Night Terror & Fialux (Book 3): Villains Don't Train Heroes!

by Archer, Mia

  I wasn’t all that broken up about the first one which probably made me an asshole on some level, but I was definitely broken up about this second one.

  I did see something that was worth a smile despite all that. I tossed a nearly intact robot aside and found none other than Dr. Lana on the ground writhing in pain.

  At least I assumed it was none other than Dr. Lana. Sure she might look like someone who’d just decided to practice their fifty meter freestyle by jumping into one of the many lovely superheated pools at Yellowstone, the post low ground Anakin look really wasn’t a good look for her, but I figured that would change soon enough with her healing.

  Besides, she was the only other living creature in this room as far as I knew. I told myself that wasn’t Fialux. That couldn’t be Fialux.

  Even if there was a part of me that knew it was entirely possible that being tossed into that portal had done this to her instead of tossing her across the galaxy. That I could be looking down at the pained charred remains of my girlfriend.

  I leaned over her. Her eyes flew open and she stared up at me. They were a creepy grey color which led me to believe blindness was one of the many unfortunate fates she’d suffered when she found herself in the middle of that portal collapse.

  I looked to the side of her face and didn’t see any ears there, but I figured of all the senses she had hearing was probably the most likely to still be preserved. It boiled down to two holes in the side of a person’s head, after all, and the actual ears were really more ornamentation than anything.

  “Genius idea,” I said. “Collapsing a portal like that while you were standing right in front of it. You really got me there.”

  That was going to be a shitty thing to say if it turned out this was Fialux. Luckily for me I didn’t have to wait for very long to confirm this wasn’t my girlfriend. Her body was slowly recovering.

  Trust me. The only thing more unsettling than seeing someone burned to the degree Dr. Lana was as she writhed on her invasion room floor was watching those burns slowly but surely healing.

  That’s something I wouldn’t mind scrubbing from the old memory banks.

  She mumbled something, but her lips weren’t working all that well.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t quite catch that. Could you maybe try to repeat it?”

  She mumbled again.

  “Here, let me help you,” I said.

  I held out my wrist blaster and set it to a focused beam setting. A focused beam that wasn’t all that powerful. She looked like she was already in enough pain as it was without me blowing holes in her head.

  I blasted. It hit her lips and she arched her back and shrieked in pain as whatever had crusted her lips shut was broken by the laser. I guess that must hurt like a motherfucker.

  Oops.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, not really meaning it. From the way she glared at me she totally picked up on the fact that I wasn’t all that sorry.

  “Fuck you,” she hissed.

  “Not if I was doing it with a twenty foot strap on,” I said. I put my hands on my knees and knelt over her.

  “What are you going to do?” she hissed. “Kill me? That worked so well the last time.”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing,” I said.

  “What’s the thing?”

  “Where are you going with this mistress?” CORVAC asked.

  “Oh you’re really going to like this one, I promise,” I said.

  “Why would I like anything you’re planning on doing to me?” Dr. Lana asked.

  I shook my head. Once again I was having a three way conversation where two of the people involved in that conversation had no idea they were on the party line.

  “I was talking to CORVAC,” I said. “He’s totally going to love what we’re going to do to you. I really don’t think you’re going to like it at all.”

  I figured she would’ve been at the limits of her ability to feel surprise or anger considering everything that’d happened to her, but that turned out to not be the case at all.

  She flopped around like a fish that’d just been removed from its nice wet environment and was desperately trying to get back to what it knew, but it looked like the flopping around was hurting her like a motherfucker considering every inch of her body was thoroughly charred.

  Then again maybe she was burned to the point that all her nerve endings had checked out. Of course the bad thing about her healing ability that’d shown up out of nowhere was that those nerves would be back and signaling her body about just how fucked it was in no time at all.

  I reached down and poked a spot that looked like it was more healed than everything else. A spot she’d pointedly been avoiding pressing against the floor. Like her pain receptors had finally started working there.

  The way she pulled away from me and screamed the kind of swear words you usually only hear from drill instructors and sailors who’d been on the job for a couple of decades told me I’d been correct in my guess.

  “That fucking hurt!” she shrieked.

  “That’s the idea my dear Dr. Lana,” I said. “The last time I made a mistake. I was in such a hurry to trap you that I forgot about the last part of my emergency protocol that gave you a handy escape because the computer thought it was cleaning up. I’m not going to make that mistake this time around.”

  I reached out and poked her again. There was a time not too long ago, back when I was under the influence of Fialux, when I might’ve felt bad about causing pain like that.

  It’s not like I felt good about it. Not exactly. I didn’t feel bad about it though. As far as I was concerned she was getting what she deserved and then some.

  Dr. Lana stared up at me once she’d finished writhing around and her eyes were wide. Sure they were still that odd grey color and they stared up sightlessly, but she was wide-eyed and I figured that meant she’d finally realized just how deep she was in the shit.

