Evil Genius 3: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

  “Alright, let’s go over what we know,” I said.

  Norma pulled up an image of our target, Morpho, and overlaid it across the windshield of my van. All the images we had of the supervillain showed her in her water-based form, so I guessed that she preferred to operate like that. She was shaped like a voluptuous woman made entirely out of water, and I knew that she could shift between mist, water, and solid ice. If she’d had skin, she might have been smoking hot, but since she was made out of water, she was entirely featureless, and even Aileen could pass as a human more easily than she could.

  “She’s something like a mercenary assassin,” Beacon explained. “Not really someone who works on her own. She’s great at slipping in and out unnoticed, so the bigger supervillains will hire her to do their dirty work, like an assassination or a theft.”

  “Any specific weapons or methods?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered after a pause. “She doesn’t use any actual weapons, but instead she morphs her body into icicle knives or morphs into liquid and goes into their mouth and down to their lungs to drown them. She’s highly valued as an assassin because she never leaves a trace behind, except maybe a few drops of water.”

  “Efficient,” I said.

  “Very,” Beacon agreed. “But in order to sustain herself and her powers, she needs to drain water from human bodies.”

  “What do you mean?” Norma asked as her brown eyes went wide behind her oversized glasses.

  “The average adult human is 60% water,” I said. “Draining even a portion of that would dehydrate anyone to the point of death.”

  “That’s how she kills when she isn’t on an assassination job,” Beacon explained. “It’s the easiest way to track her. Follow the trails of dehydrated human husks.”

  “Has she had enough time to leave any bodies behind already?” Norma asked.

  “Aileen?” I tapped into my earpiece to get a direct line to my beautiful and intelligent AI.

  “I have detected movement and activity within the pool in the basement of this gym,” Aileen’s sultry voice echoed through the car’s speakers. “But there are no active human life-forms.”

  “Are there… inactive human life-forms?” Norma gulped.

  “There are,” Aileen replied. “There appear to be several bodies that match the definition of ‘dehydrated human husks.’”

  “Probably vandals or people who were looking to graffiti the walls,” I said. “I doubt Morpho even had to hunt for them.”

  “Yeah, it definitely sounds like she drained them,” Beacon said. “And if that’s true, then she’ll be very powerful. The more humans she drains, the better she is at manipulating her powers and her body.”

  “How did the Shadow Knight capture her in the first place?” I asked, since I might as well learn as much as I could about the shape-shifting woman.

  “He monitored her for a while,” Beacon said. “She doesn’t need to sleep as much as a normal human might, but she still goes into stasis to rest. He waited until she was asleep, and then he imprisoned her in a watertight cell. Come to think of it, I don’t even think he even had to use any force against her, so he was never at risk of being drained.”

  “How often does she go into stasis?” Norma asked.

  “Not often, especially not if she’s recently fed,” Beacon admitted. “Once a week, at most.”

  “We can’t wait around for that and hope she’ll make the same mistake that got her captured in the first place,” I replied. “We’ll need to think of something else.”

  She was water-based, so we had a few options to choose from that might work. We could go for extreme heat, we could electrocute her, or we could freeze her. I was wary about freezing her since she could turn her body into ice already, but I wasn’t sure if that applied to being turned into a block of ice by someone else. It would have been a lot more helpful to grab a sample of her body to experiment on first to figure out the best way to incapacitate her, but we didn’t have that kind of time.

  “We can confirm she’s inside the pool itself, right?” I asked Aileen.

  “Yes,” my AI system replied. “There is movement in the water that could only be caused by another life-form inside of it, but I detect nothing.”

  “Nothing except water,” Norma confirmed. “So she’s using the pool to hide, I guess?”

  “Or she’s relaxing after a big meal,” I scoffed. “So here’s the plan. Norma, you’ll need to go into the maintenance room for the pool and cut off access to the outside pipes. Then, you’ll manipulate the system to drain the pool entirely into the water tanks. We’ll trap her in there.”

