No life signs. No energy readings. The golems read like ordinary roadside rocks.
"What kind of ability is this? Not bad at all." In the same breath, Thea smashed another stone golem—but her tone was off, the way someone praises a promising subordinate. Patronizing.
Forget that they were actively fighting. Even if she'd asked with genuine sincerity, Lady Styx would never tell her.
"Hah—!" Realizing two stone golems weren't enough to handle her opponent, Lady Styx finally played her trump card.
The tiny pair of eyes nestled above her brow snapped open. Combined with her original two, all four eyes channeled her psychic power at once, generating a unique purple haze. The haze carried the oppressive weight of a mountain range—even Fiona's vision could only make out vague shapes moving rapidly within it, taking form.
First arms. Then a torso. Legs, and finally a head.
Two crystalline figures stepped out—translucent as diamonds, every surface catching the light. Far more refined than the stone golems before them, with distinct, recognizable features. And proportionally, everything else had doubled: speed, strength, defense.
One of the diamond golems raised its left hand. From the ground, a spike erupted without warning—fast as a lightning strike. Fiona twisted at the waist and barely cleared it.
"The thing can use abilities now? Impressive!" the adjutant had to admit.
Fiona had noticed it from the beginning—these diamond golems, like the stone golems, were conjured from nothing. She'd smashed them to powder, but the rubble stayed on the ground. No vanishing. No dissolving into smoke or energy.
Manifesting the intangible into the tangible. Lady Styx was genuinely formidable—her ability might lack variety, but its staying power was extraordinary. Once summoned, her constructs existed indefinitely. Without the brute force to one-shot the diamond golems outright, there was a real chance they'd just keep piling up. That was probably why the Green Lantern Corps didn't want anything to do with her.
Fiona had been a villain herself once. Thinking from that angle, this made complete sense.
The reality wasn't far off. Lady Styx's home base was guarded by diamond golems. But today she'd been passing through the arena from another planet—she hadn't even made it home before Fiona cut her off.
That said, creating diamond golems drew heavily on her psychic reserves and required the full use of those mutant eyes. Even for her, it was a serious burden.
Fiona drew a long breath, compressed it through her lungs to extreme density, then exhaled in a torrent of freeze breath. The cold spread with terrifying speed. Ground, sky, and rock all bleached white. It moved like a snow dragon, coiling hungrily toward the diamond constructs.
The first diamond golem was frozen solid. But the thing didn't fully abide by physics—deep in the block of ice, its head still moved in tiny increments. Not dead.
Fiona's competitive instincts surged. She drew breath again.
The second diamond golem raised both arms, forming a barrier against the freeze. Meanwhile Lady Styx gritted her teeth against the headache building behind her eyes, slammed both palms to the ground, and a column of lava several meters (roughly 10–20 feet) wide erupted from the earth's core at tremendous speed.
Fiona didn't flinch. She kept the freeze breath going with one hand while the other blocked the lava flow.
The raw power of a Kryptonian was on full display. Lady Styx had no clean answer for any of it—she could only react as it came, trading blows while searching for an opening.
Strength? Stronger than anyone Lady Styx had ever met—no competition. Speed? So fast it was nearly impossible to track with the naked eye—and Lady Styx was using herself as the baseline. Endurance? Half the fight in, and there wasn't the faintest sign of fatigue. The heat vision and freeze breath she'd already analyzed—both essentially unsolvable.
What the hell. Lady Styx couldn't wrap her head around it. Enemies at this tier were supposed to be faction leaders somewhere in the universe—not people you just ran into at your arena!
Another exchange. Fiona pressed the attack multiple times, but Lady Styx's defensive toolkit was exceptional. Flash-step, spatial displacement, mirror images—and when she couldn't outrun Fiona, the purple psychic shield held. She fully embodied what came naturally to a long-lived species: not many offensive tools, but survival skills stacked to the ceiling.
Fiona chased her from the ground to the sky, then out to open space, and back to the ground. Still couldn't close it out.
Lady Styx wanted to run—but her speed in the void was too poor. On the ground, she could draw power from the earth to supplement herself; in space, nothing. Fiona moved at blistering speed. She had no real confidence she could escape.
Just as Lady Styx was working out her opening line for a diplomatic conversation, a black-clad woman stepped out beside Fiona.
Cold. Imposing. Even a single glance felt like pressure. The woman studied Lady Styx with an appraising look—like inspecting cargo. It was infuriating. Humiliating. The sovereign of seven sectors felt both rage and shame—until she noticed Fiona give the faintest dip of her chin and ease back half a step. Her blood ran cold.
Thea had made no progress on the two-dimensional world research. She'd eventually fallen asleep over it. But as the battle's scale kept expanding, it was impossible not to sense it. Knowing the planet's rightful owner had come back, she figured she might as well step out and see.
She had to hand it to Lady Styx—the woman was strong. A one-on-one against a Guardian? Winnable. With the fear-emotion boost augmenting Fiona, the Kryptonian had long since surpassed her original-timeline ceiling—somewhere approaching the level of super-Kryptonians like Kara. And yet she'd only managed a draw.
The universe still had its hidden depths.
"So you're Lady Styx." Thea's voice was cool and precise. "What a name. Ha."
Can I say I'm not? That you've got the wrong person? Lady Styx had already gone to maximum alert. It didn't take a genius to work out that this one was worse than the last.
Her psychic power surged in concentration. The small eyes on her brow strained open once more. The sand and gravel around her began to drift upward, hovering silently—a ring of unseen guards.
Thea gave it a sideways look.
The universe was unfair like that. Lady Styx was a mutant among immortals. Back on Earth, when one ordinary human manifested powers they acted like they'd become a god—but humans were short-lived and had sheer numbers working in their favor. How many immortals were there in the entire universe? A thousand, if that?
Besides the Guardians, the only psychic-variant among immortals Thea had encountered before was Atrocitus, leader of the Red Lanterns—who possessed a kind of divination more akin to ancient shamanism.
She hadn't expected to find another one today.
Fiona leaned close and murmured a few words. Thea glanced at the scattered stone and diamond golems.
"Created from nothing? With their own behavioral logic?"
Fiona nodded.
Only then did Thea look at them properly. She hadn't paid the stone golems much attention before—she'd seen too many similar tricks. Summoning stone constructs. Like the Five Tigers Breaking Gate Blade from a wuxia dimension—the moment you heard it, you knew it was a skill for background characters.