when facing mutants or other ability users of this type, they still needed to proceed with caution.

At the same time, the armor had been equipped with another system: the "Unconscious Protocol."

If the wearer lost normal consciousness or came under someone else's control and failed to respond with a predetermined key phrase, the armor would automatically remove them from the battlefield and take them to a designated safe zone to await rescue.

These psychic ability users might be capable of controlling another person's brain, but surely they couldn't forcibly interfere with the armor's control system as well.

That was already entering the realm of hacking.

Naturally, Henry had also implemented targeted electronic-warfare defenses against such interference.

In any case, after the three people at the secret base finished gearing up, they immediately headed toward the vicinity of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester County.

They would wait there for their opportunity to rescue the mutants from the U.S. military.

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