Across the battlefield, Alan was creating construct after construct. Green warriors materialized with swords and shields, charging the enhanced soldiers in waves. But each one lasted maybe ten seconds before getting torn apart by superhuman strength. An enhanced soldier grabbed one of Alan's green warriors by the head and crushed it like an egg. Another ripped a construct's sword arm clean off and beat it to death with its own weapon.
Sweat poured down Alan's face as the constant creation and destruction drained him. "I can't keep this up," he shouted, his ring flickering as another construct got its spine snapped by an enhanced soldier. "These things are like nothing I've ever seen."
"Alan!" Diana shouted back, catching Ares's blade between her bracers and twisting to throw him off balance. Sparks flew as divine metal scraped against divine metal. "Stop trying to fight them! Contain them! Use your constructs to separate them from Ares!"
Understanding flashed in Alan's eyes. Instead of warriors, he started creating walls. Green barriers erupted from the ground, driving wedges between the enhanced soldiers and their divine commander. Cages formed around individual soldiers, cutting their line of sight to Ares.
Without being asked, Jim adjusted his position to support Alan's strategy. He dove from above, white-hot flames streaming behind him as he absorbed heat from the burning wreckage around them. His fire burned hotter than it ever had before, hot enough to melt steel on contact. He slammed into an enhanced soldier, his superheated flames cooking the giant from the inside as he passed through. The soldier collapsed, steam rising from his armor. "They're reading our moves before we make them! Every time I change tactics, they're already adapting!"
"Because they share Ares's tactical mind!" Diana explained, dropping flat as Ares's sword whistled over her head. She rolled between his legs and came up behind him, her lasso already in her hand. "Amaya! Jay! We need to isolate him from his soldiers!"
"I've got it!" Amaya shouted over the chaos. She channeled the rhino spirit and dropped her shoulder low, building momentum as she charged. Enhanced soldiers scattered like bowling pins as she bulldozed through their formation, her spirit-enhanced strength sending seven-foot giants flying through the air. "Jay! I need you to hit all of them at once!"
Jay flickered in and out of phase, an enhanced soldier's massive fist whooshing through empty air where his head had been a split second before. "Hit them with what? These guys are tanks and I just learned I can turn into a ghost!"
"You don't need to hurt them!" Diana spun away from Ares's blade and whipped her lasso in a wide arc, keeping him at distance. "Jay, phase through every single one of them! Whatever energy connects them to Ares, disrupt it!"
Jay's face lit up with understanding. "Wait, you want me to scramble their connection? Like jamming a radio?"
"Exactly that! Amaya, the moment Jay breaks their link, tear into them! Jim, I need a firewall between Ares and his troops right now!"
The plan clicked into place with Amazon precision, but it was their coordination that made it work. They'd learned to fight together over the past hour, reading each other's movements, anticipating each other's needs. Jay vibrated his molecules until his body became translucent, then shot forward like a ghost. He phased through the first enhanced soldier, then the second, then the third, his unique energy signature scrambling the divine connection like static on a radio.
The enhanced soldiers suddenly stopped moving in perfect sync. Their heads snapped around in confusion as their shared tactical mind went silent. They looked at each other, then at their enemies, like they'd just woken up from a dream.
"Now!" Diana shouted.
The response was immediate and perfectly timed. Amaya channeled every animal spirit she could reach. The power of lions, rhinos, eagles, and bears flooded through her at once. She became a force of nature, scattering the confused enhanced soldiers like bowling pins. Her fist caved in one soldier's chest plate. Her elbow shattered another's jaw. A knee strike folded a third in half.
At the exact same moment, Jim created a wall of superheated flame between Ares and his troops, the fire burning so intensely it turned sand to glass and made the air itself shimmer. He was pulling thermal energy from everything around him now, making his flames hotter than they'd ever been. The enhanced soldiers couldn't see their commander through the white-hot inferno, couldn't receive his tactical guidance.
