Sergeant Speed charged straight towards the Molecule Wizard first. The wand made him the most volatile of the Rogue Heads. Deep down, he pitied Mardon. He was driven mad by Hydra to be another human weapon like Bucky, but the influence instead came from the soul of the man who killed his friend.

Before he could reach him, however, Sarge was stopped in his tracks by a pouncing Silver Cheetah. She wasn't as fast as him, especially right now, but in a situation like this, she was buying the Rogue Heads precious seconds to mount their attack.

"Come on, Minerva, is helping Loxxi really what you want?" Esteban asked, looking at the feline fatale with disappointment. Before her feral transformation, she was another that Sarge saw as a potential legacy. Sergeant Speed and Miss Mercury had a nice ring to it at the time. During her extremely short time on the L.M.I., she showed great promise in being a hero for the next generation in his eyes. He loved Minerva like a niece, and it broke his heart to see her go down this path.

"Loxxi's been the only one to ever care about what I want," Minerva growled before tearing into Sarge's costume with her claws.

"If you let us, we can help you. Jessica misses you," Sarge pleaded before he elbowed her in the stomach and dashed back.

He followed up by flinging his helmet into her to get some distance. He kept trying to get closer to the rest of the Rogue Heads. They were moving in slow motion compared to the two speedsters, but slow motion was still motion. And while the window of opportunity was always open for an attack, Minerva was there to make sure he never leaped through it.

Sergeant Speed and the Silver Cheetah zipped around the cliffside, chasing each other like feral animals. Sarge fought like a soldier: Skilled, precise, aiming to subdue and restrain. Minerva fought like a wild beast: Savage, brutal, and out for blood. She was a few hairs slower than him, but the Silver Cheetah's claws tore through him like a plow through a field.


Captain Winters and the Rogue Heads looked around at the red and green blurs with almost a sense of relief. Usually, it'd require careful strategies and team synergy just to hold their own against Sarge. It was kind of nice just watching someone else fight the Sergeant and make him sweat for a change. But they had their eyes on the prize.

"Alright, we're with you, Lenny. What's the play here?" Flag Burner asked as he tried to train his gun on Sergeant Speed, but he couldn't get a clean shot without singing their silver savior.

"Minnie there is softening him up. We do our usual tango with Sarge, and then she's gonna take me and Boomer to the Vault and take the score, you guys hold him off, and then once we're square, Sammy can get us all out. Think you can stall him out, Mick?" the Captain asked.

"You got it, Cap." Flag Burner answered with a loyal salute.

Barnes tracked the speedsters' movements as best he could. He fired icy blasts from his arm at the two of them, all of them missing. In their wake, spires of ice protruded from the mountainside.


Sarge and Minerva kept tussling, but now they dodged and weaved past the icicles. The Silver Cheetah would grab the Sergeant's face and drag it up the side of the mountain before slamming him into one of the spires. His cowl protected him from most of the damage, and his helmet from the concussion, but the exchange left his face bloodied. But he used the new environment to his advantage and grabbed an ice spike. He swung himself all the way around it before dismounting from beneath and sending him flying forward, dropkicking straight into Minerva's chest.

Minerva would go flying off the cliff, just as Sarge did minutes ago. Luckily, cats always land on their feet. She hit the valley below harmlessly, but she groaned in annoyance as she stared up at the climb back to the fight.

Sarge landed back onto the road. With Minerva gone, he finally had a millisecond to breathe. He ran towards Mardon, but he was stopped as the literal road beneath him punched him in the face. With a wave of the Molecule Wizard's wand, the asphalt reshaped into a little hand beneath Esteban, shot up, and uppercut him in the jaw.

Another flick of Owen Mardon's wrist transmuted the asphalt fist into a neodymium magnet which forced Sarge's helmet to slam his head down on top of it again. Then, before Sarge could remove the helmet and free his head, Batroc the Trickster came crashing down onto his back.

Sergeant Speed managed to pull himself off the magnet and went for a quick pivot and an uppercut toward Batroc's jaw. He'd just fought him last week, and among the Rogue Heads, he was the only one Sarge found genuinely annoying.

