by Matt Carter
While I had to fight off Minuteman, Locust Man, Vulcan, and the Champion of Venus, I could only get glimpses of the others faring little better.
Geode tripled in size, grabbing El Capitán and launching both of them through the ceiling.
Several heroes piled on top of Nevermore, only to be pulled off by Shield Maiden, who Showstopper had gained control of. With some effort, he managed to seize Caveman’s powerful mind and had him fighting the heroes as well.
ATHENA and several of her similarly mech-suited teammates surrounded and blasted Trojan Fox, and though her armor was as high-tech as any of theirs, she was taking a lot of damage.
Ghost Girl engaged Arcana and Horus with her quarterstaff and did well despite their great advantages. One hit to the throat sent Arcana doubling over, while one to the groin got Horus to fall on top of her.
And there I was, in the middle, blasting and trying to fight off heroes who weren’t just pretending to try to capture me. Locust Man got me in a headlock and used his superstrength to twist me to face Vulcan as he approached me with a halo. No no no, this isn’t how this is supposed to go!
The ceiling exploded above us as Geode and El Capitán, still grappling, smashed through and to the floor in front of us. Vulcan was nowhere to be seen. I got the impression he took the express elevator to the basement with El Capitán. So that just leaves these three…
Minuteman shouldered his enchanted musket as he pulled a halo from his tri-corner hat and approached me. I blasted the ground at his feet, intending to make a hole that would send him to the basement with the others. I must have aimed too high, however, as his legs exploded outward in awkward, horrible directions.
He screamed a lot louder than I would have expected.
“Holy shit!” Locust Man shrieked, loosening his grip on me just enough. I placed a hand next to his head and focused. He flew through the air, bouncing from wall to wall. He hit the ground moaning and writhing, his famous Locust helm shattered around what was probably a less pretty face than it was this morning.
There was no time for victory, but there was plenty of time for the feeling of fingers wrapping around my brain. I screamed, falling to my knees and clawing at my helmet trying to get them out.
I apologize for having to resort to such invasive methods of incapacitation, but you have given me little choice, a powerful, ethereal voice echoed in my head.
The Champion of Venus. He had one of the greatest grab bags of powers in the world: strength, flight, shapeshifting, the ability to smell colors, and telepathy, and was often called the second most powerful Protector after El Capitán.
Give in to my voice. Close your eyes, and all pain of this world will end, he intoned.
A battle cry made the Champion of Venus look up from me just long enough to see Shield Maiden run at him and smash him into a gooey, yellow stain on the wall. She continued to stomp on him as he tried to reform, keeping him in as many pieces as possible.
Showstopper ran to me, huffing and puffing, with blood running down his face from a gash in his forehead.
“Thanks.”
“Any time, mate. You guys sure know how to party!”
“This isn’t supposed—”
“I know, I was just kid—”
The crackle of a Tri-Hole opening filled the air. Turning to find it, I saw Arcana and another wounded superhero dragging the magical tree containing Odigjod through. He reached out a hand to us, his many eyes pleading as he called out for help.
Then the Tri-Hole was gone.
“Oh no,” I said. “We’re fucked! WE’RE FUCKED!”
“Apex Strike, clear the line! Everyone, Odigjod is down!” Trojan Fox said over the radio, her voice shaking but still in control. “Grab a Tri-Hole generator from a downed hero and make it home. We need to get the fuck out—”
A wall exploded down the hallway. I half-expected to see Geode and El Capitán pour through, grappling and exchanging blasts of crystal and laser vision.
What really came through the hole was much worse.
The Golem.
“WE’RE FUCKED!” I screamed again. This time Trojan Fox wouldn’t shut me up.
El Capitán and Geode burst through the floor in front of the Golem. It just punched them both through a nearby wall and started running toward us.
“I got this,” Showstopper said determinedly, cracking his knuckles. I didn’t know what he planned to do. I didn’t know what he could do. We had to run, we had to get out of here, didn’t he see that?