  “That’s right my dear doctor,” I said. “To quote another famous villain: I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you.”

  I paused. Grinned as the recognition dawned on her face. Not that I thought for a moment that she wouldn’t recognize a quote from the late, great, Ricardo Montalban channeling one of the greatest scifi villains of both the small and large screen.

  I leaned in closer. Whispered the next part of the line. I wanted to make sure she heard it, but I wanted it to be nice and intimate.

  “And I plan to go right on hurting you, Dr. Lana.”

  She whimpered. Not quite the reaction I was going for, but I’d take it. That whimper said it all. I’d broken her with nothing more than a few words and I hadn’t even gotten started on the real torture. Though that was going to come soon enough.

  “You made a huge mistake in throwing Fialux into that portal and collapsing it,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she said, but it was clear from the gibbering terror lurking just behind her anger that her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “Because I’ve been acting weird lately. There was a time when I would’ve swatted someone like you with all the remorse I show to mosquitos who get caught up in the laser death net that keeps people from getting their blood sucked when I have a barbecue at my place. Yeah, there’s been something weird going on with me, and I think that was Fialux.”

  I stood. Brushed myself off. I was covered in dust and debris and some muck I was pretty sure was from the insides of that damned lizard, but I really didn’t want to think about that too much right now.

  “You threw her through that portal though. That means the lodestone that was pulling my moral compass pretty firmly away from chaotic evil is gone, and things are about to get very bad for you since I’m willing to do just about anything to draw out of you exactly what the hell you did to my girlfriend.”

  Dr. Lana whimpered. That was about as much as I could hope for. Oh yes. She might think she was broken, or maybe she was entertaining ideas of escaping, but one thing was for da
mn sure. I hadn’t even gotten started on breaking this bitch, and I was seeing very clearly now that I didn’t have Fialux around hitting me with dirty looks every time I talked about doing something that verged into villainy.

  “Take care of her CORVAC,” I said. “No teleporting for her. We’re going to do it the old fashioned way.”

  I looked down at her and smiled. She whimpered some more. It was a pity she couldn’t see my smile. It was a smile that felt like a return to form for yours truly. It was the first truly villainous smile, the first smile that made me feel like me, that I’d done in a long time.

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  His telescoping arm reached down and grabbed Dr. Lana. I noticed he wasn’t nearly as gentle with her as when he was wrapping one of his claws around me. He was doing the villainous equivalent of the boys taking someone around back and roughing them up to show them who ran this town, basically.

  I grinned. Damn it felt good to be a villain. It’d been too long.

  39

  The City Can Save Itself

  I floated up through the massive hole. When I hit ground level a beam of nuclear fire flew through the air overhead. I didn’t bother to duck as it didn’t look like the beam was aimed at me in particular.

  Jets flew by in the distance. Jets that were using munitions that looked like they were based on some of the copied designs Dr. Lana had sold the department of defense.

  Well they could have fun playing with their toys trying to defeat the giant lizards. I was profoundly exhausted. Both physically and spiritually. It didn’t help that I was starting to really feel the effects of one hell of a case of radiation poisoning.

  I was going to spend at least a week in one of the medbays taking care of everything I’d endured in this fight. And as I looked at the city with its power flickering I found myself suddenly glad that my lab was completely off the grid.

  It looked like these lizards were going to be a disaster of unprecedented proportions even by the standards of disasters in Starlight City, and that was saying something.

  “I thought you were fighting those assholes?” I said.

  “I was,” CORVAC said. “But it seemed that things were not going well for you in your fight with Dr. Lana, and so I decided to assist you. Oddly they seemed more than happy to continue their rampaging once they realized I had disengaged from the fight.”

  I looked at a replay from SCNN in my heads up display. The reason why the giant lizards had decided it might not be the best idea to fuck with CORVAC became immediately apparent as I watched a video of him pinning one of the fuckers against a building and using a couple of his telescoping claw arms to pull the thing’s mouth open King Kong style.

  The big difference being that instead of pulling its mouth open to the point that he killed the fucker he simply pumped its gullet full of what looked like a couple of low-yield fusion bombs that really did a number on the fucker from the inside if the little mushroom cloud that came spouting out of its mouth was any indication.

  “Damn,” I said. “You’re taking no prisoners. And did you upgrade that fucker while I wasn’t looking?”

  “I did have plenty I learned from the fight with you and Fialux, and plenty of time to tweak the design while I had access to your systems but did not wish to reveal myself,” he said.

  “I should be pissed off about that,” I said. “But good on you.”

  “Thank you, mistress.”

  “Did you make sure to jostle Dr. Lana real good on the way up out of that tunnel?” I asked.

  “I did exactly as you asked, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “Good,” I said. “Time to send her back to the lab then.”

  “Mistress?”

  I held up my wrist blaster and fired off a shot. It was set to the teleporter setting of course. This time around she was being teleported directly to the depths of my lab rather than the dump.

