Individual Rachi weren't particularly strong. An ordinary human with a weapon could handle one in a straight fight. Put them in a horror movie, and a group of people with fire axes could work through them just fine. The horror was always the numbers.
BOOM. A wall of fire—over 35 feet (roughly 10 meters) high and 330 feet (100 meters) long—materialized from thin air and swept into the oncoming swarm.
Fewer than one in a thousand survived the heat. Thea drove her left foot into the ground—an earthquake technique, wide radius—and buried the rest.
"Almost no soul presence. Pathetic." She walked on, shaking her head. Large-scale soul magic barely registered against the Rachi; there was simply nothing to grab onto. Even pulling out the small amount of soul they had wouldn't make much of a dent—they ran on pure instinct. Her understanding of souls could be as refined as it liked, and it still wouldn't matter against something that barely possessed one.
The problem couldn't be ignored, either. If the Rachi had almost no souls, the undead raised during Blackest Night had none—and forget about wealth and commerce, the dead weren't in the market for anything. An army of corpses would be effectively immune to her four divine domains—Soul, Wealth, Trade, and Culture. If it came to a real fight, she'd contribute less than Diana would. That was the primary reason she'd come here to "help" the Rachi in the first place.
She was working her way through the terrain when her path finally ran out of room.
The entire canyon was carpeted with Rachi. Every type she'd seen and several she hadn't. Combat variants baring teeth and raising blades, coiled to die fighting. Logistics brood mothers—bloated, immobile, clearly designed for one purpose only—packed into every available space in a wall of bodies. The main brain had panicked. That was the only explanation. Faced with her direct approach, it had deployed everything—an all-or-nothing last stand.
She laughed, clear and bright, and the sound rang off the canyon walls.
She rolled her shoulders. The body count from this walk alone was at least a million. The Rachi had a sophisticated level of biotech—half-mechanical hybrids with solid combat ability and tight formation discipline—and working through them had actually taken some effort. She was genuinely a little tired.
"Hey!" she called toward the valley. "I'm carrying goodwill in here. I came to do business!"
The main brain didn't believe her. Not for a single second. You slaughtered your way to my front door and you want to say you're here for business? Are you mocking me?
"Anything bought, anything sold—have you heard our shop's slogan? We Meet Every Need?"
Thea cupped a hand around her mouth and shouted it into the depths of the canyon.
What shop? The main brain was genuinely confused.
Not that it mattered. It wasn't a kind creature, and it had no intention of making pleasant conversation with someone who'd just butchered her way to its gate. While Thea waited, it channeled a massive burst of energy and erected a broad shield across the canyon—a deep blue dome, sealed tight as a lid over everything inside.
Then it gave the order. Every combat-class Rachi unit threw itself at her in a berserker charge. The logistics units stayed back—useless in a fight, and the main brain couldn't afford to have them wiped out and lose its grip on the swarm's command structure.
"Psychokinesis?" Thea recognized the technique immediately. She deployed a Silver Fire Shield of her own, and the entire surging charge simply ceased to be. Every Rachi that touched it burned to ash. Her eyes weren't even on them. They were on the dome.
This time she didn't reach for soul magic or divine techniques. Thea clenched her right fist and pulled up the image she'd filed away in memory: Highfather, standing on New Genesis, throwing a punch across dimensions that had killed Superman.
It was pure physical force, no divine powers engaged. She wanted to know the real gap between herself and a New God at that level.
She took a slow breath in. The Rachi suicide charge continued around her, ignored. The air around her fist began to churn as force built and built.
When she had gathered everything she had, she threw the punch.
The air tore with a sharp crack. The ground beneath her fractured—a furrow ripped open roughly a mile and a half (about 3 li / 1.5 km) long and 330 feet (100 meters) wide, everything in the corridor reduced to powder. Air compressed violently to either side. The phantom of her fist surged forward across several miles, growing as it traveled, until it struck the main brain's blue dome as a towering shape hundreds of feet high.
THUD. It landed with a deep, muted impact.
Thea was mildly annoyed. Didn't break it.
A massive spider-web fracture spread across the entire surface of the dome. Psychokinetic energy flooded in, patching every crack, the main brain burning through its reserves at a furious rate to hold the structure together. It barely held. But it held.
"Hmph. Not being a warrior type really has closed off the 'overwhelming brute force' option permanently, hasn't it." She shook her head with undisguised frustration.
Without gathering any further technique, she simply reached back and hurled a fire lance—several yards long (a few meters), trailing a silver-white flame-tail like a meteor.
CRACK.
It struck the exact same fracture the punch had left. This time, the dome didn't survive. It shattered like glass.
"Hey." She dusted her hands off. "Come out now, or I'm actually leaving."
She considered herself extremely reasonable. She had no intention of walking all the way to the main brain's physical location. The main brain had no offensive capability, no defensive capability, and no mobility. Walking up to it while looking like a walking catastrophe felt more like extortion than negotiation, and extortion didn't make for good long-term trade relationships.
She waited ten seconds.
The air above the canyon churned. Psychokinetic force condensed under pressure, shaping itself into a rough approximation of a face—not a pleasant one, but recognizable.
The main brain had been forced out. It wasn't happy about it. The truth was that it couldn't read Thea at all. Random powerful stranger passing through? Specific enemy? It had no weak points to exploit, no way to predict her next move. If she decided to make a habit of dropping by, it couldn't stop her, couldn't hurt her—and the situation would only get worse.
So it had to show up. At minimum, it needed to know what she wanted.
The psychokinetically-assembled face studied her carefully. "Which great power of the cosmos do you represent, distinguished visitor? And your reason for coming to the Rachi Swarm is...?"
Thea smiled pleasantly and said something she didn't believe for a second herself. "I came in good faith. You live in such a harsh stretch of space—it must be difficult. Is there anything you need?"
The main brain wanted to say: We need nothing. What we lack, we take. But the collective intelligence of the entire Rachi Swarm was not without its survival instincts. It wasn't going to snap back at someone who had just bulldozed through a million of its soldiers without breaking a sweat.
She had it cornered. For this visitor who had shown up uninvited at a den of cosmic marauders to hard-sell them something—the main brain's working plan was: buy whatever she's selling, smile, and pray she leaves happy.
"Why don't... why don't you tell me what we're lacking?" The main brain's spirit was bleeding internally. It braced for pain. Just get her out of here.
Thea's eyes lit up like twin stars, blazing to their full intensity for just a moment—bright enough that even the main brain's psychokinetic projection flickered. Then she reined it in.
"I am the Sovereign of Souls," she said. "You have no souls. What if I sold you some?"
She had originally planned a transaction. But the main brain had apparently read it as an offer of allegiance, and she had no intention of correcting the misunderstanding.
"—What?!"
The face dissolved into scattered gas. It reconverged almost immediately, but the ripple of shock had been unmistakable.
"You're serious? Souls can be traded? What would the price be?"
Thea was all but laughing inside. Sell what your buyer needs, and the market practically sells itself. Watching the main brain's undisguised eagerness, she decided to start with an outrageous price.
She arranged her most solemn expression. "I am the Sovereign of Souls. My word carries authority. Souls can be created, destroyed, and yes—traded. My price is this: the Rachi Swarm fights on my behalf."
She kept it deliberately vague. In the main brain's interpretation, it filled in the blanks: She's a newly rising power without followers. She's come here recruiting.