Chapter 8

There was a haze between them when they fled the brothel. Fog of war. Neither of them really knew what the other was about to do.

Kara had said nothing in the time between her unfinished thought and their arrival back at The Quiver.

Some part of Oliver recognised that it would have been a ridiculous sight, The Green Arrow speeding down the streets of Star City on his motorcycle with a lingerie-clad woman hugging his back. Then again, he knew that no one had seen them. No one knew Star City like Oliver Queen. He knew every street, every back alley, every hidden shortcut. When he wanted to, which was always, he moved unseen. Even at a hundred miles per hour.

The moment they returned back to The Quiver, Kara seemed to shut down. She drifted to the open space of the training floor and halted. She stood there, starting into the middle distance, closed down from the external world. It made sense. Kara had donned the emotional equivalent of body armour, the only response left when the outside factors had grown so far beyond her own abilty to control. Oliver allowed her to do it, he had been there himself.

Oliver could still recall in vivid detail the first time he had taken a human life. Entirely by accident though it had been. It had been the first step in many that broke him. He never even knew what the man looked like; face hidden behind the black balaclava that all of Edward Fyres' men had worn. Still, he had never forgotten it.

He had taken that burden from Kara as best he could. The Triad boss would have died either way, of that Oliver was sure. Still, he had died by Oliver's hand, a little quicker than he would have done otherwise. Maybe, Oliver hoped, that would be enough. Enough to let Kara's soul escape the burden of taking a life.

In the back of his mind, he could almost hear the ethereal voice of Talia bawling him out for it, for giving Kara an out. It was what he had trained her to do after all. Everything else aside, Oliver had trained her to kill. With flying colours Kara had lived up to that training. There was so much of him that had wanted to ride it out, to stand there and watch as the Triad boss choked on his own blood, clutching at the blade Kara had rammed into his chest. To watch as Kara accepted what she had done, what she could have become in that moment. But he didn't give into it.

He wasn't the darkness. It didn't control him.

A laugh from somewhere within.

Refusing to give in to those thoughts, Oliver rolled the thumb drive between two fingers. It had been the only detour he had taken before getting Kara away from the brothel. Their mission objective, the gold that they needed to take the Triad out. Kara had given them the whole data network, information from more than a dozen different Triad run operations across Star City. It was everything Oliver had been fighting to get his hands on since he had first gotten into conflict with them.

He didn't need to look through the data himself, he knew everything that would be on there. He knew full well the extent of The Triad's reach, all their operations in his city, every person that they had hurt. It was etched into his mind, just as it was for every criminal enterprise The Green Arrow had gone up against. All he needed to do was drop the information to the SCPD, to the right detective, and it would be over. One more battle concluded in the never-ending war.

He discarded the drive on a desk at the computer bank and headed for the racks where he stored his equipment. Bow and quiver returned to their rack, over-armour discarded and neatly placed back where it belonged. Free of the weight of his armour and equipment, left in just the lightweight, skin-tight bodysuit he wore underneath, Oliver began to roll out his muscles. Tension that had been building since Kara first left for her undercover work puddled out of him in waves.

There was a relief seeping from his body that Oliver didn't entirely know what to do with. Part of him had come to accept his connection to Kara, the draw he had felt to her while she had been at the brothel. He had expected that part of him to die down once again with Kara away from the brothel, that he would no longer feel that intangible connection to her once her mission there was complete. Instead, the energy simply shifted. Tension to relief, but the draw to Kara was still there.

Oliver pinched thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes and tried to focus on something, anything else.

He gave her almost a full hour before he went to her. From his own experience, Oliver knew that she needed time to process before he could offer her anything. When he finally did cross back through the space of The Quiver, he saw that she hadn't moved. Her stance was identical, arms still hanging at a loose angle, feet planted and legs straight. Tension radiated from her seemingly permanently flexed muscles. Oliver took a final few steps and stopped just behind her.

For a long while, he waited there. Hoping that, somehow, his presence alone might be enough. It didn't take long to prove that it wasn't.

"It wasn't your fault." The words rang hollow, even in his ears.

Kara rounded on him in an instant. Features previously schooled with stunned immobility twisting reflexively into anger. The ever-present beauty he had become accustomed to seeing on those features vanished under a blood red haze of fury.

"I killed him!" She exploded.

"No, I did." Oliver wasn't even sure why he was arguing the point with her. They both knew the truth. Regardless of Oliver's interference, the man Kara had stabbed had already been dead, time was just waiting to catch up with him. Maybe, if he had been rushed immediately into surgery, the right doctor could have saved him, but that had been impossible.

Kara lashed out at him; a right-handed strike fuelled only by rage. Oliver didn't need conscious thought to deflect it. The move was so telegraphed that instinct and reflex alone brought up a wing block to steer it wide. The moment he batted the first attack away another followed, just as obvious as the last. With the same economy of movement, Oliver redirected the second attack, and stepped back out of Kara's reach.

"You bastard! You did this to me!" Kara bellowed at him.

