by Archer, Mia
I strode out of the office, having done my good deed for the day. From here on out I was no longer Night Terror the maybe-hero. I wasn’t Night Terror who was reluctant to hurt someone because it might upset someone.
No, I was Night Terror the villain, and there was someone out there who’d hurt somebody very near and dear to my heart.
It was time to remind the world why that was a very dangerous thing to do.
31
Nasty Commute
Missiles streaked across campus from the Applied Science Department as I took to the air. Which was a little bit of a surprise considering you usually didn’t expect to see those kind of defenses coming out of a learning institution.
Like I’m sure there are a few schools that have those kind of defenses. Especially the places that do DoD work. I wouldn’t be surprised if a place like, say, Purdue had some nasty hidden tricks somewhere around campus in addition to their massive underground complexes, but I’d never expected something like that from Starlight City University.
I flew right at the missiles, unconcerned. I glanced down and saw people running away, and some of them stopped to stare up at the missiles streaking in.
There was a time when I would’ve worried about some of those idiots being hit by a glancing blow, but not today. I’d already done everything I could to save those people, and obviously the idiots down there had never been in my Surviving A Heroic Intervention class.
Though it was gratifying to see someone run up to one of the idiots staring, slap them upside the head, then drag them towards the journalism building which was well known for having some of the best bunkers on campus.
There was something about being in a profession that was regularly the victim of Starlight City’s unique and regular attacks that gave the professors in that building a healthy desire for a good place to hunker down.
I saw all that in a split second, and then it was gone as I turned back to the missiles.
“Targeting incoming missiles mistress,” CORVAC said.
I sighed in contentment. I’d forgotten just how much CORVAC was a necessary component of me operating at one hundred percent.
“You complete me, CORVAC,” I said.
“I would ask that you never express your happiness at my return in the form of late ’90s romances ever again, mistress,” he said.
As he said it more missiles streaked up from the Applied Science Department and slammed into the ones coming at me. It was good to know he’d been serious when he said he was fighting Dr. Lana in there.
I’ll be honest. There’d been a part of me that worried it was all part of some convoluted plan he was pulling to lure me into a false sense of security so he and Dr. Lana could take their time double teaming me once they had me in their clutches.
“I’m going to need a map overlay for where her secret lab is,” I said. “I figure it’ll be easier for me to drill down into the thing directly rather than going through the stuff you’re fighting.”
“Coming up now, mistress,” CORVAC said. “But you should know that her current location appears to be heavily reinforced. I doubt drilling down will be an effective strategy.”
“Let me worry about that,” I said.
A glowing read spot appeared just under the basketball arena. Odd choice, that, but I wasn’t going to pull my punches just because her secret lab happened to be right beneath the school’s new jewel of an arena that cost more than some professional sports arenas in other cities.
I dove right through the fancy retracting dome. It wasn’t retracted right now, but that wasn’t a problem after a couple of blasts.
“That’s going to piss off the chancellors,” I said.
“Excuse me, mistress?” CORVAC asked.
“There are humans who get paid a lot of money for people throwing balls around,” I said. “And they’re not going to be happy that I just blew out the top of the place where people throw those balls around.”
There was a pause. “You humans are odd creatures.”
“I never denied that, CORVAC,” I said.
I figured it was just the one tiny hole in the roof, after all. It’s not like I was deliberately trying to destroy the place.
Then I heard more crashing and glass went falling to the ground all around me. I barely put my shields up in time to stop a giant hunk of glass from bisecting me. The thing glanced off of my shield and slammed deep into the ground, and the force of the impact was still enough to throw me to the side and slam me into an advertisement for Starlight City Construction Experts.
They were one of the biggest corporations in the city. Right behind some of the super science outfits that were the source of so many of the city’s problems.
It turns out construction was a lucrative business in a city that regularly saw its buildings reduced to rubble.
I looked up and immediately found the source of the glass raining down all around me. It was a giant tail swishing through the air that hit the stadium with a glancing blow.
I held my breath and waited to see if the monster was going to go for the stadium, but nothing happened. Odd. They seemed to be drawn to major landmarks like cats to catnip, but I wasn’t going to knock it if a busted roof was the only incidental danger it caused while I was trying to work.
The people who built this thing weren’t going to be happy when they got the repair bill. Though of course that was really their fault for building an expensive facility like this in a city where expensive facilities were regularly reduced to rubble.
I looked down. I felt rumbling under my feet. As though there was something seriously nasty going on down below. I figured that had to be CORVAC fighting the good fight well beneath the basketball arena, and I figured it was time for me to join the fight.
I floated up about halfway between the basketball court and the now destroyed arena ceiling. As I floated I heard the telltale signs of drones moving in. I looked up and saw several civilian drones as well as one from the Starlight City News Network.
