I was starting to get very fond of my mousy assistant.
Norma was sweet but could also be terrifying, and that was a perfect combination for someone who was basically my right hand. She always did a good job of keeping me grounded in what was practical and realistic, but she also enjoyed pushing us both into more creative ways of killing bad guys, and that was a hard skill to find in an assistant.
Plus, it was really fun to see how much I could make her blush in embarrassment when I complimented her appearance or an idea she had or… well, basically any time I paid her any attention at all.
“We are approximately two hundred yards away from the location of the tracking device,” Aileen announced. “You said to inform you when we were this close. Will we proceed on foot from here?”
“I think that’s best,” I said, “even though there’s a good chance that the Maniac knows we’re coming, or even if he doesn’t, he’ll probably see
into the future and figure it out right before we bust down the door.”
“If that’s true, then why does it matter whether we go on foot or by car?” Aileen asked.
“Because on the off chance that he doesn’t know we’re coming, I’d like to keep the element of surprise as long as possible,” I said, “and that won’t happen if our tires just crunch across the gravel right up to his door.”
“That seems logical,” Aileen said with a nod. “I know that I am also an element of surprise for the Maniac, so would you like me to wait outside until you need me, or should I immediately come inside with you?”
“I was gonna hold you in reserve,” I said as I slowed to a stop and then turned off the car, “but you heard what the Maniac said. He’s got Elizabeth tied up to some sort of bomb, and if she breaks free--”
“That would not be difficult for her,” Aileen interrupted.
“No,” I agreed, “but if she does, then it’ll explode and blow us all to pieces. And unlike you, we all are very much attached to our bodies, so that would be… not good.”
“She will be unable to assist in her own rescue if she cannot break free,” the beautiful android pointed out.
“And that’s exactly where you come in,” I said. “I want you to wait outside until you hear me and the Maniac start to fight, and then I’ll try to
keep him distracted long enough for you to sneak in and free Elizabeth from the bomb. You can disarm a bomb, right?”
“I am certain that I can override whatever system the Maniac has in place,” the android responded, “so yes.”
“Good, then let’s get a little closer,” I said and then carefully opened and shut my car door.
We moved as quickly and as quietly across the gravel as we could, and after only a few strides forward, it was easy to see where the tracking beacon was leading us. On every side of us, there were shipping containers stacked up on top of each other so high that they blocked out whole portions of the sky, but straight ahead was a large warehouse that looked just run-down but still secure enough for the Maniac to use as his latest hideout.
And somewhere inside the warehouse with him was Elizabeth.
I wasn’t surprised that the Maniac hadn’t found the tracking device on her, since it was designed to stay well-hidden, but there was just as good of a chance that the Maniac hadn’t even bothered to search her for one. He knew that I would come to get her, just like he knew that all of his games would ultimately lead to a final showdown between him and me.
But unlike his games with the Shadow Knight, only one of us would leave the warehouse alive tonight.
“Will you try to sneak inside?” Aileen asked. “Or will you go for a more direct approach?”
“Oh, I’m just gonna walk in through the front door,” I said. “Right now, my biggest concern is for me to distract him long enough that you can sneak in, disarm the bomb, and free Elizabeth. Then once you finish with that, you can both help me fight him.”
“I understand, Creator,” Aileen purred. “I’ll take care of Dynamo.”
“Then stay outside until you hear us start to fight,” I whispered as we moved closer to the warehouse.
As soon as my beautiful android stepped to the side of the main door and stood perfectly still, I reached for the door to the warehouse, found that it was unlocked, and then twisted to push it open.
Everything inside the warehouse was completely dark. I glanced at the screens inside my helmet as my eyes adjusted, but before I could see any movement in the darkness around me, smoke started to spill across the floor toward me at the same time that someone started to clap from out of the darkness of the warehouse.
For half a second, I thought that something was on fire, but as I watched the smoke roll across the floor, I realized that it was from some sort of fog machine, especially since there was no smell of fire. The clapping sound continued, and when it was followed by the Maniac’s familiar cackle, I rolled my eyes at his need for such a show.
“Where’s Dynamo?” I demanded as I continued to scan the warehouse for any signs of the supervillain.
“I’m here,” Elizabeth’s voice sounded a few dozen yards ahead of me and to the right.
The clapping stopped just long enough for the lights in the warehouse all to flip on, and as soon as I blinked to adjust to the sudden fluorescent light, the Maniac strode toward me out of the fog and began to clap again.
“This all seems a little excessive, don’t you think?” I asked with a glance at the fog machine. “You don’t have long feathered hair, tight cheetah print leggings, or a guitar slung over your shoulder.”
“Oh, I thought the least I could do was give you a proper welcome,”
the Maniac cackled and then finally let his hands fall to his sides. “No rock music needed.”
“Let me see Dynamo,” I said.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the thought of the lovely Dynamo in danger,” the Maniac said with an unsettling grin, “but I’ve moved her oh so carefully behind the shelves over there, so you and I could have this whole space to play in, and I don’t particularly feel like moving her back.”
