I fell in Marvel with Essence Gacha but I’ve never heard of Marvel

After comforting Jubilee, Lex decided that it was time to find the source of the psychic disturbance and put an end to whatever was happening inside the school. He left the room with Jubilee beside him, the two of them moving through the corridors while Lex tried to follow the strange psychic pressure he could feel pressing against his senses. It was not a single attack so much as an atmosphere, an invisible presence permeating the building and slipping into the minds of everyone within it, and although the Essence of Transcendent Self kept it from affecting him, Lex could still sense enough of it to know that something was deeply wrong. For nearly a minute he simply followed the sensation, turning down corridors and occasionally pausing whenever the pressure seemed stronger, until a thought occurred to him.

“Maybe Rey Tracing will work.”

Lex gathered the power and used the technique, attempting to trace the psychic disturbance back toward its source. The moment the connection formed, something on the other end seemed to notice him.

There was no explosion, no sudden burst of ordinary flame, and no warning that anything had gone wrong. The psychic connection simply seemed to reverse itself, and a brilliant fire erupted across Lex's body as though the tracing technique had become a road leading in the opposite direction, allowing whatever existed on the other side to reach him instead. Flames swallowed his clothes first, racing across the fabric with unnatural intensity before spreading over his skin and hair, forming a blazing mantle that concealed his entire body beneath layers of red, orange, and almost white-hot fire.

“Woah.”

Lex instinctively slapped at his shoulder before remembering that there was very little point in doing so. The flames were already everywhere, clinging to him without behaving like any ordinary fire he had ever encountered, and the heat was absolutely real. His clothes blackened, curled and disappeared beneath the flames in seconds, yet the surrounding corridor was spared the inferno that should have resulted from a man being completely engulfed in fire. The walls grew warm, the air shimmered faintly and the floor beneath him began to feel hotter, but the vast majority of the fire's energy was somehow being concentrated inward, directed toward him rather than freely spreading through the environment.

“Lex! Lex, are you alright? What happened?” Jubilee's voice immediately rose with genuine panic, and the sight of her face tightening with fear made Lex turn toward her even while he was still burning.

“Don't worry about it. I'm just burning,” Lex answered, sounding far calmer than someone who was currently on fire had any right to sound. He looked down at himself, although there was very little to see beneath the flames, and sighed when he realized that Donna's clothes were now gone. “No big deal. I don't feel pain anyway, and I'm healing faster than this thing can burn me, so I'm fine. It's just a shame about the clothes. Donna got these for me. She's going to be pissed.”

Jubilee stared at him as though she couldn't decide whether to panic harder or simply accept that Lex was apparently the kind of person who could stand there engulfed in fire and complain about losing a shirt.

Lex, meanwhile, was far more interested in the fire itself.

He raised one hand and gathered Demonic Energy, shaping it into a sphere of water before throwing it directly over himself. The water crashed into the flames with enough force to soak him completely, steam erupting around his body as the heat instantly converted much of it into vapor. For a brief moment the flames seemed to bend beneath the impact, but they never actually went out. The remaining water simply hissed away, droplets evaporating so quickly that a faint cloud of steam briefly surrounded him before dispersing into the corridor.

“That didn't work.”

Raphael's response appeared almost immediately.

<The phenomenon is producing genuine thermal energy. However, the majority of the heat is being concentrated toward your body rather than radiating normally into the surrounding environment. The fire itself is therefore behaving abnormally, but it is not without physical consequences.>

“Yeah, figured that much out,” Lex replied, rubbing his chin beneath the flames. He wasn't particularly bothered by the heat, but the fact that something could apparently hijack his own technique and then burn him with a phenomenon that Raphael couldn't immediately classify was interesting enough to keep his attention.

Rather than continue experimenting in the hallway, Lex moved toward the garden. He didn't want someone walking around a corner and accidentally stepping into the strange flames, and the more open space would give him room to test things without damaging the school. Jubilee followed him anxiously, still looking as though she wasn't entirely convinced that he was actually fine, while Lex concentrated on figuring out exactly what had happened.

The first thing he tried was Anti-Skill.

The Unique Skill had two functions despite its name, allowing him to suppress or negate both skills and magic, so Lex tested each possibility separately. He first attempted to activate its anti-skill function against the flames, expecting the phenomenon to disappear if it was being generated through some sort of supernatural ability. Nothing happened. The fire continued roaring around him, its light reflecting across the surrounding trees while the grass nearest to him slowly browned from the concentrated heat.

“Fine. Anti-Magic.”

Lex switched functions and attempted to suppress the phenomenon as magic.

Again, nothing happened.

That was considerably more interesting.

Raphael began manipulating the environment around him next, creating a localized vacuum that stripped away the air surrounding Lex and removed the oxygen that ordinary combustion required. The sudden absence of air was obvious in the way the nearby leaves stopped moving and the faint heat distortion around Lex changed, but the flames remained exactly as they were.

