Karen flies, though she flies very close to the ground. Flying is easier.

"Isn't that a waste of power?"

"Fairly negligible. If I wanted to turn the tide of this battle by myself I would have to run some serious calculations, but I'm pretty sure that trying to win a war that you know literally nothing about is against one of the cardinal rules of diplomacy anyway."

It would be worth thinking about if she didn't have her backpack on her and her lantern in the pack, but luckily her past self has done her a solid here.

"Huh." Okay, yep, running on different rules. "Well, it's not like you could actually win the war from here. It's just one planet. And the Compact doesn't care much about it or the assault would have more magical support than that girl down south. Of course, the Domain doesn't much care either or it'd be more than me and Cia."

"Sounds like a depressing state of affairs. You'd think they'd try to take places of strategic importance, but I guess it's different when you're dealing with a war spanning, what, your entire galaxy?"

"Yeah it's kind of existential. But the not-important places are good practice for the actually-important places."

"Everywhere's at least a little important, if people live there," she muses. "So you guys run on magic, you said?"

"Yep! Magical girls, that's us."

"Fascinating." Maybe it's not the annoying kind of magic. "I suppose I'll get a better sense of how your powers work in practice when I see you in action. Just girls?"

"Only girls. Dunno why, but boys never get picked."

"The magic itself picks you, or...?"

"No, the Imperatrix or the Polemarch visits you and makes you magic if you're good enough. Uh, they're the leaders of the Domain and the Compact and like, really strong magical girls."

"Cool, cool." So a pair of intentional evil matriarchies, insofar as anyone involved is an evil matriarchy. Unless there's some reason the magic only ever works for girls. Diligently not making assumptions, here. "Lemme know if the questions get annoying, I know you have a lot on your mind right now."

"Nah, just gotta swat some tanks around. Oh hey, we're here." 'Here' is an apparently undistinguished intersection.

She lands a reasonable distance away from her guide, close enough to continue the conversation and far enough not to crowd her too much if she has to move around. "So. You're Domain and they're Compact." Can't exactly ask who the Axis powers are, can she. "Does the war between you have, like, a specific goal, or is the Compact just evil braineating aliens who bodysnatch your friends, or - International Relations 101 would be good right now."

"They ran away to the other side of the galaxy like three thousand years ago to start their own country and then expansion crashed us together again and now it's like an- ideological war, I think it's called." She bounces a bit, swinging her arms, limbering up.

"Ah. What's their ideology, then?"

Shrug. "That we're evil for being an empire or something? You might wanna back up a bit, those buildings are gonna collapse."

" - ah," she says, looking up at the buildings. "Cool, thanks."

She's thinking less Axis and Allies and more Carthage and Rome, maybe, at this point. Modern Carthage and Rome would be something. She's not actually sure how you stop Carthage and Rome from being at each other's throats. Good thing this is probably an academic question for her, because surely someone will reverse the portals at some point and then she'll be able to tell Oa about this and they can decide what, if anything, to do about this massive galaxy-spanning war in another dimension.

Unless they don't.

She floats up a hundred feet again, figuring this is a vantage point that gives her a better view of whatever's about to happen, and waits for the tanks to show up.

Which they do in short order. Lines of bright sparks race up the sides of the buildings and they crash into the ground, creating a wall with one gap where she stands at the intersection. The tanks pause, and then begin funneling towards the hole. She waits until the first one is almost on top of her before pulling an enormous warhammer out of nowhere and taking an underhanded swing at the front of the tank and sending it flying end over end through the air as if it were made of paper.

Pretty lanterny power set for someone who's not a lantern.

She considers pulling the guy out of the tank and decides that that'll lead to her fighting one or both sides of this war in the next ten seconds, which she just got through deciding not to do. She sticks to observation.

An explosive shell screams down and detonates directly on top of her. When the blast clears, she's standing in exactly the same spot, apparently entirely unaffected. She tosses the warhammer aside, and it vanishes as she rushes forward to punch a tank literally in half. She then jumps up and smacks the ground upon landing, creating a shockwave that bounces the two pieces into the air. A beam of light shoots out from each of her now upraised hands, clipping the floating scrap and sending them crashing down to explode.

Very impressive.

She wonders idly whether she could take her in a fight. Anneia's clearly more durable, but Karen can in theory keep her armor up, and it's deeply unclear which of them has more firepower.

She continues destroying tanks and essentially ignoring incoming fire. Occasionally a particularly heavy concentration will make her pause for a moment, but she's always right back into it afterward. In a little less than ten minutes, there are no more intact vehicles in the immediate area and the buildings have been ground into even finer rubble.

She takes one last look around, dusts her hands off, and trots back over to where the green girl is waiting.

"Why do they bother sending tanks against you, with that kind of power difference?"