.
Three Days Ago
Diana was surprised at him.
Bruce had somehow suddenly gone from an amateur fighter—albeit a fast-learning one—to a formidable combatant in a mere two weeks. It was as though he'd gained at least four years of training in only fourteen days.
These training sessions were gradually getting less like training and more like actual sparring. Bruce was still nowhere near Diana's level, of course, but she actually had to pay attention to him during training. Granted, it was about as much attention as one gives a persistent fruit fly, but it was something, at least.
Diana made a firm jab with the end of her staff. Bruce stepped slightly to the right and parried her move, then twisted his staff around over his head as he spun to the left, crouching in mid-step and swinging the end of his staff at the back of her right knee.
She saw it coming, and twisted her leg so that the staff bounced off her kneecap. For anyone else, that might have hurt, but Diana was made of tougher stuff. Still, though, that move was incredibly advanced for someone with as little training as Bruce. She'd never taught him anything like...
That's it, she suddenly realized.
She leaned back out of her battle stance and stood up straight, casually examining him.
"You've had training before, haven't you?" She asked.
Breathing heavily, Bruce replied. "Yes."
"When?"
"I started when I was ten. Judo, Karate, and Aikido."
"...So you're not technically untrained, just out of practice?"
"I'm no master; I only trained for three and a half years."
"Why did you stop?"
"I... I let myself forget why I started training in the first place. I won't let that happen again."
A black fire burned in Bruce's eyes. Diana often saw that look on his face whenever he was exhausted from training, or when she would get the upper hand in combat—which was, truth be told, all the time.
She didn't know what drove that anger, or who it was truly directed at, but it almost frightened her. One day, he would learn to harness that anger; to forge it into a dark weapon. To forge himself into a weapon. On that day, she would pity the poor soul who found himself in the way of Bruce's wrath.
Now
The tires screeched to a halt a block away from the bank. Bruce stepped out of his car and surveyed the scene from a distance.
Police cars lined the street, barricading every way in or out of the building.
A sudden-yet-brief gust of wind hit Bruce's back, and he turned around to see Bart standing in front of him.
"Man, could your car be any slower?"
Bruce responded with an unamused glare. "We need to get in there and stop him."
"Bruce, uh, buddy, you don't have any powers. You'll get killed."
Bruce glared at him. "No. I won't."
Bart was more weirded out than scared by Bruce's anger. "O...kay, then... uh... shouldn't we wait for Clark, or maybe Diana?"
"Clark is with Lois in Central City. Diana's not picking up her cellphone; I left her a message. Right now, we're the only ones who can do anything."
Bart sighed nervously. "Okay, so what are you gonna do, exactly? I mean, how are you gonna get inside the bank?"
"I need you to to run me in there."
Bart stepped back a little. "Woah, you want me to carry you inside? At super-speed?"
"Yes."
"Uh... I've never done that before; I don't know if I—"
Bruce interrupted him, speaking very quickly. "Your speed works through an extradimensional power gateway; traditional Newtonian physics don't apply. As long as your bioelectric field is active, the particles contained within should remain in a state of hyper-elevated activity."
"...I have no idea what you just said."
"As long as you're moving, I should be fine. Go to super-speed, pick me up, then come to a complete stop once you get inside."
"...okay."
Bart took a second to focus. It probably was only a nanosecond to the outside world, but everything seemed slower to him. He took another second to look around. The world outside was muffled to a near-whisper—the sound waves weren't fast enough for him to perceive them correctly when he focused like this—and everything moved at a snail's pace. It was somewhat like being underwater.
Bart reached his arm under Bruce's armpit and lifted. To his surprise, Bruce came up and off the ground like a rag doll, as if he barely weighed a thing. Bart ran towards the bank, dodging the statuesque people on the streets. Bruce's body floated through the air behind him like a towel on a clothesline. Bart passed through the open door to the bank. There were a couple dozen low-walled wooden cubicles around the large room. Bart set Bruce down gently on his feet, being sure to un-focus back into normal-speed as he did so.
Bruce stumbled to his knees and nearly vomited as his brain wrapped itself around the fact that he'd just moved three hundred feet in less than a second.
It was very dark in the room; the only light came in through the windows from the street outside.
The boys both sat crouched behind a desk, staying very quiet. The sound of machine gun fire from a few desks over broke the silence.
*RATATATATATATAT!*
"Find him!" Bruce ordered Bart. Bart nodded and focused back into super-speed, then stood up and walked around the desk's corner to find Deadshot. As he stood up, however, he found that he had moved directly into the path of a bullet.
A speeding bullet was perhaps the one thing that Bart could actually see moving very quickly at super-speed. By the time he even noticed it was there, it was within a few inches of his face. He couldn't move out of the way; all he could do was let it hit him.
Bart hit the floor with a thud. Bruce looked down at Bart's body. He looked fine, and didn't seem to be bleeding. A completely intact bullet lay on the floor next to him. Bruce was confused for a moment, but quickly understood. "Heh. Clever move," Bruce thought to himself with a smile. Bart had just done the exact reverse of what he'd done with Bruce earlier: instead of using his powers to accelerate an object, he'd actually absorbed the bullet's speed into himself, thus preventing it from actually piercing him. Unfortunately, it was still the equivalent of getting punched in the face, so it knocked him unconscious.
