Synopsis / Summary / Plot
This issue we'll catch up with the doings of heroes in all 3 cities we've seen so far:- New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
Luke Cage has infiltrated Ultron's HQ in New York, pretending to bring She-Hulk for sale. But inside he found not Ultron but the upper half of Vision.
Vision mechanically asks Luke what he has to trade, but Cage wants to see Ultron himself. Vision becomes more like his old self and tells Luke that Ultron is controlling things from the future. But then he cries out in pain, and reverts to his original robotic question.
She-Hulk stops pretending to be unconscious. She grabs Cage and hurls him out of the building, urging him to escape and tell Tony Stark what they've learnt. She fights a delaying action against the assembled Ultron drones, until one of them shoots her through the head.
The drones then pursue Luke's hurtling body, setting fire to it with eye-blasts and grabbing it in mid-air. But Cage fights back until they crash onto a building. As he then runs along the roof-tops the drones follow, destroying everything behind him. Until at last they surround him and unleash a combined atomic explosion, which topples buildings and causes a tidal wave.
Meanwhile, as per last issue's plan shared with Luke and Jennifer, the other NY heroes are leaving for the Savage Land as a safe haven. Storm is flying the group with her wind power, while Invisible Woman is keeping them enclosed in a force bubble. But she tells them to hold hands to keep together as she switches from force field to group invisibility until they're out of the city. They see the nuclear blast behind them.
In San Francisco Black Widow and Moon Knight are still hiding out in an old underground safehouse of Nick Fury's. Natasha has found documents where Fury made plans for various doomsday scenarios, including this Ultron one. He left a specific doomsday bunker in the Savage Land, where they might find the wherewithal to implement his anti-Ultron plan (which of course we aren't told about yet).
In Chicago Taskmaster is fleeing with the stolen head of an Ultron drone. Suddenly he's joined by Red Hulk. It seems Rulk survived the battle with the drones last issue and has an Ultron body to go with the head. Not trusting Taskmaster, Rulk takes the head. (I'm not sure what state he leaves Taskmaster in.)
8 days later the New York contingent arrive in the Savage Land (dotted with blast craters) to find a crashed Avengers quinjet. They are met by Ka-Zar who takes them to a village (seemingly the only one left). Emma Frost detects Luke Cage inside, and reads his mind. She learns that he's dying. He survived the atomic explosion, found a quinjet and made it to the Antarctic. Then he crawled to the village to pass on his information about Ultron operating from the future via Vision. Now he allows himself to die.
It turns out Red Hulk, Black Widow and Moon Knight also made it here. Rulk says they must wipe Ultron out of existence, and Widow says Fury's plan will do that.