The closest neighbouring star to one that Korugar orbited was the white dwarf designated LR231. There were no inhabited planets in this system, no signs of life on any level. Hal stared into the heart of this glowing sun, eyes shielded by his construct visor/mask. Although he used it to conceal his identity back on Earth, the mask also served as a holographic heads up display for Hal. It laid vital information such as ring charge level, current environmental details including atmospheric composition and gravity, current sector location, speed, and positional data over his vision so that it was always accessible at a glance. This part of his uniform was based on the displays that Hal was familiar with in fighter jets.

Not all Lantern officers utilised such tactical displays. Kilowog, Vell, and Guy were among those who didn't wear 'masks', and thus did not have this information directly relayed into their vision. Kilowog had all this technical data fed into his mind through the ring, since he was capable of processing it all at once due to the increased mental capacity unique to his species. John opted to manifest his as simple contact lenses, removing the need for a mask and as a result, painting his eyes with a green glow. Vell and Guy seemed to want to punch first and ask questions later, which was admirable.

As Hal turned away from the star, he looked towards Katma. She had a construct scanner fixed on the relative location of Korugar, her face chiselled in stone. Hal pushed as hard as he could to have someone else join him on this assignment, but the Guardians denied his request. To them, it was a Lantern's duty to be responsible for their home sector...but Hal believed she was too emotionally involved.

Korugar, as every single GL recruit is told, was ruled by ThaalSinestro in a brutal dictatorship toward the end of his GL career. He turned his people into slaves, invaded their privacy, staged executions, and promised that it was all in the pursuit of peace and justice. All the while, the maniac used his Green Lantern ring as the instrument of his despotic regime...also wearing the uniform that came with it. Hal, who was at the end of his first year as a Green Lantern at the time, discovered Sinestro's secret empire and defeated him on the very planet he enslaved.

However, it was already too late. The people of Korugarlooked upon Hal with the same anger and fear that they gave Sinestro. When Sinestro's ring was revoked and sent to find a new bearer, it was a sheer coincidence that it chose another Korugarian; Katma Tui. As soon as the ring slid onto her finger and coated her in the GL uniform, she was formally banished and disowned by her own people. At that point, if she refused the recruitment, she'd have nowhere to go...so she stayed on.

Now, Hal could see the conflict in her eyes as she studied the spectral data that her constructs were gathering. This was her homeworld...a place that cast her out years ago, and now they needed her help. Quite frankly, Hal would feel the same way but that didn't mean that he thought her being here was a good idea. "Hey..." He said as he hovered closer to her.

Katma jolted, averting her eyes from the scopes and scanners that enveloped her. "Y-Yes?"

"How...how are you doing?"

"Honestly? I don't know. I know they ostracised me...but...I can't help but feel that I should've known that Thaal came back. He took it again...right under my nose."

"You couldn't have known."

"This is my sector, Hal. It's meant to be under my protection."

"Yeah, but Korugar revoked their citizenship of Guardian Space. Legally speaking, it isn't a part of your sector anymore."

"Exactly. Maybe he's right. Maybe all this...red tape is why we can't do our jobs the way we need to. Shouldn't we be able to help whoever needs it?"

Hal crossed his arms and glanced downward. "We need rules, Katma. We can't just...run around without considering what other people want."

"That's pretty ironic coming from you."

With a groan, he threw his arms up in frustration. "Think about it. If we force our will onto a bunch of people who don't want it, that becomes tyranny and exploitation. Freedom of choice is what we need to stand for...because if we don't, we're just like Sinestro who's willing to enslave his own people for some twisted vision of peace. We're cops, not stormtroopers." Hal pressed.

Katma ran a hand down her face as she shook her head. A rickety breath escaped from her quivering lips. "...I-I'm sorry, Hal. I just feel..."

"It's okay. You don't need to explain yourself." The human said as he looked towards his colleague. "This must be...really difficult."

