Issue 3
Cover: xavier and cuckoos down, jean ready to face the enemy.
Jean is struggling to protect everyone from the flames and to avoid the eminent impact of the crash. Bobby uses his powers to dissipate the fire and creates an ice cushion to soften the crash. Jean is able to slow the ship down to the point they all survive the crash. Kitty phases everyone out of the plane and they assemble in defensive formation but no enemy is in sight. Warren flies in search of remains of the projectile and locates a shard with an STARK industries insignia.
They are contacted by domino who had just alerted by her systems of the blackbird going offline. She is informed of the situation and tells x-force will be there promptly to take them back to the mansion.
In the x-force jet, domino briefs the x-men of many similar attacks around the world. In italy the building of the recently formed office of mutant affairs has been bombed, a mutant refugee camp has been decimated in coastal japan and in south Africa the human members of a mutant support NGO has been made hostages by terrorists.
Back in the mansion, cyclops, jean and kitty are debriefing the rest of the x-board about the missile attack. Psylocke examines the projectile shard. Cyclops tells the others he and the gold team are taking the other x-jet to Africa to take care the NGO situation. Storm says the blue team will remain in the US to follow up on the murders in manhattan and the attack on the x-men.
As both teams leave the war room, Magneto asks xavier to stay with him for a private conversation. He wants charles to leave the ongoing threads with him to handle so he can focus on locating sabretooth and mystique with cerebro. Charles says there’s no apparent imprint of their minds nowhere near Manhattan. They are either far away or heavily cloaked. He says he can have other psychics to amplify his range backing him up as a psychic dynamo with the new cerebro engine. With psylocke and jean leaving for missions he mentally calls the cuckoos requiring them to meet him at cerebro by 15 minutes.
In his lab, Beast gives up on his investigations and calls pixie to his lab. He needs to see someone who lives really far and asks her if she could give him a ride.
Tony stark is working at his office and feels something in his room, he looks around and see nothing out of place and gets back to his notes, he looks up again and se betsy and kwannon in front of him. He says only true masters of stealth are able to infiltrate stark tower in daylight and gallantly asks what brings they there. Betsy gives him the shard of the projectile that hit the x-men jet and asks tony if it’s possible to track who had bought it at first place. Tony says stark corporation tracks all missiles so they know when every sold unit detonates. He checks on his systems himself and says that this model precisely was largely sold but one serial number had detonated on that morning. He identifies the sell in info and gasps as he finds out that the projectile was never invoiced and should still be an asset in stark’s warehouse.
Back in the X-mansion, Esme and sophie takes betsy and jean’s seats in cerebro and together with xavier they start looking for sabretooth and mystique. They are able to get a subtle signal of their psyches but before they are able to locate it, someone in the astral plane identifies their presence and violently shuts them down. The two cuckoos are severely hurt by the attack and psy-route the blow to the other three sisters. Charles handled the attack better but also has a hard time after the mental blast and passes out. Storm and kurt come in their help and kurt teleports the 6 of them to the infirmary.
(We see many mutants in the infirmary, including a comatose Elixir)
Back in Stark tower, Tony is unable to contact the warehouse top management and the 3 of them fly to the site. As they arrive, they see all guards in comatose state and find out that the building has been raided and ordnance has been stolen. Betsy is able to push the guard’s brains to wake them up and scans their minds for any clue but they have no recollection of what happened.
Psylocke and Kwannon rushes back to the mansion. Trough a psi link, betsy briefs magneto and storm that the situation has escalated as someone, possibly an omega level psychic is now heavily armed with projectiles and plotting against them. She mentions Tony is working to track the missiles, but they seem to be heavily cloaked from stark’s systems now. They might be running out of time. Magneto thinks it’s better to evacuate the school, and storm points out that every major mutant hub is now also a target thanks to the press coverage.
Magneto contacts Emma and asks her to have Magik teleport all mutants from the main us hubs outside manhattan to Genosha and asks x-factor to stay alert for incoming aerial threats. Storm gathers the blue team to stand guard in district x.
In south africa, the local cops briefs the x-men of the NGO’s situation. There s a front line of armed men guarding the captivity and a many others inside the perimeter. Jean says the bad guys are mind guarded and the feedback loop she gets suggests they might be mind controlled. Cyclops plan is simple: Jean uses her TK to shield the hostess from attacks and while the x-men break into the facility, kitty escapes with the hostess phasing trough the back walls. The x-men easily gets trough the front line of mercenaries and many armed men shatter as illusions, revealing that whoever kidnaped the NGO members is a telepath that mind controlled a few goons while creating the illusion that the place was heavily guarded.
Jean is overwatching the team from the sky. She suspects one single person might be pushing the hate attacks throughout the globe in retaliation of the international mutant support agenda. She thinks of cassandra nova, who have already done this in the past but at the moment she engages in a mind probe she is hit by a massive mental strike accompanied by a psychic shout from their mysterious villain saying that jean and the X-men won’t spoil any plan. Jean passes out and is aided by angel who catches her kid air.The gold team heads to the x-jet and puts jean in the intensive care unit.
Bishop establishes contact with ororo and magneto. With jean, xavier and the cuckoos out of mission is now clear to the x-men that the threat is targeting the team’s telepaths. Storm asks betsy and kwannon to stay close and shut from the astral plane to avoid been taken off like the others.
Beast and pixies teleports to sinister london, where beast asks mr sinister help with the dead mutants dna tracking.
In the flashback of this issue we see a terribly injured beast witnessing sinister planting a krakoa gate ins his secret lab and evacuating krakoa during the attacks without assisting hank. While he leaves trough the portal he gives beast a dry look with no trait of compassion.
Mr sinister agrees to cooperate because he is curious about the whole crisis and wants to know who is behind this whole mess. He takes beast to his lab and they run some tests. We learn that the 5 mutants are: triage, saintanna, sister salvation and 2 other mutant healers. Beast says they have been targeted before, by the dark riders who considered their healing powers an artifice for the corruption of the survival of the fittest. Mr sinister says he knows the story and that he is pretty sure they ended up killed by some brute x-men because of this. He complements that the mutant darkriders haven’t been resurrected by the krakoan protocols, so this time it must be someone else’s deeds.
Beast and pixie teleport back to the mansion and hank reports to the x-board. Someone is killing mutant healers. They are in the med bay as scott has just arrived with jean unconscious like xavier and the cuckoos. Gambit is worried about the other mutant healers and kurt rest his hand on the forehead of elixir who is in coma in the medbay and mentions that josh is already in a delicate state. He also reminds remy that healer, the morlock, was already killed during the attacks in krakoa. Kitty says that they should track and protect other mutant healers anyway and she now is convinced that the acts of terror are a smoke screen for the villain’s master plan.
Logan is on the run, tracking sabretooth and mystique from the crime scene. He ends up in a bunker in chinatown where he run into the mind controlled villains. Not only mystique and sabretooth, but also banshee, forge, strong guy, amanda sefton and rahne sinclair. They subdue logan and force him to face their true mastermind: a corrupted moira mactargett.
End of issue 3***