Deadshot kept his rifle trained strictly on the alley exit.
As a master marksman, a single glance was all he needed to calculate his target's speed and predict the exact millisecond he would emerge. Even if the target tried to hide in the shadows, he would never escape the crosshairs.
However, the very next moment, a man on a bicycle launched out of a ninth-floor window at breakneck speed, soaring across the gap and crashing straight into the ninth floor of the adjacent building.
"?"
Deadshot blinked. His brain was still trying to process the sheer absurdity of a flying bicycle, but his training was pure instinct. Before he could even form a thought, his finger subconsciously pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The heavy roar of the sniper rifle echoed off the rooftops. The bullet pierced right through the black-robed cyclist in mid-air, burying itself deep into the brick wall of the opposite building.
A hit?
Definitely a hit.
With a veteran gunman's intuition, Deadshot was absolutely certain his round had found its mark.
But a second later, the dark figure flashed across the street through another window. His speed hadn't dropped, his movements were just as agile, and there was zero sign of injury.
Missed?
Originally, Deadshot had assumed the guy on the bicycle was just some low-level distraction. A nuisance he could swat out of the sky before focusing his full attention on Deathstroke. But now, it was becoming clear that getting rid of him wasn't going to be so simple.
He tapped the side of his mask, slightly adjusting the calibration on his cybernetic eye, and raised the rifle again.
Bang! Bang!
Seeing that Jude had successfully drawn Deadshot's aggro, the lone Deathstroke broke into a dead sprint. Moving at the speed of a high-performance vehicle, he used Deadshot's blind spots to rapidly close the distance between them.
Deadshot's oppressive pressure is insane, Jude thought, pedaling frantically.
He had swapped his ghost mask for a PVZ pumpkin. Deadshot's marksmanship was so unbelievably outrageous that whether Jude peeked out of cover or not, a bullet would inevitably find him at the next intersection. Already, two of the pumpkins he had equipped had been completely shattered.
Even though Jude desperately chose unpredictable routes, trying his best to stay entirely out of Deadshot's line of sight, the assassin's methods simply defied human logic. Deadshot only needed to know Jude's general location to calculate an impossible shot.
Worse, Jude had to keep moving toward Deadshot's position to act as bait, forcing him to continually expose himself. Despite his erratic pedaling and incredible speed, Deadshot was practically turning him into a sieve—even switching to different high-powered rounds to try and inflict substantial damage.
"Oh, is that how it is?" Deadshot muttered from his perch.
Bang!
Another gunshot ripped through the air, accompanied by the sharp smell of burnt powder and a massive muzzle flash. A scorching metal slug spun out of the barrel, breaking the sound barrier. It struck an exposed steel rebar jutting from a ruined wall, ricocheted downward into the hood of an abandoned car, bounced a second time, and slammed squarely into Jude's back despite his heavy cover.
"Damn it!"
Jude cursed inwardly as the massive kinetic force slammed into him, throwing him to the ground.
Through his scope, Deadshot watched his target collapse. Half of the body was left sprawling outside of cover. Deadshot initially intended to aim for the head to finish the job, but the target slumped entirely flat, removing any clean angle for a kill shot.
Instead, he rapidly squeezed off five or six insurance rounds into the exposed sections of the black robe.
For the first three shots, the body violently jerked. After the next few, it lay perfectly, entirely still.
Is he dead?
Deadshot finally let out a breath. He had shot the guy several times already but until this moment, he hadn't seen a drop of blood. He had honestly begun to suspect he was shooting at a literal ghost. After all, if a bullet is stopped by body armor, it doesn't leave an exit hole in the concrete behind the target.
In reality, the PvZ Pumpkin's protection mechanism for Jude was damage absorption, not attack blocking. The bullets still physically passed through him—an odd "mechanism adaptation" the system made to blend into the real world.
At this exact moment, Jude was comfortably lying flat on the ground with a fruit candy in his mouth, sighing dejectedly. As far as he was concerned, this mission for the Riddler was just him showing up to clock in. No matter how much the guy paid him, he wasn't about to actually risk his life.
But his bait tactic had worked a little too well. Deadshot seemed to take the evasion as a personal insult to his professional pride, specifically targeting Jude until he was forced to hit the deck and play dead.
Alas, it's so much easier to just lie here, Jude thought, chewing on the candy. It would be great if I could just lay low and do absolutely nothing forever.
Meanwhile, Deathstroke finally closed the gap. As the two heavy-hitters clashed, the methodical sniper fire erupted into the chaotic, rapid-fire bursts of close-quarters combat. Knowing Batman was rushing toward the scene at full speed, Jude casually got up, dusted off his robe, hopped back on his bicycle, and pedaled after them.
If it weren't for the fact that he needed to keep an eye on things, he would have happily played dead until the fight ended, or just gone home. But the two mercenaries had dragged their brawl from the streets directly into Gotham Central Station.
When Jude rolled up to the station entrance, the deafening roar of automatic gunfire and the panicked screams of civilians echoed from inside. It was obvious the two assassins were evenly matched at mid-range, and had now escalated to brutal close-quarters combat.
Unfortunately, the station was still heavily operational. As the gang war dragged on, a massive surge of Gotham citizens had flocked there, desperate to flee the war zone.
Inside the grand terminal, Deathstroke had already drawn his twin katanas. As a military-enhanced super-soldier, his movements were terrifyingly swift and erratic. To a normal human eye, his trajectory was impossible to track; he was nothing more than a lethal blur of black and orange.
Deadshot emerged from behind a shattered ticket counter, raising his twin submachine guns and unleashing a relentless wall of lead. His aim was locked perfectly onto Deathstroke's center of mass—even against a superhuman, this kind of tracking was mere child's play for him.
Deathstroke gripped his swords tight. With his enhanced kinetic vision and reflexes, he could practically see the individual bullets hanging in the air.
Clang, clang, clang!
The twin blades turned into streams of silver light. Combining his terrifying physical strength with the hardened alloy steel, Slade literally chopped the incoming bullets out of the air. He allowed only the glancing, non-lethal rounds to slip past his guard and spark harmlessly against his heavy armor, though the sheer kinetic impact forced his advance to slow.
At this time, the crowd in the station was already rushing towards the exit in fear.
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