Evil Thea's attacks came in unbroken waves, with almost no pauses. Under sustained punishment, the round shield—refitted from the Greek second-generation god-king Cronus's old shield with rare materials—was beginning to fail. By Diana's estimate, three more sword-blows and the shield would hit its limit.
She didn't flinch. Thea's main body had crossed into this world the instant the first sword-and-shield clash had landed, but Diana hadn't said a word about needing help. Thea understood her partner's temperament. She didn't say a word either. She simply stood at a distance, watching in silence.
Even if the shield broke, Diana would hold. This was her chosen war.
That said, she didn't mind getting some intel on the enemy. Holding off the onslaught with one half of her attention, she spoke to Thea behind her. "How does this one stack up against you? Stronger? Weaker?"
When they'd faced each other across worlds, you couldn't gauge their true strength through the barrier. Now they were in the same universe. The strength gap was measurable.
Thea didn't think much of this dark counterpart. Her power, her level, her grasp of how the universe worked—all of it came from Eclipso. Maybe there was some kind of pact between them. Maybe there was even some tragic, soap-opera backstory tucked underneath. But the dark counterpart couldn't bring her full force to bear, and she always had to keep some power held in reserve to stop the evil consciousness inside her from taking over.
Thea could see the gap clearly. Evil Thea and Eclipso were like a rabbit hoarding strength against the tiger it shared a den with. Whether the rabbit kept its strength in reserve or not didn't really matter—the tiger had been toying with it the whole time, and had never given that little reserve of strength a serious thought.
For Eclipso to seize the body, it would only take a few minutes. And from the look of it, he was savoring his role as the weaker player in this little game of possession and resistance.
Now Diana had asked. To protect her partner's pride, Thea fudged the answer slightly—a small, kind lie. "Counting her full strength, she's stronger than me. But not by much."
Diana's fighting spirit blazed up. It had been a long time since she'd had a real fight with Thea. Even with all her pride, she'd had to admit there was a gap. To make their sparring work, Thea had to hold back at every turn. These days they'd rather sit on the couch together watching a soap opera than spar—there really wasn't any point.
Now, hearing Thea say she came up short against this enemy, Diana suddenly felt that holding her own this long was nothing short of impressive.
Courage. Perseverance. Those things lived in your state of mind. The moment she dropped the weight, her divine power surged a notch, and her attack speed, strength, and stamina all jumped.
Evil Thea didn't know why the woman had suddenly burst forward. She assumed Diana had been holding strength in reserve, and shifted to defense.
As the previous Spirit of Vengeance for the Presence, Eclipso favored offense. The personality Evil Thea had developed on Earth-3 was offense, then more offense.
Two exchanges of pure defense passed. Realizing Diana didn't have a clearly devastating combination ready, she relaxed and switched back to counterattacking from defense.
Diana was familiar with the enemy's blade. The patterns ran red, the spine was pure black—but she wouldn't mistake what it was. That was a Sacred Sword. The pinnacle of fantasy-tier weapons.
The difference: Thea's Sacred Sword was clean, white, sacred—it represented light. The dark version in the enemy's hand was a confluence of every kind of negative energy, congealed into darkness.
Same material. Same Sacred Sword. Two utterly different forms, depending on the wielder.
"You still don't understand. Your resistance is futile. With your limited perspective, you couldn't even begin to picture the supreme power I'm drawing on!" The elegance was gone, replaced with a sharp, cutting tone. Evil Thea couldn't fathom why Diana had this much resolve to keep resisting her. Didn't she realize she was an ant in front of that supreme power?
"You don't know me at all!" Diana roared, her voice cracking. The divine power she'd already overdrawn climbed another notch. In a sense, she was using personal will to fight an entire world.
Watching from a distance, Thea revised her view of the Valkyrie's stubbornness yet again. Of course—only the protagonist got the right to keep powering up. Put Thea in Diana's spot, with Diana's strength, and she would have been long gone.
By stacking surge on surge, Diana had pulled level with Evil Thea—at least for the short term.
Courage took on near-physical form. For a moment, every Green Lantern fighting on Earth-3 felt the energy in their ring start to seethe. Diana had, in that instant, replaced the Ring of Volthoom as their power supply, becoming a living source of emotional power. The five hundred-plus Green Lanterns drew strength from her—and their courage, in turn, fed back into Diana. That was the real reason she could keep surging.
Evil Thea took her sword in both hands. The black blade was wreathed now in a heavy black aura, and her eyes had gone red. She was done playing. This kind of fight bored her. The cat wasn't a cat; the mouse wasn't a mouse. She wanted to end it.
"Dodge if you can, little mouse!" Murderous intent radiated from her. The aura wrapped around the Sacred Sword was overwhelming. She was about to crack the planet open.
Eclipso could shatter a planet with a casual swipe. She had to channel his power through one layer of separation, which slowed her down a touch. From the outside, though, the difference was a fraction of a heartbeat.
Diana couldn't ignore an attack like that. With the planet about to die, she raised her shield and met the strike head-on.
Boom—! The black Sacred Sword hammered down on the shield like a sledge. The shield—top-tier among Greek pantheon artifacts—finally gave way, and a spiderweb of cracks spread across its surface.
Diana had been expecting it. Just a shield. With Thea's Underworld backing her, the Goddess of Courage was hardly going to mourn a divine artifact.
No time to grieve. Her arm dipped slightly to absorb the impact, then twisted from a catch into a push, deflecting Evil Thea's strike sideways. A black slash hundreds of meters (about a thousand feet) long carved out into a half-moon arc, scything across the surface and flying straight out of the atmosphere.
The shield shattered into pieces around Diana's feet. Her hands crossed—one sword became two—and her left blade swept toward Evil Thea's stomach. The enemy dodged, only to find the right-hand sword coiling in like a striking snake.
Her own attack overextended. The right-hand sword arrived at peak velocity. She had a fraction of a second to do anything at all. She tilted her head.
A faint hiss—and the keen edge opened a thin slash on the left side of her face. The cut went less than a centimeter (about a third of an inch) deep before her own absurd defenses stopped it.
But Evil Thea was bleeding. For the first time. That single cut shattered all the pride she'd been carrying. Every "untouchable" pose she'd struck a moment ago suddenly read as theater.
Touching the blood on her cheek—how long had it been? She couldn't even remember the last time she'd been wounded. Rage that nothing could contain rose up. A patch of deep blue flesh appeared in the center of her porcelain-white cheek.
"So you bleed too?" Diana smiled—the smile of someone who'd finally landed the punch. The corners of her mouth lifted just a touch.