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The void was not empty. It was filled with the silent roar of Xen's endless grief. It was an auditory hallucination burned into the fabric of his awareness, a constant feedback loop amplified by the very device keeping his cold, dead heart beating: the Red Lantern Power Ring.
It pulsed on his finger, a jagged, raw scar of crimson light. Its power was not drawn from hope, will, or fear; it was dredged from the deepest, most corrosive part of his soul—the well of unadulterated vengeance.
He was a hurricane of hatred, a weapon of cosmic-scale retribution, and he was gaining ground.
The chase had lasted three cycles through three different sectors. It had carved a path of shattered vessels, incinerated moonlets, and dead, choked suns. It had left nothing behind but the scarlet residue of his power and the echoing silence of his victims. Xen didn't care for the collateral. The only thing that mattered was the skittering, cowardly vessel ahead: the Harrower's Spite. Inside, nestled like a maggot in the heart of a bruised fruit, was the last of them. The one who had orchestrated the final, agonizing horror that defined Xen's existence.
He focused his mind, or what little of it wasn't molten with fury, on the ship's rapidly diminishing vector.
No. Not this time. You won't escape.
The Red Ring, responding to the intensity of his internal scream, overloaded its output. His crimson armor, usually a dull, arterial sheen, began to glow with the incandescent heat of a star-forged plasma furnace. He broke the sound barrier—not of air, but of the very concept of velocity. Space blurred and stretched. He was less a physical being and more a singularity of speed and destructive will.
The Harrower's Spite registered the incoming impactor and deployed its final, desperate defensive sequence. A shimmering, gold-tinted energy shield flared to life, fed by massive conduits running from the rear reactor core. It was a formidable barrier, designed to withstand sustained orbital bombardment.
Xen didn't slow. He didn't swerve.
He opened his mouth.
A soundless, guttural roar tore from his throat, a noise that existed only in the sub-space channels of the Red Ring's internal comms. And with the roar, the physical manifestation of his distilled rage, the corrosive, blood-red plasma that had replaced his very life force, erupted.
It wasn't a beam. It was a torrent. A concentrated wave of hate given physical form. The viscous, scarlet energy struck the gold shield like a billion-ton hammer forged of pure acid.
FZZZZZZZK-CRACK!
The shield didn't just fail; it dissolved. The gold-tinted energy turned sickly green, then black, before vanishing entirely, leaving behind a smoking, pockmarked hull. The plasma didn't dissipate; it clung. It was not fire, but rage made solid, and it began to eat through the ship's reinforced plating like rust through tin foil. The Harrower's Spite screamed a mechanical protest as its integrity failed.
Xen tore through the final layers of plating, his own speed and momentum carving a tunnel directly into the ship's reactor chamber. He didn't use a construct—he used his body. He was the projectile.
Inside the Harrower's Spite, emergency lights flashed. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, fear, and scorched metal. Xen stopped, hovering in the wreckage, his boots kicking off debris that dissolved before it could hit the ground. His eyes, twin pools of burning crimson, scanned the carnage.
The target, a pathetic, pale creature named Kyros—a high-ranking technician in the regime that had decimated his people—was scrambling toward a pedestal at the far end of the chamber. Kyros's face was a mask of utter, gut-wrenching terror. He knew what Xen was. He knew what Red Lanterns represented. He had seen the archives, seen the historical reports detailing their singular, terrifying purpose. He had believed the legends were exaggerations. Now, facing the tangible reality of Xen, Kyros knew they were understated.
"Stop!" Xen's voice, filtered through the Ring, was a deep, grating sound, like tectonic plates shifting beneath a world. "You will kneel and you will beg for the forgiveness of the twelve million lost."
Kyros fumbled with the controls on the pedestal. He didn't look at Xen. "It's… it's not for you, monster! It's not the end! I secured a contingency! They… they told me it would work!"
Xen's entire existence narrowed to the distance between them. Every fiber of his being, every synapse firing in his pain-racked brain, was geared toward bridging that gap and ending the cycle. He raised his hand, the Ring's light growing to an intolerable supernova. A construct of massive, jagged plasma claws began to form, ready to tear the technician into component atoms and then obliterate the atoms themselves.
Kill him. End the pain. Finish the oath.
But Kyros was faster. With a desperate, high-pitched laugh that bordered on a sob, he slammed his fist onto a crystalline viewport on the pedestal.
A deafening, whining sound ripped through the chamber, not from the ship, but from the pedestal itself. The crystal, which had seemed like a structural component, began to pulse with a color that defied Xen's memory: a violent, unstable aquamarine. The air around it warped, shimmering like heat haze over asphalt.
"You are mine!" Xen roared, launching the plasma claws.
