Setting Up Bloodshot Reborn And More In The Valiant #4 (SPOILERS)

 Valiant has been touting the consequences that The Valiant – the self-contained event from Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, and Paolo Rivera that kicked off their Valiant Next initiative – would have on their whole line for since back when issue #1 arrived in December.

Well, in today's The Valiant #4 we finally get to see those consequences paid out. Beware, spoilers ahead…

Over the course of the series, the Eternal Warrior has made it mission to protect Kay McHenry, the Geomancer, from befalling the fate of her predecessors and dying at the hands of the Immortal Enemy.

Should she die, we're told, the Earth will enter another Dark Age.

Sure enough, however, that's just what happens. The heroes…lose. And Kay McHenry — the character created by Fred Van Lente and Emanuela Lupacchino in Archer & Armstrong — tragically loses her life to the Immortal Enemy…

…but before she does, she imparts a dying gift to everyone's favourite technologically enhanced super-soldier, Bloodshot, by removing his nanites and, with them, his powers…restoring his humanity in the process…

This would be the massive status quo shift that presumably sets up Jeff Lemire's new Bloodshot Reborn ongoing series beginning in April… But it's far from the only major shake-up in the issue…

Just when all hope seems lost, a new Geomancer — sent back in time by the Eternal Warrior's own future self — emerges to supplant Kay's loss in the modern day.

Is her presence in 2015 going to prevent the foretold Dark Age from coming to pass? Or accelerate its arrival? And did the heroes really win at all? Either way, Lemire, Kindt, and Rivera have just given a major new character in the Valiant line a rather auspicious debut…and left us with one hell of a cliff hanger.

Where is Bloodshot headed next exactly? Is there a new Dark Age coming for the heroes of the Valiant Universe?  Stay tuned to those Emerald City Comic Con announcements this weekend, folks…