Squads of Purifiers are collecting anti-mutant individuals across the world. They find Donald Pierce in Prague, having his cybernetic enhancements repaired; they violently interrupt the state-sponsored execution of the Leper Queen at a prison in Guatemala; they track a signal identified as Cameron Hodge to the bottom of a crevice on Mount Everest; and at a cemetery in Washington, D.C., they exhume the coffin buried at a headstone marked “Creed”.

Meanwhile, Matthew Risman reflects on everything the late William Stryker did for him. He determines that, while he will carry out Bastion’s orders, he will not do so at the cost of Stryker’s mission against mutantkind. The men’s plane lands at a hangar in Chicago, where Bastion and an army of Purifiers are waiting for them. Bastion asks if Rahne Sinclair is dead; Risman says she is.

Wolverine, X-23, and Warpath approach a Purifier church outside Missoula, Montana. They cut the power and security and Warpath pries open the door. Inside, they find nothing but Wolfsbane, tied to a chair. She’s in bad shape, but alive. The team rushes Rahne back to Colorado, where Laura determines that the Purifiers injected her with an overdose of heroin (though she believes they should have known it wasn’t a fatal dose). Wolverine tells Angel to go get Elixir and Warren flies off.

In Chicago, Bastion leads Risman and his compatriot, brother Eli Bard, down a hallway. Bastion says he has no record of Eli’s existence in either the past or the future, then grabs him by the throat. Risman stops Bastion from killing Eli, saying he will look into him and kill Eli himself if he finds he can’t be trusted. However, Risman tells Eli he will get him out of this, then follows Bastion.

Bastion leads Risman past a row of medical tables, on which lie several bodies along with Donald Pierce and the Leper Queen. At the end of the row, hooked up to a machine, is the techno-organic alien the Purifiers hauled up from the bottom of the ocean - what Bastion describes as “a mindless offspring of Magus”. Bastion interfaces with the machine and begins to command the creature, which responds by extending tendrils into the bodies laid out in front of it. Eli Bard watches from the doorway.

Later, the procedure complete, Bastion presents his new “terrestrial force” capable of ridding the world of the X-Men: the Magus-infected/enhanced group of Graydon Creed, Donald Pierce, Stephen Lang, William Stryker, the Leper Queen, Cameron Hodge, and Bolivar Trask.

---