Over on Spacebattles there has been an ongoing conversation about how fast Flash!Taylor is, powers, etc.
I wrote this.
THIS IS NOT PART OF THE STORY, though I may end up using pieces of it (particular word choices, etc) later on.
Lagniappe
Flash v SH9
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I felt like I was going to die. My lungs burned, my heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest.
But I was done.
To the world around me only minutes had passed. From my perspective, I had been running for years, searching, hunting.
But I was done.
In a dive bar outside of Seattle I had reached through a chest and disintegrated the heart of Jack Slash. Looping through Africa on my way back around I dodged between particles of sand, bits of flame, and found the boy walking through the constant explosion that was the Ash Beast. Extending a finger and allowing the smallest amount of inertia to bleed into it, I lightly tapped his jaw as I ran past, his head forced into several 360 degree turns before flying off. A moment later I was back in the dive bar. The blonde girls eyes had moved a fraction of a millimeter to the right, towards the still standing, still technically alive Jack Slash.
Bonesaw. I had read about her. A biotinker who had cultured untold numbers of pandemic plagues within her own body. Feeling the lightning surge through me I took hold of the girl and vibrated the two of us. Physics briefly forgot we existed as we passed through the wall of the bar. Trees, rocks, streams, none of these existed for the two of us. The only thing I focussed on was the mountain of rock fast approaching.
Mount Rainier.
In picoseconds we had penetrated into the side of the mountain. When I estimated we were halfway through, I simply let go.
I emerged from the other side, bleeding off some speed so I could turn and run over the top in the opposite direction.
Bonesaw was left in the heart of the mountain, a magma pocket erasing her from existence.
Shatterbird and Cherish were non-concerns. They each received the Jack Slash Cardiac Massage.
Hatchetface was an interesting case. Apparently I move too fast for him to nullify my power. If anything my head became more clear, I felt more calm as I closed with him. I moved his ax from his hands and into his skull, letting it solidify there. This just left Crawler and Siberian.
I circled around the bar into the woods behind it. Crawler had risen half an inch from when I first entered the area. Fast reflexes. I would have to be careful with him. From what I knew, anything that didn't kill him just made him stronger, more resistant to the same tactic.
Coming up to the beast I let my hands vibrate. Taking a hold of one of his hands, I let the vibrations pass from my hands into his, out of synch with the rest of his body. The hand ceased to exist as biology, instead becoming physics. A cloud of free floating particles. I stopped vibrating and ran around the world four times, each trip passing through the cloud, letting physics reassert themselves as I moved through the cloud. The individual molecules, the atoms that had been Crawlers hand, could not move in time, instead undergoing fusion. While I could have just left and counted on the resulting energy release to take care of the rest of Crawler... I had to be sure. I repeated the trick with three other limbs and then his head, running away as five, near simultaneous nuclear explosions obliterated the monster beyond any ability to regenerate.
Siberian.
She killed Hero.
She took Alexandria down without any noticeable effort.
Running to Egypt I turned around and raced back across the ocean, heading through the American heartland, building speed the entire time. West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington state, they all blur under my feet. I came up to her, a still life in black and white, concentrating on my fist, letting it accumulate mass as I increased speed, the lightning in my veins protecting the rest of my body from the beginnings of a gravitational pull in the dead star that was my right hand. Passing her on the left, my right fist connected with her face. For just a moment I allowed the rest of me to stop. The kinetic force of my punch bled out into real space, propagating out at nearly the speed of light. I accelerated faster.
The bar, the woods, everything in a half mile radius ceased to exist as a flash of light followed by a roar like that of a fallen God screamed through the area.
