Avengers

*Continued From X-Factor #11

There was only light and it was a few seconds before Crystal Maximoff was totally able to see again. The images that finally focused above her reminded her cruelly that in the field of battle, your luck could change just that quickly.

"Pietro!" Crystal's scream was not enough to shake her husband from unconsciousness. She watched as Northstar raced away from the battlefield, Quicksilver on his shoulder.

Just as quickly as the sight of her husband had welcomed her, it was sharply stolen away and replaced with a brutal pain in her back, and then her head when she hit the ground. Her sight returned quicker this time, just quickly enough to see the image of Aurora, not the Aurora of Crystal's world, but an evil pawn of Apocalypse. Aurora kneeled down over her and wrenched Crystal's head upward by her hair.

"Now, I am going to teach you the real meaning of pain." she sneered, making sure that Crystal's dazed state could understand her threat completely, "But I promise you, it is nothing compared to the pain the son of Magneto will feel."

Crystal didn't need to see clearly to respond. Aurora raised her fist across from Crystal's face but she stopped as soon as Crystal's eyes flashed open. The sky began to darken even more than it had been. For an instant, Aurora realized that she had made a mistake. In the next instant, the synapses of her brain were fried as a bolt of lightning pierced through her skull.

There was only light and it was a few seconds before Crystal was totally able to see again. She pushed the smoking corpse that draped over her with a burnt stench, and slowly rose to her feet. Her head felt like an iron weight and her vision, like a carousel. She fought through all of this with one prevailing thought in her mind.

I need to find my husband.

"Keep back, dammit!" Fury yelled and he waved his gun in the air again at the approaching UN-sanctioned troops.

"Colonel Fury," Henry Peter Gyrich pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose, "With all due respect, please leave the orders to us. The Avengers are in control of this situation now. You are lucky to even be standing here and not in the back of a police van."

Fury's eyes crumpled and his mouth opened, as though ready to spew venom, but a calmer, softer voice stopped him.

"Luck had nothing to do with it, Henry." Janet Van Dyne crossed her arms and looked at them both as a mother would two children, "Just like Fury had nothing to do with any 'revenge mission' against SHIELD. It was government crap from the very beginning, just like I thought. Fury is staying."

Gyrich's lips puckered but he did not reply. He knew that Jan was right. Perhaps it was just the anxiety of the situation that was grating his nerves. Gyrich looked with a heave over to the brilliant image of the Silver Surfer, who was in the process of pouring what looked like great amounts of some kind of energy into the Dimensional Gateway, in an effort to keep it open.

"Ha!" Fury laughed at Gyrich's embarrassment, "Pym, how could you ever let a woman like this get away from you?"

Gyrich bit his lip and turned over his shoulder to his partner, Hank Pym. Hank already looked tired, standing in the hot Texas sun in a wrinkled suit and mangled tie. But when he looked up to answer, the color seemed to fade further from his face. But he smiled anyway in the gentle demeanor of a genius.

"Even scientists make mistakes, Colonel." Hank chuckled without a hint of nervousness.

"Ha!" Fury laughed again, "You got that right. And your buddy Gyrich ain't no scientist, but I'll be one to tell you right now that these troops are too damn close to the Surfer. That's cosmic radiation he's pouring out there and we can't let these boys get too close. That goes for all of you too."

"That's right." Janet nodded, "Fury, feel free to tell General Duncan to pull his men back. We'll be along in a second."

Fury grinned and then nodded. He munched on his cigar with a deeper resolve now and turned to walk toward the troops. Hank watched him go, and saw that there were approaching vans and cars. They were all adorned with satellite dishes and antennas, speeding through the Texas desert like striking condors.

"Henry," Hank looked quickly over to Gyrich, "The press has arrived. One of us is gonna need to make a statement."

Gyrich sighed slowly. He knew he was the better speaker. Hank knew Gyrich was the better speaker.

"One of the best parts of my job." Gyrich muttered and then he walked over to the approaching news vans and trucks.

