by Greg Cox
“Way to go, Witchie,” Wolverine said. He helped a frail-looking man in torn brown trousers stumble through a particularly deep snowdrift. Wanda recognized the shivering human as Dr. Brace Banner only seconds before the man’s skin began to turn an auspicious shade of green. “Things are lookin’ up!”
I hope so, she prayed.
* * *
ROGUE’S eyes rolled backwards, so that only their whites could be seen. Her jaws locked together and she nearly swallowed her tongue. Limbs flailing out of her control, she crashed into the snow at the Ultimate Skrall’s feet.
The hex-induced seizure passed quickly, yet left the X-Man shaken and unhappily impressed by K’lrt’s rapid mastery of his purloined powers. “Guess he’s a quick learner,” she muttered, lifting her head from the snow. Her bottom lip bled where she’d bitten it during her fit, and she spit a dollop of fresh blood onto the frozen whiteness beneath her. “Serves me right for gettin’ cocky.”
“You deserve the same thing every upstart primate deserves,” K’lrt stated. His disdainful words came from only a few feet above her. “Extinction.”
“Oh yeah?” Rogue asked, scrambling onto all fours and staring straight ahead at the Skrall’s knees. “Don’t go countin’ your critters ’fore they’re cooked, you two-legged gator!” Without even bothering to get back on her feet, she launched herself into K’lrt, butting him in the abdomen with her head.
It was like diving headfirst into a trampoline. K’lrt’s elastic torso absorbed her charge, then bounced her back onto the snow. Dang! the aggravated mutant thought. The no-good Skrall had too many weirdo powers to keep track of. “Okay then,” she decided. “Let’s get down to basics.”
She threw a roundhouse punch at K’lrt’s scalloped jaw, her fist connecting with solid bone this time, instead of living rubber. As she’d figured, their mirror-image absorption powers canceled each other out, allowing them to exchange blows without trading memories. Good, she thought. That makes things simpler.
K’lrt took her blow without giving an inch, something not many opponents this side of the Juggernaut could do. From the looks of him, the alien soldier relished the opportunity for a little hand-to-hand combat. A grin stretched across his lizard-like face. Red eyes filled with baleful satisfaction as he swung a rocky fist at Rogue’s head. “You are formidable for your kind, female,” he warned her, “but you’re no match for the Ultimate Skrull!”
“Says who?” Rogue countered, blocking the blow with her right arm. “The only thing ultimate here is your outerspace-sized ego!”
Despite her bravado, however, K’lrt had her worried. The sheer strength of his punch startled her; she was lucky she hadn’t fractured her arm by throwing it in the way of his fist. Just how strong was this character anyway? Not even Colossus had ever hit her that hard.
Feinting with her left, she slugged the Skrull with her right, catching him right above his bulging brows. Hoping for a knock-out, she was disappointed when K’lrt responded instead with a glancing blow that left Rogue’s head ringing. She barely ducked beneath his follow-up swing in time to avoid another piledriver punch. Groggy and on the ropes, she kicked a pile of snow into the Skrull’s face, just to slow him down for a sec. I need a breather, she realized, still feeling woozy from that shot to her head.
The Super-Skrull’s head and shoulders ignited into flame, melting away the offending snow. “Foolish mammal!” he taunted Rogue. “Such childish tactics cannot save you. Do you not realize that I now possess the cumulative strength of the Hulk, the Thing, the Beast, Captain America, and even yourself? Nothing in this solar system can equal my might. Certainly not an ignorant harpy out of her element and her depth.”
He ain’t joking, Rogue admitted to herself. The Leader’s memories confirmed K’lrt’s boasts. If one of those Hulk-plus haymakers connects with my head, I’m history. An old-fashioned slugfest was out; she didn’t stand a chance of beating the Ultimate Skrull in an ordinary scuffle. Instead she rapidly searched the Leader’s borrowed memories for a way to defeat the amplified power of the hostile alien.
Fortunately, the Leader’s powers of concentration kept pace with his encyclopedic store of knowledge. Inspiration struck within nano-seconds, and Rogue looked to the command bulb overhead, abandoned ever since the Leader beamed down to the floor at the beginning of Wolverine’s rebellion. The answer’s up there, she grasped at once. That’s the only way.
