Ex-Superheroes

by A. J. Markam

  Suddenly there was a CLANG that reverberated through the frame of the jet.

  I looked over at one of the monitors on the console.

  Antimatter had landed on the top of the plane and was using a blast of energy from his fingers like a welding torch to cut open the top of the ship.

  I pointed at the monitor. “He’s coming in here and he’s going to get his Ephemera, and then he’s going to kill us. I say we kill him first.”

  Nova saw Antimatter and panicked. She jerked the flight stick –

  Nothing happened.

  Antimatter must have done something to the wings.

  “He fried the ailerons,” I said, “so now you fry the fuckin’ Ephemera.”

  “But the plane – ” Nova protested.

  “Is toast anyways! DO IT! Yuki, get ready to phase all three of us!”

  Nova shook her head like I can’t believe I’m doing this shit, unbuckled her harness, stood, and ignited a fireball in her hand.

  There was a metallic shrieking as Antimatter breached the fuselage, followed seconds later by a smaller clang! as he hit the metal deck of the cargo hold.

  He was inside the ship, just on the other side of the bulkhead.

  “DO IT!” I shouted.

  Nova hit the Ephemera tube with a blast of fire.

  The metal skin of the cannister began to blister, then melt –

  “YUKI, GET US OUT OF HERE!”

  Yuki slung the canvas bag over her shoulder, grabbed both my arm and Nova’s, then kicked off backwards and pulled us along with her.

  We phased through the side of the cockpit out into open air and flashed like ghosts through the airplane’s port wing.

  Then we began tumbling towards the Pacific 10,000 feet below us.

  We still had forward momentum from being inside the sparkjet – but without it to propel us along, we quickly lost speed.

  As Nova and Yuki screamed, I twisted around so that I could see what the fuck happened with the Ephemera in the sparkjet.

  Five seconds later, the plane was now 400 feet above us and at least three thousand feet ahead.

  And then it exploded.

  BOOM!

  The sparkjet erupted into a giant fireball, and a hundred pieces of flaming metal shot through the air.

  YES! GOT HIM!

  Antimatter was dead.

  One down, 600 to –

  Suddenly, a tiny spluttering flame of light popped and flickered… then burst into a slow and steady trail of flame.

  Mother FUCKER.

  He’d somehow survived. Maybe he’d been anticipating something. Maybe he’d thrown up some kind of antimatter shield around him. Maybe he’d gotten into the bulkhead, seen the fire, and run for it.

  Either way, he was alive.

  I just prayed he wouldn’t see what was about to come next.

  Even if he did, I had bigger things to worry about than Antimatter right now.

  We’d been falling about 10 seconds. We had maybe another mile and a half at most before we hit the water. Say, 25 more seconds, give or take.

  “Yuki, can you slow us down?” I yelled.

  “Not at this speed, and not all three of us!” she screamed back.

  Fuck.

  Her powers allowed her to move upwards against gravity through air and solid materials, just like she’d phased us up through the ceilings in the bank.

  But phasing upwards from the bank’s 5th to 30th floor had been a relatively slow process, like swimming through water.

  She wasn’t fast enough to counteract a speed of 120 mph – or faster, probably. After all, we were ghosting through the air. We couldn’t feel it on our faces or bodies at all. There was no air resistance slowing us down, and thus no terminal velocity of 120 mph. But gravity was still acting on us, making us fall faster and faster.

  If Yuki didn’t take us out of phase, we were going to continue through the water at 120+ mph until we went straight through the seafloor.

  There was a tiny bit of drag on our molecules even in phase, but nothing like the normal friction of air and water. It would take solid rock to really slow us down. We’d end up falling at least a mile through the earth before we slowed down, and then Yuki would have to phase all three of us upwards until we reached air again.

  We’d have to hold our breath the entire way. After all, you can’t breathe in solid rock or water.

  It would take at least 10 minutes to reach the surface.

  There was no way in hell we’d make it.

  Yuki would probably pass out, her powers would stop, and then we’d all materialize in the middle of solid rock and die excruciating deaths.