After Gyrich departed at a brisk pace, Jan walked over to Hank, gracefully leaning against his shoulder. Hank jumped lightly at her touch, but he calmed himself quickly and then took a long look at her.

"Jan, I want you to know---" he began.

"The Surfer's energies make it impossible to send anyone else through." Jan interrupted, "But I think monitoring him should be our number one priority at the moment."

Hank straightened himself, "Oh...well, yeah, of course it is. What was the status of the Avengers?"

"Surfer said they all survived the trip through the portal, and that they had agreed to help liberate Dazzler's husband, Longshot, so they can free their world from the grip of tyranny and death. You know, the same old stuff."

Hank cracked a smile but he remained serious, "Should we try to find a way in? We can't just stand by and do nothing. I can get one of my Ant Man suits here in thirty minutes. It'll be just like the early days. You and me."

"Hank." Jan's face turned stern, "You're not an Avenger. Let us handle this."

"What?" Hank's tired eyes blazed, "And you mean what by that?"

"I'm sure they have the situation under control." Jan touched his shoulder again, "That's all I'm saying. We have to give them time, like Surfer said. Let's not do anything we might regret."

"Yeah." Hank said, pulling away from her touch, "I need to help Gyrich."

Jan watched Hank walk off with his shoulders bent toward the mass that was surrounding, shouting and photographing Gyrich. She sighed, straightened her shoulders in case the cameras saw her, and turned back to the Surfer.

Wanda Maximoff deflected again a thick red beam of energy that had been sent with deadly intent toward her. She didn't have time to counterattack before another, this time yellow, beam of plasma energy forced her to keep her shield up. The two hellish brats were child versions of her friends Cyclops and Havok, members of the X-Men, and were holding up surprising well against her, using odd strategic movements and erratic shooting patterns to keep Wanda and her allies on the defensive.

That was simply unacceptable to Shiro Yashido. He flew fiery rings around the sky, dodging the quick and deadly shots from the two children beneath him. The mighty Sunfire was being bested by miniature versions of a brother duo that even together and fully-grown did not have the power to defeat him. This would not do at all.

So he looked to his left in the sky and found a familiar sight. It was Heather Hudson, also known as Vindicator, the protector of Canada, sometime leader of Alpha Flight and most recently, a teammate and completely trusted ally of Sunfire.

"Vindicator!" he yelled, "Ignite the ground beneath them! I shall ignite the air above!"

Heather's only reply was a gentle swoop through the air as she lowered herself to the ground in concurrence with Sunfire's plan. She waved her hands in a great arc in front of her face and across from the small Cyclops and Havok. Suddenly, the ground erupted with jets of steam. Her attackers howled in pain and tried to move.

Wanda began to realize the plan of the two X-Factor members. As she waved her hands in arcs and her fingers in erratic motions, the air around the two children suddenly became thick like pudding, making it blazing hot with steam and heat from the waves that Sunfire now rained down. The two couldn't move. It was only a few seconds before they each suffocated.

Vindicator and Sunfire both dropped to the ground next to the Scarlet Witch.

"Excellent strategy to keep them from moving." Sunfire examined.

"A bit grotesque, don't you think?" Vindicator questioned, giving both Sunfire and the Scarlet Witch a heavy look, "We don't need to kill them. It's not how I operate."

"They were abominations." Wanda said, giving the corpses of the children a chilling look, "They were created by machines to simply kill. They were never meant to live. It was not the nature of things."

The Scarlet Witch paid no mind to her confused allies but turned around and walked at a quick pace to rejoin the rest of the battle. She was not eager to do so, however, for everything in this world felt wrong. All this pain and violence caused by machines and unnatural creatures. It was not the right way of things. Wanda knew that before her experience with the Silver Surfer, she would not have been so undetermined, so disenfranchised.

There was a slight wave of heat over her and she looked up to see the figures of Vindicator and Sunfire flying over her to also rejoin the fray. Wanda had reached the top of a garbage-infested plateau, upon which the rest of the battle was taking place.

