Against Thea at full force, H'El chose the most conservative option available to him: pure defense. It wasn't enough. The gap between them was too wide.
The barren planet's surface was reshaped beyond recognition. Thea held nothing back—death energy swept across the battlefield in great arcing waves, and the whole arena felt like something out of a nightmare.
A final, bone-rattling impact. H'El hit the ground hard and lay there, badly wounded. He struggled. He didn't get up.
Thea stepped on his throat.
"You're a persistent one—you just cost me twenty minutes." She looked down at him without particular heat. "Tell me the rest of the plan. Impress me, and I'll let you live."
H'El coughed blood. He forced himself to speak.
"I don't need your mercy. Rebuilding Krypton is the only thing I've ever wanted. And now it's about to happen." A faint, settled look crossed his face—not peace exactly, but the absence of regret. "I have no regrets."
He closed his eyes.
Thea studied him a moment.
"You said this is the third time you've faced me. I never saw anything from you that was a real threat. Which means in both previous rounds, I killed you without meaning to. And dying sent you back to the breach point in the timeline." She worked through it aloud. "So both times I killed you—that was actually doing you a favor. You have some ability that activates on death and sends you back. By the fourth visit, you'll know my moves even better." She paused. "That's why you were bent on dying."
She smiled slightly and let the killing intent recede. The more your enemy wants something, the less you give it to them.
She wasn't going to get any useful information from him. She conjured a massive stone column, bound him with eight heavy chains, and left him there. He wasn't going anywhere in the short term.
Then she went back to Earth.
From the moment they'd left the Watchtower to right now, barely an hour had passed. But when she materialized inside the monitoring room, none of the people she'd expected to find were there. Not Diana. Not Superman. Not even Batman.
"Thea. You're finally back."
Nightwing was sitting in Batman's chair. He looked up when she pushed the door open.
"Finally?" That was an odd word choice for an hour. "Where's Bruce?"
Nightwing looked like he wasn't sure where to start. For a moment his mind seemed to go blank, then flood with too much at once—the discomfort of two different time flows colliding in one body. He forced himself through it. "I don't understand magic, so I can't explain the how. But from the moment Superman and the others returned to Earth to right now, a full week has passed. I'm certain of that."
Her first reaction was that he was talking nonsense. The fight hadn't lasted twenty minutes. There was no week.
But she looked at Nightwing more carefully. He was genuinely him—no illusions, no substitution.
Then she glanced toward Earth, and something was wrong. The planet's time flow was off. Not magic—it reminded her more of wish-power. The effect was staggering: the entire planet's temporal rate had accelerated by over a hundred times.
The Watchtower had been affected too. She'd simply punched through the field on arrival without noticing, treating it like any other barrier—which it wasn't, not exactly.
"We can't stay here. Whoever did this will have sensed me." She didn't waste time. "Where is everyone else?"
"New Continent. All remaining heroes are at the New Continent."
Remaining.
The word left a shadow in her chest. Her connection to the New Continent was deep enough that she could jump directly.
She did.
The scene she'd half-braced for—rows of casualties, walls of urns—wasn't there. People were alive, moving, going about things. But their expressions were strange. Hopeful and frightened at the same time, in a way she couldn't immediately parse.
She found Batman in the magic school. The man wore his armor at all hours, day or night, as though he'd been born in it.
When she pushed the door open, she walked into an argument. Several of Earth's foremost magical experts were gathered around the room. Thea gave Malcolm a brief nod and went straight to Batman.
"Where's Diana? Where's my mother? What's happening on Earth?"
"The President is still in the White House. No immediate danger." Batman's face gave nothing away, as usual. "As for the situation on Earth—complicated is the most honest summary I can offer." A beat. "Diana—we don't know where she is."
Thea felt something absurd rise in her chest. Diana's status unknown. Her mother still in the middle of it all. And this entire room of people had been arguing.
Her hand closed. Her gaze turned colder, and an invisible killing intent began to spread through the room.
"Thea." Malcolm's voice cut through before anything else could. He'd seen this before—the look that came over her when she was close to the edge.
She knew what it meant too. She was on the threshold of a breakthrough. That state made her dangerously sensitive to the death domain's pull. She breathed. Once. Twice. Pushed it down.
"Who's the enemy? There's always an enemy."
"A deity. Came from the sky."
"Who?"
"His followers call him Rao."
Thea stared.
Batman repeated it. She still had trouble accepting what she was hearing.
"That can't be right. Rao was a mortal man."
She couldn't explain to Batman that she'd seen Rao in Heluba's memories—Krypton's great sage, its wisest ruler. Something like Earth's ancient philosophers and scholar-kings. Revered, yes. Divine? Not even close.
"You sure it wasn't a mistake? The man's been dead for two hundred and fifty thousand years—"
"Ha." Constantine was sprawled in a corner, cigarette dangling from his lip, looking like he was narrating a disaster from a safe distance. "Don't ask me whether he's a real god. But Superman's following his word. And there's a Kryptonian woman helping too."
The others filled in the rest, talking over each other.
By the time they'd stitched the story together, this was what Thea understood: while they'd been engaging H'El, a massive alien vessel had arrived at Earth. From it descended a figure of warm, luminous divinity—followed by an uncountable number of faithful.
Superman had returned to Earth shortly after. Whatever Rao had said to him, Superman had then addressed the public, urging people to trust the newcomer and promising that Rao would bring Earth lasting peace.
Supergirl Kara had followed, joining in support. Only Faora had held out—she'd forced herself to resist whatever it was and made it to the New Continent before collapsing, where she still lay.
Backed by the combined credibility of Superman and Supergirl, ordinary people had begun stepping outside and accepting what Rao's followers were calling blessings.
At first only a handful. Then the count multiplied thousands of times over in under half an hour.
Sick people recovered without medical bays or medication—one blessing from a follower was enough. Habitual criminals were transformed, becoming people of noble character. African warlords were forced to lay down their weapons and grant their people the right to live. Rao himself went to work on the environment—dead lands turned green, resources were redistributed, and no one went hungry anymore.
Illness. War. Crime. Poverty. Four plagues that had tormented humanity across its entire recorded history, problems that had defeated the greatest minds of every generation—apparently resolved. And this was only the beginning.