They didn't flicker.

They didn't weaken.

They simply continued burning.

Lex looked down at himself, surrounded by fire in the middle of the garden, and slowly tilted his head.

“So it's not normal combustion, not a Skill and not Magic.”

He thought back to what had happened immediately before the flames appeared. Rey Tracing had connected him to the source, and then the power itself had seemed to turn around and travel back along the connection. If that was what had happened, perhaps simply ending the technique would sever whatever connection remained.

“Turn off Rey Tracing.”

<Already attempted.>

Lex's eyebrows rose.

“You already tried?”

<Yes. The technique is no longer active.>

That left him staring at the flames for several seconds as the implications settled in. Whatever had happened, it wasn't simply a lingering effect from Rey Tracing, and whatever intelligence or mechanism had responded to his attempt to trace it had apparently left something behind.

“Can you analyze it?”

<All available forms of analysis have been utilized. The phenomenon does not correspond cleanly to any known Skill, Magic, conventional energy, or biological process. Its structure appears to be intertwined with fundamental laws governing this world. Further analysis may require information that cannot be obtained from within the current environment.>

Raphael paused for the briefest moment before adding another possibility.

<Teleporting to the Boys' World and returning may allow comparative analysis.>

Lex considered it, then shook his head.

“That's a lot of effort for something that isn't actually hurting me.”

The flames continued to roar around him, casting dancing light across the garden while Lex regarded them with something approaching fascination. He could have simply left the world and returned, but that would only tell him that the fire behaved differently elsewhere. What he actually wanted to understand was why it existed in the first place, what had reacted to Rey Tracing, and what sort of power could reach backward through his own technique and affect him.

Before he could continue experimenting, a familiar voice reached him from across the garden.

“Master, why are you burning?”

Lex turned to see Grayfia approaching, her expression initially calm but quickly becoming more puzzled as she took in the sight of him. Charles Xavier floated behind her, his body bound by glowing red chains of Demonic Energy that wrapped around his arms, legs and torso, while Grayfia's attention remained fixed on the burning man standing several meters away.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Lex replied, gesturing toward Charles. “Why is the Professor chained up like that?”

Grayfia glanced briefly at Charles before looking back at Lex. “When I entered the room, Professor Xavier immediately attempted to enter my mind. Rather than stopping him directly, I allowed him to proceed into an illusion I created, which allowed me to observe what he intended to do without exposing my actual memories. He wasn't attempting to attack me. He was trying to remove my memories of coming here and convince me that I had never met him.”

Lex's expression hardened.

“So he's hiding something.”

“Yes.” Grayfia's voice remained composed, although there was a slight coldness beneath it. “After a little persuasion, he admitted that he is concealing the cause of what is happening throughout the school.”

Lex looked toward the restrained Professor, the flames around his body illuminating his face with shifting orange light.

“Then Professor Xavier, perhaps you would care to explain what is happening here. Start from the beginning.”

Charles lowered his gaze for a moment before answering. “It was the only way. The power inside her was too great, too destructive. I had no choice.”

“As I said,” Lex replied, his voice becoming noticeably colder, “start from the beginning.”

Charles remained silent for a moment before finally beginning his explanation.

“Approximately twenty years ago, I was contacted about a young mutant girl whose psychic abilities were already extraordinary. Even at that age, her potential exceeded my own, but she possessed no meaningful control over what she could do. She had been traveling with her parents when her powers erupted violently, and the incident nearly killed them. Her parents were terrified. They called her a freak and wanted her taken away.”

Charles's expression tightened as he continued, but there was no sign that he considered himself the villain of his own story.

“When I examined her mind, I found nothing fundamentally wrong with her. She was simply a frightened child who had experienced something she couldn't understand. But beneath her ordinary thoughts, buried deep within her subconscious, there was something else. Something vast. Something I had never encountered before.”

Lex listened without interrupting, his earlier curiosity about the flames slowly giving way to something much darker as he realized where the explanation was going.

“There was a fire inside her mind,” Charles continued. “Not a metaphor. Not merely an image. It was an expression of psychic power so immense that I believed, if it were ever released without restraint, it could destroy the world. The girl herself didn't understand what had happened to her parents. She believed she had killed them, and that guilt became a barrier around that power.”

Charles's voice remained disturbingly calm.

“So I reinforced it.”

Lex's eyes narrowed.

“I didn't tell her that her parents had survived. Instead, I strengthened the belief that she had killed them. I made the guilt deeper, more instinctive, until even her subconscious would reject the possibility of reaching what was buried beneath it. It wasn't a perfect solution, but I believed it gave me time. Time to teach her control. Time to teach her how to live with her abilities. Time to give her a life stable enough that she would never need to touch what was hidden inside her.”

