The sky above New Themyscira no longer belonged to anyone.
It had been claimed by violence.
Pillars of smoke rose from the corpses of buildings that had once been landmarks — proud structures of marble and steel that now existed only as broken teeth jutting from the earth.
The streets were indistinguishable from graveyards. Atlantean soldiers and Amazon warriors lay where they had fallen, armour cracked, weapons shattered, the grand ambitions that had driven them here reduced to nothing more than cooling blood on cold stone.
But the battle was not yet over. It was, however, ending.
The first sign of the tide turning came from above.
Kara Zor-El dropped through a curtain of black smoke like a missile that had grown tired of being aimed at anything other than the thing she wanted to destroy — and the Cerberus, that three-headed nightmare born from the deep mythological dark, had the profound misfortune of being the thing she wanted to destroy most in this particular moment.
The Genesis energy Ethan had poured into her still hummed beneath her skin like a second heartbeat. It wasn't simply power — it was certainty. It was the feeling of a door inside her being thrown open to reveal a room she had never known existed, filled with a light so complete it left no room for hesitation.
She caught the leftmost head mid-lunge.
Her fingers closed around its jaw with a grip that could bend steel girders into ribbon, and for one suspended second, the Cerberus stared at her with all three pairs of its ancient, burning eyes — and perhaps, in whatever passed for its consciousness, it understood.
She ripped.
The sound the decapitation made was not a sound so much as a statement — a declaration delivered in the language of shockwaves and splintering bone.
The body of the Cerberus lurched, a fountain of black ichor spraying upward as the middle and right heads screamed in something that was equal parts rage and terror.
But Kara was already moving. The middle head snapped at her — she caught it. Planted her boots against the creature's enormous chest. Looked it directly in its burning eye and pulled.
The final head swung wildly, snapping at air, at smoke, at anything — until Kara landed on its skull, seized it with both hands, set her jaw, and tore it free with a sound that silenced three nearby skirmishes as every human and Atlantean within earshot involuntarily stopped fighting just to process what they had witnessed.
She stood atop the headless carcass for exactly two seconds.
Then she lifted the entire body — all of it, thousands of pounds of ancient mythological creature — hoisted it overhead with an ease that bordered on insulting, and punched it skyward. The Cerberus became a shape, then a dot, then nothing, launched so far beyond the horizon that no one present would ever know where it landed.
Kara brushed her hands together, red light still streaming from her eyes. 'Next.'
She then found Captain Thunder moments later, holding his own against the giant octopus that had been dragging surface ships beneath the churning water near the coastline.
He looked up as her shadow fell across him. They didn't speak and just nodded to eachother.
Her eyes ignited — two beams of concentrated heat vision lancing into the creature's midsection with a sound like the world tearing at the seams.
Captain Thunder didn't miss a beat. His hands came together and the sky above him broke open — a column of white lightning so thick it had a circumference descended from the clouds like the fist of something divine, slamming into the octopus with a force that made the water around them recoil outward in a perfect circle.
...
On the eastern flank, Victor Stone had spent the last several minutes doing what he did best, thinking faster than the enemy.
The Minotaur — several metres of muscle, horn, and absolute fury — had seemed unstoppable for the first half of their engagement.
But Cyborg's scanners had been running the entire time, cataloguing every strike, every flinch, every micro-hesitation in the creature's movements, and patterns had emerged. The left knee. The base of the throat. The half-second window between its shoulder drop and its charge.
"Left knee, three o'clock," Victor said into the comm.
Grifter, moving with the quiet efficiency of a man who had survived too many impossible situations to waste energy on fear, came in low and drove the butt of his pistol into the joint with surgical precision.
The Minotaur buckled — just slightly, just for a moment — but that moment was all Cyborg needed.
His cannon arm came up, charged, and—
Something came screaming through the air from the north and hit the Minotaur at approximately the speed of a freight train.
The creature was thrown sideways, skidding across the rubble-strewn ground before it crashed to a halt against the remnants of a collapsed wall. It raised its enormous head, blinking, looking deeply confused about what had just happened.
Then it saw what had hit it and Victor also saw it at the same time.
A man. Or what had once been a man. Arthur Curry — Aquaman, King of Atlantis, the architect of this entire catastrophe — lay crumpled against the Minotaur's side like a discarded toy.
His armour, once magnificent, was now barely armour at all — it existed in fragments, hanging from him in bent, useless pieces. A line of dark blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His body was a topography of bruises and lacerations, and every breath he drew seemed to cost him something he couldn't afford.
Grifter stared then he pulled up his mask just far enough to get a better look, turned to Victor, and said, "...Is that the king?"
"That is the king."
"The king of Atlantis."
"The very same."
"The man who started all of — this —" Grifter gestured broadly at the ruins of everything around them, "— is currently being used as a projectile?"
He lowered his smoking guns, "Damn. Someone really put the 'fish' in 'fish-fry.' Look at him."
Victor's optical sensors tracked the directional signature back to its origin just as Arthur's body lifted off the ground again — hovering, rotating, drawn upward by an invisible hand with all the casual authority of someone tidying a room.
