by Alex Irvine
“They’re coming to us, mortal,” the Enchantress said. “Your little plaything will either survive or not. It matters little to me.”
“But it matters the world to me! It’s all that matters!” Volcana dropped to her knees. “Please! You’re the Enchantress! Can’t you use your magic to bring them here! Or bring yourself to them? You can help!”
“Certainly I can,” the Enchantress said. “But I do not wish to.”
“Send me to him,” Volcana begged. “I’ll do whatever you want. Anything.”
The Enchantress looked at her and smiled. “Anything is quite a steep price.”
“I don’t care! Please!”
“Go, then,” the Enchantress said. “But I will remember your promise.”
A portal surrounded Volcana, and she was suddenly onboard the ship. Doctor Octopus piloted, while Titania and the Absorbing Man hovered over Owen. He looked so pale, so vulnerable. Volcana couldn’t take it.
She rushed to him. “Owen!”
“How’d you get here?” demanded the Absorbing Man.
“I made a deal with the Enchantress. She sent me. Oh, Owen. I’m here.” She knelt next to the bed where Owen lay and touched his face.
“Girl, I’ve seen you do some dumb things for a man,” Titania commented, “but this takes the cake. You made a deal with the Enchantress? What did you give her in return?”
“Shut up, Skeeter. It doesn’t matter,” Volcana said.
“Oh, we’ll see about that,” the Absorbing Man said with a chuckle.
Then the ship rocked, and Doc Ock shouted, “Whoever’s back there now, you had better buckle in! We’re under attack!”
THIRTY-FIVE
NO PLAN survives contact with the enemy. That was an old saying. But in Logan’s experience, no plan survived mentioning it to another human being—because then everyone wanted to put in their two cents. Working alone was easier. You didn’t have to deal with Scott Tenderhearted Summers blasting you in the arm when you were about to solve the Molecule Man problem permanently. Or being halfway home and suddenly getting a telepathic note from Xavier that he was flying out to intercept the villains’ ship, and he wanted you to join the party.
“Why didn’t we just take care of things on the ground?” Logan grumbled as Scott fired on the zigzagging vessel. Xavier’s ship was coming in from another angle, boxing in Doom’s people between them.
“Put a sock in it, Logan,” Rogue said. “You want to be an X-Man, you play by the professor’s rules. Don’t you know that by now?”
“I know it, all right,” Logan said. “That’s why I don’t spend a lot of time with Xavier.”
“Got them,” Scott said. Logan looked out the window again and saw the target ship fluttering groundward, smoking and burning on its way.
“Good,” he said. “Strafe ’em, and let’s go home.”
“Xavier’s ship is landing,” Scott said. “That means we are, too. Get ready.”
Logan jumped out of the ship before it touched down, hitting the ground running. Magneto, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Xavier were exiting the other ship. They closed in on the Absorbing Man, Doctor Octopus, and Titania—the three bad guys who were still a threat. Seven on three. Better odds than last time.
No, four. Another woman, the one who turned herself into fire, was setting the Molecule Man on the ground near Doom’s ship. Still decent odds, Logan thought. He meant to improve them while Scott was still landing their ship and wouldn’t get in his way.
The Absorbing Man had his free hand on a boulder. Its coloration spread over his body as he assumed its hardness and strength. “They have forced our hand,” Doc Ock announced with exasperation. “It seems we must kill them to be rid of their annoyance. Titania? Creel? Volcana?”
“First thing you’ve said all day that makes sense,” Creel said. The woman who’d set down Molecule Man—Volcana, apparently—did her version of Johnny Storm’s flame-on, though more like a plasma-on, and looked right at Logan.
“You did this to my Owen,” she said. “You go down first.”
“I got room on my dance card,” Logan snarled.
Volcana fired a beam of thermal energy at Wolverine, melting the rocks to slag where he’d been standing a moment before. Then she swept the beam across the whole field; she just missed Storm, then Logan as he headed in low for Doc Ock. Octavius was the brains of Doom’s team here, and Logan always went for the brains first if he could. Rogue and Nightcrawler were having a tough time containing Titania. She was Hulk-strong by the looks of it, able to fling around any X-Men before they could get close enough to do damage. Even Nightcrawler couldn’t always teleport away fast enough to avoid getting hit.
