Cramming two utterly opposite forms of life into one body—that was a stretch, even by insane standards.
Even Thea, who sought life through death, would never dare hold both the Death and Life divine seats at once. That was a death wish, plain and simple.
Yin-Yang converging. Water and fire merging. Lovely concepts on paper. The reality of balancing two directly opposed energies existed only in theory. God could probably do it. Thea wouldn't go near it.
Earth-3's Professor Martin Stein happened to be bold, the kind of scientist willing to die for a breakthrough. He'd used the Matrix to bind his own living body to a corpse, and miraculously the combination produced a new form of life.
Along with superpowers, the corpse half had completely reshaped his thinking. Able to rearrange the atomic and subatomic structure of inorganic matter, he now held a strange view of how the whole world was put together. Among the Crime Syndicate, nobody held life more cheaply than he did.
His cold gaze swept across the Red Lanterns. His eyes had long since shed human visual limits. He scanned them all—and Atrocitus's life-force was simply beyond anything he'd ever seen.
Deathstorm had secretly studied Ultraman's cellular structure before. Ultraman's genome was beyond any human imagination—efficient, dense, packed with power, arranged with scientific precision that gave Kryptonians lifespans far longer than Earth humans.
But they still aged. As a scientist, Deathstorm was certain on that point.
This guy in front of him, though? He rescanned Atrocitus, rapidly calculating the Red Lantern leader's life-force. The result was an astronomical number. Worried he'd miscalculated, he ran it again.
Same result. Stunning. This barrel-chested monster, even if he were a newborn, could still live for hundreds of millions of years. Incredible.
His structure wasn't as scientific as a Kryptonian's. The arrangement wasn't nearly as optimally distributed. Why did he have such a long lifespan? He really wanted to dissect him and take a proper look.
Deathstorm's eyes held that clinical, specimen-examiner coldness as they tracked Atrocitus. It made everything that much more unsettling.
The Red Lantern leader was a short fuse to begin with. He was here to fight, then leave, and the enemy was looking at him like a piece of walking pork. He couldn't stand it. With one roar he and his team charged.
Besides Dex-Starr, whom he'd brought from Earth, he had two subordinates with him this time.
Skallox—just a meat-sac of a head floating in midair. He lived on a highly developed planet in Sector 995. The sentient life there had eliminated disease, poverty, and hunger. They'd pushed their civilization to a level comparable to Krypton.
"Crime" existed only in dictionaries and philosophical debate. Every being was, from birth, placed inside a small container. They communicated with each other over a network—holographic images only. That was the sum total of their lives. Any physical contact was illegal.
At 138, Skallox had just reached adulthood. He lived in Unit 24, Compartment D, Nutrient Pod 567. That was home. Under his planet's draconian laws, he'd been born there—and by law, he'd die there.
Decades of generational conditioning had left them almost unrecognizable as what they once were. Their bodies had fully degenerated into a few tentacles with minimal sensory function. Their skulls had grown oversized, easier to jack into the global network.
Teenage Skallox had grown bewildered about his future. An idea considered blasphemous on his world had taken root in his mind—he wanted to put on a protective suit and step out of his nutrient pod to see what the real world looked like.
The result was predictable. Arrested as a textbook dissident, his last remaining tentacles were severed, reducing him to just a giant head. His sentence was eighty years of solitary confinement. The long isolation triggered hallucinations. This world held no mercy, no hope. Hatred and bitterness filled the space where hope used to be. The Red Lantern ring came as predicted.
Skallox had extraordinary mental-control abilities. He was one of the few in Atrocitus's ranks capable of managing his own rage.
The Red Lantern Corps was actually enormous. Only a small fraction could be deployed for free combat. As their leader, Atrocitus could only leave the ones whose brains were fully drowned in rage on the home planet, letting them fight each other to burn off the fury, while he took the few who could receive orders out to work and see some of the galaxy.
Skallox now floated like a giant fleshy tumor. His tentacles had regrown. From a distance he looked like a large squid.
He hovered on Atrocitus's left. On the leader's right, by his foot, was another round one.
That was Zilius Zox, out of Sector 3544. His backstory was unremarkable—his own people had driven him out for being ugly. He'd been beaten down countless times and got up countless times. No sudden explosive breakthrough. Just the slow accumulation of resentment that eventually won Red Lantern recognition.
To be looked down on by aliens of every possible appearance, his looks really did have to be a problem. Hal Jordan had once mocked Zox as looking like an oversized beach ball with arms and legs... Thea actually agreed. He had no clear division between torso and head—just one big face on a round body, flanked by two tiny arms and two tiny legs. The look was genuinely comical.
A cat by Atrocitus's side, a floating head, and a beach ball with limbs—that was the Red Lanterns' full Earth-3 lineup.
Three Red Lantern "commanders." Deathstorm didn't put them on the board. The Red Lantern leader was his real target. The other three rabble—after the fight, study the corpses, then break them down to atoms.
But while he was writing them off, Dex-Starr was the first to charge.
Red Lanterns could construct—but rage in their heads usually left them without the composure. Instead of using ring-forged weapons, they preferred their own bodies.
Dex-Starr had been completely remade by the Red. The Earth housecat was now viciously ferocious, venting its uncontainable rage with its claws.
Atrocitus didn't know the cat was a hidden stroke by the Red itself. He'd secretly captured a few housecats on Earth before, but no matter how he tormented them they hadn't produced enough emotion. He'd had to drop the experiment.
Now Dex-Starr was his most important companion. He charged right after her. Skallox and the beach-ball bro fanned out, ready to tear the enemy apart.
"Enthusiastic. Let me see if you have the ability to back up the enthusiasm." None of the Red Lanterns had brought up constructs. Deathstorm couldn't detect any resemblance to a power ring.
The Red Lantern rings had replaced their hearts. Tucked inside the body, they were invisible from outside.
To Deathstorm, these were just four unlucky aliens who happened to be passing through.