Across the battlefield, Alan saw Diana go down and the soldier moving toward her. His stomach dropped. His ring blazed with emerald light as panic and rage flooded through him. He poured everything he had into the biggest construct he'd ever attempted, a massive green fist the size of a city bus that materialized above the approaching enhanced soldier.
"Get away from her!" he screamed, bringing the construct down with enough force to crater concrete.
The green fist slammed into the enhanced soldier like the hammer of an angry god. The impact should have turned him into paste. Instead, the construct shattered on contact like fine crystal, emerald shards of light scattering harmlessly as the soldier barely staggered. He turned toward Alan with those glowing red eyes, tilting his head with mechanical curiosity.
"What the hell?" Alan's voice cracked. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely keep the ring steady. "That should have worked! That should have put him down!" The ring flickered on his finger, responding to his growing panic. "What are these things? What are they made of?"
He tried again, desperation making him sloppy. A green barrier erupted between him and the advancing giant, thick as a bank vault door. The enhanced soldier walked through it like it was made of tissue paper, the construct dissolving around him without even slowing his stride. His glowing eyes never left Alan's face.
"Okay," Alan muttered, backing away as sweat ran down his face and his heart hammered against his ribs. "Okay, these guys are definitely not normal. They're not even close to normal."
For the first time since finding the ring, since discovering he could shape reality with his will, Alan felt genuinely powerless. Worse than powerless. He felt like a child playing with toys while adults fought with real weapons.
The sound hit them first. A rhythmic thunder that seemed to shake the very foundations of the compound. Around the battlefield, more enhanced soldiers poured out of the facility's deeper sections like a tide of living nightmares. They moved in perfect synchronization, each step perfectly timed with the others, their coordinated footsteps creating a drumbeat of doom that made everyone's teeth ache.
Thirty of them. Forty. Fifty. More emerging from every doorway, every breach in the walls. Their red eyes glowed in the darkness like wolf eyes reflecting firelight, and they moved with the fluid precision of a single organism. When one turned left, they all adjusted. When one identified a threat, they all reacted.
They weren't just soldiers anymore. They were something else entirely.
But they weren't the only ones joining the battle. Allied prisoners, freed from their cells but still weak from months of captivity, saw their rescuers being overwhelmed. These were men who had survived HYDRA's hell, who had watched friends disappear into blue light and never come back. They made a choice that would have been suicide under normal circumstances.
They charged.
"Get those bastards!" shouted a British sergeant, his voice hoarse from screaming in nightmares. He swung a piece of rebar at an enhanced soldier's knee with all the fury of two years in captivity. The metal bent like aluminum foil on impact, but the man kept swinging even as the seven-foot giant turned toward him with predatory interest.
The enhanced soldier's hand shot out and grabbed the sergeant by the throat, lifting him off the ground like he weighed nothing.
"Come on then, you overgrown freak!" the sergeant wheezed, spitting in the giant's face even as his feet kicked uselessly in the air. "I didn't survive two years in this hellhole just to be scared of you ugly bastards now!"
The enhanced soldier squeezed. The sergeant's defiance turned to choking gasps.
American GIs picked up fallen HYDRA weapons, their hands shaking as they tried to figure out how to operate alien technology while enhanced soldiers bore down on them.
"How the hell does this thing work?" one private shouted, turning the energy rifle over in his hands. He found the trigger and pulled it, but nothing happened. "Come on, you piece of shit!"
Another soldier was frantically pressing buttons on the side of his weapon. "There's all these symbols! I can't read any of this crap!"
A Canadian private actually managed to get one of the energy rifles working, sending a blue beam into an enhanced soldier's back. The giant stumbled but kept moving, turning around with that same mechanical precision.
"I hit him dead center!" the Canadian yelled, his voice cracking with panic. "That should have dropped the bastard! What the hell are these things made of?"
"They're not going down!" screamed another GI as his shots bounced harmlessly off an enhanced soldier's chest. "Nothing's working!"
Amaya's necklace erupted with light as she called upon her totem animals. The ghostly form of a massive elephant materialized around her as she charged into a group of three enhanced soldiers.
"Spirits of my ancestors, give me strength," she whispered.
The impact should have scattered them like bowling pins, but these weren't ordinary men anymore. They absorbed the elephant's charge and began tearing apart the spiritual construct with their bare hands, ripping apart pure energy like it was physical matter.
