“Do you mean it?” the android demanded.
“One hundred percent,” I said with a grin. “We’ve perfected your skin, so as long as you put some appropriate clothes on, you can go out into the world and completely pass for a human.”
“Thank you, Creator,” Aileen said. “I have been waiting to go out into the field with you for a very long time.”
“Technically, you’ll be going out into the field with Dynamo,” I said,
“but I know what you mean.”
“Between the two of us, we will kill both villains easily,” Aileen said.
“I am accessing their files now to review their powers.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and share with the rest of the class?” I asked.
“Hyena is classified as a speed villain,” the android replied. “He is very fast, and he throws his enemies off by projecting his voice into different locations away from his actual body.”
“And Mira?” Elizabeth asked.
“Mira is a different kind of projection specialist,” Aileen said. “She can generate multiple holograms of herself at once and project them to different places, in order to confuse her attackers.”
“Ugh, so they both like to fight dirty,” Elizabeth said.
“That’s why I’m sending the two of you,” I told her. “Aileen should be able to tell the difference between the hologram and the real Mira, and your reflexes are fast enough that you should be able to keep up with Hyena.”
“We will be successful,” Aileen said as calmly as if she was just reading the day’s weather forecast. “When I catch the real Mira, I will rip her arms off.”
“I know, you will,” I said. “Norma, you’ll be with me, and we’ll take on Honeybee together.”
“Okay, Miles,” my mousy assistant said and bit her lip. “Just tell me what you need from me.”
“I’ll also call Beacon in a minute and have him take on Frostbite,” I said. “He’s more of an inconvenience than a real threat, but if he keeps freezing pipes all over the city, then he’s gonna really start to cause some serious damage. So when Beacon takes him out, it’ll help to send a message.”
“What about me?” Penumbra asked. “I guess the only villain left is Hurricane, right? But, like, if Norma is with you, and Beacon’s on his own, and Dynamo and Aileen are teamed up together, then that means…”
“It means you’re going solo this time, Penumbra,” I said with a smile.
Chapter 6 - Penumbra
I couldn’t believe that Miles had trusted me enough to give me a real solo mission. Sure, I had gone up against supervillains on my own before, but only until someone else showed up to help me. I had taken on Swallow in the park yesterday, but he had been pretty easy to handle by myself. Still, maybe that was enough to give Miles more confidence in me, and that was why I was about to take on Hurricane by myself.
I couldn’t let Miles down, not now that I finally had such a good chance to impress him.
Well, I guessed that I had already impressed him, or he wouldn’t have let me hang around with all the rest of them. That was one of the things I liked the most about Miles, that he always spoke his mind, so I never had to wonder if he meant what he said. He was brutally honest, but it meant that I didn’t have to wonder whether or not I was valuable to him.
Of course, I still wondered exactly how valuable I was.
I wanted to be valuable to him as more than just Penumbra, so when he thought about me, he would think about more than just my levitation powers and my ability to change the mass and density of different objects. I
wanted him to think about me as a woman the same way he thought about Dynamo, but I didn’t know if that would ever happen.
Miles wasn’t exactly a one-woman kind of man, and Dynamo knew that as much as anybody did, but even though I had practically thrown myself on him, he had never responded the way that I wanted him to.
Maybe he didn’t think I was hot enough, and maybe, at least compared to Dynamo, I wasn’t.
As I floated along toward the last known location of the villain Hurricane, I glanced down at my sleek, short black dress and my knee-high boots that hugged my slender legs. No… it couldn’t have anything to do with my looks because even though I might not look like Dynamo, I knew that I looked good, and besides, everybody liked blondes… right?
I shook my head and forced myself to focus on my upcoming fight.
Right now, it didn’t matter what Miles thought about my appearance because at the moment, I just needed to impress him with my performance.
That was the most important thing for him, and I sure as fuck didn’t want to disappoint him or, even worse, have to call for backup.
I could handle Hurricane on my own. I knew that I could because otherwise, Miles would never have sent me to take him down on my own.
He knew what the fuck he was doing, so I would just have to trust that and stay focused until my fight was over.
I was glad that Miles could see how much my powers had grown since I joined up with him. It was so different from my time with the Shadow Knight that I didn’t even know how to compare them. For one thing, Slade never let me do anything, and that was mostly because he thought my powers were fucking useless. He barely ever let me help him when he went up against different supervillains, so he sure as hell would never have sent me on a solo mission.
But Miles had seen the potential in my powers as soon as he met me, and I had grown by leaps and bounds since then. Ever since I had started to wear the gauntlets that Miles designed for me, I had grown more and more comfortable with my own powers, and I had finally started to figure out just how powerful I had always been.
I had just never had anybody help me to see that before.
But between Miles and Dynamo, I had really discovered how to harness my own powers. I had realized that I could actually make a difference, and now that I was free of the Shadow Knight and all his ridiculous rules about how we should let even the worst supervillains live, I felt like we might really be able to make Grayville a safer place to live.
