Cisco picked up the Nth Metal signal quickly. He raised his head, not entirely certain. "Gotham—there seems to be a piece there?"
Thea didn't need him to finish the sentence to know what had happened. Batman had clearly lifted a significant chunk of Nth Metal from Hawkgirl's mace using some method or other.
The original mace—Hawkman's personal version—she had quietly held onto. It was currently in the Underworld, handed to Deathstorm for study.
She had given Hawkman and Hawkgirl a replacement mace, but apparently Batman had helped himself to a substantial portion of the Nth Metal somewhere along the chain of custody. Classic.
Hawkman and Hawkgirl obviously couldn't share one mace, so at some point they had smelted and divided what remained—splitting it in two, which produced the relatively "compact" hammer Hawkgirl was currently carrying. It truly was compact. More nail-driving scale than head-crushing scale.
Thea suspected Cisco had actually glimpsed Batman himself in one of his vibe visions. She waved a hand, indicating he should let that particular detail go and continue expanding the search.
Once the search radius moved beyond Earth, the range widened considerably and Cisco's stamina began to drain. He had to stop and rest periodically.
Thea rotated the Emotional Ring and channeled a measure of Hope into Cisco. Diana contributed some of her Perseverance divine power. With their support supplementing his ability, the search began to move faster.
"I can't—" Cisco frowned. "I'm picking up the signals, but there's something in between. Some kind of obstruction?"
"Is there a barrier?"
"Does it require certain blood as a guide?"
"Or some kind of passphrase?"
Thea ran through several possibilities in sequence, dug through reference materials, tried multiple approaches, and even drew a small amount of blood from Hawkgirl's wrist as a potential key. None of it worked.
Raven spoke up quietly. "What if the portal has to be opened from a specific location?"
Oh. Thea felt immediately that she was right—she had been overcomplicating it.
Raven straightened slightly, a satisfied expression on her face.
Thinking it through, Thea concluded it was almost certainly that simple. How sophisticated could the magic of an ancient tribal civilization actually be? At its foundation, this was probably a minor realm carved out by a handful of tribal shamans and priests in cooperation with some ancient divine power. There was a meaningful difference between creating a world and carving one out. Creation required producing something from nothing—turning the impossible into reality. Opening access was a much simpler operation, similar to how she had established the New Continent back in her early days. It worked from within the physical universe, borrowed some of its rules, and anchored itself to the material plane. Which meant the entry point was almost certainly at a specific physical location.
She quickly scanned the materials and found the last known locations where the three tribes had vanished.
Peru.
She brought everyone to a stretch of rainforest.
"Strong signal—I think I found it. A lot of metal in there." After a full half hour, Cisco finally had something. "Opening a portal now—take a look."
Thea extended her perception into it.
After two minutes, she shook her head. "That world has gone barren. There are no life signs."
The first attempt ended in failure. They rested briefly and began the second search.
The second target still wasn't Hawk World—the interior seemed to be under assault from energy disturbances, with no chance of any life surviving.
When the third portal opened, Thea probed it carefully and finally smiled. "There's life in there. Everyone get ready—we're going through."
Target found. The group checked their equipment. Diana took point; Thea brought up the rear. They passed through the portal in sequence.
—
The world on the other side was dense with vegetation. Towering trees were everywhere, and fragments of light sifted down unevenly through the canopy, scattered across the ground in broken patterns.
Looking upward through the treetops, several figures could be seen moving at a distance—winged beings with easy, fluid flight. Their wings were not the sole reason they could fly; the gravity here was lighter than Earth's.
"Gravity is about two-thirds of Earth's." Cisco had just started to share his observations when Barbara checked her wrist display and ran through the environmental data herself.
Cisco pressed his lips together. He should have brought equipment. Bat-family gear was just more portable.
"This place is small—roughly the size of Iceland," Thea said, having swept the entire realm with her perception. "Most of the life is over there."
Following her direction, the heroines spotted what appeared to be a massive floating island rising above the treetops and into the lower cloud layer.
"Why would they give up Earth to live here?" Supergirl shook her head. It was obvious even to a casual observer that this place was severely limited—small footprint, sparse resources. To abandon the prospect of ruling Earth in favor of this was hard to explain. Were the original Hawk Tribe leaders not thinking clearly?
