STRYFE: Page 4 of 4

BIOGRAPHY - Page 4

Eventually, Stryfe escaped from Apocalypse’s clutches and returned to the present. He claimed to have overpowered and killed the Eternal One, but he hardly seems like a credible source. At this point in the timeline, Hope Summers was a young woman working for her father’s X-Force while Bishop had recently returned to this time and worked with a rival X-Force led by Storm and Psylocke. Bishop found a new cause in the far future and had his memories of Hope temporarily removed. Hope discovered Bishop was alive and came after him for revenge only shortly after he regained those memories himself. Stryfe chose to intervene, capturing them both to ensure their demises were as painful as possible for his “clone,” Cable.

Cable came charging after his daughter, but his TP/TK was virtually gone at this point, making it painfully easy for Stryfe to subdue him. Stryfe hoped to goad Hope into murdering Bishop in cold blood, with Cable’s own psimitar lance, while Nathan watched helplessly from the next room. At the last moment, though, Hope restrained herself and chose not to kill Bishop. Two X-Force teams hunted down Stryfe, who was furious his attempt at taking away Nathan’s family had failed. Cable retrieved the psimitar and stabbed Stryfe with it, forcing the Chaos-Bringer to flee in order to heal himself. Before he left, Stryfe telepathically commanded Hope to mimic more of his power than she could handle, turning her into a psychokinetic bomb as he teleported away. Ironically, it was Bishop who guided Hope through the process of a controlled release of that energy, preventing Stryfe’s petty vengeance. [Vendetta crossover]

In time, Stryfe discovered a delightful new advantage when Deadpool came to him, desperate for a favor. Wade Wilson had recently discovered a long-lost daughter, Ellie Camacho. He sent Ellie to be raised by his friend, S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Emily Preston. However, Deadpool’s nemesis Madcap doused him with an engineered viral bio-weapon without him knowing it. Wade visited the Prestons for Christmas and inadvertently acted as a carrier delivering the virus into their systems. Preston had a Life Model Decoy body, but her husband, her son, Ellie and the cabbie who drove Deadpool all contracted an agonizingly slow and painful death. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s scientists could not unravel the virus’ genetic sequence in time, and Wade couldn’t locate Cable or any of his Avenger teammates to help. So Deadpool reached out to Stryfe for a combination of future tech and time travel to get the cure in time. [Deadpool (5th series) #23-24]

Stryfe loved the idea of having Deadpool in his debt, and he agreed to give Wade a cure for the virus. In exchange for saving four lives, Deadpool would owe Stryfe four murders. Deadpool’s life fell apart shortly after that, when he fell in with Hydra’s Steve Rogers and was manipulated into killing Agent Phil Coulson. With the Prestons and his daughter already hating him, Wade tried to get out of his contract with Stryfe. To emphasize his point, Stryfe called Wade from the Preston house several months earlier, showing that he could take back the lives he saved at literally any time. Even when Stryfe named Cable as Wade’s first assignment, Deadpool knew he had no choice. [Deadpool (5th series) #36]

Stryfe made schemes within schemes to get his money’s worth from Deadpool. He insisted Wade bring back Cable’s heart as proof of the kill, but he also called the Time Variance Authority to intercede at the exact moment Wade would’ve won. The TVA wanted Stryfe for “time crimes,” so by giving them a tip that Stryfe was Cable’s future self instead of his clone, Stryfe ensured that they would arrest Cable and Deadpool would have to demolish his way through the TVA to reach his target. Deadpool and Cable tried to double cross Stryfe by taking the heart of a dying alternate future Cable. However, Stryfe escaped the encounter and traveled back in time to threaten Eleanor while phoning Deadpool again, forcing Wade to switch sides and help him escape. After that, Stryfe specified that all future victims would have to come from the present time era. [Despicable Deadpool #287-291]

The rest of Deadpool’s missions proceeded with unfortunately little fanfare. Wade murdered Cable’s former Chronicler, the reporter Irene Merryweather. He managed to fool Stryfe without killing his young friend Evan Sabahnur, Genesis, by zapping him with a power neutralizer so that Evan disappeared from Stryfe’s mutant detection system. However, there was no escaping his final kill. Stryfe had Deadpool murder Marietta Nelson, an apparently normal and unremarkable middle-aged woman in Manhattan. Stryfe’s reason for this killing is unknown, but it’s likely the Chaos-Bringer had no reason. No grander scheme, just murder simply because he could. Indeed, that quiet killing seemed to linger in Wade’s mind more than most. [Despicable Deadpool #292-295]

What happened “next” for Stryfe is somewhat unclear. Cable’s intelligence reports indicated Stryfe was preparing to enter the field of magic. He found a dimension similar to Limbo and intended to recreate a version of the spell Nastir’h and the Goblin Queen once used during Inferno. He planned to kidnap mutant babies and sacrifice them to open the gateway for his demons to invade Earth. [Cable (4th series) #11] During his preparations, however, Stryfe learned of the death of his nemesis, Cable, at the hands of his own time-traveling younger self. [Extermination #1] Stryfe didn’t know what to think of this development, and actually feared it was some sort of elaborate trap to draw him in. He put his other plans on pause until he could gather more information.

