Just as Thea was about to drag her off to Central City to find Cisco, Pandora's expression suddenly changed. With a whoosh, she drew her pistol and fired point-blank at Thea.
Who taught you to shoot? Looks like you missed, didn't you? Thea's super vision tracked the bullet the moment it left the barrel, determining that this shot had gone wide—ridiculously wide, in fact.
You'd think that at less than ten feet apart, she wouldn't miss by this much. Your marksmanship is terrible.
But when Thea looked back at Pandora's face, something felt off. That gritted-teeth expression—did we really have such a huge grudge? They'd barely exchanged a few words. Even Steppenwolf, the God of Hatred, couldn't generate animosity this fast.
Bang! The bullet struck a wall in the distance. From this angle, it had missed Thea by at least thirty degrees. Ruling out the possibility of a sneak attack on herself, it meant there was an enemy behind her?
But how was that possible? Anything that could move basically had a soul—even slime monsters did. To sneak up on her undetected would require at least Eclipso's level of skill.
Thea seriously doubted Aleppo had any powerhouses of that caliber.
The woman ignored Thea, leaping into the air with both guns blazing. Bang bang bang! The relentless gunfire tore through the alley, sending walls, streetlights, and trash cans flying in all directions.
A vein throbbed on Thea's forehead as she watched in complete bewilderment. Lady, who exactly are you fighting? Is there some invisible enemy here? She'd swept the area several times with divine power, magic, mental energy, and psychic force—the empty space ahead contained only Pandora.
The woman jumped and dodged, her twin pistols dancing in a blur. Her left and right hands alternated seamlessly, maintaining continuous fire, her reloading movements smooth to perfection. From Thea's perspective as a goddess of the arts, it was quite aesthetically pleasing.
Of course, if you ignored the fact that she was shooting at thin air, it looked pretty good...
Despite Thea's considerable intelligence and wisdom, she was completely baffled. Are you demonstrating gun-fu for me? You know I control Hollywood—do you want to star in a "Daybreakers" sequel or something?
Pandora's performance soon ended. With considerable flair, she addressed the ground at her feet: "Envy, this is what you deserve. Go to hell!" She punctuated this by firing two more shots at the empty ground.
"Let's go. How are you planning to take me there—fly?" Pandora holstered her guns and pulled up her hood. Seeing Thea craning her neck to stare at the distant nothing, she patiently explained: "That green-skinned monster was Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Our war has lasted ten thousand years—three million days and nights. This is my eternal mission."
Thea glanced at the empty ground, then at Pandora's solemn, grave expression, completely at a loss for words.
My god, you've been traumatized pretty deeply. Do the Seven Deadly Sins exist? From a broad perspective, you could say yes—but they're inherent traits of all sentient beings. They didn't suddenly appear because you opened some box, making humanity sinful, nor can you kill one by waving your guns around...
Paranoid delusion—that was this Pandora lady in a nutshell.
Thanks to the old wizard Shazam, in her attempt to resolve humanity's negative emotions, she'd created seven demons entirely in her own mind. These were her so-called Seven Deadly Sins. As long as her thoughts continued, the imagined demons would exist forever, trapping her in an endless cycle of eating, sleeping, and fighting the Seven Deadly Sins.
Human warfare had nothing to do with Ares, and greed had no connection to the seven demons she imagined. She was a pitiful woman trapped in her own world.
The so-called Pandora's Box was actually a technological artifact from Earth-3 that, due to temporal and spatial distortions, ended up in this world's ancient past. It had nothing to do with magic and couldn't release any Seven Deadly Sins. Old Shazam was always a confused fool—he couldn't figure out what the box was for at all.
Like an absentee landlord, he'd dumped the problem of "fixing the released trouble" on her. Pandora, just a primitive tribal girl, could only approach the task based on her own understanding and worldview.
An ordinary person's delusions might still be curable, but hers weren't. This illusion had persisted for ten thousand years. If you told her it was all fake, that the Seven Deadly Sins she imagined didn't exist, even if her rational mind could accept it, the mental pressure would make her collapse.
This part of her memory was so deeply rooted that even Thea didn't dare casually erase it. She could only sigh and maintain the status quo for now.
After teleporting to Central City, Thea worried that Pandora might start performing gun-fu in public and scare the Flash's friends, so she called Cisco out instead.
"You want me to vibe a location that exists outside time and space? There's a place like that in this universe?" Cisco was intimidated by the tall order.
"It's the Speed Force dimension, isn't it? Last time I heard Barry say you intercepted the Speed Force space for almost two milliseconds. You just need to help me find the coordinates—I can get in myself." Thea felt this shouldn't be too difficult.
However, facing the mature Pandora made Cisco too nervous to speak properly. After half an hour of stammering, he'd made no progress.
"I can't sense something that deep in the past through clothing." Cisco's earth-shattering statement made Thea roll her eyes.
What do you mean? It doesn't work through clothes, so you want to get more... intimate? Is this the real you, Cisco?
Turns out her mind was just in the gutter—she'd completely misunderstood. Cisco was still a good kid.
The three of them had to return to S.T.A.R. Labs. He needed to build two brainwave readers—one for each of them—to conduct a deeper search.
"Oh wow, quite a crowd. Hope I'm not interrupting..." When Thea entered the lab, she discovered it was surprisingly full.
Barry Allen, the Flash, Iris West, and her father were all there, along with a young man beside them—apparently Iris's brother, Wally West.
Dr. Wells and Jesse Quick from Earth-2, whom Thea had met before, were also present. Jesse kept exchanging flirtatious glances with the young guy. From a distance, it looked like the parents from both sides were meeting to discuss some major matter.
"We're fine. What do you need, Thea?" The Flash quickly stood up.
"Nothing, nothing. You all keep chatting. I just need Cisco's help with something. Hey, Dr. Wells—how did you get here?"
The thin old man sighed, and his daughter beside him launched into the story. It was simple: after the war on Earth-2 ended and humanity reclaimed their cities, before rewarding the heroes, there was one thing to do—punish the perpetrators.
Capture Steppenwolf and execute him? They didn't have that capability, so they had to find an Earth-born scapegoat.
Dr. Wells, who had also caused the particle accelerator explosion on Earth-2 and happened to be extremely unpopular, entered the politicians' crosshairs. Many ordinary people gained meta-abilities because of his experiment, so Steppenwolf must have been drawn out because of him too! The reasoning was simple and brutal. The authorities didn't want to hold a hearing—they planned to just execute the thin old man and call it a day.
Unwilling to be a scapegoat, the old man and his daughter built a bunch of black-market tech and escaped to Earth-1 through the space rift left by Thea and Darkseid's clash.
Fleeing only made him look guilty. Earth-2's politicians piled all the blame on him, then destroyed the passage from the other side. He and his daughter were permanently stuck on Earth-1.
Thea expressed limited sympathy. Seeing them living comfortably and harmoniously with the others, she figured they could stay if they wanted.
While they were talking, Pandora apparently spotted another trace of the "Seven Deadly Sins." With a whoosh, she jumped up, drew her guns, and launched into another live gun-fu performance right there in S.T.A.R. Labs.