Three days later, in a secret base in Metropolis.
Thea sat with her hands laced behind her head, long legs propped on the desk, watching the surveillance feed with absolute focus.
On the screen, a pale-skinned man was performing what appeared to be final cleaning rites on a collection of corpses. His expression was rapturous. He muttered to himself as he worked, moving with the reverence of a pilgrim completing a sacred act.
"Is this guy actually worth our attention?" Slade Wilson—Deathstroke—loomed behind her, built like a brown bear in body armor. He genuinely didn't understand why Thea was treating this one differently. Ordinary psychopath. Murdered his entire family, now he's tidying them up. Trash like this, Slade could put down three at a time without breaking a sweat.
"Huh—well." Slade's commentary barely finished before the man on-screen broke into an enormous, unhinged grin. He straightened his collar in the mirror with careful ceremony, then produced a technological device, pressed it to his own temple, and squeezed the trigger.
A flash. The man dropped into the pool of blood with a smile still on his lips—surrounded by the blood of his entire family.
Slade had seen a lot of death. He'd been the cause of plenty of it. He'd watched men take their own lives in impossible situations. But dying happy? That was a first.
The man wasn't normal. That was Slade's read—years of operating at the edge of survival had sharpened something in him. Alive, the man had been unremarkable. Dead, he'd become something else. Stronger. In an instant.
The surveillance feed cut to static.
They waited in silence for three minutes.
Then the figure in the pool of blood stood back up.
He wore a black face mask. There was an inverted triangle on the chest, with five vertical bars like a palm print burned into the fabric. A dull, lightless cape and bodysuit. The smile from before death still curving his lips—mocking the world from the other side of it. And on the middle finger of his right hand, unmistakable:
A black ring gleamed there.
"A Black Lantern ring." Slade's Yellow Lantern ring made him sensitive to constructs of all kinds. He spotted it immediately. "That's why you were watching him."
Thea looked at the first Black Lantern for a long moment. She put her legs down from the desk.
"It's started," she said finally. "Increase security around my mother. Our people go on high alert, pull back the perimeter, consolidate around the most defensible positions and wait for the right moment to counter."
"That pessimistic? This necrophiliac is that dangerous?" Slade had never seen Thea take a passive stance before. He didn't quite believe it.
"The prophecy says he's dangerous. Better safe than sorry."
She hadn't discussed any countermeasures with anyone.
The truth was—at this moment, she could cast a resurrection spell on William Hand, codenamed Black Hand, and solve the problem immediately. Methods for resurrection were rare, but she had them. As a goddess of souls, with enough effort she could cast it herself.
Blackest Night would be enormous in spectacle, but it could be delayed. Easily. Black Hand was Nekron's anchor to the physical world—his conduit. The moment Hand was resurrected and turned from dead to living, Nekron would have no choice but to retreat back into the void.
But that only bought time. Hand had an obsession, a compulsion. He wanted to die—in the most literal sense. No way to stop him indefinitely.
And more importantly: Thea needed Nekron to actually manifest. She had to fight him, damage him badly, ideally cripple him. She couldn't let him go home untouched. What if he went home and started cross-dressing?
She gave Slade his instructions: consolidate their shadow assets, preserve the elite operatives, write off the outer-ring people as acceptable losses.
Then she went home, had an emergency consultation with Moira that lasted hours, and settled in to wait.
Meanwhile, her avatar was already at Sector 666.
The sector was deathly still—like a colossal beast with its jaws spread wide, waiting to devour the living. Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, stood at her side. The Zerg leader didn't know what they were here for. Thea hadn't explained.
A short time later, the avatar received the signal from Thea's true body. The time had come. The darkest day in the universe was here.
"Tell your swarms to get ready. The prophecy says this sector is about to release something vast and dangerous. Hold back what you can. Every ring you stop counts."
Kerrigan had questions she wasn't asking. She relayed the order.
Zerg filled the void.
Every direction, every plane, above and below and every angle between—a staggering biomass of armored bodies blotted out the starfield. Most of these units were elite-tier or above: ordinary Zerg couldn't survive open space. If this went wrong, it would deal a serious blow to Kerrigan's forces.
"Don't worry. The casualties won't be severe." Thea sounded certain. Even if Black Lanterns could resurrect, they wouldn't bother with Zerg; their life level was too low to interest them.
A short wait. Then the darkness of space—which should have absorbed all light—began to reflect.
Points of light. Small at first. Scattered.
Then they multiplied. Ten became a thousand. A thousand became a million. A million became a billion. Then beyond counting. The entire sector filled with their gleam—and each point of light was a ring.
Black Lantern rings.
Thea stared at them, unblinking. Nekron was using the Anti-Monitor as the Black Lantern power battery. The 666 Sector's accumulated dead served as vessels for his death-energy. Except for the first ring—sent to Black Hand on Earth—every ring in existence was right here.
Nekron himself existed before all life began. He had no presence in the physical universe. He needed the rings to gather enough energy to drag him from the void into the material plane.
Thea wasn't here to stop the summoning. But she wasn't here to cheer it on either.
"Tell your swarms: move up."
Kerrigan's eyes lit with that particular alien focus. Massive armored beetles—bodies encased in thick, spike-laden chitin—moved up to the front line.
Behind them came the ranged Zerg: units specialized in trapping and area denial, capable of slowing and restricting enemy movement by a dozen different means.
And at the rear—five hundred thousand of a new strain. Big heads, small bodies, eyes bulging round as a frog's, mouths that cracked open in rhythmic pulses of faint luminescence.
These were Kerrigan's newest creation: engineered specifically for this night, at Thea's request.
Destroying Black Lantern rings wasn't easy, but it wasn't impossible either. White Lantern power could annihilate them outright. Resurrection magic could do it. Angels like Zauriel could sweep a wide swath clean in a single pass. All of these worked because they carried immense life-energy—lethal to constructs built from death-force.
Outside of that: the traditional seven-corps method. Green Lantern power, combined with any one other emotional energy, could destroy a Black Lantern ring. The Guardians had earned their reputation—they'd recognized the unique properties of willpower billions of years ago.
With Oa refusing to cooperate, Thea had needed another approach.
Some heroes and villains emitted unusual emotional projections that could bypass the standard logic. She remembered that Vixen could mimic a deep-sea anglerfish's bioluminescence and use that faint white glow to destroy Black Lantern rings—though it drained her to do even once.
Zerg genetics could solve that problem. Strip out aggression, defense, and speed at the gene level. Keep only one thing: the capacity to fire that bioluminescent pulse as many times as possible in combat.