Evil Genius 5

by Jacobs, Logan

  “They should have called you Breeze Boy,” I called out. “Or maybe just The Draft. You know, because you’re like--”

  The sound of thunder and rain exploded up toward me, but Hurricane was faster than I expected. A gust of wind knocked me even higher into the air, and before I could recover, someone slammed into me with enough force to knock the breath out of my lungs.

  I spun around and floated backward as fast as I could, but it was only fast enough to see Hurricane move back down toward a balcony on the twelfth story. As soon as he dropped onto the balcony, the whirlwind around him stopped, and he stepped back into the late morning shadows.

  I bit my lip as I tried to decide between my two options. I could either rush at him immediately now that I knew where he was, or I could retreat to another balcony and wait for him to come to me. If I attacked him now, I wouldn’t risk losing sight of him again, but he would also see me coming, so that wasn’t great.

  Finally, I decided to float up to another balcony and force the supervillain to come face me. After all, I was pretty sure that was what Miles would do, so it had to be the best and most logical option.

  I zipped toward the balcony on the fifteenth story and landed so that I stood on the railing. I would be able to react more quickly if I balanced here, and if I needed to get away fast, then I wouldn’t be pinned against the building itself.

  As I balanced on the balcony railing, I tilted my head down and spotted a ladder far below. That would have to be enough of an irritation for Hurricane to come attack me, so I floated the ladder up until it reached the tenth story, and then I paused it for just a second to take a deep breath.

  Then I levitated the ladder right up to the twelfth story and slammed it toward the last spot where I had seen Hurricane. I heard the clatter of the metal ladder against the side of the hotel, but I didn’t hear any shouts or curses, so I wondered if the supervillain had already moved to somewhere else.

  I got my answer just a few seconds later.

  A whirling cloud spun toward me from out of nowhere, and this time, there were flashes of lightning and little bits of hail in the wind that blew straight at me. I could just make out the figure of Hurricane himself in the middle of the windstorm, so I had a quick choice to make.

  I could make myself dense and stand my ground, like I had originally planned, or I could try to get the fuck out of here and then attack him from the back.

  In the end, I decided to do both.

  As Hurricane barreled toward me, I felt him send a gust of wind toward me from the center of his own personal windstorm, so I instantly made my mass so dense that the balcony railing began to crumple under my weight. The wind rushed all around me, but it didn’t so much as budge me from my perch, so I just held myself steady as he threw everything that he had at me.

  The moment that Hurricane realized that he hadn’t knocked me backward, the wind suddenly died down, and the supervillain’s windstorm started to take him back down to a balcony below, so he could regroup and then try again.

  I didn’t intend to let him make it that far.

  I waited until he couldn’t see me anymore, and then I lightened my mass enough that I could float again. As soon as I was airborne, I dove off the crumpled metal railing like I was taking a swan-dive into an Olympic pool. I hurtled so fast toward the ground that I passed Hurricane on the twelfth story’s balcony just half a second later, so the moment that I saw him, I lightened my mass even more until I didn’t weigh any more than a feather.

  Of course, when I was as light as a feather, I didn’t have enough density to plunge toward the ground quite so fast, and instead, I started to just drift and coast along the air currents. It gave me enough time to flip around in the air until my head was pointed up toward the sky again, and then I darted back up to the twelfth story that I had just passed.

  Hurricane was ready for me, but not nearly as ready as I was.

  As soon as I came into view, the supervillain stayed rooted where he was, but he sent a gust of wind toward me that should have knocked me off

  balance and all the way down to the waiting pavement below. I flew toward the side before the wind could hit me, and when it started to blow past me instead of through me, Hurricane let the gale collapse so he could try to redirect it toward me again.

  But by then, it was too late for him.

  I focused all my concentration on the supervillain and began to change his mass. At first, Hurricane was so busy trying to summon another gale-level wind to send toward me that he didn’t even realize what was happening. But after his feet floated up above the balcony floor, he looked down and then started to kick in sheer panic.

  Of course, kicking was about the worst thing that he could have done to save himself. As soon as he started to kick, he lost his balance and all his control over the wind, so he just became some slightly paunchy middle-aged man who kicked at nothing but air as he rolled and flipped about in every direction.

  I had learned enough from Miles that I didn’t even feel sorry for him.

  After all, anybody who became a supervillain knew damn well what they were doing. It wasn’t like they signed up for some great charitable career and only later discovered that it was all a cover for something really

  sinister. Instead, every supervillain knew exactly what they signed up for, and it didn’t really matter what their particular brand of evil was.

  All that mattered was that they had chosen to hurt innocent people instead of helping them, and that meant they could just go fuck themselves.

  While Hurricane continued to flip end over end, I floated him out over the side of the balcony until he hovered twelve stories above the asphalt. Just as I started to make his mass dense again, the supervillain managed to hold himself still for just long enough that he tried to angle his hand toward me.

  “Not today, asshole,” I said, and then I made his mass ten times denser than it normally was.

