Prologue
Amanda Waller stood with her arms folded, watching the pulsing containment chamber as if it might twitch wrong and justify her ordering it incinerated. It was a cylindrical tank labeled BIO-08: Parasitic Lifeform Samples – Black Mercy Origin, with at least six warning stickers slapped on crookedly by interns who clearly didn't understand the level of risk inside.
Tendrils floated lazily in the viscous fluid—cuttings, no more than slivers of the original organism, harvested from somewhere off-world under circumstances that had been classified even from her. That fact alone irritated her.
Kryptonian-level threat, the readout had said. Capable of piercing the mind, bypassing consciousness, and constructing idealized delusions so perfect the subject wouldn't fight to escape. Not even Superman.
Waller squinted at it.
"It's too bad I can't just place you on people I don't like," she muttered. "Save me a lot of time."
The floating mass of alien nervous system twitched slightly, like it had heard her. She didn't flinch.
Behind her, a nearby monitor let out a soft beep—vitals. Containment integrity. Neural resonance fluctuation. Numbers danced. She didn't care about the numbers. She cared that it hadn't breached containment. Yet.
She tapped the screen twice with her knuckle, and a nearby technician flinched like he'd been hit.
"Extract another clipping," Waller said without turning. "Deliver it to prisoner IU7589578. I want another round of data before sunset."
"Ma'am," the tech started, hesitation creeping in like mold.
"If you're about to mention the risk parameters," Waller snapped, "remember that I signed off on them."
He shut up and moved.
Waller turned back to the tank. The Black Mercy fragment drifted, its threads curling gently like it was dreaming in fluid. In truth, it probably was. And that's what made it dangerous. Even in pieces, it remembered what it was supposed to be doing.
Behind her, a series of mechanical arms whirred to life—sterile, spindly things made for delicate operations. They moved with surgical care toward the mass inside the tank. Another clipping. Another weapon. Another chance to push this thing closer to working.
He reached for the Indra.
It sat on the workbench like it didn't yet understand what it was meant to be—a headband in shape only, wrapped in half-exposed alloy and threaded with pulsing biomesh too delicate for any of the tools they'd given him. Not that he needed them.
Kyren, otherwise known as Prisoner IU7589578, flexed two of his digits, and the skin along his wrist split with a soft click. Three filament threads extended from beneath the surface—thin, semi-conductive, and already warm to the touch. He didn't flinch. He never did anymore. Guiding them with unconscious precision, he leaned in and began dismantling the outer regulator loop, careful not to jostle the energy core beneath.
He had three fractured thorax struts, mild dehydration, and had been kept just lucid enough to run calculations. He'd tried not to look too closely at the Mercy the first time they'd brought it to him.
They're sending another Mercy sample any minute now. Sample Four. He could feel it in the airflow—the filters pausing half a beat too long, the ambient hum of containment shifting like a held breath. It made the back of his jaw tighten.
He hadn't forgotten what happened the last time. The Mercy filament had latched on, integrated faster than expected, then burned out the moment it stabilized. Fried the coils. Nearly cooked his fingers off in the process. And Sample Two? He didn't even remember assembling it. Just found the notes written in his own hand, in his own shorthand, with conclusions he didn't remember drawing. That worried him more than the Mercy.
He unclipped a blackened segment of neural tubing and dropped it into the bin beside his chair. It was still faintly warm. Probably from Sample Three. Probably.
"I need a stabilizer," he muttered, not expecting anyone to hear. "Or a dampener. Something to keep the signal from folding in on itself." He exhaled through his teeth. "Or anything that doesn't bleed."
They hadn't given him anything but more tissue. He'd make do. That was why they brought him here in the first place.
His filaments retracted, folding neatly back into his arm as he sat back and looked at the thing on the bench.
"Indra," he said under his breath. "That's what they're calling it now. Like it's divine. Like it's finished."
He didn't say what he was thinking.
He rubbed the side of his cranium, digits catching on the sensor rig embedded along his temple. It was pulsing again—warm and sticky, like it knew what was coming. The dampeners were holding, barely. A flicker in the emotional regulators meant a spasm of desire could spike like a seizure, and the last time that happened, it had taken four hours for the lab's auto-scrubbers to get the smell out of the floor.
