by Mia Archer
I’d been having trouble fighting it off, but it would appear the city’s resident hero with the sort of powers that belonged to the gods themselves didn’t have any trouble slicing right through the damned thing.
I felt a little bit of professional jealousy at that. It wasn’t fair that I had all these wonderful toys at my disposal and I still couldn’t manage to pull something off that Fialux could do by simply existing.
Not that I was complaining too much about those abilities now that she was using them to save my ass, mind you.
Not that I was surprised that she could slice through that thing’s armor like it was butter, for that matter. Any object traveling sufficiently fast would be able to blast through the armor, and it helped that she also had an invulnerable hide to go along with that speed.
An invulnerable hide that was downright sexy, too. I found myself staring as Fialux appeared, seeming to glow in the light filtering down over campus.
Sure her fighting style was mostly “bull in a China shop smashing everything in her path and ignoring anything that fell on her,” but it worked. Not to mention she looked damn good doing it!
I thought she was beautiful any day of the week, even if I was willing to admit I was a little biased considering we were sort of an item, but she looked especially beautiful now.
There was something about a girl swooping in to save my ass that added a couple of attractiveness points. Though in this case it meant she was going from a solid ten out of ten all the way up to eleven.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, taking the opportunity of her distraction to get airborne again. “I told you I was handling this!”
The words sounded lame even as I said them. Yeah, I told her I was handling this. Obviously I was handling it since I was down on the ground about to be smashed under a giant robot’s foot like an ant under someone’s boot.
She winked. “You looked like you could maybe use a hand. Besides, I figured if communications got cut off that meant someone out there had it out for you.”
She looked up and behind me. A rapid change in her expression was the only indication I had that something was about to happen. That and one of my aforementioned safeties beeping at me. But the robot that snuck up on me while I was distracted by Fialux was too fast.
See everything I said before about big things not necessarily moving slowly.
Something slammed down on top of me and I was swatted out of the air like a fly again. I fell to the ground and hit the pavement with a resounding thud and a crack. And again it hurt like a motherfucker.
As far as I could tell it was the pavement that cracked and not any part of my body, but it was a hard enough hit that it knocked the wind out of me even with my inertial dampeners and all the other safety systems I’d built into the damn suit to prevent that from happening. Damn it.
No wonder Dr. Lana didn’t seem to think those things needed modern weaponry like what I’d put on CORVAC’s chassis. Not when they could hit that hard. All they had to do was wade into battle and start smacking at things.
If they were hitting me that hard then they would be a downright terror on the battlefield going up against people with more conventional weapons. I’m sure there was a video out there somewhere she used to sell the things to DoD pukes that featured them wading into a hypothetical battle against government surplus tanks that got tossed around like toys.
That was exactly the kind of unoriginal shit Dr. Lana would pull. Almost as unoriginal as selling to the DoD in the first place to pay for your stuff.
I looked up and coughed. I was surprised to see that I wasn’t coughing blood. Most of my indicators were firmly in the red. I’d gone with the typical color coding, and that meant I wasn’t in good shape. They hadn’t looked like that since…
Well, since the last time I went up against Fialux, to be perfectly honest. Damn. Those robots packed a punch, and I was starting to think maybe I’d been a little too cocky and overconfident coming at them with my fists and a couple of plasma blasts and nothing else.
Something whooshed through the air above me. Whooshing wasn’t good. That meant something large was displacing air at a fast enough rate that I wasn’t going to like it when that air displacement stopped right on top of me.
Another sonic boom. Damn that was loud down here. Even with the sound dampeners kicking on they weren’t kicking on soon enough to completely shield me from the noise.
I really hoped I didn’t end up rupturing my eardrums. I was busy here, and I didn’t need to spend precious hours in the medbays in my lab regenerating that particular part of my anatomy.
A flash. The whooshing that had been threatening to rain pain down on me stopped, replaced by a loud metallic clang. I looked up and was treated to another view of Fialux looking glorious, her stomach showing in that cute little outfit she’d put together, cape streaming behind her, and both of her hands raised holding onto the robot’s foot as it tried to smash me.
My eyes narrowed. I was going to get Dr. Lana for pulling that bullshit, damn it.
“See what I’m talking about?” she asked with another wink. “Someone gets in trouble and I save them. It’s business as usual! I told you I should’ve come down here to begin with!”
I shook my head. “This definitely isn’t business as usual, and if you’d been down here earlier you could’ve been in danger!”
“Like you’re in danger right now?” she asked with a bright smile and a wink.
Still, now that it was just the two of us against the best Dr. Lana could throw at us, something that was a lot better than what I was expecting, I had to admit this was kind of nice.
It wasn’t the first time we’d fought a giant robot in an attempt to save the city, but it was the first time we’d been out together like this since that big fight with CORVAC. Mostly we’d been spending our time lounging around and trying to enjoy pretending we had a halfway normal life on campus.
