Dex-Starr had the smallest body of the four, but his movements were the fastest. A hundred meters (~330 feet) collapsed to nothing in an instant, gravity be damned. Blood-red claws tore through the air in a foul rush, slashing straight for Deathstorm's face.
"Get lost, you little thing!" Deathstorm gathered a mass of thermal energy in his right hand and hurled a whirling energy vortex forward.
Dex-Starr twisted mid-air with weightless grace. His left claw carved a blood trough across Deathstorm's skull-like face in the same motion—though only a thin line of blood welled up, as if he'd scratched a piece of dry wood.
"Mew, mew, mew." The cat grumbled at Atrocitus in feline dissatisfaction. The Red Lantern leader might look like a brute—all heft and thick muscle—but he was actually clever. During their time together, he'd picked up cat-speak on his own.
He nodded, soothing his beloved pet and most capable lieutenant. "So his body's tough, is it? Let me see just how tough."
Atrocitus charged like a raging bull. One punch shattered Deathstorm's thermal shockwave, and without slowing for a heartbeat he slammed straight into the enemy. Then he opened his bloody maw and vomited out a torrent of fire-like energy.
Red Lantern rings had replaced their hearts. Rage and bodily circulation were now fused into one system—their blood could be expelled in combat as a signature attack, fire that burned in vacuum and consumed anything flammable or otherwise, even energy barriers shaped by other power rings.
Unfortunately, this time they'd met Deathstorm.
"Oh? An unusual ability." The Red Lantern flames burned cooler than the Firestorm Matrix, and the rage laced into them couldn't touch a man who was half-dead already.
The dead feel nothing. Deathstorm wasn't fully dead, yet the blood-fire pumped through a Red Lantern's circulation wasn't pure rage either.
Beyond Atrocitus's bull-rush cracking a few of his ribs, nothing did much damage. With the ability to freely transmute atomic structures, self-repair was trivial. Less than two seconds later, Deathstorm was whole again.
Nearby, Ratchet's eyes began to flicker rapidly. For a disoriented instant, Deathstorm felt himself slip back to when he was still Martin Stein—back to the day he'd seized the Firestorm Matrix from his colleague and shot the man dead to keep the prize for himself alone. Distant memories flooded his mind all at once, and he forgot he was in the middle of a battle.
Zilius Zox—the big volleyball—leapt up above his head and spewed out blood-fire thicker and hotter than Atrocitus's.
This time it actually worked. Deathstorm was distracted by the memories stirred in him, and with all that rage hammering his half-living half, even the corpse-half's buffer couldn't stop the living half from being shaken.
"Kill—kill you all, kill every one of you!" He began to shriek in fury.
Atrocitus wasted no words. He plunged a hand into Deathstorm's chest in a heart-ripping strike. Even without the ring, his raw strength was no small thing, and Deathstorm's superhuman body was punched clean through. Unfortunately, the man had long since stopped being made of human organs. A pile of atoms arranged by a matrix—what did he need a heart for? An energy being needed no such things.
Atrocitus's strike didn't kill him. It drove him into a full berserk counterattack.
Fire energy erupted across the moon's surface as if the stuff were free of charge.
Deathstorm was barely afraid of fire, his regeneration was terrifying, and his resistance to every kind of status effect was absurdly high. For a while, even with four Red Lanterns on him, they couldn't put him down.
Then Deathstorm suddenly lunged and seized one of Zilius Zox's feet. He fired his atomic restructuring ability at full power—and just like that, Zox's foot was reduced to a crystalline mound of dust on the ground. That eerie method of attack made the rest of them wary.
Fortunately, Zox had his own trick. His hands and feet could regrow without limit. The other three had no such luck, and so they were fighting with their hands tied.
Meanwhile, Batman took advantage of the chaos to slip into the Watchtower.
He tore through Owlman's defense programs at blistering speed. He'd never met this Thomas Wayne Jr., but based on the man's history, Batman assessed that the Earth-3 counterpart didn't fully trust the other villains—least of all Ultraman. Owlman would have left himself an insurance policy, something to turn the tables in a crisis.
He raced through file after file. Careful as he was, some key data triggered a tripwire, and the Watchtower's space station began blaring an urgent alarm.
Deathstorm—who had been slowly gaining the upper hand—went cold. This was where villains truly excelled. Their paranoia ran ten times hotter than any hero's. Living in a world where you either hurt others or were hurt yourself, as one of this evil Earth's ruling oligarchs, his sense of crisis ran far beyond the average villain's.
These enemies in front of him weren't wanderers who'd just happened by. This was premeditated—a data theft operation. Deathstorm's intellect was sharp enough to work that out quickly. What he couldn't work out was what these aliens wanted from Earth.
"You're awfully slow." Sinestro floated in the sky with imperious calm, looking down at Atrocitus with undisguised contempt.
"Need a hand?" His chin tilted up as though he were dispensing alms.
"No!" Atrocitus hadn't expected his opening battle to be this much trouble. Four on one, and he still wasn't winning.
Finally he stopped holding back. Ring constructs were something he simply didn't bother with in routine fights—but not bothering wasn't the same as not being able.
With a sharp whoosh, a red hammer several meters tall materialized in his grip.
Deathstorm blinked. This looked suspiciously like a Power Ring construct—except a Power Ring's constructs were green, and this was red. What was the relationship between the two?
Before he could think it through, Ratchet launched a psychic strike at the perfect moment, stunning the enemy. The enormous red hammer came crashing down and drove Deathstorm deep into a moon-surface crater.
Then Atrocitus demonstrated his mastery of the ring. The slam shifted smoothly into a grip: a massive red hand closed firmly around Deathstorm, and then began to squeeze.
Deathstorm's physical durability was high—but only compared to ordinary humans. His atomic transmutation only worked on things the Firestorm Matrix could interpret and substitute for. And it was wholly useless against Lantern rings, artifacts from technology tens of thousands of years more advanced than his own.
"Who—who are you people?" He was a little dazed. In his field of vision, figures wreathed in lights of every color had suddenly sprung up in swarms.
Reds and yellows, indigos and blues. And then—wait. His eyes caught hundreds of Green Lanterns pouring in, and at that instant the weight of the problem hit him.
He still hadn't realized these people were from another universe. Not until he spotted Hal Jordan.
One full of courage. One timid and spineless. Two completely different temperaments—but the faces matched, and the color of the ring was the same. Deathstorm finally understood just how badly he'd miscalculated.
"You're from another world!" He tried to call for his comrades. They might not truly like each other, but in the face of a real enemy, the Crime Syndicate could at least hold the line together.