Six against one, in a space where conventional martial arts were a secondary consideration and raw enhanced strength was the primary tool. His gauntlets could hurt them. His speed could manage the spacing. His enhanced durability could absorb hits that would end a normal person.
Whether all of that was enough was a question the next ten seconds would answer.
The first one reached him.
BOOM!
He caught its strike on crossed forearms, the impact drove him back a step, and he redirected the force into a throw that sent it sideways into the second entity's path. They tangled. Two problems became one problem for approximately three seconds.
Third entity swung from his left. James ducked under it, drove both fists upward into its midsection as it passed overhead.
Thud! Thud!
The resonance effect made it stagger. He followed with a shoulder charge that used his enhanced mass and momentum to physically displace it from the path toward Zatanna.
Fourth entity hit him from behind before he'd finished the follow-through. The impact was solid, landed between his shoulder blades, drove him forward and down to one knee. His enhanced durability absorbed it. The suit took damage he'd assess later. He came back up rotating, using the momentum of recovery to drive an elbow into the entity's approximate face region.
The fifth and sixth were past him. He'd lost track of them for two seconds and they'd exploited it.
They were three feet from Zatanna.
Her voice didn't stop. Her hands kept moving through the gestures the spell required. She looked at the entities closing on her with an expression that was not the expression of someone who had run out of options, but it was the expression of someone who was very aware that the margin had gotten extremely thin.
James grabbed the fourth entity by what served it as a wrist and hauled it around bodily, using his enhanced strength to put it between himself and the other two, creating a physical obstruction in their path.
It bought two seconds.
Zatanna's voice reached a peak. The layered harmonics James had been tracking with his enhanced hearing resolved into something that wasn't a sound anymore, or wasn't only a sound. It occupied the same register as the wrongness of the entities' movement but ran in opposition to it, like a frequency specifically designed to cancel another frequency.
The blue-white light from the floor symbols detonated outward.
Not an explosion. Not physically. James felt no concussion, no pressure wave, no heat. But every entity in the chamber reacted as though they'd been hit by all of those things simultaneously. Forms flickering, proportions distorting further, the coherence that allowed them to maintain presence in this plane visibly unraveling at the edges.
The one he was using as a physical obstruction simply wasn't there anymore. His hands closed on empty air.
The one he'd thrown against the wall: gone.
All six, gone.
The light from the floor symbols faded. The carved circles went dark, inert stone again. The temperature began climbing back toward normal, slowly, the way a room warms after a window has been closed rather than the way it warms from a heat source.
The chamber was quiet.
James stayed in his combat stance for five full seconds, enhanced senses scanning every corner, every shadow, every surface for signs that the entities had relocated rather than dispersed. AEGIS ran parallel analysis.
"No residual dimensional energy signatures detected above baseline. Entities appear to have been returned to their plane of origin. Local reality stress readings returning to normal parameters. Threat assessment: resolved."
He lowered his hands. Assessed himself. His left arm was functioning fully, the numbness from that first hit long since recovered. His back ached where the fourth entity had landed its strike, a deep ache that his enhanced healing would clear overnight. His suit had taken cosmetic damage and one cracked plate along the right forearm.
He was fine. Functionally fine.
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