Issue 6

 

Cover:  psylocke, jean, kwannon, xavier and emma in psychic armors against the shadow king

 

Psylocke reveals she sent x-force to take care of arizona’s missile and stayed behind, suspecting those missiles were indeed another distraction. Wolverine recovers and draws his claws to kill moira but kurt teleports in and teleports logan out of the medchamber. Storm eletrocutes forge, gambit takes mystique out with his staff and kwannon psi stabs sabretooth from behind.  Magneto use his powers to freeze everyone into place and asks what is going on. Moira appears revealing herself. She has been a mental projection  all along. She exposes Magneto and charles are keeping her body in stasis so she won’t die to reincarnate and erase their current continuity. Magneto is clearly upset with the revelation and receives some judgmental looks by kurt and storm. Magneto says they are still learning from moira current incarnation so when se eventually dies she will have more findings to avoid the fall of the mutants in her next life. Moira says no one asked her what she wants and that xavier and magneto have no right to keep her as a lifeless corpse to pursue their plans.

 

Tony tells cyclops that the arizona  missile is heading to DC but is still inert but nevada missile was just launched heading to the x-mansion. Scott contacts lorna who says the missile are not metallic and not susceptible to her powers, plus it is following a similar low trajectory  just like montana’s missile. Scott says whoever is behind this wanted the teams separated and scattered, but he has a plan that will require all teams to regroup.

 

As the collision between cyclop’s jet and the california missile is eminent, magik teleports in rescuing the gold team in time. While the x-jet collides with the missile, they teleport to nevada and group with x-factor. They have minutes until the nevada missile hits the east coast. Hank and tony stark are doing some calculations and scott checks with X-force the status of the arizona missile. Domino says it still inert and scott asks her how fast could she evacuate the perimeter. Domino says the missile is being launched from a makeshift base in the middle of the desert and it’s the only facility in a 10 km radius. All she have to do is have x-force to leave in their jet taking a few beaten goons with them. She says she is still confused with the instructions but scott says there’s not enough time to explain and that they need to be out of this radius within 10 minutes.

 

Hank and tony finish calculating coordinates and scott asks emma to revert from her diamond state to mentally transmit them to magik. As soon as domino leaves the radius of the arizona makeshift base, Magik will have minutes to teleport the nevada’s missile from its current route. With hank and tony instructions magik teleportation disks will send the missile into collision course with arizona’s makeshift base. Kitty is going with illyana so, with both of them intangible, the missile will not hit them.

 

Domino reports the evacuation is completed and magik and kitty completes the operation with success. Carol also confirms to tony that montana’s missile has been detonated in safety.

 

Emma says that there’s no time to celebrate as during her short telepathic activity she sensed an immense psychic attack going on in the mansion.  She had to shut down before she was detected but she could clearly see that the x-men are in danger.

 

In the mansion, psylocke says that even without accessing the full extent of her psychic powers she will always recognize shadowking’s filthy mental imprint. She asks amhal to leave moira’s soul alone and face her again in the astral plane. The shadow king says the interaction of his psyche and moira’s proved to be extremely fruitful and he is now more powerful then before. Moira knows so much about the professor that for the first time he was able to push trough his mental cracks to easily take him out. Betsy calls farouk a coward and demands him to fight her one on one manifesting her new psychic armor, derived from her captain britain knight costume. She charges towards the shadowking in the astral plane with her psychic broad sword and shield but he counter strikes frustrating betsy attack. He holds betsy by the neck and before he is able to crush her psychic avatar, kwannon in her lady mandarin mental armor stabs her psychic dagger in his back. Betsy recovers from the attack and mindblast farouk, completely disintegrating his mental manifestation.

 

Shadowking respawn in the astral plane even bigger and seemingly stronger, imprisoning both ladies into psychic cages. Emma joins the battle and tells she have been observing more than enough and strike against Amahl. He easily subdues her and says xavier left her out of his mind games because her pretense is as big as her stupidity. He asks her what makes her so confident she could face him single handed when she had just seen what he did with two psychic warriors. Emma blatantly says that she worths those two ladies and more, but her goal wasn’t to defeat him, but to distract. The two woman in the cages are revealed to be illusions while their actual mental manifestation are with xavier and jean grey in their in their minds. The ladies use their psychic swords to break jean and xavier free from the shadow king influence: betsy frees xavier while kwannon frees jean. The four of them joins emma in the battle. The shadow king manifest himself as moira to mess up with charles feelings. Charles says that it was a nice try, but he won’t be tricked by amahl considering he knows him for almost as much time than he knows moira. Together the five telepaths are able to separate moira and shadowking minds.  Charles imprisons shadow king into moira’s body saying that body has little to none brain activity to amahl to take over. So Once again he is locked inside a host that he cannot control.  the psychics leave the astral plane but charles, who stays behind to have a heart to heart conversation with moira.

 

***Flashback

Magneto and xavier witness hank declaring moira brain dead. In a mental conversation, erik asks charles what can possibly have happened considering the continuity has not been rewritten. Charles says until her body is also dead, her mutant power won’t manifest. Magneto says it will be a pity to lose her so soon since no true lesson came out from krakoa. It ended up how it ends in all of her former lives. Charles says he will honor her ten lives and won’t allow her to go back without the knowledge of the ultimate path for the salvation of the mutants.

 

***End of flashback

 

In the astral plane, Moira is crying and her conscience is dissipating quickly. He apologizes for doing that with her but after he trying so many ways to protect mutantkind trough the course of moira ten lives, he feels that nothing have actually worked. After the fall of krakoa he sees no other way and he is now crossing all boundaries to assure mutant and humans co-existence in earth. What if it works? He has to give it a chance and if it’s proved effective this is the actual way of X. This could be the course of action moira goes after from the very beginning of her next and possibly last life. Moira says something incomprehensible because of her dissipation, charles asks her to say it again but she vanishes in front of him.

 

In the psychical world, x-factor, x-force and both gold and blue teams are reunited in the medbay. Forge and Mystique wakes up with no recollection and sabretooth is already gone. Logan thanks betsy and the others for freeing him from shadowking’s manipulation and asks about charles. Xaviers gets up from his bed and tells the x-men the fight is over. He tells everybody to finally have some rest and asks for some privacy with moira. As the teams leave, he closes the door of her medical chamber and cries like we have never seen him crying before. He promises he will make all of this worth it and when the time comes he himself will free her from this state.

 

Prologue:

 

Emma runs into jean in the x-mansion and tells her that farouk had mentioned that she was left out of some unrevealed xavier’s mind games. Jean evades and tells emma this is a terrible time for her insecurity issues. Emma threatens jean by telling that if charles is not seeing her as an ally she will gladly stop acting as one. She says this by giving her back to jean and leaving the mansion with without looking back.

 

End of issue 6

 

Next:

X-men 1

Uncanny x-men 1

X-factor 1

X-force 1

 

What if: the age of shadowking (10 issues series telling the story of what if shadowking had succeeded.)