At that moment, deep in the void beyond the planet, a gigantic green arrow formation composed of tens of thousands of Green Lanterns was advancing toward Joey and Kara's location.
Tens of thousands of Green Lantern Corps members.
This was supreme power capable of crushing almost anything in the universe.
Under the illumination of willpower energy, a hollow, mechanical oath echoed across space itself:
"In days of peace, in nights of war,"
"Obey the laws forever more."
"Misconduct must be answered for,"
"Swear us the Chosen—Alpha Corps!"
Joey had once said that because of the Green Lantern Ring's strict selection standards, truly evil people were almost nonexistent among the Green Lantern Corps.
Someone willing to fight for life itself—someone possessing enough courage and willpower to overcome fear—rarely became a completely irredeemable supervillain.
But exceptions always existed.
He had almost forgotten that the Green Lantern Corps contained one extremely special division.
The Alpha Lanterns.
These strange Green Lanterns were essentially former Corps members who had undergone cybernetic reconstruction surgery, stripping away their humanity in the process.
More than ten thousand Alpha Lanterns.
That was the true reason Joey felt his skin crawling.
The Guardians of Oa in this universe had fallen far beyond imagination.
Unlike ordinary Green Lanterns, whose emotions and humanity still limited them, these Alpha Lanterns had been 'optimized' into a higher form by the Guardians.
After their upgrades, their minds and bodies had been directly connected to the sacred Book of Oa and the Central Power Battery itself, granting them power far beyond that of ordinary Lanterns.
The cost was the complete abandonment of mortal flesh and emotion.
All that remained was pure willpower.
This was the ideal form of the Green Lantern Corps envisioned by the Guardians:
A perfectly obedient army of emotionless, semi-mechanical ring containers.
In deep space, those half-machine beings—faces and bodies covered or outright replaced by metal, to the point Joey wasn't even sure they still counted as living creatures—formed an endless emerald formation as they advanced toward the planet.
Compared to every other Green Lantern Joey had ever encountered, the Alpha Lanterns could only be described as empty.
There was something deeply horrifying about seeing the emotional spectrum of courage and determination embodied by beings that marched forward like chanting machines.
For the first time in his life—
Joey felt genuine oppression from the Green Lantern Corps.
"Cough...!"
Behind him, Kara coughed up another mouthful of blood.
A quick glance with his x-ray vision revealed entire clusters of her cells actively dying.
"You're about to die."
Batman's research into anti-Kryptonian weaponry was honestly terrifyingly effective.
That Kryptonite ring had weakened Kara to the brink of death in only a few moments of exposure.
Thinking about it carefully, Joey had to admit Batman truly lived up to every stereotype about him.
No matter which universe he came from, Bruce Wayne was always kind of psychologically terrifying.
Because if the ring hadn't been made as a last-minute emergency measure, then its original intended target probably hadn't been Kara at all.
"Who... are... the enemies...?"
Kara, now the first victim of Batman's ridiculously powerful Kryptonite ring, could barely speak in complete sentences anymore.
She followed Joey's gaze toward the sky, but with her powers nearly gone, she couldn't see anything unusual.
"The Green Lantern Corps."
Joey's senses swept across the entire star system, marking every hostile target and calculating their numbers with perfect precision.
"13,652 Green Lanterns."
It was an utterly absurd number.
Under normal circumstances, the universe's seven thousand-plus sectors only had a little over seven thousand Green Lanterns total.
There was even a running joke:
"More than five Green Lanterns together means guaranteed disaster."
A joke used to mock how hilariously ineffective the Corps often looked whenever they gathered in groups to fight universe-ending crises.
But now, staring at over ten thousand Alpha Lanterns—
Joey could only say one thing.
Man... this really wasn't funny anymore.
Especially considering he was currently stuck carrying a near-dead burden along with him.
"Me? I..." Kara coughed violently. "I don't need you dragging me out of here alive."
Barely able to stand anymore, Kara tightly grabbed Joey's red cape and used it to lower herself weakly onto the ground. At least she was self-aware enough to know she was dead weight.
"You can just leave me behind and run. What's the difference between being locked up by you and being locked up by the Green Lantern Corps anyway?"
Kara's understanding of the Green Lantern Corps was still based on what she knew from before. No matter how untrustworthy the Guardians were, Green Lanterns themselves were still supposed to be honorable people with their ideals.
The Corps' rules and discipline made them even softer than her cousin—so soft they couldn't even bring themselves to kill anyone.
"This time's different!"
The instant Joey finished speaking, a razor-sharp green spike of pure light suddenly pierced down from outside the atmosphere.
The attack came in viciously fast, aimed at an absurdly precise angle clearly intended to skewer both Joey and Kara clean through in a single strike.
Joey immediately scooped Kara up and shifted sideways several hundred meters in an instant, watching as the massive green spike slammed into the exact spot where they had been standing moments earlier.
The impact and explosive release of willpower energy instantly vaporized dozens of centimeters of land around the impact site.
Kara's expression finally changed.
"They're trying to kill you!"
At least ten thousand Alpha Lanterns were currently gathering outside the atmosphere.
And that attack had merely been a greeting.
If even their greeting was already a lethal killing blow, then the nature of their next attacks hardly needed explaining.
Green Lantern rings normally imposed strict limitations on their wielders, especially regarding the taking of life. Killing was considered completely forbidden and unforgivable.
Only a tiny number of Lanterns could overcome that restriction through overwhelming emotion and willpower. That same limitation applied to the Alpha Lanterns, who followed the Book of Oa with absolute obedience.
But now they had opened with a direct execution attempt.
That meant only one thing.
The Guardians had completely removed the rings' restrictions on lethal force in preparation for the coming war.
That was why Joey refused to simply abandon Kara and break out alone.
The blood debt Kryptonians had accumulated during the Tamaranean campaign was far too massive. If he left her behind here alone, her odds of survival were basically nonexistent.
Even if the Green Lantern Corps didn't outright execute her, her current condition meant simple imprisonment inside a Kryptonite containment cell would probably kill her anyway.
"Why are you still hesitating at a time like this?" Kara's flushed face looked unnaturally red now, and even her speech had started speeding up slightly. "You already said I'm an unpleasant woman!"
"Forget about me and save yourself already! You have no idea how important you are to Krypton!"
Kara knew her own life meant very little to the Kryptonian Empire.
But her cousin's identity was far too special.
Under absolutely no circumstances could he be allowed to fall into the Guardians' hands.
Joey looked down at Kara's burning-red face.
With his super-vision, he could clearly tell what was actually happening to her.
That wasn't blushing.
It was the dying flash of vitality.
Under normal circumstances, even such intense Kryptonite radiation wouldn't have pushed her body into collapse this quickly. But the altered solar spectrum had caused Kara's condition to deteriorate catastrophically.
BOOM!
Holding Kara as the cells throughout her body continued dying one after another, Joey shot upward toward the sky.
Beyond the atmosphere, nearly ten thousand Alpha Lanterns projected weapons originating from thousands of civilizations across the universe.
The space surrounding the planet looked as though a storm of green meteors was raining down from the heavens.
And within that emerald-colored downpour of death, a single streak of red charged headfirst against the overwhelming green tide.
If Kara wanted to survive, she needed real sunlight immediately.
And to make that happen, Joey first had to break through the colossal wall of willpower constructed by the entire Alpha Lantern Corps.
In other words, Joey now had to defeat the entire goddam Alpha Lantern Corps by himself.