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The cosmic void had a heartbeat now, and it was wrong.
Xen hovered in the blackness, his armor scorched and dull, the crimson glow of his Red Lantern Power Ring fighting the encroaching darkness. The rage was still there—a searing, molten core of absolute malice—but it was no longer pure. It was diluted by a bitter, metallic taste of denial. The denial was a poison, a corrosive agony far worse than the wounds he'd suffered or the pain of the dimensional transition.
His target was gone. His purpose was void. He was a weapon without a war, a predator without prey, and the Red Ring, sensing the instability of its host, ramped up its efforts to drown the alien feeling of confusion in fresh, burning fury. It failed.
Kyros… gone.
The thought hammered against his skull. The twelve million dead of his world, whose agonizing screams were the fuel for his fire, were not avenged. His oath was incomplete. He was a failure. The only thing left to him was the desperate, visceral need to destroy something, anything, to re-establish control.
He turned his crimson gaze on the luminous, swirling Nova Corps cluster of ships he had detected moments before. They were sleek, bone-white, and utterly sterile—a jarring contrast to the brutalist, functional vessels of his own dimension. They looked soft. They looked arrogant. They looked like a target.
As if his mere attention had been a trigger, one of the smaller vessels—a scouting frigate shaped like a stylized scimitar—peeled away from the formation. It approached his position with an unnerving, deliberate speed, its primary weapon systems held in a posture of cautious neutrality, but ready.
Xen did not move. He waited, letting the plasma in his veins boil, daring the small ship to approach the source of universal fury.
The scout craft stopped ten thousand meters away, hovering with barely a whisper of its engine. A light pulsed on its forward hull, and a voice—calm, mechanized, and speaking an entirely unfamiliar dialect—cut through the void via a standard, universal translator channel.
"Unidentified anomaly, this is Nova Corps Patrol 782. You are drifting in restricted Xandar territory. Power signature is highly irregular. Maintain present velocity and prepare for assessment and inspection. Identify your vessel, allegiance, and the nature of the energy weapon deployed."
The language was smooth, flowing, almost melodic. It felt utterly alien to Xen, who was accustomed to the clipped, militaristic cadence of interdimensional communication. His Ring, attempting to parse the transmission, overlaid its own translation, but the resulting words were disjointed, lacking context.
"UNKNOWN… AUTHORITY… DEMANDS… COMPLIANCE… WARNING: POTENTIAL THREAT."
Xen's rage, already a hurricane, was instantly magnified by this perceived authority. Compliance? He answered to no one. He answered to the dead.
"I am the vengeance of Sector 666," Xen snarled, the filter of the Ring translating his own language into a brutal, synthesized basso that was meant to shatter bulkheads. "I seek the fugitive Kyros and the immediate coordinates of the Red Lantern Central Power Battery. State your function and your immediate capacity to aid me, or get out of my sight."
The Nova Corps frigate paused. The mechanical voice returned, the smooth tone now laced with a flicker of confusion and hardened professionalism.
"Negative. Query parameters are outside standardized galactic data. Repeat: identify the device on your hand. It registered a sudden, massive spatial distortion event—a Class Seven Breach. We are here to secure the remaining technology and detain the operator until a full environmental assessment is complete. Power down the hostile system immediately and prepare to be secured."
Xen's fists clenched. They weren't asking about Kyros. They weren't acknowledging the Corps. They were talking about technology. They were talking about detainment. They were treating the very force that sustained his existence as a piece of hardware.
His fury transcended the physical. It became a cosmic imperative.
"The device is my heart," Xen stated, the red light on his finger flaring, sending caustic energy up his arm. "And the only thing it demands is blood. You misunderstand my function, small vessel. I am not here to surrender. I am here to find my target. If you impede the oath, you become the obstacle."
The Nova pilot, realizing they were dealing with an unstable, powerful entity from an unknown origin, wisely abandoned further dialogue.
"Hostile refuses compliance. Deploying non-lethal deterrent. Alert Command: Requesting immediate backup. Target is high-power, low-coherence entity."
A series of ports opened along the Nova ship's hull. They did not fire plasma cannons or fusion beams. Instead, they unleashed three dozen shimmering, blue-white containment drones. They were small, nimble craft, buzzing toward Xen like angry, luminescent insects. They moved in perfect, synchronized patterns, their only discernible goal to encircle and neutralize.
Pathetic.
Xen didn't even bother with a full construct. He extended his right hand and swept it in a wide, careless arc. A wave of raw, unshaped red plasma—pure, viscous hatred—shot out from his Ring, engulfing the nearest dozen drones.