With a professional detachment that he felt scrape at what remained of his soul, Oliver remained silent. His mind was at war with itself at Kara's outburst. Part of him knowing that Kara's rage just needed an outlet, that she didn't truly blame him for what she had done. Part of him knowing that without the training he had given, she would likely have responded differently.

For a long moment, Oliver found himself paralysed by those thoughts.

When he looked back to Kara, he could see the tears welling in her eyes. The anger had finally burnt away to guilt. Kara had given up on deflection and had started to process what had happened.

Streaks of tears broke from her eyes and began to spill down cheeks flushed red with rage.

Her hands gripped at the material of his bodysuit, fists tugging at the fabric and pulling him closer as the guilt overwhelmed her.

"I don't want this." She broke out.

"Kara—"

"Make me forget."

It felt like falling. He was close enough to smell the alcohol on her breath, a citrus mix that must have been something she'd consumed in the brothel before his arrival. The kiss was an open-mouthed collision that squeezed tears into both their eyes, a mutual assault of tongues, of teeth tugging on lips, and hands on clothing below. She was almost laughing into his mouth as they clinched, and his hands felt impossibly full of her body, unable to grasp the substance of it with enough force.

He maneuvered them both a step back, and found a breast beneath the lingerie, unsupported, hard under soft, a swath of stomach sprung with taut muscle, the hard length of one thigh and the lift of her ass above it. He could not settle on any of it.

Her leg thrust between his and ground upwards against his cock. He was already hard. She bit him on the neck. Hands dragged him across the room, into the main space of the training area. The training mats took over the floor. He drank it in and felt a shift in their intimacy like a tiny itching in the pit of his stomach, an opening to an inner sanctum, built into what had been their previous connection.

She let go of him with a sudden motion as if he was hot, and they both sank to the mats beneath them. His fingers touched the mound beneath the blue lace thong she wore, rubbing the groove up and down. Kara grinned at him as he did it, cheeks still shimmering with the previous shed tears.

He unzipped the top half of his bodysuit and moved to his knees, and buried his face in the blue lace, breathing in the undiluted scent of her. She gasped and sank back against the mat. The heated heart of flesh between her thighs was his only focus.

With deft movement of fingers, he threaded her underwear down her legs and tossed it aside. Then, he ran spread hands up her thighs and pressed the ball of each thumb either side of her cunt. A shiver ran through her and her lips parted. He bent his head and slid his tongue inside her. She made a tight, caught-up sound and he grinned. She felt the simile somehow and one hand gripped his shoulder, nails digging into flesh.

"Don't you fucking stop."

He pushed her legs wider and went to work in earnest. Her hand came back to kneed at his shoulder and neck and she shifted restlessly against the material of the mat, hips tilting back and forth with the motion of his tongue. The hand moved to tangle in his hair. He managed another split grin against the pressure she was exerting but that time she was too far gone to say anything coherent. She started to murmur, whether to him or herself her couldn't tell. At first it was simply the repeated syllables of assent, but as she tightened towards climax, something else began to emerge. Lost in what he was doing, it took him time to recognise it for what it was. In the throes of orgasm, Kara Zor-El was chanting a skein of Kryptonian.

She finished with a hard judder and two hands crushing his head into the juncture of her thighs. He reached back and gently prised her grip away, rose to his knees.

"Kara—"

Her head darted forward and her mouth fastened on his, shutting off the words. Her tongue felt hot and feverish in his mouth, and her hands starting working at his clothes, with determined purpose. He helped her actions along, unfastening the fastenings around the waist of his bodysuit, and her hand was burrowing in the gap as it opened. Even with the time they had spent together in the confines of the brothel, the release they had both found there, the sudden contact was overwhelming, and it was all he could do to keep from coming as her hand closed around the shaft of his cock.

Clearly, she could feel it, and she grinned into the kiss, lips unsticking from his, the faintest scrape of teeth on teeth and the great of a chuckle deep in her throat. She knelt upright, balancing one arm on his shoulder, while the other stayed between his legs, working. Her fingers were long and slim and hot and clammy with sweat, curling into a practiced grip and pumping gently up and down. He forced the trousers of his bodysuit down past his hips and leant instinctively backwards to give her space. The ball of her thumb rubbed back and forth against his glans like a metronome. He groaned his lungs empty and instantly she slackened her pace almost to a halt. She pressed her free hand flat on his chest, pushed him towards the floor while her grip on his hard-on tightened to almost crushing. Coiled muscles in his stomach kept him flexed upright from the floor against the pressure she was exerting and damped down the pulsing need her was feeling to come.

"Kara—"

A hard tug on the root of his cock. "I need you."

"Okay."

He grasped her by one ass cheek, one long thigh and dragged her forward onto him. She took the hand from his chest, reached down and spread herself, then sunk slowly onto his cock. Their gasps blended in contact. He searched inside himself somewhere for a little conditioned control, settled his hands on her hips, and helped her lift herself up and down. They both knew it wasn't going to last long. She reached down for his head and drew it to one swollen breast, pressed his face into the flesh and guided him to the nipple. He sucked it in and gripped the other breast in one hand while she rose on her knees and rode them both to a climax that dimmed out his vision as it exploded through them.

