"Kill him!" Seeing Deathstorm try to call for help—on the moon of all places, who exactly was he expecting to answer?—Sinestro barked out the warning anyway.
Atrocitus didn't need telling. He was no saint himself. He cranked his emotional output higher, intent on crushing Deathstorm to death with his bare construct.
Deathstorm wasn't going quietly. His body began to crack open in rapid-fire fission, like a chain of nuclear detonations building inside him. Energy readings climbed by orders of magnitude.
If he couldn't win, he'd go nuclear. The sheer viciousness of it caught Atrocitus off guard. Sinestro no longer had time to play the aloof master either—he might look down on Earth's civilization, but a body, any body, couldn't block a nuke. He snapped up a thick ring-construct shield. The other Green, Yellow, and Red Lanterns threw up energy domes of their own and braced for the blast.
Hal opened his mouth to shout a warning—and before his lips had even finished parting, a beam of light streaked in from far, far away and wrapped itself around Deathstorm.
The ring constructs. The nuclear fission. All of it simply ceased to exist. Deathstorm himself was peeled apart once more. The man passed out cold, laid down neatly beside the corpse-half of himself.
The light had no color. But if you looked closely, you thought you could see a color in it—and the longer you looked, the more certain you became that whatever color was in your head, the light was that color.
The glow swept off with the Deathstorm twins in tow, and left something shimmering faintly in Atrocitus's hand.
The one who'd swooped in was, of course, Thea. Deathstorm would be enormously useful to her research into atomic construction. And the man was a serious combatant. Earth-1's own Firestorm was strong, sure, but that duo had no killer instinct, hobbled by endless conditions—morality, humanity, the whole pile. They couldn't wring more than thirty percent of their theoretical combat value out of themselves.
Deathstorm was another story. The fact that he'd held his own against four Red Lanterns said everything.
Was he evil? Yes, no question. But he was also a scientist. Two-Face was considerably more evil than he was. Compared to the young miss's own lineup of underlings, Deathstorm barely registered as a sinner. And as for fusing with a corpse—that horrified ordinary people, sure, but Thea was the Goddess of Death. The walking dead in her service numbered in the trillions. She honestly didn't see much of a problem.
What she'd tossed to Atrocitus was a divination artifact. Divination "artifact" was generous—it had been crafted in the Underworld by some of her great witch-liches, built around a thighbone from some deceased Guardian of the Universe she didn't particularly care to identify.
Going forward, when Atrocitus used it for divination, he could draw on a portion of that dead Guardian's accumulated knowledge. A little reward for services rendered. Favors were favors, but a promised benefit was still a benefit.
She was currently on Mars. She scooped up the unconscious Deathstorm and flicked him straight back to the Underworld.
Thea was working with her true body to suppress this world's World Will. The World Will would pile countless coincidences into a single inevitability, and if left alone, this operation's odds of failure would be dangerously high.
She stood calmly in the void. Not far off, another "person" was watching her with close attention.
A tall man in softly armored tech-styled plate, a long golden cape at his back. His face was so ordinary it would disappear in a crowd. The only notable thing about him was the aura of black vapor coiling around him—as if he'd been practicing some kind of demonic cultivation.
"A being as unique as you, a specialized existence—why would you involve yourself in the struggles of ordinary lives? It doesn't befit your station." The man had been watching for some time. Only after Thea pulled Deathstorm out of the fight did he speak, his tone unhurried.
Thea inclined her head slightly—neither servile nor arrogant. "Honored Monitor. Our life forms differ. So do our duties. Your task is to observe, to record, to plan futures. I do what I must do."
Her realm had leapt; she'd sunk another rank deeper into the world's foundation. A Monitor—something closer to a programmed construct than a free being—did not frighten her.
Then she slipped a little nudge into her tone. "The Anti-Monitor's goal is to destroy this universe and absorb it. Your duty and my goal don't conflict. We could even coordinate closely. The Anti-Monitor is your true enemy, after all."
The Monitor remained unmoved. "Universes are born. Universes die. That is the order of things."
"Can you watch this universe end? Watch yourself vanish—and feel nothing?" Thea probed.
"I can."
"You're lying. Deep in the core of you, there is still one thread of reluctance. You haven't prepared yourself to face death with peace. You're even resisting it a little. Like a candle flame in the dark—I can see it clearly." Thea called it out without mercy.
Day after day, year after year of observing life and observing the universe had finally changed the Monitors in ways the original design had not anticipated.
They yearned to be heard. They were unwilling to simply perish with the universe. To the existence of themselves, they had developed the faintest thread of attachment.
Thea pressed the opening. "If you aren't ready, then your final moment hasn't come. This universe shouldn't die now. Am I wrong?"
Handed a ready-made excuse, the Monitor gave it to himself. Hm, she did have a point—did that mean he could go on existing?
Fate was pliable. You could argue it one way or the other; it all depended on interpretation. The moment a being's mind cracked open, it was a simple matter to drive a wedge through it.
"Return to your observational post and keep watching. This universe's end has not yet come. Your duty continues." Her voice was solemn now, touched with the weight of the sacred.
The Monitor found her reasoning sound. He shouldn't be fixating on Earth anyway—what if the Anti-Monitor appeared later, and they fought, and he was the one in the way? Help, or help, or help? Better to just go.
The troublesome Monitor was talked away, and Thea let out a breath. A Monitor's power wasn't trivial—it could borrow directly from the universe's stores—and while she had the realm, she didn't yet have the means to convert that realm into corresponding combat power. Picking a fight with one wasn't advisable.
She shook her head and refocused on the work in front of her.
The moment she set to it, she noticed something off. The World Will's resistance had dropped by more than half.
What had felt like a tug-of-war now felt like brushing aside withered grass. Her plan had been to spend two days suppressing it; at this rate, half a day would do, with room left over to make a small adjustment to the world's core parameters.
Obviously the Monitor had tilted the scales for her. The young miss wasn't about to refuse. He'd brought his own provisions, saved his own skin, and was calling it a wash—she was being generous by not extracting a slice of the world's foundation as a service fee.
When evil reaches its furthest extreme, does justice bud from it? She wouldn't stake anything on it, and such a universe wouldn't fit the cosmic ordering rules anyway. Across all the parallel universes, one had to stand for evil. Thea decided to roll this Earth back a few notches—to where it had been before Ultraman arrived.
Evil, but not without justice. That was the adjustment she'd make to the World Will.
She accelerated the suppression. And over on Batman's end, he was breaking through too.