Or we’d been spending time in the lab watching everyone’s favorite video streaming service and chilling.
Or we’d been canoodling in the office I still maintained on campus because it turns out they liked my survival rates for Surviving A Heroic Intervention and getting paid to work a few hours a week ranting at journalism majors was the best entertainment I’d ever found.
It looked like the fun times were over for now, though. It was back to work doing serious stuff fighting off the villains of the world.
I tried not to think about how that was very close to something a hero might think.
Sure there’d been a few small skirmishes with a couple of villains who thought they were going to move in on my territory, but they weren’t any threat when they were going up against Fialux and Night Terror.
Nothing was a threat going up against our dynamic duo, if you’ll pardon the phrasing.
“If you’d like I could always just take you down to the police station. I’m sure we’re doing something that could technically be charged, even if we are trying to save the city,” Fialux said.
“Not the city. More like the university,” I said. “And no thanks on taking me to the cop shop. I’d rather avoid that expensive attorney fee.”
“Come on. Fighting giant robots? This is like our second real date!”
My eyes darted around and I ducked under a metallic arm coming at me. “I don’t know. Something’s off about this.”
Maybe it was just that I still wanted something to be wrong about this. She’d shown up to the fight and nothing too terribly bad was happening, yet, despite the fact that I told her I didn’t want her showing up because I figured something bad was happening.
What if that was just my brain trying to make up a good reason why I was still right while circumstances were most definitely proving me wrong?
She glanced around at that. Maybe she could tell something was wrong too. Maybe she was just humoring me. Maybe she was nervous because I was nervous, but she was also too good at doing her job to let that stop her from t
he business of fighting off giant robots that would’ve been terrifying for anyone who wasn’t us.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something off about all of this. It had been too easy for her to defeat that first robot. Sure it had been easy for her to defeat just about every mechanical monstrosity that any villain could throw at her, including yours truly and I was the best, but still.
This was wrong. This was off. This wasn’t just my mind, one of the greatest criminal minds this world had ever known, searching for a reason why I wasn’t wrong. I was perfectly capable of admitting when I was wrong about something.
I didn’t do it that often because of the simple fact that I was very rarely actually wrong about something.
Still. Dr. Lana had shown herself to be adept enough at putting together a plan that I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else going on here. I didn’t like the feeling that there was something else going on here that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Whatever. I stood up and dusted myself off. Bad feelings were one thing, they could be frightfully useful in this business, but a bad feeling wasn’t going to do much of anything to stop the second giant robot that was still going on a hell of a tear through campus.
At the moment the robot was doing a number on the stadium, ripping up seats indiscriminately and taking out the announcer’s box, or whatever the hell they called the thing where people called the sort of games where millions of dollars were thrown around to watch a bunch of grown ass men toss around a ball.
It looked like whoever programmed that giant robot had a grudge against the athletic program. Apparently Dr. Lana harbored the same loathing I did for organized sports.
Either way, something needed to be done to stop her. And I hated that I was thinking in heroic phrases like that. I did not think like a hero. I wasn’t a hero no matter what Fialux kept telling me. No matter what she or the city thought after I helped her defeat CORVAC.
It was bad business to let someone get away with crossing you in the villainy profession. Taking out CORVAC wasn’t heroism. That was taking care of business.
I flew up as my suit came back online. I was really going to have to figure out a way to get more than one mini reactor on my suit without the two going into a resonance cascade that resulted in a hell of an explosion that had the potential to take out a good chunk of the region, but that was something to worry about later. I needed to fight this thing with the tools I had at my disposal now.
The bot might have hit me pretty hard, it might have taken something out of the inertial dampeners, but it couldn’t hit nearly as hard as Fialux and I’d been hardening my suit to go up against her which meant these things were nothing.
Sure I might’ve been in trouble if they managed to get off two hits in rapid succession, but I could deal with this. We could deal with this.
I hoped.
12
Disaster
“Do you have any suggestions for dealing with these things?” Fialux asked, zipping around the thing and trying to keep it occupied.
“I could always blast it with everything I have, watch none of those weapons do a damn bit of good, and then let you come in and do all the cleanup work after I’ve loosened it up for you.”
“You mean like you did with the last one?” she asked with a grin.
“Exactly! You can’t take all the credit for opening the pickle jar if I’m the one who loosened it up for you!”
“How about instead we just take care of this thing now?” she asked.
I shrugged. “If you want to take all the fun out of it, then sure. I suppose we could do it that way.”
“I thought you’d see things my way,” she said.
She flew down behind the thing and tried to slam a fist into it. Only the thing was too fast. Considering some of the superspeed she was capable of it was a bit of a shock to see the thing moving fast enough to dodge her.
She tried to punch the thing again. Again it dodged out of the way. It was like she was a kid trying to punch at a heavyweight champion or something. Which wasn’t right. She shouldn’t be having that much trouble with a giant fucking robot.
