Having lost half his body, the First Lantern was now outclassed by Thea in every conceivable metric—raw energy, mastery, application, understanding of cosmic law. Her seemingly casual sword thrust had already blanketed tens of thousands of meters of space. The First Lantern could only count his blessings: at least a smaller body was easier to maneuver.
With a sharp crack, he tore through space and fled at top speed, desperate to shake the menace behind him.
"Stop! Get back here!" The First Lantern sprinted ahead like a purse snatcher. Thea chased behind, shouting and waving the Nightsword like the victim chasing a thief.
She should have brought backup. Thea kicked herself mentally. Any one of her top-tier fighters—Fiona, Lady Styx, Kanto—could have pinned the First Lantern long enough for a killing blow.
In the original timeline, the First Lantern had gone out of his way to antagonize Sinestro, and in a gratuitous display of power had destroyed Korugar. That pushed Sinestro past the breaking point. He merged with Parallax and held the First Lantern at bay just long enough for Nekron to strike.
In this timeline, Korugar was fine. Sinestro was still dead, queued up for resurrection in the Underworld. Nobody to play decoy. The First Lantern ran like a rabbit.
All she could do was chase, sword in hand. A killing blow required preparation—she couldn't just casually swing and expect lethal results. The moment she gathered power, her speed dropped, and he pulled ahead. If she gave up the charge and sprinted after him, she could catch up, but ten stabs would accomplish nothing.
While Thea silently cursed herself for coming alone, the First Lantern wasn't faring much better emotionally. He'd endured all those eons of patience, had finally broken free, and now his grand dream of returning to his own era laden with power had collapsed in one afternoon. If he couldn't go back and lord his power over everyone, what had any of it been for?
The more he thought, the angrier he got. But turning around for a three-hundred-round slugfest with Thea? Not a chance. So he took it out on the scenery.
He grabbed a celestial body roughly the size of Earth's moon, ignored the screams of the intelligent life on its surface, swung around to the far side, and hurled it straight at her.
Thea nearly choked. Batman and the Joker did highway chases. The Joker threw grenades, maybe the occasional RPG.
This guy threw a planet.
It wasn't a large one. The population wasn't enormous. But she couldn't ignore it. Forget the hero argument—as a White Lantern, she had obligations.
She flipped him a middle finger from across the void, abandoned the chase, and threw herself into shoving the planet back into its orbit.
Simply pushing it back wasn't enough. Rotation, revolution, orbital velocity—if she applied too much force or too little, the planet would either shoot out of its home system or slam into its sun in a few days. Either scenario was an extinction-level event she'd have to answer for.
Destruction was infinitely easier than restoration. Every second forced Thea to juggle a dozen variables: rotational velocity, gravitational pull, magnetic field stability, day-night cycle integrity.
A single miscalculation could trigger cascading environmental collapse. For the planet itself, that was survivable. For the sentient life clinging to its surface, the slightest deviation spelled apocalypse.
She finally got everything squared away, then—worried her math was off—sent Zoom forward ten years to check. Everything looked normal. She resumed the chase. That brief delay had let the First Lantern open a massive lead.
She hadn't even caught up before he lobbed another planet at her.
Save it? Of course. This one had more people.
After correcting three planets in succession, Thea hit her limit. This was never going to end. She had no choice but to call for backup.
Diana, who had a Mother Box for instant transit, was first on scene. Planet-pushing was excellent full-body exercise—practically a green fitness initiative—so naturally Superman got drafted too. And while she was at it, Thea yanked Supergirl out of her couch-hermit lifestyle.
She briefed the three of them in about ten seconds, told Diana to put on the Star Sapphire ring so they could track her position at all times, and left the trio standing there slack-jawed as she warped away after the First Lantern.
The three of them assumed it would be straightforward manual labor. They were wrong. The instant they pushed a planet back into position, they realized this was absolutely a thinking person's job.
Supergirl was a certified academic disaster. Granted, calculus was elementary-school material on Krypton—but she'd been a disaster there, too.
Superman was no scholar either. He possessed a super-intellect and had chosen to become a newspaper reporter. That said everything.
Diana was the best student of the three, but her interests ran toward swords, gourmet food, and haute couture rather than astrophysics. Asking her to compute orbital mechanics was cruel.
The three exchanged glances. None of them had a solution. They weren't Thea—the young miss might be lazy, but she held a doctorate. These three, if they didn't want to watch civilizations die, needed reinforcements.
Diana reached Indigo-1, who patched through a long-range connection to the League's secretary on Earth. The secretary relayed the situation to whoever was available at headquarters.
Batman was a legitimate polymath. A man who could engineer an orbital space station using existing Earth technology clearly had deep expertise in astrophysics. Mister Terrific wasn't far behind. Add the Flash for processing speed plus the League's AI systems, and solutions started flowing to the planet-pushing trio in near real-time.
They'd barely finished when Thea's next distress call came in. Onward.
The First Lantern was overjoyed to discover Thea's weakness. How many aliens died was meaningless to him. Seeing her hesitation, he escalated.
Throwing whole planets was too energy-intensive—he'd already lost more than half his reserves and couldn't move the big ones. But the man was genuinely devious. He started sabotaging planets from the inside instead.
Thea could only perform a quick initial assessment before leaving the rest to the trio, who relayed everything to the brain trust back on Earth.
"Planet rotated 180 degrees. Magnetic poles inverted. How do we fix this? Standing by. Urgent."
"Star displaced. Entire system destabilized. How do we fix this? Standing by. VERY urgent."
"Planet half-swallowed by a black hole. How do we fix this? Standing by. EXTREMELY urgent."
A torrent of increasingly unhinged problems hit Earth. Batman calculated until sweat dripped off his forehead. Brilliant as he was, even his brain was made of meat, not microprocessors. Some of these problems were so obscure he'd never considered them. He called in help.
Every Justice League member with a doctorate got conscripted. Firestorm's Martin Stein, the Atom, Killer Frost, Barbara Gordon with her archival-science PhD, Cisco Ramon—who lacked the actual degree but had the brains of a dozen engineers—all of them crammed into the same room.
Through collective effort, they managed to defuse every crisis. If this were a video game, the entire roster would have leveled up their Astrophysics skill.