When Kara had first come to him, Oliver had made himself a promise. The same promise he had made to himself every time a new student walked into his life. He didn't want to control them. He wanted to train them. After Helena, that promise had come to include not falling for them.

And in the back of his head, something heard that thought, and lifted its throat to the sky, and laughed like a hyena.

There were times over the next few days when Oliver had to forcibly remind himself that it was his own life he was leading.

For the first time since they had first slept together, Kara had been the one to vanish first. After that night, Oliver and Kara had, as they had done many times before, fallen asleep tangled together on the mats in the training space of The Quiver. When Oliver had awoken, expecting to perform his usual ritual of slipping out from Kara's limbs without waking her, he had found himself alone.

When he saw her next, later that night in The Quiver, he told himself that there was nothing he could do to address it. Kara had made her request and he had given in to her. The fallout was hers to deal with. That was what he told himself.

Kara didn't mention it either. She approached her usual training with a steely eyed alacrity that belied no emotion about her actions the night before.

When it came to the mission, Kara performed with a slightly numb, mechanical competence. Their work piled up into overload as the SCPD began to take on the Triad's frontages thanks to the information Oliver had delivered to Detective Quentin Larry Lance. Not trusting himself to perform in the field with her, Oliver had instructed Kara to remain in The Quiver and observe his actions through his armour's bodycam as he assisted the SCPD where they needed it. And Kara cut a path through it like someone working through dense brush with a blunt machete. Focus ahead, swing, grab, clear and step, focus ahead, swing.

Over a few days, Oliver saw the pain in Kara's soul shift. It faded rapidly, from actual pain, to inconvenience, to vague memory. She recovered quickly. Oliver didn't know what to put it down to. Maybe because he had been able to take the death away from baring down fully on Kara's conscience. Maybe because she was stronger than he thought, more of a kryptonian in her approach to justice and death. Maybe she was refusing it, burying what she had done in the hopes that she could outrun it.

Reports from the SCPD came in through Oliver's sources. Organised Crime task forces had swept in against the Triad businesses that had been exposed via the data Oliver had delivered to them. Frontages were taken off the street one by one, and the bosses scrambled to figure out how exactly the police were able to identify their targets with such efficiency.

At the same time an investigation was launched into the shootout at the brothel. No one outside of Kara and Oliver knew what had really happened. The Triad members who had been defending the brothel against the Bratva had been entirely blind to the goings on inside, and the women who had fled from there had vanished from official sources under the protection of shelters funded by Oliver Queen. No footage of faces thanks to some tactful CCTV erasure by Kara. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gang-on-gang incursion and the missing women tied to the same fate. With some careful drops to news sources through intermediaries Oliver knew how to contact, the press spun the same story.

The media did its job, rather better than Oliver had expected. Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid fantasy. The gang-on-gang, gunfighter chic of it all caught and sold. Inner City Gangs Shootout! Criminals In Eastwood-Style Bloodbath! Coverage went on for a few days, making a sensation of the violence as Oliver and Kara slunk back into the shadows away from it all.

The following police action didn't go unnoticed either. Chasing both the violence in the brothel and the mysterious intel provided to them, the SCPD kicked in doors and broke heads. Arrests were made. The Triad felt the noose closing in on them. The media stood up on its hind legs and applauded. Star City Police Lead Gang Crackdown! Law and Order Priority for Local Community! Criminal Scum Will Be Stopped Says Police Captain! Safer Street for Our Kids Promise Police! All of it a fallacy that would have never supported the vigilante that brought it to them.

Ten days in, the original events of the brothel shootout were forgotten as the SPCD closed in on the last of the Triad frontages in Star City.

Reality blurred out in hype.

Oliver Queen turned down requests for interviews. The media wanted his comments on the SCPD vs. Triad war going on in the city. He had no interest in glorifying what was happening, no desire to connect his public self to the mission.

He spent his evenings out on the streets, watching from a safe distance as the SCPD dealt with The Triad and providing assistance where they needed it. He stayed out of the way, used his arrows only where necessary. He didn't want the Green Arrow to be involved. The people needed to know that it was their police force that had protected them. They needed to know that there were good people looking out for them, not vigilantes that hid in the shadows.

In the mornings, as night bled into day, in the seclusion of The Quiver, Oliver and Kara had each other, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of their feelings. Sprawled across the training space, against the walls of the shower, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning.

They used each other like a drug. They helped each other sleep, helped each other to avoid overly conscious introspection when, at the end of each night, even Oliver found himself wondering if he really should have let things go so far.

Eventually, it all came to a head.

The Triad had been backed into a corner. Almost all of their operations in Star City had been shut down and only their main fortress remained. Star City Docks had long been the Triad's main operating area. Their ships smuggled in people, weapons, drugs, anything that they could sell for a profit and the books were kept clean by Martin Somers. The SCPD had left the Docks for their last assault on the Triad. All their other businesses and gang houses were cut off and shut down. No help would come from the city and an escape over the water was almost impossible with a cargo ship.

