Compared to Lady Styx's near-feudal hierarchy of command, the faceless host found the Trade Consortium's atmosphere far more agreeable. In his perception, Grodd was something like a god—omniscient, doing whatever it pleased with minds and thoughts, able to summon an army on a whim.
And the already-incomparably-powerful Grodd still answered to someone else. The faceless host had no eyes, but his racial gift afforded him a different kind of sight—and in that sight, the energy contained within Thea's body exceeded every upper limit his concept of "energy" could define. The only description left to him was: vast and terrifying beyond reckoning.
He intended to throw in with the Consortium. His own limitations prevented him from determining whether Thea or Lady Styx was the more dangerous of the two—but both surpassed him by a margin he couldn't meaningfully measure.
When word arrived that Lady Styx was inbound, he went straight to Grodd.
The young mistress was in closed cultivation. (Asleep.) Grodd went to find the deputy.
Fiora turned and looked out past the planet's surface into open space.
Both were Tier 9 civilization flagships—different configurations, broadly equivalent capability. Her assessment was quick: if Lady Styx wasn't playing games in disguise, she was on that ship.
A figure of striking bearing came into view. Roughly 170 centimeters tall (five feet seven). Indigo-blue skin. A wide face with eyes that had no whites at all—pure black like a patch of open night sky, threaded with faint traces of yellow light. At the brow line, a second pair of eyes: smaller, also black with pinpoints of yellow, hovering between half-open and half-closed, suspended in a state of drowsy watchfulness.
The woman wore a purple robe edged in gold thread. She felt Fiora's gaze and tilted her head in this direction—but she had no super-vision, and whatever she was looking for, she didn't find it from inside her ship.
Her senses are sharp, Fiora noted. But her body doesn't move like a fighter's. She made her decision. "I'll go introduce myself to this sovereign who held seven sectors together under Green Lantern pressure."
Grodd gave only a neutral sound. Fiora launched herself skyward and crossed toward the flagship.
She didn't go at the ship directly. Earth's nuclear warheads could knock Superman senseless—and that was Tier 3 civilization, barely edging into Tier 4. The main cannon of a Tier 9 flagship was a different category entirely. She was not Thea. She couldn't simply absorb it.
She held position at altitude and waited. The moment Lady Styx stepped clear of the ship, Fiora moved—a crack of displaced air, and she was right in front of her.
To Fiora's eyes, Lady Styx's reaction was a fraction too slow. To any ordinary witness, the alien sovereign moved with blinding speed.
A purple barrier materialized around Lady Styx's body in an instant. Her gaze swept her surroundings and her crew—no ambush, no betrayal from within. Half the tension in her chest released.
She focused on the arrival. A woman? Moving that fast?
"Who are you?" Lady Styx had no interest in fighting without understanding why.
At the same time, Fiora completed her read: speed, clearly inferior to her own; raw strength, probably worse still. But the cosmos was full of exceptions. Someone who had maintained control over seven sectors must possess abilities that were both unusual and formidable—formidable enough that even the Green Lantern Corps had given her room.
"Your name is unpleasant," the deputy said plainly. "Someone doesn't like hearing it."
Lady Styx stared. My name was given to me at birth. Who are you to object, and on what possible grounds?
She didn't enjoy fighting personally, but this still irritated her. Fiora's words were sparse, but they told her a great deal: this high-velocity arrival was acting on orders, which meant someone else was behind her.
"A messenger running errands for someone else." Lady Styx raised one hand. A boulder weighing over forty-five kilograms (a hundred pounds) lifted from the ground nearby and hurtled toward Fiora as though passing through air with no resistance at all. "You'll regret insulting Lady Styx."
Esper, Fiora noted internally.
Deathstroke's subordinate Terra could move rocks too—but against Lady Styx, that particular talent was barely worth mentioning.
Fiora didn't meet it head-on. She accelerated, looped around to Lady Styx's blind side, and threw a full-force punch before the idea of it could register.
The punch was fast enough to push the air to either side of the impact line. Several of Lady Styx's crew hadn't finished processing what was happening before the pressure wave sent them sprawling dozens of meters away. The force struck the purple barrier—and the impact rang out like a temple bell struck at full swing, the resonance humming through the open air and refusing to fade.
Both combatants were startled in the same moment.
Fiora was not Superman, throwing twenty casual rounds at every opponent before committing. The deputy always fought at full capacity. She had not expected a full strike to fail to shatter the barrier.
She was startled. Lady Styx was more so. As a long-lived mutant, she had forgotten how many years it had been since something hit her this directly and this hard. Fiora's strike dragged up an emotion she hadn't experienced in a very long time: fear.
Fiora had her own understanding of fear—not as fluent as Thea's, but she had worn the Yellow Ring for years, and she had once fused with Parallax itself. She recognized the emotion the moment it surfaced in Lady Styx's bearing. She identified the weakness at once: strong in ruling, weak in fighting. Fear had found its foothold.
"Not bad. Solid barrier." Fiora's eyes burned crimson. Heat vision at solar-core temperature fired out, striking the purple barrier with a continuous sizzling impact. Under that sustained heat, the barrier showed the faintest, most reluctant suggestion of giving way.
"Don't underestimate me!" Lady Styx seemed to catch the trace of contempt at the corner of Fiora's mouth. The pride of a sovereign who controls seven sectors refused to let her back down. Power was the bedrock of her rule—she had to win, and especially when this was only the vanguard the other side had sent.
Yellow light pulsed in Lady Styx's eyes. Psychic energy surged. The air shimmered. Two constructs of purple-veined stone wrenched themselves upright from the ground, lurching unsteadily to their feet.
Fiora assessed them immediately, years at Thea's side sharpening her read even on abilities she'd never used herself.
The stone golems looked clumsy and unimpressive. Ugly, even. But they carried their own rudimentary consciousness—they operated without constant direction from their creator. That was genuinely remarkable.
Can Lady Styx actually grant golems a soul?
Fiora pulled back her heat vision and shifted to dodging the boulders launched from the ground. The two golems attacked independently; combined with Lady Styx herself, the three of them formed a rotating battery of artillery, rocks of every size screaming toward her from multiple angles at once.
One clean pivot in the air—like a lightning bolt inverted, head-down, feet-up—and she drove straight into one of the golems with her fist.
Stone golems, metal constructs, tree creatures—none of them were known for reaction speed. The construct had no time to process the incoming strike. Against a punch that could shatter a mountain peak, it simply had to absorb it.
A thunderous crack. The golem collapsed into rubble.
Before impact, the golem had been sheathed in a purple radiance that had blocked Fiora's super-vision entirely. Now it was broken stone—and Fiora examined the interior carefully, looking for whatever had made it work.