by Logan Jacobs
The Shadow Knight didn’t reply or let go of me, and instead he ground his teeth together as he glared at me.
“It was our lives or hers,” I continued. “It was purely in self-defense, and I only killed her because she tried to stab me with venom.”
“You shouldn’t have killed her at all,” he growled as he tightened his hold on the collar of my suit.
“If you hadn’t called me, then I could have helped Miles!” Beacon hissed as he put an arm between the two of us.
“What?” The crow-masked hero was so surprised that his grip on my collar loosened.
“What the hell was that about?” Beacon demanded.
The Shadow Knight’s former apprentice stepped forward and shoved Slade back so he would release my collar, and I carefully took a step backward so Beacon had plenty of room to confront his former mentor.
“What the hell was what about?” the Shadow Knight grunted. “Get out of my way, Beacon.”
“No,” the ex-sidekick replied and kept himself firmly between me and the Shadow Knight. “You called me out for no fucking reason, and you’re blaming Miles for using excess force against a supervillain that you put him up alone against?”
“Um, I mean, I was there,” Norma muttered, but neither the Shadow Knight nor Beacon paid any attention to her.
“You’re talking nonsense,” Slade replied. “I never called you.”
“Bullshit!” Beacon exclaimed. “For the first time since I was your fucking sidekick, you called me to back you up, and what did I find when I got there? Nothing! Just another one of your fucking mind games!”
“I never called you, Beacon,” the crow-masked hero growled. “Get it together.”
“No, fuck you!” the ex-apprentice said. “You called me for help, and now you just won’t admit it because you’re too proud or something. I’m sick of this, Slade!”
“For the last time,” the Shadow Knight said slowly, “I did not call you for help.”
“Alright, I’m out,” Beacon said as he threw up his hands. “Miles, let me know which villain I can go after next because I need to let off some steam. But I’m out of here. I can’t deal with this right now.”
“Beacon--” the Shadow Knight started.
“No, you listen to me for once,” Beacon growled as he locked eyes with his old mentor. “You calling me away was the reason why Miles had to kill Arachne. Her blood is on your hands, not his.”
I was impressed with the extent of Beacon’s rage, to be honest. He was performing far better than I’d expected him to, and even the Shadow Knight was left speechless as Beacon stormed off and slammed the door shut behind him. I glanced over at Norma and saw that she was similarly speechless.
“Wow,” was all Norma could manage to say.
We stood in silence as the Shadow Knight breathed in and out in a way that I assumed was him calming himself down. I waited patiently for him to gather himself since Elizabeth hadn’t arrived yet, and I didn’t want to risk having the Shadow Knight’s anger turn on me again. I’d let him come to terms with what Beacon had said, since it seemed to have gotten to him.
“If you had no other choice,” he finally hissed, “then… I will overlook it this once, but make sure it doesn’t happen again, Nelson.”
“It won’t,” I assured him with a cheeky smile. “Based on my calculations, Arachne was one of the most powerful supervillains to have escaped. We should have been more prepared going in.”
It did, however, amuse me to note that neither of them suspected a thing about how I’d managed to take out Arachne in the first place. Beacon seemed too focused on his own anger with the Shadow Knight to consider how I’d defeated her, and he probably just assumed I’d killed her with one of my blasters or something like that.
As for what Norma thought, well… she’d been in on my plan, but I did kind of hope she couldn’t hear what we were doing while she was trapped in the cocoon.
Slade still seemed like he wanted to go after me, but he had no reason to doubt me now that Beacon and Norma had come to my defense.
“Arachne was the hot one, right?” The Silver Squire finally reappeared from the kitchen as he munched on a protein bar he must have found. And in true teenage fashion, he had absolutely no tact.
“Arachne was a supervillain,” the Shadow Knight barked at his apprentice. “How many times have I told you not to think about them like that?”
“Sorry,” the teenager murmured. “I was just, um, trying to remember which one she was.”
“She was a true femme fatale,” I said. “We can go over it more when Dynamo gets here with Penumbra.”
And right on cue, my bombshell girlfriend and Slade’s blonde ex-apprentice walked through the door.
“What’s going on here? Where’s Beacon?” Elizabeth demanded as she looked between Slade and me.
I knew Aileen must have briefed her on what had happened before she’d arrived, and the protective glare she directed at the Shadow Knight was quite satisfying to see, since she’d once been such a big fan of his, so it meant a lot that she was willing to fight him for my sake.
“It’s all fine now, sort of,” I explained with a shrug. “Minor setback, but we’ll go over it.”
“Miles, are you okay?” Penumbra exclaimed as she ran toward me, but she glanced at Elizabeth and surprisingly backed off before she could latch herself onto my arm.
“Completely,” I assured her, and then gestured toward the screen. “Let’s go over everything we know again. It’s getting late.”
“Wait,” Elizabeth stopped us before we could move. “We ran into some… issues with Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde in particular.”
“What kind of issues?” I asked, because I had a bad feeling about what she was going to say next.
Well, a bad feeling that was overshadowed by a very proud one.
“I had to kill him,” she admitted.
“You killed him?” Slade shouted.