Batroc leaped into the air with his boots to avoid the next hit and reached into his bag of tricks. "'Scuse moi, Sergeant, you seem to have lost these from our last encounter!" He announced before tossing a barrage of marbles into the air.

Molecule Wizard then fired his wand at the marbles. They absorbed the air molecules around them to grow in size, causing mini-explosions in the atmosphere's wake. The tiny marbles grew and reshaped into steel anvils. They lost all momentum and plummeted down like the deadliest kind of weather. The Wizard laughed maniacally at his handiwork, continuing to listen to the whispers from his wand.

Sarge dodged the falling anvils with ease, but the terrain became even more unsteady as he tried to run around it all. The ice and new debris made this a very difficult environment for him to fight in. Captain Winters took advantage of that as he kept firing blasts of absolutely frigid air from his cannon, building ice walls from the road. The chunks of cryogenic crystal coruscated in the sunlight.

Sarge saw the new walls as an opportunity. He forced his helmet off the magnet in the road and flung it towards the ice. It flew through the air, colliding with the first spire, bouncing off it to hit the second, the third, and the fourth, but right before it would've crashed into Captain Winters, Mirror Move stepped out directly from the fifth chunk of ice and grabbed the helmet mid-air. While Mirror Move's only inherent powers were to reflect any movements they saw, they stole technology used by one of their bounties, Jonah McCulloch, the Mirror Magistrate, to control reflections themselves and travel through reflective surfaces.

Mirror Move then hurled the helmet back in the same way Sarge had just thrown it, bouncing off the ice in the same way. Their photographic reflexes allowed them to throw it at the same speed as well, briefly catching Sarge off guard and slamming him in the abdomen, knocking the wind out of him for a moment.

While Sarge recovered, Captain Winters looked at the side of the cliff and sprayed a massive sheet of ice on the face of the mountain. The ice glistened in the right light, and it posed as the perfect escape for when the Rogues had to get out of dodge. "You know what to do, Masters."

"Of course, Captain," Mirror Move said with gusto as they banged their holographic saber, a sword whose blade was made from hard light, against their mirror shield. From the shield spouted a mirror image of their progenitor. They advanced towards Sergeant Speed like a dangerous duo he remembered from his golden days.

Sarge got to his feet. He was starting to feel like he was in over his head. He'd fought all these guys together many times before and won handily. But the first fights with Bucky and Minerva took a bit out of him. He remembered his last day in his own time; all of the Society's finest versus Hydra's vilest. It was one-on-one fights back then, but now all of the legacies of their heinous acts stand before only him. He couldn't help but feel a tad outmatched.

Sarge was about to reach for his ID card to call Cyberman for backup. Miraculously, it managed to stay tucked inside his helmet even after being tossed around so many times. But he hesitated before triggering the distress signal. Maybe it was pride, to prove he hadn't lost his edge, maybe it was a sense of duty to handle these guys himself for the men who lost the chance to, but Sarge decided that he was going to handle them on his own.

The Mirror Moves came in swinging synchronously. It was like playing the most dangerous game of Double Dutch as Sarge dodged and ducked away from every blow. He responded in turn with flurries of rapid punches, but the assassin's body reacted faster than their mind. Each thrown fist was countered by a reflection of itself.

Sam marveled at their body's photographic reflexes keeping up with what they only perceived as a blur of fists from both sides. "I love this part so much, really gets the joints loose," they quipped before the duplicate of Mirror Move grabbed Sarge and bashed him with the shield into one of the trucks. The two of them then hurled their shields at him, raising them over their heads to mimic the way Sarge threw his helmet.

Sarge braced himself for impact, but he felt time slow down around him. His heart rate was speeding up so fast that he was tapping into more of the Speed Force as a defense mechanism. He took the extra "time" to focus on the incoming projectiles. He saw that the shield thrown by the duplicate of Mirror Move had slight cracks in it that glistened in the sun. The only way to beat Mirror Move was by using attacks they could not reflect. So by using both shields coming at him, he could throw them off their rhythm.

Time resumed as normal as the shields continued careening toward Sarge. He positioned his hands precisely so in the slowed-down timeframe to catch both shields, and they slotted perfectly into his hands. He stood up and spun around fast enough to whip up a whirlwind around himself, calculating the precise time and place to let both loose, and he slung them off.