Suddenly, an alarm shrieked through both officers' ears, seizing their attention and drawing it onto the holographic screens next to Katma's instrumentation. The Korugarianwoman gasped "Wait...I just picked up a parallax spike on the surface of the planet..."

There wasn't much a parallax burst of that magnitude could signify apart from the activation of a yellow power ring. Hal began to worry about Vell as well as regret his approval of this deep cover mission.

"Where?" He asked.

"Not too far from Vell's last broadcast."

Hal narrowed his brow as he hovered upwards. "Shit. We better move...light takes three minutes to reach us from Korugar."

"Meaning that this data is three minutes old. We should get over there right now."

"Translight to Korugar." Hal demanded, lining up his trajectory with his destination.

Katma promptly found herself by Hal's side "There's something you should know before we get there. After Sinestro's defeat, the Korugarian authorities established orbital defence platforms around the planet to protect against extra-terrestrial threats."

Hal arched an eyebrow and remarked sarcastically "Lemmeguess, they're going to paint us as targets and start unloading as soon as we drop out of transluminal velocity?"

"Yes." Katma answered, a tinge of embarrassment at her species managing to show itself through her façade.

A mental command engaged the spatial cascade drive coresinside the two power rings, folding the space between the Lantern officers and their set destination in order to allow faster than light travel. Hal and Katma crossed the three light minutes in less than a second thanks to the advanced technology of the Guardians.

As soon as the Green Lanterns dropped out of transit, their senses were bombarded by impact alarms. Several orbital stations, which Hal's scans indicated were housing parallax-actuated Magnetic Accelerator Weapons, began to whirl to life. These aforementioned MAWs were visible from afar since they were massive guns the size of the Empire State Building. They turned and affixed their barrels onto the quickly approaching Lanterns, displaying an incredibly sophisticated targeting system that was able to compensate for the incredible speeds that their targets were maintaining. Quite frankly, Hal would've been impressed if twenty of these weren't going to blow him to bits.

"Get down to Vell's last known position, I'll buy you some time!"

"Sir?!" Katma exclaimed.

"Discharge an ion cloud behind you, that'll confuse their sensor readings!"

With that, Hal broke from the formation just as a cluster of MAWs opened fire. Explosive tungsten rounds about the size of school buses detonated several metres shy of Jordan, chipping his energy shielding and disrupting his flight path. He eagerly watched Katma's positional data on his display, ensuring that she was entering the atmosphere on her way to Vell.

She promptly called "I hope you know what you're doing, Jordan!"

"Me too." He muttered to himself. "Now go save my girlfriend!"

The human seemed to dance between the incoming shots that detonated into flowers of electromagnetically charged bursts. Hal's ears picked up nothing but his own hasty breaths and the occasional flaring of alert signals. The vacuum of space was dead silent, and he was still several miles away from Korugar's atmosphere.

Periodically, Hal fired random shots of ion at the several MAW stations to ensure that they prioritised him instead of Katma. He knew that it was going to take some fancy flyingto draw the attention of these advanced orbital weapons; the kind of stuff that Katma wasn't able to do. She could, however, navigate Korugar to find Vell and Sinestro faster than Hal could ever hope to.

Some close calls followed as he gritted his teeth, urging his limited human mind to stay one step ahead of the incoming projectiles. The cylindrical shells managed to peppereverywhere but Hal's location, which seemed to pop in and out of focus randomly. All but one.

This missile wasn't fired from a MAW platform though. Its superheated, hyper-dense makeup was distilled and charged within the firing chamber of a Yellow Lantern power ring. The payload slammed into Hal's chest and detonated with incredible concussive force. The Green Lantern Sentinel was propelled through empty space, twirling chaotically until his path was interrupted by one of the MAW stations.

Hal's shield was shredded to atoms as he pierced through the outer hull, six decks of the interior, and finally grinded to a halt inside the shuttle bay after cleaving through several spacecraft. The power ring's alarm bellowed into his ears, notifying him that his shields had failed. "Y-Yeah, yeah...I gotcha." He muttered as he pushed himself upwards and wiped blood from his mouth.