He stared at the Indra, twisting it in his hands—rotating the half-exposed housing, running his digits along the biomesh wiring—not because it would help, but because doing something felt less damning than sitting still. He'd already run the numbers. They all came up the same.
The problem wasn't with the design. It was with the Mercy.
The moment he plugged a clipping into the Indra, it surged too hot, burned through the emotional regulators, and went dead. He was averaging one viable connection per sample. And there weren't that many samples left.
He glanced across the room. Boxes lined the far wall—old components, some of them scavenged, some dumped unceremoniously by Waller's people like toys thrown into a child's crib. There was a lot there. Enough to build something, maybe. But not something reliable.
He could try them all. One by one by one. Hope something worked before they ran out of Mercy tissue. Before he burned out first.
His eyes flicked to two components sitting side by side in open boxes on the shelf—a B'rodan Cortex Spine and a Zarlek Core Shell.
He snorted, just a breath through his nasal cavity. "You can make something really nasty out of those two if you had the proper adapter."
The words hung in the air.
Then: "Wait... an adapter?"
The thought landed with a cold weight in his chest. A memory, unbidden and sharp—his father, in the workshop back home, speaking with that clipped precision only engineers used when lecturing children. "You can't just plug a B'rodan Cortex Spine into a Zarlek Core Shell and expect it not to rupture. You need a Thren Module adapter—from an entirely different planet."
He straightened in his chair, the Indra still cradled in his hands. It wasn't about brute-forcing the connection. It was about translation.
Maybe the Mercy wasn't rejecting the Indra. Maybe it just didn't understand it.
What he needed wasn't more power, or shielding, or containment.
He needed a buffer.
An organic interface. Something soft enough to bend under pressure and flexible enough to process desire without folding into madness.
"Even Waller knows what an adapter is," he said to no one, moving toward the tray.
The door hissed open, heavy and impatient, and Amanda Waller stepped into the lab with a datapad in one hand and the scent of urgency trailing behind her like cheap cologne.
"You're out of time," she said, without looking up. "Sample Four's en route. If it doesn't take, I'm having the whole unit rewritten and you reassigned to biowaste sorting."
Kyren didn't turn. He was hunched over the bench, filament threads extruded again, rerouting a portion of the Indra's housing. He moved with purpose now. Not desperation. Clarity.
"I need a fungus," he said simply.
Waller blinked. "A fungus."
"Specifically a mycelial base with low signal resistance. Something networked, slow, non-reactive, and naturally adaptive to voltage feedback. It'll buffer the emotional load the Mercy pushes when the clipping integrates. If I embed the interface directly in the load-bearing curve of the Indra's base—"
Waller held up a hand. "Let me stop you before you start sounding even crazier. You're telling me you want to fix my psychic weapon with mushrooms."
"I'm telling you I need a biological adapter," Kyren said, turning now. "And Earth doesn't offer much that qualifies. But fungus might. It's old. It doesn't resist the way synthetic components do. It listens."
Waller stared at him. Then smirked.
"Oh, great. Now it listens. Do I need to get you a therapist too? Maybe something from the essential oils aisle?"
Kyren's jaw clenched, but he didn't rise to it. Instead, he gestured to the Indra.
"You're asking me to create a stable emotion-based interface using untested psychic tissue, synthetic housing from three incompatible systems, and exactly zero materials designed for this kind of frequency work. I'm improvising with wet garbage and alien nerve endings, and I'm telling you—fungus might be the only thing that won't fry itself trying to translate a signal it was never meant to carry. All to invent the equivalent of a Green Lantern Ring. You tell me which one of us sounds crazier."
Waller didn't blink. "You want mold. To keep your brain from repainting the lab with itself again."
"The device needs a buffer," he said. "And fungus would listen."
Waller stared at him for a moment longer, like she was deciding whether to laugh or throw something. She didn't do either. Instead, she turned on her heel and headed for the door.
"Someone find out where the hell we can get smart mushrooms," she called over her shoulder. "And no, I don't mean the kind that make you see music, whatever the hell that means."
The door hissed shut behind her.
