James pressed harder. Used his enhanced strength without reservation for the first time in a fight against a target he didn't need to worry about killing. The entity couldn't die, probably, in any way he understood the word. But it could apparently be hurt badly enough to wish he would stop.
He obliged it by not stopping.
From across the chamber, he heard Zatanna's voice sharpen. Still backward syllables, still the precise cadence of deliberate spell construction, but carrying a different quality now. Less maintenance. More offense. She'd registered what he was doing and was adapting her approach while he kept the entity in front of him too occupied to test her circle.
The remaining five pressed the containment boundary harder in response. James could see the carved symbols on the floor flare brighter where they pushed against it, orange deepening toward red, Zatanna's sustained spellwork visibly straining under the increased pressure.
She couldn't hold all five while casting anything useful. The math still didn't balance.
James grabbed the entity he'd been hitting by something approximating its shoulder and threw it. Not a judo throw with careful technique and controlled direction. He threw it the way you throw something you want to go very far very fast, raw enhanced strength launched toward the far stone wall of the chamber.
CRASH!
It hit the wall hard enough to crack stone and dropped to the floor, form flickering wildly, partially transparent, struggling to maintain coherent presence in this dimensional plane.
James was already moving toward the containment circle before it stopped sliding.
Five entities pressing outward from five different points on the circumference. He couldn't hit all five simultaneously. But he didn't need to.
"AEGIS, identify which point of the circle is taking maximum stress."
"Northwest quadrant. Symbol degradation at sixteen percent. Estimated time to critical breach at current pressure: forty seconds."
James went northwest. Got between the circle's boundary and the entity pressing against it from inside. Couldn't enter the circle without breaking Zatanna's work. But he could make the entity reconsider the value of being near that section of the boundary.
He hammered the circle's inner edge with both fists in rapid sequence, not trying to break through, using the gauntlets as close to the entity as the boundary would allow, letting the ferrous resonance bleed through the space between them.
The entity recoiled from its own side of the boundary.
"Symbol degradation halting," AEGIS confirmed. "Pressure dropping in northwest quadrant."
"Next highest stress point."
"Southeast. Symbol degradation at eleven percent."
James moved. Repeated the process. The entity at the southeast boundary pulled back from the resonance effect even through the circle's membrane.
He was running the perimeter now, not fighting conventionally, using the gauntlets as a deterrent rather than a weapon, buying Zatanna the thirty seconds of reduced pressure she needed to do something other than sustain.
He heard her voice change cadence entirely.
The backward syllables came faster. Lower register. Built on top of each other in a layered structure that even without understanding the language James could recognize as something being constructed rather than maintained. His enhanced hearing picked up harmonics beneath the words that his auditory processing had no framework to analyze.
The temperature in the chamber dropped twenty degrees in four seconds.
The carved symbols on the floor shifted color. Orange to white, white to a blue so pale it was almost not a color at all.
The six entities, including the one James had thrown against the wall, which had apparently recovered enough to be relevant again, reacted simultaneously. The shared-awareness quality of their movement that he'd noticed on arrival expressed itself now as shared alarm. All of them turning toward Zatanna. All of them pressing toward her at once, abandoning the perimeter in favor of a direct convergence.
Zatanna's voice didn't waver. Whatever she was building, she was committed to it past the point of retreat.
James planted himself between the converging entities and her position.
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