  Hurricane plunged toward the ground. I could see him try to get a windstorm going around himself to save him from impact, but he was too heavy for his own powers to carry him upward now. Instead, the supervillain slammed into the asphalt with so much force that his body just created a man sized crater in the street below me.

  I floated down several stories just so I could get a better look at the indentation in the asphalt, mostly so I could be absolutely positive that he was dead. But when I was a little bit closer, I saw that I had nothing to be worried about.

  Other than the small hole in the asphalt, the only remaining traces of Hurricane were some a few buckets worth of blood and a hundred or so pounds of hamburger-like flesh in the crater itself.

  “Good riddance,” I muttered.

  I flew back up into the air and scanned the rest of the building for any other victims of the supervillain, but everything else looked all clear. Still, I wanted to make sure that no one else was in danger of falling to their deaths, so I floated down to the closest police officer and cleared my throat.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “What do you--” The cop immediately stopped himself when he turned around and saw me. “Penumbra! Holy shit, you were amazing!”

  “Is there anyone else stuck in the building?” I demanded. “Does anyone else need help?”

  “No, it was just those workers on the scaffolding,” the officer replied.

  “You were really something, you know that? You were like--”

  “Keep up the good work,” I interrupted him when I saw a handful of reporters hurrying toward me. “I’ve gotta go.”

  Before he could protest, I floated back up into the air and then darted away from the scene as quickly as I could. I heard the reporters shout

  questions after me, but I just ignored them and kept going until I was far enough away that I could no longer hear them.

  There was a time not that long ago when I would have jumped at the chance to do an interview with anyone who would have talked to me. Even if they had just wanted to interview me bec
ause I knew the Shadow Knight, I would have done it in a heartbeat and never even thought about it.

  But that was when I still desperately wanted to be a member of the Wardens, and since those supers did more interviews and Supergram posts than actual fucking superhero work, I thought that I had to do those things, too, if I ever wanted to make a difference.

  Of course, now I knew that Supergram and interviews and all of the bullshit things that the Wardens did were just that… bullshit. I didn’t actually have to do any of that to make a difference, because none of it had anything to do with being a real hero.

  After all, a real hero was someone who didn’t do it for the fame or the followers or even the sponsorships. But at the same time, a hero wasn’t someone like the Shadow Knight who was more obsessed with his own image than with the consequences of his actions.

  A real hero was someone like Miles.

  Sometimes, it might not be clear to everybody else that he was a hero at all. Sometimes, the Wardens and even Optimo himself would tell the whole world that he was a menace and a terrorist because sometimes, the choices that he made meant that he ended up looking like a villain.

  But at the end of the day, none of that mattered because he knew that he was trying to make the world a better and safer place, so anyone who said otherwise could just go to hell. Miles was making a difference, and I fully intended to help him for as long as he would let me.

  “Target eliminated,” I called over the radio. “Hurricane is dead.”

  “Nice work,” Miles responded immediately. “Go back to the mansion to take a rest, and I’ll let you know if any of us need assistance later.”

  “Thanks, Miles,” I said as I felt myself blush despite the fact that he couldn’t see me.

  I continued to float back toward the mansion as I thought about how proud I was that I had killed Hurricane. It should have been strange or unsettling, but then again, maybe I wasn’t proud just because I had killed him.

  Maybe it was the fact that Miles was proud of me that actually made me feel so pleased with myself.

  Besides, I knew exactly what would have happened if I had just helped the cops arrest Hurricane instead of killing him myself. I knew because I had watched the same thing happen with the Shadow Knight over and over again until I wanted to beat my head up against the wall at how senseless it all seemed.

  Hurricane would have broken out of jail if he hadn’t been released early because of overcrowding or some bullshit lawyer’s technicality. And then he would have done the same thing all over again, only this time, he might have actually killed somebody.

  After all, I had seen his rap sheet. He had killed plenty of people before.

  No, it made much more sense to do things the Miles way. It made everybody safer, from the cops to the civilians, and it also meant that bad people got precisely what they deserved.

  I just felt lucky that I got to be a part of it.

  And as much as I loved Grayville, I wouldn’t hesitate to leave it if Miles asked me to. I had grown up here, so I loved this city, but it had never quite felt like home. I had started to work for the Shadow Knight at about the same age that I would have gone to parties and made friends, and he

  hadn’t allowed me to ever really spend time with people, so now even though I loved the city, I didn’t really have any attachments here.

  But even if I had, that wouldn’t have stopped me from leaving. I just wanted to go wherever Miles did. I wanted to help him make a difference in the world, and I knew that as long as I was with him, I would continue to improve my abilities as a superheroine until I was damn near unstoppable.

  But even as I thought about all the things that I could learn and all the things that I could do with Miles, I knew that none of that was the biggest reason that I wanted to go with him whenever he left Grayville.

  The biggest reason was just because I was completely in fucking love with him.

