The situation had escalated past any pretense of control. Diana shed the concealment charm, called her armor into being, and drew both swords. There was no longer any reason to hide who she was.
Dacey made a sound — low and animalistic, somewhere between a groan and a growl. He convulsed with agony, and then with power — raw, staggering power. Right before Diana's eyes, an ordinary human vaulted past the demigod threshold and touched the scale of a true divine being. Or rather: energy at that scale was pouring through him.
She looked at the shape materializing behind him. Horns. White hair. Two sets of eyes radiating a cold, malevolent glow. Deep crimson skin thrumming with force that felt like it could unravel the fabric of the universe.
She hadn't seen him in person. But Thea and Raven had both described him in enough detail that recognition came instantly.
Trigon.
"...Just a projection," she noted, reading the energy more carefully. The tension in her shoulders eased by a fraction.
Thea had made a point of walking Diana through the major power players — she'd wanted to fortify Diana's belief in herself as a warrior. By Thea's estimate, Trigon ran slightly above Darkseid. Hard to quantify exactly, but both of them surpassed Zeus.
Looking back now with sharper eyes, Thea had also concluded that what she and Raven had sealed years ago hadn't been Trigon's true form at all. Almost certainly a projection. And if Raven was, technically speaking, "the daughter of Trigon," she was more accurately the daughter of that projection — a fragment of a fragment.
Trigon's actual body, if it ever tried to enter a plane like Earth, would tear the universe at the seams trying to squeeze through. The container was simply too small.
So what they'd sealed back then was a projection. Its power level had probably been comparable to the Darkseid projection she'd driven off not long ago. And what stood in front of her now was a fragment of even that — a shadow of a projection.
Diana had no reason to fear it. The obvious move was to call Thea and let her handle it — but Diana couldn't bring herself to do that. This mess had started because of her. She would finish it herself.
The only real problem: if Trigon's projection kept her tied up, would the crimson armor use the distraction to run?
Fortune was kind. The ancient armor had been forged specifically to contain Trigon's energy — even now, with more than half its soul corroded by demonic influence, it remembered its original function. The red lasso swung out and targeted the demon directly.
Dacey's transformation completed. The Trigon projection behind him began to fade — not because it had been destroyed, but because the modification of Dacey's body was nearly finished.
What had once been a reasonably good-looking face was now grotesque, the flesh contorting and reshaping under pressure from within. A horn pushed upward through his forehead. Above his existing eyes, a second pair strained toward consciousness.
His hands finished the change first. A flash of blood-red light — and a massive hand, trailing coils of black miasma, shot out with mechanical speed and seized the lasso. He yanked it back.
Diana didn't waste the opening. She drew a sword, slipped sideways, and slashed for his legs.
Her divine power coated both blades. Even the ambient light from their edges felt dangerous, cutting the air itself as they moved. Trigon's projection took the threat seriously. Without shifting his torso or moving his feet, he shifted three meters (ten feet) to the right and let the strike pass.
Apparently reading Diana's capabilities as significant, he released the lasso and brought both hands up in a sweeping motion. Demonic energy swelled outward in a wave. He thrust both palms forward, and a beam of blood-red force erupted from his palms — a roiling flood of demonic power surging straight at her.
Diana faced that tide and didn't think about retreating. She never retreated. Not against an unstoppable enemy, and certainly not against this one.
She sheathed her swords. She brought the power of her silver bracelets to their absolute maximum. With a battle cry, she met the wave head-on — pouring her full divine strength into a single forward strike. The golden pulse split the demonic torrent, carving a passage ten meters (thirty-three feet) wide straight through the middle. Diana didn't slow down. She became the light at the end of that corridor and drove her fist into Trigon's face.
The demon held his ground — but he was clearly giving way in the exchange. His transformation had completed: four eyes fixed on Diana with bottomless malice, and the air within a radius of roughly four hundred meters (roughly a quarter-mile) had grown so dense it was nearly solid.
She'd sparred enough with Thea to recognize eye-based attacks. She used the ground as a springboard, launched herself skyward, drew a sword, and brought it straight down in an overhead strike.
The eye attack missed her. Trigon seemed unsurprised. His frame swelled — taller now, immense — wreathed head to toe in scarlet flame. That iron hand caught the blade. His grip tightened and he twisted, trying to hurl her away.
Diana backflipped clear. The sword came with her. In the same motion she drew the lightning spear and drove it straight into his forearm.
The crack of thunder was deafening. Lightning met demonic flesh, and the contact acted like a conductor — as sharp and violent as a bolt from a clear sky. For the first time since the fight began, Trigon's projection stepped back.
Diana pressed. The spear whirled and aimed straight for his skull. She was confident — and measured about it, deliberately targeting with intent to stun, not kill. She wanted the impact to drive the demonic entity out of Dacey's body. If she could separate them, she'd have options in every direction.
But a deep red lasso snagged the spear tip. Her momentum was spent. She poured more power in immediately — and Trigon, buying himself a sliver of time with the delay, slipped clear of the finishing blow at the last instant.
"Damn it." Diana gritted her teeth. That armor couldn't tell ally from enemy, and it had just cost her a clean finish.
The demon's four eyes glimmered with savage amusement. He raised one hand and pulled two meteors straight out of the sky — they screamed down toward Diana's position. At the same moment he opened his mouth and released a column of red light that fanned out in mid-air into a rolling stormcloud. Under that cover, he unleashed everything he had: fire, darkness, earth — magic from every tradition he could draw on, all of it at once, all of it aimed at her.
Diana wrapped herself in divine power and took to the air — lightning spear in her left hand, great shield in her right — threading through the barrage with the fluency of long practice. The urgency she felt was real. Dacey's human body had a ceiling. At this rate of output, he wouldn't last much longer.
But no matter how urgent she felt, she couldn't close to melee range. Every time she came near, the crimson armor found a new way to interfere. Her power was greater than both of theirs combined — but she couldn't bring it to bear. It was maddening.
Then, gradually, the dynamic shifted.
The more Trigon exerted control over the armor, the faster the armor's own consciousness reasserted itself. At first it was Diana against both — then it edged toward Diana and the armor against Trigon. But the moment the armor overextended its own power, Trigon's grip would tighten again and the armor would swing back to harassing her.
Back and forth. Back and forth. A loop with no visible end.