He had complete control over Shield Maiden, two of ATHENA’s lesser mech-suit teammates, and a Soviet heroine whose name I could never remember. He threw each in front of the Golem. The mech suits went by the wayside pretty quick, and Shield Maiden only slowed it for a moment. The Soviet must have had superstrength, because she was able to slow the Golem almost to a stop by digging in her feet. Irritated, the Golem grabbed her by the shoulders and flung her down the hall, smashing through wall after wall.
Showstopper’s determination faltered. He turned to run, facing me. Faster than you would think for a monster so large, the Golem caught up and grabbed him in both of its massive hands. Lifting him over its head, the Golem ripped Showstopper in half, squeezing him to a bloody pulp for good measure.
He didn’t even scream.
I thought he would scream.
The room went silent. I know there was a battle going on. I know nobody but me stopped fighting after seeing Showstopper killed, but as far as I was concerned, there was no world outside of that blood-soaked Golem and what remained of one of my best friends. There would be no more cheesy stories, no more late nights trying to decipher his Aussie slang, no more fat jokes.
Showstopper was gone.
Something popped inside me. I really, honestly think I heard a pop. My ears rang. There was a growing ball of rage that expanded beyond me. The world distorted. Debris swirled around me. My feet lifted off the ground. The walls in the hallway rippled and cracked.
I screamed, primal and inhuman.
FOCUS.
I don’t remember the explosion, exactly. The news footage (from the two helicopters I didn’t knock out of the sky) showed the courthouse exploding into the sky, the decades old structure reduced to shards of wood, steel, and stone, and never coming back down to earth. Buildings nearby fell over in a wave, knocking each other down like dominoes. In spite of the mass evacuations, thousands of people in the city were injured (mostly from being hit by pieces of the courthouse, some of which were found up to twenty miles away) and at least a dozen were killed.
It’s been called the single greatest act of villainy on American soil since the Radiation Queens annihilated Detroit.
At the time, none of this mattered.
My feet touched the ground. I barely felt them. My nose gushed blood and I was blind in one eye, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep for a very long time.
I fell to my knees, aware that sound was coming back slowly, aware that there wasn’t much of a courthouse anymore, aware that the top half of the Golem (minus its left arm) lay on the ground in front of me, looking confused and reaching out weakly for help. Tri-Holes opened all around in the building’s smoking ruin. Voices were yelling over the radio, calling my name, seeing if anyone else was alive.
Two figures walked through the dust cloud in front of me, pausing to look at the remains of the Golem and curse.
Walking closer, I could see who they were. It almost brought out a smile.
Shooting Star and Photon. Kayfabe heroes.
My friends.
“Help,” I said weakly. Her face sympathetic, Shooting Star reached a hand out to me. I reached back.
Then she blasted me in the chest with a beam of sparkling, red and blue energy. I could feel my leg breaking, vaguely, as I was roughly flung onto my back.
They both looked sad and scared as they approached me. Shooting Star said, “Sorry, cutie, but we can’t have them interrogatin’ you.”
This wasn’t
exactly how I saw myself dying.
This sucks.
I saw the gunshot before I heard it. Photon’s face from the nose down exploded outward. He quickly put his hands to where his mouth should have been, whether in confusion or pain I didn’t know. He tried to run off at superspeed, but only managed a few steps before the rest of his head fell apart and he collapsed in a twitching heap on the ground.
Shooting Star turned to face the shooter and got a bullet through her bare midriff for her trouble. She doubled over screaming as another took her in the neck and a third blew off her lips, cheek, and most of her teeth. Guess she’s not going to be headlining concerts anytime soon.
She fell to the ground, bleeding, twitching, and slowly dying. Another figure, small and shadowy walked out of the dust cloud, twin six-shooters in her hands smoking.
“Blackjack… help…”
“What are you doin’ lyin down?” Blackjack said, looking around nervously as she ran to me. “Get up and run, you asshole!”
