Although there was a genuine gap between Oliver and Diana's combat abilities, Diana—unlike Thea, who had stumbled her way into the warrior category without really trying—genuinely loved fighting. Just watching the ordinary man on screen for a few moves, she recognized his quality immediately: his movements were not fast, but they were lethal. Efficient. Without a single wasted motion. Whoever this person was, he'd refined his technique to an extreme.
She'd learned that the hard way. Before the trip to the Batcave, she'd asked Kanto for a friendly spar. Apokolips's foremost assassin among the New Gods, Kanto commanded hundreds of millions of combat techniques—and since joining Thea's service he'd been more accessible than before. The opportunity had seemed too good to pass up.
The result had been deeply humbling. Even with Kanto clearly holding back, even with Diana giving everything to the battle-hardened Greek fighting tradition she'd spent her life perfecting, she hadn't come close to winning. He'd dismantled her proudest strengths with something between boredom and consideration.
Now, watching the footage of Prometheus cutting through the A.R.G.U.S. facility, she tried to compare the two—and found she couldn't. Not from any failure of perception. She simply didn't have enough information. Prometheus was extraordinary. But without knowing how the two men would actually interact at full commitment, the comparison stayed open.
"Prometheus," Mister Terrific said. He and Batman got along well—he had partial access to the Batcave's records—and he quickly found the relevant profile. "This guy has a reputation in certain circles. Not sure what he's doing mixed up with Cayden James." He read aloud: "Mastery of every known fighting style. Mastery of every known weapon type. Armor conceals numerous hidden tools. Top-tier tactical genius. Suspected ability to learn and absorb opponents' combat techniques. Has defeated Lady Shiva three times."
The investigation moved fast—partly because the other side hadn't bothered to hide their tracks.
Felicity found two videos on one of Cayden James's compromised servers. A middle-aged man. A teenager. Both killed by a Green Arrow, without exception.
"Impossible." Oliver was loud about it. "I was at the scene when that middle-aged man died—but I didn't kill him. And that teenager—I've never seen him in my life."
Prometheus had lost his father. Cayden James had lost his son. Silver Swan had let obsession curdle into something darker. Three people with bone-deep grievances against the Queen family had found each other and were preparing for war: one exceptional warrior, one elite hacker, one highly mobile winged assassin—a formidable combination.
There were plenty of leads. A serious investigation would yield results.
Unfortunately, tonight had too much else demanding attention. Heroes across the board—including the Teen Titans—were fully deployed. The Third Army was still multiplying faster than it could be cut down. Several of the faster heroes had no time to spare; with Star City stabilized, they headed off to help elsewhere. Even Oliver didn't stay. He stepped back out onto the streets and worked through the growing ranks of assimilated victims spreading through the city.
...
At the outermost edge of the multiverse, there existed a place that was entirely black and white.
The Underworld.
Every person converted by the Third Army died at the moment of transformation. The body kept moving—directed by something other than its original consciousness—but the soul came here. A tide of new arrivals had been flowing in for hours.
Before the main wave arrived, two particularly unlucky souls had gotten here first.
"What is this place?" Even as a disembodied soul, Hal Jordan still looked as unconcerned as ever.
Walking beside him, his old buddy Sinestro wore the expression of a man deeply displeased with every aspect of his current situation. "How should I know," he said flatly.
Strictly speaking, both of them were being somewhat dishonest. The landscape around them—jagged stones, strange formations, distant sounds like wailing carried on a wind with no visible source—was doing a fairly thorough job of describing itself. Neither of them was stupid. Their memories were clear. They had died.
Was this the afterlife?
"What does your planet's mythology say about a place like this?" Sinestro tried to initiate conversation. He would never admit that the silence was getting to him.
Hal snorted. "Ask me about clubs and nightlife, fine. Mythology? Come on—that's stuff for people three thousand years ago. And why does an alien even care about Earth culture?"
"Idiot," Sinestro said.
"What did you just—"
"I said you're a fool." He didn't give Hal time to build momentum. "Have you really never noticed how unusual your planet is? Four Green Lanterns from a single sector. Nekron chose Earth as his primary target. And the woman who calls herself its guardian. You looked at all of that and felt nothing?"
Hal, despite his reputation for going at things headfirst, wasn't actually dim. He had leadership instinct, sound judgment, genuine courage. He just hadn't ever looked at those particular pieces from that particular angle.
He scanned the gray landscape. "What does any of that have to do with where we are right now? We're dead. Thea will probably use her White Lantern power to bring me back—and probably you too, whether you like it or not. Maybe we just wait?"
The surrounding environment was doing its level best to make waiting feel difficult. The most unsettling part wasn't the eerie terrain—it was the steady stream of figures moving past them. Soul after soul, expressionless, wordless, converging into a massive silent current heading somewhere ahead. All of them going the same direction. None of them showing any sign of awareness.
Sinestro's personal code had always been simple: ask no one for anything. That principle was already complicated when it came to Thea. He still intended, someday, to reclaim the Yellow Lantern Corps—which meant owing her a direct debt in the resurrection was particularly problematic. The calculation didn't work out in a way he found comfortable.
"Get down!"
Sinestro had drifted into his own thoughts for a moment too long. Hal tackled him flat and pointed upward.
Something was flying in the gray sky above them. Massive. Wrong. Moving with the deliberate ease of something that had nothing to fear from anything beneath it.
It was a dragon—but not as dragons were supposed to be. What crossed that sky was pure white bone: a skeletal framework without flesh or heat or life, gliding on nothing but the memory of wings. It banked in wide circles over the area below, scanning for something. Whatever it was looking for, it didn't find. After two slow passes, it turned and disappeared into the distance.
"What in the universe was that?" Sinestro stared after it. He'd traveled to more systems than he could count and never seen anything like it. He couldn't identify it, but he could feel its power—with a body and a ring, he estimated the best he could manage was a draw.
"That's a bone dragon." Hal let some of his accumulated pop-culture knowledge surface. "What's left of a great dragon after it dies, given a different kind of existence..."
He stopped.
He'd said it without thinking—and the moment he heard himself, the problem materialized with perfect clarity. Bone dragons. A concept from Earth mythology, Earth fantasy. He could understand why they might appear in a place he ended up after dying here.
But Sinestro was here. Korugar was light-years away.
They kept walking, without answers. Eventually they came across another soul—a Green Lantern from a sector with no particular connection to their own. In the Underworld, old rivalries meant nothing. They fell into step together without discussion, strangers united by shared bewilderment.
With every stretch of road, Hal's confusion deepened. The Green Lantern beside him had no connection to Earth whatsoever. Was this place the shared afterlife of the entire universe?
And if so—why were he and Sinestro being treated differently from everyone else?