We looked at an earlier issue of this 4 years ago, but we've jumped to the end today, with what is essentially an issue-long chase sequence.
The Student Union at the University of Chicago was hosting a meeting to decide whether to ban the mutant-hating group Purity from campus, only to have a bunch more of the person-sized, buglike Sentinels that wiped out Genosha crash the party. The only ones standing in the way are Kitty Pryde, former New Mutant Karma, and Shola, a telekinetic from Genosha attending school.
Shola's doing most of the work, as he's got some serious TK power and combat training in how to use it courtesy of his parents. Also, Sentinels like these killed his parents and everyone he had back home, so he's got plenty of anger for fuel. He encases the Sentinels in a big energy bubble, but these are the adaptive-style of Sentinels, so they figure out some way to escape and attack from underground.
Shola tries to draw their attention so Karma can escape since possessing people isn't a terribly effective power against robots, but two follow her down a dead end alley. Fortunately, Kitty shows up, having gotten lost in the building and pulls Karma through the wall (Karma apparently describes being phased as swimming through oatmeal.) Kitty leaves the wall phased to fool the Sentinel into thinking there's no barrier, then turning the wall solid again to trap it. She even calls it a 'poor bunny', which sounds more like a Psylocke expression to me, but the X-Men do so much psi-linking they probably all ought to speak in a weird melange of each other's verbal tics.
Except there were two Sentinels chasing Karma, and they're down to Karma trying to smash it with a pickax before Shola shows up and launches the thing into the air. Meanwhile, the cops showed up! Well I'm sure everything is under control now! The Sentinels register genome patterns within the range of potential mutants, and elect to attack. Shola gets tagged, but Kitty's able to phase him to keep him safe, for now.
Needing to clear potential casualties, Karma uses her power to make all the students and cops calmly walk away from the battlefield, while Kitty calls for help. Tom had been dating the head of the Purity group, but decided he wasn't a bigot, so he shows up in his car and the three mutants pile in and burn rubber. About the time they reach the university industrial complex the Sentinels catch up. Kitty phases everyone out of the car and then into the tunnels leading to the building where her group was trying to figure out cold fusion. The experiment was sabotaged, but there's still tons of heavy stuff to trap and crush all the Sentinels, if they can be lured in.
So Karma possesses Shola (with his permission) to push him past his limits. Kitty uses herself as bait while Tom, who the Sentinels ignored because he's a baseline human, pulls the lever to dump all the stuff. Kitty phases the Sentinels so they can't try to escape, though they figure out how to hurt her. Kitty uses Tom to pull herself through the junk before Shola/Karma compress the Sentinels down into nothing. I'm not sure if Kitty needed the help because she was tired, because of something the Sentinels were doing, or if it was the strain of escaping the TK field.
All that done, Kitty visits her school-mandated therapist and admits she's a mutant, then goes to the bar where she works part-time (and where the FBI is still surveilling her) to meet up with her friends. We can't have too happy of an ending, as Alice Tremaine, the leader of the Purity Group, found a little bit of one Sentinel at the student union and is helping it rebuild itself in her parents' basement.
{7th longbox, 20th comic. Mekanix #6, by Chris Claremont (writer), Juan Bobillo (penciler), Marcelo Sosa (inker), Avalon (colorist), Tom Orzechowski (letterer)}
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