Oliver and Kara heard every word of the SCPDs move on the Triad at the Docks. Wired into the radio frequency of both the Triad and the SCPD, the monitors in The Quiver relayed it all alongside footage drawn in from available CCTV and a reeled in satellite feed.

Oliver listened intently to the radio chatter. Most of the Triad's senior lieutenants had been rounded up by the SCPD but there were still two names he was waiting for. Zhishan, the scum who had led the Triad in Star City since before Oliver had even become the Green Arrow. And Chien Na Wei, the Triad's top enforcer and the only person they had who had been able to keep the Green Arrow at bay.

The SCPD had arrived with a full attachment of SWAT officers and some impressive hardware but the Triad had been ready for a siege.

Pulled back from the main bulk of buildings on the Docks and onto what seemed to be a repurposed oil tanker, the Triad had set up an impressive line of defence with machine gun nests and rocket launchers to support them. The SCPD had been brought to a standstill mere moments after their arrival.

"They need help."

It was the first time Kara had spoken since they had started watching the feed.

Oliver waited. Gave it almost a minute before he turned to her to address it.

"We could help them." He kept every word measured.

"We have to." Kara sounded insistent. "This is everything we've been working for. They deserve to be brought down."

He didn't need to hear any more. From the moment the SCPD had declared their intention to move on the Docks Oliver had been tempted to gear up in advance, to be there for when the inevitable happened. He had held back. Even if he hadn't been sure why.

As Kara declared her intention, he realised what it was that had stopped him.

He needed her to say it.

Even after every change he had seen in Kara since her arrival in Star City, a full assault on the Triad was different. It would be the full extent of Kara's training. The proof of everything that Oliver had tried to teach her in their time together. The culmination of months of lessons. With a certainty the resonated deep inside him Oliver knew that Kara would have come to the same conclusion. That there was no way she expected to be able to assault what amounted to the Triad's headquarters in Star City without needing to go the extreme.

"Are you ready for this?"

The question carried a weight that neither of them could fully acknowledge. Months of training, their relationship, the mission, all of it carried in a few simple words.

Oliver turned to her after he said it. Looked at the women stood before him in sweats and a tank top, and saw a true fighter.

It was the woman he had seen the first moment that Kara had arrived at The Quiver. The woman that he had been able to see beyond all the rhetoric and indoctrination of The Justice League. It was the woman that Kara Zor-El had always been meant to be. The person that could have come out had Clark Kent not gotten to her. Even dressed in clothes as casual as she was, Kara had the poise of a warrior.

"I'm ready."

She was ready.

Oliver crossed the floor, headed to the space in The Quiver where he kept his own armour, and grabbed the case that laid ready. He had Lodai prepare it the moment Kara had agreed to be trained by him. He knew it would be needed.

Hefting the case up onto the table, Oliver popped the clasps and opened it. Kara was at his side as soon as he did.

Lodai had outdone himself. The armour looked perfect. Deep maroon red and navy blue with black accents. The scheme of her Supergirl outfit redone to match the battlefield she was about to be facing.

"You're ready." Oliver assured her, stepping back so she could look at the armour herself.

It took them less than twenty minutes to reach the Docks. Oliver knew his city better than anyone, every back-alley shortcut was etched his mind. Navigating the streets of his hunting ground took no thought at all.

The sounds of gunfire were audible from streets away.

Oliver pulled them to a stop amidst rows shipping containers. The Triad and SCPD were fighting it out almost on the sea front, which gave them space to pull back and observe. Star City's Docks were split into two distinct sections. A storage area and the shipping front. The Triad had organised all their remaining forces along the shipping front, which gave Oliver and Kara all the room they needed.

In perfect sync they both stood from the Ducati and grabbed their bows from the hooks on the sides of the bike.

Along with Kara's armour, Oliver had ordered Lodai to make her a bow. A customised compound bow, built perfectly with Kara's frame and measurements in mind. Oliver watched her pick it up in one hand as if it was entirely natural for her. It looked like a perfect extension of her. Just as a weapon was supposed to be.

They had never been in the field together with combat expected. As part of her training, Oliver had taken Kara to various crime scenes, but stealth had always been the priority. The two of them had spent hours undercover together in the brothel. Even though that Kara had never needed to follow orders under threat of attack. Oliver wasn't at all surprised that he didn't need to speak aloud for Kara to know what she needed to do.

On a single glance from Oliver, they both fired out grappling arrows and climbed to the top of the rows of stacked containers. The height advantage would allow them to survey the ongoing battle unseen.

The sounds of gunfire and explosions built as they closed in, crossing across the docks over rows of shipping containers, and after a minute the skirmish was laid out before them.

The Triad had pulled back not just to the shipping front but to a moored transport ship. The gangplank leading to the ship had been removed and Triad members were set up almost every five feet along the deck armed with automatic weapons. Posted on some of the higher structures were thugs armed with snipers and heavy weapons. The SCPD would never be able to get close.