“Then let’s get this over with,” I said and immediately brought my arm up to aim my palm blaster at him.
The Maniac ducked and rolled to the side before I could fire, and he disappeared between some of the huge shelves to my left. That also just so happened to be exactly what I wanted him to do, since that would keep him away from Elizabeth long enough for Aileen to come inside and free her from the bomb.
I hurried after the supervillain, but by the time I entered one of the long warehouse rows, he had vanished to some other row, so I waited until I heard his cackle again and then darted forward after him.
“You didn’t bring your friends with you?” the Maniac called from up ahead. “I’m disappointed, Miles!”
“I’m afraid they were a little busy tonight,” I said and then fired my palm blaster at a flash of movement at the end of the aisle.
The shot missed, of course, but it should be enough of a sound to signal Aileen to go ahead and come inside. I just needed to keep the Maniac busy until she got to Elizabeth, so I lowered myself into a squat and jumped as high as I could with the help of the thrusters in my boots.
The jump took me high enough that I could see through a gap in the shelves onto the next aisle, and the Maniac’s pale face looked up at me in a mixture of admiration and hatred.
As I deployed the thrusters to give me a gentle fall back to the ground, I glanced at one of the screens inside my helmet and saw Aileen dart into the warehouse behind me. Immediately, I dropped down and rolled through the lowest empty shelf to come up beside the Maniac, and this time, he wasn’t able to get away fast enough.
But goddamn if he wasn’t still fast.
As I swung my fist toward him, I felt my gauntlet engage to amplify the force of my punch, but the Maniac saw where my fist was headed and was able to duck out of the way. I tried a few more punches, but the closest I came to landing a blow was one
time when I caught the upper cartilage of his ear.
“You’re not much better than the Shadow Knight, are you?” the Maniac taunted. “What’s the matter, am I too fast for you?”
The Maniac just continued to duck and dodge the rest of my blows, and every few seconds, he grabbed something off one of the shelves and lobbed it toward me. He pulled out throwing knives a few times like he wanted to imitate the Shadow Knight, but even when they hit me, they just glanced off my suit like they were nothing but little paper planes.
“Now look who’s not much better than the Shadow Knight,” I snickered.
“I need thirty-eight more seconds,” Aileen chimed into my ear, “and then Dynamo will be free.”
“And then the Maniac will be dead,” Elizabeth growled.
I could do thirty-eight more seconds. I had never fought someone who knew everything that I was going to do before I did it, and sometimes before I even thought about it. My mind worked faster than most people’s, but I still couldn’t actually see into the future, so I felt my body start to tire out in a one-on-one fight against the Maniac.
I started to throw punches so fast that I didn’t even care if they hit their target, just as long as they kept him distracted. I only managed to use my palm blaster once, but the rest of the time, the Maniac moved so quickly that I didn’t want to waste the power when I wasn’t absolutely certain that I could hit him. The same thing was true of my gun, so for now, I just kept it
holstered at my side, so when the time was right, I would have plenty of bullets to use against this asshole.
He tried to use his taser against me once, but I ducked around the end of the aisle, so the electricity just sizzled against the metal shelving instead.
I jumped back around the corner and fired my own taser at him, and just as he flung a shuriken at me, I heard Aileen’s voice chime into my earpiece again.
“In five,” my robotic assistant said.
I deployed the thrusters in my boots again to jump up toward the ceiling and then come crashing back down with my feet aimed straight for the Maniac. He rolled forward and came up with his taser aimed at me again, but before he could fire it, and before I could land, the supervillain suddenly lowered his arm, spun around, and raced back toward where he had left Elizabeth.
The moment I landed on the ground again, I sprinted after him.
“Something wrong?” I called behind him, but I knew he had taken off because he had seen the fact that Aileen was about to free Elizabeth.
“Who is she?” the Maniac shrieked. “Who’s the dirty blonde?”
“All done,” Aileen chimed again.
“Oh, was she not part of your plan?” I smirked as I reached the empty space in the middle of the warehouse.
The Maniac kept running across the middle of the warehouse, and by the time he reached the other side, I was right behind him, so we came up on the sight of the empty chair together. The bomb was still attached to the back of the chair, but there were no blinking lights and no beeping, so I knew that my beautiful android had successfully disabled it.
But at the moment, Aileen and Elizabeth were nowhere to be seen.
The Maniac whirled toward me again now that we were in the open space together, but I just grinned and fired my palm blaster at him. He rolled out of the way half a second before I fired my shot, so it didn’t hit him, and then he dashed away in between two of the huge rows of shelving.
I moved toward the glass box at the back of the warehouse and felt my stomach tense at the sight of the twisted bodies inside it. I was sure that these were some of the Maniac’s experiments with his hallucinogenic gas, but even though I knew that Norma and the others were about to eliminate the problem of the airborne toxin, it didn’t make it any easier to see the effects of the gas on these poor bastards.
“I’ll go up top,” I whispered into the comms. “Elizabeth, you come front and center, and Aileen, make sure he doesn’t leave the warehouse, and
then… well, then you can figure out when and where to join in.”