Sure they could react faster than any human could ever hope to react. Sure they had strength that went beyond anything mortal man was capable of. The problem was she had all that, and it was all way better than anything a giant robot could come up with.
My eyes narrowed. Something was wrong here. Something very bad was going on.
I cast my eyes around to find whatever was causing the problem. The problem was this was like pretty much every attack on the city, which was a polite way of saying campus was complete and utter chaos.
College students ran in terror looking for all the world like extras in a Japanese monster movie. Buildings crumbled all around us. The robot had moved from the stadium into campus proper, and it looked like whoever had programmed the damn thing had programmed it to cause as much damage as possible.
I also noted that the robot was being very specific in the kind of damage and chaos it was causing. The hard sciences were mostly spared, but it went after the English building with particular gusto. It was starting towards the journalism building, too, though hopefully there wouldn’t be many casualties there.
I smiled. No, they’d all been taught by Professor Terror. Which, now that I thought about it, would be a pretty good name for an academia-themed villain if I hadn’t already taken on Night Terror which had more of a ring to it.
Finally my eyes moved to the top of a giant bell tower in the middle of campus. It was one of the taller structures on a campus where they deliberately tried to keep things below a certain altitude. Something about keeping the quaint feeling in the middle of Starlight City where skyscrapers and a massive downtown were the rule rather than the exception.
Basically the sort of playground that heroes and villains would kill for.
The bell tower was ridiculous. They’d built the thing when I was in undergrad. It’d cost a ridiculous amount of money, and the administration had said that had nothing to do with the tuition hike that came along shortly after. Yeah, right. They’d also gone on about how the tower was bigger than any other bell tower on any other campus in the state, never stopping to realize how ridiculous they sounded talking about how their giant useless phallic symbol was bigger than everyone else’s.
My eyes narrowed as I focused on the top of the tower. Finally I saw it. Or rather I saw her. There was something oddly familiar about Dr. Lana’s getup. There was no doubt that it was Dr. Lana I was looking at. Somehow she’d recovered enough from that punch that she had time to throw on an outfit of her own and get to the top of the tower.
There was no mistaking that flowing blonde hair even with the mask, monkey suit, and cape. She hadn’t bothered to put her hair up, which was a surprisingly stupid and dangerous thing to do when you were in this line of work.
Having hair that was out there for all the world to grab onto if they wanted to was about the same as having loose hair around a lathe or something.
So again, I know I keep belaboring this point, but it was about what I’d expect from Dr. Lana. She’d proven herself to have a surprisingly ridiculous mix of stupidity and the ability to think ahead.
She stood on top of the tower pointing a weapon down at Fialux. I couldn’t see any obvious beams or other telltale energy signatures moving from that weapon to Fialux, but I figured the fact that she was pointing it at Fialux in the first place was proof enough that she was doing something nasty with the thing.
It reminded me of nothing more than those weapons she’d hit Fialux with that fateful night on campus. The night I’d intervened and saved the future love of my life. Partly because I didn’t want Dr. Lana to get the upper hand and defeat my archnemesis, but I was more than willing to admit to myself that I’d caught a bad case of feelings for Fialux then even if I hadn’t been willing to admit it to myself at the time.
Something bad was going on here
. She was doing something to try and hurt the love of my life. Hurt her to the point that she’d be able to take her out.
My eyes narrowed. Oh hell no. No way was I going to let her get away with that bullshit.
“Fialux! Watch out!”
She just barely managed to dodge as the robot sent a large metallic hand down to swat her. That seemed to be the favorite move for these things. It made me wonder why the hell Dr. Lana hadn’t bothered to armor them with conventional weapons. Or even some of the unconventional weapons I’d put together.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of my antigravity missiles coming at me. Everything else I’d ever invented had been coming at me lately because of Dr. Lana’s pesky habit of stealing my toys.
I moved through all the various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum trying to see if I could see what she was firing at Fialux. Then I went back to the visible spectrum, and it hit me what was going on.
I trying to overcomplicate things here.
If I looked close enough with my good old fashioned Mark One eyeball there was a slight shimmer extending from the gun to Fialux in a straight line. I thought I could almost see a slight purple tint around Fialux, but it was very faint.
I was an idiot. A complete and total fucking idiot. I wasn’t seeing her stupid trick on any of the usual non-visible spectra because she was using something that gave off good old-fashioned visible light that was so faint that it was difficult to see in the bright daylight surrounding us.
The fact that the beam weapon she was using was the same color, just a little fainter, than the ones she’d had her minions using when she was fighting Fialux on the quad in front of the Applied Sciences Department was enough to tell me that whatever she was pointing now could mean nothing good for Fialux.
It wasn’t that the robot was moving faster than Fialux could handle. I well remembered how she’d been sapped of her energy the last time she’d been surrounded by weapons like that. No, the robot hadn’t sped up so much as Fialux had slowed down under the influence of that gun. Whatever the fuck it was.
