The red rock outcropping in the distance, and the sharp smell of eucalyptus on the wind told him exactly where they were - some Earth, in the Australian outback. Of course, home - Bob's adopted home, Australia.

"What fresh hell is this?" Ares asked, looking around confused. But he looked perpetually confused, like he was three pages behind everyone else. No wonder he was such a grouchy son of a bitch.

"Why the Outback?" Helga asked Bob. "Why not Sydney?"

"Because by the time anyone notices somethin' happenin' in the Never Never, it's too late to do anything about it," Bob said, glancing around with great scrutiny. When he looked in Logan direction, his eyes were glowing blue, energy leaking beyond his eyelids like tendrils of smoke. "She's here."

It was then that reality was ripped out from beneath them like a flimsy carpet, and suddenly they were on the red rock outcropping, facing a woman who looked like an angel.

She was tall and lean, clothed in a flimsy but clinging white gown, accented with snow white feathers. Her long hair was like molten gold, and flowed around her head as if they were underwater; it seemed like it was alive, moving in a counter motion all its own, caressing the side of her angelically beautiful and youthful face. Her eyes were initially the empty azure of a summer sky, but suddenly, as she focused on Bob, they became sea green flames confined by the sockets of her eyes. "I was wondering when you'd get here," she hissed, her voice as light and beautiful as the sound of chimes. Logan automatically thought of the myth of "sirens", and wondered if anyone ever bought it.

She was so focused on Bob she didn't notice Helga draw back her arm and throw Ares sword.

It was a dead on hit - it skewered the angelic Kumiho straight through the face, and she staggered back, looking rather top heavy. But the fact that she didn't even fall over was a really bad sign.

She made a very angry noise and waved her hand dismissively towards Helga, and she went flying over the edge of the cliff.

Logan dove for her as he heard Ares and Bob and Kumiho going at it in some mystical way that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He landed hard on his stomach, half over the lip of the cliff, and was afraid she had fallen too fast for him to catch, but he just managed to snag the tip of her tail. It curled instantly around his wrist, and he knew she was still conscious, which was good. He bet they both didn't want to find out if Moros was enough to protect her from a ninety foot fall to the scree littered sand below.

She looked up at him as she started to climb his arm. "For what it's worth, good shot," he told her.

She gave him a wry grimace, a bit of green blood trickling from her nostrils. "Good catch."

He shrugged, and didn't want to tell her he got lucky.

After they were both back on the cliff completely, they looked around in time to see Kumiho tell Ares, "Burn."

Ares didn't so much burst into flames as explode into them, a violently green energy that seemed to consume him like he was nothing but rags soaked in gasoline. Bob had dropped to his knees, grabbing his head like he was in pain and bleeding blue energy out onto the rocks. Kumiho had pulled the sword out of her face with no obvious ill effects, and stared at the two of them like they were delectable cuts of meat. "Poor, poor lowers," she said, her voice dripping with condescension. "The first of your breed to die, and for what? Do you even know what the magnitude of your sacrifice is for?"

"Eat me, sunshine," Helga said, and tackled her.

Logan was right there with her, and as soon as Kumiho hit the rock Logan drove down with his newly sprung claw, straight into Kumi's swan like neck. He felt the tips sink into the rock below her, and ripped to the side regardless, decapitating her. Green energy poured out like blood, and pooled on the rock.

Logan shared a glance with Helga, and didn't have to ask if she thought something was wrong, because it was obvious she was feeling it too.

"Interesting. I see why you were chosen," Kumiho said, in her crystalline sing song voice. It wasn't her decapitated head talking, but her - she was now standing about ten feet away from them, eyeing them with what might generously be called contempt. The body that had been beneath them a moment before was gone, with not even a splatter of green left behind. Oh shit.

Ares vaporized, turned completely into a swirl of orange energy that was violently disrupted and "dispersed" by green energy the exact same colors as the flames that had consumed him. Was that what subsuming another god looked like? It made Rogue's absorbing thing look kind of tame - mercifully so. But where was Bob? He wasn't where he had been - he didn't appear to be anywhere.

"You are deliciously vicious little creatures, aren't you? You're like little shrews - you write meaner checks than your miniscule butts can cash."