The duplicate's disc went to the left, bouncing off the sheet of ice on the cliffside, then back towards the two Mirror Moves. The second shield went down first, bouncing up into the air, hitting Batroc the Trickster again, down towards the railing on the edge of the road, then finally towards the mirror-faced marauder.

The reflection's shield was about to hit the real Mirror Move, but they were braced to catch it. That was until the real shield came flying straight to it. The shields collided, and the real thing shattered the fake into a myriad of shards. The shrapnel shot straight into Sam's secondary soldier, shattering them as well. Mirror Move's duplicates could match them offensively, but they were as fragile as the mirror they crawled out of. The real Sam Masters was also covered in shards of hard light at this time. Sarge then ran straight into Mirror Move, and with a clean sock to the jaw, knocked them to the floor.

Before Sergeant Speed could celebrate this victory, he was engulfed in flames. Flag Burner had come from behind and blasted him with his flamethrower. His suit was designed to be heat resistant due to all the friction he generated by running, but even that had its limits.

Morgenthau laughed heartily as he sprayed concentrated heat in the Sergeant's direction, "You can't take the heat, get outta the country! 'Cuz I'm burning this whole place to the ground!"

While the flames hurt like hell, there was also a fairly easy way of handling the issue. Sarge held out his arms and started rapidly spinning them in circles, creating mini cyclones from his arms. They sucked in Mick's flames like a vacuum, robbing them of the needed oxygen.

"Only you can prevent forests, except me. I can also prevent forest fires," Sarge quipped in his earnest, boy scoutlike tone. He then spun his arms around in the opposite direction to send a large gust of back at Flag Burner, knocking him over.

His cockiness was extinguished as quickly as Mick was, as he was stabbed in the back by a pair of boomerangs. Behind Morgenthau and Captain Winters was Baron Boomerang. He had thrown his weapons from around the cliff's edge to hit him from behind.

"G'day, Sergeant Meth! Forget about me?" the Baron called out from behind the two gunners.

In reality, Sarge did forget about Baron Boomerang. But when he was fighting so many people at once, it was difficult to keep track of everyone. He groaned in pain as he plucked the boomerangs out of his back, and tried to let his speed accelerate the healing.

"Here, let me put some ice on that!" Captain Winters said mockingly as he blasted Sergeant Speed with his Winter Cannon. The beam was fast, but Sarge was faster. He tapped into the Speed Force to slow down time. He sidestepped the blast and made a break straight for Captain Winters. But as he ran, slipped on some of the ice still left on the road. He lost control of himself and flew straight forward, tripping on one of the anvils created by Molecule Wizard, only to then fall into what appeared to be a puddle of fake vomit left behind by Batroc the Trickster.

Sarge staggered back to his feet and wiped the mess off his face, but before he could find his footing, he was struck in the back, and it was coated with a sheet of ice. While missing its target initially, the ice beam flew past Sarge toward the barricades Captain Winters put up at the start of the fight. Mirror Move fired a beam of light from their saber to turn the reflective surfaces of the ice barricades into portals. The beam passed through one, ricocheted through the others, and then popped out of one more to fly straight into Sergeant Speed's back. This was the kind of planning and synergy that allowed the Rogue Heads to hold their own against Sergeant Speed for all these years.

"He's tagged, folks! Finish him off!" Captain Winters commanded as he lowered his arm to fire another icy blast at Sarge's legs, freezing him to the road.

The rest of the Rogue Heads then went all out on the restrained Sergeant Speed. Molecule Wizard turned the ice at his legs into lead, keeping him even further secured to the ground. He then blasted Sarge in the chest with a barrage of plasma created from air molecules. Mirror Move fired a beam of light from their sword into Sarge's back. Baron Boomerang flung more of his eponymous weapons at him, while Batroc started smacking him across the face with a rubber chicken. The coup de gras was when Flag Burner took the flagpole he used as a spear and jabbed it into Sarge's thigh. It didn't hit anywhere lethal, but it hurt like hell.

Fighting the Rogues was always a dangerous endeavor, but he knew they would never kill him. It wasn't "part of the game", Bucky would say. That didn't stop them from being extremely brutal in the fights. They'd seldom ever gotten this far, so being beaten like this was a novel experience.

