"You're saying I'm about to die? Impossible. I'm immune to magic." Black Thea didn't believe a word of it. Magic, in her view, was a toy. Even setting Eclipso aside, her own knowledge had long since exceeded magic's ceiling—otherwise she wouldn't have produced Lex, that freak who could shout Mazahs, cast spells, and absorb metahuman abilities all at the same time.
"...It's not magic, actually. It's something more complicated. She's using the law of causality and a few other rules. Each of these threads is someone you killed. Your counterparts were retrieved from the source of time, given the chance to take their revenge on you. I might misread plenty of things. I would never misread hatred this deep—the kind that carves itself into a soul."
As the Presence's former Spirit of Vengeance, even Eclipso was openly impressed that Thea could pull a fragment of vengeance out of death itself. This wasn't Thea's vengeance. This was the vengeance of those who'd died unjustly—crossing timelines, launching their final strike each from her own moment in history.
What Eclipso didn't say out loud was that Thea had played him. She hadn't only browsed Black Thea's life. She had also planted markers in the woman's timeline and detonated them mid-fight. The earlier sequence—opening the timeline so Thea could view the counterparts' pasts—had been Eclipso's deliberate concession, meant to break the host's morale. He hadn't expected Thea to be quite this sneaky.
"Lend me your power again. Let me crack this open!" Half a minute had passed. Black Thea was already feeling it—her vitality was draining fast. Three minutes, maybe less, and she'd lose mobility entirely.
She wasn't dead, but her body was stiffening, her soul trapped alive inside it. She decided this outcome was barely better than letting Eclipso take her.
Eclipso was finding this troubling himself. An invisible enemy was hard to deal with, and karmic entanglements came with a lot of guaranteed-hit attacks. If the host became a corpse, what then? He'd never thought about it. Would he count as alive or dead in that scenario?
Switching to a new host instead of staying with Black Thea—he considered it briefly, then shelved it. They weren't that desperate yet. There was still some time.
Topped off with Eclipso's power, Black Thea's combat strength was mostly back. She started slashing wildly at her surroundings.
"Get back!" Energy poured out without restraint. The Death Domain split open in seam after seam. Outside light filtered in through the gaps in thin streaks. Through that light, dense ranks of figures stood in row after row—and one of them, a faintly glowing silhouette, stood out from the rest.
Pale-gray uniform. High collar greatcoat. Tall jackboots. Two narrow swords in hand.
Black Thea recognized her at a glance. Earth-10's Thea Queen. A whole family of high-ranking SS officers. Black Thea had personally cut her down in the middle of an entire armed force and walked away laughing. The woman had been competent—decent martial skill, paired with some tech gear, an elite by ordinary-human standards. Against Eclipso's power, though, she'd been an ant.
The Black Thea of that era had been arrogant and unhinged. She hadn't given a thought to consequences. She'd murdered her way through the area, extracted souls, and left. The other woman had been just a symbol to her. A puppet.
Earth-10 Thea spoke softly. No sound came out. Yet countless ghostly figures around her echoed her silently.
Black Thea heard her clearly: I want a fair fight with you.
Black Thea wanted to laugh. Fair? As if that word still meant anything in this day and age. The sneer was still on her lips when she found herself standing in an open wilderness. Dead silent around her. Only Earth-10 Thea, twin swords in hand, standing across from her.
The earth-shattering, sky-splitting power she'd been so proud of was gone. All she had left was the martial arts she'd actually trained in and the experience she'd carved out of mountains of corpses.
"Eclipso, where are you!" She called out several times. The shouts vanished into nothing. No response.
Did I shake him off? She doubted it. Eclipso's stubbornness, she knew well by now after all these years.
There was no time to think it through. Twin-Sword Thea had already lunged forward with a roar.
The lack of supernatural power threw her completely. But she had to admit—she was tough. Black Thea pushed past the discomfort fast and swung her sacred sword, locking blades with her opponent.
A full ten minutes of fighting later, she finally drove her sacred sword through the other Thea's chest. Watching her crumble to ash, Black Thea let out a long breath. To be fair, the woman had been good. The reason she'd been crushed before was Eclipso, not anything Black Thea had earned on her own.
The fight ended. Her vision turned dark again. The parasite inside her body re-linked with her soul.
"You alright?" Eclipso asked, oddly puzzled.
"Fine." Black Thea dimly understood something. She kept her face neutral and swung the sacred sword.
Less than three seconds later she was back in that strange space, fighting another Thea.
When the fight in the strange space ended and she returned to her body, the timing on the outside lined up perfectly. Eclipso, watching the world through her body, didn't pick up on anything strange.
The eighth time she entered that odd space, she finally met the host.
Thea was waiting for her—surrounded by seven counterparts in various postures, some standing, some seated, all watching.
"What exactly do you want?" Black Thea finally couldn't hold it in.
"I thought it over. As much as I can't stand the sight of you, I'm still going to save you."
"Hmph. Save me? You and what army?" Black Thea sneered. "If you weren't surrounded by all those cosmic heavyweights, you would have died on my blade a long time ago!"
"Oh, please. Don't think I didn't dig into your background. Factoring in the time-flow difference between our worlds, by the time you got your hands on the Heart of Darkness, I was already a New God. How much of Eclipso's power could you even tap then? An hour or two of clarity per day, if that. From start to finish, you never caught up to me."
Even when accepting help, she had to verbally win. Thea had always been baffled by it. She herself was running the most lopsided cheat in this story. She'd pushed it so hard that even an iron-hardened brute like Darkseid had spun up wild theories to rationalize the gap—higher-dimensional being, daughter of the Creator, and so on...
In the eyes of the world, her growth rate looked insane. How could Black Thea possibly be that far ahead?
Now, looking at the other seven Theas around her, she saw they were all roughly her age. There was no eighty- or ninety-year-old Thea Queen here. Which meant the starting point had been the same for all of them.
Same starting point, and Thea was running the cheat code at full throttle—and could still be outpaced? Impossible.
The truth was, Black Thea had never actually been ahead. Her apparent power and lofty rank had all been Eclipso. On her own, she was a mid-tier League of Assassins lieutenant.
Black Thea bit her lip, said nothing. Some things weren't worth denying—denial just made the embarrassment worse. Instinct told her Thea had more to say. She wasn't wrong. Thea's next sentence stunned her: "This is a world I created myself. It's small for now, but it's plenty for a conversation."
Even with Eclipso as a built-in old grandpa—granted, an evil old grandpa angling to body-snatch her—Black Thea's frame of reference was high.