Helspont studied Thea for a long time and couldn't make sense of her. He'd never encountered a Thousand-Year Sealed Ancient God, let alone one of the New Gods: he had no frame of reference.
"Earthling, you have good taste," he announced, drawing himself up. "Tell you what: complete a task for me, and I'll spare your life. You've earned the right to kneel at my feet."
What the hell is wrong with this guy? Thea thought, already rolling up her sleeve. Even Darkseid thinks twice before talking like that. You have absolutely no idea who you're dealing with.
She was half a second from cutting him down when Batman's voice came through her earpiece. "Hear him out. Find out what the task is."
Thea caught herself. Right. Intel first.
She couldn't very well actually kneel, so she fell back on her acting skills instead: her complexion went pale, her breathing turned ragged, and she hunched slightly as if she'd taken serious damage from that earlier blast of blue light and was barely holding herself together through sheer stubbornness.
"You... what do you want from us?" she said, her voice carrying just the right tremor of forced defiance.
The performance was so convincing that even Superman and the others stared. That's Oscar material right there.
Helspont preened and launched into an introduction: eldest son of the Helsperial lineage, sovereign of the Second Territory of Montos, a cascade of titles and names that meant nothing to any of them.
Never mind that his planet had been blown to cosmic dust, that his own people had exiled him, and that precious few of his kind remained anywhere in the universe. Listening to him recite his pedigree, you'd almost think: Wow, what an important person. Very grand indeed.
"My generosity extends only for today," Helspont declared, spreading his arms wide as if bestowing a gift upon the universe. "You few are the finest specimens your world has produced. Be grateful for this rare mercy: today, you are privileged to call me Master."
He was really getting into it now. Blue energy rolled off him in waves, and faintly, just beneath the edge of perception, something like a chorus drifted through the air.
Thea had studied enough psychology to read the pattern: he wasn't posturing. He genuinely believed every word. This wasn't a taunt: he actually thought he was doing them a favor.
Hal Jordan had lunged forward three times and been physically restrained each time. Even the Flash, who had the patience of a golden retriever, was grinding his teeth. Batman held them all back and shot Thea a look: keep going.
She cast an illusion.
In it, Batman dropped to both knees with a resonant thud. Thea and Diana remained standing at a distance: far enough that the angle made it ambiguous. Visually, it landed exactly right.
"Good, good." Helspont practically glowed. "Your humility has saved you from certain death. I must say, you really do have remarkable judgment."
The Justice League exchanged glances in silence. What exactly did we do that made you this happy? Only Diana had felt the flicker of Thea's magic.
"I shall assign you a task," Helspont continued, building to his crescendo. "If you succeed, I will grant you this planet—and this young solar system—as your reward!"
Thea wasted no time. The illusion-Batman kowtowed twice, the crack of forehead on stone ringing through the chamber.
Helspont, riding a wave of self-satisfaction, finally got to the point.
"In the region your people call Jupiter, there is an ancient temple of my people. I have recovered fragments from my command core's residual memory. Within that temple lies a weapon capable of reshaping the entire universe. Retrieve it for me—deliver it into my hands—and as reward for your loyalty, I shall permit you to rule this world. Forever."
His voice had taken on a feverish edge. The assembled heroes exchanged glances. He just... told us everything. We didn't even pretend to agree and he's already given us the whole plan.
"We need to put him down and then get to Jupiter." Superman felt a knot forming in his gut. A universe-reshaping weapon was almost certainly an exaggeration—but almost certainly wasn't definitely.
Time to move.
Thea dropped the illusion.
The vision dissolved. Helspont blinked—and then, a half-second later, understood exactly what had happened. The creatures he'd written off as insects had played him. He drew breath to rage —
— and Thea's hand was already up, a bolt of lightning snapping across the space between them.
He reacted fast, shifting his body into a half-phased state and threading the attack, the blue flame-energy reversing direction to coil around Superman's torso.
Diana's boot caught him square in the midsection. From the other side, Aquaman's trident swept down in a thunderous arc.
Thea didn't join the pile-on. Instead she stepped back and watched, cataloging his capabilities with clinical attention.
Interesting.
His power had something in common with the Martian Manhunter's: mental in origin, psychokinetic at its core. But where J'onn's power was invisible and intangible, Helspont's manifested as visible blue light, reminiscent of a particular kind of spectral energy she'd once encountered in a game.
The blue wasn't pure, though. Threading through it were veins of yellow—and by every principle of elemental theory, impurity weakened power. The purer the source, the greater the output. That was practically axiomatic.
Yet Helspont was using the yellow contamination deliberately, weaving it into his attacks as a supplementary layer. And somehow it was working: he was holding off six members of the Justice League simultaneously.
Superman and Diana bore the brunt, absorbing the most punishment as the heaviest hitters. But the man was frustratingly balanced: no obvious weak points, no exploitable gaps. He fought like Martian Manhunter without the vulnerability to fire: consistent, adaptive, irritatingly durable.
And the location didn't help. Deep inside a mountain, nobody could cut loose. One misfired attack at full power and the peak above them would come down: a geological event that would register across the entire continent. Everyone was pulling their punches, fighting at a fraction of their actual ability.
Helspont had no such limitations. He opened up completely, one against six, and the exchange looked—appallingly—like a draw.
Superman, for all his strength, was fighting with both hands tied behind his back. Batman, on the other hand, was throwing left hooks and right crosses with genuine enthusiasm, footwork crisp, combinations sharp: technically speaking, the most unrestricted fighter in the room.
Diana's twin blades were still stored in Thea's ring, still stained with traces of Darkseid's Omega Effect. She was fighting with a replica lightning-spear, which meant she shared Superman's problem: too much risk of catastrophic collateral damage. She'd been reduced to a control-and-contain strategy, operating at less than twenty percent of her actual capacity.
The lightning energy should have had some natural advantage against a psychic, but the yellow veins kept absorbing and neutralizing it. Augmented by that power, Helspont's speed and strength had climbed to something approaching Superman's level: a deeply uncomfortable development.
The Flash's high-speed strikes kept bouncing off that obsidian-black armor. Green Lantern's constructs could bind him for moments, but Helspont's phasing ability let him slip free. The others weren't faring much better.
Once he'd mapped their patterns, Helspont went on the offensive. The blue energy took shape—blades, lances, shards—some flung outward, some gripped in his hands like weapons. Watching Hal's ring constructs gave him an idea, and his expression shifted.
The blue light deformed and elongated, twisting itself into something like a massive morningstar. He raised it overhead and brought it down across the group like a hammer.