Up to this point, Spider-Woman's been working with an old enemy, Octavia Vermis (???), to find a cure for an experimental serum she was dosed with. The serum boosted her strength, but made her unstable, to the extent she chewed out and pushed away all her friends. Which leaves her to contend with Octavia's sudden but inevitable betrayal, alone.
Octavia's already run the High Evolutionary (written as more sane and down-to-earth than I've ever seen) through with a lance and killed her daughter. Again. But Ophelia's a clone, so she'll just make another. Jess was cured in the previous issue, which means she's not under Octavia's control, but she's too shitty of an actress to fake it and keep the element of surprise.
Cue the fight scene, with each of them trying to hurt emotionally as well as physically. Jess' contention she has people who love her is countered with the fact absolutely none of them are here right now. Octavia's argument she made something of her kids is rebutted with the point they might have sucked because they're clones of a shitty person.
That one's a palpable hit, but it earned Jess a kick in the old joybox, so. . . Palpable hits all around. Then Octavia suggests Jess would do the same to her own son, make him a perfect obedient copy. Jess responds by getting Octavia in the face with a venom blast, so Octavia sics an army of clones of Jess' mother on her.
Jess kicks a control device into the lava and the clones, programmed to retrieve it, follow. She gets the lance out of H.E.'s chest, he activates his array, Jess kicks Octavia into it, and she's turned into a possibly mindless dino-person. The Evolutionary keeps Octavia around while he rebuilds his lab, and Spider-Woman goes home.
First to her son, because he's her kid, but also because she's going to use him as a shield when she apologizes to her unhappy friends - Hawkeye, Iron Fist, Night Nurse, Luke Cage and War Machine. It works, because none of them are prepared to go through that terrifying facsimile of a child, but there's still one more person to make up with, and Carol's not in the mood. She accuses Jess of always denying her problems or running away from them. I feel like Carol Danvers does at least as much denying or running from her problems as Jessica Drew - the whole alcoholism thing, anyone? - but that doesn't jibe with Marvel's current conception of her character, where her only fault is she's just too awesome and people resent her for it, so whatever. They hug it out.
{10th longbox, 176th comic. Spider-Woman (vol. 7) #10, by Karla Pacheco (writer), Pere Perez (artist), Frank D'Armata (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)}
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