22

Ironheart has fallen. Riri hangs from a parachute. Below her, the ground is still many thousands of feet down. And She-Vulture is far from having given up.

Like a real vulture, She-Vulture flies in circles around the parachuting Riri. She seems helpless to defend herself.

"You're a kebab of carrion to me now, Ironheart," she sneers. "With your head on a platter, I will pass on to my Jewish princess foremothers, in whose spoiled company I will then feel no shame!"

Riri moans. "Just kill me already, JAP!"

Jemma Simmons/Deathlok is hung upside down from two trees. Huntress takes her repeating rifle, and beats her with it. Deathlok forces herself to take it like a man. At least she's a more tolerant man that her late husband, Leo Fitz, ever was...

"Hate to do this to you, Deathlok." Huntress screams, and keeps beating Deathlok with the repeater. "But you are a once-in-a-lifetime trophy. You're certainly big game that'd make your late husband look like a dwarf."

Deathlok narrows her eye. Somehow, she WILL get out of this mess, and see to it that Huntress becomes butchered kosher long pork in her own Jewish smokehouse.

In the woods, the berserkers silently stalk Huntress. They're just about ready to claim her as their own...

Over the lake, a dark and heavy cloud hovers. Many, many streaks of lightning connect the sky to the lake surface. Their electromagnetism prompts a trio of maelstroms, all in a triangle. Underwater, they're really gears in an engine.

Underwater, the maelstroms look like a trio of cyclones. Any fish that get caught in them probably swim away regretting it...if they figure out how to escape them.

Scarlet Witch is tied up, and stuck right in the center between the three maelstroms. She's lost her sense of balance. She's nearly lost focus. She's powerless without the difference between reality and fantasy...

Elektra happily sits in an underwater chair on the lake's rocky bottom. She sits with both of her bare legs bowed, and her feet next to one another on the edge of the seat. She holds her sais in her hands, still generating electricity through them. She's powering the lightning through them.

A trout swims past her face. With a sole sai, she spears the trout in mid-water. She carefully transfers the other sai to her other hand, pulls the dead fish off the sai, and eats its flesh straight off its skeleton, while watching Scarlet Witch spin like a gyroscope between the three water spouts. If only Quicksilver could see his twin sister now.

"I'm just like a charbroiled Serb hanging from a power line," Elektra admits. "I'm stealing electricity!"

Maria Hill and Sandgirl walk through the woods. At any moment now, Hill will introduce Sandgirl to a likely job with SHIELD.

"I don't know about this, Ms. Hill," Sandgirl laments. "SHIELD isn't always good to the world."

"They mean to be," Hill tells her. "I'd know."

"O I'm sure you would. And yet...how many SHIELD agents are Arabian, exactly."

"They recruit from everywhere. Many potential candidates in Afroasia are assessed every year."

"I don't doubt. But has an Arab ever been the director of SHIELD?"

Hill gapes. "Getting picky, are we, Ms. Marya?"

"This is economics, Ms. Hill. I must ALWAYS push my luck when I feel like it."

"Well keep in mind, I'm not doing this to reward you for what you've done for the Sacrilegious Six. I'm doing this to try and help rehabilitate and redeem you. I believe in you. I just need you to keep in mind that there are plenty of SHIELD agents out there who aren't half as optimistic."

Dr. Octopussy's got Spider-Man trapped on a butte. And from down here, she can see that Spidey's got a VERY nice butt on that butte.

Spider-Man shoots webs at his besieger. Dr. Octopussy either bats them away with her octopus prosthetics, or makes devious use of them.

Spider-Man will run out of webbing soon. He needs an ace in the hole to play...

"You're mine now, Spidey," she sneers. "You can't shrink yourself out of this one!"

Spider-Man holds his high ground...as useless as it's about to become. Dr. Octopussy will surely end him, if the Sacrilegious Six don't...