On the other side of things, Kid Cable’s perspective on Stryfe seemed inconsistent. “Kid Stryfe” had followed Kid Cable back in time for the Transian incident, but Cable and X-Force defeated him shortly after the young Nate came to the present. Kid Cable removed Stryfe’s memories of the encounter and left him in their future to preserve the timeline, [X-Force (5th series) #10] but also made contradictory statements that he thought he had killed Stryfe. Neither Kid Cable nor Old Man Cable’s last encounter with Stryfe ended with his death, so it’s uncertain why he believed this. When Nate encountered some clones of Stryfe, this led Cable to conclude that his mind-wipe of Stryfe failed because he only wiped a clone, but that doesn’t make sense on further review.

In any case, Stryfe began using middle-aged clones of himself to infiltrate the Order of X, fanatical humans who began worshipping mutants after Krakoa’s founding. He manipulated these infatuated people into kidnapping mutant babies for his long-term schemes. [Cable (4th series) #2-3] These plans were interrupted by Kid Cable and Rachel Summers, who rescued half of the babies Stryfe needed for his ceremony. The subservient Stryfe clone killed himself rather than face reprisal for his failure. [Cable (4th series) #7] Stryfe’s next plan was to infiltrate Krakoa using clones of Kid Cable that had his mind instead, but Kid Cable and Domino discovered his clone farm and disposed of the dozen husks he had prepared. [Cable (4th series) #8]

Stryfe chose to carry forward with his demon invasion scheme, cloning the five mutant babies he did acquire in order to slipshod achieve the ten he needed. However, Kid Cable finally realized he couldn’t be the nemesis that Stryfe required, so he had the Five resurrect the older Cable on Krakoa, sending him after the Chaos-Bringer. Old Man Cable was only the advance guard, as Kid Cable soon brought Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Domino, Deadpool, Hope, Rachel and Esme Cuckoo to Stryfe’s dimension as a retaliatory force. The babies were saved, and Stryfe’s mind was sundered by the many telepaths arrayed against him. Stryfe tried to surrender and request amnesty on Krakoa, but his nemeses chose not to hear his plea and gunned him down where he stood. [Cable (4th series) #11-12]

Yes, Stryfe was dead, but within the same First Age of Krakoa, Stryfe was back. In command of a full Mutant Liberation Front and his own Asteroid S, Stryfe engaged a techno-organic cannon called the Eradicator in an attempt to destroy all life on Earth. Cable assembled versions of himself and his closest allies from across time to launch an X-Force of more than thirty soldiers at Stryfe. The Eradicator failed because Stryfe didn’t account for Major X, Cable’s alternate future son, being able to interface with the techno-organic core and shut the weapon down. Stryfe was abducted in the end by a mysterious figure who claimed to have an arrangement with Cable from some point in the future. [X-Force: Killshot #1]

However, when Stryfe next appeared it wasn’t in the future, but in the distant past. Before Krakoa and Okkara, the first mutant civilization was Threshold, begun two billion years ago on Earth through complicated time travel shenanigans. Those of Threshold were born asexually, emerging from the Birthing Sea in generations every few decades. Oxygen was not found everywhere on the planet then, and Threshold’s air threatened the Unbreathing, a sentient species to whom oxygen was poison. After the first Oxygen War, Threshold and the Unbreathing entered a tentative peace, but Threshold scientists went forward with crafting sentient bacterial weapons as a doomsday failsafe to use against the Unbreathing. One of the mutants of Threshold, Nightfount, was disgusted with this practice and betrayed the mutants to join the Unbreathing and rally them against the Thresholders who betrayed their trust.

And Commander Nightfount was… Stryfe. Through some inexplicable process, Stryfe arranged for his genetic material to be reincarnated from the Birthing Sea. His actual intent was to eradicate all recognizable life on Earth preemptively, building a new present in his image. His interference reignited the Oxygen Wars just as Threshold’s bacterial weapons, Sublime and Arkea, turned against them and so chaos was spread on three fronts. To make things even more complicated, Threshold had sent a “message in a bottle” into the future, summoning Kate Pryde and her Marauders back in time to rescue the mutants if they could. Kate recognized Stryfe and alerted Grove and the Thresholders to the extent of “Nightfount’s” real motives and treachery. [Marauders (2nd series) #8-10]

At this point, Stryfe’s timeline has become so convoluted he is effectively like Kang the Conqueror. Cloned bodies, time travel and alternating timelines mean some version of Stryfe will likely always be able to return to menace the X-Men in the… future.