Donald Pierce

The Reavers

Many months later, Pierce is violently liberated from the holding facility.^[4] Though his rescuers are never explicitly identified, he resurfaces alongside three members of the Reavers, a band of cyborg criminals which Pierce claims to have built and assembled, and which had recently been all but wiped out by the X-Men.^[5] The four of them ally with Lady Deathstrike and three Hellfire Club mercenaries (Cole, Macon, and Reese) who were cybernetically enhanced by Pierce. Under Pierce's leadership, the new Reavers are dedicated to exterminating mutants, with highest priority given to the X-Men and Sebastian Shaw (CEO of Shaw Industries).^[6]

The Reavers take over the X-Men's headquarters in their absence, but after the X-Men leave through the Siege Perilous, they manage to capture only Wolverine, whom they torture and crucify. During this time Pierce develops a romantic attraction towards Lady Deathstrike, but she is disgusted by Pierce's arrogance and spurns him. Wolverine is rescued by Jubilee, and the two go into hiding. Pierce tracks them down, but is incapacitated by Jubilee.^[7] Assuming they fled to Muir Island, Pierce and the Reavers attack Muir Island, and battle Moira MacTaggart's "Muir Island X-Men" and Freedom Force.^[8] With the Reavers, he also attacks a Frost Technologies plant in California.^[9] Pierce creates two super intelligent sentient androids (Elsie-Dee and Albert), programming them to find Wolverine and self-destruct. However, their intelligence allows them to put the bomb in Elsie-Dee on hold, and they abandon the Reavers.^[10]

A member of the Upstarts, Trevor Fitzroy, sends reprogrammed Sentinels to destroy the Reavers, as they are a threat to mutants and Pierce (as the former White King) is worth a lot of "points" in the deadly game the Upstarts play. Only Lady Deathstrike and Cylla escape. Pierce has Gateway teleport him to the one responsible for the attack on the Reavers, but the Sentinels accompanying Fitzroy electrocute him.^[11] Despite his seeming demise, he later resurfaces, starts an anti-mutant hate group, and enlists several members; revealing a plot to take militant terrorist actions against mutants and thwarted by the X-Men, he is beaten by Wolverine in hand-to-hand combat. Very little of Pierce's human tissue remains, which explains how he was able to survive the massacre in Australia with only portions of his upper torso intact.^[12]

Pierce would remain with the Hellfire Club for some time, eventually showing a more adversarial relationship with the current Black King, Sebastian Shaw. He heads out to an outpost in Switzerland believed to be the immortal Tyrant Apocalypse's old stronghold, in order to obtain the first mutant's power and technological marvels, also to secure his position within the Hellfire Club's inner circle.^[13] In one such botched expedition involving the mutant time traveler Cable, he was believed to be flash incinerated when he, Shaw and a guide leading them through another of the first mutant's lairs unleashed a techno-organic entity created by the mutant overlord in the past. All managed to survive unscathed, save for Pierce himself whose injuries further cost him much of his remaining flesh, revealing his head to be his only remaining fully organic component. Due to his constant failures and Shaw's general contempt of him, Donald is eventually cut loose from the Inner Circle, left to plummet to his death from an escaping helicopter.^[14] Ironically enough he would later find refuge in one of Summers's old safe-houses, whose futuristic resources and databases he would use in reconstructing his damaged body, making himself a new cybernetic shell out of solid Adamantium he stole from another cyborg's secret cache.^[15] When Logan and Jubilee happened upon his mechinations thanks to Gateway, they were able to preempt whatever plans he had alongside Khyber, the mysterious cyborg whose Adamantium reserves Pierce stole, who had intervened.

Pierce later re-emerges, employing cyborgs Pico, Lady Deathstrike, and Skullbuster in an attempt to abduct Domino's estranged husband, Milo Thurman, from his US government holding facility. As Thurman has the genius ability to predict future events accurately from current data, Pierce wishes to integrate him into his cybernetic brain so he may use this ability to exert further control of the world's future.^[16] Pierce reveals that after the events involving Trevor Fitzroy at the Hellfire Club,^[11] his mind and body were restored by a mysterious benefactor, and he now has a new prime directive. Just as Pierce downloads Thurman's mind into his own, Domino destroys Pierce's appropriated Weapon X base. Domino escapes, but Pierce and Thurman both seemingly perish in the ensuing explosion.^[16]

Becoming a Purifier

Pierce next tries to take over Sebastian Shaw's new Hellfire Club, launching an attack and slashing Shaw's chest. Though Shaw is left critically injured and later needed to be hospitalized, he is able to punch off Pierce's head.^[17] Pierce later is forcibly recruited into the ranks of the Purifiers and infected with the Technarch transmode virus.^[18] Being under the control of the mutant-hunting robot Bastion, he shows his mutant target, the newly formed Young X-Men.^[19]