  Good times.

  So it was all up to me.

  “Take us out of phase!” I yelled.

  Immediately I felt an electrical buzz across my skin, and the air slammed into our faces like a wind tunnel.

  I threw up a forcefield beside us – a flat, round disc.

  I did it beside us because the timing was tricky. After all, if I created a stationary shield and we slammed into it, it would be the same as slamming into rock at 120 mph.

  Well, given the current state of my powers, the shield would probably shatter, but we’d probably all get knocked out, fall to the ocean, and die on impact.

  More good times.

  Now that I had the forcefield falling beside us at the same rate, I eased it up underneath us. A second later, I felt its solid pressure beneath my body.

  Good.

  But I couldn’t just slow it down to 0.

  It would be the same as slamming into a stationary shield. Bug, meet windshield.

  So I had to slow that shit down gradually. Not so fast that we broke every bone in our bodies, but not so slow that we slammed into the water at 80 mph.

  I squinted and cursed and groaned as I throttled down the speed.

  With three bodies falling 120 mph, it was harder than anything I’d done so far other than block the shot Antimatter took at the airplane.

  The good news was, after that excruciating experience, the current one was only a devastating migraine in comparison.

  My entire body flattened against the shield as I slowed us down to 110 mph, 100 mph, 90 mph –

  The water was rushing towards us way too fast.

  80 mph, 70 mph, 60 mph –

  Both Yuki and Nova were screaming, their faces smashed into the forcefield.

  50 mph, 40 mph, 30 mph –

  I wouldn’t be able to get us to 0 mph in time, but hopefully it would be slow enough not to kill us.

  I think we were doing 20 mph right before I cut the shield.

  A split second later we hit the water.

  Pain jolted me – but it was distributed all over my body instead of just in my head.

  Cold water washed over me.

  JESUS it was cold.

  I flailed in the water and swam upwards. My clothes and jacket were a huge drag on my body, but I made it to the surface.

  I came up to hear both Nova and Yuki sputtering and coughing.

  “THAT was your great rescue?!” Nova yelled angrily.

  “Shut up and look,” I said, nodding towards the sky.

  The smoke from the explosion was a black blot in the sky.

  About a mile away, we could see flaming bits of wreckage falling into the ocean.

  And two miles above, we watched a fiery trail cut its way back towards Tokyo.

  “He thinks we’re dead. Good,” I muttered, then turned to Yuki. “You still got the Ephemera?”

  She held the dripping canvas bag up.

  “Seven cannisters… minus one,” she said in a pissy voice.

  “Yeah, well, we’re alive, so you’re welcome,” I shot back.

  “What do we do now?” Nova asked.

  I looked around. Water in every direction as far as the eye could see. Since Japan was no longer visible, that meant we had to be a good 10 or 15 miles out in the ocean.

  Luckily, Antimatter was flying back in exactly
the direction we needed to go.

  “Let’s tread water for a while and let me rest up,” I said.

  It only took a few minutes until the pain in my head receded.

  That was good. I was doing progressively harder things with my forcefields, and the recovery time was getting shorter and shorter.

  But it still was nowhere good enough to take on Antimatter again.

  Forget that right now, I told myself.

  All that mattered was getting us back to dry land.

  I created a shield beneath us in the shape of a bowl eight feet in diameter. Then I lifted us a foot above the waves and created a hole in the bottom of the forcefield so the water could drain out. Finally I began to move us slowly but steadily in the direction Antimatter had flown.

  “Where are we going to go when we get back to land?” Nova asked as she shivered in her soaked suit.

  “I’ve got a place,” Yuki said. “But we should probably go somewhere first and get dry.”

  “We’ll find something,” I reassured her as I powered our invisible air boat towards the mainland.

  15

  Tokyo’s geography worked in our favor. The city sat on the west shore of a bay. Ten miles across the bay was a 20-mile-wide peninsula, and then the Pacific Ocean.