He needed to figure a way out of this, a way to beat these guys. He just needed to focus. But every second, there was another blow. He was cold, hot, shocked, and sore all over. All of the pain and stress taxed on his already vulnerable psyche.

Esteban racked his brain to try and think of a way forward, but he kept hitting dead ends. Run backward: get trapped in one of Mirror Move's portals. Phase through the spear: get burned by Flag Burner. Going anywhere else would get him either frozen, zapped, or tricked. He was completely trapped.

Sarge's mind kept racing, his heart matched its pace as he kept internally speeding and speeding up, trying to give him a moment's peace. He felt so helpless in that one moment. He was supposed to be better than this. He was the fastest man alive because everybody faster wasn't alive. The Speed Force responded to his needs and kept flowing into his body, and his mind, until he got exactly what he thought he needed.

Time was frozen, but unlike his previous taps into the Speed Force, he was frozen with it. His mind was operating at such a high speed, that the rest of his body couldn't keep up. He was faster than the speed of thought. He had time in a bottle, but he was in the bottle with it. A bottle, he had forgotten to take his meds before coming here. He just wanted to be at his peak again, but even that wasn't enough to handle Minerva and the Rogue Heads. Nothing he could do was enough, Sarge felt helpless. This was what panic attacks were like to a Speedster. No time passed at all for the Rogues, but for Esteban Garrick, he was locked in, and he was going to be there for what felt like a while.


As half a second turned into what felt like hours, all Esteban Garrick could do was sit and suffer through all his worst thoughts. He couldn't even breathe to calm down, as not even his lungs could keep up with his supercharged brain. This was one of the downsides of super speed no one considers. He thinks about how he could have avoided this by just taking his meds. But he was too proud to let himself be less than.

He thought a lot about the people he was supposed to be there for, but couldn't. One of the first things he did after he came to the future was visit the graves of the people Thawne mentioned. When he found the graves of Barry Frank and the rest, they weren't remembered as heroes, just an assortment of random men cut down at random points in their lives. Everything they were meant to do with their lives was erased by Thawne, and only Esteban was left to mourn them.

He was supposed to be in an unremarkable grave alongside them, but he got lucky, he lived. But that meant everything those speedsters were supposed to run for now rested solely on him. It was like a parent mourning a miscarriage, all you have to miss is the potential, of what could've been.

His thoughts progressed to the Rogue Heads. In a way, they were also a part of his legacy. They were the results of him and the MSA failing to completely rid the world of Hydra, and they were led by the main Esteban saw as his own greatest failure.

Sarge had fought the Rogues on many occasions. Given both groups' deep animosity towards Hydra, they crossed paths often. Esteban worked with SHIELD to contain any Hydra remnants, making them face justice the "right" way. The Rogue Heads took a more expedient approach. He'd seen many soldiers turned into ice sculptures, shattered to pieces like glass, or just burned to cinders. One never forgets the smell of a burning Nazi.

On one hand, getting rid of them is a good thing. A little bit of him envied being able to handle them so callously. Sarge often considered just letting Bucky and the heads do their own thing, let them solve the Hydra problem for him. But he knew that would in time only spell disaster. Such extravagant displays of violence only lead whoever's left to escalate. The heads grow back from the gore. That's why the League hardly gets involved in fighting Hydra; because then they're going to try and create a counter for Thunderman or Wonder Crystal out of necessity, and nobody wants to deal with that. To summarize; he was just middling enough in power to keep Hydra from trying to make things more powerful than what it would take to handle him.

So, they leave everything to Sarge and SHIELD. Operations are done by the book, and all detained members are processed by the international justice system and sent to prison. They show that the way society and its laws work the way they're supposed to, hopefully preventing the next generation from wanting to support Hydra's tyranny. It's a delicate balance, but it's kept Hydra from pulling anything too far beyond what they can handle. By keeping the war on Hydra "fair", on a specific level of power, it keeps the dragon sleeping.

His thoughts finally then came to the two speedsters he'd actually met: Johann Thawne and Minerva Maximoff. Both of them were driven by an intense hate to commit the atrocities they did. Sarge hated Thawne for everything he took from him, but he pitied Minerva. She could've been so much more.

