Thea had no objections. She ordered her people to set up camp and hold position, then took Elder Son, Sister Blue, and Archilo along to watch the show.
From a distance of over 300,000 kilometers (roughly 186,000 miles), she first hailed Mogo, who orbited Odym like a satellite. The young planet's morale was high—the emotions it broadcast back were pure joy, excitement, and exuberance.
Then she met the third Blue Lantern: Warth. Like an elephant-headed sage of legend, he had a massive head, broad ears, and a long trunk, and hovered in midair with his hands opening and closing in a slow, deliberate rhythm, as though deep in meditation.
Thea's dual identity as a Yellow and Indigo Lantern didn't earn much of a reaction from him, but her status as a True God earned an immediate full bow.
"Did he really make it this far on his own?" Thea studied him carefully. That was genuinely remarkable. Saint Walker had only received his Blue ring because she'd handed it over like a gift. Mogo was a planetary consciousness—ordinary life was specks of dust before something like that. But this elephant-headed fellow was different entirely.
He'd earned it. Kept the flame of hope burning through sheer stubborn willpower, one day at a time. Thea found herself genuinely moved. She thought for a moment, then extended one finger and pressed a stream of light into the space between Warth's brows.
The third Blue Lantern's eyes flooded with visions. When they cleared, he gave Thea a deep, solemn bow.
She accepted it without fanfare. She'd passed along more than a few teachings from Earth's great monks over the years. The material wasn't suited to her own path—but it was a perfect fit for him.
After that, they toured the Blue Lantern training grounds. Full members were few, but the reserve corps was at least passable in number. Thea gave them a rough once-over: around two hundred recruits wearing temporary rings, every single face radiating warmth and positivity. Honestly, she could grab any one of them at random and they'd be more upbeat than she'd ever managed to be.
But hope was a fickle emotion—easy to ignite, just as easy to snuff out. One stumble, and despair was right there waiting. Maintaining that feeling every waking moment was a feat of extraordinary difficulty.
"That your new recruit?" Thea pointed at a cross-legged alien sitting in the center of the courtyard. The alien had an oversized amber-yellow head and a pair of goldfish-wide eyes swimming with moisture—the look of someone who had lived through a great deal of hardship and simply couldn't quite put it behind them.
His posture mirrored Warth's almost exactly—likely the elephant's personal meditation technique. One hand raised at chest height, four fingers as thin as chopsticks. The man looked like he'd been wrung out and left to dry, the sort of figure that practically had "push me around" written on his face.
Thea almost buried her face in her hands. Blue Lanterns' combat strength couldn't possibly get any weaker, could it? Everything will be fine—with this squad? Could you at least recruit someone who can actually throw a punch?
"Yes—that's Syen. He reached full Blue Lantern status just yesterday." Saint Walker spoke in his usual unhurried murmur.
"Add one more. Let me find you someone." Thea swept her gaze over the reserve corps. A big battle was coming; the least she could do was round out a five-person squad for him.
What she saw made her wince.
Where were the bruisers? The Yellow Lantern instructor Archilo was pushing five hundred jin (over 550 lbs / roughly 250 kg), with arms like tree trunks and thighs wide enough for a car to drive over. Blue's reserve corps had absolutely nothing like that.
Whether hope as an emotion naturally skewed toward slighter builds, or whether Saint Walker's eye for talent was simply broken, Thea couldn't say. Every single one of the two hundred-plus reserves looked lean, wiry, or just plain frail.
She lowered her standards. Again. Then again. Picking the best of a weak lot, she finally settled on a female alien who at least had some height to her. You'll do.
A flash of blue light passed. Thea gave her hope a forcible nudge—just enough to qualify her as a full Blue Lantern.
A new member. Saint Walker was visibly delighted. He arranged a brief ceremony, and the woman named Sersi officially joined the corps as a full Blue Lantern.
When fear pervades the waking day,
Through painswept nights and terrors cold—When fire of war devours all,
We raise our eyes to starlit height:
The light of hope shall never die.
With the brief ceremony concluded and two new Blue Lanterns added to the roster, they finally turned to the question of repelling the enemy—and yes, repelling was the word. The option of annihilating the Rachi Swarm outright wasn't even on the table.
"The Rachi's homeworld sits in Sector Nine. Their forces span thirty-one surrounding star systems—they control both Sector Nine and Sector Ten. A civilization of enormous power." Saint Walker, who not long ago had been living in a feudal society completely convinced his own planet was the entire world, now found himself dropped into a leadership role against a merciless alien enemy. He was, if he was honest, a little out of his depth.
That he remained optimistic at all was testament to everything his ring stood for. He kept looking for a way through.
No one laughed at him. The Rachi's fearsome reputation was known to every civilization that had entered the galactic age. Nobody picked a fight with them voluntarily.
Even pooling three Lantern corps together, even accounting for Odym's native population—who weren't pushovers—plus their warships and weapons, the math still didn't add up to victory. If there was time to plan a counterattack, it was better spent planning an evacuation.
Thea herself had no particular interest in fighting the Rachi at all. Win or lose, there was no upside. The Rachi's breeding capacity was the best in the known universe; losing even a single Lantern would sting for days. Going up against them was like throwing fine china at cheap pottery—a losing trade by every metric, and the Goddess of Commerce absolutely refused to operate at a loss.
More to the point, the Guardians had already begun their early preparations for Blackest Night, and she couldn't afford to fall behind.
Unlike the Oans' vague, cloud-wrapped prophecy from the Book of Oa—which had half the Guardians spinning wild theories—Thea knew exactly what Blackest Night was. Not a weapon. Not an apocalypse. The resurrection of the dead.
And for fighting off endless waves of corpses crawling out of their graves, was there any better weapon in existence than an insect swarm?
She'd come here specifically to recruit the enemy. As far as she was concerned, very few things in this universe couldn't be traded. The Rachi had needs—find what they needed, offer a solution, and collect the return. Simple business.
What's that? They don't have any problems? Then Goddess Thea could always put on a different hat and make them some problems.
She got the coordinates of the Rachi's territory, told no one to follow, and flew out alone under the banner of "scouting the enemy."
Several breaths later, she had crossed multiple sectors and arrived at the Rachi homeworld.
Calling it a homeworld was something of an overstatement. The Rachi Swarm had begun as a relatively small species—the original planet's dominant civilization hadn't even been them. But through endless cycles of breeding, combat, and evolution, they had seized control from its intelligent inhabitants and launched an era of frenzied expansion.
Their original homeworld became a wasteland in short order. Unable to relocate their main brain, they pillaged beautiful, resource-rich worlds throughout the cosmos and connected those stolen planets to their barren core through biological engineering—physically fusing captured worlds to the exhausted original body.
What Thea saw of the Rachi homeworld was an irregular mass floating in the void—like a colossal arthropod crouching in open space, the original planet buried at its center, seven or eight captured worlds gripped around it by vast tentacles that blotted out the stars.
The predatory instinct seemed hardwired into the species' very genome. Everything about this planet communicated a single, unwavering creed: We do not yield. We do not break. We fight to the last.