"We insert at the stern and clear out the snipers. Once they're down, you head inside, locate the weapons cache and destroy it. They've clearly got a stockpile of ammo and explosives on the ship; they were ready for a siege."

Oliver didn't turn his head to look at her, but he could sense that Kara had nodded her acknowledgement.

"And you?"

"I'll stay on the deck and clear out the goons."

Kara was being thrown in at the deep end. Sending her into the field without him to back her up the first time she was seeing combat was going to be a challenge. Oliver didn't have a choice. They needed to end the siege before more of the SCPD were injured or killed. It would be a risk, leaving Kara alone, but Oliver knew from experience that it was always a risk going into the field. It was all the deep end.

"If you come across Zishan or Chien Na Wei, do not engage. Contact me." A breath to prepare. "Let's move."

Two drawn arrows. Two high tensile cables launched into the superstructure of the ship. The soft metallic clang of the arrowheads finding purchase lost in the hail of gunfire being exchanged below them. No one saw them move. Economy of movement was paramount. They couldn't afford to give any time or ground unless they had to. There were lives at stake.

They landed on part of the exposed structure that led up to the flying bridge of the ship. The Triad's snipers had primarily been posted at various points up the metal staircase that worked its way from the boat deck up to the main bridge. Oliver dropped down directly behind the sniper that had been posted on the lowest part of the superstructure, Kara just a few feet behind him.

The soft clack of their boots making contact with the staircase made it over the sounds of gunfire and the sniper wheeled around at speed. He turned on a heel towards where Oliver crouched, ready.

He struck upward, into the exposed throat.

The blow ripped open the sniper's windpipe, and tore it across. Blood gushed, warm over the back of Oliver's hand. He staggered backwards, face working, eyes child-like with disbelief. Oliver moved after him and finished it.

The sniper toppled and lay still.

Oliver stood over the corpse, thrumming inside with the pulse of adrenaline. His feet shifted almost unsteadily under him. Muscle tremors skipped down one side of his face beneath his hood.

He glanced around. Kara was still stood behind him, looking on the death she had just been witness to. Kara had only seen him kill once before, in the brothel, and that had been only to take away a death she night have instead caused and after that she had almost shut down. The other two he had killed without her watching. In that moment though, Oliver saw no hesitation on her face, no remorse. He saw nothing at all.

"Let's move up."

Oliver looked down at the body of the thug as he stepped over it. He had been armed with a high-tech, night-vision scoped sniper, a Triad standard handgun, and a knife tucked into a sheath on his belt. His corpse lay throat open, limbs spread, outlined with a scattering of shells and leaking blood.

He moved on.

The gunfire had damped down to a lower intensity. Oliver felt a scribble of alarm run up his spine. If the SCPD saw fit to pull back and regroup for any length of time, some of the posted Triad might start to move away from their defensive positions to resupply.

They moved up the structure of the stairwell as rapidly as seemed safe without tripping a Triad veteran's combat-amped peripheral vision. There was an art to such movement, Talia al Ghul had taught him, breath shallow, move smoothly. Minimise anything that might trigger the enemies combat senses. He had in turn taught that to Kara.

Half a minute of itching exposure later Oliver laid eyes on the next sniper and dropped him with an arrow through the back of his throat.

They repeated the same approach three more times before they reached the flying bridge at the top of the stairwell.

On the far side of the exposed space was another Triad thug, braced on the railing besides the cabin of the bridge and aiming out with an automatic rifle. He looked up as Oliver and Kara crested the stairs, features twisted in surprise.

Kara took him to the ground with an arrow through his shoulder.

Oliver swiftly closed the gap and dropped his knee onto the thug's throat, not relieving the pressure until he was certain that the man beneath him was unconscious. Once he was, Oliver got to his feet and turned to the bridge.

He kicked the door open and swung inside, eyes flexed out to total scan in the moonlit gloom.

The back wall was mostly made of various instrumentation that went beyond Oliver's merge naval knowledge. The stem-facing wall was all windows and seated before them were rows of controls and readouts for navigation. A single Triad thug looked around from a radio she was studying, face haggard and angry.

"What do you—" Tightly strung Mandarin that was cut off as she recognised the hooded figures before her.

An arrow skipped through the air like a dark bird off Oliver's shoulder. It shattered through the thug's collar bone on the left side, burying itself in the muscle beneath, and she jerked in shock, came a wavering step towards them, still confused, and then collapsed.

Oliver stepped forward and knelt to check Kara's handiwork. It wasn't a lethal blow, but it would leave behind the kind of pain that would never truly go away no matter what kind of medical care the thug got. That was a kind of pain that he knew well, a kind that he chose often to inflict where it was needed. He had taught the strikes to Kara, demonstrated them to her on the training dummies in The Quiver and shown her footage from his armour's camera of him using them in the field. Seeing Kara use that level of brutality herself thrilled something inside him.

He stood up and turned to face her.

"Good shot."

She shrugged. "I had a good teacher."

Oliver moved to the radio that the woman had been operating and dumped his bow on the desk to filter through the channels. He listened in for a minute to ascertain what was being said.

