by Archer, Mia
Before me being a villain was a bullshit career that existed solely to provide a reasonable foil for the many heroes that came through the city looking to make a name for themselves. Now villainy was something everyone aspired to as much as being a hero if not more.
It was more fun being a villain.
I stepped through the giant hole in the bank and looked at each robber in turn. They wore ski masks and had shotguns and other sorts of weapons you could get by going to one of the numerous neighboring states that had far more lax gun-control laws than what you found in Starlight City.
They also wore a motley collection of tactical gear that screamed they did all their shopping out of the back of gun magazines. They were trying their best to look like the real thing and failing utterly and completely.
The dude I presumed was the leader of this merry band of misfits stepped forward and scratched the back of his head with his shotgun. Not exactly the safest thing, but then again I guess I shouldn’t expect to see much in the way of smarts from a bunch of normal guys who had the audacity to try robbing the bank in Starlight City. And in the middle of a giant lizard attack, no less.
“Um, excuse me Night Terror ma’am,” he said. “But what the hell are you doing here? We thought you was…”
He stopped. Seemed to realize he might’ve gone too far by even implying I’d moved to the straight and narrow. I frowned, and he flinched.
That was good. It was nice to know there were still some members of the criminal element in this city who remembered a time when I’d been at the top of the pecking order.
I still was. If they chose to delude themselves into thinking I wasn’t that was their problem when they ran up against me. I was going to show them who was still in charge of things around these here parts, thank you very much.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to tell them what the hell I was doing in the bank today. No, no sooner had that guy asked his impertinent question than they all gasped and then grinned.
Not the kind of reaction I was hoping for. I figured we needed to get back to some of that fear and terror, honestly, but none of them seemed interested in me for some reason.
“Fialux!” one of them breathed.
I looked around at the assembled bank robbers. My frown deepened. Simply put, this group should’ve been crapping their pants at the mere hint of Fialux being nearby. But they were looking at her with huge grins. As though they saw a payday, and not a painful beating incoming.
Now why the hell would they be grinning like they saw a payday? It just didn’t make sense. Unless…
“Let’s get her boys,” one said.
The leader turned. Held up a hand. He looked pissed off, but he also clearly looked like he wasn’t going to give anything away in front of the heroines who’d come to ruin his day.
“Now hold on just a damn minute,” he said. “I didn’t say anything about taking anyone captive!”
“But what about the bounty?” the one in the back asked.
“Yes,” I said, my voice a low purr that could be heard even over the sound of masonry and concrete tumbling over itself as the bank shifted and got used to the fact that a giant hole had been blown into the front of the place. “Why don’t you tell me all about the bounty on Fialux? I’d be very interested in learning more about that.”
They all went silent. In particular the one who’d mentioned the bounty looked like he was about to piss himself. Like he was so pale he looked like a group of vampires I’d ferreted out of a club on the east side of town.
Yeah, turns out vampires were real and you didn’t need stakes to take them out. Extensive experimentation on my part revealed that vaporizing worked just as well on the undead as it did on the living. And that adventure wasn’t even on the top ten list of weird shit I’d seen since ascending to the top of the A-list of Starlight City villainy.
Again, seeing that fear felt good. It was good to know the Terror part of my name could still be struck into the heart of my enemies.
Even if, in this case, my enemies were a bunch of low-rent criminals who never would’ve dared to pull a job like this back when I was at my height of power. Back when they thought I was at the height of my power, that is, because the truth was I’d never left.
And it was time to remind this city why they’d been afraid of me. Even if I was pulling the hero routine right now trying to fight off bank robbers.
It was complicated.
“I’m not telling you anything,” the ringleader said.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, raising my wrist blaster and letting it give off that ominous hum I loved so much. “You sure about that?”
The leader rolled his eyes. Clearly he wasn’t buying what I was selling. Clearly he’d bought into all the news reports that said I might’ve gone good, or at the very least that I’d lost my edge even if I was still bad.
Too bad for him he was going to be the tip of the spear in my new marketing campaign to remind everyone just how bad I could be. Though to be fair what I was about to do to him was going to hurt a hell of a lot less than getting stabbed by a spear.
“Get her!” the one in the front said. “She’s gone heroic. She’s not going to…”
Whatever he was about to say was cut off by a beam flashing out from my wrist blaster. The beam hit him before he could react. As I was so fond of telling my classes the time to dodge a beam weapon was when it was aimed at you since there was no outrunning the speed of light. A moment later he was reduced to his constituent molecular parts. Basically he vanished into a screaming cloud.
It was over in a matter of seconds, but that was still longer than it usually took for a vaporization. I wanted to make sure he felt it as he was vaporized. I also aimed low so there’d be a chance for him to scream just a little and let all his buddies know how much it hurt getting vaporized, even if it was over in seconds.
