by Mia Archer
Sure it might slow someone down for a little bit, something that had saved my bacon a couple of times when I was trying to figure out a way to fight Fialux, but the process still had the same fatal flaw with yours truly even if it was taking a little longer than it did with Fialux and her superpowers.
After all, I was fighting with an appreciable fraction of her power thanks to the modifications I'd made to my suit. Modifications that were possible because I'd been able to get a far more up close and personal study of the world's newest hero thanks to new developments in our relationship.
Of course those modifications came with a cost. I frowned as I looked at my power readout. Allow me to make a video game comparison here for a moment. Usually that power bar looked like a mana bar in an Elder Scrolls game where the player character has been tricked out in just about every mana regen enchantment in the game.
After making some modifications from my extensive study of Fialux in action, though? Well let’s just say my power reserves, always a dicey proposition when I was in a nasty fight to begin with, were starting to look like a mana bar on a low level character who just discovered they could cast Healing while they were in the middle of a fight with a tough damage sponging boss.
The thing was going down faster than a giant floating metaphor for man’s hubris that just plowed into some ice, is what I’m getting at.
Still, I had plenty to get out of my current scrape. I might be having a little smidgen of trouble with my power reserves, but that just meant I couldn’t stay in action for as long as I was used to. I figured the increase in fighting ability more than made up for it.
I smiled, and I wasn't sure if the smile was because I knew Dr. Lana had already lost, or if it was thinking about some of the fun I'd had with Fialux doing “research” to up my game.
Either way, the smile was enough to make the grin on Dr. Lana's face falter just slightly.
"That's the problem with you," I said.
"What's the problem with me?" Dr. Lana asked.
"You're always in such a hurry to steal other people's ideas that you never bother to stop and figure out how those ideas work."
I could already feel the anti-Newtonian field slipping away. It was a strange feeling. At first it was like I was surrounded by a tingle. Now that it was starting to slip it felt like I was diving head first into a pool of cold water.
Or at least what I imagined diving headfirst into a pool of cold water might feel like. Admittedly that wasn't the sort of thing I was prone to doing all that often. Not voluntarily at least.
Sure I'd been tossed into water a couple of times by heroes who foolishly thought I didn't make all of my suits adhere to IP68 standards, which was a nice try on their part but not enough to stop me. By and large anything that involved being outdoors wasn't exactly my cup of tea.
The point I’m getting at is the sensation of slipping out of the anti-Newtonian field was weird. I guess this is what it felt like to suddenly have the laws of physics reassert themselves around me after telling them to take a hike.
That was the thing about most of my technology. It continued to tell the laws of physics to take a hike until I was good and ready for physics to reassert itself, which was rarely if ever. The anti-Newtonian field had been a frustrating exception to that rule.
Not that I was complaining all that much. I was going to survive to fight another day because of a combination of that exception and Dr. Lana’s refusal to actually learn how to use her equipment, after all.
"You're bluffing," Dr. Lana said.
"Oh yeah?" I asked. "Let's see."
An awkward silence settled between us. I’d really hoped the dramatic breaking out moment would coincide with my pithy one liner, but apparently the anti-Newtonian field didn't have the same sense of dramatic timing I’d developed over a long and prosperous career as a villain.
Instead I was left with a long awkward stretch where I didn't break free. Where Dr. Lana tapped a finger impatiently against her arm as though she was waiting for the other shoe to drop and starting to think I’d been full of it when I told her she was about to lose.
Not that I could blame her. I well knew the terror of having a cocky smartass hero telling you that you’d screwed up. It was never a pleasant experience.
"Look, if you're going to lie about this sort of thing you're only wasting both our time," Dr. Lana finally said. "If you’d just surrender and…"
It was at that moment that the anti-Newtonian field finally gave. The thing seemed to shatter around me and I flew across the room right at Dr. Lana’s smarmy but increasingly surprised face.
8
Distractions
I didn't waste any time now that she was in the line of fire. No, I put all of the strength I could muster into one hell of a right hook that landed across her cheek.
And wouldn't you know it? She didn't even bother to use any sort of inertial dampening field that would stop that hit from slamming into her with its full force. The practical upshot being that her head jerked to the side with a sickening crunch as she slammed against the wall.
Damn. I hadn't intended to hit her that hard. After all, a hit like that could kill a person.
It's not like this was a movie or something. Hitting someone in the head wasn't a magical knock out button which immediately and safely caused all higher brain functioning to cease to exist.
Well, scratch that. A hit totally could wipe out all higher brain function. That was the problem, though. Usually when you saw that kind of thing happen in a movie the person woke up very shortly after with no ill effect. As though nothing bad had happened.
But I knew from hard-won experience that hitting someone hard enough that it knocked them out meant potentially doing the kind of brain damage that could really fuck someone over. We’re talking the interruption in higher brain function could be permanent unless doctors got in there to cut out parts of the skull and alleviate swelling fast.
