The Purifier task force beat both the X-Men and the Marauders to the scene, and proceeded to "cull" every child in the city in order to make sure the mutant baby did not survive. They were then attacked by the Marauders, who killed several Purifiers. By the time the X-Men arrived on the scene, both villain teams had departed, with the whereabouts of the baby unknown. Rictor was planted as a mole to find out what the Purifiers were up to. When the New X-Men, led by Surge, took it upon themselves to attack the Purifiers in retaliation for their assault on the Institute, it was revealed that the Purifiers had upgraded some of their best fighters with cybernetics, creating a new team of Reavers under the command of Stryker's one-time lover and X-Men foe Lady Deathstrike. While the New X-Men's raid did damage their primary church in Washington, the Purifiers managed to drive the mutants off, and then dispatched Deathstrike and the Reavers to find the mutant baby. Although the new Reavers have since been destroyed by Wolverine's incarnation of X-Force, the Purifiers' greater forces remain intact and ready to continue their crusade. Shortly after the events of "Messiah Complex" and the dissolution of the X-Men, the Purifiers raided a heavily defended S.H.I.E.L.D. installation with the help of several double agents, murdering sixteen S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel before breaching the primary vault and recovering an unidentified artifact. The fact that the Purifiers launched an attack specifically on baseline humans rather than mutants worries Cyclops, who fears that whatever the Purifiers stole from S.H.I.E.L.D. was worth enough to risk bring down the agency's wrath upon them. As Cyclops moves to rally X-Force to combat the threat. The Purifiers bring the object, revealed to be the head of Bastion, to one of their churches, installing it onto the Nimrod unit they recovered from Forge's Aerie to return the mutant-killing machine to life. At that point, the church is assaulted by the new X-Force, though Risman manages to capture Wolfsbane in the process. Bastion reveals his secret weapon in his war against mutants; he seeks out the Technarchy leader, Magus, who is lying in the bottom of the ocean, and takes one of Magus' non-sentient offspring to graft it into himself.