"Alpha Team, deploy," Sybil called over the telepathic link. "Teams Beta and Delta, secure the site and eliminate all survivors."
A team of four metas broke off and slipped through one of the open trapdoors, disappearing into the bowels of the hidden base.
"Gamma Team, locate Teekl and take the Chaos Lord out of play."
The shadow manipulator, Vari, leader of Gamma Team, nodded and expanded his shadow. Three other metas joined him, and they sank into the darkness.
I knew Alpha Team well. It was made up of my heaviest hitters: a teleporter with greatly enhanced visual acuity, a bruiser made with the Terror Twins' DNA, a powerful emitter with Killer Frost's meta powers, and a controller armed with a massively upgraded version of Count Vertigo's abilities.
Together, they were a match for most heroes and villains, and I had absolute faith they could handle Luthor's trap.
My only concern was the Witch Boy.
For the plan to work, they had to buy Gamma Team enough time to find and eliminate the Chaos Lord's tether to the physical world: a plain-looking house cat. It was never far from Klarion.
Screams and fractured memories poured through the telepathic link almost immediately.
I had been right to worry.
Klarion had gone after them, and he had not held back.
Lobo took advantage of my distraction, nailing me in the chest with a blast that knocked the wind out of me. Every cell in my body rebelled.
I lost control of my flight, and the ground rushed up to meet me. Lobo eagerly followed on his bike as brutal scenes crashed through the link and into my mind.
He bathed me in laser fire.
I dug deep, pitting my monstrous will against my short-circuiting body and forcing it to obey. Twisting in midair, I reversed direction on a dime and shot back toward Lobo.
He jerked his bike aside, but not quickly enough. I slammed into his shoulder, knocking him off the bike and drawing a bark of laughter from the bounty hunter. His cigar went flying alongside his rifle, but it seemed Lobo still had one more card up his sleeve: a hooked chain.
He whipped it upward, wrapping it around my ankle and yanking me down hard enough to bury me in a crater. Then he tried to reel me in, but Team Beta's teleporter reached me first and whisked me away.
Instantly, Teams Beta and Delta piled on, buying me room to breathe while my meta powers worked through the Red Sun energy saturating my body.
In my mind, a similar scene of violence unfolded in the Cadmus lab.
Klarion was tearing Alpha Team apart.
He flayed the teleporter alive, wrung the bruiser out like a mop, and set my emitter ablaze with chaos fire. Finally, he made the controller vomit up his entire digestive tract.
A growl escaped me, and that only made me angrier.
They were disposable. This was what they had literally been made for.
So why?
Why was I upset?
Klarion cackled the entire time, tutting softly at the end.
"Dead already? I wanted to play soldier for longer."
Something good did come of the massacre.
Delta Team had eyes on Teekl.
The cat was perched on the Witch Boy's shoulder.
Gamma Team attacked with overwhelming force, erupting from the dying shadow of Alpha Team's emitter.
"Sneaky, sneaky," Klarion quipped.
Darkness flooded the hall in an attempt to blind him while someone fired a wind blade at his throat. Klarion swatted it aside, a flash of irritation crossing his face.
The team bruiser closed in immediately and swung, forcing the Lord of Chaos to leap back as pressure swept down the corridor.
At the same time, an invisible force wrapped around the cat's head and crushed it.
"No! Teekl!"
Klarion's face twisted with rage.
Then the connection cut out, and just in time, too.
Lobo had called down his bike and cut through Team Beta's bruiser, a washed-up boxer in her thirties.
The burning pentagram in the sky vanished, and I felt Klarion's oppressive presence lift from my soul.
My cursed techniques and control returned, and with them came my rage.
I vanished and reappeared with my hand wrapped firmly around Lobo's throat.
Even caught off guard, Lobo never stopped smiling, right up until the moment he died.
He burst like an overripe melon, blood and biomass splattering across me and my meta teams, but killing him had not been enough to satisfy my anger.
"Get him down here," I ordered Sybil, who relayed the command to my clone.
He was barely holding his own against Black Adam.
They might have been close in strength, but centuries of experience and magical lightning were not something Accelerated Adaptation could handle.
My clone crashed into the dirt, bloodied and burned, but noticeably more muscular than before.
Black Adam, by comparison, looked almost untouched beneath the desert sun. Lightning crackled between his fingers as he descended from the sky.
"Did you really think that pale copy of Superman could defeat a champion of the divine?" he demanded.
I sent a telepathic order to the remaining teams, instructing them to storm the facility while I dealt with Black Adam. My clone followed them inside.
"No," I answered honestly, rising into the air to meet him. "But perhaps I will be an adequate substitute."
I caught Adam staring at my naked body and fashioned clothes from my pink hair, which cascaded down over my shoulders.
The slight sneer on his lips told me exactly what he thought of me. Even after seeing what remained of Lobo, he wasn't afraid.
My nostrils flared. I didn't know why I let it get to me.
Blood burst from Teth-Adam's chest as Dismantle sliced through his god-blessed clothes, flesh, and muscle.
And while he gaped at the wound in surprise, I went after him.
No stranger to pain, Black Adam recovered almost immediately and hurled lightning at me, but I did not slow.
I seized space itself as though it were a blanket and twisted it, redirecting the bolt harmlessly into the ground.
Then I drove my fist into his stomach, pouring all of my Kryptonian strength and cursed energy reinforcement into the blow.
He rocketed into the clouds.
I followed with a flash of Projection Sorcery, arriving before him.
He froze in place like a reflection trapped in glass as the technique took effect.
I swung, channeling every ounce of Kryptonian might I possessed alongside the extension of my fourth technique, Sky Manipulation.
"Thin-Ice Breaker."
Teth-Adam shattered twice: first when he crashed through the mirrored plane, and again when Thin-Ice Breaker fractured space centimeters from his face.
The air ignited.
The impact created a vortex of pressure and heat that stretched for kilometers.
Teth landed somewhere far from the base, deeper in the desert, where he was likely barely clinging to life.
I activated Projection Sorcery again, descending from the stratosphere to the research base entrance in seconds.
The base door stood open when I arrived.
Lex Luthor hung in the air, suffocating in Sybil's telekinetic grasp.
She had finally entered the battlefield.
She was a young-looking Romani woman with beautiful wavy hair and crueler eyes than mine.
"Where is the original?" she demanded.
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