The robot was extremely sensitive to energy. It immediately judged that Diggle posed the greatest threat. The gun muzzles aimed at the soldiers rapidly swung around—but it was a step too late. A massive stream of freezing gas blasted toward the ground beneath its tracks.
Its body could rely on the energy shield for protection, but the ground under its tracks could not. The absolute-zero freeze visibly sealed several meters of terrain beneath it in ice.
"Fire! Keep shooting—its energy shield won't hold much longer!" Thea gave Diggle's combat instincts her approval. With its mobility gone, the enemy was now just a stationary target. With over a hundred people, they could grind it down no matter what.
Not wanting Thea's people to steal all the glory, Lex Luthor gave a look to the secretary who had followed him down.
The secretary pulled out numerous components from the massive backpack on her back. Her movements were lightning-fast. Dozens of parts snapped together in her nimble hands, and in under thirty seconds, they formed a strangely shaped firearm.
She hefted the heavy, pitch-black weapon. Dazzling arcs of electricity flickered between two parallel rails.
A railgun? An electromagnetic launcher? Thea instantly recognized the principle and nodded faintly.
The secretary took a brief aim, waited a second for the electromagnetic charge to build, then pulled the trigger hard. Even with Thea's exceptional dynamic vision, she only caught a black cylinder being hurled forward by electromagnetic force, slamming violently into the robot's shield.
Driven by tremendous kinetic energy, the orange energy barrier flared brightly. The two sides locked for a second as the robot poured power into the shield. Unfortunately for it, this kind of concentrated point-penetration was its weakness. Even with far greater total energy than the railgun, its surface defense was at a disadvantage.
With a sharp crack, the railgun round punched through the shield. The cylinder continued forward, striking the robot's torso—but after breaking through the barrier, its momentum was spent, and it failed to cause real damage.
That was enough.
Gunfire poured down like rain onto the robot. The artificial intelligence launched a desperate counterattack—infrared targeting, dynamic tracking, full 360-degree fire. Few people it locked onto survived.
Diggle, holding the freeze gun, flung a grenade. It didn't explode. Instead, it transformed midair into a massive net crackling with electric arcs. This was an idea Thea had borrowed from Black Manta beating Aquaman senseless with a giant net—especially effective against tough, heavily armored enemies.
The electric net wrapped around half the robot's body. The violent surge of electricity fried countless intricate internal components. Diggle pressed his charge at great risk, blasting one of the robot's launch tubes apart with the freeze gun—but he took a hit to the arm and was forced to fall back.
The secretary fared no better. She was chased relentlessly by lasers and missiles. Her agility was genuinely impressive—dodging and weaving desperately until she barely escaped the robot's maximum range. The price was steep: the railgun was destroyed, and a bloody gash was torn open across her shoulder.
As for Mr. Luthor—after ordering her to fire, he promptly ran in the opposite direction to stand beside Thea. The two exchanged brilliant smiles. What they were thinking was known only to themselves.
They didn't need to oversee the fight. The soldiers and bodyguards were already fighting with fierce courage. After all, this was a stationary enemy. Over a hundred people against one—no matter how bad morale might be, it wouldn't collapse.
"Send interference data!" Thea ordered the hackers to give Brainiac some trouble.
Massive amounts of junk data flooded the robot's receiving systems—hundreds of pop-up windows per second, garbled emails, inexplicable installation packages. All kinds of chaotic nonsense—worse than viruses—were shoved down its throat.
This tactic was useless against low-level AI, where languages and coding systems didn't match.
But it was perfect against Brainiac.
Every time it reached a planet, it scanned and absorbed that civilization's knowledge. That meant it could parse this garbage data too.
Although Brainiac quickly began intercepting the information bombardment, part of its processing capacity was still tied up. On the battlefield, this translated into a roughly twenty-percent slowdown in aiming and firing.
The soldiers seized the opening. Over a hundred rifles opened fire at once. The robot showed no weakness. Despite losing one launcher and being harassed by data interference, its firepower barely diminished. Laser beams poured out as if energy were free.
For an artificial intelligence, there was no concept of marksmanship. Acquire target. Predict movement trajectory. Fire. If the heat signature vanished, switch targets. If it didn't—keep firing.
Thea watched from behind cover, with no intention of intervening.
This was only one of the countless billions of Brainiac's distributed avatars scattered across the universe. To balance cosmic energy levels, this was likely one of the weakest—lowest processing power, weakest armament. And yet even this low-spec unit had beaten Metropolis's elite forces bloody. Brainiac's reputation for wiping out worlds and destroying Krypton was well deserved.
Diggle and the secretary both had damaged spacesuits, but their life-support systems were intact. After quick field bandaging, they returned to the fight.
The freeze gun and the secretary's reassembled railgun played crucial roles—not in killing, but in containment. They weren't stupid. They knew the enemy used a precise threat-priority system. Wielding advanced weapons made them high-value targets, so neither dared overexpose themselves.
After several coordinated exchanges, Diggle and the secretary developed a rough rhythm. Exploiting the robot's energy-evaluation logic, one attacked from the south to draw its focus while the other struck from the north. The robot's weapons spun through two full rotations, unable to determine which was the greater threat.
The soldiers seized this rare opening. A storm of bullets crashed down. Grenade launchers didn't stop—incendiaries, armor-piercing rounds, acid rounds—no one cared whether the damage types were optimal. Everything was fired.
The robot was formidable. Under the barrage, it responded calmly, tanking bullets and selectively deploying partial shields against grenades. But there were simply too many attackers. Its body was riddled with holes.
The AI began frenzied calculations, discarding destroyed components and replacing them with internal reserves. Weapon systems and defenses were reassembled mid-battle.
But even a fierce tiger can't hold off a pack of wolves.
Each reconstruction reduced its size by a third. The original five-meter body was beaten down to three meters, then two, then one.
After nine minutes of sustained combat, all its mechanical tentacles were severed. A grenade finally blasted half of its inverted triangular head apart. The orange-red electronic eyes flickered twice—then went dark.
On Thea's side, more than thirty soldiers were killed. There were few wounded—the enemy's attacks were too fast and too lethal. Aside from a handful of highly skilled fighters, most who were targeted died outright.
The battle was over.
For a moment, no one dared step forward. No one was entirely sure the robot was really dead.