"Twenty kilometers," Hal Jordan said immediately. "I'll take point."
Before anyone could respond, he'd already gone: a green streak vanishing into the grey distance.
Three minutes later, they heard the explosions.
A pillar of fire rose from the direction he'd gone, followed by a second, followed by what was unmistakably the sound of a sustained firefight.
Batman said exactly one word under his breath.
"That idiot."
There was no real choice. The League moved.
Most of them could fly; the exceptions were the Flash, Aquaman, and Batman. The Flash had packed heating elements into his suit and the terrain barely slowed him: at his speed, the distance was negligible. Aquaman moved like what he was, all endurance and physical density, running and vaulting without elegance but covering ground fast.
Batman, on the other hand, was having a difficult time. No buildings. No trees. Nothing to anchor a grapple line, nothing to glide from. His grapple gun and glider were as useful as decorative objects, and his human-peak speed—impressive by any ordinary standard—was not impressive by this standard.
From above, Thea watched him falling behind, shoulders pumping, and felt a laugh build in her chest. She bit it back. Diana elbowed her, one eyebrow raised. Thea composed her face into something neutral, then quietly cast an advanced acceleration enhancement on him. He wouldn't know what hit him, but he'd stop losing ground.
They closed the distance to find Hal in full retreat: ring blazing, constructs shattering almost as fast as he could generate them, a horde of something pursuing him across the fractured landscape.
"There are two big ones," he shouted as he passed. "About five hundred smaller ones behind them."
This is what 'reconnaissance' looks like in the Green Lantern Corps, everyone thought simultaneously.
Superman didn't deliberate. He hit the front line.
Diana was half a step behind. Thea followed at a more measured pace, scanning the battlefield with actual analytical attention.
Different again.
The first Daemonites they'd encountered had been semi-translucent, humanoid, lizard-like. Hespont had been a blue-energy skeleton inhabiting a dead monk. These were something else entirely: massive, dense, skin like rough sandstone, heads too large for their bodies, with mouths full of interlocking sharp teeth arranged in overlapping rows. Rough hide garments. Crude bladed weapons, heavy and functional. Clusters of tendrils below their chins, the only feature that connected them to the Daemonite baseline.
Whether this was deliberate genetic adaptation to Jupiter's environment, a mutation produced by centuries of exposure, or some branching of the species, Thea couldn't say. The heroes on the ground didn't particularly care.
"The big ones!" Hal shouted as he circled back, pointing behind the onrushing horde.
Two colossi.
Two hundred meters (about 650 feet) tall. Carved entirely from what appeared to be solid obsidian, black and light-drinking, with a deep mirror-like finish that caught nothing and reflected less. They were shaped like ancient warriors—left hand bearing a great shield, right hand a sword—wearing styled helmets and carved cloaks, like Spartan soldiers reconstructed at absurd scale. Hal's constructs weren't even leaving marks. He'd hit both of them multiple times and they'd barely registered it, and meanwhile they were batting him around with casual violence.
Superman moved to intervene.
"Clark." Thea's voice stopped him. "Leave them to us."
She'd read them in a glance. Magic constructs: old ones, well-made. Whatever had crafted these had known exactly what they were doing. Letting Superman wade in with raw strength would risk damaging something she'd rather study.
He peeled off toward the main body of the battle without comment.
Thea raised one hand. Two massive conjured hands rose from the ground, palms upward, and closed around the lead golem's feet. Simultaneously she pushed out a large-area entanglement: green vines erupting from the broken earth, coiling rapidly up the obsidian legs.
The golem swung its sword and cut through the vines. It broke the conjured grip with one deliberate pull. Then it resumed walking, entirely unbothered.
"Old-school craftsmanship," Thea said, a note of something like professional respect in her voice. "Standard approaches aren't going to cut it."
She pulled in a concentrated arc of lightning and threw it like a javelin. The golem raised its shield. The bolt scattered across the surface and dissipated without leaving so much as a scorch mark.
A magical aegis. She stood back and really looked at it now, the way you look at fine engineering. If I put those in front of the Academy—two of them, one on each side—that would actually look remarkable.
The construction inside was drawing her attention too. The animating principle had remained stable and functional across what looked like centuries of operation without maintenance. The Cult of the Cold Flame's iron golems—the two she'd captured—had been barely functional. Maximum field endurance was under five minutes before they seized up. These two were operating at an entirely different level of sophistication.
Across the field, Diana had reached the same conclusion Thea had. She understood that the objective was to take them intact. Her battle-instinct, which had been running somewhat suppressed since receiving her divine rank—she hadn't faced anything that truly warranted it since Darkseid, and that encounter had carried a shadow of apprehension she wasn't proud of—suddenly found room to breathe. The golem was large, durable, and completely unimpressed by her.
Perfect.
Her fists fell like a storm. The golem stood its ground through over a hundred strikes in the span of an eyeblink, and she hit harder with each exchange.
"Work with me," Thea called.
She locked the first golem with a binding spell—layered, reinforced, woven from multiple spells cast simultaneously. Diana broke away from her own target, crossed the distance in a second, and drove the tip of her lightning-spear into the bound golem's knee with everything behind it. The sustained electrical discharge created a fractional delay in the golem's internal mana cycling—not enough to stop it, but enough. Diana's Lasso of Truth snapped out, wrapped, cinched, and the golem went rigid.
Thea stepped onto the golem's head. The head was roughly the size of a small room.
She pressed her palm flat against the stone and sent her spiritual perception inward.
What she found was elegant. Not complex by modern magical standards—actually rather straightforward in its approach—but assembled with the insight of someone who understood fundamental principles deeply and had found ways to combine them that nobody else had thought to try. The power source had an analogue to solar charging: continuous ambient energy collection, clean cycling, no single point of failure. It had been running on a self-sustaining loop for hundreds of years without anyone maintaining it.
Clever. Genuinely clever.
"Stop."
The command carried magical weight. She found the control nexus, applied a structured disruption, and the golem froze: shield arm raised, a statue again.
They took the second one down the same way.
The ground battle was a different kind of frustration.
In theory the heroes had every advantage: the Daemonite ground troops had no superhuman abilities. They relied entirely on physical strength and their crude weapons, and they fought without coordination: no formations, no tactics, just individual aggression and noise. Against someone like Superman or J'onn, superior numbers didn't matter. Ten times the count wouldn't matter.
The problem was that you couldn't kill them.
The non-lethal constraint turned what should have been a quick engagement into something wearing. One punch knocked an enemy down. Thirty seconds later they were back up. A kick launched one twenty meters; they came trotting back at the same relentless pace. The cycle repeated with no apparent end. The Daemonites didn't learn, didn't retreat, didn't get discouraged. They simply kept coming, with the persistence of something that didn't understand the concept of a lost fight.
The heroes were hitting a wall they couldn't push through: not from lack of power, but from the specific limitation of power you couldn't fully use.