The drones weren't destroyed. They didn't explode. They simply withered. The intense, corrosive energy of the Red Light melted the intricate circuitry and the advanced alloys of their hulls instantly. They stopped humming, their lights went dark, and they drifted away as slag, consumed by the malice that touched them.
The Nova frigate was clearly shocked by the sheer, destructive efficiency. Xen used the pause.
He launched himself forward, a streak of scarlet cutting through the void. His speed was terrifying, fueled not by fuel cells, but by the bottomless pit of his own self-loathing. He reached the frigate in less than two seconds.
The ship, realizing its peril, attempted a sharp evasive maneuver and unleashed a flurry of energy cables—thick, flexible beams of blue energy designed to tangle and neutralize. Xen ignored them. They snagged his armor, briefly locking his arms, but his Ring instantly flooded the cable with superheated blood-plasma. The cables glowed red, then white, before snapping like brittle wire.
He punched the ship.
It was a standard, two-handed, hammer-blow impact to the central bridge of the frigate. The blow was augmented by the Ring, generating a physical force that surpassed any known kinetic weapon.
KRA-THOOM!
The frigate crumpled inward like a tin can crushed by a giant's thumb. Alarms howled within its shattered superstructure. The pilot, concussed and bleeding, managed to send a desperate, final transmission just before the ship's life support failed and the plasma consumed the bridge:
"Hostile is non-containable! Repeat, do not engage close range! Recommend immediate heavy-fire suppression and full energy dampener deployment!"
Xen detached from the wreck, leaving a crater of scorched, melted hull metal. He was breathing heavily, a mechanical consequence of his reliance on the Ring. The brief, satisfying burst of violence had momentarily quieted the storm of despair within him. He felt the familiar, cold focus return.
Good. Let them come. They will pay for their interference.
He had barely finished the thought when the sky darkened.
The main Nova Corps formation, alerted by the failure of the scout vessel, was no longer treating him as an anomaly. They saw him as a Class-Omega threat.
Eight massive Nova Battleshps—vessels designed for sustained, heavy engagement—broke formation, arranging themselves in a crescent around Xen's position. They were backed by dozens of smaller, heavily armed pursuit craft. This was not a patrol; this was a dedicated, full-scale military response.
From the Battleshps, a single, dominant voice echoed through the cosmic channels, its authority unquestionable. The Ring struggled to translate, prioritizing the commanding tone over the specific words.
"Anomaly identified as High-Energy Lifeform, threat level escalated. All units, hold your fire! Focus power on Containment Field Arrays. Engage only with Energy Dampener Matrix. Do not risk close engagement!"
Xen realized too late that they weren't going to fight him with simple beams or missiles. They were going to fight him with technology.
The eight battleships, acting in perfect unison, began to charge their massive dorsal cannons. They were not charging weapons of destruction, but weapons of neutralization. Eight massive, humming domes of dull, sickly-green energy formed at the mouth of the cannons.
"So be it," Xen growled.
He raised both hands, his Ring screaming a warning of low structural integrity, but the pure will of his rage overriding the caution. He began to draw power—massive, unstable, raw power—out of the depleted core of his being. The power coalesced into the largest, most potent plasma construct he could forge: a colossal, scarlet hand, its clawed fingers spanning hundreds of meters, reaching out to crush the nearest Battleship.
The construct shot forward, fueled by the sheer malice of a billion screams. It struck the targeted Battleship—but the ship was ready.
Just before impact, the Battleship fired its green energy dome.
The dome struck Xen's plasma construct. It wasn't kinetic energy; it was a pure energy-dampening field. The green light didn't explode the red plasma; it choked it. It reduced the searing, corrosive rage to simple, inert heat. The colossal red hand, a moment ago a symbol of absolute power, dissolved into a cloud of harmless steam, dissipating instantly into the void.
What? The failure was staggering, a violation of the very rules of engagement he had relied on.
The remaining seven Battleships immediately fired their own Dampener Fields. The green light struck Xen in quick succession.
The first hit made his armor vibrate violently, momentarily stunning him. The second hit caused the light of his Power Ring to flicker uncontrollably. The third hit felt like his very essence—the blood-plasma that was his life—was being sucked dry through an invisible vacuum.
The Dampener Fields were specifically designed to neutralize energy-based weapons and alien power sources. They didn't simply absorb Xen's constructs; they attacked the fundamental mechanism of the Red Lantern Ring itself. They were a synthetic, high-tech antidote to pure, raw energy.
