Deep in the night, inside the camping tent, Thea was jolted awake by a rapid click-click-click. Diana had a phone aimed at her face and was firing off shot after shot—over a dozen before she lifted her chin in triumph and tucked the device away.
"Taking photos in the middle of the night instead of sleeping..." Thea grumbled, still half-asleep. Then it hit her. "Wait—you're taking photos!" Her current appearance was... let's just say "Goddess of Death" was generous. "Goddess of Dumpster Diving" was closer to the mark. Still beautiful, sure, but she wasn't exactly dressed.
"Delete those! Your phone isn't secure—if a hacker cracks it, we're done for!"
The urgency in her voice gave Diana pause. Those sharp eyes weighed how much of this was genuine concern versus theatrical overreaction.
"There are so many hackers on Earth—Batman, Luthor, and who knows how many others..." Thea threw mud at every name she could think of.
Diana was, at the end of the day, an honest person. "Oh. Fine—here, you delete them."
But she caught the flash of delight in Thea's eyes and immediately knew she'd been played.
Another round of tug-of-war between the two goddesses ensued. The Goddess of Death came out on top—again.
She turned the tables on the midnight paparazzo, snapping over a dozen shots of Diana and uploading them to her private server under the label "glamour shots."
"I will get stronger! Stronger! STRONGER!" Diana muttered from the side. Thea latched onto her like an octopus, wrapping the warrior goddess up and sealing her still-grumbling lips with a kiss.
The next morning, Diana slipped out early to train while Thea slept in.
By the time Thea emerged—yawning elegantly—Diana had already been at it for a while.
Thea pursed her lips. Drills like that wouldn't move the needle much. One look at how Kanto had mastered countless fighting styles told you everything you needed to know. Apart from ten years ago when she'd studied under Malcolm and genuinely thrown herself into training for a while, she'd been coasting ever since. Never once trained seriously again.
"Spar with me!" Diana tossed her a longsword, eyes blazing.
Thea caught the blade with the wrong kind of grace—she was still holding a toothbrush in her other hand.
They clashed back and forth for five minutes of morning exercise. Diana was not amused.
With both suppressed to ordinary-human levels, Thea couldn't beat her. Without the limiter, Diana could barely handle a single exchange—the gap in speed, strength, and every other attribute was simply too crushing.
"When did you get this strong? I can't get used to it." Diana toweled off her hands, half-complaining, half-resigned.
"Teach me magic!" They sat down for breakfast. Thea produced a bottle of Sector 313 specialty fruit juice. They sipped it unhurriedly—then Diana dropped the request out of nowhere.
"Pfft—!" Juice sprayed across the ground. Thea stared, baffled.
"Is that a no?"
"No—yes! Yes!" Thea nodded furiously.
Teaching Diana magic beat sparring with her any day.
The teaching process, however, was nothing short of a disaster. Diana could cast certain spells already, but only by brute-forcing them through raw divine power.
The actual casting process was massively wasteful and absurdly convoluted.
"Your lightning spell has so many problems—uneven mana distribution, too much initial power loaded in, the spell matrix forms too slowly... What? You've never even heard of a spell matrix?" Thea was a dedicated instructor, but she hadn't expected Diana to lack even the fundamentals.
It was paradoxical: Diana could execute a respectable number of spells, and her eye for magic was sharp enough to bamboozle archmages like Circe without breaking a sweat. But in practice, she didn't know the basic steps of spell construction.
Magic didn't require rigid formulas. Thea herself could now reshape and improvise any spell on the fly. But that freedom was built on an extraordinarily deep foundation.
Formlessness could beat technique—but you had to learn the techniques first. Everything had a progression.
Their Goddess of Courage had simply skipped that step. Osmosis and raw talent had given her a mage's eye that surpassed most practitioners, but the moment she had to cast something herself, problems erupted everywhere. The root cause: no foundation.
Thea understood what Diana was after. She didn't want anyone saying she'd gotten the Magic Legion command just because of her relationship with Thea. Diana pulled her weight, and Thea respected the effort—she held nothing back, sharing every insight she had.
Mana was weaker than divine power, but mages outnumbered gods dozens of times over. Their collective research into magical energy had reached extraordinary heights.
Diana's primary combat style would remain close-quarters—sword and shield, seeking victory in the space between strikes. That was the warrior goddess's true form.
But learning magic wouldn't hurt. Borrowing from a different discipline might spark a breakthrough when she least expected it.
High intelligence, high intuition, and a bird's-eye perspective—Diana made staggering progress in three days. Concepts that had been fuzzy for centuries suddenly clicked into place. The warrior goddess was exhilarated. In gratitude for the no-holds-barred tutoring, she let Thea "bully" her for two consecutive evenings—with only token resistance.
"Too complicated. Swords are simpler and more satisfying!" Those were Diana's exact words to Principal Thea at graduation.
For this eat-the-meal-then-insult-the-chef behavior, Thea's only recourse was two firm swats on Diana's shapely backside.
Since childhood, Diana had dreamed of leading armies into glorious battle. Breakfast finished, she wasted no time, opening a Boom Tube to New Genesis to formally assume command of the Magic Legion.
Her forbidden-spell casting speed couldn't match Thea's, but it was more than enough to fool ordinary people.
Thea didn't linger. She turned and headed back to the underworld.
Highfather had extended an olive branch; she needed to offer something in return.
On New Genesis, she'd previously used her soul domain to build a crude proto-afterlife. Looking at it now, the thing was laughably rough—souls weakened constantly inside it, and precious few actually came back stronger after reincarnation. Now that the production version was online, the bootleg could be retired.
The dead from that earlier era could line up on her side. The underworld's dense death energy actually benefited departed souls—strengthening their essence so that when they reincarnated, their baseline attributes exceeded an ordinary person's.
As for those who'd died after she took power, the underworld's official policy was supposed to be impartial. But she'd opened a back door: New Genesis and Apokolips war dead would reincarnate at a 5.5-to-4.5 ratio favoring New Genesis.
Half a point more on one side, half a point less on the other. Over time, the gap would become very real.
This wasn't just. It wasn't fair. She kept Diana out of it entirely and sent Kanto to negotiate with Metron instead.
Metron—God of Knowledge, perpetually perched on his oversized chair looking important—was cut from the same cloth as Thea: neutral, tilting toward justice. The difference was that he had no territory, no real power base, and couldn't act as freely as she could.
He knew Kanto, of course—the assassin who spent his days skulking and spying was hard to miss. The two quickly hammered out the details on behalf of their respective principals.
Highfather wanted two things: he didn't want his people suffering in the afterlife, and he didn't want New Genesis echoing with the wailing of the dead. When he heard that war casualties would receive preferential treatment in the underworld, he signed off without a second thought.