She had to hurry, though. She needed the Leader’s technical knowhow to carry out her plan, but she could already feel the villain’s mutated brainpower beginning to slip away from her. The length of her physical contact with her victims determined how long she held onto their captured attributes; unfortunately, she’d only touched the Leader for a few seconds. Damn it, she thought, I should have hung onto his swelled head a little bit longer, back when I had the chance. With the downed mastermind protected by K’lrt’s force field, there was no way to renew her claim on the Leader’s smarts. It was now or never.
“See you later, bat-ears!” She fled her lopsided boxing match with the Skrull, taking off into the air. K’lrt’s elongated arms chased after her, unwilling to surrender their prey. Rogue felt her prefrontal lobes start to shrink down to their standard dimensions; would she still have enough scientific expertise to pull off her scheme? That might depend on how quickly she got away from K’lrt. A petrified fist, unbelievably strong, closed around her ankle and she struggled to yank her foot free. “Hey, y’all!” she yelled at the various X-Men and Avengers below. “Somebody get this grabby alien offa me!”
* * *
THE snow had died down while Rogue and the Super-Skrull traded knuckle sandwiches. Banner was in the throes of his eye-popping transformation into the Hulk, greenish muscles piling onto the cursed scientist’s shivering physique, when Wolverine heard Rogue’s heartfelt cry for assistance. Peering upward into a fading flurry of snowflakes, Logan saw that the airborne X-Man was tethered to the floor by one of the Skrull’s unnaturally extendable arms. The lasso-like limb began to retract before Logan’s eyes, dragging Rogue back down toward the triumphant Skrull.
Sorry, bub, Logan thought, rushing toward the Skrull with his silver claws out front, not while I’m still breathing. He didn’t wait for the rest of the heroes to recover from their anesthetized incarceration within the Leader’s tubes. Loping briskly across the snow, he slashed out at the Skrull’s outstretched arm. “The lady said let go!” he growled, thrusting another set of claws at the Skrull’s reptilian face.
Over three meters long, the targeted arm was too pliable to slice clean through, yet Logan managed to saw through the Skrull’s uniform to the scaly flesh beneath, scratching the surface of the alien’s skin. “Aggh!” the Super-Skrull croaked in surprise and pain. He whipped his injured arm away from Wolverine’s claws at the same time that he used his eyebeams to repel the savage X-Man before Logan’s claws could spear his face. A blast of concussive force sent Wolverine rocketing away from his enemy, but, despite the bruising impact, Logan knew he’d done his part. A sense of predatory satisfaction suffused his being as his sensitive nostrils caught the unearthly scent of the Skrull’s spilled blood. Nobody messes with the X-Men and ends up unscarred, he thought ferociously. Nobody!
His minor flesh wound healed instantly, but the Super-Skrull could neither forget nor forgive the X-Man for drawing first blood. Intent on avenging his honor, the Super-Skrull released Rogue and charged Wolverine, an icy javelin materializing in his hands. He threw the spear with superhuman force, driving it through the X-Man’s midsection and into the wall behind him. “Hah!” the Skrull laughed cruelly, enjoying Logan’s plight. “I always thought you would make a fine trophy!”
Impaled on the frozen lance, pinned to the chamber wall like a bug in an entomologist’s display case, Wolverine let out a bestial howl. He tried to grab onto the icy shaft and pull it out of his guts, but its slick surface was made even slipperier and harder to hold by the warm blood gushing from his perforated stomach. H
ealing factor or no healing factor, he thought, grimacing, this hurts like blazes.
He couldn’t even shake the spear free from the wall; the Super-Skrull had propelled the javelin too hard and too deeply for that. Now the Skrull was coming in for the kill, and Logan knew he couldn’t get off the blasted spike before the Skrull turned him into a casualty of war. Never expected to cash in my chips on the moon, of all the crazy places, Logan mused, as his internal organs stubbornly tried to repair themselves despite umpteen inches of unyielding icicle, but I guess I had a good long run.
“Prepare to die, Terran!” the Skrull asserted, brandishing his claws of bone; he clearly appreciated the irony of slaying Wolverine with replicas of Logan’s own infamous claws. “May your afterlife be as backwards and odious as your planet!”
The skeletal blades shot toward Logan’s throat—only to shatter against a huge green palm that dropped between the Skrull and his intended victim. The Skrull shrieked in agony as his organically-grown claws splintered into pieces. His mouth opened so wide Logan could see past the alien’s fangs and down his throat. Not a pretty sight, but Logan wasn’t complaining.
