"Attack!" Hal Jordan didn't waste a single word before charging. Carol Ferris—his ex-girlfriend—feared for his safety and followed him in.
The rest, minus Larfleeze, launched their own construct-based offensives.
It was futile. They were too few. The sheer mass of Black Lanterns intercepted all six of them before they came anywhere close to the principals. Black Hand, Scar, even Nekron himself—none of them moved a muscle.
Scar was directing the army. Black Hand was still cradling his skeletons in a daze. And Nekron—Nekron was peculiar. Thea noticed that his attention seemed fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He didn't spare the seven Lanterns a glance.
Countless civilians-turned-Black-Lanterns filled the field, interspersed with a significant number of metahumans. Among those Thea recognized on sight: Enchantress, Killer Croc, Captain Boomerang, Maxwell Lord, the second Blue Beetle, Reverse-Flash, and several of the "great mages" — a whole roster of familiar faces.
"We're going too." Thea addressed Diana and Larfleeze. The warrior princess launched skyward to take on Scar, while Larfleeze—after receiving a kick to get him moving—grudgingly entered the fray.
The rest of the heroes poured in behind them. After a full night of fighting Black Lanterns, they'd learned the pattern: these corpses couldn't be permanently killed, but they could be injured and staggered—then handed off to the Lanterns for the finishing blow.
"Everyone push toward the center! That big one is doing something down there—whatever it is, we have to interrupt him!" Thea shouted over the chaos.
She'd originally planned to stall for more time, but a faint will had reached out to her—barely audible, threadlike. She listened for a long moment before she understood: it was the World Will itself. The Entity was using the planet's consciousness to plead for her intervention.
If the Entity emerged, it would shake the cosmos. Every major power in the universe would fix their gaze on Earth. They'd show up constantly, kicking down the door for a look. And if some suicidal human decided to crack the planet open to see what the Entity actually was—that would be even worse.
She didn't assemble the seven Lanterns. She wanted to test the gap between herself and Nekron first.
"Og kcab!" A middle-aged man in a top hat floated into her path, unleashing Zatara-style backwards magic.
Thea didn't even look at him. Backwards magic was nothing special—she wasn't afraid of the living practitioner, let alone a Black Lantern puppet.
A casual disintegration spell struck Black Lantern Zatara. He shattered like glass and collapsed into a pile of slowly regenerating dust.
Face to face with Nekron, Thea felt calm.
He was stronger than her. That much was indisputable. In a multiverse where conceptual attainment was combat power, Nekron sat at the absolute peak.
Thea knew she couldn't beat Darkseid's true form. But Darkseid's true form couldn't beat Nekron either.
By rights, Nekron should have been able to crush her outright. But when his massive scythe came arcing down—a diagonal, sweeping cut—and Thea committed half her soul-divine power into her left hand to catch it, the resulting shockwave was merely... manageable.
She was knocked back over ten meters (about 30 feet). Ungraceful, but she hadn't needed to dig deep to absorb the blow.
Same-source advantage. A is stronger than B, B is stronger than C, but A doesn't necessarily dominate C—not when their powers share a common root. Thea found this mildly absurd, but it was good news.
Black Lanterns pressed in from every direction. Friendly fire wasn't a concern. She mobilized everything she had, wreathing herself in dense, ink-black soul-power that hung around her like a cloak of shadow. Nekron's attacks meant death on contact; she needed every available defense before engaging.
At this tier, magic's utility had cratered. Magic was devastating against brute-force fighters, but against Nekron, it was nearly useless.
She went in again. Nekron's combat technique, she realized, was unremarkable. She drew the Holy Sword and brought it down in a direct overhead strike.
Nekron answered with the same move—a scythe-swing at a slightly different angle. If that death-saturated blade connected, the consequences would be severe.
Thea kicked the scythe's haft with her left foot, then converted the kick into a stomp, riding the redirected momentum to close the distance.
His swing had carried through. His guard was wide open. He didn't seem to care.
The scythe vanished from where she'd pinned it—and materialized back in Nekron's hands. Same technique, third swing.
She didn't dare take it on the Holy Sword. Instead she drew Hawkgirl's mace—Nth Metal-forged—and hurled it at the incoming blade.
Edge met hammer. The impact produced a sound so deep it registered more in the chest than the ears. The mace hit the ground, outwardly unchanged, but Thea sensed something had shifted—as though a fraction of its vitality had been drained, leaving it inert and heavy.
She tested several more exchanges. The scythe was extraordinary—the most powerful weapon she'd encountered to date. Ordinary magical weapons shattered on contact. Standard steel disintegrated into powder.
Nekron stood over five meters (about 16 feet) tall. The scythe matched his height. Close range was suicide. Thea needed to fight at distance.
She drew her bow—the weapon that had built her career—and allowed herself a moment of regret. Nekron's scythe wasn't a crafted artifact. It was an extension of his being, a manifestation of his fundamental nature—a source-weapon, not a divine instrument. That kind of existential expression exceeded her trade-domain's ability to transfer. A shame. Claiming that scythe would have been magnificent.
An ink-black arrow streaked toward Nekron. He turned his withered head and regarded it with something approaching curiosity—why bother with this small projectile? What was the point?
He chose to tank it.
The arrow entered from the front and exited from the back, passing through him as though he were empty air. Every trace of divine power on the shaft was scoured clean. Less than a meter (about 3 feet) past his body, the arrow crumbled to dust.
Thea stared. The shot had been a probe—he hadn't needed to absorb it completely. She studied him and caught the faintest uptick in his aura.
She almost swore. He looked half-dead and listless, but the cunning underneath was real. He'd deliberately let her attack land—not to defend, not to counter, but to study her death. Every ounce of death-aspected energy she'd put into that arrow, he'd consumed and learned from.
As the soul-domain's mistress, her understanding of death couldn't match Nekron's depth—but it was still worth something to him.
"Hm." Looking at Nekron's placid, lake-still expression, Thea was certain he was mocking her.
"Try this, then." She nocked another arrow. This time, the shaft blazed with rage—raw emotional energy, red as arterial blood. She wanted to know if this silent monument to entropy had it in him to lose his temper.
The arrowhead gleamed wet crimson. Red mist-like energy trailed behind it, dragging a long tail of flame as it streaked toward Nekron. The emotional eruption on this side of the field made Atrocitus snap to attention. He kicked aside the Black Lanterns around him and stared, unblinking, at the incoming shot. He wanted to see if this arrow could hurt the big one.
Nekron wasn't stupid. He wouldn't stand still like a target dummy and let everyone take potshots while practicing their ranged attacks.
Recognizing that the energy on this arrow had nothing to do with death, he swung the scythe to cut it down—and discovered the shot was angled with surgical precision. The scythe was too large, too unwieldy; he'd have to turn his body to get the right attack angle.