I grinned and gave the things a little wave. And then I did something that I’d always dreamed of doing back in my truly villainous days, but that I never would’ve actually done because back then all those reporter assholes were always flying around in helicopters and I would’ve risked killing their asses.
It was quick and simple work to swat all those drones out of the sky. One moment they all floated there and the next they were gone in puffs of smoke. They were small enough that they didn’t even give off an impressive explosion when they were swatted from the sky.
Eventually the only one remaining was the far more expensive drone from the Starlight City News Network, but they seemed to get the picture and they got the hell out of my airspace pretty fucking quick after they realized I was taking out the other civvy drones.
The only reason I didn’t knock the SCNN drone from the sky was out of deference to what I assumed was one of my old students flying the thing. They had gotten the idea from me, after all. The drone pulled back far enough that I figured it wasn’t going to interrupt my work, and I let it hang there.
Someone had to see what I was doing, after all. I just didn’t want to have a bunch of assholes distracting me in the middle of an important fight.
I pointed my wrist blaster down. Set the beam to a wide dispersal that I hoped would allow me to do some digging. It wasn’t like I could just stand on the basketball court and start spinning around really fast to dig down to Dr. Lana’s lair or something.
That sort of thing only works in the movies.
I fired off a shot. The basketball court cracked and exploded, but it wasn’t disappearing nearly fast enough. At the rate I was going it was going to take me some time to drill down, and then there was a massive sizzle and suddenly the beam I’d fired was reflecting back up at me which was an unpleasant surprise.
It’s not like the beam was powerful enough to do serious damage, but it’s also not like I wanted to get singed by my own equipment. I dodged out of the
way and the reflected beam flew off into the sky above like a massive flare letting the whole city know I was down here.
I mean the city already knew I was down here. The news feed made sure of that. Those lizards weren’t watching SCNN, though, so they were blissfully unaware there was something going on until I sent that flare up announcing my presence.
Damn it. What the hell was…
I floated down and landed just beneath the basketball floor. Then grinned when I saw what I could only assume was one hell of an unauthorized modification to the basketball court. Someone had added a layer of reflective armor coating to the thing. The kind of armor coating that was going to take a hell of a lot more time to drill through than I had right now.
“You were right,” I said. “Looks like our dear friend Dr. Lana has put up some sort of armor to keep someone from doing what I was trying to do.”
“That is unfortunate mistress,” CORVAC said. “But not unexpected. She is deeply paranoid.”
“Yeah, what I want to know is how she managed to hide something like this. It’s not like a construction foreman is going to add armor like this without asking someone higher up in the university first.”
“Likely she added it later by burrowing under the basketball arena with her many robots. That seems to be her favorite method of operation,” CORVAC said.
“Right, well we need to…”
Only before I could really start spitballing ways to get through to her lair a giant shadow falling over me. For a moment I thought it might be one of those drones that decided to get a little too close again, but then I realized the sun was being blotted out far too efficiently for it to be anything that small.
I sighed. Looked up at a very angry lizard staring down at me with a baleful glare. Not the kind of thing I needed right now.
The SCNN drone had moved out of the way, but it was at a respectful distance that would allow it to record everything that was going down while at the same time avoiding some of the radiation being given off by this motherfucker.
“CORVAC,” I growled. “I’ve got company.”
“I apologize mistress,” he replied. “I am occupied and unable to assist you at this time.”
“Got it,” I growled.
I grinned. I’d just thought of a nice way to drill down to Dr. Lana’s lair.
32
Badass
I glanced at the Starlight City News Network feed more out of habit than anything else. If there was something going down in the city then usually they were there with their insipid commentary, but I figured they might also have a good view of the giant lizard.
They did. I did not like what I saw.
It was a biggun, that was for sure. The tail stretched all the way to the football arena. It looked like I’d drawn the biggest and meanest giant lizard motherfucker of the lot.
I grinned. Just what I needed. I stared up at the thing. Pounded my hands against my chest.
“What are you waiting for you ugly fucker?” I shouted up at the thing.
I was pretty sure these things couldn’t understand English, but it did understand a pretty universal display of aggression from a creature much smaller than it that shouldn’t be acting aggressive at all. The thing snarled, growled, and rather than firing off its nuclear dragon breath its face darted down in an attempt to eat me in one piece.
I’d already done that once, thank you very much, and I wasn’t in the mood for a repeat. So I dodged out of the way at the last moment.
There was a loud clang as the thing’s snot slammed against the armor beneath the basketball court. There was also the sound of splintering wood because there was still a good chunk of the basketball court that’d remained unmolested by my weapons.
Of course I wasn’t in the way of its teeth, though it took the stupid fucker a moment to realize that it hadn’t chowed down on me. Not that I’d expect anything less from a monster that kept its brain in its ass.
No, that wasn’t entirely fair. The thing was a lizard, after all. Not a dinosaur. I might be a villain, but I was also a scientist and I wasn’t going to commit the sin of being cladistically inaccurate, thank you very much.