The Absorbing Man, still in his boulder-like form, dropped in front of Logan before he could reach Doc Ock, who had just grabbed Storm’s arm and knee with two of his tentacles. “Hey, runt,” he said. “This one’s for our own little runt.”
Creel cocked his arm to plaster Logan with his ball and chain, but Wolverine was faster. Cyclops wasn’t looking, and Storm was in danger, and this was no time to pussyfoot around people who were trying to kill you. Logan sliced off Absorbing Man’s arm at mid-bicep with a single swipe of his claws.
Absorbing Man screamed and clutched at his stone stump in confusion. Logan took a split second too long to admire his handiwork, and Volcana belted him with plasma. For a moment, the world was a furnace—then Logan heard the unmistakable crack of Cyclops’ optic blasts, and he could breathe again. Barely.
Xavier was right there trying to help him up. “I got it, Chuck,” Logan said. “Just gimme a sec.”
He got to his feet, feeling his flesh start to reknit and heal the burns. Man, I hate being burned. His claws flashed out again, and he headed back to the center of the battle. Magneto had Doc Ock wrapped up neatly in his own tentacles, but then Titania picked up Ock and ran. Storm and Rogue pounded them as they went. “Cover us!” Ock screamed. He fought to untangle his tentacles.
Miss Volcano, or whatever her name was, started to glow. Uh-oh, Logan thought.
She unleashed a wave of heat that would have incinerated them all, but Storm met it with icy rain and hurricane winds. Rogue pulled together a rock wall to shelter the team. Even so, the heat was intense. None of them could move until it dispersed; when they looked past Rogue’s wall, they saw that Doom’s people had boarded one of their ships and gone.
“We blew it!” Logan said, disgusted. “That was our chance.”
“No,” Xavier said. “All we lost was a ship we do not need. Now Doom’s minions know they cannot stand against us, and we know something far more important. We were tested, and we fought bravely as a single team.” He looked to Cyclops and Storm. “That is what matters if we are to survive.”
Logan had his doubts on that score, but he kept them to himself. If Chuck wanted to know, he’d just read Logan’s mind and find out anyway.
THIRTY-SIX
CREEL sat silently in the ship on the way back to Doombase. He almost didn’t understand what had happened. His detached arm lay across his lap. It was still stone, like the rest of him had been since he’d absorbed the characteristics of the boulder. That’s a good sign, he thought, desperately trying to keep calm. If the arm had turned back to flesh and bone on its own, it would be bleeding all over the place. And he didn’t think Doctor Octopus was that kind of doctor. The truth was, he was scared. He’d never let on, but Creel knew he wasn’t much use with only one arm.
Ultron watched them as they landed the ship and disembarked in the hangar. “My Owen needs help!” Volcana said to him—forgetting her other wounded comrade, Creel noticed.
Ultron pointed dismissively into the interior of the base. “There are alien medical machines in the central infirmary. Use them if you can.”
“Can’t you?” she asked.
“Certainly. But I will not unless Doom requires it. Only then would I lower myself to assisting biological organisms.”
Volcana looked like she might go
after Ultron, which would have been a good show. Creel was a little disappointed when instead she picked up her boyfriend and ran off. Bah. A tough gal like that, Creel thought, gone gaga over a shrinking violet like Owen Whatsisname. A guy too scared of his own shadow to use his powers unless he was trying to impress a woman. Stupid.
Ultron looked at Creel. “Organism, the loss of your appendage demonstrates yet again the superiority of machines over animals.”
“Shut up,” Creel said and headed for the garden. He didn’t know what to do. One possibility had occurred to him, but he’d be in worse shape than Molecule Man if it didn’t work.
He sat down in the garden and took a deep breath. All Creel could think to do was turn back into meat and hold his arm up against the stump while he did it. He’d probably bleed to death if it didn’t stick, but he couldn’t stay stone forever. At some point, anything he absorbed wore off.
