The series was written by Chris Claremont and pencilled by Oscar Jimenez and Michael Ryan.

A group of Earth's heroes are invited by an apparently benevolent race to participate in a series of contests against one another in exchange for advanced technology.

Courtesy of microscopic nanites, all the heroes (with the exception of Iron Man, whose armor's automatic life support systems protected him from infection) are drugged, and become indifferent to everything except the contest, unable to process the anomalies in the situation facing them.

After Iron Man loses his second match against X-Force, he learns that the heroes are actually teleported to a different part of the ship to either destroy each other or be hunted by various animals.

After encountering Psylocke, he is able to use his resources to reprogram the nanobots and use them to cure the other losing heroes, he and Psylocke forming a strike force to determine their location and gather the other heroes together to oppose the Brood's scheme.