Of course, that would only matter if we stopped the Maniac in time.
Still, I knew that Miles had a plan for that, just like he always had a plan for everything, so I just needed to hold up my end of things so we could all move onto the next phase. I just hoped that we would be able to take down the Maniac without having to get too close to him.
Of all the supervillains in Grayville, he creeped me out the most, and the obsession that Shadow Knight had with him always made my skin crawl. I had read enough about the Maniac’s murders to know that every time the supervillain killed someone, he tried to make it a little more gruesome and drawn-out than his last murder. But every time the Shadow Knight had heard about the latest attack, he just became more protective than ever of the Maniac.
At least I knew that I definitely didn’t have to worry about that with Miles. As soon as he caught the Maniac, he would kill him, and then the citizens of Grayville would finally be safe from the asshole who had terrorized them for years.
I increased my pace as I reached the outskirts of downtown. My target had last been spotted at a construction site around here, so I knew that I would have to be careful if I didn’t want all of this to go very badly. After all, Hurricane’s main superpower was his control over the wind, and a construction site would give him plenty of ammunition to work with and toss around to cause the most damage possible.
I just couldn’t let it get that far.
Once I started to float down the main road downtown, it didn’t take very long to figure out exactly where the construction site was. Half the people that I came across fled past me, and the other half hurried along with me, as each of them tried to shout and tell me what was happening. But even as I nodded and waved at them, I floated a little higher into the air so I could see the scene for myself.
“You’ll help them, right?” a woman called up to me.
“Of course, she will,” another man sho
uted. “She’s Penumbra, and she’s the one who’s been working with the Evil Genius.”
“Please, you’ve got to stop him!” someone else yelled.
“I’m working on it,” I muttered, but I just smiled and waved to try to seem reassuring.
Of course, the scene ahead didn’t make me feel particularly reassured myself. The construction site was actually just one side of a high-rise hotel building. The bottom few stories had permanent scaffolding in place where workers were repairing the walls, and there were tarps and plastic sheets that covered most of the windows.
But none of that was the cause of concern. Instead, it was the long scaffolding that had been lowered down from the roof to about the twentieth
story. One of the cables had been blown loose from the roof, so now the scaffolding flipped and spun mid-air, and it was clearly only a matter of time before the other cable snapped and dropped it all the way to the ground.
And that would be bad news for the four workers who were desperately clinging to the end of the scaffolding.
I immediately floated toward them, but I continued to look around me for any signs of Hurricane. I was sure that he had knocked the scaffolding loose, so he had to be somewhere around here, and I definitely didn’t want him to surprise me. There was a crowd of people watching below, and the last thing that I needed was for Hurricane to suddenly blow debris in their direction to take them all out before I even spotted him.
“Get those people back!” I shouted to the cops below.
To their credit, the police officers at the scene immediately started trying to herd all the civilians and reporters away from the hotel. They weren’t completely successful because there were a few stubborn-ass reporters who found a way past the police line, but for the most part, they cleared the area just around the hotel, so the only civilians that I really had to worry about were the four workers on the loose scaffolding.
Just as I almost reached the terrified construction workers, I heard Hurricane before I even saw him. There was a sound like thunder and rain from a ladder on a balcony below me, and when I twisted mid-air to face the noise, I saw a blurred form whip straight toward me.
There was a human figure in the middle of the whirling cloud, but he moved too fast for me to lock onto, so instead, I floated one of the construction ladders up and launched it straight into the middle of the spinning cloud.
The whirlwind instantly stopped moving, and a man fell out of the cloud and plunged to the ground below. He caught himself up in another spinning cloud just before he hit the pavement, but then he spun away to somewhere that I couldn’t see him anymore.
I would deal with him in a minute. Right now, I just wanted to get these four workers to safety, so then I could focus all of my attention on the spinning supervillain.
I floated a little closer to the loose scaffolding, but I kept far enough away that it couldn’t accidentally slam into me. It had already shattered one of the hotel windows, and now, it continued to jerk back and forth so wildly that it was impossible to predict its next move.
Especially if Hurricane came back and had anything to say about it.
“It’s going to be okay!” I shouted to the workers, but I wasn’t sure that they could hear me over the sound of the sirens below and the wind all around us.
I held up both my gauntlets to face the scaffolding and started to lighten its mass. I thought about just floating the workers up away from the scaffolding and taking them all the way down to the ground below, but I didn’t think I could float four people at once when they were panicked and wouldn’t know what was happening to them.
The only reason that I had been able to float Miles, Norma, and Dynamo at the same time before was because they knew what to expect, so they could be cooperative. I didn’t think it was fair to expect these four terrified construction workers to play along when they suddenly found themselves floating up away from the scaffolding.
Besides, it would have required them to release their death grip on the rails, and there wasn’t enough time for me to explain everything to them.
