"Surprised? Shocked?"
Jack Kadere watched the Reverse-Flash's expression crumble and grinned. "You thought the moment Grodd showed up, everything would flip. Have him mind-control me, force me to open a way home for you. Smart plan—I'll give you that. A gorilla that size can't exactly hide in plain sight, so you must have positioned him nearby after I grabbed Caitlin. You knew I'd come back eventually. Especially once Barry got his speed back."
He took a step closer.
"You're slower than me. You knew I'd figured out who you really are. Hiding wasn't going to work forever, so you changed tactics. Use me to get home, then have Grodd kill me. Barry stays alive, keeps running, keeps feeding the Speed Force you depend on. Everybody wins." Jack spread his hands. "Except you missed one thing: Grodd's powers don't work on me."
The Reverse-Flash didn't waste breath asking why. Red lightning crackled across his body—and he ran.
Jack cut him off before he'd moved ten feet.
Fwsshh! Fwsshh! Fwsshh!
Dozens of intercepts in the span of a heartbeat. Every direction the Reverse-Flash tried to break, Jack was already there, red lightning meeting red lightning. The Reverse-Flash pushed harder, tapping everything he had.
How fast is this bastard?
He changed tactics. The wall—phase through it, get outside the lab, gain distance. He pivoted hard, accelerating toward the concrete.
Deep breath. Feel the air. Feel the Speed Force humming in every cell. Vibrate at the frequency of solid matter—let it pass through him like he's made of light.
Fwsshh!
The Reverse-Flash's body blurred, molecules loosening, and he shot toward the wall—
Grodd stepped into his path.
Squelch.
The Reverse-Flash phased straight through the gorilla's massive body and into the wall beyond. For one triumphant instant, he thought he'd made it.
Then he emerged on the other side and found Jack Kadere already waiting.
"Shame." Jack shook his head. "I wanted to play with you a little longer."
THUD.
Behind the wall, Grodd's enormous body hit the floor.
In front of Jack, the Reverse-Flash collapsed at the same moment—face slack, eyes empty, limbs folding under him like a puppet with cut strings.
Phasing through a wall was one thing. The wall didn't care. But phasing through a living body? Different structure. Different frequency. The cellular disruption worked both ways.
Grodd was dead. And so was Eobard Thawne.
"No—"
Yellow lightning blazed through the doorway. Barry Allen skidded to a stop beside the body, dropping to his knees.
"No, no, no—if you're dead, how do I clear my father's name? How do I prove—" His voice cracked. He looked up at Jack, anguish twisting into fury. "Why did you kill him?!"
Cisco and Caitlin caught up a moment later. They stared at the corpse in silence—faces complicated, grief and confusion tangled together. Whatever else the Reverse-Flash had been, he'd also been Harrison Wells to them. Mentor. Friend. The man who'd built their careers.
"He was too slow." Jack shrugged, genuinely disappointed. "I figured he'd keep running after he phased through. Didn't expect him to just stand there on the other side. Walked right into my vibration field." He clicked his tongue. "Accidental, really."
"Look—" Cisco pointed at the body.
The Reverse-Flash's face was shifting. Harrison Wells's features melted away like wax, replaced by sharper bones, a narrower jaw, blonde hair where dark had been.
Eobard Thawne. His real face. His real name.
Jack watched the transformation with fading interest. The toy was broken now. Nothing left to play with.
Red lightning flickered around him as he turned to leave—
—and stopped.
The corpse was glowing. Red light gathered in Thawne's chest, condensed, and then shot directly at Jack like a homing missile.
Jack didn't dodge.
A thought had occurred to him.
The red light struck his chest and vanished inside. He felt it—not entering his body exactly, but connecting to something deeper. A space linked to him. A dimension.
The Speed Force.
Hmmm.
The lightning crackling around Jack's body shifted. Red bled into gold. Within seconds, the glow had changed entirely—no longer crimson, but bright, electric yellow.
"What..." Caitlin stared. "What just happened?"
Jack flexed his fingers, watching the new color dance between them.
When a speedster dies, they become part of the Speed Force. That's the rule. But Thawne's Speed Force came from Barry—from the future Barry, technically. So his death should have fed back into Barry's Speed Force, not mine.
Unless killing him changed something. Unless my Speed Force claimed him because I'm the one who ended him.
He didn't know. The Speed Force was too complicated for clean answers, and his version of it was something new entirely.
But he knew one thing for certain.
Jack turned his gaze on Barry Allen. The yellow lightning reflected in his eyes—sharp, predatory, openly hungry.
Barry went rigid. Cisco took a step back. Caitlin's breath caught.
"Jack." Her voice was thin. "What are you going to do?"
He looked at her. Smiled. Said nothing.
Fwsshh.
Yellow lightning exploded outward, and Jack Kadere was gone.
He'd keep Barry Allen alive. Let him run. Let the Speed Force Barry generated create more speedsters—more prey.
The hunt was just getting interesting.