Alan didn't need to be told what to do next. His constructs shifted strategy entirely. Instead of weapons, he built barriers. Green walls split the battlefield into sections, keeping the enhanced soldiers separated and unable to coordinate. Cages trapped individual soldiers. Barriers blocked their movement.
The teamwork was beautiful to watch. When an enhanced soldier broke through one of Alan's barriers, Jay was already there to phase through him and disrupt his movements. When another soldier tried to leap over Jim's firewall, Amaya's eagle spirit guided her to intercept him mid-air. They were moving like parts of the same organism, each covering the others' weaknesses.
"This is impossible!" Ares snarled, his composure cracking for the first time. His enhanced soldiers stumbled around like drunks, no longer moving as extensions of his will. "They are mine! They serve me!"
But even he could see what was happening. The five heroes weren't just fighting as individuals anymore. They were a unit, each one's abilities complementing the others perfectly. When one needed support, another was already moving to provide it. When one spotted an opening, the others were ready to exploit it.
Still, the tide was turning against them. For every enhanced soldier they managed to isolate, two more appeared from the facility's depths. The liberated prisoners were getting beaten down despite their courage. The five heroes found themselves pressed together in an ever-tightening circle, but their coordination only grew stronger under pressure.
The freed soldiers refused to give up. Falsworth had grabbed a HYDRA officer's pistol and was putting bullets through the joints in enhanced soldier armor. "Aim for the gaps!" he yelled to his fellow prisoners. "Their armor's got weak spots!"
Morita linked up with other prisoners, using his demolitions training to turn HYDRA's own explosives against them. "Take this, you bastards!" He lobbed an improvised grenade into a cluster of enhanced soldiers.
"Come on, you piece of shit!" Dugan wrestled with the controls of a HYDRA half-track, trying to get its weapons online. "Work, damn you!"
Gabe Jones dropped into the gunner's seat, his technical knowledge finally paying off. "Got it working, Dum Dum! Target-rich environment!"
With their divine coordination broken, the enhanced soldiers fought like regular troops. Incredibly strong regular troops, but regular troops nonetheless. And regular troops could be outfought with superior tactics and teamwork.
But the heroes' coordination was what kept them alive. When Jim got overwhelmed by three enhanced soldiers, Jay was already phasing through them to disrupt their attacks. When Alan's constructs started to fail from exhaustion, Amaya was there to physically hold the line. When Amaya got cornered, Jim's flames cleared her an escape route. They moved like they'd been fighting together for years, not hours.
Ares seemed to enjoy himself as he pressed his attack on Diana, but even he was being affected by what he was witnessing. His swordwork became more vicious, more desperate. "Your friends grow weak, Princess. Soon you will watch them die one by one. Then you will understand that hope is merely another word for delusion."
Diana spotted the Godkiller lying twenty feet away where it had fallen during the initial assault. But three enhanced soldiers blocked her path to the weapon. Around her, she could hear Jim's grunt of pain as an enhanced soldier managed to land a hit while he was absorbing thermal energy. Jay's sharp cry as he mistimed a phase and took a glancing blow. Alan's labored breathing as maintaining so many constructs at once pushed his ring to its limits.
This was what Ares had wanted all along. Not just victory, but the complete destruction of hope itself.
Robert Frank, one of the American soldiers from the 107th, grabbed a fallen HYDRA energy weapon. "I don't know how to use this thing, but anything's better than nothing."
The weapon discharged in his hands, sending a blast of blue energy toward one of the enhanced soldiers. The beam struck the man center mass, but instead of disintegrating him, it seemed to be absorbed into his body, making his eyes glow even brighter.
"That's not supposed to happen," Adam Brasher called out from nearby, where he was trying to help wounded prisoners. The former college student had been analyzing the enhanced soldiers' movements, looking for patterns or weaknesses. "The energy's feeding back into them somehow."