“Forget that,” the incredible Hulk rumbled, shoving the Skrull backwards with a sweep of his gargantuan arm. “Nobody clobbers that Canadian runt but me.”
“What he said,” Iron Man added, his amplified voice ringing out over the spacious rotunda. The armored Avenger was just one of several heroes coming to Logan’s aid. “Sort of.”
Casually, with just one hand, the Hulk tugged the bloody ice-spear out of both the wall and the impaled X-Man. The gamma-spawned behemoth broke the frozen lance over his knee while Wolverine slid down onto the snow, leaving a gruesome trail on the black steel wall. Logan clutched his stomach and bit down on his lip as his punctured entrails painfully reknit. That’s one I owe you, big guy, he thought, grateful that, for once, the Hulk had remembered whose side he was supposed to be on. Who’d have guessed it?
* * *
K’LRT scanned the wintry battlefield, reminiscent of the arctic ice caverns of B’hamma Prime. It seemed that all of the Terran champions had been roused from stasis; both Avengers and X-Men fanned out around him, staking out positions from which to launch a unified attack. He identified Captain America and Storm to his left, while Cyclops and the Scarlet Witch readied themselves to the right. The Beast, the Hulk, and Iceman spread out before and behind him. Iron Man and the Vision circled overhead, casting their humanoid shadows over the outnumbered Skrull. “All right, Skrull,” Captain America said sternly, and K’lrt was appalled by the human’s sanctimonious posture and tone. The Avenger’s shield, branded with primitive tribal emblems, stood guard upon the human’s bended arm. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. That’s entirely up to you.”
“And you’ll hand over the Leader, too, if you know what’s good for you,” the Hulk added sullenly. Unlike Captain America, the mighty brute did not bother to hide his essential barbarousness behind a facade of undeserved dignity. “Me, I’m just looking for a chance to knock your alien butt into orbit.”
K’lrt did not grant the Terrans’ hollow threats and ultimatums the honor of a reply. Let them come, he thought confidently. With his awe-inspiring new powers, he could vanquish them all, thanks to the Leader’s scientific acumen. Looking beyond the ring of Terran insurgents, K’lrt noted that the victimized Leader was starting to stir for the first time since being struck down by his former slave. Although still unconscious upon the floor, the Leader groaned weakly. His fingers scratched fitfully at the carpet of snow while his puny body contracted into a fetal position to conserve his body heat. A pathetic sight, K’lrt appraised in disgust. Perhaps the overbearing genius would be less presumptuous after this near-debacle, brought on solely by the Leader’s overweening vanity and ultimate incompetence. In the final analysis, he reflected, it is the warrior who wields the power that matters, not the lowly technician who labors to forge the weapons, but has no place upon the battlefield.
He cast a contemptuous glance at the Leader’s elevated command bulb, only to see Rogue fly into the empty transparent blister through the opening K’lrt himself had carved in the Leader’s protective bubble. For the first time, he felt a tremor of apprehension: what in the name of sacred Skrullos was that troublesome female doing up there? A sobering realization struck him with the force of a runaway comet; until the Leader recovered from Rogue’s parasitic touch, the rebellious human possessed all of the Leader’s vast knowledge—including the secret of the Skrull’s new powers!
“No! This cannot be!” His cold blood went cooler as a chill rushed down his malleable spine. Surrounded as he was by a motley assortment of X-Men and Avengers, K’lrt knew that he could not possibly thrash all his foes before the mutant wench worked her mischief in the command bulb. Invisibility, it was plain to see, was the better part of valor.
Abruptly, the Ultimate Skrull vanished before the startled eyes of Earth’s intransigent defenders, rising unseen into the air with all the speed at his command. Rogue must die, he resolved, before another minute passes!
* * *
“EASY does it,” Rogue murmured as she sat down upon the revolving seat at the center of the hanging bulb. An illuminated control panel, consisting of an intimidating array of colored touchpads and gauges, circled her like a ring. The anxious X-Man gulped as she tried to make sense of the bewildering controls, with the help of the Leader’s swiftly fleeing super-genius. Well I’ll be! she thought. This blamed set-up looks more complicated than all that Shi’ar hardware back in the Danger Room. Her greenish-white forehead wrinkled as she examined the controls, racking the Leader’s pillaged brilliance for whatever hints might be hiding there before her extra gray matter evaporated completely.