Nobody had an answer for that. What the ancient chieftains had been thinking was anyone's guess.
"Someone's coming." Supergirl, happy to be somewhere new after long stretches on Earth, had been looking around with open curiosity. She kept her voice low. "Over there."
She didn't think the two figures could pose any serious threat to the group—and she was right.
Two winged men emerged from the trees with a rustling of feathers. Their clothing was minimal, their builds powerful, their faces marked with patterns whose meaning nobody could read. One carried a spear; the other held a stone axe.
Every eye in the group drifted toward Hawkman and Hawkgirl. This aesthetic was very familiar. You two are clearly on home ground—look, your people came to welcome you.
The two men spoke rapidly in a language no one could parse. They had also noticed Hawkman and Hawkgirl—better equipped than themselves, and armed with at least one metal weapon even if it was on the small side. Their own weapons were still stone.
The two winged men exchanged a glance, then turned and flew upward toward the floating island.
Thea made no move to stop them. This was meant to be a recreational outing; if the whole tribe came down at once, she'd handle them in one pass.
The bird-men never returned. Instead, something else arrived.
A sound rolled through the forest—low, guttural growls spreading from between the trees. Shapes began appearing in the undergrowth, eyes glowing green, too many to easily count. They studied the intruders with a look that communicated one thing clearly.
"I don't think they're friendly…" Cisco's total record of combat experience could be counted on one hand. He wanted to project confidence in front of the assembled heroines—project some kind of presence—but his nerves weren't cooperating.
He thought longingly of Barry. If his best friend had come along, he could have given a casual wave and said "Barry, handle it," and watched the enemies fold while he stood there looking collected. Instead he was stuck here with only himself and Hawkman as the male representatives of the group, and even with his limited combat experience, he understood that he had to be the one standing at the front.
"Don't worry, Cisco—I'll keep you safe." The moment that destroyed whatever was left of his pride: Pandora, in her purple coat with both guns out, stepped directly in front of him and trained her demon-breaking rounds on the treeline.
He desperately wanted to say: I appreciate the sentiment, but would you please not announce my name while you do it?
The heroines only had eyes for the emerging shapes.
The silhouettes emerged fully from the forest—and what they saw gave everyone pause.
Fully upright. Completely human in body. But the hands and feet had become heavy, clawed, wild. And the heads were wrong—each one was the head of a wolf, with expressions of bloodlust and brutality in their eyes, instinct having long since replaced what had been higher thought.
"This must be the Wolf Tribe," someone concluded. "Their world became a wasteland; they took refuge here with the Hawk Tribe, but the centuries turned them into something feral."
It was the obvious inference given the context, and the mission's purpose had made this kind of encounter predictable.
"Most likely. But their physical conditioning is considerably above human baseline, and their hunting instincts make them significantly more dangerous. Everyone watch yourselves." Thea offered the caution—she didn't want underestimation to cause problems.
A high screech rang from deep in the forest. The Wolf Tribe seemed to receive some signal. Every one of them dropped to all fours and came at the group in a furious charge.
Pandora's pistols and Shado's arrows fired simultaneously. The rest of the heroines moved to engage.
Thea assessed the situation—everyone was energized and clearly enjoying themselves—and decided that sweeping the field with an area-of-effect instant-death spell would be anticlimactic. She pulled out her bow and arrows and began shooting in a performative manner.
Diana caught the look, rolled her eyes, and did the same—holding back her strength, working with sword and shield.
The restraint was theirs alone. The rest of the heroines had no such instinct.
Raven, Cassandra, and Supergirl—all three on the young side of the group and at exactly the age when the urge to show off is most acute—threw themselves into the middle of the enemy formation at full speed.
Shadow flame detonated and sent more than a dozen wolf-men flying. Supergirl caught one unfortunate specimen in her hand and, with a motion that resembled a bowling approach, wound up and threw—the wolf-man skidded and tumbled end-over-end, knocking over another line of enemies. Cassandra, meanwhile, was scanning the opposition, and quickly found the one who stood a head taller than the rest and was noticeably broader—grey-black like the others, but with a skin surface that shimmered faintly white, marking a leader. Her eyes lit up with combat intent. Without a word, she opened with a whip kick to the wolf-man's head. It raised a forearm to block, then struck back with a claw aimed for her chest. She cleared it with a back-flip, came in with both feet for the jaw—they exchanged seven or eight moves in rapid succession, neither landing decisively.
