In the ensuing fight, these three strange individuals tell Justice of how they once tried to help mutantkind but were instead betrayed by the X-Men. Eventually, Speedball and the rest of the Salem's Seven are drawn into the combat, but that is still not enough to halt the mysterious assailants who declare that Robbie is also "corrupted" – "altered by an other-dimensional energy". The strangers knock out Brutacus, one of the town protectors, to later take a gene sample of him "as requested by their lord". Taking advantage of their enemies' distraction, Justice manages to land a telekinetic blow on the face of the trio's leader and crack his armor, revealing him to be a hairy humanoid. As Vance tries to parley with them, the enigmatic attackers simply continue their proclamations against the town's inhabitants and mutants, arguing there is no point trying to talk as "judgement is coming", to later teleport out of town. Armed with the scant facts they learned of their aggressors, Justice uses his telekinetic powers to propel himself and Speedball to Avengers Tower at a vertiginous velocity. They are met by an empty place with the exception of Edwin Jarvis, the tower's resident butler, who informs them that the Avengers are busy elsewhere and conducts them to the Avengers's database. There they discover a video file made by Cyclops that reveals the identity of the town attackers: the Evolutionaries, a group of pre-homo sapiens that had been transformed in the ancient past by Phastos of the Eternals, who gave them advanced intelligence, armor and power, and assigned them the mission to protect the most advanced human subspecies from the others; at that time, homo sapiens. But left to their own devices, the Evolutionaries had decided that the most advanced subspecies in the present were the mutants and that the best way to protect them was to annihilate the rest of humanity, a situation that the X-Men stopped. While pondering why the Evolutionaries had changed objectives once again, Justice and Speedball hear an alarm and the computer informs them of an emergency taking place on New York's subway system. With none else to attend to it, Justice asks Robbie if he can act as an Avenger for a day, to which Speedball responds that he won't: he will act as a [New] Warrior. They head out and arrive just in time to rescue Mark Sim and Sun Girl, two inexperienced heroes who had tried to stop a second group of Evolutionaries from killing the mutant Morlocks that live in New York's sewer near the subway.