“Can’t…”
“I got him,” another voice said, lifting me off the ground and tossing me over her shoulders.
Ghost Girl.
Blackjack used a Tri-Hole generator to open an exit, and Ghost Girl carried me through.
Never had I been so glad to fly through the tunnel of green and screams in my life.
We landed in Death Manor’s rec room. Ghost Girl set me down gingerly on a couch.
We weren’t alone.
Nevermore and Geode were already there. They both looked pretty bad. One of Nevermore’s arms was badly burned. Geode was broken and bleeding heavily from one of his legs while Nevermore tried to tie it off with a strip of leather from one of her boots.
“Help me, he’s dying!” Nevermore cried out. Despite her limp and the gash on her belly, Ghost Girl walked across the room and began to help Nevermore tie off his leg.
Another Tri-Hole opened. Through it, the steel coffin was flung, clattering heavily to the floor. Trojan Fox followed. Nearly half of her armor had been ripped off, and the other half was heavily damaged. She was covered in sticky, green blood.
“What happened?” Nevermore asked.
“Fifty-Fifty. He tried to kill me. I got him first.”
In a rage, she ripped off her helmet and stormed to me.
“You motherfucker! This is all your fault!” she shouted and started repeatedly punching me with her one armored hand so hard she shattered my helmet.
“Helen!” Geode called out.
“We could have gotten out! We could have escaped! But you made us stay! You told us it was our job, you son of a bitch! They fucking killed Showstopper! They captured Odigjod! All because you didn’t call it off when we told you that something was wrong! Are you fucking happy? ARE YOU FUCKING HAPPY?!?!?”
Ghost Girl thrust the broken, jagged end of her quarterstaff at the edge of Trojan Fox’s throat.
“Helen, don’t,” Ghost Girl said.
“Don’t what?” Trojan Fox asked.
“Don’t think I won’t do it. Don’t blame Aidan for something he was forced into. Don’t forget who the real enemy is. Take your pick. Either way, if you can walk, we’ll need your help moving the rest into the healing pods,” Ghost Girl said. She looked down at me, not unkindly, but not particularly happy with me either.
Trojan Fox stalked off, yelling in frustration and kicking a couch halfway across the room.
She knelt down beside the steel coffin.
“This better have been fucking worth it, so help me…” she said, prying it open.
I didn’t see him sit up, but the last thing I heard before passing out was his voice.
“Took you guys long enough,” Carnivore said.
#Supervillainy101: Eye Guy
When a bizarre experimental chemical accident transformed Indian scientist Vijay Thopi into a living entity composed entirely of disembodied eyeballs, he couldn’t have been more thrilled. While being a living pile of eyes wasn’t exactly the greatest superpower in the world, it made him unique, and he thought this was his ticket to a spot on a British superhero team.
It wasn’t.
Undeterred, he started dousing himself in more experimental chemicals. In addition to putting himself in a state of constant agony, smelling absolutely terrible, and contracting three different types of ocular cancer, he also gained the ability to shift his form into any shape (so long as it was made of eyeballs), making his eyeballs harder than steel, and allowing him to see in every possible visible and non-visible spectrum. Hopped up on painkillers and chemo, he traveled to America, completely rebranded himself, and tried out for the Protectors.
They laughed him out of the room.
Embarrassed and furious, he rebranded himself again into the supervillain Eye Guy. While most hero teams wouldn’t give him the time of day, there were plenty of villain teams who were interested in a guy who could fling rock hard eyeballs that could see through walls with deadly speed, and so he found himself bounced from team to team during the War on Villainy. Though it wasn’t quite what he’d wanted, he was still glad someone was willing to pay him to use his powers.
Of course, medical treatments weren’t cheap, and as his disease began to make him less reliable, work dried up. In the end, he attempted to commit suicide by superhero to go out in one final blaze of glory, hoping to seal his legacy. Instead, he collapsed in agony five seconds into his final fight and had to be carried off to the Tower in a sack by Black Blur.