But the claws didn't reach. They struck the edge of the expanding aquamarine field and were instantly muted. The red plasma, the manifestation of pure, cosmic rage, was reduced to innocuous smoke, like a fire doused by an invisible flood.
The air pressure dropped violently. The room vibrated with an unnatural frequency. The viewport on the pedestal was no longer a window; it was a swirling, disc-shaped hole in reality, a kaleidoscope of impossibly bright, multi-colored light.
"It's a Dimensional Breach Engine!" Kyros shrieked, his voice cracking with a manic relief. He scrambled back, practically throwing himself backward into the shimmering maw. "They said it would take me anywhere else! Far from you! Far from the Lanterns! You'll never find me now, you cursed revenant!"
The light swallowed him whole.
For a single, agonizing fraction of a second, Xen's momentum stalled. The single-minded focus of his hatred was fractured by surprise. A dimensional breach? He was aware of the concept, of the rumored, high-risk, black-market technology that could potentially cross universal boundaries. But it was only ever theoretical, a madness whispered among paranoid smugglers.
Then, the hesitation vanished, drowned instantly by a tidal wave of panic and primordial fear. The target—his last target, the final necessary component for his peace—was slipping away. All the years of pursuit, the self-destruction, the cosmic agony he had endured to keep his rage burning—it would be for nothing. The oath would remain incomplete. His soul would be eternally shackled to his pain.
The thought was unbearable. It was an insult to the dead.
Xen didn't think about the risk. He didn't process the warnings his Ring was screaming at him—warnings about 'Spatial Shear,' 'Matter Instability,' and 'Universal Disparity.' He didn't care if the engine led to a black hole or the end of time itself.
He took one massive, charging leap, plunging directly into the heart of the blinding, unstable rift.
"YOU WON'T ESCAPE ME!"
The transition was not instantaneous. It was an eternity compressed into a microsecond of indescribable suffering.
The first sensation was the cold. Not the familiar, comforting cold of space, but a fundamental, absolute cold that seemed to extinguish the very concept of heat. It worked in direct opposition to the super-heated plasma that comprised Xen's lifeblood. The second sensation was tearing. His armor, the hyper-dense, self-repairing construct of the Red Ring, felt as though it were being peeled off his skeleton. Every molecule in his body was being stretched, smeared, and compressed simultaneously.
He saw colors that had no names. Geometric shapes that defined mathematical impossibilities. He heard the sound of the universe weeping, a high-pitched, desperate keen that nearly drowned out the constant scream in his own mind.
His connection to the Red Lantern Central Power Battery—a faint, eternal hum he always sensed on the periphery of his consciousness—snapped. It wasn't just gone; it felt non-existent. The channel was not blocked; the source simply wasn't there.
Panic, a cold, unfamiliar visitor, tried to surface. But Xen's training, the raw instinct forged in a thousand wars fueled by rage, immediately overwhelmed it. He focused on the only thing that mattered: the Ring. He poured every ounce of his remaining, visceral hate into it, demanding stability.
No. I will not die here. I haven't killed him yet.
The Ring, his ever-faithful servant, obeyed the command of its host's pure malice. It pulsed with a violent, independent light, carving a small, protective bubble of crimson plasma around him. He felt the reality-tearing forces push at the bubble, but the sheer, focused intensity of his rage held them at bay.
He saw Kyros ahead, spiraling helplessly, the terror in the technician's eyes magnified a hundredfold by the distortion field. Kyros was screaming, but no sound reached Xen. He reached out with a mental command, focusing a plasma tether to snag his target—
CRACK!
The aquamarine portal engine, stressed beyond its theoretical tolerances by Xen's raw power, did the only thing it could: it violently rejected both occupants and then violently collapsed. The noise was the sound of a universe sewing itself shut. The brilliant light vanished, replaced by a sudden, jarring blackout.
Xen woke to silence.
He wasn't floating. He was embedded, torso-deep, in the black, pulverized surface of a nameless, small asteroid, its gravity negligible. Shards of igneous rock floated lazily in the void around his head.
He spat, the movement a purely mechanical reflex. It was a pointless gesture. There was no air to spit into, but the residual blood-plasma that exited his mouth sizzled briefly before dissipating into the vacuum.
He pushed himself free of the rock with a grunt, his muscles screaming a protest that was instantly overridden by the Ring's life-support function. His armor was scarred and blackened, the crimson sheen dull, the left shoulder pauldron fractured and leaking a slow, corrosive energy vapor. The Ring, for the first time since he had first claimed it, was strangely dim.
"REPORT," Xen commanded, his voice a strained croak of filtered static.
The Ring responded instantly, its response displayed in crimson glyphs across his vision.
