"Not bad at all," Thea murmured, her gaze drifting to what looked like an empty stretch of wall. "Master: you can come out now. I've known you were there since we walked in."
Nine translucent figures stepped through the stone: monks, rendered in the half-real quality of lingering spirits. They came from different eras and different traditions: some serene-faced, some carrying expressions of profound sorrow. Behind their wavering forms, the faint echo of Sanskrit chanting drifted through the chamber like smoke. Even in death, the depth of their practice was unmistakable.
Thea's divine rank over souls had told her immediately. She'd spotted the nine the moment the group entered: she simply hadn't known whose side they were on, so she'd kept quiet.
"Unknown goddess," the lead monk said, his voice carrying the unhurried cadence of long practice. "Please restrain your companions. The demon cannot be killed: only sealed."
Thea said nothing. She met his gaze with those star-bright eyes and waited for him to explain.
The story, when it came, was thoroughly ridiculous: and strangely touching.
Helspont had been exiled by his people and arrived on Earth roughly two thousand years ago, which explained why his appearance had drifted so far from the modern Daemonite baseline. He hadn't spent those two thousand years in peace. He'd spent them being very inconveniently imprisoned by a rotating committee of Buddhist monks.
These nine came from different sects: sects that, under ordinary circumstances, argued bitterly over points of doctrine and occasionally came to blows over them. A Daemonite falling from the sky put a temporary hold on the theological debates.
They weren't the comfortable, half-hearted monks of the modern era. They predated Merlin. Each one of them carried genuine power.
Nine against one, they'd managed a slight advantage. The outcome: the time-honored method of seal the demon and then try to talk it out of being evil.
The part that made Thea bite down a laugh was this: they had no concept of aliens. Helspont was incomprehensible in appearance, unintelligible in language, and catastrophically violent in temperament: burning villages, killing without provocation. The monks concluded he was a malevolent spirit of some variety, contained him, and promptly began chanting sutras at him around the clock in an attempt to purify his karma.
He had certainly earned plenty of karma to purify.
Their technique was less refined than the Indigo Tribe's forced compassion conditioning, but they had an advantage the Tribe didn't: time. Even after their bodies gave out, their spirits remained. The chanting never stopped.
Two thousand years of constant sutras, and something impossible happened. A being who had once been one of the most powerful psionic entities in his species—one who at peak capacity might have matched the Martian Manhunter—had been forcibly enlightened by more than half.
He hadn't surrendered to it. His survival instincts were too strong; he knew that full conversion would erase what he was. So he'd fought back, just enough: which was why he now wandered in a state of fractured coherence, talking to himself, cycling between grandiosity and confusion, making proclamations that contradicted each other from one sentence to the next. Half-enlightened and fighting it.
Eventually, drawing on the thin strand of Buddhist clarity the monks had cultivated in him, Helspont had cracked the seal from the inside. But two millennia in that state had destroyed his body the moment he emerged. He'd used the last of his psionic energy to encapsulate the skeleton of a nearby monk who had died with his remains still present: half spectral energy, half ancient bone. That was what they'd been fighting.
"The demon, ourselves, and the seal are all deeply integrated into the mountain's structure," the lead monk concluded. "If any one element is destroyed, the entire peak will collapse."
Thea's expression grew quiet.
The monk only saw the mountain. He didn't know what the collapse of the world's highest peak would do to the tectonic plates beneath Asia. The pressure wave alone would register on every seismograph on the planet. It wouldn't be a local disaster: it would be a civilization-ending event. Coastal cities worldwide. Hundreds of millions dead. The kind of casualty count that didn't fit in a sentence.
"I'll honor your work," Thea said. "I'll re-establish the seal myself. Keep chanting: help him finish what you started."
She explained the stakes to the others in a few blunt sentences. The room went quiet. Even Superman looked briefly sick.
I shouldn't have charged in like that, he thought.
"Hold him. I'll restart the seal."
She touched the lead monk's shoulder briefly—an apology—and began reading his memories. The invasion was blunt and total, and she didn't pretend otherwise. The monks didn't love it. But they also had no ability to resist a goddess of the soul, and Thea, at least, clearly had principles.
Buddhist sealing arts. The methodology was extraordinary. Even from her current vantage point—which was considerably elevated—several of the techniques gave her genuine pause. Remarkable ingenuity for a mortal tradition.
She absorbed everything in two passes. The first gave her seventy or eighty percent comprehension. The second filled in the gaps completely.
Before the monks could finish registering their discomfort, she turned and pressed nine points of light into their spirits, one for each of them.
"Fair trade," she said. "You gave me your knowledge. I've reinforced your souls and added a few notes: my own understanding of sealing theory, and some thoughts on the cultivation of compassion. From a slightly different angle."
Divine comprehension exceeded mortal perception by such a margin that the monks couldn't fully process what they'd received. But they felt it: like looking at a familiar landscape and suddenly understanding the geology beneath it. Several of them, for the first time in centuries, felt the itch to practice.
If only we still had bodies, they thought, almost in unison. A hundred more students, at least.
Nine monks sighed collectively and turned back toward their positions. They had one student left.
Helspont, still in the middle of holding off the Justice League, felt a sudden inexplicable anxiety. He didn't know why. His subconscious was apparently better informed than he was.
"Everyone to your positions. I'll contain him."
Eight monks moved to the eight compass points. The ninth remained where he was: standing quietly, watching Helspont, watching the encased bones of his old companion still moving inside that shell of blue energy.
Thea placed her palm flat on the floor.
Her divine power and Buddhist methodology were entirely different systems, but she could brute-force the interface. A thread of grey energy—barely visible—sank into the stone and spread outward through the walls.
The chamber shook. A deep, rolling crack of sound, and then nine massive stone steles erupted from the earth: eight in a ring, the ninth in the center. Helspont reacted instantly, bringing his foot down on the central one and driving it back into the floor. Thea smiled faintly and didn't stop him.
In the firelight, the steles glowed with deep, sourceless radiance. They were ancient: the stone heavily weathered, the surfaces carved dense with Sanskrit text, each character placed with the care of someone who'd spent years at the work. The weight of history was almost physical.
The original ritual had required hundreds of monks chanting in unison over an extended period. Thea had approximately nine elderly spirits and a rapidly deteriorating situation.
She had the nine begin the opening sequence as a frame—the ritual anchor that would guide everything else—and then set aside their methodology entirely and substituted her own. You nine just stand there and cheer. I've got it from here.
As she assembled the modified sealing array, Helspont felt the shift—a predator's instinct that something had changed, that the balance was tipping.