SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Avengers #686 by Jim Zub, Mark Waid, Al Ewing, Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco and Jesus Aburtov, on sale now.
The stakes of Avengers: No Surrender keep getting bigger and bigger.
The game is in its final stages, and with one Pyramoid left to claim, Voyager has locked herself away, removing her father’s advantage. And, of course, The Immortal Hulk is still on a rampage at Avengers Auxiliary HQ.
Things step up another notch this week as a winner is declared in the cosmic game but the loser learns some vital information which leads to the death of an Elder of the Universe! All that plus Wonder Man vs The Hulk and Voyager picks a side.
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Let’s Talk
The last issue ended with Wonder Man, the pacifist Avenger, attempting to engage his old friend Bruce Banner in a dialogue to stop the rampage of The Hulk. However, as Simon finds out this week, Bruce Banner is very much not in control of the resurrected jade giant. While it seemed that The Immortal Hulk was the simple, savage beast we might expect, he’s actually closer to the cunning and devilish Mr. Fixit (only much more vicious) than any other incarnation of The Hulk.
While the returning Avengers attempt to stop the Hulk's path of destruction, Voyager watches the team and realizes that even though she had been impersonating an Avenger, she never truly understood what the team stood for. She was raised by The Grandmaster, her father, whose only purposes in life are to play and to win. The Avengers fight for something much more important than that, however, and realizing that her time with them has changed her, Voyager chooses to side with the team in her father’s cosmic game. The decision comes moments too late, though, as The Hulk breaks through and claims the Pyramoid, smashing it in his giant hands.
To The Victor
The Hulk’s destruction of the Pyramoid causes The Challenger to suffer a penalty, as The Hulk was his agent in the game. His player destroying one of the five prized objects results in a foul, and a point being deducted from his final score. As the pair were tied up until now, The Challenger is deemed the loser and destined to banishment as per the rules of the deal.
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However, while this is going on, Voyager reveals her true identity to The Avengers - -and thus to The Challenger. He realizes that The Grandmaster stacked the deck before they even started the game, and although The Grandmaster offers his fellow Elder of the Universe a rematch, The Challenger instead hits him with a giant blast of energy which seems to blow a hole right through his brother.
The Grandmaster seems to be quite dead, but if there’s anyone in the Marvel Universe with plans-upon-plans-upon-plans, it’s him. He’s on the cover of the penultimate instalment of Avengers: No Surrender, after all, and is such a mainstay in the Marvel Universe — especially since Jeff Goldblum’s portrayal of him in Thor: Ragnarok — that it’s hard to believe he’ll stay dead for very long.
As for The Avengers, the Earth was set to end once the game had completed, so what happens now? There are four more weeks left before the weekly series concludes, and as we’ve seen, a lot can happen in that time. But The Challenger just completely changed the rules, leaving everything we know about the series thus far up in the air.