Marvel: The Awakened One

Bolivar Trask’s crusade came from four main sources.

He feared that evolution would make humans obsolete, envied mutants for what he lacked, craved power and profit, and was obsessed with human supremacy. All these feelings merged into one goal: building the Sentinels, machines designed to wipe out every mutant on Earth.

Hawk explained each of Trask’s motives calmly.

In a hidden facility, Trask sat with a neural interface on his head, seeing Hawk through the Sentinel’s eyes at Quantico. As Hawk revealed truths Trask had never spoken, anger and shame flashed across his face before he quickly hid them.

“Believe whatever you want,” Trask said, his cold voice coming through the Sentinel’s speakers. Its glowing blue eyes stayed locked on Hawk as he hovered in front of it.

“History will remember this day. From this moment on, mutantkind will be swept into the dustbin of—”

“History won’t bother with a coward hiding behind a machine!!” Hawk interrupted.

“You talk tough from your bunker, but I wonder, Trask. If you were here in front of me, would you still have the guts to say any of this?”

Hawk looked at Wanda, who stood nearby with their daughter, Jean. She caught his meaning right away. As she spread her hands, scarlet chaos magic filled the air and swept across the base.

“WOOOSH!!”

Trask’s vision suddenly spun. Hawk seemed to disappear from in front of him and show up above his head, or so Trask believed. A moment later, he realized the truth: Hawk hadn’t moved at all. Trask had been pulled out of his safe room and dropped into the middle of Marine Corps Base Quantico.

“…” For a brief moment, Bolivar Trask looked completely stunned, as if his mind had stopped working.

Wanda raised her right hand before he could react. Trask’s body froze, lifted off the ground, and floated helplessly in front of Hawk.

“Now we’re talking,”

Hawk said, a pleased smile on his face. He looked the little man in the eye. “I’m giving you another chance. Go ahead and repeat what you just said to my face.”

Trask struggled against Wanda’s magic, but he couldn’t move anything below his neck. When he realized he couldn’t break free, he lifted his head and made himself meet Hawk’s eyes.

“You can’t kill me,” Trask said.

He tried to keep his voice steady, but fear still crept in.

“You think I won’t?” Hawk laughed.

“Let’s find out.”

“IF YOU KILL ME, THE SENTINELS WILL ACTIVATE IMMEDIATELY!!” Trask warned.

“Really?” Hawk arched an eyebrow, his smile widening instead of disappearing. He floated closer, wrapped his right hand around Trask’s throat, and felt the man stiffen beneath his fingers.

“That’s fantastic.”

The cold grip on Trask’s neck made him shudder.

As Hawk squeezed tighter, Trask lost all control.

“This isn’t the only Sentinel!” Trask blurted out.

“There are three more. Even if you kill me and destroy this one, the others will activate right away. They’ll keep evolving and get stronger as they adapt. None of them has the identification algorithm!”

Hawk loosened his grip. “What algorithm?”

“The mutant-identification algorithm,” Trask replied quickly.

“Only a Sentinel with that can recognize mutants as its targets. Without it,”

“Humans are on the menu too,” Hawk said with a smile. “The Sentinels will go after both mutants and humans.”

“Yes,” Trask said. He stared at Hawk, trying to see if his warning had any effect.

“The Sentinels are linked to my heartbeat. If I die, the other three will activate right away. Their mutant-identification algorithms will be replaced with two main orders: attack anything that might threaten them, and evolve and reproduce as much as they can.”

Trask had made himself a dead-man switch. If his heart stopped, the other three Sentinels would activate, attack anything they saw as a threat, and start making copies of themselves without anyone to stop them.

Calling it reproduction was generous—they would just be cloning themselves…

It didn’t matter if someone was human or mutant. Anyone the Sentinels saw as a threat would be treated as an enemy.

That last detail finally answered a question Hawk had wondered about for a long time. Now he understood how the Sentinels Trask built ended up destroying the world in the original Days of Future Past timeline.