"That's impossible," Amaya gasped, staggering backward. "They're tearing apart spirit itself. Nothing can do that."
The enhanced soldiers moved with terrifying coordination. When one engaged an enemy, the others adjusted their positions to cut off escape routes. When Alan created constructs to attack one group, another group immediately moved to flank him. They weren't just strong and tough, they were thinking and adapting as a unit.
Jay was a yellow blur as he tried to stay ahead of his three pursuers, but even his speed was being tested in ways he'd never experienced. Every time he thought he'd found an opening, another enhanced soldier was there to cut him off. Their coordination was perfect, inhuman.
"They're not just fast," Jay panted, his lungs burning as he dodged another crushing blow. "They're fucking predicting where I'm going! How is that even possible?"
A massive fist grazed his shoulder and sent him spinning into a concrete wall hard enough to leave spider web cracks in the stone. Stars exploded across his vision, and for a moment he couldn't tell up from down. His father's helmet rang like a bell from the impact.
"Jesus," Jay gasped, tasting copper as blood ran from his nose. His usual smart-ass attitude was completely gone, replaced by genuine terror. "It's like they're all sharing the same brain or something. Every time I zig, they already know I'm gonna zag."
"Oh, fuck me," Jay muttered, wiping blood from his mouth. "This is not going well."
The nearest enhanced soldier lunged at him again, moving faster than anything that size had a right to. Jay's body screamed at him to run, but there was nowhere left to go. In pure desperation, he threw himself forward, straight at the soldier's massive chest.
He should have been crushed. Instead, he felt a weird tingling sensation wash over him as he passed right through the soldier's body like it was made of smoke.
Jay tumbled to the ground on the other side, rolling awkwardly before scrambling to his feet. He spun around to stare at the enhanced soldier, who had stopped mid-charge and was looking around in confusion.
"Did I just... did I just walk through that thing?" Jay breathed, staring down at his own hands. They looked normal, but he could feel something buzzing under his skin. Not his usual speed vibration, but something deeper, like his whole body was tuned to a frequency that the world couldn't quite lock onto.
The soldier turned toward him, those glowing red eyes scanning back and forth like it had lost its target.
"Looking for me?" Jay said, wiping blood from his grin. "Well, here's a fun fact about physics, asshole."
He concentrated on that weird buzzing feeling, pushing it harder. His whole body started to shimmer, going see-through like he was made of smoke.
"Oh, this is beautiful," Jay said, watching his hand fade in and out of reality. "All this time running around things, when I could've been running through them. Howard's gonna lose his mind when he sees this. And Patrick and Rex? They're gonna absolutely freak out."
The enhanced soldier charged again, this time bringing his buddies along for the ride. All three of them converged on Jay's position with perfect timing.
Jay didn't run. For the first time since this nightmare started, he stood his ground, vibrating his molecules until he felt like he was made of electricity instead of flesh and bone. The lead soldier's massive fist passed through his head like he was a ghost.
"Whoa!" Jay laughed, his voice echoing strangely as his vocal cords phased in and out of sync with reality. "That was wild! Try to coordinate around that, you freaky bastards!"
The three soldiers pulled up short, their coordination faltering for the first time. They stood there for a moment, heads tilted in unison like confused dogs, clearly struggling to process what had just happened.
"Yeah, that's right," Jay said, reaching up to pull off his father's dented helmet. The familiar weight of the steel felt reassuring in his hands. "System error, right? Can't punch what you can't touch."
He looked at the helmet for a second, remembering his dad's stories about carrying it through hell and back in the last war. "Dad always said this old bucket was tough enough to stop a bullet and hard enough to crack skulls," Jay said, grinning like a maniac. "Time to see if he was just talking shit."
Jay wound up like a major league pitcher and hurled the helmet with every ounce of his superhuman speed. The steel projectile whistled through the air and cracked against the nearest soldier's skull with a sound like a church bell getting hit by lightning. The impact sent the seven-foot giant staggering backward, actually looking dazed for the first time.
But Jay was already moving, phasing through the second soldier like he was walking through morning mist. He materialized behind the third just as his father's helmet bounced off the wall at the perfect angle.
Jay snatched it out of the air with a move that would have made his high school baseball coach weep with pride. "Still got those reflexes," he said, settling the warm metal back on his head. "And now I've got something you tin soldiers can't adapt to."
