The clone Kara had once insisted that she remembered her classmates at school on Krypton,the nice pastry place near her home, and the drangs at the zoo.
She had tried to use those beautiful memories as proof that she wasn't a clone at all, but a naturally born Kryptonian.
But in the eyes of the real Kara, that kind of behavior wasn't merely laughable anymore.
It was tragic.
Because she remembered those things too.
She remembered the classmates she used to joke and play with while attending school in Argo City.
She remembered every birthday she celebrated before the age of fourteen.
She even remembered how her father, Zor-El, had once sat beside her on the zoo's suspended tram ride, vividly describing the evolutionary history of that gigantic Drang towering higher than every building in Argo City.
Everything had been perfect.
Until the instability within Krypton's core finally began to erupt.
No matter how many warnings Jor-El issued, the High Council refused to listen.
And in the end, no one could stop what came next.
Violent tectonic upheavals swept across Krypton.
A catastrophic earthquake struck Argo City, tearing the peaceful city apart from the ground upward into massive fractured sections.
The earth shook.
Skyscrapers collapsed.
People fled desperately in every direction.
Kara had been one of the few lucky students to survive.
She personally watched her classmates buried alive beneath indestructible carbon-silicate rubble.
After escaping the school and struggling home through layers of debris, she saw the bakery she visited every birthday erupt into flames when its solar batteries detonated under the crushing weight of the collapse, incinerating the entire shop and everyone inside into ash.
And that Drang?
The enormous, majestic creature became trapped inside a massive fissure split open by the earthquake.
Before it was finally crushed to death beneath the pressure of the collapsing earth, Kara had heard its mournful cries echo across the city again and again.
Those were the memories Kara had deliberately omitted when she implanted memories into the clone.
Before Jor-El managed to stabilize Krypton's core, tragedies like this had been happening all across the planet.
That was why Kara had ultimately defied her parents and made the single most important decision of her life, joining the Sword of Rao.
Launching survival pods toward potentially habitable worlds orbiting yellow suns had never been a particularly reliable plan.
But at the time, Krypton simply had no better options.
Fortunately, after twenty years of struggle and rebuilding, everything had succeeded.
The Kryptonian Empire had risen from the ashes.
Kal-El had been found again.
The only unfortunate thing now was that Kara herself might be facing her end.
BOOM!
Half-conscious and already beginning to experience flashes of her life passing before her eyes, Kara heard another deafening explosion.
Then she suddenly felt strength and sensation rushing back into her body.
Ahead of her, the final defensive line created by the Alpha Lanterns had been smashed open with a massive breach.
Kal-El had done it.
He had literally carved a path to survival for her using his own body.
Sensing that Kal-El's bio-field was rapidly strengthening again after returning to sunlight, Kara then heard her cousin immediately begin mockingly repeating the desperate words she'd spoken moments earlier while dying.
"I don't want to die like this~"
"You—!"
Kara, practically resurrected now that she was back beneath the sun, glared angrily at her cousin as she finally regained enough strength to lift her head, only to freeze in shock when she saw him clearly.
"You're hurt!"
Blood streaming from Joey's forehead had already run across most of his face.
The right shoulder of his suit and cape—the side he'd used to smash through the Lantern barriers—had been torn apart completely, exposing mangled flesh and a large section of his bloodied chest.
Inside an environment cut off from sunlight and saturated with Kryptonite radiation, even the incredibly adaptive Kal-El no longer possessed a truly invulnerable body.
But now everything was different.
They had escaped the encirclement of the Alpha Lanterns.
And once again, they stood beneath the light of a yellow sun.
Their injuries were already healing rapidly.
Kara could feel the metallic armor covering her body reactivating beneath the yellow sunlight and the restoration of her bio-field, rapidly purging the Kryptonite radiation from her system.
Give her just a few more minutes, and she'd be able to fight alongside Kal-El again, breaking apart this Green Lantern force piece by piece.
And then the armor's onboard AI suddenly issued an urgent warning.
Kara immediately shouted out:
"Careful!"
Although she herself was still too weakened to sense where the danger was coming from, the armor's AI was almost never wrong.
"So that's it..."
Joey didn't even need Kara's warning.
His vision hadn't been dulled despite his injuries, and the instant he saw the massive green light blazing beside them brighter than a star itself, realization hit him immediately.
"No wonder these Green Lanterns arrived so fast. No wonder this direction had such weak defenses!"
At that moment, Joey could only feel the universe's absolute hatred toward him.
The blonde Kara had unknowingly led him straight into one of the Green Lantern Corps' core territories.
But realizing that now was pointless.
Because while he and Kara had been rushing toward the sun, they had accidentally passed near the closest planet orbiting it.
At first glance, this planet looked just as barren and lifeless as every other planet in the system.
Until Joey got too close.
Close enough that there was no longer enough time to evade its attack.
Yes, from Joey's perspective, the current situation was basically: The fucking planet suddenly started attacking me.
Emerald light began igniting across the massive planet's surface.
A colossal translucent green ring materialized around the planet itself, taking the shape of an enormous Green Lantern ring.
This was Mogo.
A living, sentient planet, the largest Green Lantern.
And now, the power stored within its ring had already reached firing capacity.
The strength of a Green Lantern ring depended entirely on the wielder's willpower and imagination.
One of the main reasons Joey had managed to escape from over ten thousand Alpha Lanterns earlier was because their thoughts weren't unified.
Ten thousand individuals meant ten thousand different intentions.
That inconsistency had given him weak points to exploit.
But now it was obvious what the Alpha Lanterns' plan had been from the very beginning.
Achieve victory at the smallest possible cost.
They had deliberately driven Joey and Kara in this direction, maneuvering them unknowingly straight into Mogo's range—
The single entity possessing the largest concentration of Green Lantern energy in the region.
A living planet that had existed for billions of years projected its willpower outward across an entire planetary scale, sealing off every possible escape route.
At this point, Joey genuinely couldn't hold himself together anymore.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!"
For the first time in ages, he almost missed the miserable days he'd spent dealing with the lunatics over at Vought.
Because if his life were some kind of adventure game, then after leaving the beginner zone, shouldn't the difficulty have increased gradually?
Instead, the difficulty curve had gone completely exponential.
Realizing there was no longer any possibility of dodging, Joey immediately turned his body around and shielded the still-weakened Kara behind him.
"No!"
The only thing Joey managed to hear after taking Mogo's full-force energy blast head-on was Kara's desperate cry of protest before the roaring emerald explosion swallowed everything.