The package was waiting on the auxiliary table when Waller entered the lab the next morning, sealed in a sterile white shipping box, stamped with PERISHABLE – DO NOT FREEZE. A bright yellow sticker across the top read:
HANDLE WITH GLOVES.
She stopped walking. Narrowed her eyes.
"I was already concerned about the Black Mercy," she said. "What the hell is this?"
Hastings, standing a little too close to the wall like he wanted to merge with it, cleared his throat and stepped forward with the reluctant dignity of a man trying to explain why he just ordered a haunted toaster.
"That's the fungus, ma'am."
She blinked. "That's not an answer. Why does it need gloves?"
"It's not dangerous," he said quickly. "It's just protocol. Standard containment labeling from the university. They're overly cautious with anything biological. Especially if it's a live culture."
"You ordered this from a school?"
"Ohio State," Hastings said. "Their mycology department runs one of the oldest culture banks in the country. I found a strain that matched Vex's request—dense mycelial structure, non-fruiting, slow spread, non-toxic. It's used in soil remediation and bio-filtration, completely inert unless you're a decaying log or an overwatered ficus."
Waller looked at the box like it had personally offended her.
"You used A.R.G.U.S. clearance to buy sentient mushrooms from a school lab."
"I didn't say it was sentient."
She raised an eyebrow.
"…I didn't say it wasn't," he added, then immediately regretted speaking.
There was a long pause.
Waller walked over to the table and peeled the box open with a scalpel. Inside, nestled in a foam cooler, was a sealed Petri dish fogged from transit. A snow-white network of filaments curled tightly against the inner gel like nerves frozen mid-thought.
"I said get a mushroom," she muttered. "Not whatever this is."
"Well technically," Hastings said, too fast to stop himself, "you said 'smart mushrooms,' and that really narrowed it down."
Waller's head turned so slowly that Hastings wished he'd brought a fake ID, a change of clothes, and an escape tunnel.
She stared at him for three long seconds, then finally said, "Congratulations. You're now the A.R.G.U.S. expert on fungi. Let me know if it starts speaking Latin. Get it to Prisoner IU7589578."
And with that, she walked out of the lab, leaving the box—and Hastings' self-respect—on the table.
The lab lights had dimmed twice for the building's night cycle and brightened again before Kyren looked up.
He hadn't slept.
The Indra sat in pieces across three work surfaces, its components sorted into precise clusters—housing plates, energy coil fragments, pulse regulators, biosensor leads. He'd stripped it down further than he ever had before, even during the first design phase. Deconstruction had become an act of survival.
The fungus couldn't just be sprinkled in. It wasn't seasoning. It wasn't some miracle salve you rubbed on a wound and prayed over.
It had to be integrated.
The sample had arrived in a sealed dish. Dense mycelial growth, snow-white tendrils laced through gel. Hastings had delivered it personally, hands shaking, talking too fast. Kyren had ignored him.
He'd spent hours prepping the integration chamber alone, rerouting the housing to create a flexible contact mesh that could hold the organic material without compression. The mycelium couldn't be crushed. It needed to breathe—even inside a weapon. Especially inside a weapon.
By now, the fungus was suspended in a cradle of ultra-fine sensor threads, interwoven with a synthetic humidity filament to keep the network stable. If it worked, it would act as a bio-reactive emotional buffer, absorbing signal spikes and releasing them in steady pulses.
If it didn't work… well, there are a few Mercy clippings left. But only a few.
Kyren leaned over the reassembled Indra and ran a digit slowly along its side, tracing the new seam like a scar. The integration node glowed a pale green. Not pulsing. Not warning. Just... steady.
"I've either solved the problem," he murmured, "or taught mold how to kill a Green Lantern."
The terminal went quiet, but her voice lingered. Even when it wasn't playing, it lingered. Every order, every theory, every bone-dry lecture delivered like gospel and followed with, "Now build it."
He stared at the Indra. The fungus pulsed faintly beneath the housing—calm, steady, breathing in rhythm with the dampeners.
Waller had said it a dozen times. Maybe more.
"People think the opposite of blue is red. It's not. Not on the real spectrum."
It sounded like nonsense at first—color theory dressed up as strategy—but she wasn't talking about colors. She was talking about misconception.
