Outside, Hikaru and Jinx's fight had evolved into something between combat and dance.
He flew in close, swords flickering through combinations his father had drilled into him over countless sessions—high cut to neck, low sweep to legs, thrust to center mass. Jinx flowed around each strike like she was made of water, her hex bolts punctuating the gaps in his offense. When she landed a direct hit on his shoulder, the wing joint seized with sudden cramps.
Hikaru twisted the fall into a wing-assisted spin, his foot catching her ribs hard enough to send her tumbling. She rolled with it, came up firing, and he had to abandon the aerial advantage to dodge—her powers were too unpredictable at range.
"You know," Jinx ducked under a light construct sword, "this would be almost fun if you weren't such a—"
Hikaru's fist caught her jaw mid-sentence, snapping her head back. She recovered with a hex-charged uppercut that he barely weaved away from, the bad luck making his footing slip on perfectly dry rock.
"Such a what?" he pressed, light-chains wrapping around her wrists. She hexed them apart and drove her knee toward his solar plexus—he caught it, used the leverage to flip her overhead.
Jinx landed in a crouch, pink energy crackling around her. "Titan."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
They clashed again, faster now, both of them reading the other's patterns. Hikaru was stronger, faster, more durable. But Jinx's powers made direct confrontation a nightmare—every successful hit carried risks, every construct vulnerable to entropy. She was sporting a fierce grin now, and Hikaru realized he had the same expression.
Inside the Tower, the tide was turning.
Robin coordinated with military precision, his tactical genius cutting through the chaos. "Wonder Girl, clear the loading bay! Raven, collapse the east stairwell—cut off their reinforcements! Beast Boy, Shimmer is yours! Kid Flash, get Gizmo away from that terminal!"
The team moved like a synchronized machine.
Donna grabbed a Robot Commando by the leg and used it as a battering ram, clearing a path to the loading bay where more robots poured in. Her lasso wrapped around a support beam and she pulled—the entire entrance collapsed in a controlled cave-in that buried a dozen Commandos.
Raven's dark energy consumed the eastern stairwell, her power swallowing stone and metal alike until nothing remained but a smooth wall. See-More tried to laser through it—her portal swallowed the beam and spat it back, taking off his helmet with surgical precision.
Beast Boy became a gorilla, charging at Shimmer whose alchemy kept shifting the terrain beneath them. Ice to lava to rubber to glass—but when she touched his fur trying to transmute him, he shifted to a fly and reformed as a rhino, his horn catching her center mass and launching her through a wall.
Kid Flash became a tornado of kinetic violence, disarming Gizmo's gadgets faster than the genius could deploy them. The interface device went flying—Cyborg, having finally subdued Mammoth with a point-blank sonic blast to the skull, caught it and crushed it to fragments.
"Security's back online!" Cyborg's human eye gleamed with satisfaction. "Locking down all entry points!"
Outside, Hikaru made his final move.
He'd been observing Jinx's patterns, cataloging the tells she didn't know she had. When her eyes flicked right, hex bolts came from the left. When her shoulders tensed, the next attack would be vertical. When she smiled that particular way—
There.
Hikaru went intangible as her hex bolt passed through him, reformed already inside her guard. Light constructs formed not as weapons but as restraints—bands around her wrists, her ankles, her throat, all connected to a central point in his fist. She hexed them immediately, but he'd expected that.
The instant her powers made the constructs fail, he was already moving. His wing slammed into her back, driving her forward into his rising knee. Air exploded from her lungs. Before she could recover, he had her pinned against the Tower's wall, one hand around both her wrists, the other flat against the concrete beside her head.
They were both breathing hard, faces inches apart.
Jinx's eyes were wide, pupils dilated, her lips parted around shallow breaths. Pink energy flickered weakly around her fingers but didn't fire. For a long moment, neither of them moved.
"I guess I win," Hikaru said quietly.
"Yeah," she breathed. Her gaze dropped to his mouth. "I guess you do."
The air between them felt charged with something that had nothing to do with their powers. Hikaru's awareness narrowed to the heat of her body against his, the rapid flutter of her pulse under his thumb, the way she was looking at him like—
A sonic boom rattled the Tower.
Hikaru's head snapped up, combat instincts overriding everything else. Inside, through the broken walls, he could see his teammates standing victorious among the wreckage of Robot Commandos and defeated Fearsome Five members.
When he looked back, Jinx was smiling—dangerous and knowing. "Careful there, Angel boy. Pin a girl like this, people might talk."
He suddenly became aware of how close they were—her body pressed against the wall by his, the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the way her pink eyes reflected the glow from his light. Things he definitely shouldn't be noticing about someone who'd just tried to kill him.
Hikaru kept his expression neutral. "Let them. I'm not the one who just lost."
"You got lucky."
"That's ironic coming from you." He tilted his head, studying her switiching back to the same analytical focus he'd used during their fight—safer territory than wherever his brain had been trying to go.
"Fair point." Jinx shifted her weight, seemingly more curious about his reaction than concerned about her capture, but he didn't miss the way she tested his grip experimentally, or the disappointment when she found no give.