Guy Gardner moved to assist. To preserve his dignity, Thea assigned him to run interference.
Three exchanges later, he had no choice but to withdraw. There was nothing he could do—he spent the entire time dodging. This wasn't a game; there was no "friendly fire off" setting. Both Thea and the First Lantern fought at ranges that covered enormous swaths of space, and if Guy Gardner didn't want to join his old friend Hal Jordan in the Underworld, he needed to dedicate every ounce of speed to staying alive. Trading a few painless scratches for the risk of obliteration wasn't worth it. Better to watch from the sidelines.
With Guy Gardner stepping back to cheer from a distance, Thea's offensive intensified.
She couldn't line up another killing blow, but death power had its own particular advantages.
At maximum speed, she lashed the First Lantern's mountain-sized body with strike after strike.
He was slower. He was bigger. Turning was cumbersome. He couldn't protect every angle at once, and the result was nothing short of humiliating.
Their battlefield drifted from open space down to a planet's surface. Thea caught, in her peripheral vision, a population of intelligent beings—and immediately recognized his plan. The hostage game again.
"Guy, evacuate the combat zone. Carol, Larfleeze—perfect timing. Everyone pitch in!" She'd barely dispatched the Green Lantern to start rescue operations—whether or not anyone could actually be saved, she had to make the gesture—when Carol Ferris and the Orange Lantern arrived on scene.
Thea was thrilled. The more hands the better. She sent them all to handle evacuation. A combat perimeter of a few tens of thousands of kilometers would suffice. She'd minimize her use of wide-area techniques.
For the sentient beings on this world, calamity had literally fallen from the sky. All they could see was a kaleidoscope of light spanning the horizon one moment and a wall of darkness swallowing the sky the next.
Prayers. Wishes. Families clutching one another and weeping. Against forces like these, they were utterly powerless.
"I'll have Santa bring you a present later. Now move!" Thea booted a reluctant Larfleeze into action. The gleeful Orange Lantern threw himself into the rescue effort, summoning an entire phantom legion with a wave of his hand. Say what you would about Larfleeze—his efficiency was unmatched.
"You can't kill me with attacks like these. We have no grievance between us. Why do you pursue me so relentlessly?" The First Lantern was completely pinned—unable to fight, unable to flee. Every strike Thea landed annihilated tens of thousands of emotional threads. But so what? He still contained fifty billion individual emotions. Losing a few tens of thousands—even hundreds of thousands—was a rounding error.
"Of course it matters. Your perspective is too narrow—you're ignoring what's happening to yourself." Thea exhaled. Maintaining peak speed nonstop was genuinely exhausting.
Being called narrow-minded by a woman from the Stone Age didn't sit well. The First Lantern moved fast, lunging forward to exploit her mid-sentence distraction. That was when he noticed the problem. A serious one.
His once-kaleidoscopic body was now veiled in a thin, gauze-like layer. Grey. Fine as mist. Utterly pervasive.
"Today is the end. It's over." The First Lantern's body stiffened. The effect had a limited shelf life—a crude application of death energy intertwined with soul power. The two godhoods meshed with extraordinary compatibility, but Thea's personal understanding remained shallow. She lacked the millennia of contemplation needed to refine the technique. The fusion was rough.
Rough, but more than enough for him.
No temporal delay this time. Thea once again glimpsed the overambitious young man inside that colossal shell. He took the black blade through the heart a second time. After all that maneuvering, the First Lantern had bought himself a few extra minutes of life. Nothing more.
Leaving the main body twitching on the ground, she turned her sword on the time remnant. This one was even simpler—less than a minute, dispatched cleanly. The remnant burst into fragments, ejected from the timeline the instant its life ended. It didn't belong here, and time wasted no sentiment on it.
Thea descended to the First Lantern's side and looked down at her opponent.
The colossal body was withering. From fingertips to forearms to neck, the decay spread steadily.
Emotional energy, deprived of its anchor, guttered out like a candle in the wind, dissolving into the void. The expression on the First Lantern's face could only be described as uncanny.
"I will return. Even if the form of my existence changes—even if I am no longer myself—the moment of my return is inevitable. It is the darkness before dawn. Fate itself has shown me this..."
Death's black shroud had already consumed his face. He raised one arm, only to find his fingers had already crumbled to ash. When the last thread of emotional energy departed, his life would reach its end.
This was the power of time. Mortal, in the end, was what he was. Sustained by emotion, he'd extended his life by ten billion years. But the human body had limits, and his had long since been reached.
"Emotion has abandoned me. Next time, I will return as emotion's enemy!" The First Lantern cracked a manic grin, issued a declaration of staggering arrogance, and dissolved into a mound of grit amid his own laughter.
"What was with the tough-guy act? Is he dead?" Guy Gardner rubbed his aching head and drifted over now that the fighting had stopped.
Carol and Larfleeze waited for the answer with equal anticipation.
Thea gave them a peculiar look. "I suppose that counts as dead."
She had suspicions about the specifics but couldn't articulate them. In his final breath, the First Lantern had issued something resembling a grand vow. He was fundamentally mortal, true—but backed by enough emotional energy, enough unified will, the impossible could become possible.
That was fate's variable.
He'd vowed to return on the eve of dawn and annihilate all emotion.
Fate neither approved nor objected. Perfectly neutral.
Was it Lights Out? Thea mulled it over. That didn't fit. The Lights Out event was, from a cosmic perspective, actually protective—preventing the Emotional Spectrum reservoir from depleting and triggering a universal detonation. From the vantage of gods and the universe alike, it was arguably a good thing.
The First Lantern's dying words had dripped with venom. Nothing about them suggested benevolent intent.
The Dawnbreaker, then? An enemy of emotion, consumed by hatred—that fit the profile best.
Would he be reborn in the Dark Multiverse? She probed carefully and confirmed: the First Lantern's soul was nowhere to be found. Thea said a quick word to Guy Gardner and the others, then returned to the Underworld and searched twice. No trace.
There was no question—the man wasn't truly dead. Whether he'd become some ring-bound spirit mentor or been reborn directly in the Dark Multiverse, she couldn't say. But whatever came, she'd deal with it. If she could handle what was in front of her now, the future held no terror.
She was about to head back to Earth when Two-Face jogged up and flagged her down. For a man with strong professional ambitions, Two-Face was privately delighted with Thea's absentee-boss management style. Total authority. An endless parade of souls filing before him, awaiting his judgment. This was a thousand times better than Gotham. He was having the time of his afterlife.
Forget resurrection—let alone one that required lining up to grease palms. Even if someone offered it free, he'd refuse. He was long past tired of being alive. Watching countless souls approach like lambs awaiting sentencing, that rush of power? Gotham could never.