The Anti-Monitor couldn't have cared less. Who do you think you are, talking about beating Nekron? But he was dead. He had no good options. He waited.
Thea traded two more passes with Nekron—and then felt it.
A descending force, sharp and absolute, as though something capable of splitting the planet in half was falling from the sky.
Who—?
She drove Nekron back with a quick exchange and looked up.
A blood-red sword was dropping from an immeasurable height, cleaving the air in a single long diagonal. The power inside it was without limit—the kind of force that could erase a world with a gesture. If she was reading it correctly, this was the power of the Presence itself. Her gaze jumped instinctively to the Spectre miles away; he was also looking up, expression unreadable, deciding whether to intervene. Thea stared.
Not him?
"It's my predecessor," came the Spectre's voice, drifting to her ear unbidden.
His predecessor.
Eclipso. Or—that other Thea. The Dark Thea. Or something in between.
She examined the sword-light. Same blade as the Holy Sword, structurally—but black, veined with crimson, magnified hundreds of times over. She'd just misread it at distance.
The life-sharing link meant she had to take the first hit of anything threatening the field. There was no time to think. She flooded the Holy Sword and swung it full-force into the sky.
Against whatever this was—Eclipso, or the dark version of herself, or both merged—she went all out. She was confident. Even if Eclipso or the Spectre stepped in personally, she could hold.
The impact she expected didn't come.
Her swing cut empty air—the strike curved elegantly in the space between them, looped in a long arc, and came down toward the Black Lantern power battery far behind her.
She's trying to revive the Anti-Monitor.
Thea's guard had opened. Too late to intervene.
The blood-red sword-light struck the power battery clean. The cut was mirror-smooth. The lantern-shaped battery split in two and toppled with a sound like distant thunder, throwing clouds of debris. Something dark and motionless lay in the wreckage.
The sword-energy didn't stop. It drove itself into the life river.
"No—"
The river had formed from Thea's own combat energy mixing with the ocean—she'd intended it as a healing pool for the heroes on the field. She hadn't counted on someone using it against her. She raised her left hand immediately and the White Ring began drawing the energy back in, drinking it like a whale swallowing the sea.
Too slow.
The impact had already scattered river water in every direction, spraying across the battlefield at random.
"Huh?" One of the lucky ones who received a few drops was the Black Lantern Captain Boomerang. He came back to himself completely baffled, with no idea why he was suddenly alive again. His last memory was Deathstroke taking his head off. He took one look at the black figures surrounding him and ran.
If some were revived passively by sheer luck, others fought their way back deliberately. Those with enough personal willpower to push against Black Lantern control—even partially—broke free and scrambled for the water by whatever means they had.
Reverse-Flash was the most conspicuous of these. He erupted at nearly his peak speed, snatching droplets in sequence, four or five in rapid succession to be sure—white light flashed over him as the Black Lantern shattered—then turned without a backward glance and vanished from Coast City entirely.
Nick Necro—Constantine's old guide, and by any measure one of the most gifted young practitioners in the magical community—raised a hand and executed a seamless layered working: displacement, knockback of nearby Black Lanterns, absorption of the river water, revival, and a teleport out, all in one unbroken chain.
Felix Faust swapped positions with a Black Lantern that had been standing at his intended landing point, slipped into the revival, and was free—but fumbled his escape just long enough for a group of anti-magic users to pin him in place.
"Reversals!" Zatara—adept at backward-casting spells—pushed through the Black Lantern control as well, absorbed a few drops, and completed his revival.
These were all footnotes. What actually commanded attention was the largest single spray of water, which curved away from all of them and flew entirely beyond control—straight toward the Anti-Monitor.
Thea and Nekron moved simultaneously to intercept.
The Holy Sword's radiance and a wave of death-energy struck together against a surface thin as a dragonfly's wing—a translucent mirror that seemed to open like a mouth, chewing and swallowing both attacks before dissolving into nothing in under two seconds. But those two seconds were all the Anti-Monitor needed.
He was alive.
Five meters tall. Power armor dense with high-technology energy systems. Six energy conduit tubes running from the back of his neck down his spine, all snapped—that must have been how Nekron had drained him, tapping directly into those connections. Even revived, his condition was catastrophic: a comical helmet on his head, his right leg gone at the knee, his entire body crosshatched with wounds, blood still welling steadily from the severed stump.
The external damage was severe. The internal depletion was worse—enormous amounts of power had been extracted. The life river could bring an ordinary person back at full health; for a body of his scale, the effect was equivalent to a single drop of blood. Right now anything with half a mind could put him down again.
He didn't wait around to test that theory. Thea's sword was barely raised before he teleported—and was gone, into another universe.
That was fast. She stared at the space he'd left behind.
Three choices, now. Chase a nearly-dead Anti-Monitor. Team up with the Spectre against the dark version of herself. Or stay and finish what she'd started with Nekron.
The first was off the table immediately—he'd vanished without a trace and she had no coordinates to follow.
The dark-Thea she wasn't willing to chase either. Eclipso was not someone to be careless about. Here, on this earth, she had no fear—every living mind's power pooled together, she could hold her own against even the Spectre's full force. But the attacker had made one cross-dimensional strike, landed the blow, and left. If Thea pursued into a parallel timeline, the White Ring would be useless—no reservoir to draw on. The energy in the ring itself would drain and not refill. She wasn't quite at the level of fighting one of the Presence's vessels with raw reserves alone. Not yet.
She turned back to Nekron and touched the Holy Sword lightly to his chest.
Interruption's over. Shall we?
Nekron surveyed the field. The Black Lanterns were pushing thirty percent harder—but he felt no satisfaction. With the power battery destroyed, he was the sole power source for every Black Lantern ring in the universe. The death-energy was bleeding out of him continuously, converted and consumed by rings that numbered in the billions. He'd started with 3.9 billion. Fewer than ten million had gone offline. How long could he sustain the rest?
There was nothing to discuss.
He ran.
He was the incarnation of death—he had nothing but time. He could wait. He could come back. He clearly hadn't studied Stanislavski. He made absolutely no effort to disguise his intent, and Thea wasn't going to let him walk out.
She let the sword's tip bloom with white light—dense, threaded, a mass of tangled radiance sweeping toward Nekron in an all-encompassing wave. The light was so thick that friendly fire was inevitable—but passing through ordinary people did nothing at all. Through a Black Lantern, though: one pass, one kill.