The flight took fifty minutes. James spent it reviewing everything AEGIS could compile about Central City's layout, infrastructure, and known criminal geography, alongside a private briefing on what his meta-knowledge could offer.
Central City. Home to STAR Labs' original research campus. Home, as far as public record showed, to a new costumed figure who'd begun appearing roughly a year ago, calling himself the Flash, moving fast enough that most eyewitness accounts couldn't agree on basic physical details.
Barry Allen. James knew the name the way he knew most names in this world, quietly, privately, never spoken aloud where it could be traced back to a source that shouldn't exist.
A forensic scientist. Methodical, decent, occasionally too trusting of people who didn't deserve it. Good instincts buried under a personality that undersold how sharp he actually was.
The plane landed at eleven forty. A car James had arranged in advance was waiting.
He didn't go to a hotel first. He drove directly to the industrial district that his research flagged as the most likely location for a cell with Central City's specific profile, an area with enough abandoned infrastructure and low foot traffic to hide serious equipment.
AEGIS picked up the energy signature at twelve fifteen AM, four blocks out.
"Confirmed. Multiple Apokoliptian energy sources active. Estimated count: eight distinct signatures, consistent with weaponry rather than a single large device. Location: warehouse complex, designation matches original decryption data for Central City node."
James pulled the car into a side street two blocks away and finished suiting up in the back seat, cramped but efficient, years of practice making the process fast.
He was reaching for his helmet when he heard it.
A sound that didn't belong to a quiet industrial district at midnight. A crack of displaced air, immediate and violent, followed by a second crack half a second later, and then a third.
James stepped out of the car already moving. His enhanced hearing picked up the pattern before his eyes could confirm it. Something moving at speeds that shouldn't have been physically possible for a normal vehicle, stopping and starting with no visible transition, the air itself protesting each sudden halt.
He rounded the corner in time to see it directly.
A red blur resolved, for less than a second, into the shape of a man in a red costume before blurring again, moving between two positions across the warehouse's loading dock faster than James's enhanced vision could fully track the transition.
Flash.
He was fighting. Or trying to. James's enhanced eyes caught fragments as the speed settled enough to parse, Flash closing distance on a group of armed figures near the warehouse entrance, throwing a punch that connected, then abruptly staggering, momentum broken, as something invisible seemed to catch him mid-stride.
Fwoosh!
An energy blast, the same signature James had seen in Gotham's Intergang warehouse weeks ago, arced through the space where Flash had been half a second earlier. He'd dodged it, barely, the blast close enough to singe the edge of his costume.
But the pattern repeated. Flash would move, closing distance with impossible speed, and then something would stop him cold before he could capitalize on the advantage. Not a hit exactly. More like a wall he kept running into that wasn't visible until he was already colliding with it.
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