Suddenly, she was refilled with every emotion that had been missing from her mind. Those same feelings of fear, uncertainty and desperation gripped her like a sickness.

Crystal, Wanda's sister-in-law, was laying, motionless on the ground in front of her, wisps of lightning flaking lightly from her skin, and blood dripping casually down her face from a wound on her forehead.

"No." Wanda managed to whisper and hurried, now at her most frantic pace, to her wounded sister.

Bobby Baldwin bounced off the ground the very split second after he had been thrown against it. In a burst of multi-colored, almost balloonish light, Speedball was in the air, with even more momentum propelling him upward. Bobby adjusted the goggles over his eyes but then focused on his target: a little, blonde-haired young boy, who was, at the moment, flying higher and brighter than Speedball.

In Bobby's universe, this boy would be known as Cannonball, the brother of Bobby's teammate, Crush. But, here, Speedball knew that this child was nothing more than a killing machine. Or at least, that's how Bobby tried to think of him.

Bobby looked above him and saw that this Cannonball had changed trajectory and was now heading right for him. Bobby grinned and waited. The young murderous Sam Guthrie had expected to hit Bobby with all the force of a locomotive, but he was wrong. Speedball merely slowed and waited for Cannonball's impact, and then knocked him away like an all-star right fielder to a poorly placed fastball.

The child made a crater in the ground twelve yards in diameter. But he wasn't down, and in another quick explosion, Cannonball was back in the air after Speedball, who had landed near the crater.

"Kids these days just don't learn." Speedball cracked a smile when Cannonball drew near.

One jubilee of light later, Speedball bounced into the air and down hard across the back of the young duplicate. There was a hard noise as bone hit the ground and Speedball knew that his opponent was not getting up again.

"Nice one, hotshot." a voice cackled from behind him.

Speedball turned and faced what he thought was total darkness. But then the face of Niles Styger appeared out of the infinite dark. He was grinning like a cat.

"Care to take another ride?" Abyss laughed.

Speedball wasn't quick enough to avoid the wave of black that engulfed him.

"Bobby!" Elizabeth Guthrie yelled as she watched her teammate disappear from sight.

Everyone was dropping like flies. Now, Elizabeth was the only one of either the Avengers or X-Factor that she could see for all the mounds of trash that paraded in the distance. The two teams had been badly separated. Worse, Speedball was taken. Elizabeth already had to watch Darkhawk, another teammate, fall into a gaping chasm that lined one side of the geography.

Crush quickly turned her gaze from the sky to the small girl in front of her. She was facing a mirror image of herself at about seven years old. Elizabeth almost couldn't believe it. Not only was she looking a twisted image of herself, but Speedball had already gotten through tearing up a sick vision of her brother. This was all like some kind of horror movie.

In a snarled, twisted rage, Crush's duplicate ran at her, increasing her height and mass every step of the way. Elizabeth was too slow on the defensive and soon she felt hands that were so similar to her own wrap themselves tightly and sharply around her neck. Crush knew, as she hit the ground and her duplicate's increased mass fell upon her, that she only had a few seconds before her esophagus would crumble. She knew her last sight was going to be a wicked vision of her own face.

She was wrong.

Before her blurring eyes came a brilliant red flash and she felt the weight atop her fling forward, releasing Elizabeth from its grasp. Her vision steadied and her breath returned in rough gasps.

"Liz!" Darkhawk shouted and he leaned over her, taking her in his arms, "Can you hear me?"

Elizabeth pushed him back and rubbed her throat before replying with a rugged tone, "Yeah...they---they got Bobby...I couldn't stop them."

"We're going to get him back." Darkhawk told her and he stood up, extending his hand to her.

Crush took his hand and was pulled to her feet but her voice was still low and raspy, "Can we still?"

Darkhawk looked over at her with a cocked head and remembered the girl had never lost a teammate in battle before, "Sure. Nothing's impossible in this business. So never think that way. It's addicting."

