James reset his stance. His arm was already coming back online, Compound Alpha's enhanced recovery working fast. He looked at the entity in front of him and then at the five behind it that were now testing the boundary of Zatanna's containment circle with increasing pressure while her attention had fractured between her spell and what was happening at the chamber's edge.
She couldn't hold six of them and watch what happened to him simultaneously. The math was getting worse with every second.
'Okay,' James thought, rolling his shoulder and setting his feet. 'New data. Conventional striking is apparently going to need some adjustment.'
Then AEGIS said something that genuinely surprised him, which by this point in his seventeen months of surviving Gotham was not easily done.
"Analysis of entity physical composition indicates presence of significant ferrous metallic compounds in its exterior structure. Roughly analogous to cold iron in folkloric tradition. The entity appears to be partially self-repelling. Its own composition is causing localized stress at the points where it makes contact with this plane of existence."
James processed that at speed. "So if I hit it with something that concentrates that stress..."
"Theoretically, yes. Its own composition becomes its vulnerability. I am extrapolating significantly beyond confirmed data here."
"Noted." James looked at his gauntlets. Reinforced. Steel alloy framework under the composite plating. Not pure iron but close enough to test the theory.
The entity came at him again.
This time James didn't block. He stepped into the strike instead and drove his gauntleted fist directly into the center of its mass with every pound of enhanced strength he had.
The result was not what he expected, and also, somehow, exactly what he needed it to be.
The entity made a sound.
Not a scream exactly. Not anything James's enhanced auditory processing could cleanly categorize as pain or surprise or anger. It was more fundamental than any of those things, a resonance that seemed to come from somewhere beneath sound itself, vibrating in his chest and behind his eyes and in the fillings of his back teeth simultaneously.
But it recoiled.
Three feet of backward movement, no grace to it, nothing like the fluid wrongness it had shown coming forward. It recoiled the way something recoils when it encounters a boundary it didn't know existed.
"AEGIS."
"Confirmed. Contact point shows significant dimensional stress at point of impact. The ferrous alloy in your gauntlets is acting as an anchor to this plane of existence. For entities only partially present in this reality, that anchor creates destabilizing friction at the contact point. In simplified terms, hitting them with your gauntlets hurts them in ways conventional force alone does not."
"How much does it hurt them?"
"Unknown. Insufficient data on entity resilience thresholds. But the effect is real and repeatable."
That was enough.
James moved forward instead of waiting. His enhanced speed closed the distance before the entity had finished its backward motion, and he drove a combination into its midsection, jab to create reaction, cross to exploit it, both gauntleted fists working in rapid succession the way thirty-seven martial arts of trained muscle memory made automatic.
Thud. Thud.
The sound each impact made was wrong in a way that bypassed intellectual analysis and went straight to instinct, the part of a person that existed before language and simply registered wrongness as wrongness. But the entity staggered with each hit, its form flickering at the edges, the wrongness of its proportions becoming more pronounced the more contact occurred.
It was working.
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