Bruce heard Floyd's surprised voice a short distance away. "What the hell?"
Steel-toed footsteps got louder and louder as he moved closer to Bart's body. When he got close enough, Bruce jumped from behind his cover.
Floyd was caught completely off-guard. It was like a savage animal had just pounced on him from the shadows, and he didn't know what to do. A flurry of punches and kicks flew at his face and sides. In the darkness, he could barely see his attacker. But he could tell enough to know that this person—who he was pretty sure was just a kid—was an amateur. Floyd managed to push the kid away, then moved to pistol-ship him in the face. But Bruce was gone, ducked away behind one of the nearby desks.
Floyd looked around the room, but saw no sign of him. He checked around the corner of the next desk over, but Bruce wasn't there.
Floyd had shot out the lights in the room beforehand, so as not to be so easily spotted by the police. Now he almost regretted it, as he had a crazy person hiding in the shadows somewhere. He walked throughout the room, slowly peeking around the corner of every single desk. But his assailant was nowhere to be found.
If he had been a little more observant, he would have noticed that each desk had a lamp above it which hung from the ceiling by a thick chain.
Bruce hung silently upside-down on one of these chains, his feet touching the ceiling and his hands squeezed firmly toward the bottom of the chain. It'd been a while since he'd learned how to do this; he just hoped he wasn't entirely out of practice. When Floyd moved close enough, Bruce let his legs swing downward into a long vertical arc.
Floyd turned his head to see Bruce's heel slamming into his face.
Deadshot hit the floor with a slam, his metal armor clanking against the marble floors. Bruce landed safely on his feet. He began to move towards Bart, but stopped when he saw something peculiar. Deadshot's mask had been partially removed by Bruce's kick, and his face was showing underneath. It was not Floyd Lawton.
Before Bruce could ponder this, a red light on the mercenary's belt began flashing, accompanied by a telltale beeping noise. Though Bruce admittedly didn't know much about weaponry, he guessed that it was a bomb. He ran to Bart, still lying on the floor, and shook him furiously.
"BART! BART!"
Bart jumped awake, slightly dizzy. "Woah, what...?"
Bruce didn't give him any time to recover. "There's a bomb on that man's belt! This whole place could go up! Get the police officers on the street out of here!"
Bart nodded at super-speed and took off. One by one, the men and women standing outside the building seemingly vanished into thin air, having been carried several blocks away.
When Bart was done, he ran back inside the bank. Bruce was still kneeling over the mercenary's body.
"C'mon, Bruce, we need to get out of here!" Bart exclaimed.
"No! We don't know how big the explosion will be; more people might still be in danger. We need to see if there's a way to disable the bomb."
"What?!? You're crazy! Let's get out of here, now!"
Bruce spun around, his face twisted with anger. "I'M NOT LEAVING!!!"
Bart looked back and forth between Bruce and the bomb for a moment. He knew what to do.
Bruce saw Bart vanish into super-speed, and heard a metal snap from behind him. He turned around to see Not-Deadshot's flashing belt buckle missing.
Bart ran through the city as fast as he dared go, the bomb sitting ticking away in his hand. It was too late. Bart looked down to see the metal casing of the bomb slowly cracking open, with rays of light peeking out from beneath. It was exploding as he held it. His hands nearly burning, Bart zoomed over the docks at the city's edge, toward the river. He hit the water, but kept running. At this speed, his feet bounced off the water like a rock that wouldn't stop skipping.
He threw the bomb down into the waves as hard as he could. When he finally came to a stop on the other side of the river, he looked back to see the explosion, muffled safely underwater.
At this point, Bart was exhausted. He nearly passed out on the docks.
Bruce was left alone in the bank, not entirely sure what to do. It suddenly occurred to him, however, that he'd probably need to get out of the building before the police—or anyone else—showed up again.
He began walking down the stairs in front of the building, still trying to figure out who the man dressed as Deadshot could be, and why he was there.
A copycat criminal, perhaps?
No. A decoy. He must have been a decoy. But why?
Bruce started scanning the rooftops.
"Bruce!"
Bruce recognized Diana's voice coming from up above, and saw her land next to him in his peripheral vision. He didn't stop to actually look at her.
"Bruce, I got your message. I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner; I was flying above the city and my cell was out of range."
There. Bruce spotted him. A silhouette on the rooftop just slightly to the left, with a faintly visible red dot that could only be Deadshot's targeting eyepiece.
Bruce grabbed Diana's arm and spun her around in that direction. "DIANA! SNIPER ON THAT ROOF!"
*CLANK*
A giant, flattened bullet fell from Diana's bracelet. Her eyes were squinted in a warrior-like expression, and she easily picked out the roof from which the shooter had fired. She took off into the sky after him.
When she arrived, he was gone. A single bullet casing lay near the roof's edge, but the shooter was nowhere to be found.
She found the roof's only door and ripped it off its hinges. Inside was a stairwell. She leaned into the hallway, and listened intently. If Deadshot had been anywhere in that stairwell, she would have heard something of him: a step, breath, a heartbeat. But there was nothing. As far as she could tell, he'd completely vanished.
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