Jean Grey drifted over the battlefield like a figure from a dream that hadn't decided yet whether it was a good one. Her hair floated around her shoulders in a slow, weightless current.
She caught Victor's gaze briefly and offered the faintest nod of acknowledgement.
Then Arthur's body rocketed downward and cratered into the ground ten metres away, throwing up a geyser of shattered concrete.
Grifter watched Arthur bounce twice before stopping. He was quiet for a moment.
Then, very slowly, he turned back to Victor and said, "I think I'm falling in love again. Right after my guns, honestly. It's a close second." He watched Jean lift Arthur's half-conscious body and swing it sideways into a cluster of approaching Atlantean soldiers, scattering them like pins. "Is she also... reinforcements?"
"She's married," Victor said flatly. "And I would strongly advise you against any line of thought that follows naturally from that expression on your face."
"Marriage has never personally—"
"Her husband," Victor said, his tone carrying the particular weight of someone who had personally witnessed things he had no desire to explain, "is a very, very terrifying man."
Grifter opened his mouth but the Minotaur, recovering from its confusion, let out a bellowing roar directed squarely at Jean — apparently having decided that the woman who kept throwing Atlantean king at it was the more pressing threat.
It took one thundering step forward then stopped.
Every muscle in its massive body locked. It's eyes went wide. Its horns trembled with the effort of a charge that had nowhere left to go, restrained mid-motion by a grip it could not see and could not break. The veins along its neck stood out against its skin as it strained against nothing.
Jean turned toward it. Her expression didn't change.
"Oh," she said pleasantly, tilting her head just slightly, "you're cute."
Her eyes shifted — the green becoming something deeper, something older, something that had been burning since before this world was born. Red bled into her irises like ink dropped into water.
"Let me show you something real."
The cry came first — not from her throat, but from behind her.
A sound that was simultaneously a bird's scream and a cataclysm announcing itself, as the shape of a phoenix — vast, impossibly radiant, constructed entirely of crimson fire — unfolded from the space behind Jean's shoulders like wings she had always had but rarely chose to show.
She raised one hand and pointed at the Minotaur.
The phoenix looked at it and the Minotaur did not get a chance to roar again.
In the space between one breath and the next, it was ash and reduced to a column of grey powder that hung in the air for a moment before the wind scattered it in all directions.
The silence that followed lasted approximately four seconds.
Then, in ones and twos, the surrounding fighters — Atlanteans, Amazons, soldiers, mercenaries — turned back to their own battles, wearing the expressions of people who had collectively decided that processing what they had just seen was a problem for later.
...
On the western perimeter, Orm and Aqualad had read the situation quickly and moved even quicker — pulling Etrigan's attention toward themselves and away from the more critical theatre, buying moments that might matter.
But the reckoning they were successfully avoiding in one direction came for them from another.
Because across the battlefield, something had just hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater.
A thunderous boom echoed as a broken figure slammed into the ground. From the crater, Diana—the Queen of Themyscira—slowly crawled out, her face bruised and battered.
Everyone nearby—including Diana, who spat a mouthful of blood—looked up to see a beautiful woman floating in the air who wore a cold and serious expression.
...
A few moments earlier.
The sky above New Themyscira's ruins had become a different kind of battlefield — one that existed in the upper atmosphere, where there was no ground to fall on and every mistake carried a consequence measured in velocity.
Anna Marie Carter hung in the air across from Diana of Themyscira and smiled but not pleasantly.
Diana's sword was already gone. It hadn't been broken so much as rejected, Anna's hand catching the blade mid-swing and simply squeezing until the Themysciran steel disagreed with itself and came apart. The pieces had fallen, glinting, into the smoke below.
Diana had stared at her empty hand for exactly one second before the fury replaced the disbelief, and since then, they had been trading blows at a pace and velocity that was reducing the already-damaged skyline around them to further ruin.
It was, objectively, spectacular.
Anna's right hook caught Diana across the jaw and sent her spinning backward through the glass face of a half-collapsed office tower — the entire upper floor detonating outward in a cascade of steel and window frame.
Diana came out the other side still moving, her bracers up, and the shockwave of her counter-strike meeting Anna's guard hit with a boom that flattened three floors of another building below them and sent a wave of force rolling outward across the battlefield.
Soldiers on both sides ducked and stumbled without ever knowing why.
Diana's eyes tracked her opponent with the focused intensity of a warrior who had never in her life met a human woman who could do this — and whatever she was feeling about that, she had not yet decided whether it was fury or admiration.
"You fight like a demon," Diana said as their fists meeting again in a double impact that cracked the air between them. "Where did you train?"
"Everywhere," Anna replied before catching Diana's follow-up elbow, redirecting it, stepping inside her guard and driving her knee upward. "And some places that don't exist anymore."
Diana disengaged, dropping back five metres, her chest heaving. Her eyes moved across Anna — cataloguing, evaluating, calculating — and something shifted in them.
"You have the strength of a dozen warriors," Diana said slowly. "This is not natural. Who are you and What are you doing here?"
"Honestly?" Anna cracked her knuckles. "I'm on my honeymoon."
