She had spent her whole life helping others. She'd taken pride in it, let it define her. And now, thinking of the condemnation she would face, Kara felt so upset she wanted to bang her head against the wall.
The worst part was that even now, somewhere underneath the shame and horror, she still worshipped Rao. Like two selves occupying the same body, one full of regret, the other still rejoicing. Her head started swimming.
Thea read the signs, stepped in, and knocked her out cleanly with a single strike.
"Kara's goodwill was used against her," she said, passing her over to Lena. "Take her somewhere quiet. She needs rest—and she needs company right now more than she needs us. We'll handle things here." A look at Lena completed the handoff.
Kara's emotional state wasn't hard to map. Thirty years of carefully earned reputation—gone in an instant, with no praise, no support, and only blame to bear. That was a real blow. But Thea had known enough Kryptonians to believe she'd find her footing again. They had a resilience to them, something structural, that tended to outlast whatever broke them.
Clark, standing nearby, was almost eerily composed. He'd been through this cycle enough times that it had stopped being a crisis and become more of a recurring condition. Universal acclaim, then misunderstood, controlled, rebuilding his reputation—then misunderstood and controlled again. Then the next event, and back to the beginning. This wasn't even close to the worst version.
The problem of what to actually do about Rao, however, remained.
Kryptonian biology made the genome essentially uneditable. Under normal circumstances, that was an asset. Right now, it was an obstacle. Even with full access to Kryptonian genetic records and Lex's research, modifying the genome was a losing bet—tug one thread and there was no telling what came loose at the other end.
"As long as we don't come face to face with Rao, there's no active effect," Clark said. "We could set that aside for now. What about the civilians?"
"Kill Rao and you liberate everyone at once," Lex said. "He's the source node for all of them. Cut the head off —"
"Not an option." Thea cut in before he could finish. "He's life-linked to everyone connected to him. I don't even know if he's killable—but that's almost beside the point. The moment he dies, every person connected to him dies with him."
Batman was already working through contingencies.
"Distance limits? Could moving the engagement offworld decouple the link? What if his body loses consciousness—does that break the connection? Kryptonite? Red sun radiation? If every civilian could be simultaneously incapacitated, would that sever their end of the connection?"
Some of these Thea had already considered. Some she hadn't. The room went quiet with focused thought.
"Distance probably doesn't help much," she said finally. "He's a divine entity—the connection range would be enormous. And he's not just linked to Earth. His ships are relay hubs—and he's running more than one. There are also large numbers of sentient beings aboard those ships, all linked to him as well." She kept the framing conservative and deliberately vague. What she'd actually learned from her intelligence network was considerably worse.
Three thousand Kryptonian vessels, spread across Sectors 2813 through 3125. Earth hadn't been his first stop. He'd already consolidated well over a hundred planets before arriving here. Some of those worlds were ten, a hundred times larger than Earth, with populations in the tens of billions.
The total figure Kerrigan had passed up to her: one trillion sentient beings, across the full breadth of his network.
Any attack, no matter how devastating, dissolved to nothing when divided among a trillion lives. Nekron could speak to that from direct experience.
They talked for quite a while without landing on anything workable. Then Thea was summoned by her mother.
The White House was considerably louder. She didn't even get a glass of water before she was pulled into a meeting room.
Several heads of state were connected via secure line. None of them looked happy.
It took her about thirty seconds of listening to understand why.
Rao had announced his intentions: dissolve national borders. Eliminate artificial divisions. One world, no barriers of race or citizenship. A global community, united under a single dream.
From a purely humanistic standpoint—from sociology, resource allocation, the arc of civilizational progress—it was almost certainly correct. From a political standpoint, it was catastrophic.
The assembled statespeople had dropped the diplomatic veneer entirely. They were furious, and making no effort to conceal it. None of them came out and said they were terrified of losing power—instead, they went through democracy, rule of law, values, social order, the importance of national sovereignty to the maintenance of individual rights. They ran through the entire catalogue. The conclusion, beneath all of it, was the same: Rao's plan was poison, and they were opposing it not out of self-interest, but out of deeply principled conviction.
Moira caught her eye and left the deputy to manage the line, pulling Thea aside. "Well?"
Lots of people around. She kept it brief. "Bad. But not past saving—the enemy is formidable, but it's not time to give up everything yet. And if it really comes to that, we run."
The situation was genuinely frustrating in a way that was hard to articulate. Eliminating war. Ending poverty. Uniting intelligent life across the cosmos—everything Rao was doing was right, measured against any broad cosmic metric. The World Will stood behind him. That was precisely why the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger hadn't moved: the forces of alignment were on Rao's side, and they knew it.
Strip away the parts that felt like personal provocations, and what was left was a sincere, deeply good divine entity acting in complete accordance with his own convictions. Compared to him, Thea looked black as coal.
They exchanged information. The situation wasn't as dire as it looked: Rao was moving gently, without direct military force, and hadn't yet escalated to outright confrontation. But the rate of defection among military and security personnel was accelerating sharply. If the trend continued, within seven to ten days, the world's governments would have lost effective control of their armed forces entirely. At that point, they'd be worse off than ordinary people.
As Thea sat listening to the statespeople vent—self-righteously, at length—she found herself struck by something deeply absurd. She had spent years fighting alongside and for ordinary people. Doomsday. Darkseid. Nekron. Some of the worst things to ever threaten the planet. And the ones calling her a witch and a monster on Rao's behalf right now?
Ordinary people, mostly.
While the ones calling her humanity's champion and defending her in the room?
Politicians.
Strange world.
Meanwhile, the rest of the informal anti-Rao coalition was working.
Batman had been developing a compound—an airborne sedative capable of rendering ordinary people unconscious without lasting harm. Decoupled from Rao's control network, with a secondary restorative agent designed to return baseline neurological function on awakening.
Three corporate infrastructure networks—Queen Consolidated, Wayne Enterprises, and LexCorp—along with government satellite arrays from multiple nations were being coordinated to spray the solvent over Earth at the same time.
And across town, Lex Luthor was running diagnostics on his newest armor iteration. He'd discovered at Blackest Night, somewhat to his own surprise, that he had genuine combat aptitude. This felt like the moment to put it to use—to emerge at the critical moment as humanity's savior. And if he could land a solid hit on Rao in the process, so much the better.