Batman—an ordinary human—had strapped on the Hellbat armor and solo'd Apokolips. By any reasonable measure, she was stronger than Batman.
Courage. That emotion had stubbornly refused to break through. Thea suspected the problem was simple: she was too rational—too afraid of dying—calculating every variable to the decimal before committing. No wonder she couldn't grasp courage.
Take Hal Jordan. Charging headlong into Nekron with nothing but his body. Thea personally thought he was an idiot, but that was undeniably courage in its purest form.
This massacre would be a good opportunity. She wanted to see just how far she could push herself.
...
Apokolips.
A planet that looked perpetually on the verge of detonating. Evil saturated the air. Crime was everywhere, and the natural disasters it spawned only bred more of it—an endless, self-reinforcing spiral.
They fought each other. Killed each other. All for scraps of survival, for one more day of breathing.
"You! What are you doing here!" A patrol squad marched over, drawn by the teleportation disturbance. They found Thea surveying the landscape. The lead guard barked at her.
Unlike Hell's chaos, this place was pure evil. Every surface reeked of it. The weak had no right to live; the strong took everything. That was Apokolips's order. Apokolips's law.
"Insects." She moved like lightning. Her left-hand sword spun free, whistling through the air, its edge kissing nine necks in rapid succession. Columns of blood erupted. By the time the blade returned to her palm, all nine guards had been decapitated, their bodies crumpling into the yellow dust in unison.
Thea didn't pause. The civilians here had blood on their hands too—slaughtering entire families over a handful of supplies was commonplace. To vent the resentment sealed in her blades, to deepen her attunement to death, she used no magic. Weapons only. A road of killing, one step at a time.
She locked onto Darkseid's palace and walked a straight line toward it. Every patrol, every foot soldier, every criminal she encountered along the way became another ghost claimed by her swords.
"Who are you!" A roar erupted from her flank. The attacker was cunning—shouting and striking simultaneously.
A violent rush of displaced air. Without bothering to identify the projectile, Thea extended her right hand and caught it.
Hm? She blinked. Resting in her pale, porcelain-smooth palm was a hammer. And the hammer's owner—she recognized him. Lion's mane of a head. Kalibak. Darkseid's firstborn.
He still held a serrated sword in his other hand, and was now trying to recall the hammer.
Excuse me? What was it with these brute-force gods and throwing hammers at the Goddess of Death?
From a dozen meters (~40 feet) away, Kalibak looked exactly as expected: fur-covered, hair and beard melting into a single leonine mass, bulging muscles straining against a leather vest. He heaved with everything he had—muscles swelling to their absolute limit—but the hammer didn't budge from Thea's grip.
"Hm?"
"Give it back!"
Kalibak. The violent heir obsessed with inheriting Darkseid's throne. He clenched his jaw and pulled harder, desperate to retrieve his weapon.
It was futile. A weapon he'd wielded for over a hundred million years, locked tight in a grip that—to his eyes—belonged to a wrist thinner than his finger. How was she holding it?
"Impossible!"
"If the one next door could do it, so can I," Thea said—something Kalibak couldn't possibly understand. It was just a divine artifact. Everything bowed before death. Her right hand clenched. A web of hairline fractures spread across the hammer's surface with a series of sharp cracks.
Thea fixed him with a playful look and squeezed. The artifact sensed its master's desperate resistance—but it was like a frail maiden trying to fight off death's erosion. Utterly outmatched.
Two seconds. That was all it lasted before the weapon's core shattered. The violent destruction of a divine artifact unleashed a storm of raw divine energy that swept across several hundred meters (~1,000 feet).
A thunderous detonation. Thea had been ready—a barrier absorbed the shockwave without so much as ruffling her robes.
Kalibak, on the other hand, had no such preparation. The artifact's destruction shook him to the core. The blast hurled him a dozen meters, but that was the least of his problems. He mourned his weapon. And he feared this woman who radiated power like a force of nature.
Powerful. As powerful as his father, Darkseid. Just standing there, she exerted a crushing weight on his chest—like staring down a natural predator.
"I'll kill you!" Kalibak psyched himself up. He was Darkseid's son. Future king. Future conqueror of New Genesis. He forced the fear down, raised his serrated sword overhead, and leapt at her with a massive cleaving strike.
Thea glanced at him, then casually blew a speck of dust off her black-lacquered nails. "Too many impurities in your hammer. Melt it down and forge a new one. You're welcome."
A lazy sidestep. The blade whistled past. Kalibak was ferocious, certainly—but brainless.
Yuga Khan to Darkseid to Kalibak. Three generations, each worse than the last.
Kalibak hit the ground and went berserk, whipping the massive sword into a frenzy of slashes—left, right, overhead—each blow trailing gale-force winds and demolishing surrounding buildings.
Apokolips civilians and soldiers scattered. More still used the chaos as cover to loot and kill.
"Die! Die!" Kalibak was no weakling—raw physical force alone let him generate hurricane-grade shockwaves with every swing.
But to Thea, his entire form was riddled with openings.
"Pathetic." She advanced instead of retreating, found a gap with almost casual precision, and in the space between heartbeats, slipped behind him. Her left hand shifted into a reverse grip. One thrust backward.
The blade—forged from Nekron's scythe, saturated with resentment and killing intent—was something even a New God couldn't withstand.
The sword punched clean through Kalibak from back to front, its black tip emerging from his chest.
"Hkk..." Kalibak felt his inexhaustible strength severed in an instant. He reached back, groping for the wound, trying to plug the hole that had drained him of everything.
A wet hiss. Thea withdrew the blade, pivoted, and drove the right-hand sword through the back of his neck.
She didn't look back. The lion-like body crashed to the ground behind her as she walked on, unhurried. Occasionally a bare, snow-white foot peeked from beneath her robe's hem. Carnage surrounded her, yet none of it touched her—an otherworldly stillness, feet spotless, a thick fog of pure, concentrated death energy trailing in her wake.
She strolled forward as though nothing had happened, whistling softly, her pace steady and even. The Godhood of Death was different from everything else. Zeus's divine power couldn't be converted into it. Only killing could make it grow.
The closer she got to the central district, the stronger the resistance—though "stronger" was relative. Elite or fodder, it made no difference to her. Both swords left her hands, spinning like twin saw-blade wheels, bisecting every soldier along her path.