Although he was getting a headache from dealing with the 'all-knowing' superior he still had to follow the man's idea of forming a special metahuman league.
Because Wonder Woman and Aquaman had already proven that ordinary human armies were essentially useless in a conflict of this scale.
The disparity between the two sides' conventional forces led every military staff office to the same conclusion: total defeat. So the only hope lay in decapitation strikes.
A specialized tactical team would strike fast, take down Aquaman and Wonder Woman, and hopefully force them into negotiations.
Cyborg was currently going through his roster:
First, Captain Cold of Central City, Leonard Snart, who wielded a high-tech ionic gun capable of instantly freezing people into ice statues.
From Fawcett City, —Shazam—actually Billy Batson and five other children. Together, when they shouted Shazam, they transformed into a powerful warrior embodying the power of six gods.
Element Woman, from a military research facility, capable of shapeshifting and generating heat, as well as controlling ice, fire, earth, and other substances.
And then there was someone called the enchantress—where did she even come from?
And possibly the most useful of all: Green Lantern Corps member Abin Sur, who claimed to be 'the greatest Green Lantern,' sent by a distant planet called Oa to patrol Earth's sector 2814 and maintain peace and life in this region of space.
Abin Sur had survived a crash landing. After brief contact with Cyborg, he had departed Earth. He was effectively the first officially acknowledged extraterrestrial visitor—the first contact.
He was supposed to return to Oa to report Earth's situation and request reinforcements. By now, he should have been back.
Just as Cyborg's mental thread recalled this, another thread received a communication request from Abin Sur. His ship was already approaching the edge of the solar system.
From Cyborg's perspective, although Abin Sur's face was naturally reddish-purple, emotional analysis clearly indicated that his expression was far from good.
"Abin Sur, what's your Corps planning to do?"
Abin Sur's emotional state was noticeably worse than when he had left Earth. All his earlier enthusiasm seemed to have been drained away. And, as expected, his news was not good:
"There are no reinforcements. The Green Lantern Corps is currently tied up. But I will still fight alongside you on Earth."
Abin Sur had sought support from the Corps in hopes of stabilizing Earth's conflicts, but the coldness of the Guardians on Oa had made him question, for the first time, the meaning of the Green Lantern Corps itself.
A war between two ancient god-descended races, in his view, could be handled by a dozen elite Lanterns like himself or Sinestro.
But the Guardians had simply said, "Earth is destined to be destroyed," and ordered him to retrieve something important, then withdraw—leaving Earth to its fate.
If the Guardians created the Corps to protect life, then why abandon all life on Earth to die?
"Don't act on emotion, Abin Sur. The Corps is under pressure from multiple fronts and cannot open a new battlefield on Earth. Retrieve the Life Entity and withdraw immediately!"
The order from Oa rang again through his ring after their falling out:
"Think of the hundreds of trillions of other lives in the universe. Their lives are more important than those doomed beings on Earth!"
"No! To hell with that!"
Abin Sur, usually calm and composed, cursed the Guardians he once respected, then unilaterally cut off the communication. He turned his ship toward the solar system:
"All life is important!"
---
Joey had once read a science fiction short story called "A Divergent Path on an Alien World(a chinese sci-fi)", which described how the principle behind faster-than-light travel was absurdly simple.
Simple in the same way sparks are created by striking flint, heat cooks food, or how a mixture of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal produces an explosion.
Almost every species would discover hyperspace travel and anti-gravity fields around the transition from the stone age to the iron age, quickly entering a spacefaring era.
Except humans.
Humans, over thousands of years, advanced extremely far in many technological fields—especially in killing each other, where they were unmatched.
They would have eventually destroyed themselves in nuclear winter or internal collapse, had it not been for an invading interstellar colonial ship that brought hyperspace and anti-gravity technology to Earth—a civilization whose weapons were still flintlocks and bayonets.
Now Joey was in the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic, guided by Kara as she showed him the various artifacts from her ship.
The most intriguing items were clusters of crystalline structures that once held immense importance in Kryptonian history—Sunstone, once the core of all Kryptonian technology.
Although many sunstone-based technologies had been lost, what they could still do was beyond imagination. The entire Fortress of Solitude itself was constructed from them.
Guided by the core system of the tiny spacecraft, the sunstones were replicating and self-programming in a way that seemed almost like creation from nothing. In moments, they built the Fortress Joey had envisioned.
The process consumed only a massive chunk of ice and some seabed rock beneath it, which were deconstructed and transformed into crystalline matter.
Watching this technology, Joey couldn't help but admire Krypton's advancement—but at the same time, he felt a strange dissonance, like when he read "A Divergent Path on an Alien World" in his previous life.
A species with such advanced technology—especially one capable of surviving under a yellow sun with superpowers—should not have been so helpless in the face of its own planetary destruction.