WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Hunt For Wolverine: Mystery in Madripoor #4 by Jim Zub, Thony Silas, Leonard Kirk, Felipe Sobreiro, Andrew Crossley and VC's Joe Sabino, on sale now.


With Wolverine alive again, Marvel has set out to chronicle his return in a quartet of miniseries spinning out of the Hunt For Wolverine one-shot. Each series follows a different group of Logan's colleagues as they investigate the disappearance of his deceased body from his final resting spot.

Mystery in Madripoor brought together a group of X-women including Kitty Pryde, Storm, Rogue, Jubilee, Psylocke and Domino as they headed to the seedy country known as Madripoor. The locale served as one of Wolverine's old stomping grounds when he went by the alias "Patch."

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What Kitty and her team didn't anticipate when arriving in Madripoor was to be ambushed by the Femme Fatales. Psylocke, Rogue and Storm were taken captive, with Kitty, Domino and Jubilee left to free their teammates while also thwarting a larger plot to fire a rocket at an unknown destination.

The Femme Fatales were able to overpower the female X-team with the help of Sapphire Styx, whose power is to suck the life force energy from a person with a mere touch. These vampiric abilities allow Sapphire Styx to keep her youthful appearance while also enhancing her powers. Unfortunately, when Sapphire Styx sucked the life force out of Psylocke, it seemingly left the telepathic X-Man dead, and the villain seeing hallucinations of Patch in Mystery in Madripoor #2-3.

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The centuries of feasting on poor souls has taken a toll on Sapphire Styx, leaving her psyche fractured. The soul-sucking vampire is no longer able to control her appetite to feed, and it is becoming an issue inside the Femme Fatales. Once Sapphire Styx begins seeing the visions of Patch, she loses control in a major way. The mental Patch ghost goes on the offensive, attacking Sapphire Styx and questioning her on all the souls she's stolen.

With Magneto freed and the rocket launch counting down, Psylocke's mental voice breaks through to also assault her tormentor. When the pressure becomes too much for Sapphire Styx, her entire body breaks down and shatters to tiny pieces. We can thank Psylocke and Patch for making this happen, but there is another shocking side effect to having a part of Psylocke's soul trapped inside Sapphire Styx.

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Psylocke Reborn Again

Mystery in Madripoor #4 starts with a flashback to the moment in the first issue when Sapphire Styx has Psylocke in her clutches. Readers get to witness Psylocke's soul tumble down into the deep, dark recesses of Sapphire Styx's mind. However, before she loses herself for good, Psylocke is able to pull herself together by remembering that even without her physical form, she's still Betsy Braddock.

It's here we take a trip down memory lane with Psylocke as we view her different visual stylings throughout the years. As Psylocke looks at an astral mirror we get glimpses of her early costumes with the X-Men, along with her Captain Britain outfit and time under the control of the X-Men villain, Mojo.

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Of course, you can't revisit Psylocke's past without mentioning Kwannon, the Japanese ninja warrior who the British Betsy Braddock swapped bodies with. Though the images are of Betsy in Kwannon's body, we do see the different ninja costumes worn by Psylocke over the years as well.

When Betsy digs deeper into Sapphire Styx's mind, she discovers the psychic shells of the souls that have been devoured over the centuries, including Wolverine's. The tag team of Psylocke and Wolverine's souls is enough to fight through Sapphire Styx's defenses and leave her body shattered, revealing Psylocke's true, original British form underneath.

If you're wondering how the explosion of Sapphire Styx's body could leave Psylocke with a new body, there's an explanation for that. Psylocke explained she used Sapphire Styx's soul power to create herself a new body. It is interesting that when Betsy instinctively started the process of piecing a body together, she chose to go back to the body she hasn't inhabited in over 20 years. Of course, time moves much slower in comics than in the real world, so for Betsy it hasn't been two decades since she merged with Kwannon.

Eagle-eyed X-Men fans are aware Marvel gave away the big Psylocke reveal a few weeks ago when it released the teaser image for Uncanny X-Men Disassembled, which featured a non-Japanese Psylocke wielding her psychic knife. The only question was when and where the change would take place.

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So Mystery in Madripoor concludes with Psylocke back in a British body, but what does that mean for the Japanese body left behind in the Femme Fatales' hideout? It seems once Betsy's soul found a new body to occupy, it possibly freed Kwannon's soul to reclaim her body as well. The final page shows three men inside Viper's penthouse discussing the rocket launch. While two of them are distracted, the third is surprised from behind by a revived Kwannon looking for answers. Where her story goes from here remains to be seen.