"Mick! We don't kill people!"
Snart's shout and the sonic shockwave arrived almost simultaneously.
The high-frequency pulse tore through the air with a sound like a thunderclap compressing itself into a single point, and Mick's body left the ground entirely. He went airborne, which was the intended result. The unintended result was that Shawna, who had just teleported directly behind him to attempt a takedown, went with him.
They hit the pavement in two separate directions.
"Stay away from them!"
The figure came out of the darkness at the edge of the airfield — green hood, green robe, the kind of entrance that suggested someone who had been waiting for exactly the right dramatic moment. When the firelight caught his face, the Rathaway recognized him before anyone else did.
He'd addressed his first line to his father and his second to his mother.
"Hartley?!" Russell Rathaway stared. "Why is he here?"
"Who is that?" Jude asked, looking at Cisco. "He looks like he wandered out of a fantasy novel. Also, objectively speaking, he is extremely good-looking. Like, concerningly good-looking."
"I know him extremely well," Cisco said, with the particular tone of someone who has complex feelings about a person. "My first three weeks at the lab, I had recurring nightmares about him delivering critiques of my work."
"So he has a sharp tongue."
"Razor sharp."
"Can you two possibly worry about me first?!" Shawna had gotten herself upright, though she was holding her lower back with the expression of someone who had just been collateral in a sonic detonation. "We are supposed to be teammates!"
"Get clear of the field," Jude said. "There are three of them and all three are now actively hostile. The shockwaves alone will get you."
She didn't argue. She relocated to their position in a blink, wincing as she straightened. "My entire body feels like it got wrung out. What was that?"
"Sound waves, most likely." Wells's voice came through the team channel, calm as if he were annotating a research paper.
Cisco spun toward his earpiece. "Doctor? Have you been on this channel the whole time?"
"I wasn't planning to listen in. But given that Hartley paid me a personal visit last night, I thought it advisable to monitor his parents' situation."
"Last night?" Cisco's voice went up. "The broken ceiling, the chandelier — that was Hartley?"
"Yes. Barry noted that the glass broke without a point of impact — no external force applied to any single location, just a uniform fracture across the surface. That's resonance, not percussion. Once he described it, I thought of Hartley immediately." A pause. "I've been preoccupied and didn't want to add to the team's concerns."
"Or," Cisco said, with uncharacteristic sharpness, "you were protecting your favorite student."
"Cisco." Wells's tone didn't change. "I value Hartley because he is exceptional. A talent equal to yours, in a different discipline." He let a beat pass. "I don't say that lightly."
Cisco went quiet. It was hard to say who the compliment had been aimed at, but it had landed somewhere useful.
"Current situation on the ground?" Wells prompted.
"Hartley is engaging Mick directly," Jude said, watching. "He's using what look like mechanical gloves — green, glowing. Some kind of emission device."
"The gloves are a delivery mechanism, not the weapon itself. The weapon is acoustic frequency. Without the gloves, he has no combat capability — but with them, his effective range is significant." Wells paused. "What's he wearing?"
"Green robe, hood. No visible armor."
"Then he's relying entirely on range and reaction time. Don't get close to him, and don't let Shawna try to get close — sonic area effects during a teleport could be fatal."
Shawna, who had been about to say something, closed her mouth.
"Snart's freeze gun," Jude added, "is also an issue."
"Snart has already displayed his pattern recognition," Wells agreed. "He's watching."
"I could try—" Shawna started.
"The asbestos suit on Mick is a dead end," Jude said. "No conductivity, full insulation, nothing gets through. And Hartley's attacks are wide-radius — if you're mid-teleport when one connects, there's no recovery from that."
"Snart isn't invincible, though—"
"Snart," Jude said patiently, "has a brain."
Shawna's competitive instincts, which had been building pressure since the start of this conversation, made a unilateral decision.
She was gone before he finished the sentence.
She reappeared to Snart's left and rear, already reaching—
The freeze beam caught her square.
The ice formed around her in under a second, full-body, feet to shoulders, with the thoroughness of someone who had been waiting for exactly that angle of approach.
Snart looked at the frozen column where Shawna had been standing and exhaled slowly.
"Because I have a brain, girl." He sounded more tired than triumphant. "Your attack pattern was fully visible yesterday. I knew your options coming in: Hartley or me, and Hartley has audio-range defenses, so that left me." He tilted his head. "Also — and I say this as professional advice — you telegraph your destination before you move. You look at where you're going first. I can see where you're looking. So I know where to aim."
He crouched, tipped the ice block onto its side, and pushed it gently off the edge of the active battlefield.
Jude pressed his fingers to his forehead.
"I told you he had a brain."
Across the field, Hartley was holding ground against Heat Wave's flamethrower with the particular confidence of someone who had already done the physics.
"Since you appear to have studied very little formal science," Hartley called out, adjusting the frequency dial on his glove, "I'll keep this simple. Every physical object has a resonant frequency. Sound is vibration. When the vibrational frequency of a sound wave matches the resonant frequency of an object—"
"I hate people like you!" Mick's answer came in the form of more fire. "You lecture-room types, acting like you run the whole—"
"Community college, I'm guessing? Or did you not quite finish?"
That landed. It wasn't even Mick's worst wound — the man had been called worse — but the delivery was precise enough to do the job. Heat Wave's temper, already running on fumes, went fully combustible. He came at Hartley with everything the flamethrower had.
Hartley stepped back, adjusted once more, and fired both gloves simultaneously.
The resonant pulse hit the flamethrower at the exact right frequency.
The weapon exploded in Mick's hands in a shower of sparks and twisted metal — clean, total, comprehensive.
Hartley straightened his hood.
"As I was saying," he said, "resonance."