The enhanced soldiers tried to regroup, but how do you plan an attack against someone who could become untouchable whenever he felt like it? Jay phased through their grasps, popped back into reality long enough to land a solid hit, then vanished again before they could grab him.
"This is fucking amazing!" he called out to his teammates, his voice full of pure joy despite the cosmic horror show happening around them. "I can walk through these things! They can't touch me when I'm phased!"
He vibrated his entire body again, becoming translucent, and charged straight at the soldier he'd beaned with his helmet. At the last possible second, he solidified just enough to drive his fist into the giant's solar plexus. The enhanced soldier doubled over with a very human-sounding grunt, and Jay immediately ghosted out again before the others could dog-pile him.
"Diana!" he shouted, bouncing on his toes with excitement. "I think I found our way to beat these things! They can't coordinate against something they can't predict or touch!"
But his celebration was cut short as he saw what was happening to Jim.
Meanwhile, across the battlefield, Jim was hauling himself back to his feet, shaking concrete dust out of his synthetic hair. When he tried to reignite his flames, they sputtered and died like matches in a rainstorm.
"Come on, come on," he muttered, staring at his hands like they'd personally betrayed him. "Work, you piece of shit. Work!"
But nothing happened. Whatever cosmic clusterfuck Ares had pulled when he'd snuffed out Jim's fire, it had severed his connection to the flames completely. It was like trying to start a car with no engine.
"This is just perfect," Jim said, dodging a swipe from an enhanced soldier. "My one trick, and the god of war just turned it off like a light switch."
An enhanced soldier grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground with one massive hand. Jim drove both fists into the giant's wrist with enough force to dent steel, but the soldier's grip didn't loosen even slightly.
"Okay, that should have broken your arm," Jim wheezed, his voice strained as the grip tightened around his windpipe. "What the hell are you things made of?"
The soldier just stared at him with those glowing red eyes, no expression, no recognition. Just cold, divine purpose.
"Right, the strong silent type," Jim managed a strangled laugh. "Well, this has been fun, but I've got places to be."
The soldier hurled Jim through the air like he was tossing a football. Jim crashed through a concrete wall in an explosion of dust and rebar, his synthetic body taking damage that would have liquified a human. He lay in the rubble for a moment, running internal diagnostics and getting a very long list of things that were broken or bent out of shape.
But as he struggled to get back up, something felt different. The air around him was thick with heat from the burning wreckage, from the energy weapons that had been firing, from the very presence of Ares himself. Jim had always generated his own fire, but now, in desperation, he tried something he'd never attempted before.
Instead of creating flame, he tried to pull it in.
"Come on," Jim whispered, reaching out with senses he'd never fully understood. "If I can make fire, maybe I can take it too."
The heat in the air responded like it had been waiting for him. Thermal energy from the burning buildings, residual heat from the energy weapons, even the warmth from the concrete that was still glowing from impacts - all of it began flowing into him like water rushing downhill.
Jim's eyes widened as he felt the power building inside him, not the controlled flame he was used to, but something wild and hungry. His internal temperature spiked beyond anything he'd ever experienced.
"Holy shit," he breathed, and when he exhaled, blue flame poured from his mouth. Not the orange fire he usually generated, but something hotter, more intense. "That's new."
When he held up his hands, the flames that erupted from them weren't just orange anymore. They burned white-hot at the core, so intense they made the air around them shimmer like a mirage. The enhanced soldier that had thrown him was already charging back, but this time Jim was ready.
"Let's see how you handle some real heat," Jim said, his voice carrying new confidence.
He launched himself forward, not running but flying on jets of superheated flame. The enhanced soldier tried to grab him again, but this time when Jim's fire hit the giant's armor, it didn't just wash over harmlessly. The divine enhancement began to crack and bubble under the intense thermal assault.
"Now that's more like it!" Jim shouted, pouring more absorbed heat into his flames. The soldier staggered backward, actually showing damage for the first time.
Jay saw Jim's breakthrough and phased over to him, materializing next to his friend with a huge grin. "Finally figured it out, huh?"
"Turns out being a living furnace has more applications than I thought," Jim replied, his flames dancing higher. "These things might be divine, but physics is still physics. Hot enough fire melts anything."
"Speaking of physics," Jay said, eyeing the enhanced soldiers that were regrouping around them, "want to see what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?"