"People think fear is the opposite of will. That may not be true. It's what the Lanterns believe. But fear pushes. Will pushes back. They're the same kind of energy. Focused. Directed. Determined."
"Desire, though... desire, lust, ambition, they don't push. It pulls you. Negative canceling out a positive."
He ran a hand down the Indra's side. It was cold now. Too cold for a standard regulator. The emotional charge had redistributed through the fungal buffer. Even that was following her logic.
"Or maybe we'll discover something wholly original," she'd said. As if that was supposed to be comforting.
It wasn't theory anymore. It was design. She wanted to override will. A traction field, she called it. Something emotional enough to overpower a Green Lantern.
This was something that maniac Larfleeze didn't understand. Green Lanterns weren't typically susceptible to greed. But power? Influence? Those feelings could create a hunger so deep they didn't care about purpose. Just need.
And he had built the vessel for it.
There was a hiss at the far end of the lab—subtle, mechanical. The kind of sound that made Kyren's neck tighten before his brain even caught up.
The containment locker opened.
Inside, resting in its suspension field, was a sealed transfer pod. Cylindrical, black-glass sides, insulated ridges on both ends. Still cold. Still humming faintly. Still labeled with the identifier: BIO-08 SAMPLE 04 – MERCY CUTTING.
They had already delivered it two days ago, just before he'd requested the fungus. Then they'd taken it back.
For safety.
Even Waller had agreed—briefly—that leaving live Black Mercy outside the bio container for too long was too risky. Now that the buffer was in place, the sample had returned like a loaded gun tossed back on the table. No fanfare. No announcement.
Kyren didn't move right away.
He watched the pod through the glass, tracing the faint shadow of the Mercy fragment drifting inside. It looked smaller than before. Or maybe he was just more tired.
It wasn't thrashing. Wasn't reacting.
Yet.
He approached the chamber with slow steps, digits flexing slightly as he reached for the interface port. The fungal network inside the Indra stayed steady—cool, pulsing, undisturbed.
"Guess we're doing this," he muttered, more to the walls than himself.
He tapped the console. The port hissed open.
As he slotted the Mercy clipping into the chamber, the mycelium buffer pulsed—faint but sharp, like a heartbeat that didn't belong to either of them.
He watched the interface light shift shades. Fungal conductivity reacting. Emotional charge stabilizing.
The Indra held steady.
Too steady.
Kyren frowned.
"Is it… syncing?"
The thought barely formed before he shook it off. He didn't have time for theories. But as he sealed the housing and watched the numbers level out on the monitor, a chill crawled up the back of his neck.
The fungus wasn't resisting.
It was responding.
He sealed the housing and set the Indra down on the padded tray, careful not to jar the stabilizers. The fungal cradle held. The clipping sat quiet at the core, anchored in thread, wrapped in bio-reactive mesh.
For the first time, everything was in place.
Kyren didn't move. He didn't touch the console. Didn't power it up. He just... watched.
This was usually the part where things went wrong.
The previous iterations had all started the same—calm for a moment, then heat. A low vibration. A spike in the regulators. Then the surge. The burn. The sharp, acrid smoke of failure.
He waited.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Thirty.
The Indra sat still. The core light held steady—no flicker, no shift. The outer casing remained cool beneath the tray's temperature sensor.
He leaned in slightly. Still no hum. No rise in internal pressure.
He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or more afraid.
It wasn't trying to kill itself yet.
That was new.
He stared at the device like it might start twitching. But the lights stayed steady. No distortion in the signal. No voltage creep. Even the Mercy tissue inside looked… calm. Passive.
That was the part that bothered him most.
He muttered to himself, almost absently, "It's not resisting."
The Mercy had fought every previous integration. Lashing out, burning circuits, flooding the interface with psychic feedback as if it could sense something wrong. That was its nature. It fought anything that wasn't real.
But now it was resting.
He glanced at the buffer, then back at the console. Humidity levels stable. Heat displacement flat. Emotional resonance within target range.
"It's not that it likes the buffer," he said slowly. "It's that it doesn't recognize it."
He stepped back, hands braced on the bench, brain grinding forward even as his body begged to shut down.
"The fungus doesn't have a dream center. No identity. No ego. It's not conscious in the way the Mercy understands. There's no architecture to invade. No fantasy to feed on."