"They're planning a withdrawal. Once they can push the SCPD back they'll make a break for it over the bay with fast assault boats. We need to move now. Give me three minutes to thin out the Triad on the foredeck, then go."

Kara nodded ponderously. Oliver couldn't fully make out her face underneath the hood of her armour. He hesitated a moment.

"Try to stay alive."

There were other things in his mind he wanted to say. Things that the emotional part of him, the part that was still Oliver Queen wanted her to know. The ghostly voice of Talia as Ghul shut those things down the moment they filtered beyond his subconscious. He didn't get the luxury of caring.

He gave the adrenaline its head, collected his bow left-handed from the desk, made his way through the bridge and let the momentum carry him back outside into the storm of gunfire.

It took him one of his three minutes to get back to the foredeck without being spotted, working his way around the stairwell to the stern of the ship. The position gave him line of sight on the nearest group of Triad thugs lined up along the edge of the ship, aiming over the railing at the edge of the ship at the SCPD officers below. There were five of them directly in his line of sight. All of them turned the wrong way to see him coming. Oliver breathed out once and started towards them.

He was barely ten metres out when one of them happened to turn around and look up. The thug shouted something that he couldn't make out at a distance.

Oliver shot him first. A single arrow, buried in through between the thug's eyes as he ran forward.

The next nearest thug was moving when Oliver got to him, a single leap into the air mid-stride and a mid-air kick that slammed the thug back against the railing of the ship. He bounced off, one hand reaching for his gun. Oliver grabbed the arm, crushed it at the wrist and fired an arrow into the yelling mouth.

Something hammered him in the chest, threw Oliver on his back against the metal deck. He looked up, saw a Triad thug stood over him wielding what looked like a steel bat. Instinct dragged his bow arm up and Oliver shot the thug's right leg out at the knee. Flexing his legs Oliver threw himself back to his feet. A high-calibre round lashed into the deck where he had been. He tracked around and snapped off an arrow. The sniper spun about with the impact and red glinting blood spattered out of his chest as the arrow found purchase.

The last one tried to close with him, blocking Oliver's firing arm upward and stamping down towards his knee. Against anyone with less training it would have been a good move, but the thug wasn't good enough. Oliver skated his leg back a fraction and the thug's foot smashed into the deck beneath them, staggered. Oliver twisted and snapped out a dropkick with all of the force he could muster.

It looked as though it broke his back.

Something banged off the railing next to him. Oliver looked up the foredeck and saw more thugs spilling towards him, weapons levelling. Oliver snapped off an arrow in reflex, then got control of himself and reached for his quiver.

Conditioned training put his hand exactly where it needed to be and—

—howl, howl, HOWL—

Some kind of snarling grin made it onto his face as the explosive ordinance cut loose.

Smart shrapnel arrows. An idea originally pitched to him by Helena and perfected by Lodai after months of experimenting. The arrows required very little precise aiming on Oliver's part. Built into the housing of the explosive element was a smart locator system that detonated the payload just where it would wreak the most organic damage.

The thugs closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Turned them into shredded carcasses fountaining blood from a hundred entry and exit wounds. Those further from the blast survived the initial explosion but wouldn't make it until morning.

Something inside him gleefully thrilled at the violence.

Oliver moved forward up the deck, looking for survivors.

Halfway through the blast zone, Oliver spotted a pair of injured Triad thugs hidden between piles of cargo crates. He drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as Oliver drew near. The shrapnel had, Oliver saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest Oliver was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragment.

"What—" He pleaded.

The arrow punched him flat. Beside him, the other thug cursed Oliver to some hell he hadn't heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood.

A silence followed. The night bore down around him, only the faint sound of water lapping around the hull of the ship reached him. Broken a moment later by an echoed hailed of gunfire from the decks of the ship below him. Oliver looked around for the source of the sound, spotted an open doorway further down the deck and flinched towards it.

A voice inside stopped him dead. He had thrown Kara into the thick of it by sending her out alone and part of him regretted it. He had never hesitated with his students before. He worried for them, wanted them to finish the mission safely, but he never regretted letting them fight. Allowing Kara to go alone so soon as scratching away at a chunk of his soul that still remained.

His focus was drawn back to the bodies below him. He hovered over them for a few moments, bow half levelled then tipped about as something banged flatly, further down the deck.

"Arrow!"

The Mandarin echoed off the enclosing steel containers and cargo crates that laid around the deck of the ship. Oliver jerked around fully. Twenty metres away Chien Na Wei stood waiting.

They had fought countless times before. Every time it seemed as through The Green Arrow was encroaching too far into Triad territory, they sent her to slow him down. It usually worked. Almost every time they fought to a standstill.

There were undoubtedly more Triad deeper in the ship. Kara would be able to deal with most of them, if he was lucky, but there was every chance Chien Ne Wei would have reinforcements any moment. The SCPD were right behind them. With the Triad's vanguard taken out by Oliver, the police and SWAT teams would be making for the ship. Despite it all, Oliver felt a smirk creep out across his face.

"You're done."