Before Jim could ask what he meant, Jay grabbed his arm and phased them both. They shot forward through three enhanced soldiers in a line, Jim's superheated flames cooking them from the inside as they passed through their bodies like ghosts. The soldiers collapsed, their divine enhancement overloaded by the thermal shock.
"Okay, that was definitely not in any physics textbook," Jim laughed, watching steam rise from the fallen soldiers.
Across the battlefield, Alan was creating construct after construct, but even his improved control was being tested. His green barriers were holding, but just barely, and the enhanced soldiers seemed to be adapting to his tactics.
"Alan!" Jay called out, phasing behind a group of soldiers. "Toss me something big!"
Alan grinned and created a massive green battering ram, its surface crackling with emerald energy. "Catch!"
Jay went solid just long enough to grab the construct, feeling the strange tingle of Green Lantern energy against his palms. Then he phased again, his body becoming translucent as he swung the battering ram through the enhanced soldiers like a scythe through wheat. The combination of Green Lantern energy and Jay's phasing ability tore through their formation, the construct passing harmlessly through Jay while devastating everything else in its path.
The enhanced soldiers stumbled and fell, their coordination completely shattered by an attack they couldn't see coming or defend against. Green energy crackled through their divine enhancement, disrupting whatever cosmic force was keeping them synchronized.
"Not bad for a guy who ran into a wall when he first got his powers," Alan said approvingly, creating another construct to cage the soldiers that were trying to regroup.
Jay laughed, tossing the battering ram back to Alan where it dissolved into motes of green light. "Hey, that wall taught me valuable lessons about momentum and solid objects. Plus, it only happened once."
"Three times," Alan corrected with a grin. "I was counting."
"Details," Jay waved him off, but he was grinning too. The terror from earlier was gone, replaced by the exhilaration of finally understanding what he could really do. "The important thing is I've got it figured out now."
But even as they bantered, more enhanced soldiers were pressing their attack. These ones had learned from watching their fallen comrades and were trying new tactics - spreading out to avoid Jay's phase attacks, using ranged strikes to counter Jim's flames.
"They're adapting faster than I'd like," Jim called out, dodging an energy blast that would have taken his head off. His white-hot flames carved through the air as he retaliated, but the soldiers were keeping their distance now.
That's when Amaya stepped in. She'd been fighting defensively, her animal spirits giving her enhanced strength and agility but not enough to match the enhanced soldiers' coordination and raw power. Against enemies this large and this coordinated, even channeling the fury of lions and the strength of rhinos wasn't quite enough.
But watching her new teammates work together gave her an idea. She'd been thinking like a lone warrior, but these three had shown her what was possible when different abilities worked in perfect harmony.
"Jay!" she called out, her necklace beginning to glow brighter as she reached deeper into the totem's power. "I need speed, but not my speed. Your speed."
Jay caught on immediately. "Oh, I like where this is going," he said, phasing over to her position as enhanced soldiers closed in from three directions. "What's the plan?"
"Trust me," Amaya said, and there was something wild in her eyes, something that spoke of primal hunting instincts awakening. "And when I say go, throw me as hard as you can."
"Amaya!" he called out, phasing over to her position. "Trust me on this one!"
He grabbed her around the waist before she could protest. "What are you-"
"Express delivery!" Jay phased them both and launched forward at maximum speed. At the last second, he solidified just long enough to hurl Amaya like a human projectile directly at the center of the enhanced soldiers' formation.
Amaya's necklace blazed with the combined power of every animal spirit she could channel. The ghostly forms of lions, rhinos, elephants, and eagles surrounded her as she crashed into the enemy formation with the force of a meteor. Her spirits tore through the enhanced soldiers' coordination, scattering them like bowling pins.
"Now that's what I call a fastball special!" Jay cheered, watching Amaya tear through the giants with primal fury.
Jim swooped down on wings of flame, his superheated fire turning the enhanced soldiers' divine armor into molten slag. "I could get used to this team thing," he said, melting through another soldier's weapon before the giant could fire it.
Alan created a series of constructs that worked in perfect coordination with his friends' abilities - platforms for Amaya to leap from, barriers to funnel the soldiers toward Jim's flames, nets to hold them in place while Jay phased through them.
