Borrowing the world's power wasn't easy. Eclipso hadn't had a true body in eons. His consciousness was sealed inside the Heart of Darkness—through a layer of stone, then through Evil Thea's body, two full layers in the way. He had to spend significantly more energy to absorb and convert ambient force.
Filtering the world's power through two transit points came with massive losses.
If all that effort produced a kill, the math might work out. Unfortunately, the chaos on the surface was theater. Thea wasn't really fighting him. The cost was being eaten by the universe. Hurricane became fountain. Earthquake became bronze statue. Meteor became flock of birds. The mishmash of edits had turned a deathly serious battlefield into something faintly farcical.
Watching from the shadows on the moon, Batman had no comment. Thea felt the same. Fifth-dimensional beings were a clown college. Their move sets were all gag-coded. The day a fifth-dim type fought seriously was the day the laws of reality went on holiday.
Eclipso thought he was being mocked. He was livid—and there was nothing he could do about it. Without a real body, he wasn't even the Presence's Spirit of Vengeance anymore.
His tier was vastly higher than Thea's. But he was bottlenecked by his host, and at moments he was being driven into outright awkwardness.
Whoosh! Eclipso paused for a beat, as if making a decision. His right hand whipped through the air, and a blood-red spear hurled itself toward Diana.
Worry made Thea sloppy. No time to rewrite reality. On instinct, she drew her own Sacred Sword, raced after the spear, and split it down the middle.
"What's the point? She's nearly finished consuming you. Why waste your own power attacking?" That strike had been Evil Thea's. Thea wouldn't mistake it.
"I won't accept this. I won't accept it. I will not accept it!" Evil Thea's voice was raw—as if she wanted Thea to release the knot in her own heart. Eclipso's possession receded slightly. The voice was now entirely Evil Thea's.
"What's the difference between you and me? Aren't you me? Why do I have to suffer all of this—while you get everything? Tell me!"
Her face was twisted with pain. Her eyes carried an exhaustion that went down to the soul. She'd spent years jumping between parallel worlds, draining the soul-force of counterpart Theas to fight Eclipso. She'd tried. She'd resisted. But the ending had been written from the start.
She was about to lose control of her body completely. Whether she'd ever wake up again—no one knew. But based on her own understanding of Eclipso, the odds of getting the body back rounded down to zero.
"Family. Love. Friends. Power. I wanted those things too. Why isn't any of it mine? Tell me!" Tears welled in her eyes—but the moment they hit her cheeks, the surface heat boiling off her skin vaporized them into white steam.
Diana looked like she might say something, but Thea waved her off. Cold smile. "You think you've been wronged? The people you killed—who do they go to with their grievances?"
"The Earth-2 Thea Queen was just a teenager finding her feet. Just patched up her relationship with her father. You stomped her life flat. Who does she tell?"
"The Earth-10 Thea joined the army. Bright future. You killed her. Her family—her brother—what do you think they were feeling?"
"The Earth-36 Thea was the partner of a superhero called Bowboy. You butchered her. How do you justify what you did to her?"
"The Earth-39 Thea—"
Thea ran through them, one by one. Seven counterparts across seven parallel worlds, all murdered.
In other worlds, no Thea Queen had ever existed. Some didn't even have a Superman or a Batman. Earth-26—that was a cartoon-physics world. Their superheroes had names like Captain Carrot and Rubberduck. Cute. Sparkly. No Thea on the roster.
Or Earth-50, the Justice Lord Superman world. Star City flattened, no Thea in that one either.
Out of every Thea who'd grown up alive and bouncing into adulthood—only nine. Including herself and the dark counterpart, only two of them were still standing.
"If I'd been weak, you'd have killed me too. So what right do you have to stand here and cry?"
Thea was furious—truly furious. A pure-justice hero would have pulled out the soothing-words playbook, turned the dialogue into a redemption arc. Thea didn't have that habit. She lit into the woman in front of her instead. Either way, this was a dark counterpart—Eclipso would have her body before long. Lectures on the moral high ground? Pointless.
There was also a quieter thought sitting in the back of her mind. Wiping out every counterpart had benefits for her own path forward. What benefits, exactly, weren't clear yet.
She raised her sword and pointed. "One wrong step, and every step after is wrong. You shoved your own misery onto everyone else. Today, you eat what you cooked."
"Look at the choices you made over the years," Thea said. She pulled out the dark counterpart's timeline—usually she couldn't have moved it, but Eclipso seemed to understand what she was after, and far from blocking her, was actively helping.
Evil Thea's life began to play out. The evil world made good people worse. Old Robert and Moira—already somewhere between gray and dark in the original world—had stayed roughly the same here. But Evil Thea had grown up in that household, hungry for power. Once it leaked that she wasn't actually a Queen by blood, the family fault lines had ripped open.
In came the helpful biological father, Malcolm. The League of Assassins on Earth-3 was a charitable, do-gooder organization, a public-service operation that hunted villains. Ra's al Ghul was a kindly old man with a face you'd nominate for a sainthood medal.
Evil Thea had had a happy stretch there. But she hadn't given up the hunt for power. In a soap-opera turn, she'd stumbled across a reference to Eclipso in an ancient text. After a long, brutal pilgrimage to find him, she'd discovered that the universe didn't hand out free lunches.
Her tier and her power had been catapulted to heights she'd previously only dreamed of. The price: she'd become Eclipso's symbiote.
Her stubborn nature had pushed her to look for a way out. She'd taken Eclipso's gift and toured every corner of Earth-3 looking for a solution. Along the way, she'd found the Sacred Sword. She'd hunted counterpart Theas to siphon their soul-essence and reinforce her own. Later still, she'd run multi-metahuman-ability fusion experiments on Lex Luthor. She'd put real work into her escape attempt.
None of it had mattered. In front of Eclipso, mortal resistance was thin air.
Each piece of her past flickered past, one at a time. Evil Thea's psychological defenses cracked open. Eclipso's takeover of the body accelerated.
Thea was muttering to herself in the back of her head: faster, faster—once Eclipso fully takes over, Boss Spectre steps in, and I get to clock out. Long stretches of simulating fifth-dimensional ability were exhausting. She wasn't a fifth-dimensional being.
But fate cut against her plans. The deep-blue spread on Evil Thea's face was a hairsbreadth away from total coverage when the corruption stopped advancing—and then receded a small step backward.