Somewhere deep inside herself, the part of her that was still just a girl from Deerfield, Illinois and not a battle-hardened bujin winced. Ordinarily she hated killing or maiming anything. But when she was up against monsters from hell, and the whole world was in danger, she was willing to make an exception.
Lifting the spear into a high guard, she pivoted toward the front of the church, just in time to meet the attack of two more demons, one resembling an immense, buzzing mosquito and the other, a headless man with a leering, cackling madman’s face in the center of his chest.
From that point on, the pressure never let up. Her mind calm, her actions flowing without conscious thought, Kitty spun in an intricate circular dance, stabbing, cutting, parrying, and sweeping, drawing on everything she knew of the ways of the yari, the naginata, and the bo. Periodically, some hideous thing would leap inside her guard, and she’d phase to avoid its rending talons or snapping jaws, but she couldn’t do it often or remain a wraith for longer than a second. Because when she was intangible, she couldn’t hold the monsters away from Amanda.
Beside her, Kurt cut and thrust with his saber, and tripped his opponents by grabbing their ankles with his tail. Sometimes he parried their blows. Sometimes he evaded them with somersaults, flips, rolls, and prodigious leaps that might leave him clinging momentarily to the wall. Sometimes he teleported out of harm’s way with a muffled report and a burst of sul-furous smoke. But like Kitty, he couldn’t be as mobile as he no doubt would have preferred, for fear of exposing his lover to an attack.
A gigantic white centipede reared at Shadowcat, its serrated mandibles gnashing. It swayed aside to dodge her first thrust, and by the time she scored with her second, a gray, skeletal thing with eye sockets full of fire was lunging at her with a curved dagger in each withered hand.
She phased to avoid the blades, started to pivot and swing the spear into line for an attack, and then twin bolts of flame leapt from her foe’s fleshless countenance, struck her, blistered her, and knocked her down. The skeleton pounced at her.
The demon’s own ability to phase had taken her completely by surprise, but her trained reflexes saved her. Rolling, she narrowly avoided the skeletal creature’s knives, which plunged without resistance into the floor. They both scrambled up, but she was a split second quicker, and snapped the devil’s skull from its spine with a horizontal slash of the spear.
Yet even as she did so, she saw that she’d remained intangible too long. Other monsters were closing in on Amanda. Becoming solid, she engaged two of them, then glimpsed the billowing gray mist at the sorceress’s feet. The strands of vapor swirled upward and became a gaunt, shaven-headed, redeyed young man with rings in his pointed ear. He bared his fangs and reached for the Gypsy’s throat.
Shadowcat drove her opponents back a pace with a sweep of the spear, then spun around to help her friend, already knowing that she was going to be too late. Battling a blue woman whose body appeared to be made of countless tiny, cheeping homunculi clinging together, Kurt had his back to Amanda and evidently hadn’t even seen the danger. This, then, was the moment that Kitty sometimes had nightmares about, the moment when the X-Men were finally going to lose.
His cloak in tatters, Dracula sprang from the gloom, grabbed his rebellious offspring by the shoulder, spun him around, and drove a piece of splintered wood into his breast. The other vampire collapsed.
Whirling once more, Kitty was only barely in time to parry the strikes of the creatures that were lunging at her. As it was, the blows sent her stumbling backward, but Dracula leapt forward to confront her attackers and so bought her the time to recover her balance. Fighting side by side, they dispatched those monsters and engaged the ones that instantly took their place.
“No one has been able to reach Belasco,” said Dracula, paralyzing a creature that looked like a diseased, hairless centaur with his hypnotic gaze, then striking it a savage blow to the neck.
“Maybe I can if I phase,” panted Kitty, thrusting with the spear.
“No,” said Nightcrawler. “Your power doesn’t protect you from magic. Belasco would zap you before you got to him. It will have to be inc.” Shadowcat could imagine just how reluctant he was to abandon Amanda, but she couldn’t have guessed it from his level tone. “You two keep the lid on here.”
He feinted a head cut, drove his point into the chest of the scaly horror before him, and then, with a bamf and a puff of smoke, he was gone.