He kept himself rooted to the ground rather than physically threaten Elizabeth like he had done with me, so I guessed he knew he was no match against her, and that if he tried to manhandle her, she would just throw him through the window.
“She had to,” Penumbra quickly defended Elizabeth’s actions. “Clyde was about to use his telekinetic powers to kill every single person in the restaurant.”
I could see the Shadow Knight’s hands shaking as he fought against his growing rage that even Penumbra was turning against him, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“I would never have killed him if I didn't have to,” Elizabeth said.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Slade growled. “Ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
I guessed that Beacon walking out on him must have affected him more than he let on, because the Shadow Knight left it at that and didn’t press the subject further. Instead, he leaned back against the wall and refused to speak to any of us, and that included his Silver Squire.
“Good work,” I whispered to Elizabeth as everyone began to gather around the screens again.
“What happened?” she whispered back.
“I’ll tell you later,” I replied, and then I sat down between her and Norma on the couch in front of the screens rather than stand in the back with the sulking Slade.
Penumbra sat on the other side of Elizabeth and leaned against her, and the Silver Squire stood just behind her. I glimpsed him awkwardly try to place his hands near the back of her head, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it so he eventually just folded them in front of himself.
I flicked the screen to the Cheetah who had been the Shadow Knight’s target.
“Easily captured,” Slade said in a voice that lacked any real emotion at all.
“It was pretty cool,” the Silver Squire added. “His only power is superspeed, so once we caught up to him, it was a piece of cake!”
“He was one of the weaker supervillains to escape,” I said, since their attempts to brag after my obvious struggle with Arachne
was getting on my nerves.
“Still a supervillain,” the Shadow Knight growled. “Not taking them seriously is how you end up with a situation like Arachne. I would have never reached the point where killing her would be necessary.”
I didn’t believe for a second that he would have had an easier time with her, and in fact, his refusal to budge on his moral code probably would have gotten him killed instead. If he refused to see what I’d done as necessary, then I’d need to put him in a position where he couldn’t possibly resist the urge to kill.
“Alright,” I said, and clicked through the screens to pull up one of the supervillains we hadn’t captured yet. “Then you go after this guy next.”
It would be difficult to describe the creature I’d pulled up on screen as a “guy,” and I had spoken mostly sarcastically. Wendigo was monstrous to look at, with protruding ribs and antlers that curled up from its mostly hairless skull. Although his eyes still looked intelligent, they were pure black, including the sclera. It looked like the creature had been a human at one point, but he had now clearly warped into something else through genetic tampering. The information on the Wendigo implied that the mutations were something he’d done to himself, so clearly he was a deranged person from the start.
I didn’t think even the Shadow Knight would be able to see such a thing as a human, but considering it had been shoved into prison in the first place, he apparently had.
“More intelligent than the Golem, but just as inhuman,” I explained as different images of Wendigo appeared on the screen, each one worse than the last. “He’s a cannibal. Likes to eat people slowly, one part at a time, while keeping his prey alive as long as he can.”
I could feel the Shadow Knight’s hesitation even though I didn’t turn around to look at him.
“It hunts at night, so now is the perfect time to go after it,” I continued. “You’re probably the best equipped to handle it now that Beacon is a solo act, Shadow Knight.”
“You really think so?” The Silver Squire sounded awed, but it wasn’t really my faith in Dan Slade that made me suggest it, since I didn’t actually have any faith in him at all.
I simply didn’t think it was possible to let a creature like Wendigo live.
“Sure,” I lied. “We’ve traced it to an old, abandoned motel. No one goes there except drug addicts, so it’s a pretty popular place for criminals to hide in.”
“We’ll leave immediately, since we’ve wasted enough time here,” the Shadow Knight said with a tense tone. “Send my Silver Squire the information and directions.”
Without waiting for an okay from me, he barged out of the door as his apprentice scrambled after him.
I picked out a new target for Elizabeth and Penumbra as well, plus one for me and Norma. I also selected a weaker villain for Beacon to round up. As we got up and got ready to head out again, Elizabeth stopped me.
“Are you sure everything’s fine?” she asked as she brushed her fingers against my arm. “Are you and Norma going to be alright without Beacon? And what happened with him, Miles?”
I smiled and patted her hand.
“More than fine,” I assured her, since everything so far had gone according to plan. “Beacon chose to run solo to spite the Shadow Knight after we killed Arachne.”
“What?” she exclaimed. “You can’t just drop that kind of information on me, Miles!”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“I’ll try not to,” she sighed. “It’ll be a relief once this is over and we can work together again. Penumbra is alright, but she’s not you.”
“Most women aren’t.” I shrugged.
“Yes.” My lover rolled her eyes, but she also smiled slightly.
“Dynamooooo!” Penumbra’s voice echoed through the doorway. “C’mon! Let’s go!”
Elizabeth grimaced and then turned to join her partner, and as the door shut behind her, it was just me and Norma who remained in the house. I stifled a yawn, since it had been two nights already since I’d gotten any decent sleep. I was sincerely looking forward to a rest once this was all over.
Norma fidgeted awkwardly behind me.
