Ganthet's relief was visible. "So you do know about the Entity. Then you also know Nekron's target is this planet."
Though phrased as a question, he already knew she did.
Of course she knew. She also had plans of her own regarding Nekron that she was keeping to herself for the moment.
"Both the universe and Earth need the power of the Green Lanterns." She showed him footage from the Zamaron battle—frame after frame of Yellow, Blue, and Indigo members hammering Black Lanterns that regenerated every time, only going down when Green Lantern light was mixed in alongside any other corps.
"Is that what the Indigo Tribe can do?" Ganthet appeared to look directly through Sinestro in the footage—registering neither the man nor the green ring on his hand—but turned with measured interest toward Indigo-1 and the others in the field.
The Indigo Tribe could briefly shift their color: essentially borrowing from any of the seven spectra and projecting it outward.
The complication was that what Thea had created was pseudo-Green Lanterns to begin with. Running that borrowed light through another layer of conversion made it doubly artificial—averaging three or four combined shots to eliminate a single Black Lantern.
They were about to continue when the time-stop bubble cracked open with a sharp sound.
Thea was genuinely startled. Her control over time had reached a significant level; she could feel the nature of the break clearly—this hadn't been a targeted attack against her specifically. It felt more like collateral damage from something nearby.
She held still and focused on the sensation, then said slowly, with something approaching disbelief: "Something just punched a hole through the walls of our reality. Who did that?"
Every hero in the room stared at her blankly. Could she please say something within range of human comprehension?
"S.T.A.R. Labs!" Cisco's face went white, as if some internal alarm had just gone off. He slapped open a dimensional breach and dropped through. Several speedsters followed without a word.
Thea raised her voice over the immediate commotion. "Trust the Flash team. They'll have a report shortly."
She checked the time. "Under three minutes before the first wave of Black Lantern rings reaches Earth. To everyone watching—national leaders, heroes across the globe." She made eye contact with the camera feeds. "What comes back will look like your loved ones. It will remember the right details and say the right things. I need you to hold onto this: the people you knew are at rest. What will be standing in front of you is a body wearing borrowed memories. They are not who you think they are."
"Our only confirmed countermeasure is Green Lantern light combined with the light of any other ring corps, which makes our three Green Lanterns the primary strike force."
Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, and John Stewart stepped forward as one. The weight of it showed. They stepped forward anyway.
"I can contribute—I'm a Green Lantern as well now." Ganthet raised his ring finger.
Thea lowered her voice. "Are your former colleagues still on Oa? A few thousand Green Lanterns cannot hold off millions of Black Lanterns. What Oa needs right now are Guardians—not one more ring-bearer. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"I can't get back. Oa is completely surrounded."
"I'll send you through. Leave the ring—that way Oa has Guardians to coordinate from the inside, and they can work with the other corps to maximize how many Green Lanterns come out of this."
Something flickered across Ganthet's face—not quite a smile, not quite resignation. "Half a day as a Green Lantern, and this is how it ends. Destiny keeps leading me back down the same road."
He removed the ring. The Guardian's blue robes replaced the green uniform. Thea sent him through a spatial fold and relayed the relevant intelligence to her clone stationed on a distant planet.
The moment the ring was freed, it shot upward. It came back quickly—and it brought someone with it.
A young man was pulled bodily through the air into the hall. He looked at the assembled crowd with the expression of someone who had been in bed two minutes ago and was trying to determine if he was still dreaming.
"Hal—walk him through everything." Thea surveyed the room. Green and Yellow had old history that didn't need aggravating right now, and the Blue Lanterns were too few to spare. She assigned four Indigo members to pair with the Green Lanterns; their combined light could destroy Black Lanterns, and their teleportation would let them function as a rapid-response unit wherever the line broke open.
"One more time." She made sure she had the room. "Whatever those rings bring back—whoever it looks like—the person you knew is already gone. What stands in front of you is a corpse wearing a memory. Don't forget it."
She kept repeating this because heroes were, as a category, profoundly sentimental. In the original timeline, a remarkable number of them had died not because Black Lanterns outfought them, but because they couldn't make themselves act against something wearing a familiar face.
BOOM.
As if to offer the assembled heroes a live demonstration of what was coming, the word had barely left her mouth when a shockwave hit. Something had landed in the city. Several heroes with enhanced vision looked toward the impact point.
Black armor. A hard-planed, military face. The figure had dropped to the city center at extreme velocity; the impact force had cracked the pavement in a spreading web, fracture lines running several blocks in every direction. It ignored the civilians entirely, then tracked the assembled heroes' attention back to its source and matched their gaze.
Thea's mouth tightened. She turned to the Kryptonians in the room.
"I'll take him." Faora's face was already set as she launched herself toward the window.
Superman tensed toward the exit several times, stopped himself each time.
"Who is it?" Diana couldn't see at that distance. She kept her voice low.
"General Zod." Thea grimaced slightly. The butterfly effect was moving faster than anticipated—this was an opening move she hadn't expected. She'd buried Zod's body in the Kryptonian debris field after his death. She hadn't anticipated him being called back first. At least Krypton had shattered; almost nothing intact remained. If dozens of Kryptonian corpses suddenly reanimated at once, Earth would have no realistic chance of holding.
She watched a moment longer. Faora—furious, with grief written across her face—hit top speed and launched herself like a cannonball, catching Zod and hauling him out toward open country. Zod's body had died; the Black Lantern ring could only restore what he'd been at the moment of death. Faora had spent years under Earth's yellow sun, and she could now overpower the man who had once outranked her.
She caught Superman's eye. Don't.
Across the room, Hal Jordan and the other two Green Lanterns were doing rapid-fire orientation for the new arrival. Kyle Rayner—the young man's name, as it turned out—had just received Ganthet's custom-built ring, and despite looking completely dazed, he was actually trying to absorb the information being thrown at him. He had been in his own apartment, asleep, approximately two minutes ago.
Thea watched him with quiet amusement. He was the future wielder of all seven light spectra—the future White Lantern. An ordinary human who would one day carry seven distinct emotional forces simultaneously.
Sinestro had been a prodigy for centuries, had lived a life of extraordinary highs and devastating lows, and still managed only two spectra at once. Kyle Rayner was like a complete amateur who wandered into the wrong room, watched someone demonstrate an ancient technique once, and walked out having accidentally absorbed the entire curriculum. Where others trained for decades to master a single ring, this man would apparently just... accumulate mastery. Incrementally. By accident. While other things were happening around him.
Thea currently commanded four spectra through careful planning, sustained effort, and divine authority. She was not human. She wasn't even immortal in the ordinary sense—she was a god, and a ranked one. And even she wouldn't claim to wield all seven freely.
That an ordinary person would eventually manage that... she supposed some things were simply arranged by fate, and there was no point arguing with it. Compared to Kyle Rayner, Hal Jordan was starting to look like a bull who'd charged every wall in the room just to get where he was going.