Writers Joe Kelly & Jack Kelly

Artist Kenny Ruiz

Color Artist Noiry

Letterer VC’s Ariana Maher

After a fun detour of three titles, we are back to our bookends. 

We get a flashback to Miles and his mentor, Mister E, who is telling Miles of his destiny.  Mister E isn’t thrilled with how Miles’ friends, Illyana, and Laura, are always distracting him.

In the present, Miles, now the Scarlet Spider, is engulfing the planet in crimson. 

Illyana, Legion, must know the Scarlet Spider.  He was proud that he stopped Laura from becoming the Vision, but actually, he is the Vision.

Colossus, who is a giant sized X-Manifestation, wants to usher in an age of heroes.  Since he is still around, we know Laura wasn’t killed, which is a huge relief.

Laura is no longer X-Tremis, she is now . . . Weapon Phoen-X.  (Get it?)

We find out Scarlet Spider’s mentor was actually . . . Blackheart.

In another flashback, we see Ilayana bragging on her big bro, being the best of the X-Men, even better than Storm.  It would have been pretty cool to get an X-Men title in this event.  Well, besides the two bookends, and Ghostlocke.  I suppose we got plenty of X-Men in this event.

Weapon Phoen-X makes two attacks.  The first to Scarlet Spider, and then apologizes to Legion for the second. 

It appears that Laura sacrificed herself to restore Miles, but we mustn’t forgot that she was going by Phoen-X just a few pages ago.

I suppose Laura was apologizing to Legion for the upgrade as now Illyana is . . . Phoenix Supreme!  She looks awesome here.

Phoenix Supreme starts cleansing Blackheart. 

Before she can clearly defeat him, he attempts one last move, and opens an infinite void. 

Illyana doesn’t have complete control over the Phoenix, as she just got it, but Miles jumps in to try to sacrificed himself. 

Together Miles and Illyana take the fight to Blackheart.

That top panel is pretty cool, combining both the Phoenix and Spider imagery. 

Illyana hints that they didn’t defeat Blackheart alone.

I love this chat with the Phoenix and Illyana so much, the Phoenix is so tired of human business.

Plus, Illyana is riding her yokai, Lockheed! 

The Phoenix agrees to help Illyana as she loves to fight as much as she love to sleep. 

Issue ends with Miles creating a shrine for Laura, who shows up as her own version of a yokai. 

We get two pages where we see the cast of the other three one-shots, which I’m sure is nice for the writers who didn’t have to incorporate those stories, they just had to show the character designs.

I definitely liked the first issue more, as it had a lot more of Lockheed, but at least we got one panel of him this issue. 

The coloring this issue was breathtakingly beautiful!