The X-Men’s Inferno crossover reinforces why Nimrod is the team’s most powerful foe and shows what happens when X-Force’s luck runs out.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Inferno #1, on sale now from Marvel Comics.
As a bookend to the story that began in House of X/Powers of X, Inferno #1 by Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti, David Curiel and VC’s Joe Sabino hints at the staggering strength of Nimrod on his conquest for mutant extinction. The X-Men have been aware of this, they have done everything in their power to stop his activation and early development, aided by the multiple lives of Moira McTaggart. Unfortunately, their actions seemed to have set them onto this inevitable path, as the machine hunter continues to learn about his enemy’s habits.
Throughout Inferno #1, Nimrod shows off how threatening he can be, easily dispatching some of the strongest mutants Krakoa has to offer. When X-Force is sent to destroy him, Kid Omega, Wolverine and Domino are ambushed by Nimrod and are quickly dispatched, with Domino’s power of luck offering no help as she is the first to be killed.
Created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld, Domino has the ability to manipulate probability in her favor. In simpler terms, she is able to turn the tide of her luck to escape dire consequences or cause her opponents to have ‘bad luck.’ For instance, in Deadpool 2, she was the only member of Deadpool’s team that survived a jump from a plane and avoided death on the way down. While she is extremely lucky, her ability does not allow her to escape impossible situations and requires her to act swiftly. If she is at the receiving end of gunfire, she will survive unscathed if she moves. If she stays still, she would not be so lucky. A similar situation is how Nimrod got the best of her.
After using a variety of tactics and calling on alien allies like the Brood, Domino, Wolverine and Kid Omega launch a new attack here. Despite Wolverine’s centuries of fighting experience, Kid Omega’s raw Omega-level mutant power and Domino’s probability manipulation, their tactics fail, with Nimrod seemingly catching on to their methods and deploying effective countermeasures.
In their latest attempt, Nimrod catches the trio by surprise. As he identifies Domino, he dispatches an overwhelming amount of cluster bombs onto her that overwhelm her power. As Kid Omega attempts to use the opportunity to gain the upper hand. Nimrod uses his own psionic defense and disintegrates Kid Omega leaving only Wolverine behind. Wolverine is able to stab Nimrod through his torso, only to find out that the powerful hunter has created a duplicate of himself that quickly takes Wolverine out. Nimrod continues to analyze the footage of their many battles, attempting to understand how they can continue to come after him after he’s killed them. He realizes they have some sort of cloning technology and asserts that even though they don’t remember how they died, someone keeps remembering their failure which leads to the next attempt.
As established over the last several months of Hickman’s core X-Men title, the Krakoan era has changed Nimrod from being a potential future threat into an active, existential threat to today’s X-Men. When the X-Men perished disabling the Mother Mold at Orchis’ Forge in House of X, they also gravely injured one of the head doctors, Dr. Erasmus Mendel. As a means to save his mind, his wife Dr. Alia Gregor implanted his consciousness into the machine that would later become Nimrod. When one of that machine’s duplicates was destroyed, his fate was sealed when Mystique failed to destroy the Forge, leading Erasmus to eliminate the remainder of his human consciousness from the machine in order to save the stronghold.
Devoid of human consciousness, Nimrod seems to be able to counter whatever the mutants try to use to destroy him. He does not seem to have an identifiable weakness as all of the actions of Xavier and Magneto lead them closer to the dystopian future that Moira MacTaggert tried to warn them about. If Nimrod learns about the resurrection process on Krakoa, he may truly be able to destroy mutant kind once and for all.
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