He exhaled, deep and low.
"It's not filtering the Mercy. It's confusing it."
He paused.
"Or worse. It's… talking to it."
He rubbed his face with both hands, the gesture more habit than relief.
"If that's true, then it's not working because we solved the problem. It's working bec—"
The floor trembled roughly beneath Kyren's feet. Dust cascaded from the seams in the light fixtures. Distant screaming, comm chatter, klaxons failing to agree on which emergency protocol to follow.
The lab doors didn't open—but the air pressure changed. Like something massive had just entered a sealed system that was never supposed to be breached from above.
Kyren froze.
He reached for the nearest console, tapped into the facility feed, and saw only static. Then fire. Then something yellow, flickering like a torn flag caught in a storm.
The ceiling—not of his cell/ lab, but of the entire installation—detonated.
Not a warning alarm. Not a perimeter breach. Just... boom.
From the hallway, someone shouted over the chaos, "Aren't we, like, a thousand feet underground?!"
The silence that followed said what no one else could.
Not anymore.
Far above the lowest levels of the facility—beyond the concrete, beyond the reinforced plating, beyond even the reach of the surveillance grid—something moved.
Or rather, something descended.
The breach in the ceiling was still glowing, a ragged hole scorched through half a mile of Earth and steel. Security floodlights from the upper decks snapped on, casting stark, trembling beams through the dust-filled shaft.
And from the smoke, he came down.
Not falling. Not flying. Just… lowering. Like gravity had changed its worldview.
His armor looked grown, not forged—yellow crystalline plates stretched over ash-grey skin, veined with black lines that pulsed like veins. His arms were too long, legs reverse-jointed. His feet didn't touch the ground so much as skim it, dragging heat in their wake.
His head was hooded, the cloak flickering like torn circuitry—part fabric, part light. Where eyes should've been, there were three glowing slits stacked vertically on either side of his face, casting thin, scanning beams across the hall.
A ring glowed on his right hand. Not steady. Not focused.
Searching.
No one spoke.
No one fired.
They just… stared.
Until the first soldier whispered, "What the hell is that?"
And then the power flickered.
The Yellow Lantern touched down on the lowest level of the installation, his descent leaving the air scorched and the floor panels warped underfoot. He moved like he wasn't in a hurry—but didn't need to be.
The lights overhead flickered. Half the security systems still hadn't caught up to the fact that the ceiling no longer existed.
When he spoke, his voice didn't echo. It didn't need to.
It cut.
Filtered through a translator built for efficiency, the words came out low and clear—every syllable laced with contempt.
"I am Lantern Draal of Sector Nine-Seven-Four," he said. "You are harboring rebel garbage. The engineer. Goes by Kyren."
He raised his hand, just slightly. The yellow ring on his finger pulsed once, as if tasting the air.
"I traced that gul'shimit's energy trail to this rock. It ends here."
He turned his head slowly, scanning the corridor. His six eyes narrowed independently, reading heat signatures, movement patterns, structural weaknesses.
"Tell me where he is," Draal's he threatened. "Or tell me who dies first."
In the central command room, the monitors buzzed with static, color correction failing to keep up with the smoke bleeding into half the security feeds. Draal's towering figure flickered across multiple angles—taller than expected, thinner than most, and still somehow worse than the reports had suggested.
Amanda Waller stood at the center console, arms folded, lips pressed into a thin line. The lighting here was dim on purpose. She hated glare on the screens.
From the left, Hastings leaned forward slightly, his voice tight.
"Ma'am… what do you want to do?"
She didn't look at him.
"He wants the engineer," she said. "We'll give him the engineer."
Hastings blinked. "Ma'am?"
"Go," she said. "Tell him you'll escort him."
There was a pause. Just long enough for Hastings to realize she wasn't being sarcastic.
He opened his mouth again—then closed it. Then opened it again.
"Ma'am?"
Waller finally turned to him. Cool. Flat. Already thinking about the next five things she had to do.
"Just make sure to take him the long way round."
And with that, she stepped away from the console and walked out the door without another word.
The door to his cell hissed open.
Kyren didn't look up right away. He was still watching the Indra, still waiting for that inevitable pulse of heat or light or death.