Barbara had been quietly grooming Cassandra as her successor to the Batgirl name, and she watched the challenge with an edge of anxiety from the sideline.
Fire and Ice—former best friends who appeared to be trending toward something more—worked in the complementary way their powers allowed. One heat, one cold; the coordination was seamless.
Against a pack of adversaries with no special abilities, the heroines had no real difficulty. The gap between metahuman and baseline fighter didn't close because of some enhanced animal physicality—it was simply too wide.
In the midst of the more visually spectacular techniques, one person drew the most sustained attention: Lois Lane—or, as she might now properly be called, Lois Lane Kent.
From Thea's vantage point, Lois had exceeded the ceiling of what she would have reached in her own original timeline by a significant margin. Her potential had been compressed for a long time and was now finally releasing.
Luminous blue telekinetic energy had taken on visible, tangible form. Flight. Telekinetic manipulation of objects. Invisible force fields. Telekinetic blasts. Combat experience still raw and unformed—but if she could channel her full current capability at once, Lois at this moment was not far behind Earth-3's Superwoman in overall power.
Named heroines dispatching anonymous foot soldiers produced a predictable outcome. When Cassandra kicked the alpha wolf-man off his feet, it was over.
The wolf-men were ragged and, more critically, carried a strong odor. Their evident cognitive decline made interrogation pointless. Thea waved everyone along, and they teleported to the floating island.
If Hawk World was Iceland-sized, the floating island was roughly the size of a city park.
Unlike the wolf-men—who had lost every trace of civilization—there were at least small signs here that someone had been trying to build something. Containers of various kinds. Shelters barely worthy of the name, constructed from materials that even the most modest living conditions would reject. And people.
One elderly winged man looked up at the group of heroines who had appeared before him with clear alarm.
He spoke rapidly in a language no one could understand. Even Hawkman and Hawkgirl felt a faint familiarity in the sounds, but couldn't fully parse it.
Thea raised one hand and cast a language-bridge across the entire realm, wide enough to cover every mind in Hawk World. She had her own standards. She didn't need to learn their language—it was simpler to let them understand hers.
Whether keeping that spell active indefinitely might eventually cause the Hawk World inhabitants to forget their own original tongue was not something she considered a priority concern. This realm's combat ceiling was low. Even with Nth Metal amplification, they were collectively weak. Thea in projection form alone could dominate all of Hawk World; with her full body here, it was as different as a god descending from above.
"Empress—enemies of the Empress!" The old winged man's words were finally comprehensible. His vocabulary was simple, cycling through the same few terms repeatedly.
"Who is this Empress he keeps mentioning?" Barbara had slipped into detective mode.
Thea smiled slightly and pointed ahead. "Your answer just flew in."
Wings filled the sky. Within moments the formation resolved into more than three hundred winged soldiers, fully armed—spears, shields, short swords, each weapon carrying some trace of Nth Metal worked into the construction, though the purity of the metal here appeared low. The enhancement it offered was modest at best.
At the head of the formation was a woman—a winged woman wearing a gold mask that covered her face entirely, a ring of pure gold at her throat, a deep crimson robe, and behind her a pair of vast golden wings.
As she appeared, the assembled winged people all raised their voices together—"Empress!" "Empress!"
"Visitors without wings…" She had barely begun before she felt an enormous pressure descend on her from above. She pushed back, trying to maintain her position, but her body was no longer under her control—it sank toward the ground despite everything she did.
When her feet touched the earth, something distant surfaced in her memory. How many years had it been? How many years since she had stood supported by her own two feet?
She was not alone. Every winged person in sight—guards and civilians alike, without exception—had been brought down to the ground.
Nobody in the room was without intelligence. She understood perfectly well that the group of "visitors" in front of her was responsible. The gold mask limited her direct vision, but the Nth Metal granted her a form of enhanced perception, and she could read the faint residue of an energy pattern in the air—something that had reached out and pulled every last one of her people off the air and onto the ground.
"You are very rude," she said through her teeth.