Diana blinked. It was the first time during the entire fight that Diana's expression had registered something other than combat focus — and the expression it registered was something between confusion and offense.
"You are fighting a war," she said, "on your honeymoon?"
"My husband has a habit of taking interesting vacations."
Diana was quiet for a moment. Then something resolved in her expression and she said, with a tone that carried genuine conviction rather than condescension, "A woman of your power and capability — you are wasted fighting for men. Join me. Join the Amazons."
Her arm extended outward as a gesture that encompassed the broader battle, the smoking ruins, the entire broken world below them. "Together we could end the age of men's dominion. Build something better. Something just."
Anna's face did a thing. It was a very specific thing — the particular scrunch of someone who has just tasted something they didn't expect and found it deeply unpleasant.
"...That's," she said carefully, "a very old way of thinking."
"It is correct."
"My husband would fall asleep halfway through that speech and I say that with complete affection." Anna rolled her shoulder. "Also, world domination is boring. He told me that himself. He actually ran through the logic once and by the end of it even I was bored of the idea of world domination, and I went in with an open mind."
Diana's eyes narrowed. "This man — your husband — he has convinced you to abandon your—"
"He didn't convince me of anything," Anna said, and there was something in her voice now that hadn't been there before — not defensiveness, but a bedrock certainty. "I choose what I think. He just makes it easy to think well."
A small smile formed on her lips. "Also, I'm not fighting for him. I'm fighting with him. There's a difference. And for the record — I share him with my several sister's from other mother's, and before you say anything about that, it works beautifully for all of us and I will not be taking critique."
Diana's expression passed through several states in rapid succession — confusion, disgust, a deep and profound offence that went beyond the personal into something almost philosophical.
"He has corrupted—"
"Don't."
The word came out quiet.
"Don't finish that sentence."
Diana finished it anyway. Because Diana was Diana, and backing down from a sentence she had already started was not something in her vocabulary.
Her voice rose as she declared that she would personally see this man executed for what he had done to women who should have been warriors, that she would stand over his body and Anna was gone from where she had been standing.
The motion didn't register as movement. It registered as Anna simply being somewhere else — specifically, directly in front of Diana's face — and then Diana's face was being introduced, at extraordinary speed, to Anna's fist.
The boom was heard across the entire battlefield.
Diana went down like a comet choosing a landing site, her body carving a trench through the rubble of the street below before coming to a stop in a cloud of displaced concrete and dust.
For a moment, nothing moved then Diana stood up with Blood on her lip. Every line of her body drawn tight with the particular fury of someone who has been hit harder than they believed possible by someone they had been in the process of underestimating.
She launched herself upward. Anna came down to meet her — and this time, the light around Anna's body had changed. It was no longer simply the light of someone with extraordinary physical capability.
The magic she had been holding in reserve bloomed outward from her skin in coils of deep red.
Diana's eyes went wide and Anna's fist met her face a second time.
Diana's mouth opened in a sound that was equal parts shock and pain as she was thrown backward through the remains of a wall, through the building behind it, out the other side and into the street.
Anna was already there and She was done holding back.
What followed was not a fight so much as a reckoning delivered with both hands. Mystic arts that moved like living things — coiling, striking, detonating on contact.
Elemental spells that called down columns of fire and drove walls of force with the calm, efficient precision of someone who had studied destruction as a science.
Diana fought back — because Diana always fought back, and there was a bravery in that which Anna could not entirely deny respecting — but every time she found her footing, Anna had already moved.
Diana was strong but Anna was more. She drove Diana into the ground with a mystic strike that carved a crater three metres deep.
The shockwave radiated outward in a perfect circle.
Orm, distant, turned at the sound and went still. Aqualad turned as well.
Every nearby combatant — Atlantean and Amazon alike — paused what they were doing and looked toward the crater, and then toward the woman standing above it, and then toward the other woman crawling out of it, and then none of them said anything because there was genuinely nothing to say.
Black Manta, watching from forty metres away, considered his options. His hand moved toward the controls of his shoulder cannon.
But a shadow fell over him.
Batman materialised from nowhere, as Batman tended to do, and the brief, one-sided engagement that followed ended with Manta on the ground, at which point Etrigan — the demon still bound to Jason Blood, still burning with hellfire that required no fuel — turned, spoke four words in a language that predated most of the religions currently being invoked by the people dying around him, and reduced Manta to a memory.
The Atlanteans and Amazons remaining — dwindled now, scattered, bleeding — began to converge on their fallen leaders with the desperate energy of soldiers who had run out of options and were about to do something catastrophically unwise.
Then the sky above the coastline screamed.
The surviving combatants turned, as one, toward the water.
What remained of the giant octopus struck the battlefield as a single enormous eye — Kara and Captain Thunder's final assault having reduced the creature to something considerably less coherent than it had been — and it hit with a sound like the world's largest door being slammed by something very, very annoyed.
Then Kara and Captain Thunder were there — floating in the air above the battlefield, side by side, surveying everything below with the patient, level expressions of people who were not out of breath, were not particularly tired, and were very interested in whether anyone had anything further to contribute. But nobody did.