He only looked up when the footsteps stopped just inside the threshold.
Amanda Waller.
Hands clasped behind her back. Expression unreadable.
"There's a Yellow Lantern here," she said. "Says he wants to talk to you. Would you happen to know anything about that?"
Kyren blinked. The question rolled around in his head for a moment, dragging fog and static in its wake. There were gaps in his memory—he knew that—but this wasn't the usual kind of forgetting. This was deeper.
"I… I'm not sure?" he said.
Waller tilted her head slightly. "He called you rebel garbage. That mean anything?"
He hesitated.
Then, "Yes. I do have memories of assisting with some manufacturing of sustenance synthesizers for the Bunat'hu Alliance. Some do view them as rebels. All they want is for their land to be recognized as an independent nation on their planet."
Waller exhaled through her nose. It wasn't quite a sigh.
"Well, we weren't exactly prepared to fend off a Yellow Lantern today," she said. "Do you have the Indra working or not?"
He let out a sharp breath—half frustration, half disbelief.
"Working?" Kyren said. "I only just powered it moments ago. I have no idea if it's 'working.'"
Waller didn't react to his frustration. She just stared at the Indra for a long, unreadable beat. Then her eyes shifted back to him.
"Well," she said, "now's as good a time as any to test it."
Kyren tensed.
"Because he's on his way here now."
His mouth opened slightly.
"I have a meeting to get to," she added, already turning for the door.
"Wait," Kyren said, his voice pitching up. "Wh—how—Is this Earth humor?"
The door hissed shut behind her.
There was no response.
Just the soft hum of the Indra. And the faint, growing tremor in the walls.
Hastings walked just a step ahead of the Yellow Lantern, hands folded awkwardly in front of him like that might make him look more official. His pace was deliberate—neither hurried nor slow. Just casual enough to buy a few more minutes without looking like he was trying to.
"So," he said, glancing sideways, "I've never met one of you before."
The Lantern said nothing for three strides. Then, flatly,"I'm sure you're very honored."
"Oh, totally," Hastings replied, nodding a little too enthusiastically. "Big day for me. Real memorable."
They passed a junction and turned left. The Lantern's eyes drifted to a framed poster on the wall—an eagle soaring above a mountain range, the word VISION printed beneath it in bold, hopeful font.
"Have we not passed this picture before?" he asked.
"What?" Hastings looked back, frowning. "Oh, no. We have those all over the place. They're called motivational posters. The higher-ups think it'll make us work harder. Or at least feel less bad about how they treat us as employees."
The Lantern grunted—a sound halfway between confusion and disdain.
"You must all live very pathetic lives."
Hastings raised his eyebrows. "Can't argue with that. But hey… at least I got to meet you, right?"
They turned another corner. Still several yards from Sector G.
"So how does one become a Yellow Lantern, anyway?" Hastings asked, voice light and conversational. "Is there, like, an application process? Recruiting stations? A job fair in the galactic core?"
The Lantern's eyes didn't move toward him, but his posture stiffened just slightly.
"We are chosen," he said.
"Sure," Hastings replied. "But like—how chosen are we talking?"
The Lantern stopped walking. Just for a moment.
"The ring finds those who have seen fear from the inside. Who were broken by it. Burned by it. And who never forgot the shape it took."
He turned his head just enough for the light of his ring to cast sharp shadows across his face.
"We are not chosen for our strength. We are chosen for what we understand. How fear moves. How it spreads. How it can become something so much bigger than pain. So much purer."
His voice dropped a little further, more thought than threat.
"The ring does not come for those who inspire fear through force. That is amateurism. Thuggery. The ring comes for those who already carry fear inside themselves… and learned how to sharpen it into a weapon."
Hastings gave a weak little laugh. "Well... that rules me out."
The Lantern started walking again.
"It rules most of you... out."
They came to a stop outside one of the holding cells—Sector G, Sublevel Three. The hallway was quiet, dimly lit, and conspicuously empty.
Hastings gestured with one hand, trying not to let it shake.
"Well, sir," he said, putting on a bright tone that strained at the edges, "thank you so much for not killing me or any of my colleagues. Really top-tier restraint. Much appreciated."
