The calcified figure of Diana Prince stood stock still, hands behind her back facing the on-coming elementals from another planet. Their number was seven, for every element that asserted itself on every planet. In many cases, mainly for religions and idealists, seven was a number of mystical significance.
As queen of the elementals for Earth, Diana stood in her full regal garb, a ceremonial shield held in her hand made from the finest and hardest Quartz, its sheen bright and red, almost singing through the air with every subtle movement she makes. A shield was a symbol of protection, the weapon of defence. However, Diana let it slide from her wrist and into the palm of her hand, holding it by the rim. She never let her gaze wander from what approached her.
The seven elementals of Rann had landed, their ship a fragment of rock that had been launched through space from a volcanic eruption on their planet. The Earth’s own elementals had been watching and preparing for this moment since their messenger had returned.
As the Tornado Tyrant, the air elemental for Rann, moved towards Diana his own group stayed behind him, just as Diana had advised her own to do. His swirling hand reached out to her, but Diana simply ignored it, as the ways of war and peace were not to be interchanged. There is no duality between the two, no common ground. One is violence, one is learning.
Diana simply handed the tyrant the shield and turned her back to him. The time for war shall come, and she knows it, but she will not be the first to strike. She shall be reactionary and thus powerful.
“Here, take this; you’re going to need it more than we will.”
The Tyrant simply looked at the shield before dropping it at his feet.
“War,” it said, a voice like sand being thrown against slate.
“I know,” Diana said simply, closing the massive door of Olympus behind her.
“I know.”
“Nice speech, Diana, but I doubt it’s actually going to help us.” Tefé walked behind her, anger obviously boiling inside her. In many ways, she was more like her mother than her father, a creature of flesh that held onto the vestiges of humanity. She had a difficult choice to make so many years ago, the Red or the Green? She chose the Green, despite her calling and affinity to the Red, she never understood it the way Maxine did, and she could never calm and quell it, or call it to her aid when she needed it. No, the Green was much more receptive to her needs and had been ever since Diana had taken her pain from her. She owed the Earth elemental a lot.
“I did what needed to be done, Tefé. I can do no more than that,” Diana said, slowly walking towards the Armory.
“How many thousands of years has it been since we actually went to battle with someone who was on a comparable level with us, Diana? Last I knew we were obsolete. The great floods came and went and we were left without our connection to Maya.” Gabrielle’s voice was filled with concern as she stood in front of Diana, who slowly began to assemble her armor made from the Foundations of her mother’s Palace. White marble and strong scoured pillars made her chest plate and shoulder guards, whilst jagged sections of the islands geological past made her skirt, each slice a different section of thousands of years.
“You never forget how to fight, Gabrielle,” she spoke softly, adjusting her leg braces.
“Not if you never learnt,” Maxine interjected. She had no armor and was instead practicing a completely different sort of focus; as Diana assembled her armor Maxine was slowly removing her clothing, preparing to control her form and channel the Red directly.
As Diana looked around she saw her Elemental Amazons prepare for the battle with resignation, fear and even pleasure slowly writing themselves over their features. Today they fought for their planet, against another. A battle like this had never happened in the history of Earth before, and now their planet depended upon it.
As Diana walked out of the giant gates, she noticed that the Elementals from Rann had yet to move. Their forms were so different to the home-grown Earth Elementals; they were completely comprised of their token Elements. The Tornado Tyrant was just that, a whirling mass of Air, whilst the Avatar of the Red was a vaguely humanoid collection of smaller animals, fluffy, scaled and insectoid.
Diana lifted her hand into the air and waved her entire arm towards her stomach, looking directly into the eyes of the Tyrant.
“Come then. Let’s do this.”
The Tyrant shot forwards, the burst of wind designed to keep Diana off balance, but she’d already anticipated the attack, the wind simply blowing the lighter rock-matter from her body and pushing her hair backwards.
“Show me!” she spat as the sediment from the ground shot up, crashing against Diana’s form, chipping tiny pieces away from her. She crossed her arms and thrust them into the air and huge stone walls burst from the ground around the Tyrant and spread themselves around him, encompassing him entirely.
“Wind cannot blow, if there is no space to move,” she said simply. He would break out eventually, of course; you cannot kill the wind.
“Grrnf.” Maxine felt the blow of the waters against her flesh, which she instantly adapted to aquatic conditions. There was no way she was going to fall to the likes of this elemental. Not after all she’d done for this planet and all she had left to give.
Diana had given her a chance to prove that religion and science and love and life can all be one thing – there was no need to have a book to guide you when all you needed in your world was life itself. It’s everywhere and everything, omnipresent. Her father had showed her ways into the Red, but she was much more adept than he could ever be, proving that she was, indeed, the perfect Red elemental.
Sadly, even blood contains water, and Maxine struggled against the tides that were being pushed against her.
“You’re not going to win,” the naked woman spat through the torrents that hit her body with the force of a mountain. Her heels, with the weight of a Hippo and Elephant combined, dug into the ground whilst her skin mimicked the breathing properties of amphibians and allowed her to breathe through it both underwater and above water.
