Thea hadn't shown her hand yet. Five hundred thousand frog-Zerg dying was nothing — against the Swarm's total numbers it barely registered. She'd never run this experiment before. Caution first: could the frog-Zerg actually counter Black Lantern rings? She needed data before she committed.
The rings poured out from the depths of the sector like a rising tide, spreading through the void like a vast black curtain. The armored beetles moved up first.
As the Swarm's primary frontline unit, the beetle-tanks boasted carapaces that could absorb any conventional bombardment, limb-serrations for close-quarters dismemberment, and mass enough to simply bury what they couldn't cut. Simple and lethal.
But against Black Lantern rings, they were at a severe disadvantage. The rings were too small, the beetles too large. The rings didn't attack — they simply passed through the front line. They punched through the heavy chitinous armor, leaving holes like the work of ultrahigh-velocity sniper rounds. Several leading beetles were reduced to fragmentary debris on contact, not by deliberate strikes but purely by the rings' momentum passing through their mass.
Second-line trap Zerg deployed every tool they had. Some launched webs across the void. Some opened fire with acid clouds. Wide-maw units split their jaws and swallowed clusters of rings wholesale, relying on multi-layered stomach chambers to process them.
At the same time, Thea reached out with her power and seized one ring.
She examined it closely.
The result wasn't encouraging. Even at her strength level — comparable to Superman's, not on the tier of Highfather or Darkseid, but not weak — she couldn't brute-force the ring to destruction. She poured on pressure. The ring didn't crack.
She tested her emotional spectrum against it. Fear, rage, compassion, hope — each in turn struck the ring. It smoked white under the assault, but not broken.
When she shifted to fear and pushed thirty percent of her capacity in a single focused strike, the ring emitted a sharp crack, announced "connection severed," and crumbled to powder.
So it doesn't have to be Green Lantern power specifically. Any single emotional energy can work — it just needs to be concentrated enough. That's less convenient than using Green Lantern energy directly. Also explains how Vixen's anglerfish trick works — no Green in that, just a dense spike of a single emotion.
She went through each emotion in sequence. Rage and fear required approximately thirty percent of her output. Compassion and hope needed only twenty percent. Positive emotional energy had a cleaner advantage against the Black Lanterns' death-force.
The problem was that ordinary people couldn't regulate emotional energy output like a dial. Of all the various Lanterns, only one person in the seven corps could manage this without a ring: the Firstborn, whose nature as a divine being gave him immovable will and divine power sufficient to channel compassion on raw instinct. Everyone else — strip the ring away, and they were nothing.
Thea thought for a moment. She put on her Yellow Lantern ring, then drew out one of her counterfeit rings — the one she'd made for Alan Scott on Earth-2, patterned on the power of The Green. It carried her psychic signature; she could use it with minimal adjustment.
She raised both rings toward a Black Lantern ring that had drifted close. One beam of green light. Then one beam of yellow. The ring announced "connection severed" and fell apart.
She was pleased. Then she looked down at the ring on her hand, and the pleasure dimmed a little.
The counterfeit Green ring worked. But this was deep space, far from Earth — far from The Green's domain. Earth was where The Green was strongest; other planets had traces of it, just far less. Out here in open vacuum, the ring would run dry after a handful of shots.
"Shift the front line to containment. Hold what you can. Leave the destruction work to the special units." She turned and gave Kerrigan the order.
One night. That was how long this would last. The frog-Zerg just needed to prove useful tonight — they didn't need names.
Kerrigan's internal calculus adjusted and new orders flowed out. The beetle-tanks were taking staggering losses — their scale worked against them here; every surface was a target, and their bodies were pocked with impact holes. Holding the line passed to the Hunter-class units. Countless nets spread out across the void, snarling and slowing the rings' momentum.
With containment creating windows, the engineered frog-Zerg — built from Rainbow Raider's rage-spectrum cells, fused with deep-sea anglerfish genetics and Zerg base biology — lunged at the trapped rings. A faint whitish light burst from their open mouths, and ring after ring crumbled to dust.
"Good. Very good." Thea didn't hold back her praise.
The Zerg Queen channeled every command skill she had, maximizing every tactical window to destroy as many rings as possible.
But the frog-Zerg's emotional energy reservoir was thin, and the engineered gene-sequence didn't hold up under sustained use. Each unit could fire at most three pulses. After the third, they had nothing left.
Kerrigan could plan brilliantly with nothing to work with. Even her best choreography couldn't change the math.
"Give ground on the front. Stop what you can." The order was a mercy. No suicidal last stands required. Kerrigan let out a breath she hadn't quite been holding.
The front line opened. The black rings, operating on pure instinct and no intelligence, flowed through like floodwater following a channel — passing through the Zerg formation in a vast torrent, mechanically locking onto predetermined trajectories and dispersing outward from Sector 666 toward their designated targets across the cosmos.
The Swarm kept firing. The results were modest. Thea kept firing too, trying every method she had.
When the last ring had vanished into the dark, Kerrigan finally relaxed. Zerg forces had never operated with this level of fine control before tonight.
Surviving units pulled back to the assault carriers. Zerg vitality, as always, was stunning — many of the beetle-tanks that had looked like they'd been turned into colanders came back to full condition within minutes after being submerged in regenerative nutrient pools. Even the depleted frog-Zerg recovered partial function.
"Total count — do your bio-computers have a figure?"
Kerrigan queried the mothership's organic computation systems. The number came back fast.
Approximately 3.9 billion rings had been released into the cosmos.
Their combined kill count was under two million.
Against 3.9 billion, that wasn't even a rounding error.
3.9 billion. Thea let that number sit.
That wasn't 3.9 billion pigs. That was 3.9 billion Black Lantern soldiers. And the rings only selected the finest individuals across the entire universe — the most remarkable lives. The Zerg casualties from earlier hadn't even warranted a glance from them.
In theory, each Black Lantern could construct hard-light constructs like any other ring-bearer. But directly puppeteering 3.9 billion soldiers simultaneously was beyond even Nekron. He could only allow them to operate from memory — let them act on instinct based on who they'd been in life. This meant that anyone who hadn't known how to use a ring when alive still wouldn't know how after death.
Small mercy.
The real concern now was Oa's cemetery. Millions of the greatest Green Lanterns ever were buried there. If they rose as Black Lantern puppets — even at half their former power, even a fraction of them — the Guardians would have more than they could handle.