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 that allowed her to see through things, 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.