  “And what do we do?” Beacon asked as he leaned forward.

  “We’ll keep her occupied and make sure she doesn’t leave the pool,” I said. “I don’t think she will, since she’ll be thinking that she’s more powerful if she has access to more water. So we really just need to keep Morpho busy so she doesn’t notice Norma going into the maintenance room, and then it should be easy enough.”

  “You really trust me to do that?” my mousy assistant whispered. “What if I can’t-- or I don’t get the timing--”

  “I trust you,” I cut her off.

  “Okay, Miles,” Norma breathed. “I’ll do it.”

  We exited the car a few blocks down from the gym, so our approach would be less noticeable. The light on Beacon’s chest extinguished itself to make him less of an obvious target. So far, he’d proved himself to be easier to get along with than the Shadow Knight despite sharing similar views, but I had no idea how useful he’d be in actual combat. Hopefully he wasn’t as obsessed with being on the “moral high ground” as his mentor was, since my methods weren’t exactly saintly.

  As for weapons, my suit was equipped with both a palm-blaster and gauntlets. Both of my arms were now outfitted with blasters, even though other people might crudely call them lasers, but since I’d powered them up with specialized heat-rays that were hot enough to evaporate water on impact, I thought blasters sounded more appropriate.

  I hooked Norma up with a powerful ice gun that could instantly freeze anything. I also outfitted her with gauntleted gloves that were just protection, so she wouldn’t freeze herself in the event of a misfire. Of course, for the most part, Norma wouldn’t be directly involved in combat since I was sending her into the pool’s maintenance room, so I expected the ice gun to be used only as a last resort.

  Beacon informed us that the glowing design on his chest was actually a heat detector that alerted him with a tone only he could hear when there was a motion in front of it. He had a similar one in the back of his costume, plus a few others scattered around that alerted him in different frequencies. It seemed like the constant beeps would annoy me, but he claimed it helped him sense his opponent’s moves in combat and let him move faster. He was also a trained boxer, so he knew how to throw a punch.

  I didn’t know how useful a well-thrown punch would be against a woman made entirely out of water, so I equipped him with two electrified rods to fight with.

  “Just be careful with those,” I instructed. “You don’t want to electrocute any of us.”

  “What do you take me for?” Beacon growled. “I’m still a hero.”

  Sure-- a hero that had been trained by an idealistic idiot.

  It was still daylight and the streets weren’t entirely empty, but we came up the side and approached the caution-taped-off gym so we could slip inside through a door left entirely ajar on its hinges.

  “Guess they never got the chance to close the door behind them,” Norma winced as she took a hesitant step through the door.

  “Once we find the bodies, we’ll know we’re close,” I replied as I followed my assistant. “Beacon, is she capable of splitting herself off into multiple forms?”

  “I don’t think so,” Beacon said as he entered the gym behind us. “She’s never done that before, anyway.”

  I nodded, and we continued down the back hallway. There were several signs poin
ting in different directions, so we followed the signs that led toward the pool. The gym’s decor was old with a blatantly 90s style look to it. The linoleum tiled floors were decorated in a gaudy checkered pattern and looked damp as we got closer to the door leading to the pool. This place needed more than just repairs-- it needed to be completely torn down before it could be rebuilt, but somehow, I didn’t think the Shadow Knight’s philanthropy went that far.

  It didn’t take long for us to reach the decrepit husks that were scattered along the ground all the way up to the door labeled “EXERCISE POOL.”

  The three bodies could barely be described as human at this point, and I thought they were much closer to mummified remains than freshly killed corpses. Their skin was all wrinkled and entirely dried out, as well as tinted a sickly yellow. Only one of the bodies must have been a woman with long hair, and her hair was now as brittle as straw. As I nudged one slightly out of our way, the arm cracked and crumbled off with a dry thud to the floor.

  There was no fluid remaining in these bodies, so no blood splattered from the torn arm as it crumbled into dust.

  “Were these people really killed less than an hour ago?” Norma gasped.

