Thea had the urge to bury her face in her hands.
This was the fundamental difference between her and these so-called heroes. She wanted to ask them outright—they wouldn't kill human criminals, fine. But were aliens human? Did "no killing" apply to them too?
Looking at Batman getting swarmed from all sides, she already knew his answer: still no. Admirable conviction. Laughable rigidity.
She and Diana had no choice but to drop down and help. Thea put the Holy Sword away and drew her whip instead, deliberately avoiding techniques like Silver Fire. The whip's tip moved like a living serpent, coiling around enemy throats, then flinging them away one by one.
Diana did the same on the opposite flank—she retracted the lightning from her spear and used it like a staff, trading blows with the enemy in clean, measured strikes.
The sky flickered between light and dark overhead. Hurricane gusts periodically swept the ground. It was a miserable, grinding battle. In the end, the heroes' sheer power carried the day—they wore down all five hundred–plus aliens through attrition. Not because the Demostars stopped wanting to fight, but because they simply ran out of stamina.
"Talk," Diana said, the golden lasso binding the largest of them. "Who are you people, and where did you come from?"
The alien spat blood-flecked foam and managed to force out a single word—something that sounded like a name.
Diana pressed him with several more questions, but the creature's language faculties had nearly collapsed. All it could produce were sounds resembling roars and expressions of rage.
"They've completely devolved," Ray Palmer said, his voice grave.
Thea agreed. These Demostars were nothing like their kin—savage, bloodthirsty, feral. Talking to them about spacecraft and genetic engineering would have been absurd. The irony, though, was that many of their weapons had been forged from aerospace materials: high-grade alloys bent and hammered into spears and blades. Civilization, reduced to clubs.
Diana's questioning was swift. Her expression darkened. "Jupiter has no food. For the past fifty years, they've survived by eating each other. So..."
The question hanging over the group was grim: was there any reason to let these creatures live? Diana's vote was to execute them on the spot. Thea raised both hands in immediate agreement. Cannibalism within their own species—they'd forfeited their claim to sentience long ago.
"What if we transported them to a distant planet?" Batman said.
"Even if we could manage that," Thea countered, "what about the bacteria they're carrying? It could devastate the ecosystem of whatever world they land on. Have you actually thought that through?"
Batman went silent and looked down. He seemed to make a decision, then turned and walked away without another word.
Thea glanced at Superman. He quickly averted his eyes. She looked around at the group one by one. No one would meet her gaze.
What exactly is going on here? None of you want to dirty your hands, so you're just waiting for me to do it—is that it?
A single soul extraction could drop five hundred at once. Clean, efficient, painless. The only downside was that it would make her look evil, and Thea did care—somewhat—about how she came across.
"Fine," she said, shaking her head with a sigh. "If none of you want to kill them, and I can't exactly do five hundred by myself... let them go."
"But if they go back to... to eating each other?" The Flash tried to phrase it delicately. He failed.
No one had an answer. The heroes were tangled up in their own morality, trapped between two equally untenable options: they couldn't kill these creatures, and they couldn't safely release them.
Diana leaned in and murmured something to Thea.
"Are you sure you can do that?" Thea asked.
Diana nodded. She spread the Lasso of Truth wide, and in an instant the entire group of five hundred was coiled together in a single mass.
Thea began inscribing a magic array in midair—an intricate, sweeping pattern. She channeled an enormous surge of power, her hands blazing with brilliant light. Then, with a sharp crack, she slammed the completed array down onto the captives.
Both goddesses activated their divine power simultaneously. Thea's Authority over Wealth shattered the prisoners' mental defenses. She borrowed the brainwashing principles she had observed from the Blue Lanterns, layered in fragments of theory she'd studied at the monastery of the ancient monk at the summit, and assembled it all into a mass compulsion array.
At the same time, Diana's Lasso of Truth reached deeper—showing the Demostars a glimpse of their own lost selves. That glimpse was fragile and fleeting; even most humans never encounter their true selves in a lifetime, let alone creatures this mired in depravity. That was when the power of a sustained divine seat made the difference.
One by one, the feral gleam faded from their eyes. Memories of who they had been surfaced—their former lives, their former identities. Long-mutated organs emitted low, mournful sounds. Clouded gazes slowly recovered a faint spark of intelligence.
Thea gave a slight shake of her head. These poor fools had woken up far too late, and fallen far too deep. She was not, by nature, a sentimental person. She simply found the sample size too small for the compulsion array to hit its full potential.
The effect was barely perceptible—Diana didn't experience anything meaningful before it faded away. If we had tens of millions of lost souls to work with—a truly massive array—Diana might just unlock a new divine seat.
The rest of the League had no idea what was going through Thea's mind. They broke into applause for the two of them. One very large headache, finally resolved. They left behind a field of guilt-ridden, penitent Demostars and turned in the direction the aliens had come from.
The camp was a nightmare—blood-soaked ground, scattered containers, strips of wind-dried meat. Nobody said a word. An entire intelligent species, reduced to this in just fifty years. In some ways, civilization really was a fragile thing.
"This must be it." They stopped at a cave entrance roughly six feet (1.8 m) wide and over ten feet (3 m) tall. The interior glowed with a faint indigo light. Whatever weapon Helspont had been guarding was undoubtedly inside.
The entrance bore enormous gouges in the stone, and the surrounding ground was littered with severed limbs and stacked bones.
"The two stone guardians were right here," Hal Jordan said, still visibly shaken. "I thought they were decorations. I tried to charge straight in—next thing I knew, a sword came down at me..."
Thea pictured the scene and found it genuinely entertaining. Hal had been poking his head in curiously, assuming the stone figures were ornamental. He hadn't realized they were solar-powered sentinels with built-in security protocols. If his reflexes hadn't been sharp, he'd have been split in two.
The stone guardians were now under control. The Demostars outside had all been mentally wiped. The cave was open.
The heroes filed in single file. The cave was modest in size, but its interior had been cut with precise geometry—clearly the work of the original Demostars who had first arrived on Jupiter, when they still had a civilization worth the name.
Hal spotted lizard-man statues arranged around the walls and immediately raised his power ring, tension spiking.
"Those are stone carvings. There's nothing dangerous in here," Thea said, barely concealing her exasperation. This guy is genuinely lowering the average quality of the Green Lantern Corps.
"Is this what that creature called the world-ending weapon?" They reached the far end of the cave. There, at the very center, stood a lizard-man statue—arms raised, cradling an energy rod of deep cobalt blue. It pulsed with dazzling light, hovering perfectly still, as though waiting for its purpose to be called.
Thea nodded. The rod was saturated with enormous amounts of energy. On a technologically advanced planet, repurposed as the primary power source for some kind of super-scale orbital cannon, it would be an unrivaled weapon. The Demostars had been right to call it that.
The group swept the cave carefully. No ambushes, no traps.
This Jupiter expedition had finally come to a clean end.