Oblivious to everyone on Earth working themselves half to death, Thea had mobilized all seven Lantern Corps—Red and Orange included—to intercept the First Lantern.
Larfleeze had required a combination of threats and bribery to pry loose, but she considered the Orange Lantern the only individual who could trade a few blows with the First Lantern, pitiful IQ notwithstanding.
She wasn't asking the Corps to inflict real damage. She just needed them to report his movements and buy her a moment when it mattered.
"Stop right there!" The critical moment arrived, and Guy Gardner delivered.
His position happened to be directly in the First Lantern's path. Courage second only to Hal Jordan's, Guy Gardner didn't have the word "fear" in his vocabulary. He was the kind of man who'd kick God in the shin if God had the audacity to descend.
He raised his ring, materialized a massive green hammer, wound up his arm, and with a resounding crack, smashed the First Lantern clean out of the spatial rift the man had been halfway through.
Force was reciprocal. Emotion answered emotion by the same principle. Pitting one person's feelings against the concentrated emotions of fifty billion sentient beings was like headbutting granite. Guy Gardner's vision exploded into stars, his skull felt ready to crack, and he barely choked down a mouthful of blood.
But the intercept worked. Thea appeared before the First Lantern once more.
"Your time is up." She gripped the Nightsword in both hands, channeled every drop of her death divine power, and drove the blade forward in a straight, uncompromising thrust aimed at his heart.
She was going for a one-hit kill.
Refusing to believe he could fall in this primitive era, the First Lantern didn't even know Thea's name. Facing a lethal strike, he marshaled all his emotional power and frantically reshaped the surrounding environment—not the cause, but the outcome.
The empty void of space transformed in an instant. Stars vanished. Guy Gardner became a bystander in a crowd. The battlefield became the White House, then a village in Belgium. The First Lantern probed for a crack in Thea's psyche, manufacturing an escape route from the fabric of her own emotions.
After this prolonged chase, he'd gained a rudimentary understanding of death power. He didn't know what it was called, but he recognized its purity. If he could corrupt that purity, he'd have his opening—maybe even an opportunity to counterattack.
Thea sneered. If tricks like this could rattle her, she'd have been dead and buried long ago.
She held the First Lantern in open contempt. Cornered and facing oblivion, he still lacked the courage to go all-in. No wonder the Guardians had imprisoned him for ten billion years. His temperament was fundamentally deficient—he didn't have the backbone of a true powerhouse.
"Die." No grand speeches. No declarations. She thrust the black blade through space and punched it clean through his chest.
"Please—spare me, I don't even know you..." He was still trying to talk his way out. Death power sliced through layer after layer of emotional shielding and found its target.
Thea's gaze followed the divine energy inward. Deep within that colossal body, at the very center, she saw a young man with an unremarkable face and slightly curly hair, staring at her in abject terror.
This nameless schemer—a man who'd never revealed his true name to the Guardians, who'd crossed inconceivable gulfs of time to reach this moment—looked at her with disbelief as the black sword pierced his heart.
His expression still held a trace of bewilderment. That was it? All that power, and it meant nothing?
Timeline manipulation. Reality distortion. A being Thea had once considered practically invincible, slaughtered like a chicken.
She couldn't name the feeling. She only knew she needed to keep pushing higher. If she didn't want someone doing this to her one day, she needed to climb further still.
She exhaled long and slow, watching his body topple like a collapsing mountain. A wave of emotion swept through her.
Wait. No. Why was she feeling sentimental about him? She barely knew the man.
This emotion made no sense. Thea's heart wasn't made of iron, but she'd been through enough that mourning every random nobody was absurd. She had work to do.
A flash of emerald light—the Eye of Erasure activated but held in reserve. The scene shattered like broken glass. She was still floating in space. Guy Gardner, nearby, seemed to be edging closer to help. Only one second of her own subjective time had passed. The First Lantern hadn't fallen at all. Instead, he was staring at her with something approaching horror.
"My blade connected. Death power doesn't lie. How are you still alive?" She studied him head to toe, genuinely puzzled.
She didn't expect an answer. After a moment's thought: "Some kind of delay technique. You pushed the killing blow two hundred years into the future." She laughed sharply. "Cute trick. Let's see you take another one."
He had delayed the death strike via energy manipulation, then used emotional influence to cloud her judgment without her noticing. The First Lantern had his tools. Unfortunately, he lacked the raw power to back them up. Clever tricks only went so far.
"You've made me angry." Backed into a corner with no way out, the First Lantern played his last card. A second polychromatic giant, identical to himself, stepped out of his body. The two regarded each other with matching blank expressions. The newcomer was stiffer, more wooden-eyed—a puppet, devoid of spark.
That finally surprised her. This man had real technique. Delay the killing blow. Manipulate emotions to cloud her mind. Then—as the Flash would put it—he'd quietly created a time remnant. A parallel self, running concurrently on the timeline.
His command of emotion was genuinely sophisticated. No surprise there—that had always been the plan. But she hadn't expected his grasp of temporal mechanics to run this deep.
Unlike a speedster running fast enough to generate a time remnant, the First Lantern had brute-forced one into existence with sheer energy.
While he unveiled his trump card, Thea hadn't been idle. She sealed the surrounding space, cutting off his escape.
The time remnant gambit, aside from the shock factor, accomplished nothing.
He'd been imprisoned for billions of years. His combat experience was effectively zero. He'd assumed, with amateurish optimism, that two of him could overpower her.
Reality didn't work that way. Could two Steppenwolfs beat Darkseid? Could two Kantos beat Thea? The higher the tier, the less raw numbers mattered.
She didn't underestimate him, though. The Nightsword swept up a pale-grey storm of astral energy, blocking the puppet's attack while she committed fully to the original.
Death power gave her the fastest combat speed in existence. Speed was clearly his weakness. The ink-black Nightsword carved wound after wound across his body. Relative to his enormous frame the cuts were small. The First Lantern had no blood—what seeped out was raw emotional energy.
She struck again and again. He couldn't land a hit. Two First Lanterns accomplished nothing but getting in each other's way.