She was the older twin daughter of Erik, but everyone knew Jessica was his favorite. That is when he was around physically and mentally. She always wanted to prove to her father that she was good enough. When she and Diana were together, Minerva always felt like she was overlooked because she wasn't truly part of their world. When she was finally given the talisman by her father, she wanted to be the greatest hero of her generation, so the world would finally acknowledge her.

But her zeal for power was her undoing, and she could not bear the sacrifices needed to be a hero, including the chastity the talisman required to not be cursed by the patron's magic. Minerva was victim to a horrible curse that forced her down the dark path she ran, but she chose to run that path herself because the other paths weren't enough for her.

Perhaps if he knew what led Thawne to become the man he was, Sarge would sympathize for him as well. But then again, a bad childhood can't excuse being a time-traveling Nazi who changes a man's ethnicity so that he becomes less of a hero. That's a level of cartoonishly diabolical evil that one can never truly look past.

That was the last thing that plagued his mind. Did changing the past to make him Mexican really make him less of a hero? His own race never mattered to him, and he knew the importance of everyone being able to see a hero who was someone like themselves. But on the other hand, do another less savory kind of people see him as less than how they would view him if he was the blonde hair, blue eyed, boy scout, and how much does their point of view matter? The world sees him among the Pantheon of the LMI, their equivalent to the Messenger God Hermes. But he could have been so much more than another pair of boots on the ground. He could have been a symbol of the American Dream, and be a guiding hand to bring that to everyone, but Thawne took that from him too, his potential.


These thoughts would be punctuated by Sarge finally seeing one thing moving in his field of view. Very slowly, he saw the Silver Cheetah climb her way back up the cliff and towards him. She was, in reality, moving extremely fast, but his perspective still had her moving at a snail's pace. As much as he knew this next strike was going to hurt, he would take solace in knowing it would snap him out of this frozen hell.

Minerva charged into Sarge and slashed her claws across his face. His goggles were cracked and the straps were lacerated off his face. They fell right off his cowl, which was now even worse for wear. Sarge's face was bleeding, but his mind was back in tune with his body so he could feel the pain.

Esteban groaned in pain as he vibrated his molecules to phase through Minerva's next strike. He also phased through Flag Burner's spear and returned her scratches with a clean sock to the face. "You're gonna be confused by this, but thanks." He said before he was blasted with Flag Burner's flamethrower, just as he predicted would happen from what felt like hours ago to him.

Minerva grabbed Captain Winters and Baron Boomerang and picked them up by the backs of their coats like they were kittens, "Alright boys, you've have your fun, let's go get what we came here for." She wasn't much larger than them, but she held them up in the air so effortlessly.

"Do you gotta carry use like this, this doesn't seem very efficient," Bucky asked, feeling a little self conscious about how he looked in front of his crew.

"Not really, but it does make you look adorable, doesn't it?" Minerva responded with a smirk.

Baron Boomerang didn't seem all too bothered by the position he was in, "Keep given' him hell, boys! Hooroo, Sergeant Meth!" He called out before Minerva sped off back towards the Iron Vault with the Captain and Baron in tow.

Sergeant Speed got to his feet and stared down the remaining four Rogue Heads. On the bright side, his claw wounds were cauterized. On the other side, he was very badly injured, and he still needed to stop Minerva and Bucky from stealing whatever they were stealing. He finally admitted to himself that he needed backup. He went to reach into his helmet to grab his ID card and call for help, but to his horror, it was replaced with a playing card, two of clubs to be exact.

"Ta-Da!" the Molecule Wizard exclaimed, holding his wand in the air. He'd transmuted it during one his blasts.

"It appears you're on your own, Sergeant. It's a real shame, I would've loved to go toe to toe with someone who was actually worth replicating. Fighting you has almost grown a bit stale," Mirror Move taunted as they banged their saber against their shield, creating a few more mirror images to up the ante of the fight.

Flag Burner grabbed his spear from the ground and raised it into the air, "The next one's going through your heart, Speedy!"

Batroc hovered back into the air as he looked around, feeling something change in the atmosphere. "He doesn't seem all too worried, mes amis. Pourquoi?"

