This article contains spoilers for Way of X #5.
The X-Men's Nightcrawler has just performed his most amazing feat yet by teleporting an entire moon. Kurt Wagner was the first teleporter to join the X-Men, and - although others exceed him in sheer power - he's still one of the best. Over the years, he's learned to carry others and traverse greater distances as he teleports, but both of these place a great strain upon him. One of Nightcrawler's greatest accomplishments was when he teleported the so-called "Mutant Messiah" Hope Summers from San Francisco to the nearby island of Utopia; Kurt was already critically injured, and the strain of this killed him.
Still, death is a revolving door in the X-Men comics (especially in the Age of Krakoa), and Nightcrawler is back. He's the main figure in Si Spurrier and Bob Quinn's Way of X, a series that has seen Nightcrawler attempt to make sense of the spiritual implications of the nascent mutant society. He's discovered the greatest threat facing Krakoa, the monstrous psychic being Onslaught, who has been feasting on the lingering psychic effects of the X-Men's Resurrection Protocols. In Way of X #5, Onslaught engineers what could well have been an interstellar disaster when he causes a fight between mutants Fabian Cortez and Lost to escalate to horrific lengths on the X-Men's newly-terraformed Mars. Cortez uses his own ability to amplify Lost's gravity manipulation, causing one of the moons of Mars - Phobos - to be pulled down towards the planet.
His own teleportation powers also amplified by Cortez, Nightcrawler teleports up into space and grabs the plummeting moon. He then proceeds to teleport it - once, twice, a third time, and again, until it is returned to orbit around Mars. The effort kills Nightcrawler once more, a heroic sacrifice that saves Krakoa's Martian settlement.
Nightcrawler has wrestled with the question of what it means to die in an age where death has been conquered by the X-Men's Resurrection Protocols. Younger mutants are concluding death is now meaningless, a view that has been encouraged by Onslaught's malevolent influence, for the powerful psychic creature is feeding on the lost fragments of psychic energy. But Nightcrawler's heroism serves as a reminder death still has meaning, even now. Kurt Wagner sacrifices himself in an act that saves millions of mutants, preventing a planetary catastrophe. It is as good a death as any X-Man can ever have.
Of course, this feat would not be possible without the help of Fabian Cortez; there is no way Nightcrawler would ordinarily be able to teleport an entire moon. This, too, is a reminder that life and death are important; there is a sense in which Kurt's moment of heroism redeems Fabian Cortez, the foolish mutant supremacist consumed with self-hatred. The tragedy of it all, though, is that Onslaught renders Cortez comatose, and even when he is resurrected, Nightcrawler is unable to remember what happened because of quirks in the Resurrection Protocols. So this moment of redemption is lost, erased forever in the action and adventure of the X-Men story.
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