I blew at the tip of my wrist blaster even though that was completely unnecessary. It’s not like it was an old-fashioned powder weapon that actually had smoke curling from the tip, though I made a mental note that it might be a good idea to add something like that.
There were a lot of costumers who were doing wonderful things with e-cigarette kits to add smoke effects, and I was all about a bit of theatricality.
I looked at the bank robbers who’d frozen in place again. Clearly they were reconsidering whether or not it would be a good idea to cross me, but the fact that they were still considering it rather than running in terror was proof enough that I had so much work to do to rehabilitate my good bad image.
I grinned an evil little grin.
“Anyone else want to presume that I’ve gone heroic and I’m not going to hurt them?”
9
Mortal Combat
There was a long pause where they seemed to be seriously considering whether or not they wanted to take me on. The fact that they were seriously considering it rather than running in terror like they should’ve been was a sign that my reputation had fallen way too far.
I was never going to take time off to go canoodling with Fialux again. I could do that in the evening when I got back from work, but no more vacations lasting the better part of a month.
A wise person once said that it was nothing but work once word got around that you’d gone soft, and I was learning that firsthand here. I can’t say that I cared for the experience.
“You heard the boss!” the one who’d mentioned the bounty said, and there was something about his tone that said there was going to be more work now.
“What the hell is he doing?” Fialux asked.
“No honor among thieves,” I said.
“Which means?”
I looked the guy right in the eyes. “He figures I’m going to pay particular attention to him if they ended up getting captured and he doesn’t want to find out what it meant to have Night Terror paying particular attention to his criminal ass.”
“Huh. I guess I can understand that,” she said. “He’s trying to
take heat off of himself by ordering his fellow thugs into action.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Pretty smart when you think about it.”
At least it was smart up to the point I started spilling his plan. His friends didn’t like that idea judging from the glares he was getting.
I could respect him throwing his compatriots under the bus, or the murderous villain in this case, to try and save his own bacon. It wasn’t going to work, but I could respect it.
“Don’t listen to her!” the guy shouted. “She lies! Get her!”
Clearly the order was enough to get through any misgivings they might have about their new leader. They jumped into motion even though they were obviously terrified. I figured some of them were probably soiling themselves as they came at me, but that wasn’t enough to stop them from coming at me.
I sighed. I really needed to get back to the way I used to do things, even if I couldn’t quite figure out how I was going to do that and also keep Fialux happy.
There’d been a lot of calculated death and destruction involved in maintaining my reputation before Fialux. I could already hear the bitching out she was going to give me later tonight because I vaporized that one guy.
The bank robbers raised their weapons and fired. It was almost like a volley from an old-style military back when guns had been so inaccurate that the only way they could guarantee a hit was by sending out a mass of bullets.
Unfortunately for them they were using shotguns, and the way the pellets spread out from those shotguns meant it was a hell of a lot easier for me to stop them even if they usually had a hell of a lot more stopping power than your typical bullet.
My heads-up display filled with too many targets for me to keep track of myself. Which is the whole reason I’d given this over to the computer.
I’d slowly been making more and more improvements to the suit. Giving it new safety protocols and other features that CORVAC used to handle, but that I didn’t trust an external artificial intelligence back in the lab to handle in real time any longer.
To be honest I’d been lazy. I had an AI who was capable of doing all this stuff so I’d left a glaring weak spot in my defenses. Mostly because I didn’t want to do the work to go through and program those defenses myself.
Well I’d learned the hard way what a bad idea that was.
The computer attached to my suit automatically targeted each individual pellet coming at me and little micro shields appeared in their flight path. Not enough to stop them, but enough to slow them down to the point they landed well short. The one or two that did get through were moving slow enough that they bounced off of me like little pebbles that had been thrown by a toddler.
“Holy shit,” one of the robbers said.
Another one threw his gun down and held his arms up, but then he got a glare from one of his buddies and sheepishly reached down to pick it up.
I locked eyes with the guy and grinned. “You were a hell of a lot better off when you threw that thing down buddy.”
I raised my wrist blaster and fired. The gun blew into a puff of smoke and metal shards. The guy went down screaming, and the heads up display showed me that the shrapnel had hit his leg.
A quick report showed I hadn’t hit anything vital. He was going to have a bad day, but he’d live. One less bitching out from Fialux later.
“Anyone else want to cause some trouble?” I asked.
Someone appeared beside me. It wasn’t quite the green blur that had been in the habit of appearing next to me once upon a time, but it was close enough that I flinched away before my rational brain caught up with the instinctive side of my brain and reminded me that not only was Fialux not going to hurt me, but she was wearing a safetied version of my tech which meant I was currently more than a match for her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Fialux hissed.
“I’m taking care of these are bad guys,” I said. “Doing the whole hero thing? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“But you killed that one guy!”
And here we were. I guess I wasn’t going to have to wait until we got back to the lab to get bitched out. Great.
This was getting really old.
