The Champions Appears to be Setting the Stage to Kill a Founding Member

The following contains spoilers for Champions #22 by Jim Zub, Kevin Libranda, Marco Menyz, and Clayton Cowles.

There's been a lot going on in the Marvel Universe over the last few months, and all of it is just starting to reverb back over to the Champions. Taking place primarily after the recent events of the Champions' involvement with Infinity Countdown, everyone is affected in their own way.

Amadeus Cho has a new codename , one he's adopted after coming to accept himself, Riri Williams has new Ironheart armor, and Sam Alexander is coping with just having his Nova helmet taken away from him. But all of that is front-loaded at the start of the issue, and Viv Vision winds up going through the biggest change by the end.

The events of Avengers: No Surrender saw Viv's father the Vision get his power source shattered by a then-enraged Hulk after being brought back from the dead. In the time since then, Viv, Nadia Pym and Toni Ho have been doing what they can to bring him back online and construct a new Solar Gem to help continue the repairs. Despite her concerns, Vision implores his daughter to go on a Champions mission, and as they depart, Toni drops the act and informs the audience of what's really going on. Thanks to the Hulk's attack, his Nano Core is damaged, meaning only one thing: the Vision is dying. And though he's very aware of the fact, he actually doesn't want to try to find any workaround or a solution to bring himself back.

Informed by the events of his miniseries by Tom King and Gabriel Walta, Vision is content to let himself die years after he built a family that's seen its fair share of ups and downs. "Life is precious because it is finite," the synthezoid explains. "I must allow myself the chance to die and leave my progeny to inherit the responsibilities of adulthood." As Viv's father, Vision was the first Avenger to really meet the Champions and get integrated with them. In his own way, he served as the liaison between the two teams, and his death will hit the teen team even harder considering how he became embroiled in some of their recent actions.

Grief and tragedy has always loomed over the Vision family, and all of it finally comes to overwhelm Viv. Even though she's unaware of her father's grim fate, the Champions' trip to Africa shows that she's still worried about him; she's just made the very conscious choice to turn off her emotional core to keep her focused during the mission. Things aren't that simple, of course, and she soon finds herself hit with all the feels she's actively chosen to repress.

All it takes is being trapped in the vines of the Man-Thing for her trauma to overwhelm her, each vine representing a horrible moment in her life. From her "death" back when she was first created to being forced into becoming a human and having to kill what was essentially herself, all of it comes rushing back to send her into shock. This is the first time in years where she truly does feel like a teenager with her inner monologue filled with talk about pain and misery and wondering how she can go on with so much coming out at once.

Tragedy always befalls the Vision family, and the fate of the two synthezoids is in a more precarious decision than before. With Vision dead in the movies, it stands to reason a similar fate may come to him in the comics, and the true loss of her father and family may truly break Viv in a way she's never known.