Maybe it was the adrenaline. He laughed out loud. Shouted it.

"You're fucking done!"

They began to circle, still the width of twenty metres apart and no guard up to even hint at what either of them was about to do.

The both charged.

Chien Na Wei lashed out first. The techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such speed and power that it was all Oliver could do to block them. Counter-attack was out of the question. He steered the first punch outward right and used the momentum to sidestep left. She followed the shift without hesitation and went for his face. Oliver rolled his head away from the strike and felt her fist graze the edge of his hood. Instinct told him to block low and a knee-shattering straight kick caught him off guard. A follow-up elbow strike caught him on the top of his head and he reeled backward, fighting to stay on his feet. She went after him. A low-level punch snaked under his defences and Oliver felt the metal bluntness of brass knuckles collide against a rib.

He staggered back three steps.

Chien Na Wei backed off and was facing him with hooded eyes and both fists raised in preparation. It almost looked like she was enjoying herself.

"You will not see the dawn." Wei had followed Oliver into English. "You have interfered in our business for the final time."

Oliver gritted his teeth. "Your business is done. You're finished in my city."

The whole ship rocked around them.

A defending crack like thunder and a portion of the deck near the aft-end of the ship exploded upwards. They both stumbled, struggling to find their footing as the whole structure beneath their feet began to shift.

Oliver took advantage and began to close. She was still staggering when he made it to her, and he lashed out with the same speed and curiosity she had shown. She was able to deflect one or two but he managed to break through her guard a few times to lay strikes across her ribs and chest. She wove a counter attack but Oliver stayed squarely in her path, gave no ground until they were face to face. He let go of the headbutt with all the ferocity he could manage.

Her nose broke with a solid crunch and, as she wavered, he took her down with an instep stamp to the knee.

He stepped back as the ship rocked again from end to end and another explosion rang out. Looking towards the aft of the ship, Oliver saw smoke and flame billowing from the hole that had been punched through the deck.

Panic drenched his system. Kara had been below deck.

A hand shot up to switch on his comms. His finger hand barely reached the transmit button when a hooded figure pushed through one of the doors in the main tower. She was at his side in seconds, barely sparing a glance at the bloodied Chien Na Wei on the ground.

"One of the thugs tripped some sort of fail-safe. The engine room went up in flames. This whole ship is going to explode."

A laugh from across the deck.

Oliver looked over as Wei made it to her feet.

"Did you really think we would let you leave here alive?" A sickening grin filled her lips even as blood leaked from her broken nose. "All this way for you. We knew you would come. And now you will die for what you have done to us. You and your new pet."

Something snarled inside. A taloned grip closed around the back of his neck.

They had done it all to get to him. His attempts to shut the Triad down, the final steps in the war against them, and they had turned it around to try and draw him in. Men and women of the SCPD had been killed in the process, lives thrown away because the Triad had wanted The Green Arrow. That had been why the Triad had been prepared for a siege, they needed to last long enough to draw him out. Worst of all, it had worked. He had charged towards them, given them what they had wanted.

He wouldn't let them get away.

"You won't stop me."

And out of the corner of his mouth, he muttered to Kara.

"When I engage, get out of here and head for where we arrived."

"I'm not leaving you."

Another explosion. The inky blackness of the night was pushed back momentarily as a wave of red and orange flame leapt from the bowls of the ship. The whole word seemed to shake around them.

"That's an order." He hissed at her.

Kara rushed at Wei and Oliver followed immediately cursing her in his mind. He had trained her as well as he could, passed on the lessons that had kept him alive time and again, taught her every fighting technique that he could impart. She wasn't good enough to go up against Chien Na Wei unscathed.

In a series of moves that looked almost effortless Wei batted away Kara's first attack, sent her stumbling back a few paces as Oliver closed in. He swung in using his bow, aiming for her ribs. Wei pivoted to counter his attack and it gave Kara the chance to rebound. As Wei shoved Oliver's attack aside Kara exploded into action. She punched hard, driving high for the face and low for the guts. Wei turned back too late. Kara's high punch drove into Wei's already broken nose but she caught the low punch in one cupped hand. She dragged the captured fist up, used her other hand to grab Kara's shoulder and shoved her hard back against the railing at the edge of the deck. Breath thudded audibly out of her audibly as her back connected with the metal.

Oliver rushed in behind, panic setting in as he saw the glazed look that crossed Kara's eyes. Wei was faster. She turned perfectly to catch his oncoming blows, locked up his dominant arm and shoved him back. Oliver slid on the surface of the boat, almost went over as another explosion shook the ground under him. The blast felt far closer that time.

Another incoming attack. Wei left Kara against the railing and shot for Oliver, arms pining back as she prepared to swing. The floor exploded under them. Oliver felt his feet leave the ground and a strange sense of weightlessness for a brief moment before gravity caught up to him and dragged him back down. He thudded, cracked the back of his skull against the metal ground and felt his bow leave his hand and skid across the deck. He tracked it, saw where it stopped and span to his feet.