Xen roared, a physical sound of pain and outrage that tore through his helmet. He fought back instinctively, unleashing pure, untamed plasma bursts from his chest plate, attempting to scorch the green field with the Red Light's corrosive heat.
The red and green energies met, and the cosmos became a maelstrom of color and chaos. Xen's rage was powerful, but the sheer, focused technological input of eight synchronized battleships was overwhelming.
RING WARNING: POWER DECAY RATE: 300% ABOVE THEORETICAL MAXIMUM. SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT. RETREAT! RETREAT!
The warnings were useless. Retreat was not in his programming. Retreat meant failure. And failure meant the final, complete collapse of his soul.
He fought harder, driven by the memory of the dead. He flew straight toward the nearest Battleship, intending to tear it apart with his bare, Ring-augmented fists, relying on physical, kinetic force rather than pure energy.
But the Nova Corps had him surrounded. Three smaller pursuit crafts, closing in fast, struck him with specialized, short-range Taser Nets—high-frequency energy grids designed to lock down a large target.
He was instantly encased in a web of crackling, white-hot current. The Ring struggled to burn through the material, but the Dampener Fields, still focused on him, continuously bled the Ring's power, reducing its effectiveness. The kinetic energy was massive, shaking him to his core, forcing a guttural cry of agony from his lips.
Xen slammed into a passing asteroid, the force of the collision pulverizing the rock, but the Taser Nets held. The eight Battleships maintained their green containment fire, slowly, agonizingly, draining the Power Ring.
RING WARNING: POWER LEVEL: 85%... 80%... 75%... HOST SUSTAINING CRITICAL LIFE FORCE DEGRADATION.
The drop was catastrophic. The power wasn't just being spent; it was being annihilated.
He struggled violently, trying to summon a single, powerful construct to shatter the nets, but the Ring could only manage flickering sparks. The red light that kept his heart from turning to ash was weakening.
And then, the final, decisive blow landed.
One of the Battleships, designated as the command vessel, fired a single, enormous, highly-focused Confinement Beam. It was a massive, non-lethal, purple beam that encased Xen entirely, overriding the Taser Nets and the Dampener Fields. It was a prison of pure, high-density light.
Xen's rage, deprived of its ability to fuel the Ring, turned inward. He thrashed, he screamed, he felt the despair he had fought so hard to suppress finally surface, and it was crushing. He beat his fists against the purple light, but it was like punching granite.
"Let me go!" Xen screamed, the words lost to the vacuum. "I will have my vengeance!"
But the universal translator on the command Battleship only picked up the raw aggression, interpreting the cry as a confirmation of hostility.
"Target is secured and immobilized. Power signature is rapidly stabilizing at acceptable parameters. Begin transport procedure. New priority destination: The Kyln."
A heavy-duty transport shuttle detached from the command vessel. It was massive and utterly without any pretense of beauty, a blunt, utilitarian machine designed only for its terrible function. It approached the immobilized Xen, its heavy tractor beams locking onto the purple Confinement Beam.
Xen felt himself being lifted, dragged away from the open void toward the monstrous maw of the transport shuttle. He was helpless, his body numb, his mind a swirling mess of failed vengeance and terrifying isolation.
The last thing he saw before the transport shuttle's hatch closed and his surroundings went pitch black was the sight of the unfamiliar, shimmering, blue-white galaxy—a place that knew nothing of his Corps, nothing of his pain, and had just neutralized the most powerful weapon of hate in his universe with a few, sterile beams of technology.
He wasn't dead. He wasn't free. He was simply caged.
Inside the oppressive darkness of the transport ship's maximum security containment cell, Xen finally allowed the raw, unfiltered terror to surface. It lasted only a split second before the Red Ring violently asserted its dominance, flooding his veins with an overwhelming, toxic rush of pure, desperate fury.
The vengeance is postponed. Not denied.
The Ring's light surged one final time, confirming its self-sustaining nature even under extreme dampening. It had conserved just enough power to keep him alive, to keep him burning.
He was in a prison. Good. A prison was a closed system. A prison had walls to break. A prison had guards to kill. And in a new, unfamiliar universe where no one knew his name, he would rediscover his purpose by doing the only thing he knew how.
He would destroy.
The journey was long, cold, and silent, and Xen used every second of it to meticulously stoke the flames of his hatred, preparing for the moment the doors of the Kyln opened and released him upon this pathetic, soft new world.