He made three hard runs at the perimeter, trying to break through. Diana held the passage alone, shield and spear, not attacking—just occupying—and turned him back three times. He came away with bruises from her shield and nothing to show for it.
"Hal: contain him. Everyone else, back off."
Hal poured everything into the construct: not an elegant cage, just a solid mass of pure will, heavy and relentless. The ninth stele tore itself free from Helspont's foot and rose to meet the others.
The eight outer steles responded. Gold light traced across their carved surfaces, and then the inscriptions on the walls began to glow: scripture carved by human hands over generations, thin as thread at first, then building into a stream, then a flood. Every line of text in the chamber converged on the central stele, which ignited with a pull so absolute it simply ended the fight over resisting.
Superman had been looking for a use. He found one: he put both hands on Helspont's shoulders and pushed.
Eight monks chanted. The psionic resistance visible in Helspont's movements faded like smoke in a strong wind.
The ninth monk—the one who had been watching—made his decision. He threw himself forward, spirit and bone and two thousand years of practice, wrapping around Helspont in one last embrace.
They went in together.
The gold light folded shut. One by one, in the same deep silence with which they'd risen, nine stone steles descended back into the earth and became the floor again.
"Cool." The Flash crouched and ran his fingers along the seam where one had disappeared. He couldn't find it. "How does that work?"
The fight had been relatively mild. They all knew it: this was the appetizer. Jupiter was the main course.
"Fan out," Batman said, already moving toward one of the side passages with a torch. "Check whether the two escort machines pose any threat. Clear any remaining hazards."
The other six stood in silence.
"...When exactly did we elect him team leader?" Hal said, a distinct edge in his voice. "Because no one asked me."
Thea shrugged. Diana smiled slightly. The others dispersed without comment.
Thea didn't think there was much left to find, but she pulled Diana toward a section of wall covered in text anyway.
"Sanskrit?" Diana could read most of the world's written languages, and what gaps existed, her divine comprehension filled in without effort.
"Buddhist scripture," Thea confirmed. "It has something in common with your Patron domain: the idea that all living things possess inherent wisdom and virtue. All beings carry the nature of enlightenment within them. I don't know where the Buddha is now, but he walked further than any of us and saw things we haven't reached yet. This text might give you something to think about."
It was a calculated choice. Diana was steadfast—genuinely, admirably so—but steadfast could shade into inflexible, and her foundational worldview had been shaped too thoroughly by her mother Hippolyta's framework: with great power comes great responsibility. Useful. Also, in Thea's personal opinion, a bit limiting.
Some traditions would have suited Diana's instincts in certain ways—the universal love, the selfless service. But Thea had a deeply personal objection to her wife organizing her value system around the concept of loving all of humanity equally. She'd seen humanity up close. It was a complicated picture. And the idea of Diana walking around channeling boundless compassion toward every person on the planet was—no. That was her Diana. The rest of the species would figure itself out.
Buddhism, particularly the older and less socially engineered variety preserved in this underground chamber, offered something better: wisdom, truth, direct insight into the nature of reality. The advanced stages touched on concepts Thea recognized from the domain of cosmic rules: form arising from mind, the universe held within a single thought. That was worth Diana's time.
Diana read carefully, tracing the text with her fingertips. Thea talked through the harder passages: her absorption of the monks' memories gave her a working understanding, even if her intuitive distance from Buddhist thought meant she was explaining a landscape she'd never personally walked through.
Diana kept nodding. Her eyes grew brighter the longer she read.
Watching her, Thea felt quiet satisfaction—and a faint, private embarrassment. She'd been speaking with such fluency that Diana had no idea she was being guided by someone who hadn't internalized a single word of it. Buddhist theory was too far from her own nature. She could explain the architecture of a building she'd never set foot inside. As long as Diana didn't ask follow-up questions, she'd be fine.
The benefit, at least, was real in one direction. The discussions had sharpened something in Thea's grasp of her Truth domain, even if the philosophical content slid right off her. Her perception of certain aspects of the cosmic order had shifted noticeably: less like reading a map, more like recognizing terrain she'd been standing in all along.
Two muffled impacts echoed from the passages: Superman and the Flash, each resolving one of the escort machines.
Diana looked at the wall for another moment, visibly reluctant to leave.
They emerged from the crypt into the main corridor. Thea moved them all back to the Hall of Justice.
Back in the warmth, sunlight falling through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Aquaman finally exhaled. That's it. He was never setting foot anywhere that cold again. Not for any amount of mission briefing. Not for anything.
He had approximately ninety seconds of peace before his brow started to furrow. Because Superman and Batman were already standing on opposite sides of the room, and neither of them looked like they were done with the day.
Superman and Batman were already at it.
Superman's position: the heroes with space-survival capability should fly there and handle it directly. Batman's position: the non-flyers needed to be part of the team. His stated reasoning was that Jupiter was enormous, the temple's location was unknown, and more people meant faster search coverage.
"Fine. Everyone goes." Thea cut through it. "More people means faster searching. This has been a long enough day already." She sided with Batman: she had no memory of Daemonites from her previous life, which meant they weren't exactly a heavyweight threat in the wider cosmic catalog. A few extra humans in the mix weren't going to change the outcome.
"The Management Council has a few alien vessels, but the authorization process will take forever. Let's use the Daemonite ship from the dark side of the moon."
"The control interface —"
"There's a woman in Council custody: codename Voodoo. She has Daemonite heritage and can operate it. Leave that to me. You all gear up and meet me on the moon."
She transferred back to the Management Council.
Finding the woman designated Voodoo took no effort at all. She was hard to miss: suspended spread-eagled in mid-air by restraints that suppressed her abilities, watching the entrance with the lazy attention of someone who has stopped expecting anything interesting to happen.
"I know you," the woman said, her voice carrying a wry edge. "The President's daughter. Superhero. Well, well."
"You know me: good. That saves time. But I have a question: do you know yourself? Do you actually know who you are?"
The woman's lip curled. "Another 'love your planet, be a good person' speech? I know exactly what I'm doing and why. Working for aliens: what's wrong with that? Don't try to guilt me. You grew up in that house, with that money. What do you know about what it's like at the bottom?"
Thea held up a hand. "You've misread me. I have zero interest in lecturing you. But I'm confident about one thing: you're a clone."
She'd done extensive cloning research during the Black Adam project; none of it had ended up being necessary, but knowledge didn't disappear just because you stopped needing it. One look at Voodoo's file and the conclusion was immediate.