Thea tapped a few keys and scanned the system.
Just as she expected — she now ranked third in clearance level.
Above her were only the Council itself… and Rip Hunter.
Technically, Gideon probably still possessed a hidden top-tier override protocol. But Thea didn't need total control. What she had was enough — more than enough to seize command of the non-sentient Gideon that existed back in her home timeline.
She dove into the ship's archive logs.
Year by year she scrolled: 2100… 2050… 2008…
There!
2005.
Buried in a dusty subdirectory, she found the initial login key. The signature matched — this was the original root password that Reverse-Flash had programmed into Gideon himself.
With this, half the battle for her own artificial intelligence was already won.
"Perfect," Thea murmured, pleased. "Bring me one of your laser pistols."
The enthralled councilman — the "bad old man" she had hypnotized — obeyed immediately, producing the sleek weapon from his belt.
Ever since the Time Wanderer had destroyed her hoverboard (and himself, incidentally, in a spectacular explosion), she'd been itching to reclaim a bit of that lost satisfaction.
She examined the pistol closely.
The trigger assembly wasn't much different from a standard firearm, but the power core was something else — a translucent blue crystal, no radiation output, no resonance with her solar magic. Definitely not light-based.
Interesting.
She slipped it into her bag for later study.
As for the fabled Oculus, the so-called "Eye of the Chronoverse" that drew power from a caged supernova — she gave it only a cursory glance from afar. The readings made her temples throb.
It was too much. Too vast.
Even the Council, after centuries of tinkering, hadn't truly understood it.
She wasn't arrogant enough to think she'd crack it by staring for five minutes.
Better to let Rip Hunter blow it sky-high. That was the safest outcome for everyone.
Time passed in the frozen void of the Vanishing Point — or rather, the illusion of it.
Suddenly, she felt her mental tether snap. A ripple in her consciousness — one of her enchanted markers gone dark.
Which meant… her little puppet had just been killed.
"Oh, lovely."
Invisible once more, she extended her senses and followed the echo of gunfire.
"Move! We need to reach the Oculus!"
Rip Hunter's voice rang out ahead, hard and urgent.
He'd finally seen the truth — that the entire conspiracy had been orchestrated by his beloved Time Masters. Now he wanted revenge, and payback meant destruction.
The Legends fought their way forward through a storm of plasma fire.
Ray Palmer and Captain Cold stood out most — both had been enhanced by Thea.
One now hit like a cross between Iron Man and Captain America; the other fought like a half-powered Iceman from the X-Men. With Firestorm's heavy blasts backing them up, the team bulldozed through the guards and crashed into the Oculus' underground control chamber.
"Enhancements working better than expected," Thea thought with satisfaction, quietly tailing them under invisibility. She'd worried that empowering them might derail the timeline — but apparently fate was flexible.
"I'll need a few minutes to figure out how to trigger a self-destruct," Ray said, crouching by the glowing console. His eyes gleamed with manic confidence.
"Do it. We'll hold them off," Rip barked, and the team scattered to defensive positions.
Laser fire rattled through the corridor as soldiers poured in.
Thea took one look at the Oculus array and almost rolled her eyes.
Complex quantum relays, subspace conduits, layered signal matrices — the design was decades, maybe centuries beyond their current technology.
And Ray thought he'd figure it out in minutes? Genius or not, there had to be a limit.
Yet somehow, impossibly, he did.
"Almost there!" Ray called. "I've found the polarity matrix. If I reverse it, the entire complex will detonate in two minutes!"
"How powerful are we talking?" Heat Wave demanded.
Ray hesitated, then said with dead seriousness, "On a scale of one to ten? …Ten to the power of a hundred."
Heat Wave froze, trying to do the math. His face said it all.
Thea nearly laughed aloud.
The guards — only a handful, really — broke through the line. She noticed something odd: these low-level soldiers were absurdly tough. Their durability was on par with the Time Wanderer she'd fought months ago.
The irony made her grin.
The top brass were weak as kittens, and the grunts were built like tanks.
How had no one staged a mutiny yet?
Then Ray's voice cut through the chaos.
"Uh-oh!"
"What now?" Rip shouted back while firing into the hallway.
"There's an anti-tamper failsafe! I have to keep this switch pressed down, or it'll trigger instantly!"
The words hit everyone like a bucket of ice water.
A beat of silence, then —
"I'll do it," said Martin Stein, stepping out of the Firestorm fusion. "I'm the oldest. You kids still have your lives ahead of you."
"No, I'll stay!" someone else barked.
"Forget it, I will!"
"No, me!"
A chorus of stubborn heroics erupted.
In the original history, Captain Cold had been the one to stay behind, buying the team's escape. But with so many self-righteous heroes around, the poor thief didn't even get a chance to volunteer. He and Heat Wave just stood there awkwardly, exchanging glances like, Well, this is new.
Rip, for his part, was loudly cheering them on but showed zero intention of dying himself. He'd rescued his family — no way was he throwing that away now.
Eventually, the argument devolved into chaos. No noble farewell kiss from Sara this time.
Thea sighed, dropped her invisibility, and stepped into view.
"Hi, everyone."
They all turned, startled.
"Thea?!"
"Remember this, people—" she said gravely, voice firm and dramatic. "Legends never die!"
Internally, she was loving every second of it. Wow, that line sounds amazing when I say it myself.
She strode up beside Ray. "Let me."
Instant panic.
"No! You can't—!"
"Thea, please, let me—!"
She rolled her eyes. "Relax. I said let me look, not let me die."
Ignoring their slack-jawed confusion, she crouched to inspect the mechanism.
It was laughably simple — a pressure switch.
As long as someone's hand kept it depressed, the failsafe stayed dormant. Lift it, and the trigger arm would rise… detonating the core.
"So all it needs is constant pressure?" she asked, glancing at Ray.
"Right," he nodded, still sweating. "If I let go, boom."
"Easy enough."
A flick of her wrist, and a glowing Mage Hand shimmered into existence above the switch.
"On three. Three, two, one—release."
He lifted his palm. Thea's invisible hand pressed down seamlessly in its place.
She studied it for a few seconds—steady, stable, no vibrations. Perfect.
"Alright," she said briskly. "Everyone, move!"
They didn't need telling twice. The team sprinted back to the ship, bursting onto the Waverider's deck and collapsing in collective relief.
More thanks, more praise. Thea accepted it all with practiced modesty.
Once they'd cleared the blast radius and Rip gave the signal, she dispelled the spell.
From orbit, she watched the Time Masters' headquarters erupt into a massive sphere of deep blue light.
For a fleeting second, she smiled—
—and then her entire body lurched violently as an unseen force wrapped around her like a vortex.
The pull was colossal, unstoppable.
Her mind barely had time to register the surge before she was yanked off her feet—
dragged, in a blinding flash, into the depths of a place beyond space and time.