Villains Don't Save Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  Dr. Lana was threatening my girl, and Fialux’s sluggish response time as she tried to fight a giant robot that should have been easy street for her was proof enough that Dr. Lana’s proof of concept was working.

  It was terrible, and it was working.

  Damnation. I wished I’d taken more time to study the weapons I’d stolen from her that fateful night on the quad, but I’d sort of been busy with the whole “fighting off my maniacal supercomputer” thing, and then after that I’d been so distracted with everything happening with Fialux, so excited in the first blush of new love, that it hadn’t occurred to me to tinker with those confiscated weapons.

  Well, I suppose it had occurred to me from time to time, but I also didn’t exactly have a computer that was capable of assisting me in analyzing something that complex and I didn’t have time to do it myself what with the constant delightful distraction that was having Fialux in my life. Damn it.

  It was a rookie mistake, and now Fialux was the one who was going to pay for it.

  “Watch out! She’s using a…”

  I never got a chance to finish my thought. The giant robot turned around and casually backhanded me. Like I’m talking the kind of hit that was embarrassing. It shouldn’t have been able to get that kind of hit on me, but here I was flying through the air and slamming into the ground. Again.

  I’d allowed myself to get distracted again. Not exactly my best day on the job.

  Again all the compensators on my suit redlined. That wasn’t good. And they were taking a little longer to come back this time around.

  I really fucking hated it when all the indicators on my suit started behaving like indicators in a videogame heads up display at a particularly dramatic moment in the narrative. I really needed to figure out a way to add more power to the damn thing so it could keep up with all the new upgrades I’d added since having Fialux ready and willing to help me with testing in the flight lab.

  I managed to pull myself up onto my hands and knees. I was impressed that I managed that much. That’d been one hell of a hit.

  Maybe I was going to have to revise my opinion on using robots to do some of my dirty work. The proof of concept today had shown they could be a worthwhile distraction.

  I looked up into the sky just in time to see Dr. Lana turn up whatever she was using to weaken Fialux. One moment I was looking at that purple haze that I could barely make out, and the next moment she’d dialed it up to a blinding purple blast.

  The beam hit Fialux and her back arched. She threw her head up and screamed in pain, and it was the kind of scream that reached into my rib cage and clutched at my heart.

  I’d allowed this to happen. This was all my fault. I was the one who’d decided to go on a fishing expedition in the Applied Sciences Department to figure out what asshole had been stealing my designs. Even though I had a pretty good idea that the answer to that question was none other than Dr. Lana.

  I was also the one who made the mistake of not trying to figure out exactly what made those weapons tick. She had a weapon that could hurt Fialux, and I should’ve spent more time looking into that.

  Not because I was particularly interested in defeating Fialux anymore. No, that ship had well and truly sailed. But more because I should’ve been more worried about someone out there having a weapon that could be used to defeat my girlfriend, damn it.

  She floated in the air above the giant robot for a long moment. Screaming her terrible scream that was so loud and powerful that it was sending my noise compensators into the red and beyond and smashing windows all around.

  I’d never heard her scream like that before. Even when I captured her using the anti-Newtonian field. She’d always been calm, cool, collected.

  She hadn’t even been this upset when Dr. Lana and her minions had surrounded her that night I saved her. Sure she hadn’t realized the danger she was in that time, but she was a cool customer, is the point I’m trying to make.

  That facade was gone now though. The screaming stopped. The beam continued firing, no respite there, but she moved out of the line of fire.

  Not because something had happened to throw off Dr. Lana’s aim. No, one moment Fialux was screaming and the next she went limp and gravity reasserted its control over earth’s most powerful hero.

  Fialux fell through the air, either because she’d been knocked unconscious by whatever Dr. Lana hit her with or because that secret weapon had deprived of her powers. Either possibility was terrifying.

  My systems were just now coming back online or I would’ve fired everything I had to stop Dr. Lana. I didn’t care if there was a potential danger in destroying the beam weapon that was aimed directly at Fialux.

  I was back in action now, though. I blew through the air.

  13

  Rescue

  It was a damn good thing the robot was giant. That meant Fialux had plenty of time to fall. Plenty of time for me to swoop to the rescue. Assuming I could avoid that damned robot long enough to get to her, that is.

  I had to be careful about this. My proximity alarm flashed and I jerked to the side like a fighter pilot trying to avoid a missile.

  Another proximity alarm. Another robot hand sweeping through the sky, but I moved with reflexes that surprised even me. It was as though I’d been treating this like a lark, like a joke, but suddenly things had gotten really fucking serious really fucking fast.

