Sigurd looked toward the source of the roar, a sense of uneasy recognition flickering within him. "Why do I feel familiar with this creature?"
Diana followed his gaze, her hand instinctively moving toward the sword at her side. "What is it? Do you know what that thing is?"
Before Sigurd could answer, the ground trembled as the creature—a monstrous fusion of Kryptonian biology and shadowy, alien energy—burst from the wreckage of the ship. Its form was jagged and disproportionate, with skin that seemed to absorb the light around it, and eyes that glowed with a sickly, intelligent malice.
"It's not just a beast," Sigurd murmured, his eyes narrowing. "There's a consciousness there—something old and hungry."
Diana tensed. "We can't wait any longer. If Lex Luthor brought this thing to life, it's already be a threat."
"You should join the fight," Sigurd observed, nodding toward the battlefield where the familiar figure in armor charged forward. "They'll need your strength."
Diana hesitated, looking from him to the chaos unfolding. "What about you? You said you would be there."
"And I will," Sigurd assured her, his voice low but carrying a weight of certainty. "But first, I need to understand what we're dealing with. That thing… it shouldn't exist here. Its presence bends the rules of this world."
As he spoke, the creature let out another deafening roar, and a wave of destructive energy exploded from its form, leveling several buildings in a single pulse. Superman was thrown back; Batman's gadgets shorted out in a shower of sparks. Only Wonder Woman's bracelets deflected the blast, though the impact still sent her skidding across the rubble.
Sigurd appeared in the place where they were fighting, his expression darkening. "It's drawing power from something beyond this dimension. That's why it feels familiar—it's touched by realms that should never intersect with this one."
Diana drew her sword. "Then we cut it off from whatever it's drawing from."
"Easier said than done," Sigurd replied, but a sharp, determined smile touched his lips. "But you're right. It's time to intervene."
He raised a hand, and the air around them hummed with gathering energy. "Stay close," he told Diana. "This won't be a quiet entertaining."
With a sound like tearing silk, space folded around them, and they reappeared at the heart of the devastation—just as the creature turned its gaze toward Wonder Woman, preparing to strike.
Sigurd appeared directly in front of the creature without restraining his power and punched it squarely in the chest. The impact resonated with a deafening crack, not just of sound but of reality itself fracturing. The creature was blasted backward, not through buildings or rubble, but through the very fabric of the world—into the shimmering, unstable expanse of the Mirror Dimension.
Then he turned toward Superman, Batman, and Diana. "Stay back. In here, this creature won't be able to destroy anything else."
Sigurd looked toward the creature, which was already scrambling to its feet in the disorienting, glass-like landscape. "It's time to practice."
Sigurd's body began to expand, his form growing in size and density as he marched toward the creature. Bones shifted, muscles coiled and thickened with the promise of immeasurable force, and his height surged until he stood as a titan within the crystalline void, his shadow falling over the abomination like a shroud.
The creature screeched, a sound that cracked the very geometry of the Mirror Dimension. As Sigurd's frame reached its full, awe-inspiring magnitude, his muscles rippled with the contained density of collapsing stars. He now looked the abomination directly in its sickly, glowing eyes.
The beast, sensing a predator that finally eclipsed its own malice, did not retreat. It lunged. Its jagged limbs, infused with shadowy Kryptonian energy, tore through the crystalline air, leaving trails of void-matter in their wake.
Sigurd did not flinch. He did not even raise a guard. He simply stepped forward, his footfalls shattering the "ground" of the dimension like glass.
"First lesson," Sigurd's voice boomed, vibrating through the literal fabric of the space. "Force is irrelevant if it has nowhere to land."
As the creature's claw swept toward his throat, Sigurd shifted. He did not just move his body; he seemed to move the space around him. The claw passed through the air where he had been a microsecond before, hitting nothing but a distortion of refracted light.
In one fluid motion, Sigurd grabbed the creature's outstretched arm. The contact hissed—shadowy energy reacting violently to the purity of Sigurd's unleashed power. With a grunt of focused effort, Sigurd did not just pull the creature; he pivoted, using its own momentum to slam the mountain-sized beast into a floating island of mirror-shards.
The impact was silent but devastating. A shockwave of translucent energy rippled outward, visible even to Superman and Wonder Woman, who watched, transfixed, from the dimensional threshold.
The creature roared, its chest cavity splitting open to reveal a core of swirling, hungry darkness. A beam of concentrated anti-matter erupted from its center, aimed directly at Sigurd's heart.
Sigurd smiled, a sharp, terrifying expression. He did not dodge. Instead, he reached out and caught the beam.
His hands burned with white-hot intensity as he compressed the destructive energy into a dense, vibrating sphere between his palms. The Mirror Dimension groaned under the weight of the paradox—energy meant to erase existence being held captive by a physical grip.
"You are a hungry thing," Sigurd whispered, his eyes now glowing with an ancient, gold-flecked fire. "But I have walked through the gullets of gods older than your creators. You are merely an appetizer."
With a final, decisive motion, he slammed the compressed sphere of its own energy back into the creature's open maw.
The explosion did not just wound the beast; it began to unravel its very physical form. The creature's skin, once light-absorbing, began to flicker and turn transparent, patches of its body dissolving into shimmering motes of void-dust. It flailed, its intelligent malice replaced by a primal, overwhelming terror, its roars now sounding like the screams of a dying star.
Sigurd stood over the trembling fusion of science and sorcery, his shadow casting a long, dark line across the fractured dimension. The air grew still, heavy with the aftermath of power that had no business in any mortal realm.
"Now," he said, his voice dropping to a low, melodic hum that felt like a death knell resonating through the soul of the dimension itself. "Let's see what's hiding inside."