"Then we stop using their shit against them!" Dugan yelled as the half-track's main gun finally roared to life. "Gabe! Light 'em up!"
The conventional shells tore into the enhanced soldiers' formation, finally giving the heroes some breathing room as divine enhancement met good old-fashioned high explosives.
Ares backhanded Diana across the face, sending her sprawling. "You fight like Antiope taught you. All technique, no real power. She died the same way, trying to protect mortals who weren't worth saving."
Rage flared in Diana's chest, and for a moment, something else stirred beneath it. Something that made the air around her shimmer with heat.
Jay appeared beside one of the enhanced soldiers in a blur of motion, throwing a dozen punches in the space of a heartbeat. Each impact should have been enough to shatter bones, but the soldier absorbed the punishment and backhanded Jay into a concrete wall with inhuman force.
Jim had recovered from Ares's attack and was back in the air, this time coordinating with Alan. Green constructs guided the android's trajectory as he slammed into enhanced soldiers with controlled bursts of what little flame he could muster. They were finally starting to make progress against Ares's troops.
But more kept coming.
Diana rolled away from another of Ares's strikes, the god's fist punching a crater in the concrete where she'd been lying. She came up in a defensive stance, trying to reach the Godkiller.
"You cannot win, Princess," Ares taunted. "Even if you defeat every enhanced soldier I have created, even if your little friends somehow manage to harm me, it changes nothing. The damage is done. The war has fed me power beyond your comprehension."
"Maybe," Diana panted, wiping blood from her split lip. "But we can still stop you."
"Can you?" Ares gestured, and more enhanced soldiers poured into the courtyard from buildings throughout the facility. Fifty. Sixty. The number seemed endless.
But then something unexpected happened.
The enhanced soldier fighting Alan suddenly staggered, his divine augmentation flickering like a bad electrical connection. The constant interference from Jay's phasing ability, Alan's constructs disrupting their coordination, and Jim's superheated flames overwhelming their nervous systems was taking its toll. The shared tactical mind that had made them so deadly was beginning to fracture under the chaos of fighting opponents they couldn't predict or counter.
Alan's construct, which had been useless moments before, now sent the disoriented soldier flying backward.
"What the hell?" Ares spun, his attention torn between Diana and the larger battle.
Another enhanced soldier collapsed entirely, his glowing red eyes fading to normal human brown as the divine connection severed completely. He looked around in confusion, his superhuman size already beginning to diminish, clearly disoriented and unsure of his surroundings.
Amaya, her necklace blazing with the power of the rhino spirit, charged into a group of three enhanced soldiers. This time, they went down under her attack, their divine enhancements failing at the critical moment as their connection to Ares became too strained to maintain.
"The connection's breaking!" Adam Brasher called out from where he was helping coordinate the prisoner evacuation. "They can't maintain the link! Look at them!"
He was right. The enhanced soldiers' supernatural abilities were failing one by one. The combined assault from Jay's reality-disrupting phasing, Alan's will-powered constructs, Jim's thermal overloads, and the sheer chaos of battle was overwhelming the divine network that bound them to Ares.
"No," Ares snarled, his composure finally cracking. "I need more time. The power transfer isn't complete yet."
Robert Frank was still holding the energy weapon when the overloaded HYDRA technology finally gave way. The weapon began to spark and hiss in his hands, blue energy crackling along its length as the Tesseract powered systems went critical.
"This thing's gonna blow!" Robert shouted. He hurled the weapon toward a group of advancing enhanced soldiers, trying to get it away from the wounded prisoners.
Adam Brasher had been helping a wounded prisoner to safety when he saw the weapon flying toward them. The blue energy was building to critical levels, and the wounded man couldn't move fast enough. Adam threw himself over the injured soldier just as the weapon exploded.
The explosion erupted in a sphere of pure cosmic energy, the blue light of the Tesseract washing over everything in a thirty foot radius. Adam was at the epicenter, the raw cosmic radiation flooding his body as the energy blast consumed him. The Tesseract energy saturated every cell, every atom, rewriting his molecular structure at the quantum level.
