After all these years, Thea was experiencing a power-up moment for the first time. Excalibur was drinking in the emotion of all sentient life. As the pinnacle of fantasy-class weapons, the sword had no upper limit. Whatever you fed it, it could hold.
That single strike reached its peak: momentum, speed, force, conviction, everything. Krona had a good eye. He had no intention of testing the blade with his neck.
He gave a soft snort, abandoned Diana, pulled back all his power, and focused entirely on Thea.
Three quick exchanges. Krona and powered-up Thea fought to a stalemate.
That bought enough time for the second wave. Superman and Thor came in, one swinging his fists, the other his hammer, joined by Diana who'd caught her breath, all three piling on Krona.
"Are all the women from your universe like this?" Iron Man's suit had energy sensors. Of course he could read the output from Thea and Krona's exchange. He turned to Batman, mildly indignant.
Batman didn't bother answering. Instead, he produced a toy-sized robot from his belt, then a ray-gun-looking device. He pointed the ray at the robot, and a moment later jumped into it.
A three-meter-plus iron-gray mech, head shaped vaguely like a crab. Batman dropped into the cockpit, ran a fast check on the systems, and rocketed toward the fight.
"Not bad..." Iron Man thought it looked vaguely like his Hulkbuster armor. How it actually fought was another question.
Thea was striking faster and faster, but Earth's martial arts simply weren't on Krona's level. Krona was something like a humanoid supercomputer; he instinctively read the openings in her strikes and punished them. After the opening exchanges, she lost the lead again.
He slipped one of her downward cuts and brought his elbow around to meet her face.
The armor at his joints fed him massive energy gains, multiplying his speed and force tens of millions of times over. The incoming elbow strike was on the order of a top-tier tech civilization's main planetary cannon firing at full charge.
Thea moved to evade. In her peripheral vision a black shape dropped in behind her. The shape wasn't especially fast, but it moved like it had been calculated a thousand times, and it slotted perfectly into the half-beat before Krona's energy could release.
Batman? She saw him in the strange mech. He shoved Krona's elbow off-axis. The strike didn't land at full power, not even half. Thea used the opening to slash her sword across Krona's left shoulder.
"Nice suit. Looks familiar. Damian told me about it. This is the Anti-Thea Armor, right?" she rasped, breath uneven. Seventy percent of Krona's attacks were still landing on her. The pressure was crushing.
Batman's voice came back flat and corpse-like, slightly tinny through the cockpit speakers in the void. "I upgraded the original suit. This one's called the Anti-Justice League Armor. Also called the Fenrir Armor." His tone was the same one he'd use to introduce a new product line at a Wayne shareholder meeting.
The Leaguers didn't even blink. They exchanged sidelong looks. They'd all seen the same flicker of resigned acceptance on each other's faces. Very Batman.
Trash-talking mid-combat: a signature Avengers move. Even under existential pressure, you do not skip the banter.
Thor saw the League's wry expressions and got curious. He turned to Superman. Asgardian habits still gave him a tendency to underestimate women. And Batman dressed all in black wasn't exactly a justice aesthetic. Thor liked Superman, the straight-ahead-punch-the-enemy type. The two had matching builds and seemed to share a common temperament.
"You guys are called the Justice League, right?"
"Yes." Superman was a little puzzled. Hadn't they already introduced themselves?
Thor was confused. He lowered his voice. "Then what does 'Anti-Justice League Armor' mean? Is that guy an enemy of yours?" Fighting alongside former enemies was an Avengers tradition; Thor figured he'd guessed it.
Superman's face went sour. He knew Thor was asking about Batman, and for the life of him he couldn't think how to explain. He could hardly say our friend has issues.
He laughed it off, hoping to skate past the very awkward question. Splitting his attention had a price. Krona's fist caught him square in his all-American hero face.
A punch that could pulverize planets, taken to the face. Even Kryptonian flesh couldn't take it cleanly. Thor saved him: his hammer slammed in and angled Krona's arm slightly off true. The punch landed at a glancing line. Even so, Superman was sent flying over a hundred meters, his features deformed.
Immediately afterward, Batman's armor took a heavy hit. Krona's so-called energy gun, actually a multiversal-tier cannon, punched a clean hole through the Fenrir Armor.
This suit was originally the Anti-Thea Armor: high magic resistance, extreme hardness, defenses against energy attacks at the theoretical maximum. And it was still punched clean through.
Iron Man and Vision opened fire in unison. Their respective signature firepower looked like toys against Krona.
The impact energy off Iron Man's repulsors broke against Krona's plating without producing a single ripple.
Vision, without the Mind Stone, had lost a significant chunk of his output. He gathered his maximum power into a single pure-energy beam from the gem-shaped hollow on his forehead. Krona swatted it apart with a raised hand.
Seven of them hitting him with everything, and the result was bleak. Only Thea was occasionally able to score scratches on his armor. The rest were doing essentially nothing.
"We can't win. Falling back!" Less than a minute and a half in, Thea saw no path to victory and called the retreat.
A dozen multicolored vortexes appeared from nowhere, every emotion knotted together in waves, layering against Krona like a tide.
The formless, ceaseless assault forced Krona back two steps. By the time he raised his energy absorption shield, Thea had covered the rest of them out of this space.
Reuniting with Star-Lord and the Grandmaster on the outside, Thea decided their top-end firepower wasn't enough. She needed to check on the Grandmaster's real body herself. Her projection would head back to Earth with the group to plan the next move.
If Marvel's top-tier cosmic figures all entered the fight together, even a second Krona would have to kneel. But every one of those entities was content to sit back and watch the world burn. The top tier on this side wouldn't get involved, and her own top tier couldn't cross over.
So she'd have to recruit her own help. Forty people per side, two full teams, and they'd brute-force Krona down together.
For the heavy hitters, Diana counted as half, maybe. Just Thea alone wasn't enough. She'd have to gather every ally she could find.