The ring and Thea still had some necessary adjusting to do. She had been wearing it every day for the past week.
Death. Soul. Wealth. Trade. Arts & Literature. And now Emotion from the ring—six divine seats in total.
She had actually considered prying the Mobius Chair loose during Metron's treatment. Knowledge wouldn't have been a bad seat to hold either. Unfortunately, the old scholar had been alert. They were acquaintances, after all—she'd hesitated for a moment, and decided against going for the kill.
Whether she could sustain even more seats was an open question. But Highfather and Darkseid both carried five, and she was already feeling some friction between her growing portfolio—the divine powers weren't harmonizing cleanly. Something had to go.
Highfather had given her a useful model. She made the same call: Arts & Literature was the seat she relinquished. No point letting it go to waste, though—it went straight to Diana.
Diana was the obvious choice, whether because of her own deep foundation in Greek aesthetics or because of the practical need to direct the bards of New Genesis. Most importantly, she was family.
The divine seat changed her. A thread of softness wove itself through Diana's martial bearing, making her considerably more charismatic—there was now a certain quiet grace beneath the commanding assurance that had always been there.
Diana's character was iron-deep, so a minor seat like Arts & Literature left little mark on her personality. She hadn't turned into some brooding poet. That was a relief.
On Thea's end, trading Arts for Emotion had pushed her overall power up by roughly twenty percent.
The Emotion seat was nothing like Death. It was relentlessly alive—if left unmanaged, it ran wild like a horse without a rider, shifting from moment to moment. Excitement one second, despair the next.
Rage amplified raw strength. Fear sharpened speed. Compassion dulled an enemy's hostility. Any single emotion, isolated, was genuinely useful—Diana's specialization in Courage gave her the ability to punch above her weight class, to exceed her own physical limits in a burst when it mattered. But when all the emotions ran together at full volume, it was a different story entirely.
Too much noise. Legion—the one with thousands of personalities—might actually be better suited for this ring than she was. Thea sincerely hated it.
She had to lean on Death to suppress the emotional current every single day just to avoid turning into a complete mess.
This was not a Source she could keep inside herself. It wasn't right for her, and it wasn't right for any sapient mind. The Guardians and the First Lantern had made it into a ring for a reason—that had been the wise move.
The Emotion Source was simply too chaotic. Without immense divine power to anchor it, it would drive anyone mad within minutes.
Thea ultimately decided against absorbing it directly. She'd run it through the ring and seal it when she wasn't actively using it.
Still, the weaknesses didn't outweigh the benefits. There were plenty of those too.
Focused on a single emotion for a short window, she could push her combat effectiveness up by thirty percent or more—sometimes significantly higher.
And if she could switch fluidly between them in a fight, she could boost different attributes mid-battle. When an enemy had adapted to her strength and speed, a sudden shift in nature could end things in one exchange. The fight between Darkseid and the Anti-Monitor had illustrated that principle clearly—when the gap between opponents is narrow, even a small variable can swing the final outcome.
With the Emotion seat acquired, and every parallel-universe counterpart of herself eliminated, she was now singular—truly the only one. The name Thea Queen belonged entirely to her now. Whether that carried future benefits she couldn't say, but her ranking among the Endless had quietly climbed another three places. She now stood at seventeen.
That made her even more eager for the Life Equation—and by extension, she had been pushing Kyle Rayner's emotional fusion training harder.
Unfortunately, it got steeper the further they went. Even Kyle—a cheat-level powerhouse if there ever was one—was struggling. His mastery of Avarice refused to reach the threshold. He was stuck at five emotions fused, and a full week had passed without any movement.
On her side, the Life Equation showed zero progress. She hadn't even glimpsed it.
Darkseid's situation on Apokolips was roughly the same. The prize was right in front of him; he simply couldn't get it out.
Her former subordinate Kanto had slipped back in to scout the situation. DeSaad had constructed an enormous magical array designed to draw out the Anti-Life Equation by force. Massive numbers of slaves and civilians were being slaughtered and tortured to death—the entire planet was drowning in screams, and viewed from outside, Apokolips looked wrapped in a corona of blood. Darkseid had gone into a frenzy, sending his forces out daily to seize anyone they could find and feed them to the array.
The theory was to use the violence itself to lure the Anti-Life Equation to the surface.
The problem was that the Anti-Monitor's essence was too deeply layered. He had no interest in separating from his host, and brute-force extraction was producing almost nothing.
Given enough time, a steady drip would wear through any stone—keeping up that pressure, day after day, year after year, would eventually dislodge the Anti-Life Equation. But time was exactly what Apokolips didn't have.
In under two weeks, Darkseid had already repelled two waves of Hell's forces.
The invading demons weren't at the absolute top of the power scale, but they were far from weak—all lord-class greater demons. Without Darkseid personally in the field, even Steppenwolf and the others were barely holding. This was clearly Hell probing Apokolips's limits.
After Thea's first pass through Apokolips, and then Batman's, Hell's archdemons had been unable to contain their hunger for the Anti-Life Equation. They had taken over the raiding schedule—third pass, fourth pass, fifth—a steady stream of demons marching on Apokolips. Darkseid didn't have the luxury of fury. He wasn't giving up the Equation, and his reputation as a tyrant wasn't built on bluster. Come fight, then—let's see what you're made of.
By the time Kanto left Apokolips, they had beaten back a third assault.
Darkseid personally defeated one of Hell's greater demons in single combat, then reduced the creature to just a head using his Omega Beams—leaving it alive, because Hell's will wouldn't resurrect what wasn't dead. He had the skull mounted above the main gate of his palace as a demonstration of force and to steady his troops' nerves.
The intimidation factor was limited. The demons kept coming in waves; his own people, at least, regained some of their confidence.
In Heaven and on New Genesis, they were celebrating like it was a festival. The forces of justice took a generally optimistic view of Apokolips and Hell tearing into each other—keep fighting, don't stop, never stop. Every spy New Genesis had planted inside Apokolips, every fallen angel whose loyalties still lay with Heaven—all of them received instructions from on high: do whatever it takes to keep this war burning, without end, without limit.
As it turned out, the Archangels were not exactly paragons of virtue either.
Watching Darkseid struggle to extract the Anti-Life Equation, and worried he might lose hope and give up, the Archangels decided to manufacture a little "hope" for the Dark Tyrant. To bolster his conviction, they collectively roused their master—Michael Demiurgos, the Lord of Heaven, who had been lost in his own inner world. This son of the Presence, equal in renown to Lucifer himself, used his superior insight to look at the problem and came up with a suggestion before returning to his slumber.
The highly efficient method for extracting the Anti-Life Equation proceeded to make its way—through seven or eight carefully arranged intermediaries—to Darkseid's hands, entirely by "accident."