For a moment, Charles almost sounded proud of how carefully he had constructed the deception.

“And it worked,” he said. “For years, it worked. She learned to control herself. She learned to live among other people. She grew into someone capable of using her abilities without destroying everything around her.”

Lex stared at him through the flames.

“But about a week ago, she somehow discovered the truth.”

Charles finally hesitated.

“She learned that her parents were alive.”

Lex's expression changed.

“So it was…?”

“Yes, it was Jean,” Charles said, finally giving the girl a name.

The realization settled heavily over Lex. The psychic pressure he had been sensing, the bizarre changes throughout the school, the distorted memories, the impossible flames that had answered his Rey Tracing—suddenly the pieces were beginning to fit together.

Charles continued before Lex could say anything.

“Her memories began changing almost immediately. The truth was incompatible with the memories I had spent years reinforcing, and her mind began attempting to reconcile the contradiction. I tried to suppress the new information. I tried to remove the memories that she had recovered, but her psychic abilities had grown far beyond what they had been when I first found her. Every attempt I made only destabilized her further.”

His eyes lowered.

“She is now trapped inside her own mind. Her psychic power is reacting to everything around her, rewriting memories, imposing false experiences and dragging people into fragments of thoughts that aren't their own. The students and teachers aren't simply forgetting things. Their minds are being overwritten by the psychic storm surrounding her.”

Lex's flames continued to burn, but the heat no longer seemed to be what occupied his attention.

“You are a pathetic person, Charles.”

Charles's eyes hardened.

“You don't understand. There are times when terrible choices must be made for the greater good.”

“Indeed, I don't understand,” Lex replied, his voice carrying a restrained anger that was considerably more frightening than shouting would have been. “And I'm glad I don't. Because I cannot imagine reaching a point where I look at a frightened child, realize that she's carrying something dangerous inside her, and decide that the solution is to deliberately make her believe she murdered her own parents.”

Charles's jaw tightened.

“You weren't there. You didn't see what I saw.”

“No, I didn't,” Lex answered immediately. “But I don't need to have been there to understand what you did. You found a child whose mind was already traumatized, discovered that she had an overwhelming power she couldn't control, and instead of helping her understand it, you built her entire emotional prison around a lie. Then you kept reinforcing that prison for years because you were afraid of what would happen if she ever learned the truth.”

Charles's expression became more defensive.

“If I hadn't done that, she might have destroyed countless lives.”

“And instead you made sure that when the truth eventually came out, she'd have no healthy way to process it.” Lex's voice dropped lower. “You didn't prevent the disaster, Charles. You delayed it while making the eventual collapse worse.”

“You speak as though there was an easy alternative.”

“There wasn't,” Lex admitted, and the admission made his anger sharper rather than weaker. “Maybe there wasn't an easy answer. Maybe she needed years of training, supervision and protection. Maybe you would have had to make sacrifices yourself. But you don't get to call psychological torture a solution simply because the alternative was difficult.”

Charles stared at him.

“Leaders make difficult choices,” he said eventually. “They carry the burden themselves. Sometimes they have to make decisions that others would never understand, and sometimes they have to live with the guilt in silence because the greater good requires it.”

Lex's expression became almost incredulous.

“That's the problem with people who decide they're the ones qualified to define the greater good. Once you've convinced yourself that you're carrying a burden nobody else could understand, every horrible thing you do becomes something you can excuse as necessary.”

He turned away from Charles before the argument could continue.

“Talking to someone who thinks their intentions automatically make them morally superior is exhausting.”

Using the Force, Lex reached outward through the school, searching for her.

Jean.

Lex found her.

He moved toward the source, but then remembered the rather obvious problem that he was still completely engulfed in supernatural fire. He couldn't simply walk into whatever psychic barrier surrounded her while burning everything nearby, so he decided to bring her to him instead.

Lex reached out with Demonic Energy and attempted to teleport her directly to his position.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, adjusting the spell and attempting to pull her through the spatial connection rather than teleporting her normally, but the spell simply refused to establish a proper connection with her. It was as though something inside Jean's mind was rejecting the very concept of being moved through that particular medium.

“Huh.”

Telekinesis, however, was different.

Lex reached out with his mind, grasped Jean's body and carefully lifted her from where she lay. For the moment, there was resistance, but nothing overwhelming, and Jean's unconscious body slowly drifted toward him through the air.

When she came into view, Lex's expression softened.

Jean looked as though she were trapped inside the worst nightmare imaginable. Her body was physically still, but her face constantly betrayed what was happening inside her mind. Her brows tightened with confusion before twisting into pain, her lips trembled as though she were trying to say something in her sleep, and then her expression suddenly contorted with guilt. Moments later that guilt gave way to fear, fear to anger, anger to something resembling rage, and then all of it collapsed into a grief so profound that Lex could almost feel it simply by looking at her.

