A thread of white light caught Nekron's left foot. His retreat stalled for a fraction of a second.
Thea drove in, Holy Sword loaded with emotion, and stabbed him in the back.
Thud. A wave of rot and decay bloomed in the air—thick enough to gag on. She had enough of a clean streak to find it genuinely unpleasant, but she held her breath and twisted the sword inside the wound. Twice.
"You can't kill me," Nekron said. He sounded like he was explaining something obvious.
His body crumbled to ash. Less than a second later, his presence reappeared inside a Black Lantern—the body stretching and reshaping itself, gaunt and skeletal as ever, a long staff back in his grip.
He can jump between any Black Lantern freely. Nekron wasn't a living creature. He was something more like a will that had taken form—a concentrated intention wearing a body for convenience. Conventional methods weren't going to work. Thea weighed the question of a war of attrition and found herself hesitating: the life-sharing link meant the people who'd run out of reserves first would be the elderly and children. She didn't like that math.
Nekron raised a barrier in front of himself and turned to leave this world behind.
It was Hal Jordan who moved first.
One burst of green light, and he was flying full-speed directly into Nekron's side.
"Hal, don't—!" Carol Ferris knew exactly what Nekron's death-aura did. She screamed his name and lunged after him.
Nekron had his guard angled toward Thea—he hadn't accounted for someone being reckless enough to tackle him with their body. Does this man's skull contain anything at all?
Green light shattered on impact. Death-energy cascaded, crawling up from the contact point at Hal's shoulder to his neck and across his face. Hal Jordan's life had less than a second left.
Thea didn't hesitate. She dropped the rest of her considerations and cleared the death-energy from Hal first—then wheeled on Nekron.
They clashed again, back and forth, the exchange loud and relentless. Every second Nekron held on, he bled more death-energy, and to compensate he began shedding Black Lantern rings.
Across the universe, Black Lanterns stuttered simultaneously—a single heartbeat of stillness—and then rings began departing their hosts, drifting loose. Every planet that had been overrun felt the pressure drop. The sound that went up was barely audible from where Thea was fighting, but she felt it.
She noticed the shift immediately—she was attuned to death-energy now, and this kind of change was impossible to miss. But there was no way to stop him from cutting losses.
The gratitude of every living mind across the universe crystallized into something like prayer, pouring in an unbroken stream into the scales of order. She couldn't stop that either.
Nekron's focus narrowed to escape and survival. He pulled the black mountain he'd raised back into himself, shed rings in batches, and worked at maintaining what he had left. Thea stopped pressing aggressive combinations and shifted to defense, conserving her own reserves while the assembled heroes poured on offense.
The logic was simple: the Black Lanterns were extensions of Nekron. Whatever damage they took was damage to him. Every ring destroyed on the field was a fragment of death that was simply gone. Not transferred—gone.
The battle hit its peak intensity. Ganthet recalled every Green Lantern who had been stationed at Odym and every scattered Lantern across the universe, pulling them all in.
Everyone moved at full speed, racing to destroy as many Black Lanterns as possible before the window closed.
Thea opened up repeatedly—white light cascading outward in every direction like sheets of rain, wave after wave, relentless. She kept the intensity calibrated: enough to destroy, enough to dissolve death-energy, but not enough to trigger revival. Nothing she did was an accident.
"You're not going anywhere!" Another swing, another strike—this one landing on Nekron's shoulder. The Holy Sword's edge dissolved an entire arm in a sizzling line of white energy. He used the moment she spent on that strike to open a corridor behind himself, stepped through without looking back.
Thea thought for two seconds.
She didn't know how well her rings would hold in there. But she decided to follow.
Because the corridor Nekron had opened was a time stream.
At the far end of time lived the Council of Time Masters. At the beginning of time lived the Endless. Time wasn't her turf—but she had people there. She wasn't afraid of either end.
The instant she crossed the threshold, her White Ring read ninety-nine percent.
She wasn't surprised. Time treated everyone with the same indifference—Darkseid, Highfather, all of them kept a respectful distance from it for exactly that reason. Any overwhelming force that entered the time stream got trimmed down to something manageable. That fairness was absolute.
Previously she'd only been able to enter via an avatar. Her current status as death's reserve was what had freed her from that limitation—and she doubted Nekron shared the same advantage.
"This is a time corridor—I'm going after him," she said, leaving one sentence behind for the field.
Fair warning. If some hero decided to come anyway, that was their choice.
She stepped in.
The timestream was as vast and strange as she remembered—a layered expanse of compressed realities, each frame of three-dimensional existence stacked against the next. To her eyes, space itself stuttered, flickering like a faulty projection.
This was a dimension built from countless three-dimensional worlds piled on top of each other, their echoes crowding the air around her. She looked through the layers, past the noise—and found Nekron. He hadn't gone far.
"You are chasing death, New God," Nekron said, watching the white light on her body begin to dim. His voice carried something she hadn't heard from him before: the faint edge of satisfaction.
What are you bragging about. She could see perfectly well that his own aura had dropped below one-fifth of what it had been at the start. No weapon. No power left to speak of. What was there to be afraid of?
He did exactly what she expected: ran. He sprinted through the timestream, hopping in and out of the current whenever she got close.
They chased through centuries. One second in the Middle Ages, the next in the thirtieth century. The time flow worked on both of them—pushing, pulling, reshaping the parameters of what they could do.
She passed Jesse Quick and Trajectory at one point and waved them off. Big one. Go rest.
They ran and fought in bursts across the timeline, neither gaining clean ground. Time diminished Nekron less than she'd hoped—barely at all—and her own caution around his death-energy kept her from committing fully. They were testing each other's endurance.
"Hey—Thea—I'm over here..."
She was moving at speed through a particular time-slice when she caught the voice. Impossible—no one who knew her had any business being in the timestream. But her dynamic vision was exceptional. Even at that velocity, even from a single passing glance, she'd already reconstructed the face.
Bare torso. Rough linen trousers. A full beard. What looked like the deck of a ship.
Who is that? She turned it over for a moment.
Then she had it.
Oh. That was Bruce Wayne. She hadn't recognized him at first—he was almost never without the cowl—but that jaw was unmistakable once you knew what you were looking for.
She kept pursuing Nekron and sent a message ahead to Booster Gold: retrieve Bruce from the timestream, bring him to the Vanishing Point. They'd figure out the rest afterward.
"Hold still!" Her gaze fired two beams—since absorbing that hunger deity, her eye beams had leveled up considerably, somewhere in the range of forty or fifty percent of Omega-level intensity. She couldn't eliminate Nekron outright—neither could Darkseid—but she could slow him.
Nekron didn't take it on the body. He shifted two steps left—realized the beams were tracking—and in a moment of apparent resignation raised the manacle on his left wrist to bat them aside.