I wasn’t in that nasty business, even if she did sort of deserve it.
"Well shit," I said.
I hadn't intended to kill the woman. As I watched blood trickled out of the side of her ears and her nose. That couldn't be good. I hadn't meant to hit her that hard. I assumed if she was stealing my tech she would’ve stolen the stuff that allowed me to safely use that tech as well.
You couldn’t go around making fundamental laws of nature your bitch without a little risk to life and limb, so I’d overengineered the safeties on my stuff to hell and back. It appeared that Dr. Lana skipped that step in true Dr. Lana fashion.
I guess that just went to show that the old thing about assuming making an ass out of you and me had never been more true. I wasn’t sure if the bigger ass was me for hitting her that hard, or Dr. Lana for bringing her boring normal unenhanced body to an atomically powered supersuit fight.
Then I heard something coming from Dr. Lana. Which was totally impossible and raised my hackles. The only noise she should’ve been making after taking a hit like that was a death rattle.
I leaned in a little closer, wondering as I did if I was about to get myself caught in some post-death trap she'd put together to spring on whatever poor unsuspecting bastard, or bitch, had the audacity to kill her.
But as I leaned closer I realized it was a quiet laugh. And it wasn't even a laugh coming from an electronic laugh box or something cliched like that. Talk about tacky. No, she was laughing by pushing air past her voice box. Sure it sounded like she was a little worse for the wear, but that was her laughing.
She was still alive.
I jumped back as she turned and stared at me, her eyes wide. The way she turned her head shouldn’t have been possible in someone who had a fully functioning and undamaged neck. It was like she was still moving the muscles in her neck but her spine wasn’t held together to stop her from flopping her head around unnaturally.
Though how she was even able to flop her head around like that in the first place with a severed spine was beyond me. Talk
about freaky. Like something straight out of a horror movie.
I didn’t like it when my life’s genre of choice went from scifi to horror. It’d happened a few times early on in my career, and I made sure to carry enough firepower these days that I’d never stray from action scifi ever again.
Or at the very least if I did move into horror territory it would be my enemies feeling the terror while I methodically stalked them.
The point is I didn't like it when my opponents started acting like something straight out of a horror movie. It was difficult enough to maintain my composure when I thought I'd just accidentally killed somebody.
To have them suddenly come back to life when by all accounts they should be dead or seriously brain-damaged? Well that was an unpleasant cherry on top of the shit Sundae I was being force fed today.
"That's the thing about you," Dr. Lana whispered.
I licked my lips. Decided to ignore the fact that her ability to speak was medically impossible and go with it. After all, this was hardly the strangest thing I’d seen in my career.
"What about me?" I asked.
She was mirroring what I’d said to her earlier. I didn't like that she was mirroring what I said to her earlier. That was something I did all the time with heroes, and it usually meant I had something up my sleeve that said hero wasn't going to care for.
It was a little weird to think of myself in the heroic role, but here we were. And I didn't like that she was acting like I was the one who was about to have a very unpleasant surprise.
"All I had to do was distract you," she whispered, pulling herself up against the wall.
She trailed some blood. Like we’re talking the kind of blood that belonged at the spread at a vampire buffet. The amount of blood that would’ve made any self-respecting human body stop working.
Normal people didn't recover from hits like that. It was enough to make me wish I'd done a scan on her right after she got hit with that punch just so I could figure out what the hell was going on here, but of course I hadn't thought to do a scan because what was the point of doing a scan on a dead person?
You only run scans on people who are mostly dead. I’d figured she was all dead. Which sucked, but it wasn’t going to stop me from rifling through her lab and look for evidence of tech toys she’d stolen from me.
A huge confident grin split her face. I didn't like that she was confident. It was never good when a villain was confident. It never meant anything good for the person facing down said villain.
As weird as it was to think that I was facing down someone who was a villain. Which I suppose made me the hero in this instance. If you could call breaking and entering heroic.
I suppose it all came down to intent and point of view.
Sure everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story, but I’d always been more than willing to call a spade a spade and admit that I was the hero of a story where I was the villain for everyone else.
What can I say? I always figured you should be brutally honest about your position in life.
I knew I was going to regret saying this, but at the same time I knew it had to be said if I wanted to keep things moving.
"What did you have to distract me from?"
She glanced up. That was all the warning I was going to get. And again, I knew it was an action I was going to very much regret, but I had to follow the script. I'd done this so many times before with heroes and it was always so frustrating when they didn't follow the script you had running in your mind.
Hey. I might loathe Dr. Lana, but it's not like I was a complete monster.
So I slowly looked up. The ceiling was opening. That was interesting. It looked like one of those ridiculous stadiums that opened or closed depending on the weather that cities were always making taxpayers foot the bill for.