Washington had likely interfered with the project after Trask finished building the machines. The government wanted the Sentinels, but it would not have allowed their creator to stay in control.

When the leaders saw that only Trask could operate the new weapons, they probably chose the easiest solution: getting rid of him.

If he had been assassinated, the government would not have known about the failsafe connected to his heart. His killers would have assumed the Sentinels would keep hunting mutants with new leaders in charge. But instead, the machines would have turned rogue, targeted Washington, and taken over factories to build more of themselves. To outsiders, it would have seemed like they had started thinking for themselves.

After that, nothing would have come next.

As long as Bolivar Trask lived, the Sentinels were destined to enter service. If he died after completing them, they would trigger the end of the world. The only clean solution was to rewrite the future and then kill Trask before the Sentinels ever came online.

Wolverine had intended to do exactly that at first. Magneto had reached the same conclusion.

Then Professor X had intervened.

Because Charles Xavier always tried to solve problems peacefully, the simple answer was lost. From this point of view, all the universe’s cycles of destruction and resets could be blamed on Professor X’s belief that everyone should talk things out and try for peace again.

——————————

As Hawk thought about that strange chain of events, Trask watched him and misunderstood what he saw. Trask believed Hawk was finally thinking about what would happen if he killed him. The fear in Trask’s eyes disappeared, replaced by the confidence of someone who thought he was back in control.

“I can let you live,” Trask said.

“You can what?” Hawk snapped out of his thoughts and looked at him.

“Let me go, and I’ll spare you and your family,” Trask said with a friendly smile. “I can tell my Sentinels to leave you all alone.”

Hawk looked at him, wondering for a moment if he’d heard right. Trask’s serious face showed he meant every word.

Hawk glanced up at the sky.

Ah. That explained it.

Night had come, so of course Trask was dreaming out loud.

Trask saw the glance and thought it meant hesitation, so his smile grew even wider. His thick black mustache seemed to lift along with his grin as he enjoyed what he believed was a win.

Hawk glanced down, then noticed Trask grinning as if he had just made the best deal ever. Hawk smiled back. When their eyes met, Trask looked even more sure of himself.

“I’m giving you one final—” Trask began.

“I refuse,” Hawk replied.

“WHA—”

Hawk’s expression turned glacial as his right hand clamped shut. Trask’s throat collapsed with a crisp crunch of splintering bone.

His mouth dropped open. First disbelief, then pure terror filled his eyes as he realized Hawk was never bluffing. In the end, his face showed only bitter resentment, refusing to accept this was how his life would end.

Hawk let go. With his neck broken, Trask’s head dropped forward as his body fell to the ground. He hit the cracked concrete with a heavy thud and lay there, lifeless, like a stray dog thrown into the street.

Wanda looked at the body without changing her expression.

Hawk’s choice didn’t surprise her. He never put up with threats, and Trask had made the mistake of threatening him with something he didn’t even care about.

Did Trask honestly believe Hawk was afraid of this world being destroyed? What a joke…

Certain restrictions prevented Hawk from initiating an apocalypse himself. Without them, countless inhabited worlds aligned with Eternity would already have been shattered by his fists—and those worlds belonged to Hawk’s native universe. The reality around him now wasn’t even his home.

Hawk didn’t want to be a hero in his own universe, so why would he come to another and pretend to be their savior?

As soon as Trask’s heart stopped, Hawk felt something shift. He looked up at the Sentinel, which stood sixteen feet tall above the base, and heard a faint mechanical hum start inside its body.

The vibration got louder and quicker, speeding up until something inside clicked into place. The Sentinel lifted its head, and its deep-blue eyes scanned the battlefield.

Nearby, soldiers aimed their rifles at the Sentinel. Mutants, including Storm, watched from other parts of the base. As the Sentinel looked at them, red targeting markers appeared around each person it saw.

Then the Sentinel focused on Hawk.

The marker around him quickly changed from red to deep crimson, then turned the unmistakable color of blood.