Thea announced she was in a hurry. Even Galactus had to step aside. As for whether Iron Man would catch a glimpse of Galactus's form and go home to pre-build himself an Anti-Galactus suit, she didn't care.
Past Galactus's lifeless head, her eyes found Krona.
The Seven Lantern Entities had been fully absorbed into his body, but that was only one part of his power. Outside the DC universe, Krona had reverted to his normal proportions. He stood two meters tall, in tech-laden armor, with a distinctive drooping mustache. His eyes burned red, and that gaze brimmed with an inexhaustible fanaticism.
"Krona, you dared steal my Lantern Entities! If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have dismembered your corpse and ground the bones to ash." Thea was holding back a chestful of rage. This time he wasn't getting off with a simple death.
"Ha. New God? In my eyes you're just a little girl who understands nothing. Do you know the secret of the universe's birth? Do you understand that a single inflow of energy at the beginning of everything is what made the present possible? You don't understand any of it. You're all slaves to power. You take like bacteria, and you never once consider the cost of taking." Krona threw it right back at her.
Thea didn't waste her breath on him. He was a textbook fanatic. Whether his pursuit of cosmic truth was right or wrong was honestly an open question. There was no right or wrong here. He had his ideal. She had her duty.
This wasn't a clash of ideologies or dreams or faiths. He had simply crossed her bottom line.
If he were holed up in some quiet lab, not breaking universes, she wouldn't bother with him. Every last one of those little blue men had problems. Sick. The whole species.
She lifted an arm. Threads of emotion converged, every spectrum tapped, positive and negative both. They were still a thousand meters apart. Without warning, she shoved her right hand forward, and a hundred-meter-wide, ten-meter-tall wall of multicolored light came avalanching toward Krona.
The wall churned with raw, riotous color, eye-searingly bright, like an insurmountable mountain hurtling forward.
Krona held what looked like a metallic weapon, a kind of energy gun with massive arcs of electricity dancing along both ends.
He studied the incoming wall with serious focus, the way someone studies a math problem. Examined it. Analyzed it. Dissected it. Inside of a second, he was bored. He raised his weapon like a spear and charged into the emotional wave.
The collision of two different energy types produced a thunderous roar and released enormous light and heat. The flash was almost blinding. None of these people had been in combat for long without learning not to flinch from light, though.
Through the glare, two red points stayed clearly visible. Thea knew that was Krona. Not a scratch on him.
Strong. Genuinely strong. He'd taken a strike at seventy percent of her current power and walked away untouched. This was the most dangerous opponent she'd faced to date.
"Little girl. You do have some skill. Tell me the truth. Tell me your secrets. Now. Right now. Tell me!" Krona roared, half-mad.
Thea wanted to spit in his face. Tell you? Like hell I will.
"How dare you look down on me!" She made a grabbing motion at Krona through the air, intending to drag him back into the DC universe. In normal form Krona at two meters was terrifyingly strong; back in his native rules, shrunk to a little blue man, even Diana could mop the floor with him.
Wait. They were a thousand meters apart, and her fingers had reached across that distance to land on his shoulders. She pulled, but he didn't move.
She wasn't a strength specialist, but moving an entire planet with raw physical force was no problem for her. And this wasn't just brute force; she was also pouring in rule-level power.
There was something off about his gear. She could now see that Krona's armor wasn't just for looks. It was neutralizing her pulling force through a mechanism she didn't even understand, and reversing the pull to drag her toward him.
"I take back what I said. You do carry some knowledge worth reading." Krona seized her wrist with one hand and brought the other fist down at her head.
His strength was almost grotesque. Even Darkseid, God of Power, didn't seem to hit this hard. A scientist with this kind of muscle? Thea complained inwardly. Wildly unscientific.
A scientist who wanted to brawl up close. Brilliant.
No time to wrench free. She channeled emotional energy into her arm and exploded it outward, leaving Krona clutching nothing. Then she gathered her full divine power into her palm and met his armored fist with a punch of her own.
A fist white as jade and a fist clad in heavy plating collided in mid-air. Even in this near-empty pocket dimension, the explosion was enormous. The shock wave punched into Galactus's corpse, gouging out craters of every size.
Thea was hurled back a hundred meters. Krona's body merely rocked. He didn't retreat. He advanced, lifted his energy gun, and fired a brilliant beam straight at her.
Clang! Thea wiped blood from the corner of her mouth in mid-flight. The beam was on her, no room to dodge. She prepared to pull out of the space. At the last possible instant, Diana arrived. The reforged shield took the blow, the full force of what might as well have been the entire universe's energy.
The energy itself was almost pure. It was what Krona had drained after destroying the universe. He believed it contained a portion of the original creative force. The man was operating at roughly a half-strength Anti-Monitor at peak.
The supply seemed bottomless. The beam hissed against the shield without letup.
Diana braced the shield with both hands. It had been forged from materials scavenged from the Antimatter Universe, materials that had survived a cosmic detonation, which gave you a sense of how durable they were. Even so, the shield was struggling. Optimistically, it could maybe take a few more hits at this intensity.
"You're asking to die." After losing that exchange, Thea's temper flared. This time she set aside the death-power. Excalibur was usable again. She snapped into her Artoria-lookalike battle form, the holy sword in hand, and charged.
For her own universe, Krona was a fugitive. The cosmic will wanted him in custody. And the Marvel universe had no use for him either.
If Thea, right now, was the textbook example of moving in harmony with cosmic intent, then Krona was the textbook case of defying fate to seize his own destiny.
One universe refused to admit him. The other wanted him hauled back.
Neither could step onto the field directly. They could only grant Thea their assistance.
Even broader currents of emotion mobilized. Tens of billions, hundreds of billions, or trillions, she'd lost count. All she knew was that uncountable sentient beings were feeding their emotion to her.