Thea played dumb. "One of them is Darkseid—but the other is hard to make out. Looks a lot like the Anti-Monitor who fled during Blackest Night. Seems his eye really has been fixed on this place all along."
"What do we do?" Superman asked. Even his super-vision couldn't reach across several galaxies. "They're too far away to observe."
Thea certainly wasn't going to say grab a folding chair, pop some popcorn, and enjoy the show. She thought it over for a moment. "Their battlefield isn't anywhere near Earth. That's a good thing. At this level, the fight won't be decided quickly. My read is that Darkseid has the edge."
"Darkseid is our enemy too," The Flash pointed out. "If he wins, what happens to this universe?"
This time Thea actually gave it genuine thought. "Even if he wins, he'll burn through the majority of his divine power doing it. There's a fundamental difference between New Gods like us and an entity like the Anti-Monitor. Even by the most objective estimate, Darkseid coming out of this badly wounded—nowhere near full strength for the foreseeable future."
What she kept to herself: Once Darkseid gets the Anti-Life Equation, obviously he goes home to recuperate. Conquest can wait. Why rush? Darkseid knows that rule better than anyone. He won't begrudge himself the time.
The assembled Justice League exchanged glances. They had come here ready to lay down their lives fighting the Anti-Monitor—and now, at the very end, they were watching their main boss get dragged off by a different boss entirely. The situation was so convoluted it had left everyone, including Batman with his hundred contingency plans, completely at a loss.
The Anti-Monitor they had come to destroy was now getting into a private brawl with a supposedly civic-minded Darkseid. Given this baffling development—what exactly were they supposed to do now?
Batman disliked things moving outside his control. With the combatants too far away to see or touch, he redirected his attention to what was directly in front of him. He pointed at the screen showing the Spectre and Eclipso mid-battle. "What's the history on these two? And where's your counterpart right now?"
Thea told the story from the beginning. The assembled heroes responded with a collective mix of sighs and headshakes—though no great shock. Superman had an evil counterpart here. The Flash had one too. One more for Thea wasn't exactly news.
A young person breaking into some ancient ruin and promptly getting possessed by a demon—that premise had been done to death across every medium imaginable. Nobody had much trouble accepting it.
The only unusual part was the demon's apparent pedigree. Otherwise, all very plausible.
Only Batman's mind ran on a different track entirely. He rubbed his chin. "A fragment of the Creator's own emotions? Can you elaborate?"
Thea gave him a rueful smile. "That has nothing to do with anything we're currently facing. Your hunger for knowledge has breached some kind of threshold, Bruce. That's not healthy. You've drifted very far from yourself."
"Have I?" Batman looked inward for a moment and found nothing obviously wrong. Though—he had been somewhat relentlessly chasing answers lately. The secrets of the New Gods. The secrets of the power rings. The secrets of Nth Metal. There was too much to investigate, and so much of it lacked the necessary background information; the relevant knowledge existed in regions of the universe far beyond his reach, and that distance had stalled a great many threads of inquiry.
"I'm going to help the Spectre. The rest of you—clean up what you can. This operation is officially concluded." With that, Thea joined the fight between the Spectre and Eclipso.
She had to move quickly. Darkseid and the Anti-Monitor had been trying to murder each other with their eyes for a while now, but neither had yet thrown the first punch. Thea understood their hesitation—which meant she needed to get back down there, seal Eclipso fast, and return to the original universe in time to watch their fight live.
Eclipso had never been the Spectre's equal. With Thea added to the equation, he stood no chance at all.
The Spectre had said Thea could serve as his host—which meant there was at least a partial channel between their powers.
Both the Spectre and Eclipso were operating at roughly five meters tall. To coordinate effectively, Thea enlarged her own body to match, drew the Night Sky Sword, and brought it down in a single sweeping arc that shattered Eclipso's shadow-pulse.
"Work with me, Goddess of Death." The Spectre's palm filled with a deep, pulsing green—a thread of supreme divine power woven through it. Thea had spent enough time studying the Phantom Stranger's silver coins and the Judas Contract to recognize immediately what she was sensing: something that surpassed language, an absolute purity.
Since the Spectre was taking the lead, she wasn't about to refuse. She sheathed the sword, lunged forward, and landed lightly behind him—a single hand on his shoulder, channeling a portion of her divine death energy through the contact.
The green pillar that erupted was laced at its edges with a spiral of black death energy, drilling forward like a high-speed bit, punching clean through Eclipso's surface shield without losing a step—and boring a massive hole straight through his abdomen.
Death energy and the Spirit of God's Vengeance, working together for the first time. Not bad at all. Thea found herself quietly calculating: if I were actually his host, our power would compound rather than simply add—there might be fewer than a handful of beings in this world that could match us. We might even be able to take a finger from the Great Evil Beast, if some reckless cult managed to summon it again.
But another person's power was another person's power. At her level, becoming someone's host would just be embarrassing.
Eclipso had already remade Dark Thea's body into a pure energy form—not a drop of blood to spill—but the divine vengeance energy and death energy searing through the wound site were giving him a serious headache nonetheless.
"Impressive. But—Goddess of Death." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Do you dare meet my eyes? Your counterpart is still struggling inside me. Come and help her..."
Without a word, Thea stepped behind the Spectre.
She would have to be profoundly stupid to look him in the eyes. Obviously it was some kind of trump card. As for the fragment of dark-Thea's soul still trapped inside him—well, that was her problem to sort out.
The sheer lack of dignity in this response nearly made Eclipso cough up blood. What little divine power he had left went into the Spectre—and since they were, in a sense, colleagues from the same department, the Spectre didn't fear it at all. He absorbed it quite serenely, pulling in a portion for himself, much to Eclipso's dismay.
The Spectre hammered away at the front line. Thea provided ranged support from behind, firmly refusing to take point. Under their combined rapid assault, Eclipso's counterattacks grew steadily weaker. He had never been a match for the Spectre alone—with Thea added, he was simply outclassed.
After considerable effort, they destroyed Eclipso's new body entirely.
Eclipso collapsed back into what he was: a black diamond, flawless and translucent, as if a universe of secrets had been pressed into stone.
When it came to Thea sealing the Spectre's predecessor with an additional layer, the Spectre raised no objection. Seal away if you like. He'll break out eventually regardless—this just changes whether it takes a hundred years or a hundred and fifty.
The battle for Earth-3 was over the moment she enclosed the Heart of Darkness inside a larger stone.
The larger stone couldn't go back to Earth-1—she thought about it and decided to leave it in this universe. She picked a direction at random, found a planet so hostile no life could arise there in ten thousand years, and buried it deep.