If she were still the Soul Goddess, she might not have been able to weather this many attacks. Each Guardian's combat power was on par with Superman's, and thirteen of them striking in unison made for a formidable assault.
All thirteen together? Even Steppenwolf would have been forced to retreat.
But from where she stood now, the barrage registered as merely decent. One hand maintained the barrier while the other rummaged through Ganthet's soul.
"No—! That's mine! MINE!" The First Lantern had been watching with aloof detachment, regarding them like ants. But Thea's sudden move had thrown his plans into chaos. He began struggling to break free.
Thea smiled. She'd found what she was looking for. Ganthet's resistance was fierce, but her tier advantage was simply too great. Ignoring his struggles, ignoring the First Lantern's howls, she dragged from the soul-plane a ring blazing with prismatic light—dazzling beyond measure. This was the universe's first emotional ring. It wasn't green. It wasn't yellow. It belonged to no single spectrum. It embodied every emotion in existence.
The ring wasn't hers, and it fought back savagely. But arms couldn't outmuscle thighs. A rootless, ownerless thing—how could it hope to resist the Goddess of Death?
Thea cleared her mind and focused on extracting the ring from Ganthet's soul.
The ring was tangled with countless filaments, and as she hauled, the threads dragged on the soul itself. Pain twisted Ganthet's face.
"Bear with it! I'm almost done. Honestly, what's wrong with you people—why would you bury something this deep?" she muttered, half-complaining, half-pulling. Some soul damage was inevitable, but this was well within her ability to manage. And Ganthet was no ordinary being; a long-lived being of his caliber had an exceptionally resilient soul.
An average person would have blacked out and gone critical by now. The fact that the old man could still scream bloody murder said everything.
Sensing her absolute determination, Ganthet gave up resisting. Thea's hands moved dramatically faster. Of the hundred-plus soul-threads, roughly half had now been severed. Success was within reach.
"How dare you touch what's mine! You're nothing but a primitive! You don't deserve that ring!" The First Lantern exploded with rage, finally revealing his trump card.
At his command, the Third Army across the entire universe stopped in unison. Every drone turned to face the First Lantern's direction. The process mirrored their original conversion—only this time, it was far more thorough.
Muscle, bone, skin—everything dissolved into a gelatinous mass, from which a sliver of barely-visible light was born and streaked across the sky.
In an instant, the Third Army that had blanketed the cosmos ceased to exist. Every assimilated being collapsed into a lifeless mound of sludge. Virtue, life, intelligence—everything that had once belonged to a living soul was catalyzed into a single point of light.
One point of light might be imperceptible. But when those lights spanned the universe, the spectacle was breathtaking. The Guardians had used the First Lantern's energy to power the Third Army; the First Lantern had in turn exploited their army to engineer his own escape.
Both sides had been playing each other. Neither could claim the moral high ground in treachery.
Even stripped of their souls, the flesh still retained traces of living emotion. Some had been passionate. Some had been greedy. Others had been full of love. Their emotions were vanishingly faint—fireflies in a night sky.
But when those fireflies numbered in the billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions—even a god couldn't ignore them.
The Third Army, carrying the Guardians' dream of "universal peace," transformed into countless streams of light. From every corner of the cosmos they came, radiating kaleidoscopic brilliance, an ocean of light surging toward the First Lantern.
"Reinforce the prison!" The Guardians hadn't anticipated this trump card. Forgetting Thea entirely, they threw themselves into shoring up the lantern cage. The eight wardens worked hardest of all. The long-bearded elder ground his teeth to powder, veins bulging on his forehead, apparently invoking some secret art—wringing every last drop of energy from his body to strengthen the seal.
It wasn't enough. Against those countless streams of light, their reinforcements were a cup of water against a wildfire. They were long-lived beings who could fight ten thousand to one, but against hundreds of billions, they were merely mortal.
And opposing them wasn't just the residual emotion of intelligent life—it was the First Lantern, who had been scheming for this moment from the very beginning.
"HAHAHAHA—! Tremble before me, primitives!" Amid the First Lantern's manic laughter, the prison shattered from both inside and out. The long-bearded warden, having overextended the most, was knocked unconscious by the energy backlash.
The Guardians' final defensive layer held like tissue paper—one push and it tore apart. And this consumed only a negligible fraction of the light-sea's energy. The remainder began converging on the First Lantern's body, and his power multiplied exponentially.
Thea watched sidelong. The First Lantern ballooned from normal human size to several hundred meters tall. Every nerve, every blood vessel was replaced by multicolored lines of emotional energy. His presence was imposing, his aura suffocating.
Had Hal Jordan's crew witnessed this, they might genuinely have been shaken.
The concentrated emotions of hundreds of billions of intelligent beings were not something ring-constructs could defeat. No matter how united the Lanterns were, no matter how strong their collective will—forget the seven Corps, even seventy would have been cannon fodder. The gulf between them was qualitative, not quantitative.
An ant's odds of defeating an elephant were essentially zero. Only a higher-tier predator could take down an elephant.
But that was where the First Lantern's ceiling stood. Intimidating Lanterns? Absolutely. At several hundred meters tall, with energy so dense it was nearly solid—so dense that a casual flex of his shoulders made the universe itself seem to shudder—on raw power alone, the First Lantern could have annihilated a thousand Lanterns, ten thousand Lanterns, without breaking a sweat.
To Thea's eyes, though, it was a lot of flash with little substance. The energy was too diffuse, too buoyant, and he lacked the ability to compress it. Hence the absurd size.
Darkseid stood barely over three meters—that was his species' natural height. Thea kept her one-meter-eighty frame. It wasn't that they couldn't inflate to several hundred meters; it was that doing so would only earn them ridicule from peers. Pointless.
Someone like the First Lantern, whose own energy exceeded his capacity to contain it, would inevitably be slow. Beyond becoming a massive target, the bloated form offered zero advantage in a fight between equals.
"So this is the ring you crossed ten billion years to get your hands on!" Thea surged with force, abandoning all caution about Ganthet's wellbeing. With brutal efficiency, she severed every remaining soul-thread at once.
A ring radiating every color imaginable appeared in her palm.
She'd known from the instant she touched it.
This ring was a Source. Or rather—the ring was a New God.
It represented Emotion.
Just as Metron's Mobius Chair embodied knowledge—sit in the chair and you became the God of Knowledge; the chair was the god more than Metron ever was—this ring worked the same way. Whoever wore it became the God of Emotion.
Emotion didn't rank as high as Death, but it was roughly on par with Justice or Evil—a fundamental trait of all intelligent life.
Without emotion, you couldn't really call something alive.
Thea had reached the carrying limit of her divine seats. She'd have to shed one to gain another.