Sergeant Speed's worry turned to sweet relief as he saw dark clouds rolling in around them, "Don't you hear it?" He asked to the group.

"No, what is it?" Batroc asked.

"Thunder." Sarge answered with a smile.

With a loud rumble, and a louder crack, a cascade of lightning bolts descended from the heavens and crashed down upon the Rogue Heads. Mirror Move's duplicates were shattered to pieces. They're destruction would probably add up to about 50 years of bad luck. Molecule Wizard and Flag Burner's weapons became lightning rods, and they were fiercely shocked. Lastly, Batroc the Trickster was knocked out of the sky and forced to the ground, the impact and shock rendered his Leaping Boots inoperable.

After the light show, Thunderman flew down from the clouds to land by Sergeant Speed, "Well met, Sergeant," Thor called out in his booming voice.

"Hey Thor, thanks for the help. I guess I'm back to owing you eighteen, right?" Sarge asked, still reeling from everything he just experienced.

"Bah, don't think too much of it!" Thor answered with a laugh, "I only keep count for Stark because I know how it vexes him. You're all good." The god put a hand on Sarge's shoulder. He felt Esteban flinch as he was grasped. "Oh, you seem to have a few battle scars. Do you need my aide, Sergeant?" He offered jovially as he raised his hammer and twirled it in his hand.

"No, no thanks. I can heal fast. What I need is to get to the Vault and stop Minerva and Bucky," Sarge answered as he took a few deep breaths and let the Speed Force accelerate his healing, primarily closing the hole in his thigh after Flag Burner's stab.

Thor noticed the lightning crackling around Sarge as he channeled the Speed Force energy, "Sergeant, your aura returns to you. What of your medication?" Dr. Donald Kent was one of the physicians who helped engineer the medication that kept Sarge in the right headspace.

"It's fine, it's fine Thor. I just forgot to take it today. I think it's alright. I needed the power boost when I was going up against these guys. Silver Cheetah did a real number on my face. I'll take them after all this is over." Sarge assured as he patted one of the pouches on his belt. He felt the pill bottle still in there.

"Sergeant, did you get locked in again?" Thor asked in a far more serious tone. He was genuinely concerned for his friend.

Sarge sighed, "Yeah, I was for a little bit. But I'm fine. I needed to be at my best, and I still do. I can handle myself."

"And what if you can't? What if you overload yourself, let the stress of battle force your mind into that box again? All your speed is for naught if you lack the peace of mind to use it!" Thor reprimanded.

"And my peace is useless if I can't use my speed to save lives," Sarge argued back.

"Sergeant….Esteban, you are more than what you can do for others. Don't forget to save yourself too." Thor reminded him with a kind smile.

Sarge looked at the face of his friend and relented. It was hard to say no to him. He reached into his belt pouch, grabbed his bottle of pills, cracked open the bottle, and took two pills. With a quick swallow, the lightning around Sarge faded away. He felt a calm wash over him as his mind was grounded back to the standard flow of time. He was still fast, but not the level he felt he needed to be.

Just as Sergeant Speed slowed down, the slightly charred Rogue Heads rose back up and collected their weapons. Molecule Wizard waved his wand, and he seemed completely refreshed as the ash and soot from his previous shock disappeared. He shot his wand into the sky, and the blast of energy forced away all the clouds. It was clear skies, and not much opportunity for another lightning strike. Flag Burner cocked his flamethrower and Batroc retrieved his remaining bag of tricks.

Sergeant Speed got into a fighting stance, but Thunderman stepped past him and raised his hammer. "Go, Sergeant. I'll handle these ruffians, myself."

"Thanks. Make sure to keep your distance with Mardon. I don't think he can make Adth Metal with that wand, but he can probably make something that'll at least sting." Sarge warned as he got into a runner's stance to blitz past the Rogues and go after Silver Cheetah.

"Thanks for the heads up. As for you fighting Minerva, aim for the head. No particular reason, it's just aiming for the head never hurts, at least not you." Thor advised with a coy smile. He got into a similar running start position as Sarge. The two heroes stood side by side, brothers in arms prepared to fight their respective foes. They both tipped their respective helmets to each other and charged into battle!