Now we get to see what happened to Illyana during the ~7-8 years that Illyana spent in Limbo. The story starts with Old Storm teaming up with "Cat" who is an adult Kitty Pryde from Old Storm's group of X-Men and is also apparently now a Ninja, managing to get Illyana away from Belasco. But not before he could corrupt Illyana at least a bit, creating the first of five blood gems necessary for Belasco's dark masters to come to the main reality.
Anyway, there is some disagreements between Cat and Old Storm. Cat thinks they should just off her, saving the world and saving Illyana the trouble that would be growing up in Limbo. Ororo thinks she should teach her how to use magic to defend herself. Ororo teaches her some (for about a year), but then Cat takes off with her.
Cat then decides to try and get Illyana home instead, training her to fight along the way (it takes two years to get to Belasco's citadel), and also revealing that under her mask she has a feline look. They get to the castle to try to send her home, but then Belasco easily, I mean stupidly easily, overcomes them, and turns Cat into a non-sentient feline creature and takes Illyana as his disciple to try to finish her corruption. Illyana accepts as she feels the call of the dark side and another of the blood gems is created.
Over another couple of years, Belasco trains her in the dark arts. During this time she also experiments with the magic Storm taught her, the ability to create rather than destroy or corrupt, though she can never get it right. She also manages to manifest her actual mutant ability, the ability to create teleportation discs to step through space and time. She visits several locations, and finally discovers Cat and Belasco attempting to kill Old Storm. Protecting Old Storm, she kills Cat, but Belasco again overpowers them and insists that Illyana sacrifice Storm to create the third bloodstone.
Instead, she kills Storm to let her soul go free. She escapes with her stepping discs and buries Storm in her garden. Belasco then torments her, finally getting her to create the third bloodstone, taking away her power to teleport and stranding her in the ruins of Storm's gardens. There she attemps to create something again with magic like Storm showed her. But she fails over and over again. Until she realizes that she doesn't want to create an acorn like Storm, and that is why she fails. She instead creates the soulsword. It breaks Belasco's spells on her, and she confronts him.
She defeats him, draining all his Limbo imbued powers and becoming ruler of limbo. She then lets him escape, and leaves Limbo back to Earth.
X-Tra Notes: I can't say that this was exactly expertly written, but a lot of things established in it become kind of important, especially for Illyana's story, and it isn't exactly bad either. It's just kind of there. I really think it could have done with way more foreshadowing of the ending that she would win by taking over his control of Limbo.
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