The forging hammer, formed by Rage Red Light and Will Green Light in Dante's hand, struck repeatedly until the various shapes of uru metal gradually melted into one.
Then came continuous compression and shaping.
As stellar energy poured in, the uru metal not only heated up but also gradually reached a saturated state of internal energy.
At that stage, Dante immediately stopped hammering.
The uru metal had now reached peak plasticity.
Without hesitation, Dante materialized a Lantern Furnace mold and shaped the uru alloy completely.
For forging an Orange Lantern Furnace, this was actually the simplest step.
The real difficulty lay ahead.
"The Lantern Furnace prototype is ready. Next, we solve the Lantern Beast problem."
Dante turned his head and said this to Hela.
Hela was stumped.
She had never even seen an Orange Lantern Beast.
But if Dante brought it up, it meant she had a part to play.
"How do we solve it? What do you need me to do?"
"It's simple. By now, you should be able to pinpoint that thing in your body called 'mammon's blood,' right? The Greed Orange Light inside you was born from the extreme greed triggered by mammon's blood."
As Dante spoke, he took Hela's hand and lifted it.
Faint orange marks, shaped like splattered blood, appeared on her arm.
It was the mammon's blood that had splashed onto Hela during Grandet's death in Storybrooke Town.
"Use your divine power to envelop the Greed Orange Light and mammon's blood within you, then… expel them through your blood."
"Is it that simple? Then why didn't we do this in Midgard?"
"This is the orange light of greed. You can't just evict these parasites for no reason," Dante said, holding up the almost fully shaped Lantern Furnace. "But here, we have endless stellar energy and uru metal capable of holding immense power. Once you use your divine power to sever mammon's blood from the Greed Orange Light with your internal energy, they'll naturally leave your body and enter the Lantern Furnace, drawn in by their own profit-seeking nature."
"Tendency towards profit… When you say that, it sounds like mammon's blood is alive."
"Hela, you're absolutely right," Dante nodded. "Mammon's blood is part of a Dimensional Devil God. Combined with your intense desires and your Death Goddess divinity, it's basically an unformed, half-finished Lantern Beast. It hasn't developed self-awareness yet, so it runs on basic Emotional Spectrum instincts, attach to a host and influence them through greed."
He'd only realized this after meeting Lex Luthor. Lex had also been corrupted by greed after touching mammon's blood, but as an ordinary man, his body lacked the power to feed it. Without fuel, no Lantern Beast could be born.
Hela was different. Thousands of years of desire, paired with divine power, made the perfect nutrient mix for a Lantern Beast.
Dante wasn't sure if a Lantern Beast born this way would still count as a pure spectrum energy creature, but it didn't matter.
Ever since he came into contact with the Ancestral Green Lantern power battery, the whole Emotional Spectrum in this universe had gone off the rails.
Overpowered Will Green Light. Rage Red Light that didn't strip away reason.
One more Orange Light that broke the rules was hardly news.
After hearing his explanation, Hela didn't hesitate.
Channeling her divine power, now recovered to nearly ninety percent since returning to Asgard, she wrapped the Greed Orange Light stirring within her desires and pushed it into her arm, merging it again with the mammon's blood.
Then…
With her other hand, she summoned a Nightsword out of thin air, raised it, and sliced open her arm.
Dante felt a pang of heartache seeing the wound, but Hela didn't react at all, as if it wasn't even her own arm.
Seeing the flicker of pain in his eyes gave her a twisted sense of pleasure.
To her, such a wound was nothing.
In her campaigns across the Nine Realms, she'd taken far worse.
"Alright, begin. Bring the Lantern Furnace closer."
Dante nodded, dismissed the mold, and brought the Furnace to her wound.
The moment it drew near, a stream of orange blood, alive and writhing, emerged.
After a moment of probing, it moved toward the Furnace like a newborn smelling its mother's milk.
But it hesitated, unwilling to part with Hela's millennia of desire.
Dante chuckled.
An unfinished Orange Lantern Beast indeed. It didn't want to give up either side, wanting more and more. The purest greed.
"It seems… this little guy is still clinging to me."
"No worries, let's give it some strong medicine."
