Thea put the imposter down with one punch—because that was exactly what the thing was, an imposter, full stop—then pivoted and dispersed the Reverse-Flash's thrown lightning with her other hand.
A weight settled in her chest.
If Wonder Woman had been raised, everyone who had died on Earth-2 had likely been raised as well.
The confirmation came immediately: a rush of wind, and a massive figure tore through the breach—broad-framed, face threaded with black ichor, the S-crest on his chest, and a wide cape. He caught the Earth-2 Wonder Woman in midair without slowing, then spun and drove a fist straight at Thea in the same motion.
"You're not in my league either. Move." She turned the full-strength punch back at him and sent the Black Lantern Superman skidding across the street.
She was a spellcaster first and foremost. She spent an entirely unreasonable percentage of her existence hitting people with her actual hands, and she was getting tired of it.
"Am I in your league, then?" An arrow came from her blind spot—upper right. Thea caught it, squeezed, turned it to powder.
"You're even weaker than he is." She turned to face the source.
A woman in a red tactical jacket stood across the wreckage, a quiver on her back and a compound bow with two arrows already nocked in her hands, aimed steadily at her from the distance. The fury Thea had been keeping a lid on began to climb.
Black Lanterns had resurrected the Earth-2 version of Thea Queen.
Then more came through the gap: Batman. Oliver. Malcolm. Tommy. Moira.
Unbelievable. Her fury at Nekron had passed the point where words were adequate. Intentional or not, this had just become personal.
"I'll take him." Barry identified the Reverse-Flash and started talking trash to draw his old nemesis away. Clark engaged the Black Lantern Superman, and the two of them filled the air with impact noise on the far side of the breach.
Both of them were stronger than their opponents now. But the Black Lanterns kept recovering. Drag this out long enough and neither Clark nor Barry could win an attrition fight against enemies with no ceiling on how many times they could stand back up.
Thea didn't wait. She signaled Caitlin to help slow them down, slipped on both rings, and started moving through the field.
"Why? Why do you get to have everything? What do I have that you don't—aren't I you?" The Black Lantern version of herself kept working the outer perimeter with arrows. An individual Black Lantern ring was drawing from a pool diluted across 3.9 billion units; every performance metric was way down across the board. Flight still worked. Combined with skills learned in life, she was managing well enough to be a persistent nuisance.
"You're inferior to me in every way." Thea said it plainly. The old version of herself wouldn't have talked this way—compared to entities that genuinely warranted the word god, she'd always considered herself comparatively small. But tonight she was going to say it, or she wasn't going to sleep. "You're mortal. That's the difference."
She grabbed the Black Lantern Oliver by the arm. The smell of old death hit like a wall. She planted a foot on his neck and pressed down. Earth-2's Oliver had died in a shipwreck, his potential entirely untapped—a deadweight of a man right to the end. She had absolutely zero hesitation. Two pulses of combined light, and he collapsed into dried bones.
On the other side of the field, the Black Lantern Malcolm and the Black Lantern Batman were demonstrating that combat intelligence persisted after death. They'd circled around Thea entirely and were going after Caitlin and Cisco instead. Bart Allen and Wally West cut them off.
Thea pointed at each of the remaining figures in sequence. "You, you—all of you. You're husks. I have no family connection to any of you, and you have no connection to me."
She turned back to face the Black Lantern version of herself. "You want to understand the difference between a god and a mortal? Let me show you a gap you were never going to cross."
She brought both palms up, facing each other, and began slowly drawing them apart. Between her fingers, light fractured into shards—dim at first, then building. A dense, barely-contained heat began accumulating between her hands, compressing itself inward, smaller and brighter. The air immediately around her palms started to distort.
Thea held her focus, lips moving in a low murmur. The spell was called the Ammon Ator Eternal Sun—something she'd found during research in Hell, largely by accident. It compressed magical force into the form of a miniature star. Against conventional undead armies it was a weapon of mass destruction; whether it could genuinely damage Black Lanterns remained untested, but concentrated solar intensity would definitely damage their dead bodies.
She knew enough about rings and about death to know that death had limits. Everything ends—even Nekron had an ending written somewhere. And the Black Lanterns' capacity to regenerate wasn't free. Every gram of dead-matter restored drew from somewhere—which meant ultimately from Nekron. His reservoir was vast enough that the draw wasn't visible yet. That was fine. She was prepared to make it visible eventually.
Attrition. The longer this ran, the more it cost him.
The sphere of light between her hands grew from a faint glow into something that bent the air around it and warped the light. Even her own skin was registering the heat now. She shoved the sphere upward with both hands.
At first, the effect was subtle. The Black Lanterns only registered a general brightening—uncomfortable in the degraded optical range their dead eyes operated in, but manageable. Then the minutes stretched, and the heat built.
Several Black Lanterns in the air began to show it. The Black Lantern Superman had already been losing to Clark; between the real Kryptonian outclassing him and the building solar intensity, his performance started coming apart in visible increments. Clark pressed harder—and landed a clean punch to the chest.
The Black Lantern Superman staggered. He tried to compensate, tried to pull his speed back up—and found it wasn't there anymore. He looked at his own hands. The dark muscle was smoking. He tried to make a fist; a finger simply detached.
He looked around with what might have been confusion. The Black Lantern Wonder Woman nearby showed the same symptoms. The Reverse-Flash was worse—he'd tried to break left and his right foot had dissolved from under him mid-stride. He was stumbling.
The ordinary-human Black Lanterns fared worst of all: some were dragging a leg; some had already stopped moving entirely.
The rings kept working to repair the damage—methodically, mechanically, with the dedicated focus of something that had never been programmed to recognize a losing position. Their logic was rigid: while the host persisted, repair. So they repaired. The concentrated sunlight dissolved the repair. They tried again.
The result was a loop: dissolve, repair, dissolve, repair, with combat effectiveness swinging wildly as bodies fell apart, were reconstituted, and fell apart again. Without structural integrity, even a Black Lantern Superman couldn't generate meaningful force.
Clark and Barry both found themselves at a clear advantage for the first time in the fight. The Reverse-Flash couldn't run. The Black Lantern Wonder Woman was still thinking tactically—she shifted to targeting bystanders, forcing Barry to peel off and intervene rather than pressing the advantage.
And Scarface, even at ground level with the Black Lanterns forming a partial screen between her and the sky—the light found her anyway. The chains had started to change color where the light struck them directly. Two showed visible damage. The eight rabid dogs who had been tearing at Diana began to stutter in their assault, their blank expressions showing the first faint trace of returning awareness.