By this point Lex had gotten pretty much everything the Earth-3 prisoner knew about Ultraman's orbital surveillance platform. The picture lined up exactly as expected: this world's equivalent of Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Except on our Earth, Superman kept the Fortress parked at the North Pole as a kind of home away from home, a memorial to Krypton. On that world, Ultraman had simply fired up the engines and turned the whole thing into a planetary monitoring station.
The prisoner didn't know much past that. Just the Syndicate's codenames—no real names. The Fortress belonged exclusively to Ultraman; the other Syndicate members couldn't get in. And Earth-3's Owlman had launched his own orbital base of operations—not a ring like the Watchtower, but a squared-off structure.
A full day rolled past. Lex's main job was still setting up the teleportation array so that more heroes could slip into this universe without raising alarms.
Reconnaissance—military intel, data on the Syndicate members—had been handed off to the three Justice Leaguers on the ground.
By evening, the dignitaries had all cleared out. Only the nine League members remained in the Hall of Justice, waiting for Nightwing's latest report.
Nightwing held himself to standards that were nearly as punishing as Batman's. At the exact second of the agreed meeting time, his comm channel opened.
"I have to say, this place is genuinely awful. The streets are empty during the day, but once night falls, it's like everyone's gone rabid. They all come pouring out, smashing, looting, robbing—every flavor of crime you can imagine. It's just…" Nightwing looked a little pale. He'd covered a lot of ground in a single day, quietly observing and logging every incident. The whole experience had left him unsettled. Deeply unsettled.
"Bruce, you wouldn't believe it. The Grayson here is rotten to the core. Same circus act, same flying trapeze family—but they don't tour the country to perform. They tour to launder money. Their leader, Richard Grayson, is a straight-up criminal. He runs logistics for crime operations nationwide—weapons, cash, intelligence trafficking. Everything."
Nightwing's tone was bitter. The man wasn't him—but someone wearing his name was out there committing horrors, and it bothered him.
"What about Gotham?" Batman asked.
"Ha. They've got plenty of familiar landmarks. Arkham Mansion. Thompkins Brothel—yes, really. A soup kitchen for the poor that's now been leveled by Owlman: the Iceberg Lounge." Nightwing's face twisted.
The others threw sidelong looks at Batman. Unsurprisingly, his expression gave nothing away.
"Jim Gordon's the mayor here. Also a massive embezzler," Nightwing continued, running through his intel.
The Atom took over then, with his own findings. The Founding Father here was Benedict Arnold—the same man who in Thea's world had sold out George Washington and the Revolution for six thousand pounds.
The flag wasn't blue with white stars. It was red with black stars. And the red-and-white stripes had become blue and black.
"Clark, I thought Superwoman was going to be Diana over here. Turns out it's Lois." Atom sounded almost apologetic.
"Their Green Lantern is Hal Jordan too, but the records describe him as a coward."
Buried in all this grim intel was one piece of news that was either good or bad, depending on how you looked at it. The Earth-3 military was catastrophically corrupt.
Ghost payrolls. Inflated rosters. Underreporting, overreporting, substandard gear sold as premium, surplus trafficked on the black market. Every form of graft you could name. It was universal.
If this Earth's military squared off against theirs, our forces could wipe them out without taking meaningful casualties.
The call ended quickly. Ultraman slept during the day and roamed at night, and the longer the transmission ran, the higher the risk of being intercepted.
When the line cut, the heroes exchanged looks. Without the Kryptonian, that world would've been nothing worse than a particularly nasty planet. It forced Superman to sit with a hard question: when his parents sent him to Earth, had they made the right call?
But Thea wasn't going to waste time handing out emotional reassurance. The rank-and-file heroes were busy figuring out their own matchups. Flash was already comparing notes with Green Arrow on how to handle Johnny Quick. Diana was expressing her deep displeasure with Superwoman's outfit and signature lasso.
The strategic questions, though, came down to Thea and Batman.
"That blood-red sky—that's the barrier you mentioned?"
"Yes."
"And the Anti-Monitor is almost through into that world, right? How long do we have?"
"On their side, fourteen days and two hours. On ours, seventeen days, nine hours, and thirty-five minutes." She said it with flat confidence. Spatial barriers, dimensional membranes, time—these were the natural wheelhouse of a magic-caster deity. After days spent picking apart Fifth-Dimensional abilities, her grasp had deepened another layer.
"Can you take the Anti-Monitor?"
"Should be about right."
What she didn't say out loud: Darkseid should be able to put the Anti-Monitor down. In the original timeline, the Anti-Monitor had devoured the entire Earth-3 universe and still only managed to fight Darkseid to a draw. Now that she was going to deny him that meal, there was no way he'd end up stronger than the baseline version.
As for why Darkseid was going to show up on the battlefield—the young miss wasn't going to explain. Let everyone assume he was just passing through. When the fight got going, the collateral damage would be apocalyptic enough that no one would have the spare attention to rubberneck.
"I don't think I'm following. I thought you were taking a team in to wipe out the bad guys. But now it sounds like there's a layer underneath that? Something worse is coming to wipe them out, and you're going in to save them? Is that the idea? Why not just let them kill each other?" The room had one non-League attendee: Amanda Waller.
She knew the real identities of every superhero present. The League brought her in for strategy sessions so she could brief the politicians afterward. The politicians weren't young anymore, and late-night briefings weren't good for them.
Thea wasn't in the mood for grandstanding and tossed the explanation to Batman.
"Here's the situation. We're not going in to save bad guys—we're going in to head off a crisis that'll hit our universe. If we do nothing, yes, the evil over there gets wiped out. The entire universe turns to dust. But immediately after that, something far worse comes for our Earth. Our own Earth. This isn't a rescue mission for villains. It's a rescue mission for ourselves."
Amanda neither agreed nor disagreed. With her perspective, it was genuinely hard to imagine a single entity capable of devouring an entire universe. What kind of power level did that even require?
But she trusted Batman, and she trusted Thea's judgment. She nodded to show she understood.
By even the most conservative estimate, Lex would have the second portal stood up in seven or eight days. The League—along with every allied faction—had reached its final stage of preparation.
Thea and Diana left the Hall of Justice together and teleported straight to Paradise Island.
The recent stretch of combat had been a white-knuckle ride for the young miss. Nekron, Rao, the First Lantern—one after another. For Diana, though, the opposite problem: the enemies strong enough to trouble her, she couldn't beat; the ones she could beat, she steamrolled. She had the distinct sense that her martial skills were atrophying. With the big fight approaching, she wanted to go home—back to the land that had raised her—and rediscover the feel of real combat.