  “Yup,” I grimaced. “This is definitely her MO, alright.”

  “Try not to breathe in too much,” Beacon said as he covered his mouth and nose with his hand. “We don’t want to huff in a bunch of particulate human remains.”

  I tried the door leading to the pool and found it unlocked. I glanced from Norma to Beacon, and both of them gave me a nod.

  “Be ready,” I directed. “Stay clear away from the water, obviously, since that’s where she’ll be hiding.”

  “And if you feel her touch you, make sure you get away from her as fast as possible,” Beacon added. “She drains via contact, so we don’t want to get too close to her.”

  “Alright,” I said. “On three, then.”

  I held up three fingers and counted down, and then we burst through the door with our weapons ready. I held out my hand so the power of my heat laser began to charge up, but I didn’t fire it. As I had expected, there was no sign of Morpho since she was probably under the water. Despite our quiet approach, I figured that she had already sensed that someone else was here based on the vibrations in the water.

  Beacon and I split up to surround the pool, while Norma slowly made her way over to the door that led to the maintenance room. That was very likely what held the tanks, valves, and temperature control for the pool, so it was exactly the place Norma needed to be, and I was glad to see her already making her way over toward it.

  Beacon then stepped in a puddle with a splash that made Norma flinch, but she only hesitated for a second before she continued onward.

  I resisted the urge to chew Beacon out for being heavy-footed, but then I noticed a large puddle had suddenly begun to shift and take on a different shape behind him. A woman materialized herself out of the water molecules, and she stretched her mouth wide enough that she could have consumed Beacon whole, so I only had a second to act.

  “Beacon!” I yelled as I raised up my charged heat blaster.

  I fired it off across the pool, and Beacon leapt out of the way as the heat blast slammed into Morpho. She screeched and reeled as the explosion tore apart her middle and ripped open her stretched jaw, but with a wet squelching noise, she very quickly managed to reform herself with the evaporated steam. There was a splash, and she dropped back into the puddle to disappear. Her wet giggles echoed around us, and I set my blaster to charge up again.

  Beacon darted around the side of the pool to join me as Norma continued to slink along the back wall toward the maintenance room.

  “Thanks,” he breathed. “She formed too fast, and my suit didn’t alert me in time.”

  “Would it have?” I asked. “If she’s made out of water, would you be able to detect that? You only have a heat sensor.”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s Shadow Knight’s tech. I wasn’t allowed to crack it open to see how it works.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said. “How are you supposed to even use it properly if you don’t even know how it functions?”

  Before Beacon could respond, a hand formed of water slithered up from a nearby puddle with a gaping, wet mouth in its palm. I fired another heat blast, and the hand dispersed into steam.

  “We can go over your equipment later,” I snapped. “Let’s get rid of this bitch first.”

  “I hear you,” Beacon replied.

  I turned to scan the indoor pool for any signs of Morpho, or anything we might be able to use to our advantage to keep the water-elemental within range of the pool’s drain. It was the kind of pool only meant for exercise swimming and not for lounging around in bikinis, so it was a pretty small area.

  Of course, that also meant that Norma sneaking along the wall was painfully obvious, but so far Morpho hadn’t seemed concerned with anyone except for Beacon. Maybe she recognized him from prior encounters with the Shadow Knight, but either way, it worked for us.

  “Beacon,” I called. “Go get her attention.”

  He gave me a resolute nod and started back off around the other side of the pool. He kept his hands raised with both electrified rods out like he planned to fight her off in lightning-style hand-to-hand combat, since that was what he’d been specially trained in.

  I trusted in the power of my own technology more than I trusted Beacon not to electrocute all of us in the room accidentally if he tried to shock a harmless puddle. The rods were charged minimally, so they weren’t powerful enough to surge through every puddle in the room if he misfired, but hopefully it would still be enough to do some damage to Morpho.

  “I’m almost there!” Norma whispered through our earpieces. “I’ll run the rest of the way!”