The words were not anything Maxine could understand, like water hitting a stones surface and gurgling to itself. She braced herself as the torrents grew larger and she had to bend down to dig her fingers into the dirt for stability.
It was going to be a long fight.
In contrast, the two combatants simply stared at each other. Gabrielle was the last of her kind now, the last Aurakle, and the only reason she’d survived this long was because of the immortality that came with being an elemental. Since her recruitment into the ranks of the elementals, she’d always been the youngest and the most inexperienced, as well as the idealist. She hated fighting and she disliked using her abilities for more than their given point.
Before her stood the Green elemental of Rann, yet she broke her gaze for a moment to stare at the fights between Diana and Maxine. She knew Diana would be all right, she’d trained them all in battle long ago and she was perhaps the greatest combatant left on the planet. But Maxine…she was fresh to this and, despite her connection to the violence of the Red, she was still innocent and sweet.
Gabrielle barely had time to register it as the tree roots struck her, slamming her into the ground. She just managed to maintain a force field of electromagnetic energy around her body. Being the electromagnetic elemental, she wondered how wise fighting a creature of Green would be; after all, she was going to hit it with light and light simply fuelled the growth of plants.
As the roots slammed into her, she decided that the more light she generated the more she would create heat. She amped up the photons as the Green elemental’s enormous tree head grew exponentially, leaves and twigs the size of cars falling from its swollen body all before it burst into flames. Gabrielle smiled to herself, a job well done, just as she was punched the back of the head by the Rock elemental.
“Burn!” Fiery tempers ran high today, especially within the fire elemental. The duality of having a fire elemental without a temper was an intriguing one, but not something that often occurred. Kako wasn’t able to hide her feelings and she was the sort that never would, not after Diana showed her that the only way to be true to you is to embrace yourself. She’d never repress her feelings the way she had when she had born Aquaman’s son; the feelings of resentment, anger and abandonment. These were things that had subdued with her time spent with Diana, as well as the budding relationship between herself and Naiad.
The Red Elemental was comprised by what appeared to be thousands of furry and hard animals put together, nothing like what Maxine was. This appeared to be the Red manifesting itself as a physical entity rather than simply being channelled. As Kako’s burst of fire shot towards the creatures, it revolved and all the chitinous shells of the insectoids that made up some of its form shot forward to deflect and defend against the fire. Nothing on earth could do that…Rann’s rules were clearly different.
Pouring on the heat, she hoped to burn the furry creatures and take away from the Red creatures mass, but this was before the Swarm descended upon her. The insect creatures, of multiple legs like enormous spiders mixed with flies, crabs and grasshoppers, landed on her and bit into her burning flesh and injected her with venom, poison and hundreds of thousands of eggs.
“S&^t!” was all she could utter before she fell to the ground.
Naiad had been an environmental avenger. Her life had been dedicated to making humans pay for what they had done to the Clear and to the planet, but as she spent more time as an avenger, more and more of her humanity had slipped away. It wasn’t until Diana had met with her and persuaded her that she was more than just anger, that her fluidity allowed her access to things the others could not fathom.
That wouldn’t prepare her for the anger she felt, the torrents of water that made her body and the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the air, all being pulled into her as her fellow elementals fell. All save for Diana, her mentor and her mother figure. The one who tempered her anger, anger that now flowed from her in the form of liquid violence, crushing and drowning the light elemental underneath her body, pinning it to the floor.
The creature shot through the translucent body of Naiad and into the sky, bursting downwards with all the electromagnetic and photonic force it could muster, literally blowing Naiad into component atoms, scattering her away from the site of the battle and into the Atmosphere.
The flame elemental was as tall as a house, with tendrils of burning arms pluming into the sky, leaving a trail of burnt ozone and black smoke rising into the sky. Its words were simply crackles and split ambers, falling from the only part of it that wasn’t deep red with burning.
Traya said nothing as she felt her bladder loose itself. She was a generational hero, to be sure, but her bravery was nothing compared to her father’s. He was an android; if he died, he would come back to life in a different form and if his body was destroyed he would create another.
If she died, that was the end. She pulled deep within herself as the air began to darken, and swirl around her, blowing her short bob out of place, and pulling her clothes in tight circles around her. Releasing this burst of window, she tried to extinguish the flames of the elemental but was caught in its own burning fist. She felt her flesh begin to bubble, the cool wind that whipped around her dying away, leaving her a defenceless woman in the hands of a monster.
He final thought was for her father’s shame as she passed out.
“DAMNIT!” Tefé leapt forward, hands covered in bark and razor sharp leaves as her fists repeatedly smashed against the rock surface of the Rannian elemental. Its huge head turned to face her, as amber began to seep from her broken knuckles.
“You f&^*ing %&$ ^*$%face!” Her hands repeatedly based into its face while it remained reasonably motionless. Roots exploded from her fingers and worked their way into any available grooves in the creature’s body, trying to pry it open with the force exerted from the extensions of herself.
