Yellow lightning cracked through the office. Wind scattered the papers on Wells's desk across the floor.
Harrison Wells had just handed the Velocity serum formula to Jack Kadere when he noticed the extra person standing in the room.
Red leather jacket. Silver helmet with wing-shaped flanges on either side of the steel.
"The Flash!" Jesse blurted.
"Getting crowded in here." Harrison Wells's tone was flat, bordering on hostile. "What do you want?"
"Him." The Flash looked at Jack Kadere with bright, eager eyes and extended his hand. "Hey. My name's Jay Garrick. I'm The Flash."
Jack Kadere studied the handsome face and the open, friendly expression, and almost laughed.
Villains in The Flash loved to act. The Reverse-Flash had spent years wearing Harrison Wells's face and playing Barry Allen's mentor. This one was no different. His real identity was Hunter Zolomon — Zoom — who had used a time remnant to split himself in two. One half played the hero. The other became the monster. Practically a split personality with a speedster budget.
And he was claiming to be Jay Garrick — the name of The Flash from Earth Three. In the original story, Zoom had captured Earth Three's Flash to boost his own speed while stealing the man's identity as a cover.
Which meant Zoom had already grabbed the real Jay Garrick. But he hadn't been at the facility where Jesse was held. How had he crossed between universes? Wasn't the whole point of kidnapping Jesse to blackmail Harrison Wells into researching interdimensional travel?
Jack Kadere filed the questions away.
The Flash noticed the silence and the strange, appraising look Jack was giving him. He shifted on his feet, smile fading slightly, and started to pull his hand back.
Jack Kadere raised his hand.
The Flash relaxed — visible relief — and reached out to complete the handshake.
Jack dodged sideways.
The Flash blinked, confused, and then saw Jack Kadere's hand vibrating at high frequency.
Schlick.
The vibrating hand blade punched clean through The Flash's chest. His eyes went wide. His fingers closed around Jack Kadere's wrist — not to fight, just grasping, reflexive — and he sank to his knees. Jack pulled his hand free, and The Flash pitched forward onto the floor.
Dead.
The room went silent.
"What are you doing?" Jesse screamed. "Why did you kill The Flash? He's a hero!"
"Jesse!" Harrison Wells grabbed her arm, pulling her back before she could take another step toward Jack Kadere.
Jack Kadere ignored both of them. He crouched beside the corpse, watching with open curiosity.
Yellow light bloomed across The Flash's body. Within the glow, the flesh began to dissolve — not decay, but unmake itself, the matter breaking apart into luminous particles. The light streamed upward, hung in the air for a beat, and then surged directly into Jack Kadere.
Or rather, into the Speed Force space connected to his body.
Lightning crackled around him as the Speed Force activated.
The color hadn't changed. Still yellow. Because the body was a time remnant and not the original? Or because the quantity wasn't enough?
Didn't matter. Killing a speedster genuinely enhanced his Speed Force. That confirmed the theory. The title of Speedster Hunter could be unlocked now.
Jack Kadere straightened up and glanced at Harrison Wells — tense, calculating behind his fear — and Jesse, who radiated fury and disgust. He shook his head.
Superheroes had strange priorities. Jesse especially. Setting aside her refusal to leave Central City earlier, her reaction just now wasn't how you treated someone who'd rescued you from a cage. Harrison Wells, at least, Jack Kadere could respect. The man would sacrifice anything for his daughter.
As for how Zoom had crossed universes to capture the real Jay Garrick — Jack Kadere was curious, but not curious enough to chase the answer. He'd run into Zoom again eventually.
He grabbed Black Siren and vanished.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Yellow lightning blazed through S.T.A.R. Labs, accelerating with each lap around the facility's circular corridors. Faster. Faster. The air tore apart in front of him, and a space-time wormhole ripped open — a swirling tunnel of compressed light and gravitational distortion.
Jack Kadere ran straight in.
He fixed Earth One in his mind, pushed his speed higher, and stepped out the other side.
BOOM.
The wormhole collapsed behind them. Earth One.
The first thing he heard was screaming.
People were sprinting past in every direction, pouring out of a park along the waterfront, shoving and stumbling over each other.
"Is this... your world?" Black Siren looked around, wide-eyed.
"My world? Not really. My world's a lot more boring than this."
Jack Kadere led her toward the chaos.
The park opened onto the shoreline, and they stopped at the edge.
Massive waves were building offshore — towering walls of dark water rolling toward the coast like a tsunami. On the beach, a streak of yellow lightning raced back and forth along the waterline. Barry Allen — The Flash — was running parallel to the incoming surge, trying to generate enough of a counter-force to break the wave before it hit the city.
Jack Kadere watched with interest. This was the scene. Mark Mardon — the original Weather Wizard's brother — had kidnapped Joe West and conjured a tsunami to destroy Central City as revenge. And while trying to stop it, Barry Allen had accidentally fractured the continuity of time and traveled back to the previous day.
Time travel was fascinating.
Normally, traveling to the past would produce two versions of The Flash existing simultaneously — the one who traveled back and the one already living on that timeline. But Barry's accidental jump had disrupted temporal continuity entirely, creating something closer to a loop. The Barry who traveled back replaced his past self on the original timeline. One Barry Allen. No duplicate.
Jack Kadere had always found clones repulsive. Even running into a past version of himself through conventional time travel would bother him. But this overlay method — replacing rather than duplicating — that had potential.
The catch was that Barry seemed to have stumbled into it by accident. Every time travel trip after this one followed the standard rules, producing a second version of himself.
And there was another problem. Once the overlay happened, the traveler appeared to be locked into taking over the timeline from that point forward. If the past self was simply erased without the traveler stepping into the vacated space, the consequences could be severe. The method probably only worked with short intervals — hours, maybe a day at most.
Jack Kadere filed that away too, eyes still on the lightning streaking across the shore.