"Help us—we can't hold much longer!" Robert Queen had one arm around the elderly Thomas Wayne, running at the front of the group, gasping, waving urgently at Thea. "There are two of them behind us—stop them!"
Who? Earth-2 didn't have that many heavy hitters left. Thea assessed the state of the arrivals—every one of them looked like they'd been worked over for hours—and looked past them into the passage.
Doctor Fate kept throwing wide-field magical strikes back toward pursuit. Alan Scott kept hurling constructs behind him. Val-Zod fought a running retreat—engaged, disengaged, covered, re-engaged—a full minute of continuous combat across the length of the portal just to buy time for the non-powered members of the group to cross.
"Who's chasing you?" Thea asked.
"Na—" Robert caught his breath. "Nabu."
The name had barely left his lips.
Val-Zod took a fireball to the chest and was thrown fifteen meters through the air. Doctor Fate's magical shield detonated. Alan Scott caught a column of fire and went down.
Through the portal walked something that had not been alive in a very long time.
Black, rotted muscle. The smell of ages. Eyes burning with terrible light.
Nabu—the ancient mage who had become a god on Earth-1 while on Earth-2 choosing to sacrifice himself—had been raised by a black ring.
Millennia of death had eaten most of his clothing. Thea automatically disregarded what remained of the fabric and focused on the man himself. He floated at eye level, legs folded in meditation posture, wearing the remnants of a half-cracked pharaoh-style golden mask.
She immediately revised her assessment of the situation upward.
The man was loaded. Earrings. Rings on every finger. A nose ring. Wristbands. A belt. Ankle bracelets. And his toes—she was fairly certain his toes had rings on them too. The overlapping magical auras pouring off each piece made her eyes water just looking at them.
No wonder he'd crushed Earth-2's finest. An artifact ensemble like that was effectively its own army.
Nabu uttered a few syllables. Before Thea could make sense of what he was doing, she found she didn't need to—the artifacts did it for him. Without preamble, without monologue, without warning, each piece began to coordinate. Each piece activated in sequence, their power flowing through Nabu's will like a liquid through a precision instrument. Not one joule wasted. Not one millisecond of lag. He raised both hands.
A rain of fire unfurled across the sky—miles wide—each drop wrapped around a burning meteor.
If those hit, half of Central City would be leveled.
Ancient magic. Thea felt a genuine spark of interest. There weren't many people in the world who could actually push her in a pure spellcraft contest.
She quickly located several key nodes in the casting framework and struck one apart to break it.
Nabu paused. Briefly. He didn't speak—not even a warning—just connected to a different artifact, and the burning rain hiccupped once, then resumed its descent.
They traded moves. Thea hit a node. Nabu rerouted. She hit another. He adapted. The fire rain jerked across the sky in stuttering fits and starts, like a film skipping frames, each volley pausing mid-fall before lurching downward again.
He was committed to completing the spell. She was committed to stopping it. Seven, eight exchanges—neither one pulling decisively ahead—because whatever managed to get through, Superman, Diana, and Val-Zod were already breaking it apart before it hit ground.
"Don't worry about me," Thea said, eyes fixed on Nabu. "There are still enemies coming through on the other side."
She didn't add the rest of it—that Nabu, through some combination of deliberate caution in life and sheer luck in death, had stacked seven or eight layers of magical shielding on his body, and that her usual shortcut for dealing with Black Lanterns (one green, one yellow) was completely useless against him. She'd have to strip every last shield before she could even think about finishing him.
As if to punctuate the point, a golden shape burst from the portal.
Once-gleaming armor, now flooded with black. Winged helmet. A caduceus staff, both serpents dull. Lightning trailed behind the figure as it moved, and the first bolt struck Diana before she'd fully registered what she was looking at.
"Speed Force?" Diana got her shield up on instinct. The impact was real. Her sword came around and caught nothing.
She fired a look at Thea.
"Earth-2's Hermes," Thea said without turning. "Their god of speed. Jay Garrick's speed was his gift before he died."
Barry lit up and ran to help.
The gap announced itself immediately. Hermes was a god. Barry was human. A divine body could perform movements that simply weren't available to human physiology—angles of attack that defied inertia, reversals that required no wind-up. Barry could track him. He could not match him. The other speedsters didn't come close.
Earth-2's Aquaman appeared next—Arthur Curry as a Black Lantern—and behind him, Mera. Their Atlantis had never sunk, but Steppenwolf had broken it open in the early hours of his invasion; Arthur had died in that breach.
Clark moved to intercept. He managed two exchanges before Black Lantern Batman appeared behind him and a Kryptonite dart nearly ended him. It took Cisco, Caitlin, and half a dozen others to drag him clear in time.
The situation was getting complicated.
Thea escalated against Nabu. Which proved significantly harder than she'd expected. The ancient mage was extraordinarily resilient—seven parts defense, three parts offense. His shields regenerated the moment she broke them. His magical traps reset as fast as she could dismantle them.
Against any normal human mage, three soul-strikes and it would be done. Against a Black Lantern, soul techniques were off the table entirely. Immunity was built into the ring.
She was stuck fighting him by pure attrition. For every nine spells he cast, she countered ten. She was winning. Slowly, and at significant cost.
The problem was she needed to conserve power for Nekron. Grinding through Nabu's entire shield array would drain her far too much—but his spellwork was too precise and too dangerous to hand off to anyone else.
She glanced around for the Guardian she'd freed earlier.
Gone. Hadn't said a word. Hadn't offered so much as a perfunctory thanks. Just vanished.
With no other options, she called in a favor.
Raven—the crown princess of brute magical force, who had never met a problem she didn't want to solve by hitting it harder—heard what the task was and immediately looked interested.