"What is that?"
"Some kind of aircraft?"
"We're in Central City, not Metropolis. They don't have aircraft."
"Wait—why does that look familiar?"
The couple on the sidewalk had tilted their heads back to look at the sky at the exact same time, and now they were staring up with the simultaneous expression of people whose brains had just made a connection they hadn't expected.
"How did he get here?"
The figure descending from the sky was picking up speed—not slowing, not gliding, accelerating. It was the trajectory of something in freefall that has only recently become aware that the ground is a serious concern.
"He's going to die—Jude's going to crash—"
A voice drifted down through the gale, faint but recognizable:
"I'm not dead yet. Stop jinxing it."
The triangular frame unfolded from his back in one clean, snapping motion. It was Kite Man's folding wingsuit, assembled in Cisco's workshop from blueprints that had been sitting in Jude's system storage since Gotham. It had been built over several enthusiastic late nights by a man who could not look at novel mechanical schematics without immediately needing to construct them. They'd tested it twice. Jude had familiarized himself with the controls.
This was the first time it had been deployed in an actual emergency, at high altitude, over an unfamiliar city... and it worked exactly as designed.
He leveled out thirty feet above street level, killed the descent, and touched down in the space right between the two of them.
"How did you—" Drake started.
"Don't." Jude held up a hand. He was already checking the internal readout, the numbers visible only to him.
Ninety-five percent.
The repulsive force of the universe was no longer a background pressure—it was active, directional, and rapidly building toward something final.
"There's no time. I'm about to be expelled." He grabbed them both firmly by the arm. "You're coming back to Gotham with me right now. Both of you. If we miss this window, I cannot re-enter this universe, and you are stuck here indefinitely."
They exchanged a look with the speed of people who have learned, through hard experience, that when Jude says something incomprehensible with that particular tone of urgency, the correct response is to move first and ask questions later.
Then the blue-green lightning arrived.
It came from the wrong direction—too fast, the trajectory completely impossible to track. A streak that crossed half a block in the time it took Jude to simply register it. Faster than Barry. Faster than Eobard Thawne. The figure resolved for half a second into a black-suited speedster crackling with cold light, and the voice that came out of him had the same vibrational distortion as the Reverse Flash, but deeper, rawer, and deliberately uglier.
"Where do you think you're going?"
I can identify a villain by his voice alone, Jude thought. This one's not even trying to hide it.
"Only an idiot answers questions from someone they've never met," he said smoothly.
The Drakes nodded in unison.
The speedster in black laughed—the kind of laugh that communicates absolutely nothing about humor and everything about intention—and became a streak of blue once again.
Three targets, the speedster calculated in the time it took the light to cross the distance between them. The one who refused to answer, center. Break the neck of the one on the left first. Use the woman on the right as leverage. Then take the center one apart slowly.
It was the arrogance of the nearly uncatchable—the reflex assumption that people without the Speed Force are simply furniture, that the only variable in the equation is which order to dismantle them.
He reached them.
Gold lightning suddenly flickered around the man in the middle.
"Idiot," Jude said, wearing an expression that the speedster—to his considerable surprise—had not expected from a man about to be killed. "How do you expect to hit anyone with a punch that slow?"
The speedster in black processed this. His hand, mid-strike, encountered absolutely nothing.
The universe, which had been building to this moment for the last thirty seconds, exhaled.
Jude stopped resisting. The repulsive force that had been pressing against him from every direction suddenly found no opposition, and the three of them vanished. Not dramatically, not with a flash or a bang, but with the clean totality of something removed from a space it was never supposed to occupy.
The speedster's fist completed its arc through empty air.
The roar of rage that followed shook windows for two blocks.
"I will find your world," the black suit promised the empty street, "and grind you to dust."
He had a pretty good idea how to do it, too.
Jude came back to himself in his own Central City.
Not Barry's. His. The one that had been running without him for however long this had actually taken.
He sat on the pavement for a moment and let the system process.
[SPECIAL REMINDER] You have been removed from the universe by the universe itself. This is what happens when you meddle. You're welcome for the experience.
[MISSION COMPLETE: "FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE"]Business trip status: concluded. Cleanup status: mostly satisfactory. Reward Acquired: Intermediate Energy Affinity (Increases maximum mana capacity; grants seven additional anti-crisis energy affinities).
[CONNECTIVITY UPDATE] As a consequence of removing the Drakes from their universe and severing their potential interference with that timeline's future: +5% connection.Your connection with this universe has reached 100%.You are recognized as a native element of this world. Official access to this universe has been fully restored. All skills and items from both universes have been combined into a single inventory.
Jude exhaled. A long, genuine exhale of pure relief.
The Speed Force. He hadn't been able to use it natively—it wasn't one of his normal energy sources. But Satsuki had been running analysis on the Speed Force energy cubes for months, and at the precise moment it mattered, she'd activated the compatibility bridge between the stored Speed Force energy and his own system. A one-time assist, but it had been enough. Enough to move faster than a Black speedster mid-strike and not die.
Without that, he reflected, the result would have been considerably less elegant.
"Okay." Drake looked around the street with the careful expression of a man trying to locate himself on a map he's never seen. "What just happened. What was that explosion. Where are we." He paused and pressed his forehead. "Are we still in Central City?"
"Technically yes," Jude said. "Just a different one."
"The bad guy—"
"Gone. Different universe. Can't follow us here." He stood up. "You're safe."
Camilla had been watching him since they landed, with the focused patience of someone who is going to wait out all the chaos until she can ask the question she actually wants answered. She asked it now.
"Jude. Did you come here specifically to find us?"
"I got your letter." He casually dusted off his jacket. "I'll keep the explanation simple: you two are remarkably hard to kill. Metropolis, Central City, three separate catastrophic events—an ordinary person wouldn't have survived even one of them. After the letter arrived, I saw a news item about unusual phenomena in Central City, and I came to look. You'd apparently been missing for about a day and a half."
"A day and a half?" Drake stared at him.
"That's impossible." Camilla shook her head, precise and certain. "We arrived today. Got off the train, checked into the hotel, walked two blocks, saw a massive fire and explosion—and then we were inexplicably running down this street. And then you fell out of the sky."
"That's right," Drake added. "There was no gap. It was continuous."