Rao descended on Earth like a second sun—warm, radiant, filling everyone around him with a sense of light. But he was not a god who tolerated other gods. On his third day, he sent his followers to war.
"Holy war?" Thea's laugh was short and cold. The phrase hadn't been used in any serious context for decades. She and Darkseid had never dignified themselves with language like that—and here was some alien crawling out of the cosmic margins to declare one. Remarkable audacity.
"What happened?"
Arthur answered from the doorway of the adjacent room, looking more worn than Thea had ever seen him. Mera stood beside him, her expression even worse.
"Countless followers poured out of the ship,\" Arthur said. \"They didn't care about their own lives. They broke through Atlantis."
Mera delivered the secondary piece of news quietly. "Poseidon is dead."
"Rao went himself." Mera's voice was carefully controlled. She had been raised with genuine faith in Poseidon in a way Arthur—raised on land—hadn't. Watching that faith lose in single combat had left her without an appropriate expression. "The sea rose for the entire day. Every Atlantean witnessed it. The battle lasted a full day. And then..."
Dead.
Thea didn't correct Mera's word choice. Gods almost never truly died—you could hack them into pieces, and as long as a heart or a skull remained, a dozen or so years of reverence could restore basic consciousness. Full recovery, enough to walk among mortals again, took considerably longer. But it wasn't permanent.
She'd assumed Rao was a pretender. Killing Poseidon forced her to reconsider.
Poseidon was no lightweight. Even with a significant portion of his essence siphoned by the Death King, the sea itself amplified his power—he was comfortably in the first tier of divine strength. Thea ran a quick honest assessment: she could beat him, but killing him would take hours. Old gods had too many escape routes, especially in their native domain.
She didn't understand why Poseidon had chosen to fight to the death rather than retreat. She asked several follow-up questions. Mera hadn't been close enough to observe what technique Rao had used.
There wasn't enough data. And honestly, Poseidon's fate wasn't her primary concern right now.
"What about Diana? Was she at Atlantis?"
"Unknown." Batman's voice was flat. "Rao knocked her into some kind of passage. We haven't seen her since. She's missing. You were missing. Superman is behaving like a man possessed, helping Rao with everything. That's our current situation." He pulled up a recording.
A spiraling tunnel—and not just Diana. The Flash was in there too. And Iris West.
Thea stared.
Iris West. An ordinary human. How had she ended up in the middle of that?
But the more pressing point was that Diana wasn't in danger. The tunnel's structure was odd-looking, but it was unmistakably a time conduit. Finding her was possible—Zoom and the Reverse-Flash could spread out across the timeline, and with the Time Masters' cooperation, a conduit's destination could be traced. It wasn't random displacement like Batman's had been.
She let out a slow breath.
The H'El-and-Rao combination had caught her genuinely off-balance. H'El had died and reset three times. How many times had Rao? Was Rao new to this iteration, or had he looped too—twice, three times? Nobody knew.
"All right. I have a broad picture now. So what's the actual problem?" Her patience was fraying. She wanted to solve this and move on, whether by fighting or talking.
"The problem," Constantine said from his corner, smoke curling lazily from his cigarette, "is that we haven't figured out what the problem is yet."
Madame Xanadu, who usually managed to be invisible in these meetings, spoke up. "The divination says Rao genuinely can bring Earth peace."
"He's also eliminated many injustices," Zatanna added, clearly conflicted.
"By stripping ordinary people of their freedom," Constantine shot back immediately. "They've all been brainwashed."
"They haven't. We've run every magical diagnostic we have. There's no evidence of any compulsion."
The two of them fell back into argument.
Batman caught Thea's eye. You see the problem.
She waited through a few more rounds of it.
The heroes had split along two lines.
The first view was cautiously welcoming: if there was no brainwashing, no coercion, then maybe they should accept Rao. Superman trusted him—and they trusted Superman. If the heroes couldn't bring Earth lasting peace, and someone else had, then getting in the way wasn't just wrong; it was self-serving. Batwoman, the Atom, Zatanna, and a significant majority shared this position. Superman's reputation had done real work here.
Even Arthur, who had just been expelled from his own palace, didn't think Rao had committed any grave crime. The breach had cost lives, yes—but after Atlantis fell, Rao's followers hadn't harmed anyone. Poseidon had been killed, yes—but the Atlanteans themselves had welcomed Rao into the palace with open arms, with the kind of joy usually reserved for a liberating army. That, more than anything, had given Arthur a private and deeply uncomfortable question about how legitimate his own claim to the throne actually was.
The opposing view belonged, predictably, to Batman—and to Lex Luthor, who was running his own analysis in parallel. The deal was too clean. There were no costs. The universe didn't work that way.
Lex's reaction to hearing a Kryptonian deity had arrived had been immediate and visceral displeasure. He was currently dissecting Rao's followers—cutting, slicing, every method at his disposal, all of it ethically questionable. Something was wrong here. Every human being on Earth spontaneously becoming virtuous? He didn't believe it. He refused to believe it.
And then there was the third voice of dissent, who deserved particular mention.
The Joker.
When Batman had vanished, the Joker had escaped. Nightwing's subsequent assumption of the mantle had put him into a sulk for a while. Then Batman came back, and the Joker went back to work.
Rao's arrival had done what nothing else had: brought Gotham's chaos to a halt. A city full of saintly, reformed citizens was completely unbearable to him. He and his crew were currently running a guerrilla campaign against Rao's followers across the planet—improvised, relentless, and refusing any ceasefire.
Refusing to yield, refusing to compromise. The Joker was, objectively, the most committed member of the resistance.
Batman, the Joker, and Lex Luthor. Three of Earth's most distinctly human minds, standing as the vanguard against a god.
The rest of the holdouts were less certain. Constantine was mostly just arguing with Zatanna—his actual opposition was softer than his words implied.
Thea inhaled sharply.
This Rao was good. Without any schemes, just real action and a few small kindnesses—he'd nearly taken the planet.
"Your read on this?" Batman was watching her. Waiting.