Only in this case it was something far more sinister than turning a private temple of profit into a public expense because sports.
I found myself wondering exactly how far we’d gone in that elevator. It felt like it was moving down, but obviously the elevator had been using some technology that masked the direction we were moving. There was no way going straight down from the Applied Sciences building would've put us in a location like this where it could open up onto a massive room.
If this massive room was right under the Applied Sciences building it seemed like an invitation for disaster. I could just imagine the entire building falling down into said massive room in the middle of some unfortunate attack. And in a city where unfortunate attacks happened all the time that kind of construction was just asking for a hike in your insurance rates.
My mind ran at a million miles a minute, I still thought that way despite multiple science degrees thanks to being raised in the USA where they used freedom units thank you very much, but all those thoughts left my mind as I looked up and saw several giant robots staring down at me.
Well shit.
9
Predictable
These were nothing like the giant spherical robot I’d constructed for CORVAC. That thing had been specially designed to confuse anyone attacking it as to whether it was a terrestrial giant robot or an alien visiting from another world to lay the smack down on humanity.
Apparently Dr. Lana didn't have any sense of imagination when it came to trying to throw her enemies off. Which sort of made sense given everything I knew about her.
These robots were your good old-fashioned humanoid type. They didn't even look that big. They were maybe three times the height of your average person. Which would be impressive if you were looking up at the things on a battlefield or something, but it wasn't particularly impressive here in Starlight City where giant robots were typically measured on the scale of massive skyscrapers and not on a much smaller human scale.
They basically looked like the kind of busted low technology crap that would impress military types and have them spending billions of dollars to go and play with their new toys in some undeveloped nation that’d still manage to give’em a run for their money despite all their multimillion dollar death toys.
"Really?" I asked. "That's the best you can do? The crap you're putting together for the military?"
"How do you know that's not my design for taking over the world?" she asked with a defensive sniff.
"Because those things look like something that would be in James Cameron's reject pile when he was working on the Terminator movies and not something that could legitimately take over the world," I said. "Besides. If you were serious about using those to take over the world I wouldn't be able to do this."
I didn't even bother to take careful aim. A careful aim wasn't needed for busted old technology like that. No, it was simple enough to point my wrist blaster up and fire a couple of quick shots. The bots disintegrated the moment my blast made contact.
I turned back to Dr. Lana and put my hands on my hips. Cocked my head in a triumphant smile.
"See? If you were serious about this then I wouldn't be able to do that! You don’t bring military-grade hardware to fight the greatest villain the world has ever known. Just ask the military types how that worked the next time you’re in DC begging for a contract.”
I thought that was a pretty good zinger. The only problem was she still had a smile on her face. The kind of smile that said she was in on a joke she was about to reveal. Again, I really didn't like it when someone I was fighting looked at me like that.
I'd been on the giving end of that kind of look enough times that I knew it could only mean trouble for yours truly when someone turned it around on me.
I sighed. "Go on. What's the big reveal you have waiting for me?"
She blinked a couple of times. "What makes you think I have a big reveal?"
"God. You really are terrible at this. You know that, right?"
She looked insulted, but whatever. That was the point. I wanted to make sure she knew I thought she was amateur hour.
“What do you mean? You’re talking like there’s a scrip
t or something. That’s not how this works,” she said, a touch of indignation coming to her voice.
"That's exactly how this works. Have you never been in a fight with a hero before?"
"I've been in fights with heroes before, and you're no hero," she said.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Damn it. That had been a problem ever since I'd teamed up with Fialux. I found myself referring to myself as a hero more and more, and that wasn't a good line of thinking to get used to.
I was a villain, damn it, and it didn't matter if I was dating the most powerful hero the world had ever known. That didn’t magically make me a hero by association just because I’d fought off one giant robot with her.
Never mind that the whole city seemed to think I’d gone good and disappeared. Sure the reason for my disappearance was I’d been busy with Fialux in the lab doing all sorts of experiments, both scientific and otherwise. Booyah.
The city was starting to forget that they feared me. That wasn’t good. I wasn’t a hero. I was a villain.
Even if that was inevitably going to cause some relationship conflict. The greatest hero the world had ever known versus the greatest villain the world had ever known? Yeah, I figured there was going to be some friction there down the line, but I figured the longer I ignored that friction the longer I could enjoy myself.
“There’s totally a script to this and obviously you haven’t been doing it long enough to know how it goes. You tell me you have a big secret. I destroy whatever big secret you're throwing at me. You say you've got another even bigger secret you're going to use to try and defeat me and we go back and forth until it turns out one of us has run out of ways to defeat the big reveals we’re throwing at each other."
Dr. Lana smiled. "Well. In that case you're going to love this surprise."
I looked around. "What surprise?"
She pointed up. Inside I cursed myself, though on the outside I didn't give away a damned thing.