Eyes dashed across the deck. Threat scan, looking for Wei. He found Kara instead. A glimpse of her. A flash of deep red tumbling over the edge of the ship as the kinetic wave of the explosion threw her back. His limbs tensed into running, springing across the distance with all the speed he could muster. Made the railing in time to hear the splash below but the darkness of the bay hid any tell-tale signs of a landing.

"Another one lost." A voice behind him. "How many now is that you've killed?"

A fracture within.

Kara couldn't be dead. The explosion hadn't been close enough to deal her that much damage, the shrapnel wouldn't have been able to punch through her armour. But she had been winded by Wei's attack. If her lungs were empty when she hit the water. Combat conditioning should have shut the emotion down, adrenaline should have kept him thinking straight.

Should have.

A fracture within. Something had broken and a voice long suppressed found purchase in a growl that rose up through Oliver's throat.

Oliver left his bow on the deck of the ship and turned to face her.

Wei was backed off, wiping blood that had spilled from her broken nose. She looked curiously at her red-stained palm and then back across at him, then shook her head, grinning lightly. Oliver's features drew up into a blood-thirsty snarl.

"Come on then." The grin took full form. "Put me away."

He was on her almost before the last word left her mouth. Oliver went at him with everything he had left and she was hardly able to touch him. Red tinted aggression flooded over his training and instinct. He wasn't looking to disarm and disable. He was looking for maximum damage.

Wei threw out blocks to keep the brunt of his attacks off her, steered blows clear and wide where she could, but his rage made up for her speed and most of his attacks made it through her guard.

One of the attacks found purchase on her left arm. He pulled, locked out the elbow and swung his unoccupied arm down towards the joint. She twisted in his grip but couldn't move away in time and Oliver felt his forearm shatter her elbow joint as the strike connected. The elbow exploded under the attack and Wei screamed out in pain and rage.

They both separated for a moment, then dived at each other again. Oliver wound a series of strikes and blows he knew she wouldn't be able to deflect with only one functional arm but she did admirably.

On the last of her responses, she overreached and he snagged his wrist. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into her ribs and Oliver felt them snap underfoot.

Wei went down on the injured ribs and wheezed out what breath remained in her lungs.

Punctured lung. Something told him.

Her functional arm pushed her around, back flat to the floor, and Oliver saw a ragged line of cuts down one side of her face where her cheek had made contact with one of the ruined parts of the deck. Blood oozed from the wounds.

Her mouth hung openly loosely, the eye on the ruined side of her face pressed shut, the other lolled back in its socket. The arm Oliver had shattered trailed across the floor at an impossible angle to the rest of the body.

He grinned. Almost as though something else had its claws on the wheel. Oliver pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth to quell the grin and stalked towards her, unsure if she was unconscious, if somehow her body had caved to the damage, or if she was acting to draw him in.

Another explosion somewhere close.

He knelt down, reached into one pocket of Wei's jacket and tugged out her phone between finger and thumb.

A hand closed around his leg.

Oliver's focus snapped up to her face. She was still alive, eyes wide and staring up at him. Her good arm made feeble motions. Her mouth opened and closed silently, like a landed fish, but no air seemed to be moving.

She would be dead either way. Her injuries alone would probably be fatal and the ship was moments away from total destruction. He could just walk away.

A voice somewhere within, mocking him. Talia maybe, or Slade, or Yao Fei. Voices of mentors rolled into one and something else laid on top of it. He couldn't leave her there. It wouldn't be right.

Oliver remembered every encounter they'd had before. The taunts, the arrogance. The lives that Chien Na Wei had been directly and indirectly responsible for ruining. Kara. His mouth tightened and he stowed the stolen phone in a pouch at his hip.

His lips peeled back from his teeth. Hands gripped her throat and he put his full weight behind the action.

He was bent over, glaring into her face.

It seemed to take forever.

At first, she only made choking sounds. Then, from somewhere, she found strength enough to get her undamaged arm up to claw at his hands.

Oliver kicked the hand away and pinned it down underfoot.

Wei's choking sounds grew frantic. She twisted her head against the railing. She curled her trapped fingers around the edges of Oliver's boot.

Oliver pressed harder. He lifted his foot and stamped down hard on her hand. He heard the dry snap as one of the fingers broke. He pressed harder. His whole weight went into the grip, taking his body into a curl.

Something crunched. She stopped moving.

Afterward, Oliver forced himself to his feet and remember the maelstrom around him.

He turned, looking across the deck of the ship for his discarded bow as another wreath of flame exploded from below. The deck beneath him detonated up and out. Flung from his feet, towards the edge of the ship. His chest collided with the railing, he felt at least one rib give way under the pressure. He sucked in a ragged breath. The ship rocked; he went over.

A rolling tide of numbness washed over him. Flashes of red and yellow danced across his vision. Sound washed away in a roaring tunnel of darkness.

Beneath it all, he heard Kara.

You can't beat it? Your conditioning?

Her hands on him. She was smiling. For some reason he couldn't pin down, he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

He couldn't beat it. He didn't need to. He didn't want to.

And a sound like distant thunder.