He pulled a keycard from his belt pouch and held it out, careful not to make any sudden movements.
"This will get you in," he said. "You just slide it through that little gizmo there, and… ta-da. He's inside."
The Lantern didn't take the card right away. He just stared at it like it might be an insult.
"I, uh… I hope you don't mind if I slip away now," Hastings added, smiling with way too many teeth. "I figured you'd want some privacy anyway."
Still no reply.
The Lantern finally took the card, his ring glowing faintly around the edges—just enough to make Hastings' hand go numb for half a second during the transfer.
He turned and walked away. Not quickly. Not yet.
But the moment his back was to the Lantern, he whispered under his breath, "Please be working, please be working, please be working…"
The keycard slid through the reader with a soft chirp. The door clicked, then hissed.
Lantern Draal reached for the handle.
The moment it cracked open, the world exploded.
A wall of energy burst outward, invisible in color but not in force—a concussive blast that flared against the corridor walls, washing every surface in sickly reflections and warped shadows. The corridor lights shattered one by one as the pressure wave knocked Draal off his feet and sent him crashing into the far wall hard enough to dent the frame.
Alarms screamed. The air warped. And then—footsteps.
Kyren stepped through the doorway.
The Indra pulsed on his head, a crown of uncolor, rippling ultraviolet energy that danced like a flame over his skull. It didn't glow in the usual sense—it bent the light around it. Red looked orange. Green looked gray. White shimmered with hints of violet no human eye could fully comprehend.
His expression wasn't calm.
It was blank.
He looked down at the Lantern crumpled on the floor, then tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something no one else could hear.
Kyren stepped over the twitching form of the Yellow Lantern without breaking stride. His eyes flicked across the corridor—not with panic or urgency, but the slow, drifting scan of someone hunting for potential.
The Indra pulsed again, that ultraviolet corona distorting every edge and surface it touched. Hallway signs became unreadable. Security lights turned strange colors. Reality bent softly around him like it was trying to give space.
His eyes locked on the ring on the Yellow Lantern's hand, still pulsing, dim but alive. Kyren crouched beside it, head tilting slightly.
"Emotional spectrum ring," he said quietly. "Yellow wavelength. Fear-based. Constructs drawn from internal projections. Neural-link interface. Environmental shielding. Combat optimization protocols keyed to autonomous survival instincts."
His voice remained flat. Curious, not reverent. "I would like it to be mine."
He reached out slowly, not touching—just watching. "It will make me more than I am."
Lantern Draal groaned. His armor had held, but just barely. He lay on his back, limbs splayed, expression twisted with something between rage and confusion.
He tried to sit up, but flinched halfway.
"What… what are you?" he rasped. "Why did that—hurt?"
Kyren didn't answer. He was still staring at the ring.
Draal shifted, trying to gather himself, but before he could react—Kyren reached.
His digits brushed the ring.
There was no warning.
KRATHOOM.
The sound wasn't just an explosion. It was a rip—like the atmosphere tore sideways. Light that didn't belong in this spectrum surged through the corridor, and in an instant, both figures were gone.
Not vaporized. Not disintegrated.
Just gone.
The shockwave hit next.
Metal groaned. Walls cracked. An entire wing of the prison began collapsing in on itself, sucked inward like the space had forgotten how to hold shape. Alarms screamed, systems crashed, and pressure doors slammed shut two floors above to try to contain it.
And then—seconds later—
The Yellow Lantern ring shot from the rubble, sparking, jittering, flickering like it was malfunctioning.
It wasn't flying so much as stumbling through the air—dipping too low, veering too hard left, correcting, then twitching again like a wasp that had been hit with a shoe.
It zipped past scattering soldiers. It then zipped past Waller, who was halfway up the emergency exit corridor, eyes sharp and jaw set.
She didn't even break stride. "Somebody grab that ring!" she barked.
Several tried.
All failed.
One dove. One leapt off a crate. One even threw a containment net.
The ring dodged none of them. It just happened to fail upward in the same moment, buzzing out of reach like a drunk insect with too much power and nowhere left to go.
It disappeared down the corridor, turning corners with increasingly unpredictable wobbles.
Waller didn't watch it go. She was already pulling her communicator.