This guy's ridiculously strong! After just one exchange, Thea felt like she'd grabbed onto solid steel. Darkseid's arm was thicker than her waist, and his counterattack carried a vicious wave of energy that slammed into her soul.
This guy's mastered soul manipulation at an expert level! Thea instantly understood—Darkseid had also been eyeing the Soul Godhood, but she'd beaten him to it. All his early preparations had gone down the drain, making their conflict even more irreconcilable.
Taking advantage of her smaller frame, Thea grabbed his wrist with her left hand while her right hand followed up, gripping his arm tightly. Soul divine power surged forth as she extracted another sliver of his soul.
The price? Getting backhanded across the battlefield by the Dark Lord.
Thea glanced at the soul fragment in her hand and tossed it to the shadowy chubby figure in the distance. She wiped the golden blood from the corner of her mouth. "Your Majesty, this avatar's power seems insufficient. Perhaps you should pull more from your main body?"
"You will fall here today."
"Heh, let's test that theory again!"
Thea began a frenzied assault, spending divine power without restraint. Darkseid wasn't accustomed to this kind of reckless fighting style and found himself briefly overwhelmed. But after being grabbed twice more, the Dark Lord finally lost his temper. You think I'm some kind of pushover?!
Once the Dark Lord got serious, even as just an avatar, he quickly turned the tide and drove Thea back step by step.
Meanwhile, Diana had returned to the ground level and engaged Amazo, relieving the Lanterns and Guardians. Facing both the endless tide of parademons and Amazo simultaneously, the two Guardians had been struggling. Now that Diana had taken on Amazo, they only had to deal with the cannon fodder—even if outnumbered by hundreds to one, they could manage.
After exchanging more than ten blows with Diana, Amazo recognized her close-combat specialty and switched from Superman simulation to Lantern combat mode.
Now mimicking the infant planet Mogo, Amazo wielded hope emotion like an ocean, spending it lavishly. Diana threw everything she had at him but couldn't break through his defenses.
"Batman, speed it up. Thea can't hold out much longer up there," the warrior goddess called out, her twin swords dancing through the air. Unfortunately, Amazo's AI was too sophisticated—it simply refused to engage in direct combat, leaving her stuck.
"We're working on it." Batman quickly cut the connection.
His strategy was simple: let the combat-capable Lanterns hold the rear while the main force eliminated the enemy's primary army, then wheel around to clean up stragglers.
On the western flank, Green Arrow in his power armor was drenched in blood. What "no-kill rule"? To hell with that! The sister-obsessed Oliver wanted nothing more than to charge up there and chop that blue bastard to pieces. These grunts couldn't contain his fury.
To the north, Hercules and to the south, Aquaman also began pushing hard. Hercules' battle-axe and Aquaman's trident periodically gathered massive energy to unleash upon the enemy.
Only the eastern front with Firestorm struggled a bit. Even combined, the two scholar-types weren't natural warriors, fighting hesitantly until Batman's stern orders finally got them to attack aggressively.
Facing the coalition's elite forces, even with numerical superiority, the parademons began falling back. But they didn't dare retreat through the Boom Tube—they could only desperately hold the passage entrance.
Out of twenty-five million enemies, the coalition had slaughtered nearly five million. Now less than twenty million remained, and that number decreased by the second. Without command, without a core leader, their total annihilation was only a matter of time.
As Diana dealt with the enemy before her, she kept glancing at the sky. After just a few exchanges with Darkseid, she knew the Dark Lord far exceeded her capabilities. Watching Thea struggle to hold on made her heart twist. These Earth bastards—we're not fighting for ourselves here!
Her eyes blazing with fury, she glared at Maxwell Lord in the distance. The man looked positively jubilant, even waving at her cheerfully.
She tried several times to charge over and cut down this scheming worm, but Amazo blocked her every time. Ordinary people couldn't even get close to Maxwell—Apokolips had equipped him with a device that amplified his mind control powers. The closer you got, the stronger it became. Within a small radius, aside from Diana, only a handful could resist his enhanced abilities.
Maxwell firmly guarded the Boom Tube entrance as countless parademons poured through every second.
The Lanterns had long since joined forces, fighting desperately to stem the tide. Even Guardians Ganthet and Sayd had taken to the front lines, with Mogo occasionally firing support beams to clear the field. Over a thousand Lanterns against a million parademons—they could barely hold the line even while throwing everything they had.
But the enemy numbers kept growing while their rings needed recharging. Channeling so much emotional energy took a mental toll. Despite Blue Lanterns restoring mental strength and Indigo Tribe healing wounds, casualties were inevitable. Two Yellow Lanterns and one Green Lantern, their emotions depleted, were swallowed by the horde.
Diana tried multiple times to break through Amazo's blockade, but the AI had calculated her movement patterns a hundred and eighty ways. She couldn't think her way past it.
Just as she reached peak frustration, a thunderous crash erupted. A motorcycle with twenty-foot (6-meter)-tall tires burst through a wall and skidded to a stop before her.
"Whoa, Wonder Woman? My arms are always open for you, babe—hugs and kisses included!" The completely unhinged Harley Quinn, still sporting her signature pigtails, had arrived on the Batcycle. She stopped sideways in front of Diana and blew her a kiss.
Ugh, this nutcase was also one of the few immune to mind control...
"Next time we gotta be besties, girl!" Harley Quinn reached out to pat Diana's shoulder with inappropriate familiarity. The warrior goddess quickly dodged.
Completely oblivious, Harley didn't realize they were in the middle of a battle. She watched Diana viciously slashing at Amazo while he countered with massive volumes of blue light.
Seeing no one paying attention to her seemed to genuinely sadden Harley. She turned toward Amazo instead. "Big guy, you need to add some laughter to your life—doctor's orders!" With that, she pulled out a bomb decorated with a clown face and hurled it at him.
Amazo quickly manifested a construct to block it. "BOOM!"—but there was no fire, no shrapnel. Just colorful confetti everywhere. Yep, just a wedding celebration confetti bomb. God knows why Harley Quinn even had one.
Amazo, already developing a glimmer of self-awareness, was instantly fascinated. This thing looks pretty cool...
Seeing it work—whether remembering Batman's instruction to lead Amazo away or just finding it fun—Harley pulled out a can of silly string and sprayed the confused android for a good while, then used another can to draw a smiley face on Amazo's steel-blue chest with a "pssst-pssst."