“She wouldn't let anyone get close to her anymore,” Charles explained behind him. “That's why I couldn't move her somewhere safer.”

Lex ignored him.

The closer Jean came, the more clearly he could see the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes despite her being unconscious. Her face looked young, vulnerable and utterly exhausted, and knowing that the suffering was ultimately the result of a lie someone else had deliberately forced into her mind made something inside Lex twist.

He wanted to help her.

He wasn't entirely sure how yet, but he wanted to help her.

His first thought was almost absurdly simple. If his blood could carry the effects of Transcendent Self, a tiny amount of it would be enough to give Jean some protection against the psychic storm tearing her mind apart. He moved toward her, intending to get close enough to use his bodily fluids directly.

He never got the chance.

The instant Lex crossed a certain invisible boundary around Jean, an immense psychic force struck him and hurled him backward. His burning body skidded through the grass before he caught himself, flames still wrapping around him without ever touching anything except what belonged to him.

Charles's explanation came from behind.

“She wouldn't let anyone close to her anymore…” Charles repeated.

“Can you shut the fuck up?”

Grayfia stepped forward before Charles could answer.

“Let me help, Master.”

The red Demonic Energy binding Charles tightened for an instant before Grayfia teleported him away, removing him from the immediate situation and, more importantly, removing the distraction he had become.

Jubilee remained several steps away, staring at the place where Charles had disappeared with an expression of disbelief. The revelation had clearly shaken her far more deeply than Lex's burning body ever could, because everything she had believed about the man who had run this school was suddenly being forced through a completely different lens.

“I think I should maybe change schools,” she muttered.

Lex barely heard her.

His attention had returned entirely to Jean.

If approaching her directly was impossible, there were other ways.

Lex drew a small amount of his own blood from his body and used Telekinesis to guide it toward Jean. The droplets moved through the air with surprising precision, crossing the distance between them while the psychic pressure around her fluctuated violently.

For one brief moment, it worked.

The blood crossed the invisible boundary.

Then Jean's subconscious reacted.

The psychic force surrounding her surged, and the telekinetic pressure resisting Lex increased so abruptly that he immediately felt his control beginning to slip. The droplets of blood stopped in midair, trembling violently as two opposing telekinetic forces struggled over them.

Lex pushed harder.

Jean pushed back harder.

The pressure suddenly exploded outward, throwing Lex away along with the blood he had been trying to send toward her.

He landed heavily several meters away, flames still blazing around his body as he rose again. His expression wasn't angry at Jean. If anything, the resistance only made the sadness in his eyes deeper. She wasn't attacking him because she hated him; she wasn't even consciously aware that she was doing it. Somewhere inside that fractured mind, a terrified part of Jean had simply learned that anything approaching her was a threat, and now her power was adapting to every attempt to reach her.

“Grayfia,” Lex said, his voice becoming firm again. “Take Fluffy and Jubilee back to the mansion. Call Kara, Gwen and, if necessary, Ben as well.”

Grayfia nodded immediately.

“And Jubilee, you go rest, you need it, stay at the mansion and rest,” Lex added looking at Jubilee.

Jubilee looked as though she wanted to protest, but the exhaustion and emotional strain written across her face made it clear that Lex was right. She glanced toward Jean one last time before moving toward Grayfia, while Fluffy who had just came back, obediently followed them, his massive polar-bear-sized body padding across the grass.

Once they were gone, Lex reached outward with the Force.

One by one, he located the remaining mutants scattered throughout the school grounds and surrounding area. Rather than attempting to move them through ordinary space, he used the Force to pinpoint each person before using Demonic Energy to establish the actual teleportation pathways, sending them away from the danger and toward Krakoa.

“Raphael, send a message to Regina about everyone.”

<Done.>

The school grew strangely quiet.

Lex looked toward Jean again.

The fire continued to consume him, casting flickering light across the garden, but he had long since stopped paying attention to it. Jean remained where she was, unconscious and surrounded by an invisible storm that seemed to grow more complicated every time he interacted with it.

Lex flexed his fingers.

He could use his Telekinesis at its full strength.

He could also add the Telekinesis obtained through the H'El Template.

Together, the two forces should be enough to overpower Jean's current defenses. The problem was that Jean's power wasn't something he could safely overpower in the middle of New York. A direct clash between their telekinetic forces could rip apart the surrounding structures, destroy the school and potentially devastate everything around them before Lex even reached her.

So he waited.

Because more minds meant more idea to solve the situation.

Then Raphael's voice appeared within his mind.

<I have begun constructing a passage to the pocket realm. Once the connection is completed and Jean is transferred there, you will no longer need to restrict your output to protect the city.>

Or maybe one mind with Raphael could do the trick too.