-Broadcast-
Savitar was not satisfied with what Borsalino was doing, which was the problem.
A speedster fight required both participants to be trying. One of them pulling back — conserving, pacing, maintaining an escape route — was not a fight. It was an insult dressed as a competition. The mecha's voice carried this assessment without particular heat, more as a technical objection than anger, but the hand that had lifted Barry Allen off the ground by the collar suggested that the distinction was becoming academic.
"Admiral Kizaru." Blue light pulsed across the mecha's surface. "What exactly are you afraid of? Holding back only irritates me. You're not doing him any favors."
The right arm began to move.
At the speed Savitar operated, "began to move" and "completed the motion" were the same phrase separated by a formality. The right hand accelerated to the point where the arm produced only a visual artifact — a ghost of where it had been, moving forward — and the penetrating force that speed produced at its extreme was sufficient to pass through most materials as though they had agreed to step aside. A human heart, at that velocity, was not a meaningful obstacle.
"Let's think about this—" Borsalino started.
Savitar inserted his right hand into Barry's chest.
The yellow light that came from Borsalino next was not a technique. It was not a decision, exactly. It preceded the decision by approximately the time it takes for something to become irreversible, which is the correct moment for it. Golden light scattered from his body in all directions and then gathered — not exploding outward but collecting, condensing, becoming a space that operated by different rules than the desert around it.
Everything stopped.
Not slowly. Not in stages. The wind between the dunes stopped mid-motion. The grains of sand that had been moving stopped where they were. The blue light pulsing from Savitar's mecha stopped. The hand inside Barry's chest stopped.
Borsalino moved through it.
The Pika Pika no Mi (Glint-Glint Fruit) at its awakened ceiling operated on the same physics that made time and light the same conversation: at sufficient speed, what you experienced as movement through space became movement through time instead, and the two became interchangeable. He had not used this before in any context he was willing to describe to a colleague afterward. He was not entirely certain what the downstream effects would be. He did not currently have the time to care.
I don't particularly care about the consequences.
The golden world moved with him. Everything around him reversed — not in the dramatic way of myth, not lightning going backward into clouds, but the precise mechanical reversal of physical processes: vehicles unmoved, wind un-blown, the positions of objects walking backward along the paths they had just taken. He watched this with the calm of someone experiencing something unprecedented and finding it less surprising than expected, which was either enlightenment or shock presenting itself as composure.
He reached Savitar.
The right arm was just touching the surface of Barry's combat suit. A fraction of a second before contact. He took hold of Barry and pulled him clear, and was already thinking about what came next when Savitar moved.
The mecha had integrated into the golden world through its own speed — finding the same loophole in reversed time that Borsalino had used to create it, and using it to arrive inside the construct rather than being subject to it. This was the first time Borsalino had encountered something that could do this. He took a quarter-second to register it as significant, which was all the time that was available, because the slap arrived at the end of that quarter-second and it hit him at a speed that transferred enough force to move a man ten meters across sand without the man being able to do much about it.
The golden world shattered.
Time resumed. Normal physics. The desert in Arabasta, the dunes, the midday heat. Barry Allen, breathing, technically alive, in Borsalino's arms. Borsalino, having traveled ten meters involuntarily, using the Glint-Glint Fruit's light-conversion to shed the inertia before the ground could stop him in a less controlled manner. His feet found purchase. Two long furrows in the sand behind him.
He touched his cheek where the blow had landed. Blue. Would heal quickly — at this speed, cellular repair accelerated proportionally.
"It's generally considered poor form to hit someone in the face," he said, with the tone of someone filing a formal objection. "There are conventions."
Savitar made no comment on conventions.
The bruise was already fading. The clothes remained absent — the healing capability that applied to his physical form did not extend to fabric, which he had confirmed empirically over several decades of high-speed travel and had stopped finding frustrating somewhere around the third time. He was standing in the desert without clothing and with a rescued hostage and had just used an awakened time-reversal technique for the first time in a field situation. He assessed his position as net positive.
"Young man." He angled his gaze at the person in his arms. A touch of electricity ran from his fingertip into the location in Barry's brainstem that governed the transition between unconscious and awake. The voltage was calibrated. Roughly. "If you stay asleep, the situation here will become complicated. Wake up."
Barry Allen's eyes opened. They were full of blood from pressure damage sustained in the speed-space — a injury that came from being hit by something faster than the surrounding medium could cushion. He looked up at the face directly above him, which was Borsalino's face at close range, and produced a sound that was not quite a scream but was its immediate predecessor.
"You're safe," Borsalino said. "Approximately."
Barry recognized him. The processing took a moment — the blood in his eyes, the location, the context, the additional context of the man holding him being entirely without clothing — but he arrived at recognition and then at the relevant tactical situation with the speed of someone who had been doing this for a while. He said: "You saved him — saved me. I knew you could do it. Your speed is— your clothes are—"
"I'm aware of my clothes. Are you functional?"
"I can move."
"Good."
Barry pulled himself upright, somewhat carefully, and took a position next to Borsalino facing Savitar. He did look, briefly and with some effort at discretion, at the state of his rescuer. He appeared to conclude, accurately, that this was simply what this was.
Savitar stretched.
"Two speedsters," the mecha said. The tone had moved into something closer to genuine anticipation. "One old, one young. Both worth something. This is more like it."
He looked at Borsalino ally.
"You're at your peak right now. Whatever you were in the past or will be in the future, this is what I came for. Don't disappoint me again."
The blue light on the mecha's surface intensified into a continuous glow rather than a pulse. The air around it began to smell like the moment before a lightning strike.
Borsalino looked at Barry. Barry looked at Borsalino.
They had arrived at the same tactical conclusion by different routes.
The chase resumed. This time, neither of them held back.