The enhanced soldiers, for all their divine enhancement and perfect coordination, simply couldn't adapt to four completely different fighting styles working in perfect harmony. They'd been created to fight conventional opponents, not a speedster who could become intangible, a Human Torch who could absorb heat to become even more powerful, a Green Lantern whose constructs defied physics, and a totem warrior channeling the fury of the animal kingdom.
One by one, the seven-foot giants fell. Their glowing red eyes dimmed as the divine energy sustaining them was disrupted by attacks they simply couldn't counter or coordinate against.
"Well," Jay said, breathing hard as the last enhanced soldier collapsed, "that was educational."
Jim landed next to him, his flames still burning white-hot from all the thermal energy he'd absorbed. "Remind me to thank Ares later. If he hadn't cut off my fire, I never would have figured out I could absorb heat."
"Don't thank him yet," Amaya warned, her totem spirits still swirling around her like protective guardians. "This was just the appetizer."
She pointed toward the center of the battlefield, where Diana and Ares were locked in single combat. The god of war had driven the Amazon princess back, his nightmare blade weaving deadly patterns that forced her to give ground with every exchange.
"Diana's in trouble," Alan said, his ring pulsing with concern.
"Then let's even the odds," Jay replied, already starting to vibrate his molecules for another phase.
But before they could move to help their friend, Diana rolled to avoid Ares's descending blade, the weapon carving a furrow in the concrete where she'd been lying. She came up in a crouch, looking for the Godkiller, but Ares was already advancing, his nightmare sword weaving deadly patterns in the air.
"You fight well for an untested child," Ares taunted, his blade work forcing Diana to give ground step by step. "But you lack the killer instinct. The willingness to do what's necessary."
"I've trained my whole life for this," Diana said, wiping blood from her mouth. But even as she said it, doubt crept into her voice. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this. Ares moved like he had all the time in the world, like this was barely worth his attention.
"Trained?" Ares laughed, pressing his attack. "You've played at war, Princess. Sparred with your sisters on a peaceful island where the greatest danger was a scraped knee. This is real combat. This is what it means to face a true god of war."
His blade swept in a horizontal arc that forced Diana to throw herself backward. She hit the ground hard, her armor scraping against concrete as she slid away from the descending point of his sword.
Around them, the sounds of battle were becoming more desperate. She could hear Alan crying out as another construct was destroyed. Jay's pained grunt as he took another hit he couldn't dodge. The mechanical whir of Jim's systems struggling to repair damage faster than it was being inflicted.
"Diana! We're getting hammered here!" Jay called out, his usual smart-ass confidence replaced by genuine strain. He tried to phase through an enhanced soldier's attack but mistimed it, taking a massive fist to the ribs that sent him sprawling. "These things are reading my moves somehow!"
"Welcome to the fucking club!" Dum Dum Dugan's voice boomed from across the battlefield where he was wrestling with the controls of the captured HYDRA half-track. "These Nazi bastards just don't know when to quit!"
For the first time in her life, Diana felt what every mortal warrior knew but Amazons had forgotten: the cold certainty that they were outmatched. That all their training, all their courage, all their determination might not be enough.
"Now you begin to understand," Ares said, reading the realization in her eyes. "This is what your precious mortals face every day. The knowledge that there are forces in this universe beyond their comprehension, beyond their ability to resist."
He gestured toward her struggling friends, his smile cruel. "Tell me, Princess, what will you do when I've killed all your little allies? When you're alone with the knowledge that your noble ideals led to their deaths?"
Diana ducked under a horizontal slash that would have taken her head off, then drove her shoulder low and swept at Ares's legs. Her foot connected with divine armor and the shock ran all the way up to her hip. It was like kicking a mountain.
She rolled hard to the left as his blade came down where she'd been standing, gouging a crater in the concrete. As Diana came up in a crouch, her warrior instincts kicked in. She'd been fighting Ares like this was single combat, honorable dueling on the training grounds of Themyscira. But this wasn't her home. This was war, and in war, you used every advantage.
"Listen to me!" Diana called out, her voice cutting through the chaos as she spun away from another strike. "The enhanced soldiers aren't just coordinating with each other! They're connected to him!" She gestured toward Ares while bringing her bracers up to catch his descending blade. The impact sent her skidding backward, boots scraping against concrete. "Ares is the source! Break that connection and we break them!"
But even as she fought, Diana could see her friends working together in ways that amazed her. This wasn't just five individuals fighting separate battles. They were becoming something more.