“Sometimes I wish I’d just kept on wrestling,” he muttered to no one. Then he leaned to his right so he could wedge his arm tight to the stump. He pressed down with all his weight, and then let himself morph back to flesh and blood.
Please, he thought. Please.
It was a word he hadn’t said out loud in a long time—years, maybe—but he felt a tingling in the air around him, like something had taken notice. Like reality was shifting a little, making room for a new thing that hadn’t been possible before. Creel remembered what the Beyonder had said. Yeah, he thought. Please. This is my wish.
The hot, razor-sharp pain that tore through his arm took his breath away. It was worse than anything he’d ever felt. He got tears in his eyes, and blood roared in his ears so loud he thought there was some kind of earthquake. Creel gritted his teeth and kept going, letting the change flow through him and feeling…
Feeling his arm!
He felt his fingers around the cold steel chain, felt the ends of the broken bone grinding against each other, felt the muscles and tendons shift as they knitted back together. When he could open his eyes again, Creel blinked away the tears and looked down at his arm. He flexed his fingers, and they did what he told them to do.
“Man, I didn’t know I could do that,” he said. Then he bent over and threw up between his feet.
But he felt better after that. Shaky, but determined. He got up, knowing where he had to go next. The rest of the gang needed to see him whole again. They needed to know that Crusher Creel wasn’t just muscle.
He could rebuild himself.
Maybe it was just because of Battleworld, but that was okay with him. He knew something the others didn’t. Maybe not even the Beyonder knew it.
Battleworld was made out of wishes.
He headed back to the Doombase hangar, where he heard a door slide open. Doom himself walked in. His cloak was shredded and his armor scorched. He was limping, and in general looked like the proverbial hundred miles of bad road.
A rippling flash of light appeared with a loud crack; when it cleared, the Enchantress had materialized in the hangar. “Doom! What has happened to you?”
“Begone, Amora,” Doom said wearily.
“Mortal, I have linked my fate to yours,” the Enchantress said. “You will speak to me. What jeopardy have you placed us in? What plan do you contemplate?”
He spun on her. “Do…as…you…will.”
Speechless, Amora just stared at him. First time I ever saw her without something smart to say, Creel thought.
She vanished in another ripple of sparkly light. Then Doom turned to him. “Leave.”
Creel didn’t need to be told twice. He headed downstairs again to kill some time until their next mission. Looked like Battleworld wasn’t made of wishes for everyone.
As Creel walked through the prison section, which had its own door and hangar-sized receiving area, the Wrecking Crew was bringing the Lizard out of stasis. “Doom just got back,” he said.
“No kidding,” the Wrecker said. “He gave us orders over comm. Probably we oughta check in and see how things went with Galactus.”
“Not so good from the looks of it,” Creel said.
“We’ll ask him ourselves in a minute,” the Wrecker said. “Right now we have to wake up the Lizard. Thunderball, you ready?”
“Say the word,” Thunderball called.
“Do it,” the Wrecker said.
The Lizard’s stasis chamber opened and he sprang out, still covered in swamp mud. “Hey, it’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon,” Thunderball joked.
“Lizard, old buddy,” the Wrecker said. “You’re back on the team. Vacation’s over.”
But the reawakened Lizard didn’t rejoin the team. He went after the Wrecker. “You killed Wasssp!” he hissed, slashing at the Wrecker with his claws. His jaws snapped shut barely an inch shy of the Wrecker’s nose.
Thunderball smacked him down, and the whole Wrecking Crew formed a half-circle around the Lizard as he tried to get up. “We shoulda left you in the swamp,” Piledriver said, cracking his knuckles and flexing his super-strong muscles. “Woulda served you right. Now you go and attack us? Buddy, you need to learn some manners.”
The Lizard bared his teeth and hissed. But he didn’t attack.
“You feeling bad for your lady love?” the Wrecker taunted him, twirling his crowbar. “So much for romance in the swamp.”
They all laughed, and then the Lizard snarled and leapt forward again. This time Bulldozer caught him in midair with a driving headbutt that laid him out gasping for breath.
“Let’s finish him off,” Bulldozer said. “He’s nothing but trouble.”