  No matter where we ended up hitting land, we were going to be at least 30 miles away from Antimatter’s HQ in Tokyo – 20 miles of peninsula and 10 miles of water in the bay. That was the only good news in all this mess.

  When we got within sight of land, I slowed down our approach and aimed for a sparsely populated section of the shore. In the area I picked, we could see houses set back about a quarter mile from the water, but nobody was on the beach.

  Trying to look as inconspicuous as a bunch of people with wet hair and clothes can be – not to mention one of them dressed in a bright red leather jumpsuit – we crossed the sandy shore and deserted road and made our way to a bunch of summer cottages.

  We picked the one farthest from the others that also didn’t have a car parked in the driveway. Yuki phased through the side of the house and unlocked the door from the inside. “No one home, Hunter-san!”

  We checked out the house and found a stash of dried ramen and canned food in the pantry. Enough to tide us over if we needed to stay for days, which was good.

  Then we set up defenses, which basically consisted of Yuki phasing broom handles lengthways through the doors and letting go of them. Basically, she fused the door and wall into one solid piece of wood bound by the broom handle. Way more effective than any lock.

  It wasn’t going to stop somebody from coming through the windows, but nobody short of a super was busting through that door. Yuki could phase us out easily enough, but nobody was getting in until she removed the broom.

  “Sorry about your crew, Yuki,” I said as she finished up.

  “Ahhh,” she said, waving it off. “I wasn’t friends with any of them, I was just on a job. How did you find out about it?”

  “Somebody tried to recruit Shade.”

  Yuki knew all about Shade – and what a bad idea it had been to approach an assassin for a heist.

  “Bukiyona baka!” she growled, using the Japanese phrase for ‘clueless idiots.’ “They deserved to die, then. But I’m glad you’re here, Hunter-san!”

  She jumped up in my arms, wrapped her legs around my waist, and planted a hot, wet kiss on my mouth.

  I kissed her back for a second or two, then laughed. “Okay, okay – I’m glad to see you, too. But let’s get out of these wet clothes first. We’ve got to let them dry.”

  “Okay!” she agreed as she jumped off me – then kicked off her boots, unzipped the front of her leather catsuit, and peeled down until she was entirely nude.

  Yuki was a wild child. I’d known it the second I met her three years ago. You’d have thought she’d been raised in a nudist commune from how unselfconscious she was.

  And God DAMN she a sight for sore eyes.

  She was on the petite side, about 5’3” and thin – but with an incredible rack. She weighed less than 100 pounds, and 20 of it was in her tits. At least double D’s, maybe bigger, with tiny little nipples still hard from the cold water. There is nothing better than a thin chick was big, full, firm natural breasts. Not to mention her pussy was shaved bare. She looked absolutely mouthwatering.

  I was halfway undressed, with my jacket and shirt off, but I stopped to just drink her in.

  Yuki noticed my reaction, and saucily put her hands on her hips. “Like what you see, Hunter-san?” she giggled.

  “Yeah,” I said. After a year without seeing a single naked chick, to see an incredibly hot one like Yuki was definitely ‘lifting my spirits,’ if you know what I mean.

  Yuki noticed that, too, and walked right up to me and stroked my cock through my pants. “We’ll have to take care of that soon, Hunter-san,” she said with a smile, but her voice was husky with desire.

  “Um…” another voice spoke out.

  We both looked over to see Nova looked incredibly uncomfortable – and still fully clothed.

  She cleared her throat and tried not to look directly at us. “Are there any towels?”

  “Of course!” Yuki said happily, and bounced over to the linen closet, her incredible tits swaying and jiggling all the way. She opened the door and tossed Nova a couple of towels. Then she took one for herself and began rapidly toweling off her damp hair – which caused her boobs to wobble even more.

  My hard-on was starting to get painful.

  “Sooooo… who’s your girlfriend, Hunter-san?” Yuki asked with a grin.

  The question was so ridiculous that I laughed.

  It was no laughing matter to Nova, though.

  “I am NOT his girlfriend,” she said sourly.

  I chuckled. “It’s strictly a working relationship,” I explained to Yuki.