Instead, I just locked onto the scaffolding and concentrated on floating it away from the building. At least then, it wouldn’t slam into the side of the hotel and knock the workers loose. Once I felt like I had good control over it, I dropped one hand so I could be ready for Hurricane’s
return, and then I used my other hand to keep my hold on the scaffolding as I slowly began to float it down toward the pavement twenty stories below.
As soon as the workers realized that the scaffolding had floated away from the building, they stopped screaming but tightened their grips even more on the rails. One of the workers had their feet dangling off the end of the scaffolding, but he didn’t seem to be losing his grip, so I would just have to try to hurry and get them down to the ground as soon as possible.
When I had floated them down to about the tenth story, I heard the sound of thunder and rain again, but this time, Hurricane struck a lot faster.
I didn’t even see him coming. Instead, I just felt a gust of wind ram into me like it was a fucking eighteen-wheeler, and I spun backward through the air at the same moment I dropped my hold on the scaffolding.
As the air filled with screams from the workers and from the people still down below, I felt my body flip end-over-end as I tried to steady myself against the force of the wind.
The next moment my feet faced the ground, I forced my mass to become much denser and heavier, so the wind from Hurricane was no match for my suddenly dense mass. I instantly became still in the middle of all his gusts, but just as I started to congratulate myself, I looked over to see that the scaffolding was just about to slam into the pavement, and its workers didn’t have any control over their landing.
I sent all of my attention toward the scaffolding and began to levitate it, and while Hurricane tried to figure out what the fuck I was doing, I floated both the scaffolding and myself all the way down to the asphalt.
There were only a few inches between the scaffolding and the pavement, and I wanted to be careful when I set it down the rest of the way.
But I knew that Hurricane would recover from his surprise at any moment, and that meant the workers needed to get off the scaffolding as fast as possible.
“Hurry!” I shouted to the workers. “Get off now!”
I let the scaffolding settle down the last few inches until it rested on the road, and as soon as it sank down the rest of the way, a team of cops rushed forward to help get the four construction workers off the scaffolding before Hurricane blew it into the air again.
As soon as I was sure that the workers were safe and on their way to the paramedics, I looked back up into the air to try to spot Hurricane. The gust of wind that had knocked into me had come from my right, so he must have blown himself into the air long enough to attack me, and then he had dropped back down to some kind of hiding place.
I started to float back up into the air again. I didn’t want him to catch me so close to the cops or the civilians, so if he wanted to fight me, it would
just be between me and him. Unlike the Shadow Knight, I wasn’t about to inflict a fuck-ton of collateral damage on the city just to make sure that I brought in my target peacefully.
I just wanted to kill Hurricane before he had the chance to hurt anybody else.
Still, I floated up a little more slowly than I normally would have, so I had a chance to scan all the balconies and windows under construction on this side of the hotel. The higher I rose, the more the wind gusted around me, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was because I was so high up off the ground or because Hurricane was fucking with the weather.
The next time I heard the sound of thunder and rain, it was right below me, so I made my mass just a little bit denser. When the blast of wind hit me, it rocked me to the side, but I didn’t completely blow off course or flip head-over-heels like I had earlier.
Of course, Hurricane was also more ready for me now than he had been earli
er.
He immediately launched another gale-level wind at me, this time from my left, and I spun around like a ballerina until I realized that I was about to slam into the side of the hotel. I held out my gauntlets and thrust
my feet forward, so when I crashed into the hotel, my boots and my hands took the worst of the impact.
But thanks to Miles’ gauntlets and protective footwear, I bounced right back off the side of the building and turned to face the supervillain with no damage except for a slight stinging in my palms.
Hurricane was nowhere to be seen.
I realized that his power must only allow him to fly up into the air when he was in the middle of a whirlwind, but the moment that the wind stopped, he had to land somewhere to avoid a sudden drop to the ground below. That was why he kept appearing and disappearing.
It wasn’t because he kept retreating to regroup and try again. It was because he literally couldn’t stay in the air like I could. He had to take breaks before he could launch back up into the air in another blast of wind.
“Okay,” I muttered as I scanned all the balconies that I could see. “I can work with that.”
If I could time things right, then the next time Hurricane blasted me, I could make myself super dense so he couldn’t blow me away. Then as soon as he saw that I wasn’t moving, he would stop and try a different approach.
That should give me just enough time to make myself light again, zoom in
for the kill, and then make my mass dense again just before I slammed into him.
It should be enough to kill him.
Or so I hoped.
So now all I had to do was get the timing right, plus I also had to keep him engaged so he didn’t try to run away or, even worse, try to involve the civilians below in our fight.
In my experience, there was always one sure-fire way to keep a supervillain’s attention, and that was to fucking piss them off.
“Hey, Hurricane!” I shouted, even though I still couldn’t see him.
“What’s the matter? You can’t even knock one skinny blonde out of the sky?”
There was a slight sound of thunder from somewhere below me, but it wasn’t enough for me to think that the supervillain was on the move yet.
Evil Genius 5 Page 10
