The Phoenix soon began mocking Emma that Scott Summers would never love her as he loved Jean Grey revealing also that Jean had been reborn and that Emma Frost already knows it. This Phoenix, however, seems to be a side effect of when Emma invaded Juggernaut's mind and began feeding into Emma's fears. As the Phoenix manages to convince Emma that Hope is Jean reincarnated, it tells Emma that she knows what to do. Emma, in a trance like state, takes her pillow and heads towards Hope, about to smother her to death, and she would have killed Hope if not for Namor's intervention. During the "Avengers vs. X-Men" storyline, the event has the Phoenix Force returning to Earth, presumably to reclaim Hope Summers, the "Mutant Messiah", which led to a confrontation between the Avengers and the X-Men on how to deal with its arrival. With the Avengers anticipating the destruction that the Phoenix could bring while Cyclops hopes to use the Phoenix Force to restart the mutant population. It has also been revealed that the Phoenix Force was once wielded by a young red-headed girl named Fongji, who became an heir to the legacy of the Iron Fist. As the Phoenix Force nears Earth, the Avengers fight the X-Men on the Blue Area of the Moon, while Iron Man and Giant-Man prepare a disruptor weapon to kill the Phoenix Force. Iron Man pilots the weapon against the Phoenix Force. But, when he uses it on the Phoenix Force, instead of killing it, the blast forcefully alters the entity and divides it into five fragments that bond with Cyclops, Emma Frost, Namor, Colossus and Magik. They defeat the Avengers and head back to Earth with Hope. It has since been theorized that Scarlet Witch's spell of "No more mutants" angered the Phoenix, and in order to calm the entity, a new host was needed along, with five acolytes, to succeed at bringing about evolution (the acolytes were actually the first five new mutants that have appeared around the globe since the decimation of the mutant population), and that was the reason the Phoenix came to Earth. When the Avengers manage to defeat Namor with a mass assault on him during an attack on Wakanda, his portion of the Phoenix Force gets divided between the other four members of the "Phoenix Five," making it harder to defeat them. Spider-Man then baits Colossus and Magik into taking each other out by playing off their fears when fighting them in a volcano as they begin to argue about the other's recent actions, forcing their portion of the Phoenix to be divided between Emma and Cyclops.