Chapter 313: A Perfect First Battle?

Just as Iris and Eddie were chatting happily, the phone in Eddie's pocket suddenly rang.

"Ding-ling-ling—"

"Hmm?"

Eddie frowned, instinctively glancing at Iris beside him, while Iris nodded, signaling him to answer the call first.

"Sorry, Iris. It's the police station."

"Hello?"

"Eddie? No time to explain. Get to the station quickly. The serial robber just finished robbing a bank; we've got a lead on him!"

"Serial robber? Now?"

Eddie was both surprised and helpless; he had to put down his coffee cup, stand up, and say to Iris, "Sorry, Iris. The station needs me, and it's urgent."

Iris smiled helplessly: "Go ahead, go ahead. You look handsome playing the hero."

Eddie sighed, hugged Iris, then hurriedly ran toward the café entrance.

Meanwhile, Iris stood dazed in place because, through the coffee shop's glass window, she saw Barry standing by the roadside, his eyes looking directly at her.

It turned out Iris's acting was actually quite good; she had fooled Joe, an old detective, for several whole months—but she couldn't fool Barry, who had only just woken up a few days ago.

Three minutes later, along the city streets, Barry and Iris walked side by side on the sidewalk.

"Barry, don't tell Joe about this," Iris pleaded. "He doesn't know yet."

"I didn't know about this either," Barry replied gloomily. "If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have suspected anything at all."

"I wanted to tell you—while you were in the hospital, Eddie and Joe took turns on duty; he also helped nurse you for a while."

"Did the two of you become a couple back then? That's Joe's partner, Iris."

"This is the first time I've had someone I like, Barry. Can't you be happy for me?"

"You don't understand, Iris. You're asking me to help you lie to Joe."

Screech—

A black Mustang suddenly sped past the two of them on the road, followed by the wail of several sirens.

"That's!?"

Barry instinctively looked at the car window; in the driver's seat, a familiar face came into view—Clyde Mardon?

Barry clearly remembered Joe saying yesterday that both Mardon brothers had died in a plane crash that night, so what was going on with the face he just saw?

He turned to look at the several police cars chasing behind and said to Iris, "Iris, you leave first. I'm part of the police too; I have to chase with them."

"Barry! You're in forensics!"

"Never mind!"

Iris couldn't dissuade him at all and could only watch helplessly as Barry's figure disappeared by the roadside.

"Old Ma, the police are about to catch up to Clyde's car."

The crisp female electronic voice sounded again; at this moment, Ma Ma Zhaodi was riding a motorcycle through the streets at breakneck speed, moving so fast he was almost strictly out of the Mustang's line of sight.

"Good. Once the police catch up, let Mardon crash directly into the roadside; we'll do a full chain reaction."

"Wait, Old Ma, Barry Allen has caught up."

"What?!" Hearing that Barry had also followed, Ma Ma Zhaodi was dumbfounded: "Could we run into him too? What is this? The self-correcting force of the timeline?"

"I don't know, but he's accelerating—he's about to catch that car!"

"No problem, change the plan. Let him catch the guy; crash!"

"Received."

The moment the words ended, the Mustang's tires immediately began to skid and lose control.

Screech—

A blurry afterimage invisible to the naked eye sped along the road; Barry was running recklessly right now—after discovering he possessed superpowers, he had gone to S. T. A. R. Labs to have Dr. Wells, Cisco, and Caitlin help test his speed.

"I can catch him, I can catch him!"

While repeating this silently in his mind, Barry watched helplessly as he ran on his own feet, overtaking one police car after another, and gradually ran alongside that Mustang; in his world, everything slowed down.

Flowers, trees, the sky, the breeze, clouds—all like slow-motion in a movie; he could clearly see the car tires turning slowly on the road, never quite completing a full rotation; he could see sweat droplets sliding bit by bit from the officers' foreheads inside the police cars, taking a long time to hit the ground; he could hear the sirens becoming dull and slow, turning into bizarre, strange sound waves.

When he started running, a force propelled him faster and faster, farther and farther; once he took a step, the scale of time changed beneath his feet, stretched infinitely like dough, stretched again, becoming a thin line, one second becoming several seconds, becoming ten-plus seconds, becoming several minutes—time and this world almost froze together into solid form.

In his view, at such times, only he was moving normally; his speed was no different from usual—while in others' eyes, his speed was as fast as lightning.

In this special state, he could freely paint this nearly motionless world; this feeling made him joyful, excited, intoxicated, and even gave him a strange sense of familiarity and intimacy, as if this rushing power was born for him and existed because of him.

Just then, that black Mustang suddenly began to skid and lose control, rushing toward an uninhabited grassy area, looking as if it was about to crash into a street tree.

He turned his head to look into the car window again; the expression on Mardon's face began to change slowly: surprise, disbelief, unwillingness.

But he couldn't react in time; the car crashed straight into that tree.

So Barry took a step.

Whoosh—

Smashing the window, grabbing the person, binding his hands behind his back; in Barry's perspective, doing these things seemed to take dozens of seconds; but to Mardon, from the moment his car suddenly malfunctioned, to realizing a crash was imminent, to inexplicably ending up on the grass outside the car, it seemed only a few seconds had passed.

He couldn't react to what had happened at all.

"I'm CCPD (Central City Police Department). You are under arrest for robbery, Clyde Mardon!"

Barry recited the few formulaic lines properly, heard the sirens approaching the roadside, and couldn't help but let out a long breath.

"How is it? Done?"

Ma Ma Zhaodi stopped his motorcycle at the street corner and asked San San Bengzi about the situation.

"It's over. Barry Allen captured Clyde, and the CCPD officers have all arrived at the scene."

Hearing this, Ma Ma Zhaodi simply twisted the handlebars and headed straight for home.

"You did well, San San Bengzi," he said. "The money is recovered, the person is caught, and I don't need to show up."

"The backup plan is no longer needed—let's go! We'll have a special meal when we get back!"

San San Bengzi instinctively objected, "I can't eat human food."

"Alright, I'll buy you some high-grade motor oil when we return."

(End of this chapter)