Diana put on a face that said we have a lot of history, but I can't get into it. "She's my enemy."
Superman had no choice but to swallow his frustration and drag the Flash off after Lex and Superwoman. Over the comms, this Earth's Lex Luthor had already learned about his counterpart and was riveted. He'd locked onto their coordinates and was closing in. Three on two. Their odds were good.
"You can't beat me. Not going to call for backup?" Evil Thea ignored everyone leaving and watched Diana with amused interest.
"Even my counterpart plus you can't beat me. But you can probably last a few moves, can't you?" Her tone was even—the implications were enormous.
"That power doesn't actually belong to you," Diana said, the words pointed. She'd heard Thea's analysis of this woman more than once, and she felt no fear at all. There was even a thread of condescension in her voice.
"You're the one who hasn't worked out the layers of power. Our strength belongs to us. But your strength—who does it belong to? Past a certain threshold, you lose control of it, don't you? Are you still you, at that point?"
"Quiet, ant. I'll take your head off and leave that woman to grieve for the rest of her life!" Diana's words had hit a nerve. Evil Thea's composure cracked. She looked like a volcano about to blow.
She didn't seem to move at all. The blood-red sword simply leapt across the distance and came down on Diana's head with overwhelming force.
Klang—! Diana was lightning-fast. Shield up, she caught the strike dead-on.
A flicker of nerves. A flicker of doubt. But she'd chosen to take this one head-on. She had her pride. She had her convictions.
Even as the enemy's strength rolled over her like a mountain landslide—as if the blade could cleave a planet open with a wave—as if every inch of the swing carried oceans of hatred and towering evil—Diana set her teeth and held. And then she pushed Evil Thea hundreds of meters back the way she'd come.
She could fight. If this was the enemy's ceiling, Diana didn't see herself losing.
The shockwave of sword-on-shield blasted air outward in every direction. Fortunately, Superman and the Flash had pulled the fight out of the city. The surrounding wasteland took the brunt—flying sand, scattered stones, but no casualties.
Diana set her shield in her left hand and her sword in her right, settled into her cleanest fighting stance, dropped her center of gravity, and locked her gaze on the enemy. Time felt like it had spooled backward. Everything felt like it had returned to the day she'd first left Themyscira—when she'd been green, naive, full of romantic ideas about the wider world. Now she was tempered and calm. She had the courage to face any enemy in front of her.
"Impressive presence. You're an opponent worth respecting." Evil Thea moved like a noblewoman from a finishing-school portrait, flipping back from the boulder onto her feet. She walked forward—unhurried, unrushed, every step measured. With every step, an enormous force gathered around her.
Heaven, earth, the cosmos, time, space—everything that could be named and many things that couldn't—began to align with her. Every step she took, the alignment grew.
Diana had the strange sensation that she was about to fight the entire universe.
She was tense. Bone-tense. This kind of crushing, world-rending pressure was something Ares hadn't given her, and Doomsday hadn't either. But there was excitement in it, too. She was a warrior—had always been one. Magic had never suited her. Finding her path in combat was the thing she'd never stopped chasing.
Diana gathered every ounce of her power, the divine power of courage channeling through her. Sword and shield up, ready to receive whatever world-cracking blow the enemy chose to deliver next.
The escalation tugged at the corner of Evil Thea's mouth. Then she laughed—a cold, sharp laugh, with contempt curled inside it. "Pathetic stubbornness. Pathetic courage. You think you can stand against the heavens themselves? Against this world?"
"I can!" The Valkyrie's presence rose to its peak. She believed, with every fiber, that justice could break evil.
"Ignorance." Evil Thea moved like a thunderbolt. A hundred meters collapsed in a single stride, and she was in front of Diana. The sword was light as a leaf, but its arc was heavy as a mountain range, and an unstoppable force sliced the air on its way to Diana's flank.
Knowing now what they were dealing with, Diana—a battle-hardened warrior—didn't try to take it head-on. She vaulted clear of the horizontal cut and answered with a backhand strike at Evil Thea.
"Scrap metal." Ignoring the edge of the Sword of Hephaestus, Evil Thea reached out with her free hand to catch the blade.
Diana shifted fast. Mid-air, she twisted her waist and swung her left arm in a horizontal arc, the heavy shield slamming squarely into Evil Thea's face with a crack.
The enemy retreated half a step—but her fingers had closed on the Sword of Hephaestus. Diana felt a vast force yank her in, dragging her straight onto the unstoppable edge of the blood-red Sacred Sword.
She let go of the sword instantly. Her left foot stamped down on the spine of the enemy's blade, pinning the edge low, and in the same motion she drew the lightning spear with her right hand and drove it with all her strength toward Evil Thea's face.
Her strike missed. The spear was at her eyes. Lightning was effective against Eclipso—and now against the body that hosted him. Evil Thea had no choice but to retreat, putting distance between her and the lightning spear.
Diana's foot hooked the Sword of Hephaestus on its way out, and the blade flipped back into her hand.
The whole exchange happened in a single beat—the kind of move you only saw from elite combatants. Evil Thea had power but lacked adaptability. Diana had elevated combat into something close to an art form.
Neither side got the better of it. But the storm-cloud aura Evil Thea had carried into the fight had taken a hit.
Some truths cut across every domain. The first charge is the strongest, the second weaker, the third spent. Combat wasn't only about energy, magic, divinity. Confidence and conviction were just as much a part of the equation.
With the enemy's edge blunted, Diana's confidence sharpened a notch further. She stopped defending. She moved like a hunting cat—quick, light, deadly—back to the sword-and-shield combination she knew best, every divine fiber inside her humming, charging in with full force.
Evil Thea hadn't expected her to press the attack despite knowing she was the weaker of the two. Initiative lost, she could only parry through the next several exchanges.
But unlike the wandering, scattershot Thea—who flirted with every discipline—this dark counterpart hadn't dabbled in much. Magic, technology, fifth-dimensional methods—none of that. Before she'd become Eclipso's host, she hadn't even understood the basic structure of the world. Reality was a thick fog she could barely see through. To get anywhere in an evil world, all she'd had to fall back on was hard physical training.
After becoming Eclipso's host, her training had only intensified—fighting his attempts to erode her will. How much willpower she'd actually built up was unclear. Whether her training even helped against Eclipso was unclear. But her swordwork, at least, was meticulous. Honed.
Three exchanges in, she stopped the slide. And then she started turning her real advantages—higher tier, greater strength, faster speed—into pressure of her own. Diana shifted to defense. What she could dodge, she dodged. What she couldn't, she absorbed with her shield.