#icemaster

The New Champions/Assembly tell their story of how they re-formed into their own team after meeting Spider-Woman and breaking away from Hydra's brainwashing.

From Spider-Woman Vol. 8 #009, “The Price of Liberty”

Art by Ig Guara and Arif Prianto

As the Assembly wake up from the brainwashing, they did not know what to do when they watch Spider-Woman fight Titan-Gremlin in a hopeless battle. Liberty points out that even if they are not fit to fight Gremlin in Titan suit, they could at least try to help Spider-Woman by waking the other supervillain inmates instead. While Spider-Woman and Gremlin are still fighting, the latter (Titan-Gremlin) explains to her how he (as Gremlin) survived the battle with Iron Man in the Armor Wars from long ago, how he joined Hydra and how he got the kids brainwashed into sleeper agents. When Moon Squire tries to darken the place, Titan-Gremlin scoffs that he knows his technique until Spider-Woman takes advantage in darkness by zapping Titan-Gremlin in the face.

Spider-Woman decides to focus on getting the Assembly Kids out of the battleground. Hellrune tells Spider-Woman that her teammates are distracting Quicksand, Icemaster and Zzzax so that they could lure them into fighting Titan-Gremlin. Then, as Titan-Gremlin emerges out of the wreckage, he gets distracted by the four elemental supervillains. Even though Titan-Gremlin makes a short work on the four supervillains, his armor starts to malfunction that he collapses. When Spider-Woman tears off the armor, Gremlin tells her that he would have the last laugh by doing the self-destruct on not only himself but also, he would blow up the whole prison. Spider-Woman knocks Gremlin out by zapping him. Thus, Spider-Woman works on getting the Assembly Kids and Angar the Screamer out of the prison before the place explodes.

After learning the ugly truth of the "new heroes", Spider-Woman and Liberty fly to Alcatraz Island where they could find Angar the Screamer and break him out of the cell. Spider-Woman figured out that Angar's hallucinatory scream could undo the brainwashing on the rest of the Assembly like he did to Liberty. As they reached the island, Spider-Woman and Liberty had to go on cloaking mode with the help of the latter (Liberty) so that they could get past from the guards. While Liberty goes to the control room to deactivate the security system of the prison, Spider-Woman goes up to Angar's cell to talk to him. However, they get interrupted by the Assembly who break into the prison, angry over Liberty leaving the team without their permission. Liberty releases the other prisoners from the cells to distract the Assembly but they could not hold them off because they have the inhibitor collars on them. Since the Assembly are distracted, Liberty was able to reach Spider-Woman and Angar to disable the inhibitor collar from the latter. With the collar off, Angar screams at the Assembly. Though the kids of the Assembly wake up from brainwashing, Titan was left standing as he wasn't affected from Angar's scream. Titan swats Angar aside and advances on Spider-Woman to grab her neck. Spider-Woman fries Titan with her venom blast and learns that he is a robot. (Though little did she know that he is a robot controlled by Kondrati Topolov a.k.a Gremlin). Titan gloats at Spider-Woman that she would die at the hands of the man who turned her child into a Hydra assassin.