Kurt teleported in behind Belasco, materializing in the shadow of the inverted cross and its grisly, foul-smelling burden. One surprise attack, one stab in the back, and this part of the fight could be over. Scarcely the most swashbuckling of tactics, but occasionally even a disciple of Zorro and Captain Blood had to bow to expedience, and considering what was at stake, and the sorcerer’s awesome power, this was surely one of those times.
He lunged, and though he hadn’t made a sound, Belasco turned smoothly and blocked his attack with a parry. When their swords clanged together, Kurt felt a slight but repellent shock, no doubt a manifestation of the evil magic locked in the sorcerer’s phosphorescent blade.
“Hello, Wagner,” said the leering homed man. “Have you come to beg for mercy? To plead to be my slave? Even now, it’s not too late.”
Kurt lashed out with a head cut. Once again, Belasco parried.
“Poor, deluded little goblin,” the warlock said mockingly.
“Rejecting your own true nature. Spuming paradise. But never fear. I’ll save you from your folly.”
Nightcrawler feinted another head cut, then rotated his wrist ninety degrees for a strike at the flank. But as he did, his eyes met Belasco’s.
Suddenly the mutant felt a ghastly shifting and churning in the depths of his psyche, like a convulsion in the depths of the earth forcing something that had been buried for eons to the surface. He tried to finish his attack, but his sword arm, like the rest of his body, was numb and dead.
For an instant, Jean didn’t remember where she was. Something—her surroundings themselves?—gnawed and pried at her.
Reflexively she shoved the attacking forces back, realizing as she did so that she was now a creature of pure psychic energy and a dweller inside Rogue’s mind. The forces nibbling and tugging at her were that psyche’s automatic, unconscious efforts to merge her with the whole. Had they succeeded, they might have robbed her of her ability to operate as an autonomous entity, or at least addled her to the point that she no longer recalled why she’d re-created herself here.
Fortunately, as a trained telepath, accustomed to walking in other people’s heads, she should be able to resist any degree of assimilation—for a while anyway. The fact that Rogue’s powers had already been subverted and altered helped her resist as well. Turning, she gazed about to orient herself.
Not that she was physically turning, of course, or peering through a pair of eyes. The landscape and her body alike were symbols, forms her imagination spontaneously generated to make the abstract realities of the psychic domain easier to grasp. But for all intents and purposes, she found herself standing on a cratered, barren plain beneath a moonless, starless sky. From somewhere shone a bare trace of light, just enough to reveal the several mountains rising from the flatness of the wasteland, A horrible miasma, seemingly compounded of a variety of foul stenches, hung in the air.
After a moment something made a thick, liquid sound. Pivoting in that direction. Phoenix saw the nearest of the mountains quake and change shape. First it slumped lower, as if it was melting, and then three thick, writhing appendages sprouted from its right side. Only then did she realize that the immense mounds were the psychic representations of the Elder Gods themselves.
She waited tensely for a moment, but the colossal thing didn’t attack. Evidently it had shifted and grown its tentacles for some reason that had nothing to do with her. Resolving to keep a wary eye on it and its fellows too, she levitated into the air.
As she flew across the blighted plain, she heard sobbing and
whimpering, and swooped lower to investigate. Cowering in certain of its the pits and declivities lay the withered, faded simulacra of people whose essences Rogue had at one time or another absorbed. Many of them were so tattered and blurred that Jean couldn’t even recognize them. But she did spot the Magus, the intricate black and yellow pieces of his techno-organic body broken apart, and Captain America, his shield crumpled, his shrunken frame all but lost inside the folds of his red, white, and blue uniform.
In yet another crater crouched a thin, pale, prim-looking woman in dowdy clothes. Phoenix just had time to notice that she didn’t look as ravaged as the other doppelgangers when the woman snarled and, crimson eyes shining, clawed hands extended, hurtled up at her.
Caught by surprise, Jean narrowly dodged that first attack. Instantly the vampire wheeled to fly at her once more. This was evidently the avatar of the servant Belasco had used to poison Rogue, a creature he’d enchanted to enable her to thrive and exert power on the psychic plane.