The console looked familiar, kind of, but the more she tried to tap into the requisite expertise, the faster her stolen memories seemed to recede. K’lrt’s a sitting duck right now, she reminded herself, biting her wounded lip in frustration. All I’ve gotta do is push the right dang buttons!
But which ones?
“Mutant sow!” Without warning, K’lrt appeared right outside the bulb, glaring at her with murderous fury. Copying Rogue’s own powers allowed him to fly without wind or flames. “Leave those instruments alone!” he ordered Rogue angrily. Close up, his alien features looked more ugly and inhuman than ever. Overlapping layers of sea-green scales glinted beneath the harsh artificial lighting. Pointed ears flared like miniature devil-wings along the sides of his skull. Deep grooves segmented his lower jaw into puffy green pouches. Yellow fangs gleamed like daggers. “You’ll pay for trespassing where you do not belong, you human maggot!” Snakelike eyes glowed Cyclops-red.
“’Fraid you’re behind the times,” Rogue rejoindered. She hit the Skrull with the only weapon against which he had no defense: one of the Leader’s telepathic mind-blasts. K’lrt reeled backwards, clutching his head in shock and agony as every synapse in his brain blazed with psychic fire. “Maggot ain’t been part of the X-Men for some time.”
A trace of the Leader’s own deep disdain for his alien accomplice filtered into Rogue’s knowing smirk as the Super-Skrull tumbled backwards through the air. Figures, she thought, that the Leader wouldn’t provide his partner with any protection from mental attacks. Every no-account scoundrel wants to keep an ace up his sleeve.
Meanwhile, she was running out of time and pilfered memories. Her overstuffed skull was literally shrinking by the moment, wringing the Leader’s boundless intellect and erudition from her head like water from a sponge. Tense fingers rested lightly upon the control panel, anxious to put the Skrull out of his misery but hesitant to make a mistake. Don’t think about it, she decided. Just trust that the knowledge’s still back there— somewhere—and let your fingers do the walkin’.
Relying more on habit than conscious design, she activated the transmat projectors, experiencing a surge of relief as her hands tapped out the appropriate commands. A dazzling burst of emerald light enveloped th
e stunned Skrull, transporting him at once down onto what Rogue now recognized as the transformation platform. His mind still dazed by her telepathic jolt, K’lrt looked about uncertainly, momentarily puzzled by his instantaneous relocation. “Don’t let him budge from that platform!” Rogue shouted via the Leader’s loudspeakers.
Avengers and X-Men both responded without hesitation. A shimmering violet tractor ray, courtesy of Iron Man, locked the baffled Skrull in place, while Iceman anchored K’lrt to the pedestal with great slabs of glistening ice. As if that wasn’t enough, the Hulk’s massive hands dropped heavily onto K’lrt’s shoulders. Careful, Rogue thought, don’t touch his skin; that lizard’s still got my absorbing powers.
Thankfully, the Hulk kept his big hands on K’lrt’s dark purple uniform, even as the Scarlet Witch cast an eerie occult glow over the proceedings, shielding the other heroes’ efforts from any Skrull-generated hexes. Looking down from her perch beneath the ceiling, Rogue was impressed, and mildly surprised, at how well the two teams worked together. Nothing like a pair of A-number-one crums like the Leader and the Skrull to get us heroes to put aside our differences.
At the last minute, the Ultimate Skrull caught on to his predicament. “No!” he raged. “You can’t!” Shards of ice went flying as he thrashed wildly in a desperate attempt to escape the platform, but the Hulk’s strength, coupled with Iron Man’s magnetic beam, could not be shaken off as easily as Iceman’s hastily constructed frozen shackles. Flames erupted from the trapped Skrull, yet the Hulk did not withdraw his hands from the inhuman torch. Despite his augmented power, K’lrt was unable to flee the pedestal fast enough.
“Too late, sugah,” Rogue said, pressing the final button. Her brain had nearly shrunk to normal, and her formerly green-tinted complexion was a rosy pink once more, but that didn’t matter now. The Leader had taught her everything she needed to know. “You’re toast,” she announced.
A green aura surrounded K’lrt, outshining even the blazing flames racing over his body.