Dante materialized a syringe, pierced his own arm, drew a full tube of blood, and poured it onto the uru Lantern Furnace.
His crimson blood spread across the natural runes in the uru metal, igniting them with a faint divine glow.
Hela's gaze locked onto his blood.
He was no longer the same man she'd first met. The Pure Dionysus Factor; he'd become Ion Man, gained the power to manipulate space and time; and, after Storybrooke Town, inherited the Old God status once belonging to Chthon.
Varied as they were, the divine power inside him was no less than hers.
Chthon's Old God status didn't give him direct power boosts, but it elevated him in terms of rules themselves.
He was still human, but to a spectrum energy creature, he was an Old God of Earth in human form.
A title the universe itself had stamped and approved.
Sure enough, after his blood lit the Furnace's runes, the hesitant half-formed Lantern Beast instantly chose, fully leaving Hela's body and diving inside.
It kept trying to reach his blood in the center of the Furnace.
Dante smiled. The time had come.
It was time for the Eternal Flame.
Opening his pocket dimension, his smile froze.
He'd taken it out to roast skewers and forgot to put it back.
Embarrassing, but Dante was thick-skinned.
"Thor! The Eternal Flame's still in Asgard! Bring it here!"
Thor, watching from the furnace perimeter, instantly understood. He flew back to Asgard, grabbed the Eternal Flame — pot and all — from the deck, then flew back and handed it to Dante and Hela.
Then immediately retreated.
Watching from outside was clearer anyway. No need to stare into blinding stellar energy.
Dante pulled the Eternal Flame from the brazier.
The massive blaze shrank into an egg-sized flame in his hand.
This was the true body of the Eternal Flame. The rest was just escaped energy.
Small as it was, its purity far exceeded the brazier version.
"So this was part of your plan?" Hela teased. "I thought you really just wanted skewers."
"The Eternal Flame, also called the Eternal Torch, is the source of power for the fire giant Surtur. Destruction… and rebirth."
"My Queen, your Nine Realms knowledge is deeper than I thought. A human who's only lived twenty-five years and never left Midgard shouldn't know all this."
"Oh, my dear, I know far more than you think."
They traded jabs, then Dante sent the Eternal Flame into the Lantern Furnace.
The half-formed Lantern Beast immediately noticed and lunged.
A sharp hiss tore out of it, short, piercing, before falling silent.
Inside the Furnace, the Eternal Flame sank into the beast, and its viscous orange-blood body began to transform.
The blood sublimated into pure Greed Orange Light, evolving into a true Orange Lantern Beast.
Its body shifted, intricate and detailed like Ion Shark or Butcher.
"Is that… a snake?" Hela asked.
"That's right." Dante nodded.
Even artificially created, it was still a snake like Ophidian from the original. But far more beautiful, exquisite scales, elegance with a hint of dominance.
If Ophidian was a street punk, this one was a rich beauty.
Within it burned Mammon's power, the Eternal Flame, Hela's divinity, and part of Dante's Old God status.
Artificial or not, it wouldn't be weaker than naturally born beasts like Ion Shark or Butcher.
The Orange Lantern Snake stretched, releasing a flood of Greed Orange Light that filled the Furnace. The uru's runes turned orange one by one until the last completed.
A child's voice sounded in Dante's ear.
"Father, Mother."
Dante froze, meeting Hela's equally shocked gaze.
The Furnace blazed with greed.
The Ancestral Orange Lantern Furnace was complete.
The light surged and spat out an Orange Lantern Ring, its patterns matching the uru runes.
Dante expected it to fly to Hela, but it hesitated, split into two, and floated to them both.
"Intelligent life locked.
Dante from Earth.
Your desires are insatiable.
You belong to the Orange Lantern Corps."
"Intelligent life locked.
Hela from Asgard.
Your desires are insatiable.
You belong to the Orange Lantern Corps."
Without hesitation, they both donned their rings.
Hands cupping each other's faces, greed and possessiveness surged under the Orange Lantern's power.
Between their lips touching, they recited the oath:
"What's mine is mine, and it's mine.
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine.
It's not yours."
(To be continued.)