A Yellow Lantern landed with a 'thud' before Hal. He brandished a twisted array of jagged blades, all poised and ready to lance forward into his target. "Insect. Your mate is already being strung up by her innards." Arkillo spat. Hal hadn't seen this guy, Sinestro's second in command, since the whole Arxis fiasco.

"For your sake, buddy...? You better be wrong." He snapped.

The Green Lantern charged forward as he consolidated a massive ion charge in his ring. As Arkillo came into range, Jordan swept his hand forward and released the energy which funnelled forth in a focused hurricane of searing hot particles. Arkillo was slammed into a shuttle behind him, crushing the thing into scrap and breaking his concentration enough so that roughly half of his constructs failed and dissipated.

Hal then called through his comm "Tell me you got her, Katma."

The sound of energy fire screamed through the channel, but fortunately it was followed by the sound of Katma's voice. "Affirmative! Sinestro gave her a decent beating, but she's alright now! As long as we stay alert, Sinestro shouldn't be going anywhere!"

Sinestro and the officers under his command were all being buffed by the fear felt by the Korugarians. As powerful as Thaal Sinestro was before, he'd only be stronger now. Hal needed to deal with Arkillo fast.

"Right now the top priority is to-" A scream tore through Hal's throat like tiny shards of glass ripping his throat into tatters. Pain ebbed from his shoulder, and when he finally managed the strength to look down, he saw that the yellow construct of a pipe had been pushed right through it. The fact that the construct wasn't a specialised weapon but instead a piece of regular material spoke about Arkillo's simple yet effective instincts.

"Hal? What's going on?" Vell frantically asked but she was answered with yet another yell as Arkillo lifted Hal's impaled body upward. The pipe dug deeper, tearing through flesh and bone alike, yet the bleeding was subdued by the passive defence systems still remaining in Hal's ring. It was all that was stopping his frail human body from going into shock.

With one violent throw, the Green Lantern was sent hurtling into a nearby wall. The pipe was forced from his shoulder, and the entire structure almost buckled beneath the sheer force - a massive hole was left in its wake.

A grunt escaped Hal's lungs like whiskey out of a shot glass, and thinking that he could desperately use a few bottles right now, he forced a reply for Vell's sake. "I'm...k-kinda busy. Stay outta trouble."

Upon the closure of their communication channel Arkillo charged towards Hal like a gargantuan, bellowing ape. Even injured it was an easy enough task for Hal to dodge him, and instead the Yellow Lantern crashed into the same wall with so earth-shaking a subsidence that he broke the whole thing with his beefy frame; shaking into the room a cloud of white dust like the particulate matter discharged by a volcanic eruption.

Hal touched a hand to the seething gap between his arm and neck, then hissed instinctively at the shot of sharp numbness that started to shoot through that side of his body. The life support suite had already frozen the blood and engaged low level cellular reinforcement; it wasn't going to heal, but it wasn't going to get any worse which was one less thing for Hal to worry about. "Look... I don't really have time to fight you right now, Arkillo. Can I take a raincheck?"

The only response he received was in the release of bright yellow fire from the enemy's ring, Hal swiftly created an influx of water that poured towards the flames...but it didn't distinguish them. In fact, it only made the fire intensify. Hal's body was soon encased in the flames, but he didn't burn. He froze. It was ice cold. An analysis of this strange fire appeared on his visor, and though Hal was currently trying to make a shivering escape, he couldn't help but make an internal sarcastic comment about how this information had come a little too late. Apparently this 'fire' from Arkillo's home planet 'burned' at temperatures below freezing point, and the air was blazing hot. There was no such thing as water.

Hal's skin felt so incredibly stiff and cold that he thought he may have turned into a living ice sculpture. If it wasn't for the hole in his shoulder, which was instead pulsating with searing fiery bursts, he would have truly believed it.