Come on, then, thought Jean. I'll show you the difference between a real psi and a fake enhanced with a little hocus pocus. She put her hand behind her back where the vampire couldn’t see it, and a manifestation of her intent materialized inside her fingers.
Her adversary flew at her, and she blasted the undead thing with a mental bolt. Momentarily stunned, the vampire floundered in the air, and Jean dodged once again.
Baring her fangs, the vampire gazed into Phoenix’s eyes. The telepath could feel the other woman’s hypnotic power pounding at her, but her shields held. She didn’t counterattack, just shook her head and gave her foe a scornful, pitying smile.
Shrieking in fury, the vampire charged her a third time. Jean waited until she was nearly on top of her, then threw the object in her hand, guiding it with her telekinesis, or what passed for it in this realm of pure mind.
Belasco’s minion pivoted and began to dive, and for an instant Jean was afraid that, close as she was, she was still going to manage to dodge. Then the wooden stake punched into the vampire’s chest, and her body exploded in a shower of dust.
Jean looked about. She’d hoped that the undead woman’s demise would produce some encouraging change in the mind-scape around her, but no such luck. Although the vampire had been the original source of Rogue’s difficulties, her subsequent possession by the Dark Ones was so overwhelming that it rendered all other sources of psychic pollution irrelevant.
The telepath flew on, searching, wondering just how quickly time was passing in the physical world, until at last she spotted the deepest opening yet, a shaft descending deep in the rocky, sterile ground. Following her instincts—no doubt Logan would approve—she dove into it head first.
Almost immediately she plunged into total darkness, and willed a glow into existence to light her way. And it was a good thing she had, because farther down, the passage began to twist and narrow. Had she been unable to see where she was going, she might easily have bashed her head open.
Soon the way was so cramped that she felt as if she were crawling rather than flying, and wondered if she might get stuck. But then, after a final bend that changed the passage’s attitude from vertical to horizontal, it opened out into a claustrophobic little bell jar of a cave.
Here Rogue lay curled in the fetal position on the cold stone floor, looking as blurry and insubstantial as any of the psychic constructs weeping and shuddering above her head. Her glove-less hands were covered in blood, and the coppery smell of it suffused the air. For an instant Jean wondered if her fellow X-Man was comatose, but then, seeing the light, Rogue gasped and flinched.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Phoenix. “It’s me, Jean. I’ve come to help you.” She knelt beside Rogue and took her friend’s hands in her own.
“I’m so sorry,” the possessed woman whispered.
“Don’t be,” Jean said. “Belasco hasn’t opened the Dark Ones’ prison yet.” At least she hoped not. “We can still stop him.”
“You don’t understand,” said Rogue, tears slipping from her eyes. “I don’t have any control. You’re only here because I killed you.’’
“No,” said Jean.; ‘‘I’m here in your mind because I came in of my own free will.”
“Killed you, Scott, Logan, Ororo, and God knows how many others,” continued Rogue as if she hadn’t heard.
“You’re wrong,” insisted Phoenix, staring intently into her friend’s emerald eyes and gripping her fingers. “Belasco had someone impersonate you and murder people, but I promise, you didn’t kill anyone. If it seemed otherwise, it’s only because he lied to you and tricked you.”
Rogue blinked. “Really?” she asked in a tiny, childlike voice.
“Really. You fought your cravings every inch of the way, and you held out.” The gore evaporated from Rogue’s hands. “I need you to keep on fighting now. I got rid of the vampire for you, but the Elder Gods are still squatting up there on the surface making their magic. We have to work together to banish them. They have way too much psychic energy bound up in them for me to do it alone.”
“I—I don’t know if I can,” Rogue said. “They didn’t touch you, did they? They’re even stronger than you think they are. Stronger than you can imagine.”
Ordinarily it was useful to cloak the mindscape in forms derived from the material world, but there was a time to dispense with the pretense as well, and Phoenix judged that this was it. She willed her surroundings to become what they truly were, intricate patterns of energy, then established a mind link that enabled her to share the vision with Rogue. The other mutant gasped.
