Luthor unleashed his constructs in a blaze of concentrated fire. The sliver of Earth's greed settled neatly into place. Diana and Dex-Starr followed close behind—love and rage both cresting at exactly the right level. Six of the seven emotions were now perfectly calibrated, with hope the lone holdout, its slight dissonance the one thing still blocking the Violet Ring's power from fully merging with her.
The Entity of Life fed her a current of warmth and ease. Even within herself, the seven emotions were beginning to find a tentative harmony.
"Brother Allen—all will be well." Saint Walker floated beside Barry Allen, who stood in his all-blue suit, murmuring quiet reassurances.
Barry's personality wasn't so different from Saint Walker's. Both were the kind of people who couldn't help caring.
He was baffled. He pointed at Luthor's Scarecrow construct. "Do I have to do something like that? But all I do is run..."
"No, Brother Allen. Running is not truly your gift..." Saint Walker said, his voice unhurried as ever.
Barry blinked. What does that mean? I'm not good at running—do you think YOU are?
"Your gift is giving others hope. That is your true power."
Barry smiled at that. He'd always taken quiet pride in it—the idea that his greatest strength wasn't the Speed Force but the fact that he never stopped. The more he looked at Saint Walker, the more he liked the man. There was even a faint hint of bromantic chemistry between them.
Across the battlefield, Thea watched with a furrow between her brows. We're in the middle of a fight. Can we skip the inspirational speech and do something useful?
Through the mental link she said, "Barry—don't worry about constructs. Just run. When you run, you give people hope. Let yourself feel for anyone who needs help, and the hope emotion will multiply your speed. Think back to the first time you ever helped someone—really helped them. Remember: the Speed Force chose you. That wasn't an accident."
Barry took a few skeptical steps—and found something had changed.
He could fly.
The air beneath his feet was as solid as the ground. He could run across it. Every limitation the earth had ever placed on him was simply... gone. He was like Hermes had been, sprinting freely through the open sky.
He did what Thea said—reached out, felt for the people calling for hope—and found them everywhere. As many as he could want. He felt as though he could be at any of their sides in an instant, just by choosing to.
Hope had given him wings.
As much as he wanted to help every single one of them, he knew the battle came first. He turned and started threading the lines between the Green Lanterns, picking off Black Lanterns.
He had never moved this fast in his life. He ran inside a pocket of relative time—the world around him frozen, every soldier and hero locked in a single still frame. It let him see the battlefield clearly, gauge everyone's relative strength on it.
Nekron and Thea were unaffected entirely. One was drinking in Black Lantern energy; the other was gathering the light of seven colors. Both wore the same grave, measured expression of people building toward something enormous.
Diana, Ganthet, Sayd, Scarface, and the seven unnamed Guardians were barely touched. Diana gave him an odd look as he streaked past.
Superman and Martian Manhunter were slowed considerably—still mobile, still fighting, but moving like slow-motion replays against the swarm of enemies pressing in from all sides.
Strip away the speedsters and the Black Lantern Reverse-Flash lurking at the edges, and all the other ordinary people had gone completely still.
"Don't go near him," Thea cut in sharply when Barry drifted toward Nekron. "Time isn't absolute here—don't gamble on it. Conventional force won't bring him down. Help the Green Lanterns."
Barry saw that Thea's speech was still flowing at normal pace even as she charged her power. She was working. He turned and got back to work.
In a world where time had nearly stopped, he moved like a tireless bee—darting from Green Lantern to Green Lantern, nudging their aim, making sure each beam would land on a Black Lantern ring. Then he'd add a pulse of blue light, and move on. Run, correct, follow up, run again, without pause.
To everyone else, it looked like he had coordinated the takedown of over two thousand Black Lanterns alongside the Green Lanterns in an instant.
And in every soul on that battlefield, a thought rose without being summoned:
We can win. There's hope.
A fragile, stubborn spark of light kindled in each of them—and that hope fed back into the Entity, and from the Entity it flowed into Thea.
Finally.
The hope emotion locked into place. It shifted on its own, making room—and the Violet Ring of love slid onto Thea's finger as naturally as breathing.
Four emotions of her own. The Violet Ring on her left hand. The Green Ring and the Orange Ring on her right. Seven colors of the emotional spectrum—beginning their final convergence.
"Stop her!" Thea had been building the light openly, and Nekron wasn't blind. He called out the order, and the race became immediate: whoever finished charging first would win.
Scarface was already holding the line with everything she had. But the Guardians she controlled were only performing at twenty or thirty percent of their true ability—and under Superman and Martian Manhunter's relentless assault, she was barely keeping herself upright.
Then Black Hand stirred.
He'd been sitting there the whole time, cradling the bones of his family with a vacant smile. Now something behind his eyes woke. As the first Black Lantern ever created, he finally bared his teeth.
The ring on his right hand split into countless black threads—suture wire, the kind used on corpses, made for the dead. Endless coils of it, dense as a storm, surging toward Thea.
Diana was already moving to intercept. She didn't bother with a construct—she drew the Sword of Hephaestus and carved through the threads in wide, powerful arcs.
On the other side of the field, Hal Jordan and the others launched everything they had at Black Hand. But the techniques that reliably took down ordinary Black Lanterns did nothing here. Black Hand wasn't a puppet—he had his own will, his own awareness. A hundred beams hitting him at once didn't matter.
The suture wire caught several Lanterns and heroes. It looked ordinary, but it was anything but—laced with microscopic barbs that dug deeper with every movement, draining the life from whoever it touched. Hal Jordan was ensnared for less than three seconds before his face began turning an unnatural black.
Diana cut through several strands and, seeing Hal on the verge of collapse, flung one of the gems she carried—a sealed burst of Firestorm's flame. The fire roared out and pushed the wire back. But in less than ten seconds it was pressing forward again.
"Burn it!" Hacking with a sword was too slow. Diana could only throw a few fireballs herself—magic was never her element—so she called out to everyone around her.
The Kryptonians answered with heat vision. The heroes who commanded flame followed: the Revenge Demon of the Suicide Squad, Firestorm, and Fire from the International Justice League all opened up at once.
But the one who turned heads was Raven.
Her hood shadowed her face, but in the darkness beneath it three pairs of crimson eyes were open and burning. Her bloodline power was fully awake. She screamed—and from the shadows behind her rose a shadow-raven vast enough to blot out the sky. Hellfire and dark sorcery woven together, the bird swept the suture wire along with it as it bore down on Black Hand.
The power of Trigon's lineage was not something a mortal could resist. Black Hand tried several times to lasso the raven in wire, and each time it burned through. The rot and death energy of the black threads only fed the shadow, making it stronger.
The raven let out one low, resonant cry—and passed straight through Black Hand's body, continuing on toward Nekron in the distance.