“So it’s just us again, huh?” she asked with a nervous smile.
“Looks like it,” I said. “Beacon really did a lot of legwork for us with Slade, didn’t he?”
“I guess he felt betrayed, since all he seemed to want was for the Shadow Knight to ask him for help,” Norma replied. “I do feel kind of bad for him.”
“I do, too, but it’s about time he actually confronted Slade,” I said with a shrug. “At least their fight distracted him from the fact that I totally just killed Arachne because I could.”
“No way, really?” Norma rolled her eyes. “I’m still sorry our plan didn’t work out the way you wanted it to.”
“Eh, I still got to fuck her,” I scoffed. “And between you and me, she wasn’t that good of a fuck.”
“R-really?” my mousy assistant asked, although I could tell the path of conversation was beginning to make her embarrassed.
“Yup,” I kind of lied, since the spider-woman hadn’t been nearly as amazing as Elizabeth in bed, but I still really enjoyed climaxing deep inside of her. “For someone with such a reputation, I really expected more out of her.”
“Did she use her webs for some, um, creative bondage ideas?” Norma asked in a cute, timid way that made me laugh.
“Norma!” I exclaimed. “No, she didn’t. See what I mean? Boring.”
“Guess so,” my assistant giggled. “Our next target isn’t nearly as attractive, so this one won’t be much fun.”
“The Croc,” I said with an eye roll at the crocodile-man’s very typical villainous moniker. “But yeah, alright. Let’s go.”
As we loaded up the van with the traps I’d intended to use to capture the crocodile-man, I reflected further on the progress we had made so far on both of Dan Slade’s old apprentices. From the way Penumbra had immediately jumped to defend Elizabeth’s kill, I could tell they were already at least partially swayed over to my way of thinking.
All they needed was to see a working moral compass, and I’d definitely given them a lot to think about. I just had to hope that mindset stuck with them after we were all done here, and I had a strong feeling it would.
The Shadow Knight was definitely about to lose this game of ours.
Chapter 9 - Shadow Knight
The Wendigo had been a formidable foe the first time I’d captured him, and I fully expected this time to be no different.
“Finally, we get to fight something real!” The Silver Squire was elated about our newest target.
I knew better.
I knew that Miles had only assigned us Wendigo because of how repulsive the cannibalistic supervillain’s methods were. I had barely managed to stomach it the first time I’d faced off with him, and he was the first supervillain I’d struggled internally about my code with.
He was a monster now, but he’d been human at one point, and that was what let me keep my resolve against killing him. As repulsive as his cannibalistic practices were, there was still a semblance of a human within him, and I would not ever kill another human.
That was what set me apart from men like Miles.
“This isn’t a game,” I growled at my sidekick as I gripped the wheel of my armored crime-fighting tank.
We were on our way to the last sighted location of the Wendigo, which was an abandoned motel often frequented by criminals and drug addicts. It was located in a neighborhood that had been totally overrun with crime and misery, and even though the police stopped patrolling there, I embraced areas like this as my hunting grounds. Most of my usual supervillains knew better than to seek out the motel for refuge since I tried to clear it out weekly like I would clean spiders out of a garage.
The last time I’d caught Wendigo, he’d also been trying to hide out here. Maybe at one point, he’d thought he was righteous for hunting the scum that made th
e abandoned hotel their base of operations, but that wasn’t the case anymore.
The fact that he had returned to his old hunting grounds was more proof that the Wendigo was less human than he used to be, since he didn’t have the presence of mind to pick a better hideout. He was moving purely on his instincts.
“Did you hear me?” I demanded when my apprentice didn’t respond.
“I heard you,” the Silver Squire muttered. “I know this isn’t a game. I’m taking it seriously.”
“Are you?” I growled. “Because all you’ve done so far is to ask me about Miles and Dynamo, and whine about the supervillains we’ve been tasked with bringing in.”
My newest sidekick grumbled something under his breath, but I didn’t even humor him with a glance.
“You need to shape up, focus, and start learning from me,” I continued as I kept my eyes on the dark back alleys of Grayville. “Not Miles. Me. Do not forget whose apprentice you are.”
“I’m trying to learn from you, but you barely teach me anything,” the teenager protested.
“I am training you in combat, and I let you follow me on my missions and learn my methods,” I explained. “Is that not good enough for you? Maybe I should find a new apprentice, if you no longer have any interest in the job.”
When I finally looked over at him, I could tell that the Silver Squire was thinking very carefully about what to say from the way he glared daggers at his hands in his lap. Still, I didn’t care for his excuses, or anything else he had to whine about, especially if he wanted to bring up Miles Nelson again.
“Alright, I get it,” he finally said, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “I just thought…”
I waited for him to continue as I pulled my tank into three parking spots on the side of the street. I didn’t want to give anyone warning by pulling into the main parking lot, so we could walk the rest of the way to the motel from here.
“You thought?” I pressed when my apprentice still hadn’t finished his thought.
“I thought Miles was pretty smart, so I don’t get why you’re so against how he does things,” my apprentice finally said in a serious tone that was different from his usual, careless way of speaking.
