"Really? You're the ones being rude, talking down from your high perch." Thea couldn't have cared less.
The nerve, putting on airs in front of the Goddess of Death. Not making them all kiss the floor was already a courtesy.
Inwardly, she was working her own angles. The goal was simple: swallow this little pocket world, plus the two already-ruined ones from before, and skim off some Nth Metal in the process. If the Hawk people had been like the wolf people, that would've been easy—but these ones still had minds and a civilization. Slaughtering them like animals didn't sit right.
Of course, you can always fabricate a charge if you need one—provided you have evidence to back it up. She was just turning over the options—frame them, or really frame them—when Stargirl spoke up. "Over there. That one looks like a regular person."
The group followed her line of sight. Sure enough. A man slumped unconscious in an iron cage. No wings. And most damning of all—he was wearing a pair of jeans.
An Earthling? So they had a spatial rift here, and they'd been using it to abduct humans.
The few spatial-magic specialists in the group worked it out fast enough.
"How did he get here? What do you plan to do with him?" Thea pointed at the man in the cage and turned the question on the Empress of the Hawk World.
The Empress sneered inwardly. Just because you ask doesn't mean I have to answer. Are outsiders really this naïve? Dream on. As if I'd actually tell you the truth—laid out that bluntly. Then her own next words shocked her.
"What else? Skin him, bleed him, sacrifice him to the Hawk God. The ceremony comes once every ten years—it stands for the depth of our faith." The thought came out unfiltered, no hesitation, straight off the tongue.
The bombshell landed instantly. Every woman in the team went hot with outrage at the sheer evil of it. Supergirl glanced over at Thea, caught her nod, and shot forward.
The one prying the truth out of the Empress was Thea, of course. The woman's mental defenses were paper-thin; even a small emotional nudge had her spilling whatever was at the front of her mind.
That made things easier. Flaying. Murder. Evil by any reading. And as for whatever "Hawk God" she kept invoking—Thea couldn't feel a thing. Most likely a deity invented to dress up her bloodlust, repeated for so long the Empress herself had come to believe there was actually a god out there waiting for the sacrifice.
The Hawk guards were tougher than the wolf people downstairs—they had weapons, and they fought with some coordination. The baseline-human heroes like Barbara and Black Canary could only manage five or six each, and that was with the enemy grounded.
Their side, though, was stacked with veterans. The Hawk guards had almost no experience fighting on the ground. They outnumbered the women, but they were getting steadily pushed back.
The tide tipped hardest once the new Green Lantern, Jessica Cruz, joined in.
The newcomer who had bonded with the Earth-3 Green Lantern ring came to the ring with a serious anxiety disorder. Being chosen by the ring had eased the worst of it, but only slightly. It wasn't until Hal Jordan brought her to Diana, and the goddess of courage stepped in, that the shadow over her finally cleared. Now she carried herself like someone reborn—and the ring in her hand burned with a light it had never quite reached before.
At the combat tier Thea and her circle were operating at, a Lantern ring was just one tool among many. But in lower- and mid-tier fights, it was effectively unstoppable.
The stronger the belief, the stronger the constructs. The women's Justice League's newest Green Lantern was scattering half the Hawk guards single-handedly. The Empress, who had been holding her composure all this while, finally moved.
A golden claw, one strike, shattered Jessica's construct. The blow didn't lose momentum—it kept going, talons closing on the new Lantern's throat.
Clang. A small Nth Metal mace caught the attack mid-arc. The weapons met, and the Empress let out a small surprised sound. She glanced at the mace first. Nth Metal had worked itself into every corner of their lives—she knew this metal in her sleep.
This was an uncorrupted piece. By her measure, the head's purity rivalled the last untouched blocks left in the tribe's vaults.
How did an outsider have her tribe's metal? They'd swept every last shred of it before leaving for this world.
The Empress looked at the Hawkgirl who'd parried her strike with a puzzled, questioning gaze. A Hawk woman? A Hawk woman wielding metal weapons?
"Who are you?" Through Thea's language link, both sides could understand each other now.
Something about her was off—the Empress felt it. Hawkgirl and Hawkman felt it too.
When they'd first awakened, the two of them had assumed they were the only people in the world with wings on their backs. Finding so many Hawk people in this world below their feet meant they weren't alone—and that this metal might even be used to make Hawk people in numbers.
Hawkman flew over to Hawkgirl, took off his helmet, and asked the Empress, "Do you know me?"
He looked familiar to her, but the memory had gone hazy. Four thousand five hundred years had passed; the past had warped beyond recognition, and looking back on it now was like watching another life.
"I... I don't know you!" The memories came rushing in like a tide. The Empress lost her grip on the violence inside her. She snapped her hand out, five fingers like five sharp daggers, driving straight at Hawkman's chest. She was going to tear out this enemy's heart—how dare he make her head ache.
It came out of nowhere. Lucky for Hawkman, he'd been wearing the Gauntlets of Horus the whole time. His reflexes had been quicker than any other Hawk in the room—he stepped back at the critical moment and saved himself from being gutted. The claws—already metal-clad—still raked five bloody furrows across his chest.
Hawkman had tried to stir her memory and nearly killed himself doing it. Thea watched, mildly amused. Not everyone got plot armor.
The Empress lost it. Her helmet, her bracelets, her necklace—all Nth Metal. The stat boost from that much pure metal was enough that she alone was pushing both Hawkman and Hawkgirl back.
Pandora saw them in trouble and drew her gun to help. Interestingly enough, she knew Hawkman and Hawkgirl—back when they were the prince and the priestess of Egypt, Pandora had passed through Cairo. The visit hadn't gone well; her whole sermon about the Seven Deadly Sins had gone over as heresy and she'd been thrown out on the spot.
Four thousand five hundred years later, the three of them met again in the modern world. After so much time, old grudges had turned into shared laughs. She got along with both of them just fine, and the moment she saw them losing ground, she stepped in.
Pandora drew her gun. Cisco—who'd been "protected" through the whole fight—also let loose a string of shockwaves at the Empress.
Two melee, two ranged, four-on-one: they barely managed to hold the Empress in check.
The remaining specialists—Fire, Ice, Killer Frost, Raven, Zatanna, Lois—turned their energies and magic on the Hawk guards.
Thea kept slacking off with her bow and arrow. Diana, equally bored at this combat tier, also pulled out a bow—and any time someone looked to be in trouble, she fired a shot. That's right: Diana could shoot a bow too.