Thea thought the smile was beautiful. Captivating. To Evil Thea, it read as a sneer.
Ant.
Weakling!
Kill—kill—!
A wave of dark, skin-crawling energy poured up from the deepest layer of Evil Thea's soul, gusts of pure malice slamming into the planet, slamming into the universe. Power that didn't belong to this world. To supreme beings, it was a footnote—but to magic and divinity, it was a level above. In quality and quantity, the gap was abyssal.
At first it was a thin trickle. Then the floodgates opened—and there was no stopping it.
Evil Thea's elegance and composure were gone. Pure menace had replaced both. Her eyes still held a flicker of struggle for a moment—but that flicker drowned almost instantly under the tide of malevolence.
Diana watched, breathing hard, as the enemy's face changed—and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She was exhausted. Her body had been spent. Her divine power was running dry. Her most valiant state, the one that had let her catch the world-cracking strike, had begun draining away the second the strike landed. But she wasn't afraid. She wasn't fighting alone.
Evil Thea was transitioning into Eclipso. Sword extended in one hand, the tip aimed at Diana, the body still hers—but the soul fundamentally changed. The Sacred Sword didn't approve of the new occupant. Its resistance was nothing against Eclipso, though.
"I will be the one to take your life." The voice was still the same female voice, but layered now with another voice underneath, in another language.
It was soft, almost a whisper. Easy to miss if you weren't listening closely. But the moment you focused, you found it loaded with mind-tampering magic—the harder it was to make out, the harder it became to stop listening.
The language Eclipso was speaking was unheard of. That was the most ancient language in existence.
The Old Testament's Book of Genesis tells of a time when all peoples of the world spoke a single tongue. They tried to build a tower up to heaven—the Tower of Babel. To stop them, the Presence had given humanity different languages. Construction broke down. The plan collapsed.
Some of that story was myth. But part of it was real. At least, to Thea—who spent most of her free time pondering creation—it tracked perfectly.
In the early days, there'd been only a handful of beings. They'd shared one tongue. Made sense.
The Presence, wanting his creations to mature quickly, had handed them a language to accelerate communication and progress. Easy enough to understand.
Thea figured if she'd been in his shoes, she'd have packaged the whole curriculum—language, hunting, sewing, masonry—into a one-stop kit.
The faster a world developed, the more she stood to gain. For a profit-maximizer like her, the idea of hoarding language was bizarre. Why hold back what would speed up your own returns?
The language Eclipso was speaking was the most ancient. Taught by the Presence at the dawn of things. Antique, weighty—every syllable held a fundamental truth. A language even the Spectre didn't speak. Hidden some distance away, Thea quietly memorized a few syllables, planning to chew on them later when she had time.
She wasn't just listening for the linguistics, though. It was almost her turn to step in.
Diana would handle baseline Evil Thea. Thea would handle the half-Eclipso form. The Spectre would close it out against full Eclipso. That was what she'd settled on with the Spectre earlier.
Coming all this way and not throwing a single punch would have looked bad anyway. Plus she still had to demonstrate strength. Darkseid was watching from somewhere, and a verbal arrangement only held when both sides knew it was binding. The Anti-Monitor was almost certainly cooperating with Eclipso, and was probably watching this fight from the Antimatter Universe right now. If he joined in at the wrong moment alongside Eclipso—that turned a one-on-one into a two-on-two and got messy fast. If Darkseid stayed out of it, or worse, sided with the enemy, the situation went from messy to dangerous.
A coward at heart, Thea wasn't going to put herself in the higher-risk slot. She'd volunteered for phase two. Phase three, the dangerous one, she'd dumped on the Spectre boss.
Even if Darkseid flipped, three on the Spectre—Darkseid, Anti-Monitor, Eclipso—the Spectre boss could probably buy her enough time. By then, she'd have grabbed everyone she cared about and made for the door. At least that was the plan.
Evil Thea's laugh was strange and ugly—half cry, half cackle. Seeing Diana hanging limp, looking like she'd given up, Evil Thea raised her sword and swung.
The strike was no weaker than the planet-killer she'd thrown earlier. And more casual—like swatting a fly. Easy. Effortless. Natural.
The sword's edge whipped up a black hurricane. The hurricane swept down on Diana, blotting out the sky.
Thea stepped out of cover. Trading magic and divine force in a head-on exchange against this thing would look a touch low-tier. To intimidate the enemies watching from the shadows, she went straight for the fifth-dimensional move set: brute-force reality manipulation.
A small wave of her right hand. An invisible ripple spread out from her palm.
A hundred meters from Diana, the black tornado stopped dead. In a blink, the snarling, fanged cyclone became a fountain—about ten meters (roughly thirty-three feet) tall, the water faintly warm.
Thea's reality-rewriting was limited. Short duration. She'd used the enemy's stunned half-second to forcibly seize control of the tornado.
To Diana, this was hard to parse. The Valkyrie was still on the path of unlocking and refining her own personal abilities. Thea was in a different country. She'd already lifted a corner of the curtain on creation. Borrowing a sliver of the universe's force was nothing for her at this point.
If Eclipso could borrow it, so could she.
In less than half a second, the fountain vanished. The black tornado snapped back into shape—but its direction had been flipped one hundred and eighty degrees, and it was now ripping straight back at Eclipso.
"Not a bad trick!" Evil Thea's consciousness was thinning fast. The dark blue had spread across the entire left side of her face. She looked grotesque from a distance.
To Eclipso, whose sight reached above the fifth dimension, this was a not bad level of trick. Reality manipulation was always temporary. Mister Mxyzptlk himself could have popped out at this moment and Eclipso wouldn't have flinched.
Lucifer Morningstar, Michael, and the archangels were chasing eternity. Their own eternity, the world's eternity. The Spectre and Eclipso were two of the Presence's branch operations; they didn't have to chase eternity, because they were eternal already.
Reshaping a slice of space and the things inside it was within their reach. They just considered it pointless.
Eclipso wasn't impressed. What he didn't understand was that the trick wasn't for him. Darkseid, watching from the dark, had genuinely gotten a fright. No magic signature. No divine signature. And not the kind of force his terrifying father Yuga Khan had wielded either—which had once made him wet himself. This was a completely unfamiliar mode of power.
The new force served a side function: it confirmed Darkseid's suspicion that Thea came from somewhere higher up the food chain.
While Darkseid simmered in confusion, watching the women fight, Thea threw her full understanding of the cosmos into motion. Like a butterfly threading through flowers, she traded blows with Eclipso through layered, stacked fifth-dimensional techniques.
She wasn't fluent with reality manipulation. But with the Princess of the Fifth Dimension's memories at her back, she could simulate a large portion of fifth-dimensional ability through divine force.
She hadn't changed armor. She hadn't put on the Goddess of Death's regalia. She was wearing something casual. But what she did with that wardrobe was making Eclipso miserable.