Thea and Diana were playfully roughhousing in Diana's apartment when the phone rang. Batman's voice cut through.
"Both of you—there's an urgent situation. I need you at the Watchtower immediately."
They dressed quickly and made for the orbital station.
They arrived first. Batman acknowledged them with a brief nod and turned back to his banks of monitors.
Noticing no one else was around, Thea said what she was thinking. "Bruce. You need to rest. Running at this pace, never stopping—you're far too wound up."
"I'm fine. Someone has to do this work."
Thea glanced at Diana and shrugged slightly, a wordless I've got nothing. The man had boundless energy and nothing to do with it. Probably best not to interfere.
Superman and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner arrived shortly after.
"Just us?" Diana surveyed the room with a trace of confusion. The Justice League was supposed to move as one. "Is the threat extraterrestrial?"
"Three light-years from Earth, I've detected more than a hundred unidentified objects." Batman pulled up several screens and pointed. "I've analyzed their mass, thermal output, energy signatures, and trajectory. They're warships. Their heading is Earth."
"I don't recognize them." Batman was looking at her. Thea shook her head. The universe contained countless civilizations—she couldn't be expected to know every one of them.
Batman turned to Kyle. The newly appointed Green Lantern gave a light shrug. "I'm new to this. My ring can't scan at this range. You're asking the wrong person about cosmic civilizations—I know none of the famous ones and even fewer of the obscure ones."
The message was clear: don't look to me.
"Should I go take a look?" Superman volunteered.
They weren't going to send him alone. Batman stayed behind at the operations center while the others launched into space.
Thea had been ready to teleport, but Superman had pointed out that until they knew what they were dealing with, caution was the wiser approach.
It didn't take long. Beyond the solar system, near a planet outside their familiar territory, they found the source—exactly as Batman had predicted. Warships, and combat-configured ones at that.
The fleet had landed on the surface. Humanoid figures moved around them in organized groups, running what appeared to be resupply operations.
"Daxam fleet." Kyle's ring swept over them and returned a result. He relayed it with a shrug—the ring wouldn't volunteer anything unless asked the right question, and Kyle hadn't known what to ask. He turned to the others.
"What is Daxam? How does it compare to Earth?" Batman asked from the Watchtower.
"Daxam is Krypton's sister world—or was, before it presumably perished when Krypton exploded." Superman's voice carried a note of uncertainty. He'd pieced together his knowledge of Kryptonian history from the Fortress of Solitude's archives, and he wasn't fully confident in the details. He looked to Thea.
Miss Thea had inherited Guardian Herupa's ten-billion-year memories. Unknown quantities in the universe were few.
"Everything Superman said is correct. Daxam orbited a red sun, same as Krypton. But their system was nothing like Krypton's—if Krypton was the United States, Daxam was the Nazis. Arrogant, coercive, deeply possessive. On the universal civilization scale, Krypton ranked as a Class Eight civilization. Daxam was Class Seven. Earth sits somewhere above Class Three but hasn't quite reached Class Four."
"Not exactly encouraging news." Batman's voice was flat. "They can also absorb yellow sunlight?"
"In principle, yes—though they don't reach Kryptonian levels. They're distant relatives, sharing enough of the genetic template. The commonality is partial."
"I'll stop them." Superman moved immediately. Over a hundred warships meant at least ten thousand people—and if every one of them could power up under that kind of authoritarian regime, what chance did Earth have?
Thea caught his arm. "Don't panic. They have a weakness—lead. And besides..."
She hesitated slightly. "I'm reading death-energy on all of them. Not in the sense that they're dying—more like either they're about to, or they already have."
Her sentence was still unfinished when a fireball erupted from one of the warships without warning. The explosion consumed three or four neighboring vessels in a chain detonation. Through the wall of flame, a single figure drifted out, unhurried.
The Daxamite soldiers—virtually indistinguishable from humans in appearance—raised their weapons and opened fire. More warships were lifting off, bringing their cannons to bear on the intruder.
The attacker was fast. Impossibly fast—appearing to occupy multiple positions simultaneously, moving as if the laws of physics were a formality. Within seconds, another dozen warships had been torn apart. Somehow, one person was fighting a hundred-ship fleet, and appeared to be intent on finishing all of them.
"This is a massacre. We can't stand here and watch." Superman launched himself forward without waiting.
Thea clicked her tongue quietly. The Daxamites had come here to conquer Earth—they weren't innocent bystanders. Someone was doing the cleanup work for her. Under ordinary circumstances she'd welcome the help.
But she wasn't in the mood to hear Diana tell her she was sliding deeper into darkness again. She pushed off and flew after him.
She flew slowly. Diana, reading her perfectly, matched her pace without a word.
Kyle Rayner had been a perfectly ordinary artist a month ago. Fighting aliens—this kind of brutal, no-hesitation fighting—was genuinely outside his comfort zone. His pace was naturally measured as well.
The three of them hadn't covered about one kilometer before Superman came rocketing back, moving considerably faster than he'd left.
Thea caught him with an outstretched hand.
"That person hits hard." Superman worked his jaw with an expression that mixed genuine pain with disbelief.
Thea had no excess sympathy for the Daxamite fleet—a hundred combat-configured warships with clearly hostile intent. If someone was dismantling them on her behalf, she could hardly complain. She turned to examine the attacker properly.
Close to two meters tall. Long, dark hair loose and tangled. A red shirt knotted at the waist. Iron-gray skin. A letter S had been carved into the chest—not painted, not printed, but cut deep into the muscle.
The contrast was striking. Feral and unpolished on one hand. A refined, gentle air on the other. Two wholly incompatible qualities existing in the same frame.
The attacker glanced toward them without breaking rhythm.
From closer now, Diana and Kyle could see it clearly—the figure appeared to be able to blink between positions, and could disassemble incoming attacks and biological matter alike through some method that defied easy description. Energy weapons were caught and redirected to distant space with a gesture. Daxamite soldiers were reduced to their component atoms—cleanly and completely gone.
"Stop this slaughter!" Superman had recovered enough to launch himself forward again. He didn't have a justification—something about the figure simply unsettled him in a way he couldn't name.
The force behind his punch could move a small moon. His fist, which had shattered mountain ranges, connected with the attacker's chest.
The attacker didn't move.
Not a single step back. Like hitting a wall that had decided it was immovable. The figure turned and looked at Superman with something like mild irritation.
Then the attacker reached out with their left hand, grabbed Superman by the shoulder, and flung him outward with casual, dismissive force—the way someone discards litter.
Superman's form went translucent. With a sharp crack, he vanished entirely from their sight.
"Parlor tricks." Thea let out a quiet, disdainful breath. A close-combat fighter trying to play portal games against a teleporter. She extended her right hand into empty air, tore through the spatial fold, and pulled Superman out of the dimensional gap.
"What is that person?" Kyle was struggling to process what he'd just seen. The attack patterns—the speed, the methodology—were operating on a framework he hadn't encountered before.
"What are they? Genetically, they're Kryptonian—carrying the full suite of Kryptonian abilities. Beyond that: spatial displacement, teleportation, energy manipulation, and likely more." Thea's expression carried a distinct thread of genuine curiosity. "I think Super-Kryptonian is probably the right name for them."