Crush smiled a little and then Darkhawk looked past the mounds of waste that surrounded them.

"I saw lights from over that hill." Darkhawk said and he started to walk to where he was pointing, "But there isn't much noise anymore. We need to move fast."

She was gone. Warbird was gone. His leader was gone. Carol was gone. There was nothing Craig could have done. What now?

Okay, Craig, pull yourself together. That...thing that swallowed Carol disappeared just after Carol did, so that probably means teleportation rather than incineration. Carol is just shackled in some kind of dark castle straight out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That's the rule in apocalyptic realities, right?

Craig swerved his attention back to the battle, or what was left of it. It had been quick and even stupefying in how swiftly the villains had gotten the best of the two teams. Craig couldn't see any others, but he could hear the din of violence. So he walked toward it.

He had just begun climbing a towering pile of junk when he was knocked backward by a sudden impact in his chest. Craig tumbled down the hill and came to a stop after hitting himself hard on a steel beam. It wasn't enough to kill him and Craig cursed the fact. It would have been less painful if he had died.

Craig groggily opened his eyes and saw the crimson sky. He didn't have time to focus before something leapt at his chest again. It was about the size of a housecat but looked humanoid, with four thin arms and giant face. Sharp, vicious teeth grinned inside a crooked mouth before opening to reveal a tongue that flitted like a snake.

But the creature was only in front of him for a second before it exploded in a burst of bright white light. Blood and some kind of yellow ooze sprayed the air and Craig shielded his face from the rain of it. Then, he scrambled backward on his hands and knees before finally pulling himself up.

"You're not hurt?" A voice asked from in front of him.

Craig looked up from the bloody mess on the ground and saw the face of Warlock, one of X-Factor's members. He looked over Craig like a nurse.

"No. What the hell was that thing?" Craig asked him.

"It was a genetically engineered clone of the creature known as the Sugar Man. You have nothing to fear. It is dead." Warlock stated blankly.

"Yeah and I'm gonna pay for it with my dry cleaning bill." Craig shook his head, "Look, we gotta regroup with whatever is left of our teams and formulate some kind of plan. We were not ready for this."

"Agreed." Warlock nodded, "I have located one other member of your team. Jack of Hearts. His energy signatures are quite...large."

"Good." Mister Immortal said, straightening his shoulders, "Let's go help him out. Maybe we'll find some of the others while we're at it."

"You can't be serious." Jack of Hearts chuckled as his skin began to ripple with pink energy.

Standing in front of him was a child. But to make things more complicated, this child seemed to be encased in a clear, stabilizing suit, much like Jack himself. Through the headpiece of the suit, a burning skull sneered at him.

"You will learn like the rest of this world." the young Holocaust chuckled as he cocked an arm at Jack, "My father and I will laugh over your rotting corpse."

"Right." Jack smiled and zero energy rippled from his eyes, "Just show me what you got."

The grin faded from Holocaust's face and morphed into a snarl. Holocaust raised his arm to the image of Jack floating above him. His arm, which looked to be made up of nothing more than a roughly shaped energy cannon, began to glow and crackle with anger. There was a great orange light that filled the space between Jack and Holocaust, before that same space was ravaged by the colossal attack released from Holocaust's arm cannon. The light kept Holocaust from seeing his target, but he continued to pour more and more toward Jack.

Finally, Holocaust rested his arm, turning his face back to the smile of before, and breathed contently with the knowledge that nothing could have survived his assault. But as smoke cleared, Holocaust could see just how wrong he was.

"Now," Jack said, still smiling, "I'm going to show you what I got."

His suit was in tattered rags now and all his hair was gone from his head. Zero energy, in thick pink streams, leaked from his eyes and his nose. With a vengeful arc, Jack darted at Holocaust and collided with him in a flash of pink hue.

Holocaust felt his armor break under the force of Jack's blow. He looked down at himself and saw that Jack had stuck his hands into the clear armor, into the swirling orange energy that made up the inside.

