"We weren't coerced. Rao is a true god—selfless and genuine." Kara insisted, her voice tight with urgency.
Beside her, Superman's expression had drifted somewhere distant. His memories were all intact—today, yesterday, years before—every one of them clear. He remembered flying back to Earth, sharing a long conversation with Rao, then throwing himself into act after act of service in his name. The deep, unforced joy he'd felt doing that work was something he could still taste now.
Thea studied Superman's face. It took roughly two seconds—watching his expression shift from confused to resolute—before she made her call: they'd both been gotten to.
Of the three Kryptonians, Kara had the weakest willpower. Under Rao's influence, she'd had no resistance to offer whatsoever. Faora was the strongest—hardly surprising, given how many years she'd spent wearing a Yellow Lantern ring. Fear-based emotion offered significant protection against psychic control. Clark fell somewhere between the two. His subconscious might have already registered the wrongness of it all, but his surface mind had kept that awareness buried.
"Come with me. Both of you. There's something wrong with your physiology, and I need proper equipment to run a full diagnostic." She moved to pull them away, fully aware she was not going to get them easily—not unless Rao was a complete fool playing a con.
Sure enough, Rao remained as polished as ever. But his words had drawn a knife.
"Wicked woman! How dare you try to lead my faithful astray!" He planted himself on the moral high ground and let the accusation ring out from there. "Do you wish to test the cleansing fire of justice? Then stand down—now!"
The crowd below reacted like he'd hit a switch. The chanting started almost immediately.
"Get out of here, witch! You're not welcome!"
"We stand together—your magic means nothing to us!"
"Ha!" Thea let out a sharp laugh, openly mocking. The racket these people were making was genuinely grating on her nerves. She forced herself to breathe, forced herself not to take the bait, though letting herself be screamed at without so much as a reply wasn't exactly her style either.
She had never once let anyone get the upper hand on her. She wasn't about to start now.
Her gaze swept the crowd below. Each person in its path felt, for a moment, as though she were looking directly at them—and felt, in that same moment, a chill run straight through to the bone. The noise died quickly. Then it stopped entirely.
"Magic?" Her voice was quiet now. Measured. "You actually want to see what magic looks like? I do hope you won't regret asking."
Vast magical energy swelled outward, darkened by her divine authority until it was black as ink. Tendrils of shadow came streaming in from every direction, converging overhead. The ordinary people staring up at the sky went pale one by one as the bright afternoon began to dim, as though a sheer veil had been drawn across the sun.
And the veil kept thickening.
The clouds above compacted, writhing with something forming inside them—something alien and enormous. It wasn't the stillness of Nekron's death, the kind that simply ended things. Her path was different: glimpsing death from within the living, finding return through dying. She hadn't mastered that yet. But the faintest outline of it was taking shape above Metropolis.
The black clouds seemed to find a rhythm of their own. The layers shifted and breathed, alive somehow, and on the wind came something that might have been singing—formless, half-heard, the kind of sound you strained to catch only to find yourself shivering without knowing why. Dozens of ordinary people looked up, understood that something had gone badly wrong, and bolted for their front doors.
The ones who ran were immediately sneered at by those who stayed. Weak faith, someone shouted. We're not afraid, others echoed. Come on, then—kill me if you can!
"Thea, don't!" Superman's memories hadn't been touched, which meant he understood the situation perfectly—and misread it entirely. He lunged forward, convinced she was going for a killing strike. "Stop —"
"I'm just giving them something to keep them busy." She caught him with one hand, then quickly ran a tendril of mental energy through his body. Still nothing. Whatever Rao had done left no trace she could find.
The delay cost her some of the spell's full effect, but the ordinary crowd had more than enough to contend with.
The sunlight faded. Darkness moved in. And from the churning sky, black snowflakes began to drift down—some of it air particulates and atmospheric impurities, but most of it was simply what had been sitting at the bottom of her chest for a while now. She might as well let it out.
She wasn't worried about the effect on ordinary people. With Rao right there radiating all that light and virtue, he'd find a way to neutralize it. Probably feel obligated to, even.
Sure enough, his brow creased—and then, without hesitation, he rose to the highest point he could reach, blazing with light, working at the black clouds.
Which turned out to be harder than he expected. The emotion threaded through this storm had a direct line to death itself; cleansing it was not a simple matter. He lit up like the world's largest lightbulb and managed to illuminate exactly one city block beneath his feet.
"Come with me, Kara." Thea said. Then, turning: "Clark. You too. I've known you both for years. I'm not trying to hurt you."
Kara hesitated, but old habit won out and she prepared to go with her for the checkup. Clark paused, then nodded as well.
"No—please, don't go." Rao's voice shifted. The polished authority dropped away, replaced by something that sounded achingly genuine. "Don't you remember the people you helped? Their happy smiles? Aren't we family? To assist me, to help me—hasn't that always been your truest wish? My children. Please. Don't leave me."
He looked at them like a father watching his children walk out the door.
Thea stared at him, and an uncomfortably sincere loathing settled in her chest. Every word the man said was real—his words were honest, bone-deep belief. And somehow that made it worse. Far worse. He had actually convinced himself he was a god of light. He'd gotten far too deep into the act.
"Think about Lois," she said. "Think about Lena. They're both waiting for you. Just come for the checkup—if everything's fine, you come right back."
She was about ready to drag Rao offworld and beat him senseless, but the local space felt like it had been pinned down. Teleportation was sluggish and imprecise, and she had no interest in a full-scale brawl in the middle of Metropolis. The Kryptonians first.
"I will not have you lure my people away!" Rao pulled a blade of light from nowhere and brought it sweeping down at her.
Her dark attribute was running too high for the holy sword right now, and Nekron's scythe was fighting her too. She reached into her inventory and pulled out a longsword—not her first choice, but it would do.
Their blades met. Seven or eight exchanges followed in rapid succession, and Thea had come in expecting something comparable to Highfather. She came out the other side reassessing. Considerably.
Rao's divine power was fundamentally hollow. A sand castle—impressive architecture, no structural integrity. One solid push and it would collapse.
"Ha—that's it? That's all you've got?" Black snowflakes spun around her as she put him back three times in quick succession. "I treated you like a real threat for nothing."
With each exchange, the dynamic became clearer: her death-attribute wiped out his light-energy on contact, while anything he threw at her death-energy cost him enormous effort to counter. The gap between them wasn't close.
She pressed the offensive, keeping up the conversation at the same time. "You called them your people just now. Does that mean you're actually admitting you're Kryptonian? How have you survived this long? According to the Green Lantern Corps archives, your natural lifespan caps at two hundred years."
"Some kind of secret technique? A divine artifact to extend your life?" She deflected his blade, then landed a palm strike on his shoulder.
Hard enough to flatten a mountain, even at her lower end of force.
Rao didn't react. Not at all. He slashed back at her.