Thea had noticed something extraordinary about Nekron's shackles long before this moment. Someone had used them to imprison him once—but the material was unlike anything she had ever encountered. Not metal. Not arcane material. Not magical alloy. Yet their power was absolute: no matter what energy she hurled against them, not a single mark appeared.
She wanted them badly. She had even hacked off Nekron's left arm to try—but it regrew in the next second, shackles still attached. The things outclassed even his scythe, his signature weapon. Infuriating.
She swatted away the tracking beam. Nekron hadn't even had time to celebrate before—BOOM.
A colossal column of light punched through from beyond the timestream and slammed directly into him. The pillar was saturated with savage, annihilating energy—like an entire universe screaming in rage. Every moment of time it passed through shattered like glass, leaving a trail of glittering, multi-colored fragments drifting down the river of time.
"Antimatter cannon?" Thea didn't stop to think about the consequences. She jumped backward through two time-slices in an instant. An antimatter discharge that intense was unmistakable. Did the Anti-Monitor just shoot Nekron from outside the timestream?
She wanted to leave the timeline entirely, but Nekron showed no reaction whatsoever—just drifting away along the current of time. She hesitated, then made up her mind: seal him first.
The Anti-Monitor firing on Nekron made perfect sense. Being locked inside the Black Lantern's central power battery and used as a living generator would break anyone. An entity who had collapsed countless parallel universes, finally free—of course he'd take his shot. What would be strange is if he didn't.
What Thea wasn't sure about was how he felt toward her.
She trailed Nekron along the river of time for a good fifteen minutes. When no second shot came and no further moves were made, she allowed herself to relax—slightly.
Maybe his injuries were too severe—one shot and he passed out? It was the only explanation she could come up with.
Years later, she would learn how deep the Anti-Monitor's hatred for Nekron truly ran—that he had been running on fumes, barely holding himself together, and had reached across time and dimensions for that one shot out of sheer spite. Afterward, the cannon exploded. The effort knocked him unconscious.
For now, Thea hauled Nekron out of the timestream.
One antimatter cannon, designed to destroy a parallel universe with a single shot—its effect on Nekron was plain to see. He was completely unconscious. A hole still burned through his chest, smoldering at the edges, his body unable to close it.
This was remarkable in itself. Nekron wasn't a living creature in any conventional sense. He was a conceptual entity. Flesh, bone, blood—these were just external representations he adopted. If all life was human, he was human. If all life was fish, he was fish. Normal biological functions had nothing to do with his actual existence.
And yet he was unconscious. Knocking a concept out cold—that said everything about what an antimatter cannon could do.
"Mine now." Thea didn't waste a syllable. She stripped the staff from his hand and set it aside—she'd try fitting it onto the scythe's blade later. No idea if it would work.
She examined the shackles at his wrists and neck. She couldn't remove them. Couldn't even force-trade them away. She let it go.
Next came the Soul-Sealing Chains—recovered from Highfather's armory when she was building the magic web. Rumor had it they had once bound an ancient black dragon. She'd originally planned them for Darkseid, but right now she wasn't being picky. She wrapped Nekron up thoroughly.
Four light mirrors pressed flat against his four limbs, steadily eroding the death-energy.
Through the hole in his chest, she then—with the cheerful efficiency of someone pouring sand into a jar—dropped in all kinds of things: four emotions, the Black of Rot, the Green, the Red, a few Doomsday cells. That sort of thing.
Finally, she produced a sarcophagus. This particular piece had come from Hades' treasury—originally the great solar barque of Ra, the Egyptian sun god, used for his nightly journey through the underworld. It had passed to Osiris, then been converted into a coffin by Hades, and eventually found its way into Thea's hands.
She trussed Nekron up like a tightly wrapped bundle and dropped him inside. Decadent music was, of course, non-negotiable—she tucked in an echo stone from the Underworld, infused with a thread of divine power and set to loop. Conservative estimate: three thousand years of continuous playback.
She grabbed Hawkman's war hammer and Apollo's arrows, and hammered away until the lid was nailed shut. Then she straightened up and exhaled.
Nobody's breaking him out of that without help. A thousand years minimum.
She pulled up Nekron's ranking. Encouraging results: he'd dropped to 210th, and with the antimatter energy continuing to eat away at him—plus her various additions—sliding past 300th to keep Darkseid company was only a matter of time.
Now: where to put the coffin?
The Beginning of Time was ruled out immediately—she wasn't leading Nekron anywhere near the Endless. The Vanishing Point was full of lightweights. The timeline itself wasn't safe. Parallel universes were a liability—someone might stumble in and try to free him.
Heaven would honestly be ideal. Thea had no connections there, but she suspected the shackles on Nekron's wrists and neck came from Heaven. Those archangels who wielded the Light of Life—Michael, Lucifer, who possessed the power of creation—only they would have had the power to restrain Nekron at his peak.
In the end, she placed the sealed sarcophagus inside the Rock of Eternity, the old Shazam's domain. Ordinary people couldn't reach it. Extraordinary people had no reason to come. Relatively safe.
She finished the cleanup, set several trigger-based wards—just in case someone came poking around—and teleported to the Vanishing Point.
"Hey." Bruce was wrapped in a towel, looking like a man rescued from a shipwreck. He looked up when she arrived and greeted her with his usual composure.
Booster Gold stood on the other side, reviewing data readouts. He gave Thea a small shake of his head.
"What's wrong? What happened to me?" Bruce's voice was slightly hoarse.
Thea said nothing. She picked up the report and read it, then studied Bruce twice over before gesturing for Booster Gold to explain.
Booster walked him through it—from the moment of his disappearance to recent events.
"I disrupted the timeline. If I go back, I'll..." The truth was, Bruce had been genuinely glad to see Thea. He hadn't known how long he'd been drifting through the timestream, but Booster Gold had brought him here instead of Gotham—and that, combined with what he was hearing, told him something. "All right. I should pay for my recklessness. So killing me would solve everything—correct?"
His expression remained flat. He said it like he was discussing someone else's problem.
"It won't come to that. You're our teammate—the Justice League doesn't abandon its own." Thea said it plainly, then held out Nekron's staff. "Here. Take this."
Batman looked at the staff in his hands. Long, black, cold to the touch—a chill that seeped from the palm straight into the marrow, as if every drop of blood in his body had begun to freeze.