His speech is interrupted by Stryfe who, disguised as his doppelganger and nemesis Cable, shoots Xavier with a bullet that infects the professor with a lethal strain of the Techno-organic virus.

Meanwhile, War and Famine, the Horsemen of Apocalypse, attack Iceman and Colossus, distracting them from Caliban, who kidnaps Cyclops and Jean Grey.

Stryfe trades Mr. Sinister a canister containing the past and future Summers family DNA history, and receives Jean Grey and Cyclops in the exchange.

Apocalypse is incredibly weak, having been nearly killed by Cyclops in their previous encounter and prematurely awoken from his regeneration chamber by his minions the Dark Riders.

Meanwhile, Bishop and Wolverine locate Cable and after a brawl, decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and work together to find Jean and Scott.

After Stryfe stabs him in the chest, Apocalypse escapes and seeks refuge amongst the X-Men, ultimately curing Xavier of the techno-organic virus as payment for sanctuary.

Cable finds himself hopelessly outmatched by Stryfe, but as they battle, Jean Grey and Cyclops break free and Havok regains consciousness.

Professor X discovers that the techno-organic virus has left him temporarily capable of walking and spends his few hours without paralysis bonding with Jubilee.

The comic framing device was that the files in the one-shot were on a CD-ROM found at Stryfe's base by Bishop and handed over to Xavier without telling anyone else about it.

After nearly two dozen pages of text and picture files, most of which were taken from the trading card inserts included in the individual issues of the crossover, the book ended with a closing sequence where Xavier destroys the disk rather than showing it to Cyclops and Jean Grey.

The subject of the crossover was having the X-Men face their biggest enemies at the time, Stryfe, Apocalypse, and Mr. Sinister, and revealing the origin of the popular X-Force leader Cable.

[citation needed] A year earlier it was heavily implied that Cable was Nathan Christopher Summers, the infant son of X-Man Cyclops and Madelyne Prior.

[citation needed] During the planning of the crossover, Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza wanted to feature the return of Magneto, believed to be dead at the time, during the storyline, mainly to provide fans with an added shock moment and to add to the impact of the story, which would have the X-Men and their allies face down against their worst enemies in a single crisis.

[3][4] There is a long-standing rumor that X-Men editor Bob Harras forced Lobdell and Nicieza to change the ending of the story to remove what was supposed to be the main drawing point of the storyline: Cable's origin.

[8] Ultimately Stryfe would be brought back to life as a time anomaly, having shown up out of the blue alongside the Dark Riders during a crossover between Cable and X-Man and would go on to bedevil the X-Men until his most death during the Gambit/Bishop mini-series.

Stryfe had earlier given Mister Sinister a canister that he claimed contained two thousand years worth of genetic material from the Summers bloodline.