  Chapter 7 - Dynamo

  I tightened my grip on the wheel and then slid the car around the next curve. If it had been a poorly built car, we might have gone up on two wheels or even just spun out of control, but Miles had designed this little beauty, so it handled every curve that I could throw at her.

  And I had definitely put the poor thing to the test today.

  Aileen and I had been driving around in the armored car the whole damn day while we tracked down Mira and Hyena. Of course, I had done all of the driving myself, even though the beautiful android wanted to drive.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her or anything like that. After all, I had just had a threesome with her and Miles, so I knew better than anybody what her body was capable of doing.

  Hell, she could have just operated it remotely, just like she could just take over the controls from me at any time. But Aileen was considerate, for a robot anyway, so she let me drive because she knew how much I enjoyed it. Or maybe it was just because she didn’t want to take control without telling me and then cause us to have a wreck.

  Still, if we could ever track down and eliminate our two targets, then maybe I would let Aileen drive us back to the mansion. I knew that she

  wanted to feel what it was like to drive like a human, but I just wanted to keep driving myself for now.

  Driving just helped me focus. It was like whenever I worked out in the home gym that Miles had built for me. It gave me something physical to do, so while I was completely focused on that task, I could let my mind wander. Sometimes, that was because I wanted to relax and not think about anything, but then sometimes, it was because it helped me plan something out.

  And right now, I needed to plan out what was going to happen when we finally caught up with Mira and Hyena. Since they both liked to trick their opponents and make it seem like they were in half a dozen different places at once, they would be tricky to beat, but I trusted that Aileen would help us distinguish between what was real and what was fake.

  At least, I sure as fuck hoped so.

  I turned down a side street in Midtown Grayville and slowed down as we approached a red light. If we had been in active pursuit of the two supervillains, I would have just checked the sidewalk for any civilians, veered up onto it, and then raced past all the other stopped cars on our way to our targets.

  But we hadn’t heard any signs of them for the last hour, and I was starting to get frustrated. We had tracked them almost all day, so now the sun was beginning to set, and we still seemed no closer to getting them than we had been when we first set out.

  Part of the reason was, of course, because their superpowers made people very confused about where the two villains were actually located.

  For every one helpful tip that we got, we had to sort through at least twenty bogus tips, whether on the news or on the police scanner. And whenever we got word of their actual location, it was always far enough away that by the time we got there, both supervillains had headed off to terrorize some other neighborhood in the city.

  I glanced up at the darkening sky above us and knew that we would have to get our targets soon if we planned to be successful tonight. I knew that Penumbra had already killed Hurricane before noon, and she had been on a solo mission, so if she could find and eliminate her villain, then we sure as hell could, too.

  I had super strength, incredible reflexes, and the ability to detect when someone was telling a lie, and in the passenger seat next to me was an android who would never get tired and who was damn near indestructible.

  Even if her body somehow got completely mangled, her consciousness

  could easily inhabit a different form, and then it would just be a matter of constructing more skin for her.

  I glanced over at Miles’ robotic assistant again and shook my head. I couldn’t believe how human she looked. Her dark blonde hair hung down in unbridled “just got fucked” waves over her shoulders, and her protective vest just barely buckled over her generous breasts. She didn’t need the protection, of course, but Miles had wanted her to have some kind of barrier
to protect her skin, so he had fitted her with a tactical vest.

  I had let her borrow some of my leggings so she also had clothes to cover her bottom half, and Miles had given her an earlier prototype of some of my boots that came up just above her knees. Everything was black, just like all the rest of our outfits, and with her gun holstered at her hip, Aileen looked as sexy as she did badass.

  In fact, just about the only thing that reminded me that she was an android was her inability to understand sarcasm… that, plus her general lack of facial expressions.

  “Have you picked up anything that could help us yet?” I asked Aileen.

  “Nothing definite,” the android responded. “There was some police radio chatter about the south end of Midtown, but then someone else

  confirmed that to be a false report.”

  “Let’s head there anyway,” I said. “It’s the best lead we’ve had in a while.”

  I took the next left to head back to the southern end of Midtown, and I wondered how Miles and Norma were doing against Honeybee. So far, he hadn’t told us anything, so I knew that they hadn’t defeated her yet. Maybe they were also having trouble tracking their target down, but even if that was the case, I knew that Miles would find her sooner or later.

  Just like we would find Hyena and Mira before too long.

  “I will continue to scan all radio frequencies,” Aileen said.

  “You’re handy to have around, you know that?” I asked.

  “I could just as easily scan frequencies from inside the mansion,” the android responded. “My location inside the car has nothing to do with that.”

  “Right, I must have forgotten,” I said as I rolled my eyes at how literally Aileen always took everything.

  “I am here for more than just remote backup,” Aileen replied. “I am here to test out my physical body against our enemies.”

  “I’m sure you’ll pass the test with flying colors,” I said. “I saw how strong you were in our… uhh… fun with Miles.”

  “And how flexible,” Aileen said. “And how fast my reflexes are.”