“You see?” asked Jean. “The rock around us, the air we’re breathing, and everything else you were seeing and feeling is simply a kind of illusion. A spectacle we’re creating for ourselves. In reality, it’s all just a part of your own thoughts. Your own mind. Even I’m not the genuine, original Jean. I’m just a facsimile your absorption power generated using the energy and the pattern the true Jean gave it.” She tried not to dwell on the possibility that her counterpart had died as a result, or that one of Belasco’s minions had tom her apart as she lay helpless.
“I guess I understand,” said Rogue slowly, as matrices of energy became dank stone walls once more. ‘ ‘Even with Helen gone, it’s so hard to think.”
“I know,” said Jean. “That’s because so much of your psychic force is tied up in those ugly lumps upstairs. But the main thing to understand is that just as I’m not the original Jean, they aren’t the real Elder Gods, either. They’re a part of you too. A pattern you wove and can unravel again.”
“How?”
“With my help,” said Jean, trying to sound confident. “I’m a psi, remember? Manipulating mental forces is what I do. I’ve never been able to manipulate yours very well before, but now that I’m actually living inside your mind. I’m in a better position to do so. When we go after the Dark Ones, I’ll feed you power, and help you direct your attacks for maximum effect.”
“But how do we fight them?”
“Do whatever feels right. You can punch them just like you would a physical foe. Or use your imagination. Visualize lightning bolts blasting them, or something like that. Or simply will them to disappear. Whatever you do, believe that they’re only a facet of yourself, and that one portion has no power to destroy or dominate the whole. Your faith will weaken them and strengthen both of us.”
“Can I absorb them?”
“Since in reality, you’ve already absorbed them, no, unless, perhaps, you make a conscious effort. And I don’t recommend that. We definitely don’t need you running off yet another copy of an Elder God on an even deeper level of your psyche. Are you ready?”
Rogue took a deep breath and gave a jerky little nod. ‘ ‘I guess so.”
“Good,” Jean answered. “Let’s do it.”
She led Rogue back up the shaft, noticing that it was now wider and straighter than when she’d descended. In fact, before long it opened out into a wide pit, permitting the two X-Men to fly side by
side. Presumably the terrain was shifting because Rogue no longer felt she needed a hiding place.
Even so, the possessed woman hesitated for a moment when they rose above ground level, and the enormous, squirming masses of the Dark Ones came into view. Once again, Jean showed her the reality behind the facade, dissolving the intricate, festering things into constructs of force, mere subpatterns in the grand design that was the mindscape as a whole—albeit subpattems containing a prodigious amount of power.
“You see?” said the telepath. “They’re just pale shadows of the originals. Those spiral nodes are weak points.”
“Got it,” said Rogue. She clenched her fists, extended her arms, and rocketed at the nearest Dark One like an artillery shell.
Jean peered behind the illusion of the other woman’s avatar, viewing it too as a structure of pure psychic force. After an instant of analysis, she infused her friend with a measure of her psi energy, lending her additional strength and shoring up a weak spot in the matrix.
The living mountain didn’t even try to fend Rogue off. Perhaps it was so busy with opening the gate to the prison dimension that it didn’t even notice her coming. She slammed into it with an enormous thud, and an instant later plunged all the way out the other side, propelling raw wet chunks of the Elder God’s substance before her. The huge creature formed a hundred mouths, which shrieked, howled, and roared at once. Rogue wheeled for another pass.
Jean turned and hurled a sort of mental bolt at a second Dark One, willing it to cease to exist. Even though her attack caught it squarely in the vulnerable spot at the center of its writhing, chaotic mass, that first effort did little more than attract its attention. Suddenly it was sliding across the plain toward her with appalling speed, like the bullet trains she’d seen in Japan streaking down their tracks.
She flew upward, trying to rise beyond its reach, and it stretched like taffy to follow. Countless limbs erupted from its surface, flailing and clutching at her. Fending them off as best she could with a telekinetic shield, she struck at the Dark One’s weak point again, this time using every iota of her strength.
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