In H'ruba's memories, she'd watched the entire forging process of this first ring. The First Lantern had originally appeared before the then-still-naïve Guardians as an earnest, ambitious young man. A little smooth-talking later, he'd taught them how to harness the Emotional Spectrum to forge rings.
That first ring contained not just the emotions the Guardians had purged from themselves, but also the First Lantern's hidden ambitions. The ring was his entire scheme. Unfortunately for him, the "earnest young man" façade had crumbled a bit too early. The Guardians of that era were already past their prime, but they'd still managed to seal him—ring and all. Afterward, the ring was stripped away and buried deep within Ganthet's soul.
Thea took a moment to study it. The ring was a Source, but the Source wasn't the ring. If she put it on, she'd be borrowing the power of the Emotion godhood—not claiming it. The ring had no fundamental connection to her.
Borrowing a fraction of divine power in exchange for giving up one of her own seats? That would be idiotic.
The result left her mildly disappointed. Emotion was a high-tier Source in its own right—not as deep as Death, which cut straight to the heart of universal law, but roughly on par with Justice and Evil. If it didn't clash too severely with her existing portfolio, she could have forced a decomposition and absorbed it.
But this ring was different. It was too impure.
Woven into it wasn't just the Source of the Emotion godhood. There were also the emotions of the little blue Guardians and of the First Lantern himself, used as bait to snare the Source. Eons of contact had fused the three elements together. Just like Death before it, Thea would need to invest enormous effort to purify the contaminants.
Worse, the ring was far more troublesome to use than Death had been. She had no affinity for emotion. The emotions of intelligent life were staggeringly diverse—far beyond seven neat categories. Seventy, seven hundred—none of those numbers would be exaggerations.
If she went down that rabbit hole, she might end up neglecting her own path of Death. Not worth the attempt.
And Death was notoriously poor at accommodating other domains. Wealth and Trade had gotten a pass only because they'd been the foundation Thea built upon before ascending to Death—they had prior claim, essentially. The Emotion godhood was a total outsider. Death wanted nothing to do with it.
If Thea forced a merger, there was no telling what might go wrong.
"More trouble than it's worth," the young miss sighed. In the First Lantern's hands, this ring would have catapulted his power to terrifying heights. In hers, it was little more than an ill-fitting collectible. But stripping an enemy of a major asset while pocketing a piece of loot—that was a win by any metric.
She stowed the ring in her bag, right under the First Lantern's gaze—eyes so furious they might as well have been shooting fire.
Then she flashed him a smile as radiant as the dawn. Glare all you want. If you've got the guts, come take it back.
The First Lantern was seething. His plan had been meticulous: let the Third Army grow to maximum scale, then flip the table at the precise moment the little blue Guardians were at their most triumphant. He'd savor their horror, then deliver the killing blow—a classic reversal of fortune—and reclaim the ring sealed in Ganthet's soul. A plan that combined humiliation, annihilation, and personal triumph in one glorious package.
He'd wanted to destroy them not just physically, but psychologically—crush their wills alongside their bodies. The revenge fantasy had been stewing for countless millennia. Victory had been within reach. He'd even war-gamed contingencies, but every scenario had focused on the little blue men. Never in his wildest projections had some unknown woman shown up out of nowhere.
You want to flip the table? Flip your own damn table! Why'd she have to wreck his plan? Thea hadn't just flipped his table—she'd stolen his prize.
An ordinary person in this situation would have charged in swinging. But the First Lantern wasn't ordinary.
He glared at Thea with naked hatred. Everyone in this timeline, this world, was a primitive in his eyes. He didn't even bother asking her name. Hands spread wide, light flickering between his palms—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, mingled with countless other emotional frequencies—streams of energy poured forth.
Gossamer threads of emotion drifted like butterflies, dancing through the void, each one exerting its own infinitesimal pull on the fabric of space. Millions of threads converged into beams, and with that combined force, the First Lantern tore open a rift in reality itself.
He was going to rewrite the timeline. Roll it back to the moment before Thea's arrival. Even with his table flipped, he was getting his prize back.
"Smart choice." Thea was quietly impressed. He hadn't lunged at her to fight over the ring. Instead, he'd gone straight for the source—rewind time, erase the problem. It showed he hadn't been addled by the sudden surge of power. He could still make rational decisions.
The supreme art of war was to attack the enemy's strategy; next, to disrupt their alliances; last, to engage in open combat. At this tier, the same principle applied. Even Darkseid, hot-tempered as he was, avoided direct confrontation whenever possible.
Rewriting the timeline, bypassing Thea entirely, eliminating all adverse variables before they sprouted—it was an extremely intelligent approach.
But he'd still underestimated her. That kind of trick might have been invincible against Sinestro or Hal Jordan. Against Thea, it didn't even register.
"Bad luck running into me." Anyone who dared to mess with time these days had better have something to back it up.
The First Lantern had started tearing—and Thea had countermeasures ready.
This was her timeline. He was the one who'd crossed billions of years to get here. Thea had home-field advantage by default.
More importantly, she had allies in the timestream.
Zoom and Trajectory received their orders. No time for subtlety—no time to even switch aliases. Two streaks of blue lightning ripped out of the timestream.
In the blink of an eye, they began severing the First Lantern's connections to the timeline. The converging beams looked terrifying in aggregate, but each individual thread was still just one person's feeble emotion—fragile beyond measure. With enough patience, even an ordinary person could have snipped them.
The two split the work efficiently. The speedsters cut from within the timestream while Thea sealed the rift from the real-world side. Before the First Lantern even understood what was happening, he'd been squeezed back out.
He'd never encountered speedsters before, but that didn't stop him from attacking the two pests. His vast energy granted him reality-warping power—but the speedsters were hiding outside of time, beyond his reach.
As an emotional aggregate, his speed was glacial. Reality-warping, timeline manipulation—none of his exotic abilities could touch targets who simply weren't there. Against speedsters weaving in and out of the timestream, he had no answer.
Emotional shockwaves were devastating, sure—if they couldn't hit anything, they were wasted effort.
The First Lantern tore at the timeline again. Blocked again.
On her end, Thea opened with a legendary-tier spell as a probe. Over a hundred flaming meteorites were ripped from the void. This wasn't her first time fighting in space. The Meteor Swarm was an excellent ground-based spell, but without gravity in space, its power dropped by half.
Still, the First Lantern stood several hundred meters tall, seven colors blazing across his body. Parading around like that in front of the Goddess of Death—Thea felt she'd be doing him a disservice if she didn't lob a few boulders at that oversized frame.
As for the lack of gravity, that was a minor problem. Thea mimicked the First Lantern's psychic signature to create a beacon, and every meteorite locked on as if drawn by an invisible tether, streaking straight toward their target.