"Come over here and say that," Helga said, but they both knew it didn't matter anymore. They were dealing with a god who manipulated minds easier than Xavier and Bob combined - and had already taken Bob out of the equation. Where the hell was he?

Kumiho gave them a smile that was colder than a night in Antarctica. It grew slowly, full of malice and poison, and Logan knew he'd never seen an eviler thing hiding behind such an angelic face. On her best day, Mystique and the Sisters could only hope to be a fifth as malevolent as this thing.

Helga grabbed his arm, and he knew why. They were both about to die - right here, right now, probably much more violently than poor, dumb Ares. There'd be no "rebirth" as energy for Kumiho to exploit - they'd simply die as weak and frivolous mortals, way out of their league.

It was in a moment of white hot hate - he didn't so much care about himself, but Helga deserved a hell of a lot better than this, and where the fuck was Bob?! - that he really felt what had been in the background of his mind all this time. That swirl of blue energy, the stuff circling his brain and infusing his veins with power, always there but unnoticed by him as his body simply adapted to its presence; the stuff that Bob had given him to fight with.

It almost seemed irrelevant that it was only a fraction of what Bob had, and would theoretically be of no use against her. Bob had said together they were powerful - more than the sum of their parts - and he wondered if he was just blowing sunshine up his skirt, or if he honestly and truly meant it. He decided if he was ever going to find out, it was going to be now. If nothing else, it had the element of surprise going for it.

He focused on his anger, closed his eyes, and let his depths of rage come out into that glorious blue light. It was like having a star inside his brain, a beautiful light ... now surging and pulsing with power, waiting to explode.

Logan opened his eyes on Kumiho, and saw her through a filter of blue.

He screamed in rage, and just let it go - he had no idea how to control the energy; all he knew was rage was the trigger that shut Arakis down, and if it worked once, it would work again. He shut his eyes as he screamed, hands balled into such tight fists his claws sprung out of their own accord, but he didn't really feel it anymore. His body was a river of blue light, and he felt no pain, no boundaries, nothing constricting his once fragile form. He was a cleansing fire, and he knew nothing but that light.

Logan had to stop when he felt spent, hunched over until his forehead touched rock, and he was slowly getting a sense of himself again, of the body around him. Just like after he used it in Bob's body back on Dis, he felt more completely spent than he had ever had before.

"Good going, tiger," Helga said, her hand now on his back. "I see why Bob gives you his energy."

As soon as he could open his eyes and look around, he did. It looked like they were still on a rocky crag, but this time it wasn't red but blue. And the air smelled like parchment.

No fucking way .

He looked up just in time to see a pretty pissed off Amaunet transform from her serpentine form to her humanoid one. "What are you creatures doing in this sacred space?" She demanded.

"What the fuck did I do?" Logan asked Helga, wondering if even she knew.

But she did. of course. Good old Helga. "You opened up a dimensional rift and got us the fuck out of there before she could smite us. Bob couldn't have done better himself." She didn't seem the least bit phased.

"I teleported us?" He didn't even know he could do that. Or how to do that.

"Where is Bob?" Amaunet asked angrily.

"Fuck if we know," he snapped at her, not in the mood for any more shit from goddesses. how in the fuck could he have teleported them anywhere? how did you open a dimensional rift? How the hell did you even know where you were going? "Kumiho just subsumed Ares, and Bob disappeared, and the crazy bitch was gonna kill us before I remembered Bob left me an escape hatch." Escape hatch ... okay, that had a familiar ring to it, and not just in this context ...

Amaunet's gold eyes seemed to widen ever so slightly. "Kumiho subsumed Ares?"

"And Fenrir, if we can believe what we were told," Helga informed her. "Although after having seen Ares burst into flames, I'm willing to believe it."

It was really hard to read the expression on a snake woman's face, but she did look pretty shocked. For the first time, he realized the dark reddish-purple sky of this dimension was actually quite soothing. "She is doing it then," she said, but not to them. She seemed to be staring at a nothing point in front of her face, not even seeing them anymore. "Kuk is dead?" It almost wasn't a question.

"Ares killed him," he told her. "He finally figured out frog boy was insultin' him."

"Balder, Kombu, Hermes ... in her avarice, she has subsumed many."

He exchanged a questioning glance with Helga. Okay, Hermes was a real god too? Who the hell was Kombu, though? Sounded like an African deity, but he was only judging that from the vowel sounds of the name. And where the hell was she pulling these names from? Was there some kind of deity hotline? If so, why weren't they using it before?

