This is the fifth story featuring the evil League of Supergirls. As always, big props to @erikhandel for inspiring the whole thing with his (not evil) Council of Supergirls.

A big thank you to @fbru2000 for reading the draft and giving me excellent feedback.

This one took a while from conception to completion. Originally, it opened in Argentina with the second murder. I added the Seoul restaurant scene after some deeper consideration of my lore. That's where I was stuck for a long time. I knew who I wanted the killer to be, but I wasn't sure how to get there.

The original idea was a pulp/noir style detective story. The problem was that Chandler's advice of "when things slow down, have a guy enter the room with a gun" doesn't work so well with a nigh-invincible protagonist.

Inspiration came from a few sources. An idea from @WillowTreeCat about collateral damage had me consider changing the culprit, but I decided she made for a better red herring, even if that required a small retcon to her origin. A marathon viewing of Midsomer Murders helped with writing a mystery that's mostly talking rather than gunplay. Reading Quarry by Max Allan Collins fleshed out some of the hitman stuff - the idea of the Broker was ripped wholesale from Quarry, name and all. The inclusion of Interpol is entirely down to me having watched every episode of Leverage multiple times.

The name "K-Metal" is a reference to an unpublished Siegel and Shuster Superman story featuring an early version of Kryptonite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K-Metal_from_Krypton

All of that percolated in my mind until I decided to stop faffing about and buckle down to write the damn thing. In the end, I replaced Chandler's advice with: "when things slow down, have the protaganist grind on a guy's face."

Illustrations made with Stable Diffusion and GIMP.