The faceless announcer froze as well. He had no idea why the former boss was stepping into the ring herself, and quickly "looked" toward his new boss, Gorilla Grodd.
Receiving orders to proceed as normal, he offered a slurred two-sentence introduction.
As for the God of Shadows, Kanto—he was stunned. He knew Lady Styx, naturally. An alien powerhouse like her could genuinely threaten him. At full strength and in peak condition, "threat" was as far as it went—he was one of Darkseid's generals, veteran of a hundred thousand battles, killer of aliens far more dangerous than her. The problem was that his divine power was currently self-sealed.
Right now he couldn't even access a tenth of his true strength. Beating Lady Styx was out of the question, and his seal was too intricately layered to break open quickly.
Abandoning all pretense of anonymity, he drew gasps from the entire arena as he raised a dagger and stabbed himself—seven, eight times in rapid succession.
Each stab came with a wave of regret so intense his insides twisted.
He'd come here in his true body. Every wound to his divine form would cost divine power to repair afterward. Add the brute-force seal-breaking, and the bill was stacking up fast. A losing proposition any way he sliced it.
But under mortal threat, his mind stayed cold. He calculated silently—roughly thirty seconds to crack the seal—while fixing Lady Styx with a lethal glare, praying she wouldn't open with her strongest move.
Glory to Darkseid. Darkseid protect me. He silently chanted words he didn't believe.
Just as he was counting down the seconds, a massive force surged up from deep within his body.
His divine power—unlocked.
Had his lord actually heard his prayer? Before Kanto could process the thought, Lady Styx's eight diamond golems drove a forest of crystalline spikes across half the arena floor. The blinding white light seared the eyes of every spectator in range. Even Kanto's divine body flinched from the glare.
Without divine power, his only option against that kind of area-of-effect assault would have been to curl into a ball and minimize his target profile.
Now things were different. With full control over his divine power, he dodged the spikes in an instant and activated his domain ability—plunging directly into shadow. Years of dancing on knife edges, surviving kill-or-be-killed encounters, had given him a deeply unsettling premonition.
He dissolved into a mass of black vapor and hid within the arena's shadows, scanning his surroundings.
What he saw nearly stopped his heart.
Following instinct, his gaze shot upward to the high platform—and there sat Her Ladyship, sipping a glass of juice and waving at him.
What was she doing here?! Kanto's blood ran cold.
As the woman who'd defeated Darkseid's avatar, every soul on Apokolips knew Thea's name. And thanks to Steppenwolf and DeSaad inflating her combat prowess by a good thirty percent to cover their own cowardly retreats, her reputation preceded her considerably.
As the multiverse's foremost assassin, Kanto had originally dismissed the hype. Divine casters were natural prey for divine assassins—in his view, Steppenwolf was a coward and DeSaad a craven. He'd held that opinion right up until one second ago.
Seeing Thea wave at him, Kanto understood at once: she had broken his seal. From hundreds of meters away. Without him noticing a thing.
There were two possible explanations. Either she possessed power so overwhelming that his carefully crafted seal was nothing more than a parlor trick to her. Or she'd planted something inside him long before, and he—the assassin—had been completely oblivious.
Both possibilities were equally terrifying. Kanto's composure cracked, and his first instinct was to run.
Warrior's honor? Arena rules? None of that applied to him.
But as he turned to flee, an immense will pressed down on him. Under normal circumstances, being watched was just being watched—a few stares never killed anyone. Not even Darkseid's gaze would make Kanto lose his nerve.
The problem was that Thea hadn't just unlocked his seal. She'd slipped in a little something extra.
If he turned tail and ran, his own divine power would very likely detonate from within. Death was uncertain, but crippling injury was guaranteed.
"Fight Lady Styx at full strength. One match. Then you can leave." Thea's clear voice resonated in his mind.
Kanto had zero room to negotiate. All he could do was trust that she'd keep her word.
He was furious—furious enough to slap himself. He'd had nothing better to do, sealed his own power to play gladiator, and now he'd been rigged like a puppet. The humiliation was absolute. Next time he'd rather stay home and sleep than play these games.
He'd done his homework beforehand. He knew Thea and Diana were in this universe, but both goddesses operated mainly in Sector 2814, while this was Sector 313—half a universe away. They were justice-aligned deities. Until then, Kanto genuinely hadn't expected them to show up somewhere as unsavory as a gladiatorial arena.
The one thing he'd never expected had happened: not only had they crossed paths, but he'd been caught red-handed. Cursing under his breath, he forced himself to focus on the fight.
There—an opening. Combat instinct was second nature. He spotted a blind spot in Lady Styx's defenses almost immediately. Divine power flared. When he reappeared he wore dark crimson armor and held two daggers trailing faint light. He struck at Lady Styx's eyes like twin bolts of lightning.
Lady Styx didn't understand New God abilities. She cast a mirror-image spell to try to deceive him.
Kanto didn't even blink. His daggers tracked unerringly, plunging straight through the illusion.
Life-or-death moments hold true terror—that old saying wasn't wrong. Staring down instant death, Lady Styx's psychic power erupted to its absolute peak, and at the last possible instant she swapped positions with one of her diamond golems.
The daggers looked featherlight—no more than a couple of pounds—but they hit like sledgehammers, smashing the substituted golem to powder.
Scared the life out of me! Lady Styx panted, heart hammering. She didn't notice that her psychic power had surged significantly—nor that her two brow-eyes seemed a fraction larger than before.
"Careful—his daggers have strong armor-piercing properties. Don't try to tank them with your shields." Thea's warning arrived like a police officer at a crime scene: fashionably late.
Lady Styx wanted to ask why she hadn't mentioned this earlier but ultimately didn't dare. Warning or not, she had no intention of letting him get close again.
Four diamond golems shifted their arms into blades and chains and charged Kanto as a unit, while the remaining three hung back to guard Lady Styx and provide ranged support.
The ground shuddered violently as she wrenched two streams of magma from below. This time she didn't hurl them recklessly—she layered the molten rock over her existing psychic shield, wrapping herself in a second barrier of magma. Only then did she feel somewhat safe.
Less than two seconds later, she was ready to applaud her own foresight.
Kanto tore through the four diamond golems like a streak of black light, slipped behind Lady Styx, and drove a dagger at her throat.