"And Bob is next on her list if you don't get off your royal ass and help," Helga said savagely, gaining Amaunet's deeply offended attention. "Do you really want her to get Bob's power too?"

In spite of the waves of hate coming off her, aimed at Helga, it was clear that she thought Kumiho taking on Bob's powers was a really bad idea. Maybe she had already, maybe that's why he was gone ... but wouldn't Amaunet have known? "Look, lady, are you gonna help us or not?" He asked, feeling a little stronger as his healing abilities kicked in, even in the wake of psychic injuries that probably didn't leave a scar. "We gotta find Bob, and we got to put her away for good."

Once again, Amaunet glared at him like he was the most aggravating insect she had ever had the misfortune to pluck out of her skin. "Is that why Bob brought you, mortal? To irritate everyone to death?"

Before he could tell her to go fuck herself, Amaunet said, somewhat dismissively, "You have the ability to find him yourself, mortal. Find him, and tell him we will use him as a conduit. Kumiho will be stopped."

"What do you mean he'll be used as a conduit?" Helga asked warily.

"What do you mean I can find him?" Logan wondered. But even as he asked, he realized - the escape hatch. That's what Bob said he put in his mind, so Logan could take over if Kumiho exploited his fears. And that's what Kumiho was doing, wasn't she? She had put him somewhere where he was the only living thing on the planet. She couldn't kill him directly, so she was trying to break him down. Or so he assumed, but it would make sense - when she said burn, Ares burst into flame, but Bob only grabbed his head. He didn't even smoke.

He found Helga looking at him funny. "Still with us, bud?"

"I can find him," he admitted, a little stunned at the idea. "I'm not exactly sure how, but I can."

She looked slightly relieved. "Then go get him. I'll see you back at bitch central with the cavalry."

He nodded, smirking at the description "bitch central". See, that was why you just had to love Helga - why weren't there more people like her? No drama, just getting shit done. He wished she were a mutant so he could pull her into the "X Men" - not only to annoy the hell out of Scott, but to make sure he always had someone on his back who could kick ass and take names. If she was covering him, he'd have no worries at all.

The problem here was he really didn't know how to work this crazy thing. But he didn't know he could teleport them out of danger either. Maybe, rather than get angry this time, he should just let go - the energy was quite literally Bob, wasn't it? Wouldn't it be drawn to the place it had come from? Or maybe that was totally fucking wrong, but it was worth a shot. So he closed his eyes and concentrated on the energy he could still feel inside his mind, letting it ebb and flow and follow its own natural impulses.

He let the energy flow through him, over him, carry him away like a river of light, and it took all of his will not to fight against it; his default position was to fight, his first knee jerk response to everything. He was aware that meant something, but he really didn't want to know what.

It felt like it was it was filling him, taking him over, and carrying him along, to where he didn't know - he just hoped it was to Bob.

There was an odd sensation - not quite like falling, but something close to it - and he knew something had changed drastically. It was the air; it seemed dry and dead, and sound didn't carry. There was no sound at all; it was beyond deathly quiet. He could feel sand beneath his hands, but it wasn't sand; it was too fine, too soft.

Logan opened his eyes, and found he was kneeling in a pit of burned ashes. From what smell there was in this dead and colorless location, he could tell they were human ashes.

Oh boy, this was going to be a fun place.

13

The buildings that were standing in this blasted wasteland were tumbledown shacks, their sides so washed out by sand abrasion and harsh sun that they had no color at all. Where there was soil, it was an unhealthy and dead cigarette ash grey; there were no plants, not even cacti. The sky was a washed out ivory, edging towards beige, and the sun was like the eye of a baleful god, watching closely as everything withered and died beneath its gaze.

"Bob!" He shouted, getting to his feet. But the air was so dead it was like shouting into a thick towel - he could hear his own voice come back to his own ears as muffled. What a creepy dimension.

He wandered a bit, until he came to the edge of a crumbling cliff, overlooking the sea. Bob had been right - it looked like glass; flat and shallow, two dimensional somehow, as if he had accidentally wandered into a bad oil painting hanging on the wall of a cheap motel. If you weren't dead here, you would wish you were dead.

Now where the hell was Bob?

