Thea gave him a slightly bitter smile. "You can't apply ordinary logic to him. Krona belongs to the oldest race in our universe, comparable in nature to your Elders of the Universe. He's a formidable fighter in his own right. And the truly terrifying thing about him is his science. He's at the absolute ceiling of what technology can do."
When she saw the room still wasn't taking it seriously, she dropped a bombshell. "I've been to your universe before. Thor can verify. Krona is stronger than I am. Possibly stronger than all of us put together."
They glanced at Thor. His face had gone an awkward shade of dark purple and he wasn't saying a word. That settled the matter. The same woman in casual clothes suddenly read very differently to all of them.
Tony was already working his personal terminal, scanning global feeds. Anomalies were spiking everywhere. That pushed him to believe her a little more.
A villain from another universe coming over to wreck things, dragging them into the fight. Realistically, opinion inside the Avengers was not unanimous.
But a hero is a hero. The basic instinct kicked in, and they all said they were in.
The Grandmaster rattled off a list of coordinates, places where Krona had previously stopped. The Avengers tapped Star-Lord's Guardians of the Galaxy to investigate.
"We should go search too," Thea murmured to Superman. "This is more our problem than theirs."
When her side proposed going out to recon, the Avengers needed a moment for their own internal debate.
"Can you survive in space?" Tony asked, blunt.
Turned out they all could. Even Batman, with the Yellow Lantern Ring, could move freely through hard vacuum.
Tony's curiosity was officially piqued. "How are you planning to get there? Those coordinates are a long way from Earth."
Thea smiled, lifted a hand, and opened a portal, her own Marvel-flavored reskin of the technique, capable of teleporting anywhere within a single universe.
Iron Man laughed and snapped his armor back on, declaring that he and Vision were coming along. Thor thought about it for a beat and signed on too.
Captain America stayed behind to bring the rest of the Avengers into alignment. The contingent with deep-space survival capability lifted off to sweep the void.
A long stretch passed. The search turned up nothing. Krona's trail was still cold.
"He's not here. At least, I'm not picking up anything strong in the vicinity..." Star-Lord, on the heavier side these days, pinged Iron Man through long-range comms.
While the search continued, Thea was acclimating to this universe's rules. Death in this world rejected her outright. She had to settle for second-best and route her access through the First Lantern ring, tapping into the local emotional spectrum instead.
Here, green meant rage, not willpower. Blue meant space, not hope. Yellow meant mind, not fear. A jumble of emotional energies had been scrambled and rewired. Thankfully every translation happened inside the ring, sparing her a lot of work.
"Are you ever going to give us the truth?" Diana grabbed the Grandmaster, fed up. She'd already noticed his power level was off, and he kept dodging straight questions.
He stammered, unable to spit anything out.
Thea pulled Diana back. "He's just a projection. I assumed he wanted easy access between the two universes, but at this point his real body is almost certainly..." Honestly, the Avengers couldn't bring much heavy firepower to bear. She'd been hoping the Grandmaster could. Now one of her two main assets was effectively dead, and she was the one shoved out front against a monster. The mood wasn't great.
"You're talking nonsense! I'm only badly wounded. Severely wounded. You understand the difference? I, the Grandmaster, do not die!" He argued back, indignant.
Thea shook her head without commenting.
The odds had been long to begin with. The Grandmaster was now relegated to mascot status: stand on the sidelines and wave a flag.
But she'd weathered enough storms over the years. She wasn't the rookie who used to run and hide whenever Solomon Grundy showed up.
She closed her eyes and thought. "Krona's inside a dimensional barrier. The fusion point between our two worlds."
Vast amounts of emotional energy began flowing toward her. Threads of color flickered along her skin: red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, blue, violet, and beyond, in colors she couldn't name. They surfaced faintly, and the combined emotion of countless minds erupted into a quality no language could quite describe.
Right now, Thea was like an upgraded First Lantern, freely commanding the energies.
Emotional energy was directional. The seven Emotional Entities glowed in her vision like beacons, lighting the way.
Not even seventy percent of her peak. And this kind of energy came fast and faded fast. Bad for a drawn-out fight.
She had to use the surge while it lasted to locate Krona.
She scanned the area, found the fracture, and turned to the group. "I'm opening a doorway. After we go through, no matter how the fight goes, we have three minutes. Star-Lord, keep an eye on the Grandmaster. Don't let him bolt."
Iron Man wanted to say, We haven't even finished mobilizing. Aren't you all being a little impulsive?
He never got the words out. Thea had already gripped the empty air with both hands, fingers white as jade catching invisible doorframes. Threads of every color flickered between her knuckles. As she pulled, a more dazzling world was revealed through the gap.
Before Iron Man could speak, the Justice League had already flown through. Thor, ever the first into the breach, charged in without hesitation. Even Vision followed.
With no other option, Star-Lord stayed behind with the Guardians and the Grandmaster, exchanging dumbfounded smiles. Iron Man said a few brief words, then dove in after the rest of the headlong chargers.
The space inside was small. It existed outside of time, a chaotic, hallucinatory realm.
Iron Man's eyes locked immediately onto something enormous. A humanoid being hundreds of meters tall, ancient and weighty in form, as if time itself couldn't scratch him. And yet this colossal creation was hanging motionless in the void like discarded debris.
"Who is that? Or what is that?" Iron Man asked Thor, who'd "been around" the most.
Thor, who didn't actually know, was casting around for a way to bluff it when Thea's voice drifted back from up ahead, already far in the lead. "That's Galactus. One of the Five Cosmic Entities of your universe. He's dead. The enemy's up ahead. Catch up."
"Are these guys all savages? Doesn't anyone over there believe in tactics?" The headlong-charge approach was making Iron Man twitchy. He grumbled to Vision. Thor, on the other hand, loved this style of warfare. He was already roaring, "For Asgard!" and rocketing into the lead.
Thea was streaking out in front. She only spared Galactus a glance and didn't look again. He fed on planets; his power swung wildly between starved and gorged. Killing him at this point would prove nothing. What she needed to see was Krona's current level of power so she could plan around it.