Besides, I was pretty sure the science of dinosaurs keeping their brains in their asses had probably advanced since I was a kid reading books on the subject even though paleontology was one discipline I hadn’t kept up on.
The thing chowing down on the armor also gave me the opportunity I was looking for. I jumped on the thing’s head and grabbed for dear life. The thing was big, and I was straining my suit’s antigrav to the limit with what I was doing, but it worked.
I managed to yank the thing’s head back. It didn’t harm the fucker, but it was enough to get its attention. It reared up and I felt the familiar hum and tingling that meant it was charging up the old nuclear dragon breath.
I couldn’t help but grin. I also glanced at the SCNN feed once more and was treated to a sight that was a hell of a lot more interesting than watching the anchors making jokes about how I was glorified lizard poop.
Yeah, the image of yours truly with her hands dug into the radioactive lizard riding the fucker like a bucking bronco was a lot more interesting than watching me coming out of the unfortunate business end of one of these things.
Its head reared and it let out an ear piercing roar. The fuckers were loud when I was facing them down from a distance, but that didn’t come close to the decibel levels achieved when I was right on top of the thing when it let out its roar.
The only thing saving me from a hell of a case of tinnitus was my ear filters and the fact that its roar was directed away from me and I was slightly behind the source of that roar.
It was difficult trying to control the thing. Like we’re talking if I’d been trying to lift the whole fucker it would’ve been impossible.
We were talking about a monster that was throwing around so much tonnage that the inverse square law should’ve turned it into a puddle of broken bones and flesh on the ground. I’d long since stopped worrying too much about things that violated the laws of physics.
Well I worried about it, but only insofar as I wanted to figure out how that lizard was violating said laws of physics so I could figure out a way to do it myself. Unfortunately in this case I was pretty sure it had something to do with the high doses of radiation running through the thing that somehow gave it super strength rather than cancer, and that wasn’t something I was willing to put myself through.
I jerked the thing’s head to the side, and then at the last moment I fired everything I had in my antigrav to point its head down towards the arena. I also averted my eyes.
Sure my mask had compensators that were supposed to go up the moment it detected the bright flash that indicated a nuke was going off nearby, but I could still be prudent and avert my eyes when I knew something like that was coming.
So I heard the thing’s breath go off rather than seeing it, and let me tell you hearing the thing was spectacular enough. The light was still blinding enough that it flashed through my eyelids and the filters that went up to keep me from being blinded. The sound of that nuclear fire hitting the stadium and the armor was also nothing short of spectacular.
I let go at the last moment and flew back. Mostly going on instinct since I didn’t dare open my eyes. I just knew I wanted to get away from that lizard pretty damn quick considering what I thought was about to happen.
There was a final roar, then a sickening crunching sound. I opened one eye and dared to peer out. The blinding flash was gone, but there was the briefest afterimage of a bright column of light shooting up to the sky causing a couple of fluffy white clouds to vaporize around it.
The Starlight City News Network drone that’d been hovering over our fight like an annoying gnat was nowhere to be seen, but I could see several at a distance moving in fast. No doubt to pick up coverage where the destroyed drone left off.
None of that was my concern though. No, I was more interested in the carcass of the giant
radioactive lizard that’d fallen over the now thoroughly destroyed arena. More than that I was interested in the giant smoldering hole that had been reflective armor just moments ago.
I smiled. Then I threw my head back and my arms out and let out a good old fashioned villainous laugh.
That felt good. It’d been entirely too long.
Also? I totally needed to see the instant replay on that one. Sure I also needed to get in there and save the girl asap, but I figured it wasn’t going to hurt anything to have one look at what those pukes at the Starlight City News Network were saying about what I’d just done.
The only problem? When I pulled up the window for SCNN so it filled my heads up display the anchors sat at their desk staring slack-jawed. I almost would’ve thought something else bad had happened in another part of the city with the way they stared, but a quick glance at the news ticker showed the main story was still the multiple giant lizards attacking the city.
Finally the pretty lady at the desk cleared her throat.
“Um. I think we need to see that again,” she said.
“Uh, yeah,” the older distinguished gentleman said. “We’re coming to you live from Starlight City University where… Well. Uh. You just need to watch this for yourselves people.”
Holy shit. They were talking about me. I’d actually stunned those pukes at the Starlight City News Network into silence with my antics for once.
Amazing.
They switched to the feed from the one drone I hadn’t shot down in a fit of pique, and boy was I glad I hadn’t shot down that drone now. The footage the thing got was nothing short of splendiferous.
I rode the top of the giant irradiated lizard like it was a bucking bronco and I was going for the title. Or whatever it was they called the pinnacle of achievement for people who liked to hop onto angry moving animals and hold on for dear life for sport.