He knew this place was throwing off his senses when he turned around and nearly jumped out of his skin as Bob hugged him. He tried to squirm out of his grasp as he asked, "Where the hell did you come from?"

"I was gonna ask you the same thing," he said, pulling away and holding him at arm's length. He thought Bob understood he was not a "huggy" sort of person. "I've been trying to open a gateway out of here, but she has this place locked down tight. How are you and Hel?"

"We're okay, just wondering what the fuck happened to you."

"Ares toast?"

He nodded. "Totally absorbed. We saw Amaunet and she said they'd use you as a conduit to shut Kumiho down, but you have to get your ass back there first."

"Finally! Man, it takes a wholesale slaughter for them to wake up, doesn't it?" He then gave him an odd look. "How did you see Amaunet?"

"I tried to use your power against Kumiho, and somehow teleported us back to Ogdoad."

"Good move."

"I got no fuckin' idea how I did it."

"All that matters is you did. Thanks for lookin' out for Hel too." He then sighed, in a way that suggested he was gearing up for something, and said, "Ready to go back? I have a feelin' this is gonna get ugly."

"I don't know how to get back," he pointed out.

"I do, and now that you're here I'm sure I can get us out. You ready? I'm sure it will be ugly from the get go, 'cause Hel drew first blood, and you pulled out before she could toast you too. And if you thought she was bad before, wait'll you see her pissed."

Logan simply stared at him. "That's the worst pep talk I have ever heard."

"Sorry mate, left the pom-poms at home."

Man, the things he did for the weirdest people.

Bob kept ahold of his arms, and he could feel power surging through him as Bob's eyes filled with blue light. He didn't know if he was siphoning off power from him, or giving him more - it felt the same either way.

"Tell me something," he asked, surprised he could speak. "Can we win this?"

"We'll have to," Bob replied, his voice sounding just slightly inhuman.

That wasn't really an answer at all.

14

But it smelled right, and he knew that this was simply what Bob had been warning him about - Kumiho pissed off.

The desert was in flames. Not normal flames, but the same unholy green fire that had consumed Ares, and they reached up eighty feet, almost to the very lip of the cliff. It wasn't heat that was threatening to do them all in before they even took a step, though - it wasn't heat that was baking them but power, a kind that made his flesh want to crawl off his muscles and get the fuck out of here.

Kumiho was now hovering slightly above the crag, green energy sketched in the shape of wings seemingly keeping her aloft. She really loved the irony of her "angel" image, didn't she? Her eyes oozed with green fire, mimicking the landscape bellow. But the moment they zapped into this hellish scene, she began, "You're too late, B - "

A sentence she never got to finish, as Bob gestured violently with his fist, and she went flying backwards, hitting the rock with a meaty ( and not angelic ) thud. "Oh, can the balloon juice sister," Bob snapped, storming towards her. "You want to subsume me? Come and get me!"

Logan was right behind him, but had barely gotten two feet when things flew out of the emerald flames surrounding them.

His first thought was it was birds, somehow caught up in the flames and flying towards the only opening, but there was no way anything living on this plane could have survived that without a little help.

And they weren't no fucking birds either.

They were shaped more like manta rays, with long, whiplike tails, and they weren't on fire - they were made completely of green flame. There were dozens of them now, filling the bloody red sky, and zooming towards them like dive bombers. "On your zero," he shouted to Bob, as he popped his claws and slashed out at one swooping down towards him.

It was like cutting through nothing, a cloud, and it dispersed instantly, but a sickly feeling travelled down his claws and through his body. It stunned him for a moment; it was like ... what was it like? It was like Rogue touching him, but only briefly with a fingertip, perhaps - it felt like some energy was drawn from him just coming in contact with the thing long enough to slice it to ribbons. That's when he understood the magnitude of what was going on here: Kumiho had demons named after her that drained the "life force" of their victims. The flames here could do the same thing - they didn't burn you, they consumed you; they absorbed your energy and spit out whatever was left. Letting them touch you was instantaneous death ... and that meant everything in this desert was now dead, including any plants and animals with the misfortune to have been in the way.

And that's when he realized that empty dimension that Bob had been trapped in - that was a plane she had already devoured.

Bob was right - they had to win. Otherwise, Earth was next on her menu, and nothing would be left but a pile of ash.