  “Too bad – she’s hot!” Yuki replied as she ogled Nova from head to toe.

  Well, she wasn’t wrong about that.

  Nova blushed almost as red as her suit.

  “What’s your name?” Yuki asked.

  “Nova. But… um… you can call me Angelica.”

  “Angelica! How pretty!” Yuki squealed, hopping up and down on her toes – which set her boobs jiggling again.

  I noticed Nova eyeing Yuki’s rack almost as intently as I had been earlier.

  Interesting.

  “Angelica Smith,” I said in a jokey tone of voice. “You wouldn’t tell me your first name this entire time, but you tell Yuki after knowing her 15 minutes?”

  Nova glared at me. “She seems more trustworthy than you.”

  “She’s a thief,” I reminded her.

  “Hai,” Yuki agreed cheerfully. To her that was a compliment, not a slam.

  “Like I said,” Nova said coldly, “she seems more trustworthy than you.”

  “So what the hell are you doing in Tokyo?” Yuki asked. “Besides fighting with each other?”

  “We came to get you,” I said.

  “What?” Yuki asked in surprise.

  “We did?” Nova asked, just as surprised.

  “She’s the first member of the team I want to assemble,” I said.

  “I’m in!” Yuki cheered. “What are we stealing?”

  “Actually, we’re going to kill a bunch of supervillains.”

  Yuki paused. “…seriously?”

  “Yup. Starting with Antimatter.”

  Yuki’s mouth dropped open. “You want to kill Tonmonoshitsu? Anata wa kurutte iru!” That was Japanese for ‘You’re crazy.’

  “You’re the one who just tried to boost Ephemera from him,” I said.

  “And I did,” she said, holding up the canvas sack of metal tubes.

  Touché.

  “But you can’t kill him,” Yuki continued. “It’s impossible!”

  “We almost did back there in the plane.”

  “Almost. But you didn’t.”

  “Well, we’re going to try again.”<
br />
  “Why do you want to kill him?”

  “Because the US Military wants him dead.”

  “That’s who you’re working for?!” she yelped.

  “Yup.”

  She scowled. “I’m out.”

  I reached inside my jacket, took out the paper Harding had given me, and carefully unfolded it. It was soggy but still intact. I put it on the kitchen table and pointed at it.

  “Just wait till you see what they’re offering.” Then I looked over at Nova. “I’m going to need another one of these, by the way.”

  Overcome by curiosity, Yuki bent over the table to read the letter. Which gave me an absolutely stellar view of her heavy boobs swinging in the air.

  God DAMN I needed to get her into bed ASAP.

  “A full pardon?!” Yuki cried out.

  “Yup.”

  “And ten million dollars US?!” she exclaimed.

  “Yup.”

  She looked thoughtful. “Will they pay more?”

  Good old Yuki. Always angling for the bigger score.

  “The pardon’s worth way more. With that, you can go straight and live off the interest on the ten mil,” I said. “You’d never have to steal again.”

  She frowned. “What’s the fun in that?”

  “I’m sure you can kind other ways of having fun.”

  She looked down at my pants and gave me a mischievous smirk. “I’m sure I could. But ten million would only make up for the tube of Ephemera you lost.”

  “I didn’t lose it, we blew it up. And I already made up for that by saving your life.”

  She sighed. “Fine. I’ll sell off the Ephemera first, then I’ll take the ten million.”

  Nova cleared her throat. She was still in her damp suit, though her hair was now wrapped up in a towel. “Actually, we’re going to need the rest of the Ephemera, too.”

  Yuki stared at her. “What?!”

  Oh great.

  I could see where this was going.

  “We can’t have you dumping a bunch of Ephemera on the black market,” Nova explained.

  “It’s mine.”

  “No it’s not. You stole it.”

  “Hai!” Yuki said, like it was obvious. “So it’s mine!”

  I could tell Nova was trying not to lose it. “You stole it from the Japanese government!”

  “I stole it from Tonmonoshitsu. I don’t give a damn where he stole it from.”