The Rock creature simply raised its large but fragmented hands together and clapped either side of Tefé, crushing her body and causing Amber to squirt from her nose, mouth and eyes in large jets that spattered against the Rock creature’s face. Tefé wasn’t killed by the action, but the fight hard certainly left her. Her root network suddenly went limp and the creature threw her into the ground, stomping on her body a few times, until she stopped wriggling.
With her elementals defeated, Diana stood in silence as the remaining Rannian elementals moved before her, the Tyrant laughing its shrill laugh before crossing its massive arms.
“We claim your planet on the elemental pack, forged at the start of this universe.” The Tyrant had broken free of his bonds moments ago, long enough to witness the defeat of all of Diana’s elementals.
“You have defeated some of my Sisters, this is true, Tyrant, but you have won only a few battles.”
The Tyrant moved silently towards Diana, blowing the shield before her, reflecting the light of the sun onto her face. “You will need this,” it spoke, moving backwards again, as Diana knelt down to the shield, tracing her fingers across it and turning her attention back up to the Rannian’s.
“You might not have this on your planet, but where I come from we study out opponents before we send our soldiers into battle with them. We learn and we prepare and we plan.” Diana got to her feet slowly, kicking the shield back over to the Elementals and walking slowly towards the doors of Olympus.
“You have beaten the elements, like for like, correct?” She stopped outside of the doors of the Mountain, waiting for a response.
“This isn’t how the pact was forged, Earth Elemental. We took to the battle and we have defeated your champions.”
“I didn’t say they were my champions, Tyrant. You just assumed.” She smiled, softly. Something that was an altogether new experience for her and for the Elementals before her – their enemy was showing them a soft side. Something that was practically unheard of for a rock elemental.
The Tyrant said nothing as Diana opened the doors. The shock on his face was visible as behind the door was an army, an army with generals that stood in silence, waiting to be called into battle. The multitude of the foot soldiers was rounded by the mutates that had become gradually more and more unviable in human conditions, led by the Tom Kalamaku, formerly of the New Guardians, now nothing more than a floating skeleton with no leg bones, his body ending at the waist. Standing next to him was the ancestor of the yellow aliens that had visited the Earth many times before, holding the Tantu totem firmly in its left hand and wearing the elongated B’Wanna Beast Helmet on its large head.
“These are my champions.” She spoke softly, as the Blue Beetles, numbering in the millions, swarmed over her body and crashing into the ground before her as a huge biological wave. She took a few more steps forwards, the ground erupting into a massive hilt as Diana pulled a Diamond sword from the ground and levelled it directly at the invaders.
“Did you think I’d be stupid enough to be unprepared for you, Tyrant? Do you think I’d be solely reactionary and just let you take us apart elemental by elemental? I’ve been preparing for your arrival since my messenger returned.”
“We defeated the sum elements of your planet, Earth Elemental. What do you think these paltry soldiers have to offer us in terms of a threat? We’re not so easily defeated, nor killed.”
Diana smiled against, letting the sword drop as a woman in a suit waved from the sidelines, giving Diana the thumbs up.
“We’re not trying to defeat or kill you, Elementals. We’re going to trap you.”
Steam exploded from the doors as the Mutates exploded from their position, to take on the elementals, who stood their ground and built up their power levels. All sides were preparing to take to the battle; lines were being drawn in the sand.
Diana walked towards the suited woman, who was chewing on the end of a pipe.
“Willmeenha, are they ready?”
The woman nodded and led Diana towards the seven differently coloured bodies that lay on tables before them.
“You know, the Prototype that Morrow built was very advanced for its time,” she offered, as Diana inspected her final trap.
“Just as it was in my time? History will repeat itself?”
“I believe we can trap the Elementals in these android shells, yes,” Willmeenha replied as Diana stood in silence for a moment, before walking back towards her warriors.
“RANNIAN ELEMENTALS! TONIGHT IS YOUR LAST NIGHT OF FREEDOOM, DO AS YOU WISH BUT KNOW THIS!” She paused for dramatic effect, feeling the waves of tension, and of violence emanating from the creatures as well as her own warriors. “YOU WERE BROUGHT HERE BY YOUR OWN ARROGANCE AND HUBRIS, YOU WERE JOINED IN BATTLE BY A FORCE THAT YOU THOUGHT WEAKER THAN YOUR OWN, A FORCE THAT YOU THOUGHT YOURSELF BETTER THAN IN IGNORANCE AND HATRED.”
She pulled her sword into the air and swiung it downwards, digging the enormous blade into the ground as her army rushed forward, clashing against the Elementals like waves against cliffs.
“Know that the little things are what defeat you. Know that the details are all that matters, and know that when this day and this battle is done, you will belong to me and to Earth.”
The Tyrant screamed and hundreds of insects hit Diana’s body, covering her form with green ichor.
“You’re mine.”
The End...
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