"The Entity of Life is with me," Thea said, hovering in front of Nekron. Her voice was even, almost casual, as though she were commenting on the weather. "You've already lost. There's no way you beat me now."
She was hovering mainly because the skirt had a slit that ran slightly higher than comfortable, and any aggressive footwork was going to create a situation. The white light surrounding her helped, but a few people on this battlefield—Superman, Firestorm—had the kind of eyes that didn't care about bright backgrounds.
Nekron started to strike—then remembered. Right. No blade. The scythe head was gone. What he was holding was, unambiguously, a stick.
Thea almost laughed out loud. She didn't bother using her Soul Force to slow him—she just reached out and caught the pole.
She absorbed the impact without effort. The death-energy riding it dissolved before it could touch her.
"You see? You can't touch me anymore. The White Ring links me to every sentient being in this universe—I share their life force. How would you kill me? And as for that weapon of yours—" She let out a short, amused sound. "Well."
She reached into her ring-space and drew the Holy Sword.
Technically, the White Ring's arsenal didn't include weapons. A White Lantern wasn't supposed to carry one. But four-sevenths of the power was hers, which left the Entity without enough authority to stop her, and she had no intention of fighting empty-handed. Her Holy Sword worked just fine, thank you.
The blade was forged from light and had always been exceptional. In her hands right now, it was something else entirely. She hadn't even activated it—and already a sword-aura nearly two meters long had erupted from the one-meter blade on its own, the energy inside it purer and more intense than anything she'd drawn from the sword in all the time she'd carried it.
Seven emotions, unified. She swung.
Nekron lifted the staff to block.
He had freed himself from the ground—his feet could leave the earth now—and that opened up his options considerably. Thea could share all damage across every living mind in the universe, spreading it so thin it meant nothing. He could reach into the memory of every being who had ever died, pull out whatever he needed. Across the billions of years of accumulated death, someone had known how to fight with a staff. He simply absorbed the memory and moved as if he'd always known it.
One upward sweep. Thea slipped left—and in the fractional gap before his guard reset, her left hand snapped out. A silver chain, conjured in an instant, looped around his right leg with a crack.
He saw he couldn't pull free. He phased the leg—pushed backward one step—and the chain fell slack and hit the ground. In the same motion he drew a breath and exhaled a mass of death-fog. Thea was already pulling back, Holy Sword carving a silver arc through the air as she went.
They exchanged a few more passes. Probing. Each one faster than the last.
The sword and the staff were almost secondary. What they were actually trading was philosophy—every collision carried the weight of what each of them represented. Thea had seven emotions distilled into white light, and she worked them into the blade: the wonder of a newborn seeing the world for the first time. Do you like it? A promotion, a raise, the thrill of reaching the top of your life. Do you like that? Children gathered around you, a long old age lived to the full, leaving the world smiling. Do you like that?
Nekron answered with stillness. Whatever came at him—elation, grief, hunger, joy—he received it and returned nothing but calm.
Passion. I am unmoved. Sorrow. Still unmoved.
Thea felt her own emotional state starting to pinball. She was cycling through highs and lows so fast she was essentially demonstrating emotional instability in real time—watching the expression on her own face go from bright to flat to somewhere complicated. The borrowed emotions were still inferior to Nekron's, but with every mind in the universe absorbing her share of the impact, she herself was barely affected.
Nekron's mastery was genuinely terrifying. Death, for him, was as fundamental as breathing. Every casual swing of that staff carried the weight of legendary death-magic. At full strength, without the White Ring, she guessed she'd last a minute before she'd need to run.
With it, she had no reason to be afraid. Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine units of whatever he threw at her, spread across every living being in the universe—none of them would lose a single hair. And her own offense wasn't weak. Nekron had no one to share his damage with. He was absorbing everything alone. The outcome was already settled.
Their exchange escalated. The ripples of their clash began to reshape the world around them.
Death-energy seeped into the earth and raised a mountain of pure black—no sound, no wind, no breath of life within it. Silent and absolute as the grave itself.
The life-energy did the opposite: a river wound itself into existence, curling south to north across the battlefield. Heroes who had been fighting since before dawn, drained to the edge of collapse, felt their strength return the moment they touched it. Wounds that should have taken weeks—gone in seconds.
Where the mountain and the river met, Thea and Nekron continued.
Their residual energy flowed into both—into the stone, into the water—and the landscape shifted with each blow.
"...Help me..."
The voice came faint and far away. Thea's first thought was the Entity, but she dismissed it almost immediately. The signal was coming from within the Black Lantern power battery.
The Anti-Monitor.
She had absolutely no interest in helping him. The Anti-Monitor was Darkseid's problem—he'd been after the Anti-Life Equation for years. She'd leave that particular headache for the two of them to sort out.
Still, she looked. Maybe there was something worth knowing.
Apparently hoping to compel her rescue, the Anti-Monitor dropped every defensive barrier he had, letting her see him completely.
He was dead.
That was her first clear impression. His body showed no vital signs—only a faint wisp of will still clinging to the shell. Nekron had killed him. Not entirely surprising: the Anti-Monitor was strong, but he was still a living creature. Without anyone to share his damage, without a countering power type, it didn't matter how much health he had—given enough time, it would run out.
The Anti-Monitor's desperate counterattack had hurt Nekron badly before the end—that was why he seemed weaker than she'd expected.
She continued fighting Nekron with one hand and examined the Anti-Monitor with the other, openly, without hurry. A rare opportunity. She intended to use it.
"Save me. Your power could bring me back..." he was still pleading, still playing helpless. His plan was obvious: recover, destroy one universe to replenish his strength, and this one conveniently beneath her feet would do just fine.
She read him like a page. The dense life aura surrounding her had masked her New God traits, and he was too weakened to read her level. Who are you? Where did you come from? Where are you going? A cheerful stream of nothing while she studied him—and with him already dead and using no concealment whatsoever, everything was plain to see.
The more she looked, the less impressed she was. He'd started as an ordinary person and had simply gotten access to something extraordinary—by all signs, the Anti-Life Equation, source of the antimatter universe. Pure destruction for its own sake. She had limited interest in that.
She gave him a few vague reassurances. Big battle going on, have to deal with Nekron first, then I'll come save you. And kept fighting.