Young X-Men

He appears in a nightmare of the precognitive mutant, Blindfold, battling a not yet formed team of X-Men and killing one of their number.^[20] Pierce himself recruited this team using an image inducer to pose as the leader of the X-Men, Cyclops. His reasons for recruiting these mutants as "X-Men" are not entirely clear, however, it appears that his primary focus is to eliminate the current Lord Imperial of the Hellfire Club, Roberto da Costa, and his former New Mutants allies. He also hires Ink to deliver Dani and Blindfold to him, misleading him. Following the confrontation with the Young X-Men, his face is scoured by Dust.^[21]

With the synthetic skin on his face restored, he is kept captive by the Young X-Men.^[22] Ink is allowed to stay on the team and despite contention from Rockslide, later apologizes to Blindfold for working for Pierce, who remains in X-Men captivity. Pierce and Dust have frequent conversations while he is imprisoned, despite his vocal hatred of mutants and derogatory remarks toward her faith in Islam, noting that his attitude reminds her of home. While they talk, Dust admits to Pierce that she is dying, as he is "the only one who won't care" and he agrees to share with her the secret information he has about her teammates. He tells her that Ink is the mystery "non-mutant" among them, which is later discovered by the rest of the team.^[23] Also, he subtly tells her that three of her friends will die soon, referring to Boom Boom, Hellion and Surge, who were captured by the Sapien League and injected with a strain of the Legacy Virus.^[24]

Second Coming

It was eventually revealed that Pierce was only captured to act as Bastion's mole inside the X-Men's headquarters, all the while building several structures that surround Utopia.^[25]

Later after receiving the green light from Bastion to proceed with their plan, Pierce provokes an explosion that decimates all the X-Men's jets and the Blackbirds. Pierce stands amid the debris, and muses to the X-Men that he is sorry that he will not live to witness the decimation of the mutant race. Cyclops eliminates him with an optic blast.^[26]

Uncanny Avengers

Donald was seen alive again with the rest of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle on a pleasure cruise reserved for super criminals and cabals. He along with his compatriots were seen at a gambling den aboard the vessel as the Avengers Unity Division were searching for The Red Skull across the world.^[27]

Age of Apocalypse

In the Age of Apocalypse, Pierce was the leader of the Reavers, a band of human assassins enhanced by Apocalypse's techno-organic virus. Thanks to the virus, Pierce and his band of assassins become cyborgs with regenerative abilities and the power to assimilate both organic and non-organic material to mutate themselves. Pierce infiltrated the territory of the Human High Council in an attempt to destroy the Council fleet and later attempted to kill Gateway, an ally of the HHC. After the fleet was assembled for an attack on Apocalypse's empire, Pierce infected Carol Danvers with the remains of the Reaver Vultura to aid him in the destruction of the fleet. During his attack he also used Brian Braddock, who was under Apocalypse's mind control, to kill Emma Frost, though he resisted Pierce's orders, for which Pierce killed him. In the end, Pierce was destroyed by Weapon X.^[28]

A human team known only as X-Terminators had used Pierce's blood sample before he was infected by the techno-organic virus to create several clones of him in order to help the fight against the mutants.^[29] One such clone began operating under the codename "Goodnight" and infiltrated the Hellfire Club, becoming a great friend of Sebastian Shaw. The general public and Club members think he is in fact a mutant.^[30]

House of M

In the House of M, Donald Pierce was a member of the Human Liberation Front, one of the many human resistance groups labeled as terrorists by the House of M. Alongside Seiji Ashida, the father of Surge, he was part of the HLF's base in Tokyo, which had targeted Project Genesis, a plan of Emperor Sunfire to forcefully mutate baseline humans.

Television

• Donald Pierce appears in the X-Men episodes "The Dark Phoenix Saga (Part 1): Dazzled" and "The Dark Phoenix Saga (Part 2): The Inner Circle". He is depicted as much younger than his comics counterpart.
• Donald Pierce appears in the Wolverine and the X-Men episodes "Shades of Grey", "Foresight (Part 1)", "Foresight (Part 2)" and "Foresight (Part 3)". He is shown as part of the Inner Circle. Instead of a mutant-hating cyborg however, he is a mutant capable of emitting energy blasts.

Film

• Pierce appears in the 2017 film Logan, portrayed by Boyd Holbrook.^[31] This version of the character is Transigen's chief of security, with a cybernetic right arm, who works for Zander Rice and claims to be a "fan" of Logan. After Logan declines to help Pierce find Gabriela Lopez and her charge Laura, Pierce kidnaps Caliban and forces him to use his mutant powers to track Logan, Laura, and Professor Xavier. Pierce survives Caliban's suicide by grenade, then uses a fleet of drones to find the gathering place of Laura and other mutant children who are trying to escape to Canada. The children kill or incapacitate several of Pierce's Reavers, then combine their powers to kill him.