Robert had been twenty feet away when the weapon detonated. The blast wave hit him hard, sending him flying backward as secondary cosmic radiation washed over him. The energy penetrated his skin, his bones, his nervous system, but the dose was less concentrated than what Adam had absorbed. Still, the cosmic power flowed through him, changing him in fundamental ways.
Both men hit the ground hard, their bodies smoking with residual energy. Blue sparks danced across their skin as the cosmic radiation continued to course through them, transforming them in ways that wouldn't be understood for hours or days.
The explosion had another effect. The enhanced soldiers nearest to it suddenly returned to normal, their divine augmentations severed completely as the Tesseract energy interfered with Ares's control over them. The cosmic cube's power, chaotic and uncontrolled, was disrupting every supernatural connection in the area.
"The enhanced soldiers are connected to you through pure will," Diana realized, pieces falling into place as she watched more soldiers collapse, their glowing eyes returning to normal. "But our friends are disrupting that connection. Your power can't maintain control when there's too much chaos to process."
"You understand nothing!" Ares roared, and this time his divine power erupted outward like a nuclear blast. The temperature spiked to furnace levels. The very air seemed to catch fire.
Jay tried to speed toward Ares but was caught in the heat wave. Even with his enhanced reflexes, he couldn't outrun divine wrath. The superheated air hit him like a wall, and he collapsed, his father's helmet rolling away as steam rose from his body.
Jim felt the massive thermal surge hit him and immediately began absorbing the heat into his systems. His synthetic skin, instead of bubbling and warping, began to glow with absorbed energy. The android's systems, designed to process and channel thermal energy, started pulling in the divine fire like a sponge. His flames, which had been flickering weakly, suddenly roared to life brighter than ever before.
"That's more like it," Jim said, rising into the air as absorbed divine heat coursed through his systems. His internal furnace was now running on power beyond anything Howard Stark had designed him for.
Alan's constructs melted into shapeless green puddles. He fell to one knee, his ring flickering as it struggled to protect him from forces it was never meant to withstand.
Amaya's totem spirits recoiled from the divine heat, her connection to them severed by Ares's overwhelming power. She stumbled backward, gasping as the superheated air seared her lungs.
Diana and Jim remained standing, though even Diana was struggling under the assault. But as Ares's power washed over her, something deep within her core began to respond. Something that had been sleeping for seventeen centuries.
The feeling was familiar. It was the same power that had awakened during her battle with Mala on Themyscira, when her bracers had glowed and her strength had transcended anything she'd thought possible. But here, facing Ares himself, it felt infinitely stronger.
"You want to see real power, Princess?" Ares advanced on her, his form wreathed in flames. "Let me show you what divine heritage truly means."
He struck at her with a blow that could have leveled a building. Diana raised the Godkiller to block, and when divine fist met divine blade, the impact shook the entire facility. Cracks spread through the concrete floor beneath their feet like spiderwebs.
But Diana didn't fall.
Instead, light began to emanate from her skin. Not reflected light, but something that came from within. Her bracers started to glow with the same golden radiance she'd felt on Themyscira, and her tiara caught and amplified it until she stood in the center of a pillar of divine fire. The very air around her shimmered with power that felt ancient and terrible and pure.
"Impossible," Ares breathed, actually taking a step backward. His divine senses were screaming warnings at him. "You're not... how are you channeling this much power?"
Diana felt energy flowing through her veins like molten gold. Every lesson Antiope had taught her, every principle her mother had instilled, every moment of training on Themyscira suddenly made perfect sense. This was what she had been created for. This was the power she'd glimpsed during the trials, but now it was fully awake.
"I am Diana, Princess of Themyscira," she said, and her voice carried harmonics that made the enhanced soldiers stumble. The golden light pulsed brighter with each word. "Daughter of Hippolyta, champion of those who cannot champion themselves."
