She barely got her guard up in time. The black snow whirling around her had been buying her breathing room—the cold and the dark worked against Rao's light-affinity, cutting his effectiveness significantly, and the storm made visual tracking difficult. Even with psychic perception, the clouds of death-affiliated snow created significant interference.
The man was a charlatan through and through, his swordsmanship no better than basic. Three exchanges later, she spotted an opening, feinted to his flank, and put her blade through his side.
The steel sank in with a clean sound.
The longsword was barely a half-tier divine artifact at its best, but with death energy channeling through it, it performed like a full divine weapon. The angle, timing, and force were textbook—as clean a hit as the technique could offer.
And then something stranger happened.
Rao's body simply pushed the blade out.
The death energy she'd injected took less than a second to neutralize—and the wound sealed up after it, bloodless and unmarked, as though nothing had happened.
What in the—
Thea had seen a lot of things since meeting Haer, but in the past hour and a bit, she'd been surprised more times than she usually managed in a month. What was this? The recovery speed alone was staggering. When their weapons clashed, the minute traces of death energy he contacted were neutralized at a crawl—but the same energy injected directly into his body burned out almost instantly. Passive resistance outpacing active resistance? That made no sense at all.
She filed the question, relying on her superior swordsmanship to stab him twice more, watched him take both without flinching, and decided it was time to pull back.
Rao's real combat level sat somewhere around Steppenwolf. Comparable to Haer—not dramatically stronger. But whatever was happening with his damage absorption was too strange to work around blind. She needed Batman.
"Enjoy shoveling that snow with your congregation!" She poured more power into the black storm, smothering even the block around Rao's feet. The blizzard combined with freezing rain and biting wind, and began spreading across the city.
The temperature dropped sharply. A great many people who'd been very loud with their chanting a few minutes ago were now pulling their collars up and heading indoors.
You enjoy gathering in crowds to shout slogans? Fine. She'd give them three straight days of this. She'd see exactly how devout they were.
Black snowflakes gathered in her palm like something animate, coalescing into a cage of shadow around Rao. Then she grabbed her two Kryptonians and ran.
"Thea, Rao really isn't a bad person," Kara said, keeping pace. "You've misunderstood him."
She gave appropriately vague responses—yeah, mm-hmm, sure—and kept her mind on the problem.
Death energy that doesn't stick. No-flinch counterattacks. No injuries regardless of what hit him. There was a familiarity to it she couldn't quite place.
Death energy. Nekron. White Lantern.
It clicked.
This was the same mechanic as her White Lantern ring—distributed damage across a connected network. And the scale of faith-energy he was running was absurd, far larger than it had any right to be.
Faith. Distributing damage across countless living beings. The White Lantern. Three separate threads, and when you connected them, the conclusion was straightforward.
Rao had, at some point on a timeline she didn't have access to, witnessed her White Lantern in action. Then he'd built something that replicated a fraction of its function.
Everyone who had accepted his "blessing" now had their life force tied to his. That was how he'd absorbed the hits. That was how he'd been able to shrug off her attacks. And it was that same mechanism he'd used to absorb the faith of the Atlanteans and turn it against Poseidon, killing a near-equal in power.
Not a bad theory—she was reasonably confident it was at least eighty or ninety percent right. Poseidon, she had to admit, had died somewhat unfairly.
Unlike her White Lantern, which passively connected to the life-force of the universe at large, Rao's version appeared to be manual. Step one: recruit followers personally. Step two: scale up. High upfront investment, slower initial growth—but past a certain critical mass, it wasn't far behind the real thing.
"Kara! Oh my God, are you okay?"
Back on the New Continent, Lena came sprinting out the moment she saw Kara, wrapping her in a hug before she could object. Kara went a little stiff, but when Lena followed through with a rather insistent kiss, she went a vivid shade of red and gave a tentative response.
Lex emerged from indoors at roughly the same moment Clark came in from outside. They saw each other, exchanged expressions of mutual discomfort, and both elected to say absolutely nothing.
Thea stepped in to save everyone from the silence by pulling Batman into the room. Clark still put a fair amount of stock in Batman's judgment, and even with Lex's presence as a mark against it, he didn't escalate.
"Two days of work. Ladies and gentlemen—observe." Lex opened his display. Two brain scans appeared side by side.
"Left: baseline. Right: one of Rao's followers. They look identical. But —" He enlarged three small regions in turn, pointing at each. "Here, here, and here. Fundamental structural changes."
He didn't elaborate on his methodology.
Everyone except Kara—who had stared at the scans with no idea what she was looking at—understood clearly what those regions governed in terms of human behavioral patterns.
"This could be individual variation," Thea said. Current-generation medical authority or not, she wasn't about to accept a conclusion from a sample of one. "A slight expansion in one region isn't a sufficiently robust finding."
Lex didn't look offended. He genuinely appreciated scientific rigor. "I drew from a random sample of seventy followers. The result was consistent across all of them."
"You ran procedures on ordinary civilians?" Superman's hand was at Lex's collar before anyone could move.
"Your Kryptonian deity acted on Earthlings first." Lex matched his volume and held his ground without budging an inch.
Looking at the fury in Lex's eyes, Thea had the fleeting, irrational thought that he might produce Omega Beams on the spot. She put herself between them.
Lena and Kara exchanged helpless glances as Kara's cousin and Lena's brother squared off.
Batman, as reliably as ever, redirected the conversation.
"What's causing the Kryptonian anomaly?"
"I wasn't exposed to any so-called blessing," Clark said, forcing himself to calm down. "No physical contact. Our cellular density is tens of times greater than a human's—whatever he did shouldn't be able to penetrate that."
"It's in the genome." Lex didn't hesitate. "It was already there. Whatever Rao encoded, it's baseline Kryptonian DNA. Normally dormant—but encounter Rao in person, and the faith response triggers automatically. It isn't conditioning. It's written directly into what you are."
The silence that followed landed heavily on both Kryptonians.
Clark had already suspected something was wrong. He'd had time to mentally prepare. Even though he disliked Lex, he knew Lex wasn't lying—Rao really had tampered with ordinary people. He absorbed the confirmation, jaw tight, and said nothing.
Kara had no such buffer.
This was worse than being controlled. She had spent her entire life helping people. She had taken genuine pride in that. And now she was learning that she had done it willingly, fully conscious and remembering everything—every recommendation she'd made on Rao's behalf, every introduction she'd facilitated. Her carefully built reputation, the trust she'd earned over years of genuine effort—all of it was gone. The goodwill of the very people she'd always helped would curdle into blame. They'd never trust her again.
Her head swam with the weight of it.