Murphy's Law was painfully accurate sometimes—the more you feared trouble, the faster it arrived. Just as Amanda opened her mouth to speak, a terrifying, vast, overwhelming psychic force descended from the sky. In an instant, it crushed everyone's consciousness. Amanda held on for a moment before collapsing into unconsciousness.
Damn it! I should have just passed out immediately!
Thea's instincts made her resist for one second—and now she regretted it deeply. If she had fainted like Amanda, nothing would have happened to her. But because she fought back even a little, the thing above immediately took interest, doubling and redoubling the mental pressure like it was toying with her.
Her own psychic strength felt like a tiny boat in a raging storm. The other side was an ocean—violent, vast, and crushing. Every second, new waves slammed into her. Thea had to focus entirely just to keep her mind from collapsing. Several times she felt her thoughts drifting into dead ends—and she didn't even want to imagine the consequences of her consciousness getting stuck. Clinging to sheer stubborn willpower, she kept dragging herself back into clarity.
She had no idea how long the assault lasted.
When she finally regained control of her body, she found herself half-kneeling on the floor, drenched in sweat, a puddle forming beneath her. Her clothes felt like they'd gone through a full wash cycle. But she had no time to think about that—she pushed her wet hair aside and forced herself to look straight ahead.
Of course…
The Toad she'd knocked out earlier was standing again—but his swollen head had been replaced with a blur of yellow light. That crushing psychic storm had come from there.
Parallax?
No… not quite.
Parallax the Entity was born from the accumulated fear of countless intelligent beings, existing between form and formlessness. It chose hosts very carefully. Once fused with a host, it became Parallax the Demon.
Thea wasn't looking down on Toad, but even if he begged to be a host, Parallax wouldn't pick him. If she remembered correctly, he'd only gotten contaminated by a fragment of Parallax due to dissecting a dead Green Lantern.
Who knew where the true Parallax Entity was now? Someone out there might know, but Thea didn't. What she did know was that Parallax the Demon was being drawn by those cells—and was dramatically, stupidly, theatrically flying straight toward Earth. This yellow mass in front of her was clearly the result of those cells reproducing wildly. Whether the thing controlling it was Parallax the Entity or Parallax the Demon, she couldn't tell.
"Earthling, what are you looking at? You don't seem afraid of me."
The yellow sphere detached from Toad's neck. The headless corpse collapsed to the ground. The sphere circled her, probing her consciousness with its voice.
"Nonsense! I'm scared to death! Where the hell do you see 'not afraid'!?"
Thea didn't care about distinguishing which version of Parallax this was. She couldn't beat either. Forget her—Horus at full power wouldn't be able to beat it.
The sphere kept circling, raising every hair on her body. When it spoke directly into her mind, she didn't even dare stand.
"No. You say you're afraid, but your heart isn't. In fact… you're excited. Stranger still—you seem to know me. Yes?
You know who I am, and yet you're unafraid. In all these years, this is the first time I've met someone like you."
Not afraid?
Thea asked herself honestly—was she afraid?
She feared the Old Gods, the Eternal Beasts, Yuk Khan, Eclipso—too many cosmic terrors to count. Even their "lesser avatars" scared her to death.
But Darkseid? The Anti-Monitor? Nekron?
Not as much.
Why?
Because they'd been defeated before.
Parallax, for all its power, had also been chained and dominated by Sinestro like a feral dog. Thea knew that storyline. All that fear energy had been overshadowed by even greater cosmic threats. By the time she considered Parallax, most of the fear had already been diluted by context.
Whether her guess was right or wrong, she slowly stood. The world felt sharper—Amanda's faint breathing, insects chirping outside—all were painfully vivid.
Her psychic power had grown—by at least twenty percent.
Her eyes locked onto the yellow sphere. This thing should be looking for Hal Jordan, for the Green Lantern Corps.
Why was it circling her?
Just as she wondered whether she should say something, the sphere suddenly pulsed violently. Not psychic force this time—something else. A glow. Before she could react, it wrapped around her, opened a corridor through thin air—
—and she vanished from the secret base.
Inside the yellow radiance, Thea saw herself being dragged into a tunnel of shifting lights. It was too fast; she had no time to think as it hurled her through a bizarre realm.
Reality as she knew it broke apart.
Mountains flowed like rivers.
Oceans hung motionless in the air.
Gravity didn't exist.
Dreamlike creatures drifted freely.
Jet-black trees chased a three-headed rabbit across the sky.
The entire world was chaos—no order, no hope, no reason.
"This is the Anti-Matter World. One of the negative parallel universes at the bottom of the cosmos," the yellow glow explained for some unknown reason.
But Thea's thoughts were nowhere near fast enough to keep up. They left the Anti-Matter World almost instantly. The glow completed seven hyperspace jumps, then—absurdly—did a hard stop, flinging Thea out.
She flipped mid-air and landed on solid ground.
Real ground.
Gravity.
Thank the gods.
This was the material realm—she wasn't destined to float in a void for centuries.
Where was she?
She looked up. The sky glowed with sickly green light dripping through black clouds. When the clouds briefly parted, a deep red glow shone from behind them—not quite a star, more like some gravitational anomaly.
This definitely wasn't Earth.
The air was thin—low oxygen. Even with divine enhancements, the sudden drop made her uncomfortable.
She glanced around. She was on the highest point in the area—at the peak of a narrow, impossibly tall mountain at the center of what could be called a city.
"Earthling, welcome to Planet Oa. Your body is remarkable—no ring, no augmentation—and yet you can breathe freely here. Hard to believe, for someone from Earth."
A voice came from her right—soft, but clear and authoritative.
Thea turned.
A small blue-skinned elder hovered calmly beside her.