"No," Cyborg said, his cannon still leveled. "You're not Constantine. Who the hell are you,all of you?"
The other league members tensed immediately, shifting into ready positions. The air between the two groups tightened.
"Woah, calm down mate," the other Constantine said, raising his hands. "I'm the real deal. Just not from here."
"It's true," the other Superman said, stepping forward slowly with his hands visible. "We come from different Earths." His eyes moved across the group and settled on Max. "And we're here for him."
Every head turned toward Max.
"What do you want with him?" Wonder Woman asked, her eyes narrowing as she looked between the newcomers.
"I believe he already knows," the other Wonder Woman replied.
Max exhaled slowly. "I thought I had a bit more time."
"It's been a while, mate," Constantine said, his tone carrying the particular weariness of someone who had traveled a very long way through very bad circumstances to get here.
The weapons came down. The tension in the group easing a bit.
"We need to move as soon as possible," Mr. Terrific said, his voice urgent. "Before he comes here looking for us. If we were able to find this location, so can he."
Superman turned to Max, closing the distance slightly. "What's going on, Max?"
"A lot," Max said simply.
A crackling sound cut through the air above them as they turned.
Brainiac's mothership was still hanging in the sky,damaged but far from finished. Along its hull, a massive cannon was slowly rotating into position, its core building with a deep, pulsing charge that hummed loud enough to feel in the chest.
The Archer Cannon.
----
Deep inside the ship, Brainiac inhabited his new body,weaker than the last, a fact he had already catalogued and filed away without sentiment.
He interfaced with the mothership's systems and began prepping the Archer Cannon.
The conclusion had come quickly, as his conclusions always did. There was no viable path to victory here. He had reached that determination the moment his arm had ceased to exist on contact with that shield.
The implications of that were significant. If physical contact with the girl's constructs resulted in immediate molecular erasure,and the evidence strongly suggested it did,then close quarters engagement was not a viable strategy. Ranged engagement had already proven insufficient. His army was gone. His android body was in two pieces on the ground below.
And that was without factoring in the others.
The male with the mismatched eyes was the variable that concerned him most. Similar energy signature to the girl. Possibly similar capabilities. Possibly greater ones. And he had done nothing. He had simply stood there and watched,which either meant he had no reason to intervene, or he was confident enough in the girl's abilities that intervention wasn't necessary.
Neither interpretation was reassuring.
The honest assessment was simple. There was insufficient data to counter these individuals. Fighting them further without that data would be foolish.
But escape is still viable.He would withdraw,analyze,formulate a proper counter strategy. And if no counter strategy presented itself,he could simply wait. Unlike the beings below, he was not constrained by biology. As long as he had energy, he could exist indefinitely.
They are made of flesh,he is not,he just needs the Archer Cannon to buy him enough time to escape.
Outside the ship, Thena watched the cannon charge, its muzzle glowing a deep, pulsing red.
She was briefly tempted to let it fire. Just to see what it could do.
'Probably not great for the people below though.'she thought.
All nine Truth Seeking Orbs drifted away from their orbit around her and split,dividing and subdividing into dozens of smaller spheres that hung in the air for a fraction of a second before launching outward at speed, streaking toward the ship like a storm of dark bullets.
They punched through the hull without resistance, erasing everything they passed through cleanly and silently, emerging from the other side only to curve back around and punch through again. And again. A relentless, precise storm of erasure that shredded through the ship's interior from every angle simultaneously.
The ship groaned. Sections of its hull detached and began to fall,only to be intercepted mid-drop by the same storm of orbs, shredded into nothing before they could reach the ground. The massive vessel shuddered, its power failing, its ability to hover deteriorating rapidly.
Then a small escape ship ejected from the collapsing mothership's side and blasted upward toward open sky.
Thena watched it go then raised one hand.
"Universal Pull."
The escape ship lurched. Its trajectory bent. Its thrusters fired harder, burning everything they had,and still it was dragged steadily back toward her, pulled through the air by a gravitational force it couldn't overcome.
'I've been wanting to use that in a real fight for a while.'
She grew a second arm from her left shoulder, the limb forming smoothly and without effort while her original left arm maintained the gravitational pull. The new arm morphed into a cannon at the end, charged in less than a second, and fired,a thin, precise purple beam that sliced through the escape ship cleanly causing it to explode,putting an end to Brainiacm
Thena turned back to the mothershipzand immediately realized the problem.
With its power gone, the massive wreck was falling. Directly toward Max and the others below.
"Shit"
She vanished.
She reappeared beneath the falling wreckage in an instant, all nine orbs rushing back toward her from every direction, recombining into their original sizes before merging together into a single dense sphere. The sphere flattened outward rapidly, spreading into a vast, pitch black sheet directly beneath the collapsing ship.
Every piece of wreckage that made contact with it disappeared.Each section simply ceased to exist the moment it touched the surface, swallowed silently into the black until the last piece was gone.
Thena lowered the sheet. It compressed back into her orbs and drifted into their familiar orbit behind her.
She descended and landed before the group.
Max clapped twice, slowly.
"Impressive," he said, a small smirk at the corner of his mouth. "Creative application of the Truth Seeking Orbs. Efficient too."
"I know, right." Thena rolled her shoulders. "Though that was a little underwhelming honestly." Her eyes drifted to the newcomers and narrowed slightly. "By the way,who are these people,why does she look like mom?" She asked gesturing towards the other Wonder Woman.
"Apparently they're from another Earth," Terra offered.
"Ah." Thena nodded slowly, as though that explained everything perfectly. Then she frowned. "But what are they doing here?"
"That's what I need to discuss with you," Max said. "Privately." He placed a hand on Terra's shoulder and turned briefly to the group. "Excuse us. We'll be back."
He vanished with Terra.
Thena lingered a moment. Her gaze drifted to the other Wonder Woman,studying her quietly for a beat longer than necessary.
Then she vanished too.
End of Chapter