“Nah,” the Wrecker said. “Doom wants him around for now. Put him in a cell. Not the stasis thing, a regular cell. Swing by and say hi every so often, just to keep him in a good mood.”
Piledriver dragged the Lizard to a cell and slammed the door shut. “That’s what we get for trying to be nice,” he said. “Jeez.”
“I’m beat,” Bulldozer said. “I’m gonna grab some shut-eye. That scaly maniac darn near ripped my throat out. Whatever Doom wants him for, I hope it’s worth it. And I hope it’s painful.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
JENNIFER WALTERS had stayed in the background long enough. She’d pitched in, gone along with the team’s desires, avoided causing conflict—in short, done everything you might expect from someone trying to live the ideal of finding consensus. Win-win situations were her favorite outcomes in court, and she liked them in real life, too.
But her good friend Janet Van Dyne was lying dead in an alien village on a faraway planet, and Jennifer was not interested in consensus anymore.
She was looking for revenge.
The transport shuttle she discovered had Doombase’s location programmed right into it, like it knew where she wanted to go. She landed nearby, not caring whether anyone saw her. She didn’t bother looking for the nearest door—as She-Hulk, she could take the direct approach. The wall wasn’t built that could stop her. She went for the closest point on the base’s exterior; when she got there, she tore through the wall like it was paper. Then she got to another wall, and tore through that. Then a third.
When she stepped through the hole she’d made in the third wall, she found Bulldozer in his quarters. He stood at the far wall, bracing for a fight—obviously having heard her advance. But at her entrance, his eyes widened through the holes in his mask.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“Uh-oh is right,” Jennifer said. “I’d be worried, too, if I were you and I’d been part of a certain murder.”
“How did—I mean, I didn’t do anything,” Bulldozer said.
Jennifer smiled. “Until just now, I wasn’t sure,” she said. “But now I am.” She strode toward him and flexed her arms, giving him the full gun show. “I’m looking at you, and you know what I see? A coward and a murderer.”
“Nice speech,” Bulldozer said, lowering his head to point his helmet at her midsection. “But I got nothing to say to you. You’re going to be flexing your arms outside in a second!”
Head down like a charging bull, he raced at her. She slapped him aside, and he crashed into what was left of the wall. “Oh, you’re strong, all right. But you’re out of your league.”
Bulldozer stumbled back up to his feet, and she dropped him with a punch that caved in part of his helmet. “Usually I prefer a fair fight,” Jennifer said as Bulldozer hit the floor. “But not today. Because Janet Van Dyne didn’t get a fair fight, did she?” She hit him again. “Did she?!”
Jen knew her dramatic entrance would draw the others; sure enough, the rest of the Wrecking Crew appeared just in time to see her break Bulldozer’s helmet on the floor. Jennifer looked up as they entered, and she smiled. “What the…” said the Wrecker.
“Yeah, boys,” Jennifer said, rising to her full height and clenching her fists. “It’s me.”
Thunderball, Piledriver, and the Wrecker charged her all at once, and she met them halfway across the room. Thunderball got to her first, swinging his wrecking ball. Jennifer caught the chain and yanked him close to head-butt him square in the face. Piledriver’s fists hammered on her shoulder and she spun to level him with an elbow to the gut. Then, she just had time to lean out of the way of the Wrecker’s crowbar.
“If we’d known you were there, sweetheart, we’d have taken you out, too,” he snarled.
“I wasn’t there,” Jennifer said. “I didn’t even know for sure who killed her until you idiots gave it away.”
Thunderball stirred at her feet, and she kicked him across the room like he was no more than a soccer ball. The Wrecker lunged at her then, bringing up his crowbar for an overhead swing. She easily caught both his forearms and drew him in to glare right into his eyes. “Now you pay. All of you,” Jennifer said.
She lifted up the Wrecker and then slammed him onto the floor. She pounded punch after punch into him until he wasn’t getting back up. When she stopped to look around, she spotted Piledriver stumbling to his feet. “Oh, no, you don’t,” Jennifer said. She took him down again with a haymaker left. He dropped without a sound.