Tannarak glanced back in frustration at Grand Magician Sargon, who was lying on the ground playing dead. Dealing with voodoo warlocks was what Sargon did best, but unfortunately, he and Sargon's daughter had earlier joined hands to ambush him, completely tearing their relationship apart.
Mister E's eyeless face looked at him with a half-smile. It seemed Tannarak would have to step up himself.
An alchemist fighting a voodoo warlock was an odd matchup, but Tannarak, who looked down on Papa Midnite in his heart, still stepped forward. A street punk who can't even make it onto the stage dares run wild in the Cult of the Cold Flame?
The Grand Alchemist swept a glance and roughly judged the poison gas's composition. He flicked his hand and tossed out two bottles of solvent—one clear, one cloudy. The potions mixed mid-air into a gas with a hint of fresh fragrance.
It neutralized Papa Midnite's poison spray outright.
Midnite showed no weakness. He pulled out a palm-sized dark brown skeleton and silently chanted. The skeleton expanded with the wind—but judging by its bone structure, it didn't look like modern human remains.
"So small. Is this human?" Deathstroke looked at the skeleton Midnite threw and asked Thea with confusion. The thing wasn't even a meter tall—had it been a dwarf in life?
"That should be a Lemurian skeleton, from a civilization on Earth even older than Atlantis. For present-day humanity, it's a super-prehistoric civilization."
Thea was quite interested. She hadn't expected Papa Midnite to have such treasure. Lemurians were divided into giants and dwarves. Barring accidents, this skeleton belonged to the dwarf race—born psychics.
But supernatural abilities were tied to bloodlines. Dead for hundreds of thousands of years, trying to squeeze the last bit of value from this skeleton that crumbled at the slightest touch really wasn't simple.
Papa Midnite had thought this through long ago. He gave the skeleton a small hand drum to carry. The dark brown skeleton slowly beat the drum. Invisible psychic shocks intermittently shot forward in a cone.
The Grand Alchemist's willpower wasn't high, and he was forced to retreat repeatedly by the psychic assault.
At the critical moment, Mister E—who practiced eighteen sets of meditation techniques daily—stepped forward. Ripples radiated from his hands as he engaged Papa Midnite. Whether he intended to leave the inscrutable Thea and Poison Ivy to his companions, no one knew.
The Grand Alchemist had been played by a voodoo warlock he looked down on, and resentment surged. He stopped holding back, continuously slapping the ground. Amid booming impacts, two massive steel golems ran out from the backyard, their enormous bodies quickly appearing before everyone.
"Kill them!" The Grand Alchemist pointed at the mercenaries.
Thea was mildly surprised. These Earth spellcasters really did have good stuff. Midnite's super-prehistoric skeleton, and now these steel golems—all extremely valuable.
Letting everyone blow them up with missiles and incendiaries would be wasteful. Thea gave Poison Ivy a look.
Poison Ivy's eyes instantly turned emerald green. The steel golems, which had been striding heavily toward the crowd, suddenly had massive vines burst from beneath their feet. Influenced by Poison Ivy's chlorokinesis, the vines' growth speed was heaven-defying. The vines, which initially could only entangle, had already slowed the golems in less than ten seconds.
The golems were immensely strong and charged forward tirelessly. Vines as thick as a child's arm snapped under tremendous force. One snapped, two more wrapped around. Two snapped, five or six took their place. In less than thirty seconds, the two steel golems were still struggling fiercely but couldn't advance an inch under the mass of vines.
Seeing this, Mister E shrank back and pulled his battlefield with Papa Midnite further aside.
By now, the Grand Alchemist sensed something was wrong. He pulled out a handful of powder and threw it toward Poison Ivy and Thea.
"Hiding yourselves—come out!" The powder was scattered, yet it violated physics. Thrown dozens of meters, it only dispersed five meters in front of Thea.
Poison Ivy casually waved her hand. A green wall of plants rose from the ground's cracks, blocking all the powder.
"Play with them for a bit." Thea changed into a black robe, covering herself head to toe, and reached out to cancel their invisibility.
Except for Mister E, who'd noticed earlier, the remaining three all gasped.
Poison Ivy sat atop an incredibly vivid, gigantic man-eating flower. The flower alone was three meters tall. With roots, stems, and branches fully spread, it was at least ten meters across.
Did Earth really have plants this big? Facing powerful external enemies, Sargon and his daughter—who'd temporarily made peace—looked toward the Grand Alchemist. Among them, he had the widest knowledge.
The Grand Alchemist Tannarak shook his head. This thing didn't look naturally grown. As mages, they often summoned strange species—a gigantic plant didn't surprise them.
What left them dizzy was they couldn't see through Poison Ivy's essence. Was she alive or dead? If alive, her internal circulation was completely different from humans. If dead, she could breathe, and there was no aura of death—only a dazzlingly bright aura of life.
Like Mister E before them, the three regarded Poison Ivy as some kind of summoned life-form from another realm. As for the summoner? Who else but Miss Thea beside her, dressed like a necromancer?
Poison Ivy was full of vitality but had no magic, so they were merely wary. But Thea? They were completely dumbfounded. This person's magic was simply too deep.
The nose-ring woman, who'd just begun learning magic basics, and Tannarak, who focused on alchemy and rarely accumulated magic power, only felt she was formidable.
Among those present, aside from Thea, the strongest—Grand Magician Sargon—felt things far more deeply.
Pure, heavy, profound, vast—none of these words sufficed to describe this magic power. Sargon couldn't figure out what kind of being this was. Driven by curiosity, he used a secret technique to peek at Thea's inner essence.
He was the oldest and had seen too much. Even if she were an angel descended from higher realms, it wouldn't surprise him. But the scene he imagined didn't appear. He seemed to be standing alone in the void. Up, down, left, right, front, back—everything was pitch black. Subconsciously, he lowered his gaze. As his vision descended, the void grew darker and darker until it swallowed his sight.
He could no longer see anything. Only his cultivated spiritual power was warning him: You are looking into the abyss, and the abyss is looking back at you. If you want to see tomorrow's sun, you'd better get out now.
He didn't know this was the psychic shield Thea had learned from Martian Manhunter. Yellow fear energy wrapped around the mind. Having been ambushed by his daughter and betrayed by a close friend, his willpower had already dropped to nothing. Looking at Thea's magic reaction from afar would've been fine, but he just had to court death by trying to look at her "inner essence," resulting in him smashing headfirst into the psychic shield and a magically modified psychic maze.
All kinds of hallucinations appeared one after another. Spellcasters he'd tortured to death, demons of hell, monsters of the abyss, nightmares from spatial interlayers—countless species, some seen and unseen, appeared around him. His spiritual power was exhausted to the extreme until it was completely drained. His vision filled with endless emptiness. He could no longer perceive any information from the outside world.