Marvel's X-Men have yet again been entangled in galactic conflicts between ancient alien empires. This time, it's at a scale greater than ever before. As of the new issue X-Men #9, the entire Brood species, a hive mind spanning ten thousand worlds, one thousand queens, and six trillion drones, has fallen under the command of Broo, one of Wolverine's grade-school students.
The Brood is one of the deadliest species that Marvel's multiverse has to offer. Survivors of a dead universe, the Brood inject eggs into their prey that consume and replicate the original host. (Imagine the Xenomorphs from the movie Alien but with a whole superhero universe to flourish in.)
Normally the Brood are bestial predators who follow an insect-like hive mind, but the X-Men encountered a mutant Brood drone that developed intelligence and independent thought. They adopted him and enrolled him in Wolverine's school for young mutants, where he took the name Broo. The Broodling is a scientific prodigy but has struggled with his predatory nature. A guest teacher named Deathlok analyzed the timestream to decide that Broo had a 22% chance of curing all cancer in the next five years... and a 34% chance of eating several of his classmates. But Deathlok clearly didn't expect what actually unfolded.
In recent issues of X-Men, the New Mutants returned from a space adventure with a mysterious egg which turned out to be extremely valuable to rival alien nation-states the Kree and the Shi'ar, as well as the Brood... as shown by the Kree and Shi'ar fighting over its location and the Brood invading Earth to get it back. The X-Men beat them back while Broo and his colleagues studied the egg to learn its secrets.
X-Men #9 revealed what it actually is: the King Egg, a superweapon developed by Kree scientists to weaponize the Brood. The King Egg, when activated, would produce a Brood King, a unique creature whose pheromones would rank it as far above the Brood Queens as the Queens were above completely disposable drones. This would allow the Kree to set the King against rival intergalactic powers and consume them with billions of deadly predators. As various extraterrestrial factions descended upon the X-Men in a massive battle, the Brood suddenly stopped in place. Some were happy to see the species relent, but others recognized an entire hive falling quiet as a frightening omen. They all looked around to see where the egg went when Broo delivered the bad news. "Sorry," he admitted as licked his fingers. "I ate it."
The narration confirms it: the properties of the King Egg have transferred to young Broo, giving him inherent authority over every Brood hive in existence. This isn't the first time that an X-Men character has ruled an empire; most recently, Cyclops' mad brother Vulcan temporarily ruled over the Shi'ar. But it is a much more immediate sort of power. Leaders of galactic empires may have political supremacy, but Broo is a king at the biological level. The Brood are more than a people; they are a single, immense entity spanning multiple galaxies. The alien armadas approaching Earth in the upcoming Empyre storyline need to watch mutants carefully... because they just became an interstellar superpower.
X-Men #9 is available now from your local comics shop and digital providers.