When Neela, Timewalker discovers a threat against the entirety of the time-space continuum, she recruits Faith Herbert, a.k.a. Zephyr, a.k.a. Summer Smith, who is sticking to her civilian identity since Zephyr has been framed for murder in the events of her own series, to help her stop it.
The title is a reference to a part of the original Rai book, which was retitled Rai and the Future Force after the events of the Unity crossover, which featured the death of the original Rai.
Tropes
- Boring, but Practical: The robot has a very clunky design, but is powerful enough to destroy time and space bit by bit and fight and kill the heroes over and over.
- Crisis Crossover: Downplayed in that the team eventually comes to include almost all of the heroes in the Valiant line at the time, but we only really follow Faith, Neela and Ank and the rest keep getting killed by the robot.
- Cruel Mercy: Chris Chriswell points out to the robot that it has seen how much pain humanity causes itself throughout time and convinces it that letting it keep existing to suffer it is a better revenge than wiping it out.
- Decoy Protagonist: While Faith is the title character, the one who most drives the plot is Neela, who recruits her first and keeps retrying when the group's attempts fail.
- Enemy Mine: In the group's fourth attempt, rather than recruit all the Valiant heroes again for another slaughter, Faith gets the idea to recruit a young Chris Chriswell and convince him that he and the robot are in a movie and that he's playing a supervillain trying to trick him into giving up his plan.
- Glamour Failure: Ank uses a Zelig device, just like Neela, which makes her look like a heavy-set human to Faith when they first meet and bystanders. However, because Ank is also roughly 10 feet tall, she still stands out since the Zelig can't mask her height.
- Running Gag: Neela, an actual time traveler, really doesn't like Doctor Who and gets mildly annoyed whenever Faith references it.
- Serial Escalation: Neela's attempts to stop the time-destroying event. First she tries to just bring Faith, which fails. For the second attempt, she also gets Faith to bring along the other Renegades, which fails. The third time she and Faith recruit not just the Renegades, but all the other heroes of the Valiant universe from the present day and the 41st century, which also ends up not being enough.
- Shout-Out: The robot sometimes quotes classic sci-fi movies and TV, like "I'll be back" and "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast".
- Temporal Suicide: After being convinced to give up on trying to wipe out humanity, the robot goes back in time and kills its past self at the time when it was about to start doing that, undoing its own existing and preventing the time-space crisis.
