The Ultimate X-Men Read Online Free Page A

were airborne and in all the years he’d known him he’d never been able to persuade Hank that a full frontal assault wasn’t the best way to assess a new and unknown threat. In the instant that the Beast disappeared in a flash of light, all the rules changed, and the glowing man calling himself the Wheel of Fortune went from potential victim to certified threat.
    Making sure his teammates were out of the fire line, Cyclops opened his visor far enough to emit a thin ruby lance of raw power.
    Split-second calculation raced through Scott’s mind:
    in A WONDERFUL UfE
    Should, be enough to KO him if it hits; he looks human enough —
    There was a grinding crash from above. At the same time a tree beside the stranger’s head exploded in a shower of splinters. Chunks of ice fell out of the sky. A dozen different things clamored for Cyclops’ attention all at the same time.
    Bobby?
    Missed!
    How?
    “X-Men—pull back!” Scott shouted.
    Phoenix had chosen to come at the glowing man from behind. She heard Scott’s shout through the link they shared, and her automatic running assessment of the danger they were in spiked. Hank had vanished, but the clean abruptness of it told Phoenix that it was probably some sort of teleportation—
    And if it weren’t, the years ahead would be time enough to grieve.
    There’s something wrong here. And whatever it is, it’s getting worse.
    When he’d first appeared, the stranger had been surrounded by a chatoyant nimbus of biogenetic energy, almost a halo. Now the area of affect began to spread; the figure inside it to blur, to multiply—and as it did, its psi-signatures did as well. The sensation for Phoenix was similar to being in a rapidly filling auditorium where everyone was talking at once. Ten, a hundred, a thousand: the force of his multiplied thoughts was drowning all other thoughts in a wave of telepathic static.
    IRE OLimAIE im
    Hoiv does he—? There are more of him every instant.
    Above and ahead there was the sound of an explosion; Jean Grey swerved groundward to avoid the flying chunks of ice. What had happened to Bobby?
    What had happened to all of them? She could no longer “hear” her teammates, nor any of the ordinary human minds that made up the community of Salem Center—and in fact, she was no longer sure any of them were there at all. But above all things, Jean Grey was a professional, and the Mission Objective came first. Stop the intruder; shut him down.
    Seconds before, Iceman had been twenty feet overhead. Trained always to fight as part of a team, he’d kept a running check of where the others were—Warren was above and on his left, Jean should be coming up from the bogey’s blind side. Hank and Cyke were somewhere on the ground; not in his attack path. Now was the time to put a set of ice handcuffs on their unfair unknown and have him wrapped up and ready to deliver.
    Bobby angled his ice slide groundward—
    —and smashed directly into Archangel below him, also coming in for an attack run.
    But that’s impossible — he was behind me —
    “Drake, you—moron!” Archangel shouted, silver feathers chiming faintly as he battled desperately to stay airborne.
    But Bobby Drake had troubles of his own. The collision with Archangel’s wings had shattered his ice slide; Iceman was four stories up with no visible means of support.
    Where’s Hank? Bobby wondered as he fell. He didn’t
    !H A WONDERFUL IIEE
    want to nail him with an ice pylon if Hank was moving into position to catch him, but at the same time, he didn’t want to crash —
    Snow. Just the thing on a hot day. With reflexes honed in a thousand Danger Room sessions, Iceman flung out both hands, making the air beneath him cold, colder, coldest. . .
    It was only too bad that what was beneath him wasn’t ground at all.
    No! That’s impossi —
    The rest of his life was going to be measured in seconds if he didn’t time this just right. Bobby Drake drew a deep breath and launched himself into