Raven brought everything she had and spent none of it carefully.
Dark magic hammered into Nabu's shields in a relentless barrage—no finesse, no distinction between shields, deflections, or traps, just overwhelming magical force. She couldn't tell them apart and didn't care to try.
"Ya—!"
Behind Raven, her magical avatar manifested: a raven so vast it blotted out the sky, solid as stone, and it hurled itself directly into Nabu's layered defenses.
The impact shattered three shields simultaneously.
For the first time, Nabu showed something close to alarm. Every artifact on his body blazed at once. His tactical intelligence was still intact—he identified Raven as Thea's reinforcement, braced against Thea's disintegration attack using sheer artifact synergy, and counterattacked with both hands: a multi-colored chromatic beam that struck Raven dead-center.
Thea and Raven looked at each other.
Then they both started laughing.
Nabu had assumed Raven was young, and that a young woman's mental fortitude would be soft. He'd used a high-order confusion spell—the kind that could crack a senior archmage. What he didn't know was who Raven's father was.
Trigon. Demon King of Three Worlds.
Demonic bloodlines had the second-highest magical resistance in existence, after dragons—and against mental magic specifically, that resistance bordered on immunity. Even Thea, with all her depth of craft, had been planting mental influence in Raven since Mekastar was at her weakest, and still couldn't claim to have truly controlled her for more than a handful of years. Nabu's brute-forced external will, hammered in through a single conjured spell?
It didn't land.
He had wasted the move. His defeat arrived faster.
The man was still extraordinary. Two full minutes of sustained bombardment from both of them—Raven opening full manifestation attacks repeatedly, the dark raven crashing through his defenses again and again—before the last shield finally collapsed.
Thea: one green. One yellow.
The black ring shattered. Nabu went down.
With both of them fully engaged, the rest of the battle turned. Hermes remained a problem—his divine body resisted the miniature sun's light far better than any normal speedster, and unlike the rest, he could fly. It took a coordinated effort from everyone on the field to finally run him down.
But the delay had cost them. While Nabu and Hermes had held the field, Black Lanterns had scattered across Central City.
Thea looked over the final results, speechless.
BL Batman. BL Malcolm Merlyn. BL Reverse Flash.
The three most strategically dangerous combatants in the entire battle had escaped.
Of course they had.
Robert Queen stepped forward, his voice quiet and earnest. "Please. Don't destroy the portal."
Thea turned the problem over in her mind. Earth-2 had already been devastated by Steppenwolf—its heroes bled dry, its strength reduced to a fraction of what it once was. Now a Blackest Night on top of everything. Adding insult to injury.
Without other-spectrum lanterns, with only Alan Scott's nature-based power to work with, Earth-2 had no real mechanism to quell a Blackest Night on its own. And this crisis had originated on Earth-1. Earth-2 was a casualty, not a cause.
If she destroyed the portal, the Black Lanterns already on the other side would simply finish what was left of Earth-2 without interference.
"I'm willing to help," Thea said. "Drive the dead ones through to our side."
Clark and Diana didn't hesitate. They had the ability; that made it their responsibility. Earth-2's heroes were allies. The call was obvious.
The Earth-2 contingent wept. Several of them simply dropped to the ground to rest. The fight had come without warning, without preparation—they'd absorbed an overwhelming blow and hadn't stopped moving since.
Thea looked over the arrivals. "Where's Hawkgirl? Where's Captain Steel? Don't tell me everyone coming through the portal was—"
"They died fighting," Robert said quietly.
She absorbed that. Earth-2 had been used as a sacrifice by Scarface, its brief recovery from Steppenwolf's devastation spent in a single afternoon.
She didn't carry guilt over it. The portal had existed whether she knew it or not. Discovery was always inevitable. If Scarface had found it, she'd been operating on Earth for a significant stretch of time—not an impulse. Everything had been arranged by something larger than any one player.
She put it under Destiny's name and felt marginally better.
Clark flew to her side, staring at Val-Zod with visible confusion. Blue bodysuit. Red cape. The S-shield on the chest.
"Who is that?"
"Val-Zod. Their world's Superman. The Black Lantern version you just put down was their world's Zod—but on their Earth, Zod was a pacifist. A scholar. He's the one who ended up carrying the cape."
The explanation came out in fragments. Even Thea had to admit the situation was getting absurdly layered. Dead people walking. Parallel timelines. Dead people from parallel timelines crossing into their timeline.
And somewhere in the suburbs of Metropolis right now, Faora was locked in a full battle with the real Zod—while his son from a parallel universe sat twenty meters away, recovering.
The portal kept producing Black Lanterns. But with Clark, Diana, the Flash, and the Earth-2 contingent supporting the Central City police and National Guard, the line held around the ruins of the former S.T.A.R. Labs complex. The miniature sun continued to degrade every Black Lantern within its radius; conventional weapons and combined hero firepower handled the rest. The human side was holding, barely.
Thea said her goodbyes and left.
Star City needed a miniature sun. Metropolis needed one. Washington needed one.
She had work to do.
Elsewhere.
Amanda Waller's head dropped below the door frame as something hummed past at lethal velocity. Deadshot's shot shattered the boomerang mid-arc.
A.R.G.U.S. was in full retreat. The agents were skilled—but against opponents who couldn't stay dead, skill had a ceiling.
BL Captain Boomerang had apparently taught himself to create ring constructs on the fly. His projectiles came back from angles that didn't exist, in the dark, without warning.
Doctor Light—their best option against Black Lanterns—had taken a hit in the first wave and was down.
If Amanda hadn't spent her career being paranoid about contingencies, they'd have been sealed inside the A.R.G.U.S. complex an hour ago.
Five hundred agents. Under three hundred remaining—and half of those were desk workers.
"Change vehicles—move!"
The convoy ground forward, losing another car every few blocks.
"Amanda." The voice was warm and terrible, coming from somewhere behind them. "My old boss. Rick Flag and Doctor Moone are here to see you."
BL Rick Flag—once Amanda's most promising operational asset, the man she'd been grooming to lead the Suicide Squad—was running them down from behind, pale light burning in his eyes. Right on cue, June Moone—the Enchantress, raised again by a black ring—raised both hands and fired a volley of shadow arrows, followed by a wave of shadow creatures churning across the asphalt.
Doctor Mist—an African hero whose entire body was inscribed with magic circles—caught the directed spells on his reflective wards. The shadow creatures were another matter. Katana stepped into the gap, her soul-cutting blade a blur, putting down three creatures in quick succession before they could reach the group.
Crisis averted. For the moment.