Marvel: Raising — Chapter 153 - Farm Wanda VS Remote Ghost Wanda

Mirror Dimension. Heaven and earth, inverted.

Kamar-Taj's spells, combined with the Darkhold and Chaos Magic, JK Wanda's power had broken through the ceiling.

She was the true Sorcerer Supreme.

She stepped forward. Scarlet roses bloomed along her path like the hem of a floor-length gown.

"Rustle, rustle."

Scarlet magic traced the Darkhold's pages, runes dancing like sprites.

Spells shook loose by the hundreds.

JK Wanda attacked.

Chaos Magic became scarlet tendrils, thrusting in every direction, hammering the earth with a bloom of blood and iron.

The zombie mutants tried to react.

They couldn't.

Because JK Wanda's range wasn't a single street. Wasn't a city. It was an entire world.

The whole Mirror Dimension bent to her magic.

The vast earth curled back like a flying scroll. Skyscrapers buckled and folded. Roads twisted into chains and strangled everything in reach, streetlights, cars, trees. All of it.

The mutant zombies felt like they were gunning in reverse on a highway, and their lives had grown a visible progress bar ticking toward zero.

One. Two. Three. The zombified superheroes were ground to ash, one by one.

The scarlet spikes converged, tendrils weaving together into a massive sphere of light that twisted reality, displaced physics, and blazed with a radiance that dissolved everything it touched.

Predictable results, really.

JK Wanda was simply on another level, no weaklings on her farm. And zombified superheroes were, as a rule, downgraded. Zombie Phoenix could be killed with a single punch. Zombie Wolverine had lost his healing factor. Zombie Spider-Man, not even present, couldn't shoot webs anymore and had resorted to weaving nets from his own veins.

If it had been zombie heroes who'd eaten Galactus and could fire cosmic energy, that might have been worth watching. Still wouldn't have changed the ending.

RUMBLE!

The aftershocks made the Mirror Dimension shudder and quake, the whole space creasing like a folded painting.

Dust and rubble settled.

JK Wanda tilted her head and looked at the sole survivor.

Red uniform. Chaos Magic. Rotting cheeks.

"Are you a zombie version of me?"

She sounded genuinely curious. "A parallel-world me? How did you end up looking like this? Did your godfather throw you out?"

"..."

Ghost Wanda went completely silent. Shut down. Shattered.

She had no godfather.

Her childhood was the dark room, Stark bombs, and Hydra's kill training.

A walking jinx. Wherever she showed up, death followed. Her whole existence served as a tour of fresh corpses. And in the universes she'd drifted through, she'd sometimes been the corpse herself, there for everyone else to look at.

"Say something."

"Did your vocal cords rot too?"

The godfather comment hit a nerve. When Ghost Wanda stayed silent, JK Wanda's patience snapped. She warped reality, displaced herself directly beside Ghost Wanda, and grabbed her wrist.

Smooth as a martial arts master.

Their Chaos Magic collided.

But Ghost Wanda was possessing a rotting body. She was no match for JK Wanda, and they both knew it.

THUD!

Ghost Wanda hit the wall. She let out a low, furious grunt.

"That's enough!"

"Do you think every universe has a Guan Fuyun?"

"Wrong!"

"Only this universe has him. Only you met him!"

JK Wanda froze.

One young and beautiful, one rotting and hollow. Two Wandas standing side by side, like twins raised in opposite worlds, a living before-and-after of everything that could go right and everything that could go wrong.

"In Hydra's base!"

"In the Avengers!"

"In the town!"

"...Any of those moments. If I could have met him. If he could have reached out his hand and said, you don't have to be a superhero. You just need to be yourself. You just need to live happily with your powers."

"Do you have any idea how happy that would have been?"

Ghost Wanda stared at her other self. Her voice went complicated. "Wanda. I envy you. Every version of me envies you."

"The life that should have been nothing but despair — he saved it."

"To him, it was like picking up a stray cat."

"But to the stray cat, that's everything."

"You probably don't even know I exist, do you?"

Ghost Wanda grabbed JK Wanda by the collar. Her teeth were clenched, power surging through her, jealousy bleeding into every word. "I was a superhero. They bombed me out of a Hydra base and told me, be a superhero."

"They called me a superhero. So I lost my brother."

"They called me a superhero. Then I lost Vision."

"They called me a superhero, and I couldn't even bury him. I had to watch them desecrate his body."

"Just because I'm a superhero — I'm supposed to deserve all of that?"

"Yeah." JK Wanda looked at her with the patient expression of someone explaining basic math to a very slow student. "What else did you expect?"

Ghost Wanda: "..."

The calm was worse than any insult. Ghost Wanda's voice cracked a little. "Why?"

"Because in America, private rescue is illegal. If the government won't save you, self-rescue gets blocked too. Rescue too effectively and they'll send helicopters into the disaster zone to shut you down. Disasters have the freedom to kill, you violated that freedom, which makes you the criminal."

"So officially? Superheroes and criminals are the same thing."

"You're already a criminal. Did you really expect things to go well?"

JK Wanda delivered this with the tone of explaining something every adult should already know. "All beings have different capacities, ranked accordingly. That's just the order of things. You can't go around disrupting it."

"A superhero." She almost laughed. "Did anyone pay you for that?"

Ghost Wanda: "..."

She felt even worse.

"Your godfather taught you all of this! If I could have met —"

"Thanks. But there's no 'if.'"

"He's my godfather."

JK Wanda smiled. Genuinely happy about it. "Godfather and I have a great life together. You don't need to worry about us."

"Godfather, he,!"

"I'll say it again. My godfather."

"You, he,!"

"He and I are perfectly happy. You're superfluous."

"Why are you so completely shameless?"

"Because I'm me. Not a Wanda caged inside the word 'superhero.' I do what I want."

"That's it, I'm done talking! Come on!"

Ghost Wanda was too angry for words. She let out a sharp cry and charged. Around them, Chaos Magic erupted from every direction, seeping through the air like blood from a wound, rewriting reality, bending every rule it touched.

The earth moved like an ocean. Tides rolled in, surged, crested and broke, waves churning up sofas, televisions, streetlights, cars. The two magics colliding looked like AI art mid-seizure.

The two Wandas were right in the middle of it, pulling each other's hair.

It didn't last long.

Ghost Wanda was beaten out of her possessing state. Her zombie body came apart. And her actual body, somewhere far away in DC, was so furious it passed out.

➤ Next: Speed Force Homelander