ENERGY CORES: 95.3%
EXTERNAL COMS: FAILURE
RED LANTERN CORPS SIGNAL: NON-EXISTENT
LIFE SUPPORT: ACTIVE
LOCATION: UNKNOWN. DIMENSION: UNVERIFIED.
The numbers were meaningless, secondary to the one word that pulsed like a hammer blow to his remaining consciousness: NON-EXISTENT.
He tried again, overriding the command. He stretched his senses, reaching out with the specialized sub-frequency bands only a Red Lantern could utilize, seeking the familiar, distant comfort of the Central Battery—a lighthouse in the cosmic storm.
Silence. Not the silence of space, but the absence of his kind. The absence of the power source that defined his world.
He focused on the space around him. It was a region of cosmic dust and scattered stellar remnants. The nearby galaxy, visible as a bright, dense swathe of white-blue light, was utterly unfamiliar. It didn't correspond to any celestial map or sector designation he had imprinted from the vast, universal database of the Red Lantern Corps. The constellation patterns were wrong. The galactic density was wrong. The fundamental physics felt wrong.
Unknown. Unverified.
The Ring's cold, mechanical assessment was beginning to sink in, turning the boiling rage in his chest into a terrifying, crystalline dread.
He raised his hand. "LOCATE SUBJECT: KYROS."
The Ring hesitated. It stuttered, the glyphs flickering red-black.
SUBJECT LOCATION: UNVERIFIABLE.
TRACE SIGNATURE: ERADICATED BY RIFT COLLAPSE.
RECOMMENDATION: RETREAT AND REGROUP.
Kyros was gone. Not killed, which would have brought release. Not escaped, which would have meant continued pursuit. Gone. Wiped from the slate of reality, possibly atomized, possibly shunted across a billion light-years to another plane entirely. His ultimate fate was irrelevant.
The vengeance was denied.
It was a failure so profound, so absolute, that it struck Xen with the force of a cosmic ray blast. His life's single, bloody purpose—the one thing keeping the blood-plasma pumping through his veins, the singular, focused objective that had defined his existence since the day he took the oath—was suddenly, violently, ripped away by a twist of unstable technology.
The roar of grief inside his head intensified, but it was a muffled, choked roar. The Red Ring, sensing the catastrophic, existential rage that threatened to implode its host, began to work overtime. It poured extra doses of its crimson power into his veins, drowning out the shock, reminding him of his duty.
Rage. Rage. Rage.
Xen screamed, but the sound was trapped behind the filter of his helmet. He slammed his fists onto the asteroid, not forming a construct, but simply lashing out with raw, physical power. The asteroid, a mass the size of a small moonlet, groaned beneath the force of the blow. Deep fissures spiderwebbed across its surface.
"NO!"
He stood amidst the wreckage of the nameless rock, his breath rasping, his body trembling with the colossal power and monumental fury he couldn't unleash on his target.
He was marooned. Stranded. Alone in a sector of space that bore no resemblance to his own. His purpose was hollowed out, leaving him standing on the edge of an abyss—the abyss of his own shattered mind. He was a creature designed for one function: vengeance. And that function was now useless.
He scanned the stars again, his visor zooming in on a prominent, swirling cloud of gas and color. It looked like a galactic core, impossibly bright and beautiful. A cluster of vessels, sleek and brightly colored, were streaking through a nearby trajectory, headed toward the luminous center. They were vessels Xen had never seen, bearing insignia he had never encountered. Their propulsion technology was different, their hull composition alien to his knowledge base.
A small, insignificant vessel—a scout craft—detached from the cluster and altered its course, heading directly toward Xen's position on the battered asteroid.
The Ring, its analysis complete, flashed a warning in his peripheral vision.
INCOMING VESSEL. POWER SIGNATURES: UNKNOWN. THREAT ASSESSMENT: LOW.
Xen ignored the analysis. Threat level was irrelevant. He was consumed by the crushing, cold fact of his denial. The fury needed a home. The anguish needed a conduit. His power demanded a release.
His eyes burned brighter, two tiny crimson pinpricks in the terrifying darkness.
I am lost. I am denied.
The energy vapor leaking from his fractured pauldron intensified, turning from a slow wisp into a raging plume.
"You will find your punishment here," Xen snarled, directing the hatred, the disappointment, the cosmic grief at the insignificant, unsuspecting vessel approaching through the strange, silent, wrong universe. "I will make you pay for his escape."
The Red Lantern raised his fist, the Ring burning with a renewed, desperate intensity, prepared to unleash a wave of dimensional rage upon the first sign of life in this new, alien reality. The hunt had failed. The violence had not. He would take his vengeance on the only thing left: existence itself.