He turned two corners and burst out of the shadows. From his earlier observation, he'd already pegged Mirror Master as the team's mobility specialist. Kill that man, and the other three couldn't escape him.
Unfortunately, his flaw was the same as Ultraman's. He underestimated Earth-1's heroes and overestimated himself.
Captain Cold had spent years tangling with The Flash. Of course he'd anticipated speedster ambushes.
His goggles packed considerable tech, and dynamic-vision tracking was the most critical feature. The moment a hyper-speed motion registered nearby, the goggles automatically switched to assist mode.
"Left!" he barked. The Cold Gun snapped left, aiming at the pavement, and he yanked the trigger.
Heat Wave and Weather Wizard reacted just as fast, not bothering to confirm whether anyone was actually there.
Weather Wizard hurled a whirling tornado. Heat Wave was right behind him, spraying fire wildly to both sides.
Johnny Quick was blocked by the freezing blast. As he watched the tornado bearing down on him, he could only run up the wall to keep moving. He smashed straight into Heat Wave's flames.
The blast launched him three or four meters (about ten feet) backward, fully ablaze. He reversed course immediately, hoping to extinguish the flames with sheer speed.
But Heat Wave had been comparing arson notes with Lady Firefly back during the Blackest Night, and his fire mix now included accelerants—hotter than standard flame and far harder to put out.
Johnny Quick had to sprint a full three kilometers (about two miles) at top velocity before the flames finally guttered out. The protective suit below his left ribs was charred through, with some skin damage underneath, and he was caught dead to rights by The Flash before he could regroup.
Right and wrong don't mix. They confirmed each other's identities and immediately broke into a sprint.
So this was it. After running a few steps, The Flash already had a sixty-percent chance of winning in his head. The enemy was slower than he was. After getting drilled by Zoom and Savitar, The Flash's speed had outpaced Johnny Quick's.
The reason they looked evenly matched right now was simply that he didn't know the local terrain.
After dealing with those extraordinary speedsters, Barry now found Johnny Quick's ordinary speed frankly underwhelming.
Earth-3 only had one speedster. Johnny Quick had no real competition and no reason to grind hours of training. Naturally talented speedsters existed—he wasn't one.
Watching the two speedsters trail long yellow afterimages and pull farther away, the Rogues weren't happy. Flash, you're poaching the kill, that's bad form, that's two million bucks you're walking off with.
Mirror Master didn't waste a word. He gathered the team and gave chase.
Already a tier behind Barry, Johnny Quick now had the Rogues hassling him too. Sweat beaded on his forehead. A full minute earlier, he'd swallowed his pride and called for help over team comms—but Batman had hijacked their channel. Nobody received a thing.
Barry was running faster, which meant he was attacking more often. With the Rogues backing him up, Johnny Quick came close to going down several times, only escaping each round through pure malicious cunning.
"Mama!" A little girl was ripped out of her mother's arms by Johnny Quick and hurled into the sky.
Barry had to break off and catch the child.
A white-bearded old man was kicked off his feet by Johnny Quick. Whether or not the old man had been a bad guy mattered less than the Rogues' code: protect old people, women, and children. They scrambled to make the rescue.
Between distractions, the speed gap closed back up to even. But Johnny Quick was alone against five, and he was visibly running out of gas.
The Flash and the Rogues were deliberately driving him toward the outskirts. Squeezed between the two sides, his territory was shrinking fast.
Refusing to go down, he set a small trap. He used a feint that drew Heat Wave's flame into a high-rise. The fire spread fast. Black smoke filled the building, and at least a few dozen people were trapped inside. The Flash had no choice but to dive in for the rescue, leaving the Rogues without their high-speed coordinator and in serious danger.
"You bastards are dead!" Johnny Quick hated this crew of meddlers. Without them, The Flash alone never could've cornered him.
Mirror Master had a wide range of movement options, and they were full of misdirection—at one point he'd nearly dragged Johnny Quick into the Mirror World. Johnny Quick, who valued his own skin, would never voluntarily step into that kind of pocket dimension.
Captain Cold's and Heat Wave's weapons could damage him too. Especially the Cold Gun's slowing effect—that one was lethal to a speedster. He locked onto Weather Wizard, the heavy hitter who took an extra beat to act.
Weather Wizard was a "wizard" in name only. He had nothing to do with traditional sorcery; he was a metahuman who controlled weather. Given enough time to charge up, his offensive output exceeded the rest of the Rogues combined. But in moment-to-moment combat, his slow startup was easy to exploit.
Picking him as the weak link was, Johnny Quick had to admit, a smart call.
"Die, you trash!" He blew past the others, leaving cold and fire in his wake, and stretched out his hand for Weather Wizard's throat.
A high, brittle crack rang out. Weather Wizard shattered like broken glass. Johnny Quick's adrenaline crashed. Looking at the shards of glass in his hand, he knew he'd just walked into a setup.
The Rogues were a pack of bad guys, sure. But they were a tightly coordinated pack of bad guys, and they'd weaponized their own abilities and their enemy's personality against him.
Weather Wizard had peeled off from the team during the chase. He'd been hovering above the city all along, generating a storm and hiding in the eye of it—both screening Johnny Quick's vision and slowing him down with crosswinds.
Meanwhile Mirror Master had spawned mirror duplicates that ran alongside the team, ultimately luring Johnny Quick into the trap.
"Pop." A clean little shot. A swirl of freezing mist clamped around Johnny Quick's calf.
Nobody could run with a frozen leg. Johnny Quick's face went pale. He desperately channeled the Speed Force to thaw the ice, while bowing his head to Captain Cold and the others. "I surrender. I surrender! I'll tell you a huge secret!" He was buying time—any time at all, even seconds, and the Speed Force could melt the ice.
Captain Cold had read him from the moment he opened his mouth and didn't bother engaging. He just brought his foot down hard on the iced-over calf.
The ice cracked apart with a brittle clatter. So did Johnny Quick's left leg.
His balance gone, he hit the ground howling.
Captain Cold knocked him out cold, slapped a power-dampening collar on him, and told Heat Wave to carry him.
"Let's go. We bagged one alive—time to find that lady's secretary and collect the check." Cleanly executed mission, payday on the way. The Rogues were in high spirits, and getting paid on top of that just made it sweeter.