  One of the high security research labs. It wouldn’t do for her to suddenly start exhibiting some of those pesky Fialux powers and really giving me a hell of a headache, after all.

  She disappeared and I smiled a satisfied smile. Just for a moment she’d heard the ominous hum from my wrist blaster. She had to know what that meant from her own time stealing my designs. Her eyes, still sightless, had gone wide and she’d rolled around in CORVAC’s claws.

  It was a pleasant feeling knowing I could cause her pain just by letting her hear her certain doom that wasn’t as certain as she might think it was.

  Damn. If I kept this up for much longer then I was going to be a complete recidivist when it came to the whole villainy thing. It probably should’ve worried me how right that felt, but without Fialux around to give me those stern looks and make me want to be a better person…

  No. To force me into being a better person because I wanted my girlfriend to like me. And now she was gone because trying to be the kind of bleeding heart non-villainous person she wanted had led to her being stripped of her powers and tossed through a portal to a planet that was being bombarded with the kind of radiation that would kill anything but a giant lizard that’d inexplicably evolved to take that kind of punishment.

  Giant lizards. I counted four in the immediate vicinity, but it didn’t look like there were any more portals opening up.

  “Motherfucker,” I growled.

  “Is something wrong mistress?” CORVAC asked.

  “Of course something’s wrong,” I said. “There are no more portals opening up letting the giant lizards into our world.”

  “I would think that would be a good thing, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “Yeah, you’d think. I suppose it’s a good thing for the city, but I was really hoping there might still be one open so I could go on a rescue mission.”

  An overwhelming wave of nausea hit me. I leaned to the side and hurled up the contents of everything I’d eaten before coming out here to try and save the city, or whatever the hell it was we were trying to do when Fialux and I came out here as happy as can be looking forward to another date night.

  The contents of my stomach slammed into my shield. Apparently the vomit was traveling fast enough that it tripped the shields even coming from the other side. Or maybe it was that the contents of my stomach were radioactive enough that they activated the shields.

  Either way some of it splashed back up on me. Today really wasn’t the day for me to look like the calm cool villainess in charge of the situation. Here I was covered in lizard goop and lizard poop and now me puke as my body finally starting to give up the ghost as the city was destroyed all around me.

  “Right,” I said. “Time to take care of one more thing and then we’re going to head back to the lab and put me into a medbay.”

  “If I may mistress,” CORVAC said. “I do not think it is a good idea for you to stick around to try and take care of those lizards. It would be far more advisable for you to…”

  “Who said anything about taking care of those lizards?” I growled. “The city can take care of itself. The government spent enough time taking pot shots at me. Well they can use the weapons they stole from me to take care of those things.”

  “But if you were not talking about taking care of the giant lizards then…”

  “This is what I need to take care of,” I growled.

  I held my wrist computer up. Hit a couple of buttons in sequence. That dialed me into the frequency I’d picked up on when CORVAC was activating this robotic motherfucker. I just hoped he hadn’t changed the destruct sequence when he made his modifications to the original design.

  “Mistress,” CORVAC said, worry tinging his voice. “What are you…”

  Beneath me the glowing red eyestalk on the replacement giant death robot chassis started blinking and glowing violently.

  “Ah what the hell,” I said. “I guess we can help the city just a little bit.”

  I hit another combination of buttons and the giant spherical robot that I suspected owed more than a little of i
ts design decisions to CORVAC being enamored of the old ‘80s and ‘90s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon when he designed the thing vaulted through the air and landed on top of a lizard that happened to be moving through Starlight City Park. A nice open spot where a big explosion would take out some trees but wouldn’t hurt anyone hiding in a skyscraper.

  A moment later there was a bright flash followed by a tiny mushroom cloud as the thing blew and then melted right on top of the lizard. The thing twitched a couple of times and then stopped moving.

  It was going to be a hell of a thing trying to get that out of there, but the city could manage.

  “What did you do mistress?” CORVAC asked, for once his voice sounding stunned. “How did you even…”

  “Don’t ever cross me again,” I said. “Because if you do I will end you, and it isn’t going to be pleasant. Destroying that robot you were controlling is just a small hint of the precautions I’ve taken that you haven’t found. Always remember that.”

  Sure it was something I made up on the fly by tracking down his signal and praying he hadn’t changed the destruct code, but he didn’t have to know that.

  There was a pause. I wondered if this was going to destroy the brief detente we’d enjoyed. After all, he’d had multiple opportunities to kill me and hadn’t taken them.

  Sure it wasn’t like I’d actually taken direct action against him. More that I’d taken the opportunity to destroy one of his toys and make it absolutely clear that I wasn’t going to take any of his shit.

  “Understood, mistress,” he said, for once sounding thoroughly chastened an not at all like the smarmy bastard he’d been when he was talking about infiltrating my computer systems.

  Damn it felt good to be a villain.

  “So if I might dare to ask. What is the next part of the plan mistress?” CORVAC asked.