Just as the fire dissipated, Hal pieced together the image of a standard fusion cannon in his mind; including all of its inner workings. It formed in front of him, entwined with pure energy, and without any hesitation Hal fired it. Arkillo may have been nigh unstoppable, but at the expense of speed and agility. He tried to make a shield, but it was a simple rigidslab of metal. His species didn't dabble in advanced forms of protection, their incredibly resilient physiology had evolved to possess great physical defence, and so he had very few references for how a shield was meant to work. Someone like the scientifically brilliant Salaak would've used a folded alloy exterior forged with isometrically jagged panels to better deflect physical impacts, combined with shock-absorbent internal mechanisms; a combination that would've performed far greater.

Arkillo's fragile construct crumbled beneath the cannon's power, and the beast was hit with at least half of its ion output. He stumbled back, but only barely. His personal energy shield absorbed most of the attack, with some of the discharge overflowing and dealing some plasmic burn damage to his body.

Arkillo's reptilian eyes darkened with rage, and with an animalistic growl, he made another structure. It had a very loose form but weaved through the air like the inside of a lava lamp. Hal's ring identified the construct as a Rrulknar; an amorphous weapon from Arkillo's home planet. It was made from a formless liquid metal that could be refined to the thickness of a single atom, making it sharp enough to cleave through nearly anything. The GL swiftly ducked away from the construct, making a charged particle shield to block it. Semi-subconsciously, he made a whip from the deepest reaches of his own thoughts. It looked remarkably like Wonder Woman's lasso but was made from a strengthened Kevlar weave, and as Arkillo applied pressure to Hal's makeshift shield, he flicked it towards the Yellow Lantern's legs and yanked them from the ground.

The construct vanished and the world rumbled at such a massive creature falling. Wasting no time, Hal focused the green light of his ring towards one of the shuttles. He lifted it into the air, only to drop all of its weight on top of Arkillo. The Yellow Lantern roared with rage, but all his struggle seemed to be for nothing. His mind was filled with such fury that he couldn't make a construct, and even if he could, his hand was trapped beneath the shuttle.

Hal turned around and reconnected his link with Vell and Katma. "You two still breathing?"

"Of course we are. Why wouldn't we be? You think I'm a bad Lantern?" Vell snapped over the sound of energy fire.

"I don't think now is the time, Vell...! We could use an assist!" Katma replied, sounding breathless.

"I'm on my-" Hal was cut off once again by the sensor reading flaring onto his screen. There was something big...and it was speeding towards him. Hal glanced over, ring beginning to form some sort of barrier when he saw that it was a shuttle. Arkillo had broken free and thrown it at him.

The time it took to reach him almost seemed to happen in slow motion. Hal realised that whatever structure he had planned to make wasn't going to protect him from something that size, and it was now too late to catch it with something else. This was going to hurt. It wouldn't kill him, thanks to what was left of his defence systems, but he'd certainly feel it for the next few weeks.

The air fell still, and the pain that Hal had been waiting for never came. A yellow glow had captured the shuttle in mid-air and tossed it back towards Arkillo. Hal's brow furrowed just as Mortess appeared before him. He waved a furry hand to Hal, and motioned towards the breach that was torn through the station when Hal was thrust into it by Arkillo. His soulless eyes had small slickers of fire within them, consuming his expression with a determined and centred anger. "Leave us."

"M-Mortess? What the hell are you doing?" Hal gasped.

"Do not make me ask again." The panther-like humanoid hissed. With that, his ring glowed gold before he threw himself in battle against Arkillo. The K'Tullan hunter brandished constructs of brutal and primitive design as he twirled through the air with unmatched speed and agility.

As much as Hal wanted to know what was going on, he wasn't going to get another chance. Sinestro needed to be stopped...and he needed to be stopped now. Hesitantly, the human Lantern plotted a course out of the station. As soon as he departed its vicinity, the other MAW platforms resumed their barrage. "Oh for god's sake, just leave me alone." Hal panted, still fighting against the now numbed pain of his shoulder injury. He locked onto Vell and Katma's positional data and engaged maximum thrust.