Ares lunged forward, his divine sword materializing in his hands. He brought it down in a killing stroke that should have cleaved Diana in two. But when his blade met her upraised bracers, the impact sent a shockwave through the facility that shattered every window for a mile around.
The golden light exploded outward from the collision. Where it touched the enhanced soldiers, their divine bonds burned away completely. Dozens of HYDRA troops collapsed as Ares's control over them was severed, their connection to him overwhelmed by Diana's awakening power.
But it was what the light did to Ares himself that truly shocked him.
Where Diana's divine radiance touched his armor, the bronze began to smoke and blacken. Not from heat, but from something deeper. The light was burning away the corruption that had sustained him for millennia, revealing the hollow darkness beneath. He screamed as it touched his exposed skin, a sound of agony that was both divine and utterly inhuman.
"What are you?" Ares snarled, backing away from the light. For the first time in centuries, he felt something he'd almost forgotten: pain. Real, searing pain that cut through his divine essence like acid.
Diana stepped forward, and with each step, the golden light grew brighter. "I am what you made me," she said, her voice carrying the weight of absolute truth. "You wanted to corrupt this world, to turn its champions into weapons of war. But your corruption awakened something else in me. Something you never expected."
She raised the Godkiller, and the blade began to sing with the same golden light that surrounded her. The weapon that had been forged to kill gods was now channeling power that made even Ares retreat.
"The light," Ares whispered, understanding dawning in his ancient eyes. "You're channeling pure creation force. The opposite of everything I represent." He looked at her with something approaching horror. "No wonder it burns."
"This is what happens when you try to corrupt something that refuses to be corrupted," Diana said, advancing on him step by step. The golden light was growing so bright now that even her allies had to shield their eyes. "When you try to turn love into hate, hope into despair, protection into conquest."
Ares swung his sword again, a desperate strike born of growing panic. Diana caught the blade between her glowing bracers, and this time, his divine weapon cracked. Actual fissures appeared in metal that had been forged in the first war between gods.
"Impossible," he breathed. "Nothing can break divine steel."
"Your steel was forged in violence and hatred," Diana replied, pushing back against his blade until he stumbled. "Mine is something else entirely."
She spun away from his failing guard and drove the pommel of the Godkiller into his chest. The impact sent him flying backward through the air to crash into a concrete wall with enough force to leave a crater. Golden light continued to pour from the point of impact, burning away at his divine armor like it was paper.
Ares pulled himself from the wreckage, his perfect features now showing actual damage. Burns marked his face where Diana's light had touched him, and his armor was cracked and smoking. "This isn't over," he snarled, but for the first time, there was real fear in his voice. "I will have my revenge on Olympus. I will claim my rightful place as supreme among gods."
"Then you'll have to go through me," Diana said simply. The golden light pulsed around her like a heartbeat, steady and inexorable.
Ares looked at her for a long moment, weighing his options. His enhanced soldiers were all unconscious now, their divine bonds completely severed. His divine power, so overwhelming moments before, was actively being burned away by Diana's light. Even breathing the air around her caused him pain.
For the first time in millennia, the God of War faced an opponent he couldn't defeat through violence.
"We will meet again, daughter of Hippolyta," he said finally, gathering the tattered remains of his divine energy around him like a cloak. "And next time, I will be prepared for what you truly are."
He raised his arms, and a pillar of flame erupted around him. But even as he prepared to flee, Diana's light continued to burn at him, forcing his retreat to be hasty and undignified rather than the dramatic exit he'd planned.
When the flames cleared, he was gone, leaving only scorched earth and the acrid smell of brimstone.
Diana's divine light held for another moment, pulsing once more through the facility like the beat of a cosmic heart. Then it faded, and she immediately stumbled as exhaustion hit her like a physical blow. The power that had flowed through her left her feeling hollow, drained in ways she'd never experienced.