#LessonLearned: Sometimes, no matter what you do, life just sucks.
21
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…
I fell into a sort of waking coma after Amber City, lying naked in bed with the TV on and its ’round the clock coverage of the aftermath. I was never quite dreaming, never quite awake, never quite sure of what was real and what wasn’t.
I kept seeing the bodies. Showstopper. The Golem. The other heroes. Even the civilians the news said I killed. They got added to my usual nightly run of Icicle Man, Iron Bear, and Adriana.
My subconscious was starting to get crowded.
The civilians were mourned for, but not nearly as much as the heroes. The news had daylong retrospectives of the careers of Shooting Star, Photon, Fifty-Fifty, and Vulcan. Even though Vulcan was probably the only one the news should have been glorifying, since he was ugly as fuck compared to the other three, he got the least amount of screen time.
The greatest minds in the magical world gave interviews on how much work it would take to put the poor, damaged Golem back together, while hours were dedicated to talking heads trying to figure out just why Blackjack had defected. There was some discussion about what Carnivore’s escape meant, but even more gratuitous gloating about how the heroes had killed Showstopper and captured Hellspawn and how crippling a blow this was to the New Offenders, even though the captured villain refused to talk.
Time and again they played the clip of me utterly vaporizing the courthouse, knocking down building after building from my one, Golem-destroying burst.
I tried, for a while, to tell myself that this wasn’t my fault; that this was just the life we led and that sometimes surprises like this happened, but the lies felt bitter.
It was my fault. I could still smell Showstopper’s blood on my hands.
For a day or so, people tried visiting me, but I acknowledged none of them (unless they brought food).
Nevermore and Geode brought food and were clearly concerned.
Ghost Girl didn’t bring food, but I could see her standing in the doorway, scanning me, leaving.
Carnivore crawled on my bed and straddled me, his face inches from mine, saying that as soon as I was well enough to stand, he’d give me exactly what I deserved.
His presence here was the ultimate cosmic joke, our punishment for doing this, probably.
Trojan Fox didn’t come around and beat me again, even though I kind of wished she would. I certainly deserved it.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Showstopper
, wherever you are, if you’re a ghost or a spirit or whatever, or if you’re in hell with Odigjod’s folks, please know I’m sorry. Please. I… I wouldn’t trade places with you. I don’t want to die, but you gotta know, I didn’t want you to die either. You were my friend… I’m so, so sorry…
That damned clip again. The buildings dropping like dominoes. Helicopters falling out of the sky. The whole world exploding.
“You know, you got really lucky there.”
Someone new, but not quite, stood in my doorway. He set a bag on my nightstand and sat at the foot of the bed.
“With that much power released, you’re lucky you aimed it all at the Golem. Then it all went up. Otherwise you’d have killed everyone in the building, but like this… well, you live to villain another day.”
Adam.
Of course he’d say I was lucky.
He wasn’t there.
I rolled away from him. He sighed.
“We didn’t know. You… you do believe me, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything or roll back over.
“They didn’t trust us, if you can believe that. They thought that because we never took you down, that a different approach was required. That’s why we weren’t there; they didn’t tell us. They just wanted to capture you, in private, and be done with you like they were done with all the other villains. They don’t have vision. They don’t see your necessity.”
“What about Shooting Star and Photon and the others?” I said, my first words in days.
“They were scared. Once we all found out what the other heroes were doing, they thought it might be safer to eliminate you before anyone could be interrogated and reveal Kayfabe. Thankfully, you got away before that could be an issue.”
“Odigjod didn’t. Showstopper didn’t.”
He brushed this off, almost casually: “Casualties of war. They can be replaced, though. Anyone can.”
He must have heard how loud the silence in the room got because he playfully pushed my thigh. “Except you, of course! You’re Apex Strike! What would we do without you?”