“I will choose the optimal time,” my beautiful android replied.
Just before I used the thrusters in my boots to jump up to the top of one of the industrial shelves, I saw something on top of the glass box. It was at the very end, and it looked almost exactly like…
“Goddamn,” I whistled as I took a step closer. “Is this--”
“What’s left of the Shadow Knight?” Elizabeth asked as she stepped out from the aisle beside me. “Yeah, apparently the Maniac likes to keep mementos.”
My superpowered girlfriend looked as beautiful as ever, and other than her missing gas mask, she seemed totally untouched by the Maniac.
She flexed her fists at her sides, and the muscles of her arms rippled with the movement at the same time that she nodded at me.
“Let’s get the bastard,” Elizabeth growled.
I knew that she was pissed that she hadn’t been able to take down the Maniac all by herself, but he wasn’t like any other supervillain that we’d gone up against before, so she really shouldn’t be too hard on herself about it. He liked to use tricks and literal smoke against his enemies, but Dynamo was much more of a direct fighter.
Elizabeth might have been what kept our team honest, but just because she didn’t like to fight dirty, that sure as hell didn’t mean that I couldn’t.
“You stay here,” I told her as I picked up what was left of the Shadow Knight’s skull. “And don’t ask Aileen where she is. Wherever she is, I want that to stay a surprise.”
“What are you gonna do with that?” my girlfriend asked with a nod at the skull.
“Oh, I’m about to piss off a psychopath,” I said with a grin.
“He is moving toward the exit,” Aileen announced over the comms.
“I will stop him.”
As Elizabeth got into position in front of the long glass box, I backed up into one of the aisles, tightened my grip on the Shadow Knight’s partial skull, and then used my thrusters to propel me up toward the top shelf that was just under the ceiling of the warehouse.
As soon as I lowered myself down onto the top shelf, I looked around and realized that I could see almost everything in the warehouse, and that included the Maniac as he moved toward the exit of the building. He looked over his shoulder just as he reached the door, but when he saw that Dynamo
was just standing in front of the glass box, he hesitated like he couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t come after him.
Then I watched him figure out that Aileen was about to strike.
The Maniac grasped the door handle, but the warehouse door slammed into him from outside, and then my robotic assistant strode through the door, closed it behind her again, and immediately started to shoot at the psychopathic supervillain.
He only just managed to roll out of the way in time, but as he raced back across the warehouse to get away from my android, Dynamo sprinted toward him from the other direction, so he was caught between both my beautiful, powerful women.
The Maniac pulled something out of one of his pockets, and it looked like a tiny gas canister. I didn’t think he would actually gas himself with the same toxic shit that he had planned to release on Grayville, but I didn’t want to take any chances since Elizabeth didn’t have her mask on.
I was about to whistle to get his attention, when the Maniac suddenly stopped and looked at the end of the glass box where the Shadow Knight’s skull had been.
“Where…” the Maniac trailed off.
“Looking for something?” I then whistled from my position on the top shelf.
Aileen, Elizabeth, and the Maniac all swiveled their heads to look up at me. As soon as the Maniac’s attention was fixed on me, I raised the skull and waved it at him, and at the same time, Aileen and Dynamo started to stalk a little closer to the supervillain.
“That does not belong to you,” the Maniac said. “You should not take things that don’t belong to you.”
“Then give me back
my gas mask,” Elizabeth said when she was just a few strides away from him.
“Fine,” the Maniac said but didn’t take his gaze off of the Shadow Knight’s skull.
Instead, he kept the gas canister in one hand and fished out her mask from another pocket with his other hand. He tossed it in her direction, and as soon as my girlfriend caught it, she slipped it back over her nose and mouth, so she would be protected just in case he was able to release the gas.
I didn’t plan to let him get that far.
“Now put it down,” the Maniac warned.
“But I never said that I would,” I snickered. “After all, can’t you see what’s about to happen?”
“No!” the Maniac shouted, but it was too late.
I lobbed the partial skull as hard as I could toward the concrete floor, and even though the Maniac dove for it, he couldn’t get there in time.
Instead, the last remaining piece of the Shadow Knight shattered when it hit the concrete, and by the time the supervillain got there, all he could do was try to scrape up the little shards of bone that were left.
He had set the little gas canister down while he tried to scrape up the Shadow Knight’s remains, so I ejected a small stream of webbing down to the floor to latch onto it. As soon as it was connected to the canister, I yanked it back up toward me and had just enough time to tuck it securely into my suit before Aileen and Elizabeth both reached the Maniac.
The Maniac pulled something else out from one of his pockets and threw it toward Aileen, and as he rolled out of the way, it exploded just in front of my robotic assistant. It was a small blast, but it didn’t even faze her, and instead, the beautiful android just strode forward with a small burn hole in one of her tall boots.
I used my thrusters to jump off the top shelf and slowly lower myself back down to the concrete. When I hit the floor, I saw the Maniac run over to the other side of the warehouse, so Elizabeth and I followed him into one of the aisles while Aileen went down another row to come up on him from the back.
Evil Genius 5 Page 26
