Looking at Laurie, who had gone quiet again, Jack Kadere chuckled and pulled her into his arms. He ran his hand along her bare legs, idly stroking.
"You got conned by Lilah and then strong-armed by me—rough deal, I'll admit. But I didn't chain you here. Staying was your call." He smiled. "I'm in a good mood right now, so if there's something you want to say or ask for, now's the time. Can't promise this offer comes around again."
Laurie hesitated but said nothing.
"Want to kill the Comedian? Avenge your mother?" Jack tilted his head. "I could make that happen."
Laurie nodded on instinct, then quickly shook her head. If killing the Comedian would have fixed anything, she wouldn't have stayed in the first place. And in this era, the Comedian was almost certainly long dead anyway.
"You sure?" Jack pressed.
She gave a quiet affirmation.
"Suit yourself." The offer had come from a full stomach and a freshly copied ability—generosity of convenience. If she wanted to keep playing the silent punching bag, that was her business.
Jack wandered to the living room sofa and stretched out, grabbing the tablet from the side table. Central City's news feeds were wall-to-wall coverage of the four-person group. Their rampage hadn't exactly been subtle—they'd used their abilities openly during the killings, and countless photos had surfaced. Names, faces, powers, all of it catalogued. The whole city wanted them found.
The other headline was The Flash. Barry had rescued enough people over the past few weeks that public opinion was shifting. The skeptics who'd dismissed him as an urban legend were starting to come around, especially now that metahuman threats were undeniable. Central City's very own guardian.
Barry was probably having a miserable time, though. If Jack remembered right, the last target on The Mist's list—the cop who'd originally arrested him—was Joe West. Barry Allen's adoptive father. Iris's dad.
Three of the four were still out there, which was more than enough to keep The Flash running in circles. And that was before factoring in the rest of Central City's growing villain population.
As for the Reverse-Flash? The sheer terror of watching his plans unravel—of being stranded in this century forever, unable to get home—would keep him busy all on its own. Once Jack recovered and the Birds of Prey sent word, he'd pick up that game again.
In the meantime, he had a project.
Jack wanted to find out if he could build Iron Man armor. Theory into practice—applied engineering at the speed of thought.
He also planned to experiment with the Speed Force: specifically, whether he could use it to travel through time or across dimensional barriers.
Building the armor was no small undertaking. It required capital, raw materials, precision equipment, workspace, and time. None of which posed a real problem. He converted the villa's garage into a workshop, then ordered everything he needed—fabrication tools, alloys, wiring, circuitry, polymers, the full spread.
Money was irrelevant. Firestorm's transmutation ability meant he could turn scrap metal into gold whenever the accounts ran low. The entire setup took less than a week, and most of that was just waiting on deliveries.
Swish, swish, swish.
The crisp snap of pages turning filled the workshop, rapid and rhythmic. Jack sat surrounded by towers of textbooks—metallurgy, electrical engineering, materials science, aerospace dynamics—flipping through them at a pace no human eye could follow. On the TV across the room, a news anchor debated whether The Flash could actually protect Central City against the remaining trio.
Speed-reading through the Speed Force was genuinely incredible. A textbook that would take someone a year to absorb cover-to-cover was three minutes of his afternoon.
The monotony of it, though—that was the problem. Plowing through hundreds of books at superspeed risked turning the whole exercise into a numbing blur. So Jack developed a new Speed Force application to deal with it: Overclocked Senses.
He could adjust his subjective perception independent of his actual speed. Dial it up, and the experience compressed like a video on fast-forward—hours of reading felt like minutes of real focus. Dial it down, and a single second stretched into something leisurely, every detail crisp and unhurried.
To anyone watching, he was still a blur of red lightning. But inside his own head, he could make the experience feel as fast or as slow as he wanted.
He closed the last book and glanced at the mountain of volumes piled beside his chair. A grin spread across his face.
"Time to see if any of that actually sticks."
Swish!
Red lightning streaked from the living room into the garage.
Laurie blinked at the empty sofa, then slowly made her way down the hall. She pushed open the garage door and stopped.
Red lightning was spinning around the workbench in a tight orbit—impossibly fast, yet generating no wind at all. The air was perfectly still. No turbulence, no displaced tools, no papers flying off surfaces. Just a silent red streak circling the bench like a contained storm.
Swish!
Jack materialized beside her, arm draped over her shoulder, and pointed forward. "Done. What do you think?"
Laurie's mouth fell open.
A suit of armor stood on the platform ahead of her—red and gold, sleek and angular. The paneling had a brutalist precision to it, every plate flush against the next, every joint articulated with mechanical exactness. The metallic finish caught the garage's fluorescent light and threw it back in hard gleams. Even with her recently crammed education in modern technology, Laurie had never seen anything like it. She didn't particularly care about armor or machines, but this thing was stunning in a way that bypassed preference entirely.
She walked over without thinking and ran her fingers along the chest plate. Cool metal, seamless edges, the faint smell of machined alloy and ozone.
"It's... unbelievable," she said after a long moment.
"Three hundred design iterations, all calculated at superspeed," Jack said, walking up beside the suit. "Theoretically, it should hold together perfectly. The problem is there's no AI to run it—no JARVIS, no autopilot. Everything's manual input." He knocked a knuckle against the helmet. "Basically a high-tech stick shift."
He circled the armor, tapping sections as he spoke. "Energy's the other bottleneck. Full combat output drains the power cell in about five minutes. Flight lasts longer—comparable to a small helicopter's range, give or take. There's a lot of room left: better energy storage, portability, self-repair systems, weapons integration. First draft, though. Not bad for a week."
Laurie nodded along, still staring at the suit.
Jack caught the look on her face and laughed. "You like it? Everyone says giant mechas are a guy's fantasy, but you look more into this than I expected." He crossed his arms. "Tell you what—when I've got the time, I'll build you one."
Laurie's head snapped up. "Really?"
"Depends on how you perform." Jack's grin sharpened. He stepped forward, and the Iron Man armor split open down the center with a mechanical hiss, panels folding outward like a shell.
Jack backed into the suit. The panels closed around him, locking into place segment by segment—legs, torso, arms, helmet. The seams sealed with a series of quiet clicks.
For a moment, the armor stood dark and inert.
Then the eyes blazed to life—cold, luminous white cutting through the garage's dim light.
"Taking it for a spin," Jack's voice came through the helmet, slightly reverberant, edged with metal.
Blue propulsion energy flared at his palms and the soles of his boots. The suit lifted off the concrete floor—one foot, two feet—hovering with a low, steady hum. Jack hung in the air for a beat, stabilizing.
Then the thrusters kicked to full output, and he rocketed out of the garage in a streak of blue light.