  I watched as my mousy assistant breathed in and darted toward the maintenance door. She pulled it open with more force than was really necessary and slammed it shut behind her in a way that I hoped wouldn’t attract attention.

  But, naturally, I’d been right about where Morpho’s attention truly was. She’d gone after Beacon on the other side of the pool, and he’d positioned himself so that in order to sneak up behind him, she would be facing away from Norma and the maintenance door.

  It was a little clever of him, I had to admit.

  The water-shifter had indeed appeared behind him again, but he’d been ready for her. He struck her with the two rods that sent electric shocks throughout her body, so her limbs jolted and splattered apart into little particles. In order to re-form her body, she had to slow down, so Beacon was making steady progress in ripping her apart.

  It was steady but still way too slow, and I could see the pool begin to churn with waves as Morpho rethought her own plan.

  As I ran forward, I raised my heat blaster arm, and the mechanism whirred to life. I fired a shot from across the pool in an attempt to take her by surprise again, but Morpho dispersed herself into pre-formed steam to avoid being hit by the blast.

  Instead, it slammed into the side of the wall with enough force to make the tiles crack, and it felt like the entire building shook from the impact. I paused to loosen my arm out because the blast recoil was starting to get to me. I’d need to look into improving my blaster again, so it wouldn’t cause as much recoil when it fired.

  I made my way over to Beacon again so we could fight back-to-back. I didn’t think his sensors would be able to detect something made out of water since she gave off no heat, but I didn’t want to be proven right. So far, he was an alright team member. He was no Dynamo, of course, and he couldn’t even really hold a candle to Norma, but he wasn’t miserable to work with, could actually hold his own in a fight, and listened to directions.

  “So?” Beacon panted. “What now?”

  “We keep her attention,” I said simply, since I wasn’t about to say my entire plan out loud where Morpho might hear it.

  It didn’t prove very difficult to keep her attention on us, thou
gh. It was honestly a little annoying that she was so focused on Beacon, but it made her easier to fight. I assumed it was because she had no idea who I was and recognized Beacon as one of the Shadow Knight’s former apprentices, but I still took offense to it.

  My blaster and Beacon’s double electrical rods were clearly superior to anything the Shadow Knight had fought her with before, and just as we paused to brace for her next attack, the water in the pool began to swirl and froth with waves.

  “Enough playing!” A garbled, girlish voice echoed up from the water. “Where’s the Shadow Knight? I didn’t escape his stupid prison just for him to send his lame lackies after me!”

  A giant, sharp-nailed hand raised out of the water, so Beacon and I split to dodge in separate directions. As the hand slammed down right where we’d been standing, the water sloshed and crashed against the ground like an ocean in a storm.

  Morpho was finally ready to use the pool to her advantage, and that was exactly what I’d wanted her to do.

  “Norma?” I called through the earpiece. “Status?”

  “Not yet!” she responded. “But almost-- I just need to disconnect one more thing.”

  We needed to keep Morpho situated within the pool, but even though that should have been easy, she was already starting to form herself a new, much larger body that utilized the rest of the water in the room. Two arms climbed up out of the side of the basin now, and the water levels of the pool were significantly lower. One of the hands slammed down near Beacon, and he looked frantically over at me with his rods raised uselessly in front of him.

  “How are we supposed to fight something that big?” he called as he jabbed one of the rods forward, but the weak electrical surge barely sizzled against the torrent of water.

  I knew exactly how to fight it, but it all depended on how fast Norma could activate the drain.

  “You need to have it ready now, Norma!” I yelled through the earpiece over the sound of waves that crashed against the tiles.

  “Just one more second!” she shouted back.

  It was a good thing I’d designed the suits to be waterproof. I hadn’t tested what would happen to my blaster if I submerged it in water, but at the very least I knew it wouldn’t electrocute me to death. The metal plating around my arms was enough to protect the inner workings of it, but I didn’t think it was powerful enough to fire while underwater. I would have to stay above it, because at this rate, if either of us were caught in her waves, we would drown.