“What?” I asked, hitting her with my best sweet and innocent look. A look she wasn’t buying if the glare she gave me was any indication. “I promise it didn’t hurt when that beam disintegrated him. At least not all that much.”
It had hurt, a lot, but she didn’t have to know that.
“That’s not how you do the hero thing,” she said.
“I thought I made this clear,” I said. “I might do heroic things, but I’m no hero.”
She put her hand against my chest. Right over my heart. “But you are. I know that deep down you are. Besides, we already settled this when you swooped in to save me from those giant robots Dr. Lana kept throwing at us.”
I rolled my eyes. “Are you really trying to Anakin Skywalker me in the middle of a job?”
I paused to reach out and grab a guy who’d been sneaking up on me. His shotgun had been pointed right at my head, and I figured I couldn’t let that stand. Sure my shields would’ve deflected the shot and sure I had sound compensators that would’ve dulled most of the tinnitus-inducing blast, but it was the principle of the thing.
I squeezed and he let out a satisfying cry and dropped his shotgun as I crushed his favorite piece of anatomy. Then I turned and punched him hard enough to throw him across the room where he slammed into the wall and slipped to the ground unconscious.
I winced. That was going to leave a mark. Knocking someone out like that wasn’t without consequences, but I figured it was better that he was out than to be awake and feel the aftereffects of the world of hurt I’d just given him.
With any luck he’d wake up in a hospital where he’d have plenty of nice drugs being pumped into his system to keep him from feeling the worst effects of getting punched by the world’s greatest villain. And he’d have a hell of a story to tell when he was in the clink.
It turns out even having a brush with Night Terror was enough to give guys and girls some status in there. Who knew?
I turned to grin at Fialux. “Was that awesome or…”
I cut off. Her look said it all. Damn it.
“Come on. What was I supposed to do? He was trying to shoot me in the head! He deserved it!”
“This is…” she said.
I put my hands on my hips. I was starting to get really frustrated with this holier-than-thou hero routine she was pulling on me. Frustrated to the point that I was going to give her a piece of my mind, damn it.
“Fine,” I said. “If you want to take point, then by all means do it your way. Treat the nice criminals with kid gloves and see where it gets you without your powers to throw around.”
She stared at me for a long moment. Then she smiled. I smiled right back at her, though probably not for the reasons that she thought. No, I was looking forward to watching her fall flat on her face.
“Fine,” she said. “Watch how it’s done.”
I was going to watch, all right. My only regret was I didn’t have any popcorn on hand so I could really enjoy the show.
10
The Show
I wish I could say this was one of those moments where I was wrong. I’d honestly love nothing more than for Fialux to suddenly get her groove back. To be able to take on all these the bad guys at once.
The only problem was she still didn’t have much experience when it came to using my super suits. She still kept pretending she had her powers.
That was a big problem, because she was still going at everything like a bull in a China shop. She had no finesse. No sense of style. She didn’t use their momentum against them. No, she simply flew forward with her fist outstretched.
To be fair to Fialux, this time when she flew right at someone she managed to make contact. The guy stood there like an idiot, obliging enough to watch in disbelief as she flew at him. Her fist made contact and his head
jerked back, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as he went down.
When he hit the floor he was still conscious, but his nose was bleeding and that was going to leave a mark.
“Come on,” I said. “That’s your idea of ethically taking out a bad guy? Seriously? You beat the shit out of him!”
No one was paying attention to my not-so-quiet frustration. Not Fialux, and not the robbers. Damn it.
All the other asshole bank robbers looked at her in disbelief, but then a couple of them started to smile. And I realized exactly what was wrong.
In flying at that guy at a much slower speed and punching him but only giving him a bloody nose rather than knocking him out or knocking him through the back wall she’d just revealed she wasn’t operating at the same level she usually did.
“I told you it was true!” the one who’d given up the info about the bounty shouted. “She doesn’t have her powers! Wait until everyone hears this! You get her boys! She’s worth millions!”
I arched an eyebrow. This guy really didn’t know when to shut the hell up. It was one of the many villain rules I lived by. Keep your big mouth shut and never reveal anything to a hero you didn’t want thwarted later at a dramatically appropriate moment.
But at the same time I felt like a mama cat watching her kitten playing with a mouse. Sure Fialux wasn’t doing a very good job of fighting these guys off, her fighting style only worked when she had the advantage of overwhelming power and invulnerability, but I had to let her make her own mistakes while I watched to make sure she was never in any real danger.
A couple of the robbers did a quick game of paper rock scissors, and the losers turned and advanced on me. They didn’t look happy about advancing on me. The rest of them sprinted across the bank towards Fialux who’d kept right on flying after landing that punch and crashed into a bank vault in the back.
I saw someone’s head pop up from a desk by that vault and a brief moment of recognition hit me. I smiled. It was the asshole who’d tried to step between me and a bank vault on the day I first met Fialux. How appropriate that he’d be here today at this main branch.