"No." Holocaust yelped as he saw what Jack was going to do.

There was a sharp piercing pain that shot through Holocaust's body. Looking down at himself once more, he saw that his insides were starting to crackle and turn into an eerie pink vortex before seeping into the welcoming, smiling Jack of Hearts. Holocaust couldn't scream or writhe or beg. He was paralyzed. Jack wouldn't have listened anyway.

Finally, after the cacophony of light, what was once Holocaust finally dissipated into pink darkness before that finally faded into Jack's hands. The armor fell with a dull, blunt sound to the ground. Jack collapsed to his knees, clutching his chest.

Jack felt the zero energy that had been Holocaust twist and contort and rip through him like an angry lion trapped in a hunter's net. It was going to escape. It needed to escape. There was only one thing to do. Let it escape.

Whipping his head and his hands to the sky, Jack screamed.

He felt his eyelids and fingernails melt away as the zero energy pulsed from his eyes and the ends of his fingers in one long, brilliant, sparkling stream from him and into the crimson sky that hung over the world. And when it was done and the light had faded, Jack fell.

"Aw, crap." Craig said as he watched Jack destroy Holocaust and, then the light display.

He stumbled down the hill of trash as fast he could without falling, but it was difficult. But, he felt an arm wrap itself around his midsection and lift him into the air. Craig was startled at first but then he saw the fair face that lifted him. It was Vindicator.

"Is he dead?" Heather asked as Craig put his own arm around her.

"I don't think so." Craig said, remembering the files on Jack of Hearts that he had read, "His powers are incredibly unstable. But, judging by what we just saw, I don't think we have to worry about that."

Vindicator sat Craig down next to Jack, while Sunfire touched down with Warlock just a few seconds later. Craig cradled Jack's head in his hands. He gulped as he examined Jack's face. Gone were his eyelids and his entire face looked gaunt, like a decaying corpse.

"Jack?" Craig asked and he slapped Jack's cheek slightly.

Just as Craig had made contact, Jack's eyes filled with a flash of pink energy and he sat up with renewed vigor.

"Wide awake." Jack said, his voice like the roughest sandpaper.

"Uh...awesome." Craig nodded, looking for any excuse to look from Jack. Vindicator gave him one.

"Great." Heather said simply, looking over to Craig and then Sunfire, "We need a plan. They played us like a violin. Whatever 'base' Dazzler said was here, isn't here anymore. Either they were expecting us, or we have the worst timing imaginable."

"We were embarrassed!" Sunfire yelled, "It was a standard battle strategy: divide and conquer. And it worked. Worse, they took one of our own with little opposition."

"Make that two of our own." Darkhawk's voice echoed from behind them, and they saw him and Crush walk from behind them, "They got Speedball. We gotta get him back."

"Hey," Craig said, standing up and looking right at Heather, "The Avengers lost one too. Our leader."

"We lost more than that."

All seven of the heroes looked over their shoulders to the approaching Scarlet Witch. Standing on her own, yet walking at a slow pace, was Crystal. Her matted hair stuck to her bloody forehead and she breathed in painful gasps.

"They took my husband," she said simply.

"They took my brother." Wanda added, "We need to get him back. Now."

"Of course we are." Vindicator said, "We just need to catch our breath first. Make a plan. Make sure that what happened here does not happen again. Seems like Apocalypse got out of here pretty quick, even though he could have finished us, if he wanted. That means he's got what he wanted, namely Dazzler. We've got to move fast, if we want to see them alive again."

"Perhaps I can be of assistance."

What was left of the Avengers and X-Factor all whipped their heads toward the strange voice. They turned their heads upward to the top of a towering pile of trash. Standing there, looking over them, was a woman, tall and Olympic. White hair draped over her shoulders from under a horned, silver helmet. Six muscular arms protruded from her sides, each holding a bladed weapon.

"My name is Spiral," the woman told them, "I want to help you free my world."

To Be Continued In X-Factor #12

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