Zatanna was exactly as he'd known she would be and also nothing like he'd imagined. Stage magician's coat and top hat, both torn and scorched.
Dark hair loose around her face, several strands stuck to sweat on her cheek. Hands raised, moving through gestures that synchronized with the backward words coming from her mouth, maintaining something James couldn't see directly but could feel as a pressure in the air between her and the things she was holding back.
The things she was holding back.
There were six of them. Entities occupying roughly human shapes the way a hand occupies a glove that doesn't quite fit. Their proportions were subtly wrong in ways that James's enhanced brain registered before his conscious mind caught up. Their movements had no wasted motion because they apparently didn't understand what wasted motion was. Where they stood, the carved symbols on the floor glowed red-orange and strained outward, Zatanna's containment circle doing visible work to keep them where they were.
Her eyes cut to James for exactly one second. What he read in that glance was layered. Relief that someone had arrived. Warning that what he was walking into was worse than it looked. Assessment of whether he was actually useful or just another problem she'd have to manage.
Then her eyes went back to the things she was containing because she couldn't afford to look away longer than that.
One of the entities turned at James's entry. Then, with a slow uniformity that suggested shared awareness rather than individual response, all of them did.
James settled into his combat stance and felt, with crystalline honesty, the grounding weight of a problem he hadn't fully solved. He had enhanced strength four times baseline human. Enhanced speed three times baseline. Thirty-seven martial arts at genuine mastery level. AEGIS providing real-time tactical support.
He had no idea if any of that applied to what he was currently looking at.
But he was already in the room. The question of whether his preparation was adequate had officially become irrelevant.
The largest entity moved toward him without rushing, without the mechanical threat displays James had learned to read in human opponents. It moved like something that had no concept of him posing a real challenge and was simply curious about what kind of noise he would make.
James's right fist tightened. AEGIS began threat analysis and immediately returned results that were more question marks than data points.
From across the chamber, between backward syllables, Zatanna's voice cut through with something that sounded almost like it wanted to be a warning but ran out of time before it could be a full sentence.
"Iron," she managed. "Cold iron, it burns them, if you have anything that..."
The entity reached him.
BOOM!
The impact of its first strike against James's raised guard hit like nothing he had ever blocked before, not in training, not in the underground circuit, not against Batman's most committed combinations. The force drove him backward three full steps across stone floor, his enhanced legs absorbing impact that would have shattered normal bone, and for a single disorienting moment his entire left arm went numb from fingertip to shoulder.
His suit had taken hits from Apokoliptian energy weapons.
This was worse.
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