Spoilers: X-Force followed the pull of the Opal of Ozymandias to an ordinary-looking American town secretly controlled by Clan Akkaba. Psylocke sensed that nearly every mind nearby had been fitted with psi-blockers, yet she also detected an ancient presence drawing the opal toward it. Although she did not believe they had found War, the signal suggested that they were finally closing in on the Horseman’s trail.
While Jubilee and Sunspot posed as stranded travelers, an elderly resident welcomed them inside before he and his wife revealed themselves as armed cultists. After subduing the pair, Jubilee warned Cable that the entire town appeared to serve Apocalypse. Cable, Psylocke, and Archangel encountered similar resistance inside the local elementary school, where they defeated more followers and stole their freshly laundered robes to infiltrate the Clan’s gathering.
At the ceremony, Ozymandias rejected a worshipper’s request to use Apocalypse’s rejuvenation chamber, insisting that it belonged only to his master and the woman chosen to stand beside him. He then presented Famine—Autumn Rolfson—wearing a bridal dress. Ozymandias recalled how her uncontrollable mutant power once caused food to wither in her hands until Apocalypse transformed her, while Famine boasted that she could now destroy far more than what was on her plate.
Convinced that Famine could bear Apocalypse’s heir, Ozymandias called her a far better candidate than Pestilence. He then warned her about Candra, who had joined Apocalypse after Rama-Tut’s defeat and became the only woman he regarded as his near-equal. Candra secretly persuaded him to share a fragment of his power, then attacked him in a moment of weakness and fled, using the stolen energy to become an immortal External—a betrayal Apocalypse never forgave.
Before the ritual could continue, Exodus arrived with his Acolytes and denounced Apocalypse as a fallen prophet, arguing that Magneto’s vision offered mutantkind a nobler path. Exodus then revealed that he had penetrated Ozymandias’s psi-blockers and that locating one of Apocalypse’s rejuvenation chambers had been his true objective all along. He intended to use the chamber to resurrect Magneto. As the rival factions confronted one another, Cable searched Ozymandias’s quarters and recovered enough prophecies to anticipate War’s next moves.
Ozymandias refused to surrender the chamber, and fighting erupted after Famine struck one of the Acolytes. Exodus ordered his followers to defend one another, while Ozymandias branded them apostates and commanded Clan Akkaba to purge them. After recognizing Rusty and Skids among the Acolytes, Jubilee warned X-Force that although they had entered the town searching for a man named War, an entirely different kind of war had found them instead.
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