After dressing down her people one by one, Thea threw herself directly into the fight. With the three corps finally moving in actual coordination, the Black Lantern assault remained relentless but could only keep giving ground against sustained heavy magic.
On the far side of the battlefield, Indigo-1 began the evacuation in staggered waves. Each Indigo Tribe member could carry tens of thousands of civilians per jump.
"Fall back!" Thea raised her hand—a massive fire-tornado erupted and swallowed a cluster of Black Lanterns whole. Lethal damage aside, none of them were getting out for several minutes.
They retreated step by step, fighting the whole way. When the last group of civilians had cleared the planet, the allied corps disengaged entirely and withdrew to Odym.
On Odym, Saint Walker launched immediately into his customary speech about how everything would ultimately be fine while shepherding the Zamaron Queen toward the refugee area. Thea monitored incoming feeds remotely. The Black Lantern rings were converging on Earth. After a moment's consideration, she left a clone behind on Odym and used the Ankh amulet to teleport her true body back.
She entered the Justice League Hall and triggered the highest-level alert. Superman arrived first, Diana right behind him, then the three speedsters—Barry Allen, Wally West, Bart Allen—followed by Martian Manhunter, Supergirl, and Green Lantern John Stewart.
They came at a run, most of them clearly unprepared. Diana was in civilian clothes. Superman hadn't shaved. Barry had a lipstick mark on his cheek; Wally made a series of increasingly frantic eye signals until Barry finally noticed and wiped it off.
"What happened?" Diana's voice was sharp. The League's highest-level alert was wired to reach every superhero on Earth, not just League members—a feature Bruce Wayne had quietly installed in the system and that the others only discovered after Dick took over as Batman.
"A catastrophe of cosmic proportions is unfolding in the universe. It will reach Earth within minutes."
"The Green Lanterns will handle—" John Stewart began.
"Don't." Thea cut across him flatly. "Your homeworld Oa is already surrounded. You just haven't received confirmation yet."
She picked up her phone. Not every hero could fly, and even those who could wouldn't cross several thousand miles in time. Queen Consolidated's global network could reach them, using local communications infrastructure to pull together an emergency cross-continent video conference.
One by one they connected: Starfire, Stargirl, Raven, a young Booster Gold, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Blue Beetle, Animal Man, The Atom, Vibe, Faora, Livewire, Firestorm, Hawk and Dove. Those with flight or teleportation entered the hall in person; the rest joined via screen.
Thea's gaze lingered briefly on Hawk and Dove. The two tall men had absorbed fragments of fate she'd deliberately shed—Hawk, already inclined toward aggression, had intensified, looking more and more like a Red Lantern. Dove had gone the other way, becoming so serene that even the actual angel Zaurel seemed less so by comparison. She'd amplified their most defining traits by offloading those aspects of her own destiny onto them. Whether that road led somewhere good for either of them was genuinely unknowable.
She steeled herself. Some things had to be left behind so she could move on. There was no going back.
She wrapped them in a thin layer of soul-force, isolating them from the surrounding aura. Hawk and Dove registered a brief, vague discomfort—and attributed it to nerves at finding themselves among so many heroes.
She gave instructions to the students at the magical school to hold position. Black Lanterns couldn't enter the New Continent, and magic had proven largely ineffective against them in any case—she knew that from direct experience. No point sacrificing fragile mages in this fight.
She checked the time. Less than a minute had passed. Most of the assembled heroes knew each other; many didn't. They gathered in clusters of two and three, watching Thea work the phone. She glanced at the main screen. Those without flight—the new Batman, Green Arrow, and national leaders from multiple countries—were already on the video feed.
"Everyone." She let that land. "We have very little time. Less than an hour ago, an uncountable number of black rings emerged from deep space."
She paused. The sharper heroes in the room glanced at the two Green Lanterns.
"Your instincts are correct. What's coming are Black Lanterns. Black rings. A conservative estimate puts the total at 3.9 billion."
"That's impossible—"
"That can't be right—"
The room fractured into voices. The national leaders on-screen were worse—except for Moira, who'd been briefed earlier, all of them looked shell-shocked.
Two Green Lanterns on Earth had already been enough to inspire fantasies about seizing rings for national power. Now 3.9 billion were incoming. Average it out and there was nearly one ring for every two people on the planet. Not that kind of math. Not that kind of ring. If Thea could have read their minds through the cable, she'd have told them: congratulations—you guessed right. This really was aimed at Earth.
Several leaders went completely blank.
Guy Gardner, veteran League member with the posture of someone who'd seen too many actual wars, turned to John Stewart with an expression of undisguised disbelief. They'd been trying to reach Oa. Not a single signal had come back.
"What can they do? Have you engaged them?" Only Diana had the standing to ask that directly.
"They reanimate the dead—but in a specific sense. They can select the most elite warriors in the universe, restore their memories, and deploy them as Black Lantern soldiers with full access to their living capabilities."
The two Green Lanterns exchanged a look. John Stewart asked, "Can they use constructs too?"
"Yes. What else could lock down Oa so completely that nothing gets out? And while we're on the subject—you know the Crypts of the Honored. I'd imagine that place right now is—"
"I refuse to believe that." John Stewart wasn't ready.
At that moment, a voice came from outside the hall: "Stewart—she's telling the truth. Oa's fall is only a matter of time."
Two figures flew through the entrance—one large, one small.
"Hal!" Several heroes called out. Hal Jordan was well-liked; right now he looked utterly exhausted, and he returned the welcome with a single nod.
Thea turned to his smaller companion with genuine puzzlement. "Ganthet? I was just looking for you on Odym. What's that symbol on your chest—are you a Green Lantern now?"
"I have renounced my status as a Guardian." The small blue figure's voice was unusually measured. "Now I fight as part of this universe—as a Green Lantern."
Thea respected that, actually. The Guardians had always treated the Green Lanterns as instruments. For Ganthet to break with his own kind, abandon every fixed idea held for millennia, and willingly step down to fight alongside people his colleagues had always dismissed—that required something that most beings never managed.
She let it sit for a few seconds, then deployed a time-stop bubble and pulled Ganthet inside it for a private word.
The small blue man surveyed the different temporal flows around him with seasoned calm. "You know about that presence on Earth, I take it. That's why you came back to hold the line here."
"The Entity." Thea didn't hedge. "I'm aware of it. No need to probe me—I know it exists. It's the physical manifestation that formed when the universe's first light made contact with matter."