On the other side, Green Arrow had already moved—three arrows, shot in a tight triangular formation, converging on Silver Swan.
Diana hesitated. Against genuine enemies she could be completely decisive, but this was a civilian—someone who'd been a friend, once. She couldn't bring herself to attack.
Fortunately she didn't need to. Her overall capabilities were overwhelming in every direction, and a single sweep of her eyes found Silver Swan's openings with no effort at all. Vanessa was a ballet enthusiast, not a trained fighter. Her evasion relied almost entirely on raw speed. And Green Arrow's accuracy was unchallengeable. Silver Swan dodged—badly, scrambling more than gliding, surviving by velocity alone.
Diana took two quick steps. Before Silver Swan could register the movement, Diana was there—grabbing her by the ankle and yanking her straight down from the sky.
"Pin her. I need to run a scan—there's something wrong with the spinal implant." Mister Terrific was more scientist than superhero in moments like this. His T-Spheres ran nearly every standard modern function simultaneously; he had the interface open and Silver Swan targeted in seconds.
"I'd advise you to release her."
A short, heavyset middle-aged man stepped out of the shadow of a nearby building. His hairline was slightly receding, but he held his head high—an appraising look in his eyes, as if deciding whether these people were worth his time.
"Stop where you are." Green Arrow had his bow up immediately. Diana stood aside; there were reasons she wasn't competing for the opening line here.
The man walked forward, ignoring the drawn bow entirely, and raised both hands in a casual gesture of openness. "I'm just an ordinary man. I don't have the ability to fly around like the rest of you."
He said it lightly. The contempt underneath wasn't light at all.
"Release Silver Swan—unless you want to watch Star City burn. The detonator is with my associate. If I don't return within sixty seconds..." He let that sit for a moment. "I placed six bombs. You might want to call in some backup."
Oliver looked at Diana. He was hoping the Amazonian might have some unconventional method for simultaneously putting this man on the ground and locating his partner.
"He's exactly what he appears to be." Diana studied the man for a moment. At her current level, most things couldn't be hidden from her. "Ordinary human. No powers. No magical enhancements. No technology in his equipment."
She paused, and something in her expression shifted to a kind of quiet frustration. "But I can't identify enemies in the surrounding area. There's a great deal that Thea can do that I simply can't..."
Diana was a pure warrior—systematic magical study had only just begun for her recently. She could lift a building, she could drag a ship across the ocean. But finding one concealed person inside a complex residential district, without the Flash's speed, without Superman's X-ray vision, without Thea's ability to stop time—that was genuinely hard for her.
"Why would you threaten innocent civilians?" Diana tried the direct approach. "We've never met."
"Release Silver Swan, miss. Finding the bombs is what heroes are for." His voice remained completely level. He didn't seem interested in answering, and he clearly had no feelings about Earth's current planetary crisis one way or the other.
"You know there's an emergency happening right now," Diana pressed. "You can't believe the Third Army will spare you."
"I have my own responsibilities, miss. You have yours." His voice didn't waver. "I don't care how many people on Earth die. Let me remind you—thirty seconds left. My associate is watching from a distance. If I'm physically restrained, Star City becomes a sea of flames. Call as many allies as you want; I've planted six bombs."
She had no choice. Diana let go.
Green Arrow on his board, Mister Terrific's T-Spheres in the air, Felicity's remote system access, the Flash's legs, the Atom's ability to search at miniaturized scale—six people spreading through Star City. The bombs, it turned out, had barely been hidden at all. Six locations, poorly concealed. Every one of them cleared within minutes.
By the time the last device had been neutralized, the middle-aged man and Silver Swan had vanished.
Silver Swan's identity required no effort to establish. The middle-aged man was harder—until Felicity opened the Queen Consolidated database.
Between the medical division's patient records, the defense and intelligence partnerships Thea had assembled over the years, Queen Consolidated's data holdings were the richest privately-held repository in the world. It hadn't always been that way. Early on, a coordinated global assault had nearly overwhelmed even the several hundred network specialists working under Felicity's direction, until Thea had authorized limited AI access to the company's network division and the situation had stabilized.
The satellite network ran its comparison. The man hadn't bothered to cover his tracks.
"Cayden James." Felicity's face lit with recognition—then immediately walked back. "He's an extremely well-known hacker. I once, uh, borrowed—no, that's not the right word—copied—no, I mean I referenced a small program he wrote once..."
"Why is she targeting us?" Diana asked. She knew Felicity was close to Thea.
The question stumped the room. Four of them—the Flash, the Atom, Felicity, and Mister Terrific—started independent searches simultaneously.
"Cayden James's last official contact: apprehended by A.R.G.U.S., charges of endangering national security." Felicity had the government connections and found it first.
"Ten days ago, a thirty-million-dollar transfer landed in his accounts." Ray Palmer had the bank relationships.
"Thirteen days ago, he was broken out of A.R.G.U.S. custody by a single operative." Barry put the security footage on screen.
They watched: a tall figure in purple soft armor with a white cape, twin katanas in hand, moved through A.R.G.U.S.'s trained field agents as if they were standing in a corridor doing nothing useful. He killed his way through, collected Cayden James, and walked out.
"He was almost certainly nearby today," Diana said. "That's Cayden's partner. The skill level is extraordinary—it's genuinely difficult to believe that's an unpowered human."
Oliver hadn't said a word since the footage started. His eyes hadn't moved from the screen.
He'd held his own against Nightwing without a bow—he counted as a martial artist by any reasonable measure, even if the learning process had been entirely unconventional. His eye for technique was something else.
Thea had once joked that her brother was born with civilian-grade Sharingan—naturally exceptional dynamic vision that he'd always had and barely knew how to use when he arrived on Lian Yu. No training, no teacher, no methodology. Just those eyes: watching while he got beaten, absorbing technique mid-punishment, practicing in secret, and eventually becoming what he was now.