  Fialux had been put in serious danger because I’d treated this like an easy situation I’d be able to take care of no problem.

  I frowned. Looked down to my weapons array. I had numerous options available to me, there was no kill like overkill, and I decided fuck it. I fired everything I had.

  Missiles appeared out of thin air. Transported into that thin air by the pattern buffers I stored on my belt where I kept some of my nastier tricks that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to store on my person.

  Think of it like one hell of a technologically advanced bag of holding with a hellacious carrying capacity filled to the brim with the kind of futuristic arsenal that would make any military puke with more weight on their shoulders than good sense get a half chub thinking about it.

  Kinetics that operated with antigrav devices on them materialized right alongside good old-fashioned chemically fired missiles. And on top of that I fired every possible plasma weapon and beam weapon I had.

  Some of those were designed as countermeasures, something I’d put into place after I found myself dodging a ridiculous number of missiles when fighting CORVAC, but I figured it was safe enough to use them as good old fashioned weapons rather than counter-weapons considering this thing hadn’t shown any indication of possessing real weapons so far.

  Yeah, if I fired off everything I had and turned them all up to eleven they should be more than enough to distract the robot while I concentrated on saving Fialux.

  It was a testament to the sheer power the robot was packing with its smacking that I was able to fire off all of those weapons and still not have an appreciable dip in power output. Getting hit took a hell of a lot of my power, but firing everything I had didn’t use nearly as much power.

  I’d never identified more with Tim the Tool Man Taylor in my life when it came to the need for more power, is what I’m getting at.

  Still more than enough to swoop in and save Fialux.

  I heard a satisfying crunch as the thing finally buckled under one of my shots, but I didn’t care. I’d fired everything I had more in an attempt to distract the thing than anything else. I figured if the asshole was distracted then I didn’t have to worry about it trying to hit me while I concentrated on rescuing Fialux.

  This was something that was going to take a little bit of finesse. I might be personally exempt from the laws of physics, particularly the ones that could cause me grievous bodily injury, but that didn’t apply to everyone around me.

  It was a tale as old as heroes. One of the problems with most heroes and villains was they never stopped to think about the physics invo
lved in their day job.

  Like how it was impossible to reach out and lift up, say, a piece of rock the size of a mountain without having the whole thing crumble to giant boulder-sized pieces around you because you were putting all the stress of the force required to lift the damn thing onto a single point.

  Seriously. The stuff they showed in the movies? Entire mountains or cities getting lifted in the air? Yeah, unless the ground beneath those cities is solid rock it’s all going to fall apart. Imagine trying to hold up a nice squishy cake on the point of your finger and you start to get an idea of what it would look like in reality.

  Unless we’re talking about a giant landmass floating through the air that had been reinforced through and through to allow for that kind of lifting, which applied to no giant landmass ever, you were going to very quickly have a situation where one large chunk of rock became many small chunks of rock raining down on the area.

  The big problem there was that “small” chunks was a relative term. A chunk might look small in comparison to a giant mountain being lifted in the air, but it could still be pretty big and damaging when it came to rest on the ground. Usually violently.

  Hey, it’s just an example. I had no idea why the subject of giant landmasses being lifted by one hero or a small team of heroes was something that happened so often, but I’d seen the unfortunate aftermath when they ended up raining down skyscraper sized chunks because they failed to take physics and engineering into account.

  Or, for a much more personal and small scale example of the dangers physics posed, take swooping in to rescue somebody who was going for a hell of a fall. It was something people just didn’t think about. It was the same problem that had caused me to build a bunch of inertial dampeners and anti-physics compensators into my suit.

  Suddenly bringing a body to a rapid stop would apply the force of that rapid stop across said body in a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario all those forces are brought to bear on a small portion of the body which could be even more disastrous.

  We’re talking forces that would be enough to break said body in numerous places if, say, it were to hit the ground. At least if you were talking about your typical human body. All that kinetic energy is still going somewhere. Sure it isn’t being converted into a rapid stop on the ground, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly.

  Armor wouldn’t do jack shit either, unless you considered spreading out the force of an impact over the entire interior surface of armor and turning someone into human jelly a better outcome than breaking every bone in their body.

  They’d still break every bone in their body inside the armor, but they’d be so busy getting liquefied that they probably wouldn’t notice either process.

  I didn’t consider that a better outcome at all, and it was an occupational hazard I’d spent many sleepless nights in the lab developing toys to avoid. I worked with forces that were very much within the understanding of man, and I did my best to make sure those forces weren’t going to kill me due to a lack of understanding.

  Plain old physics was the problem with this situation. I didn’t know exactly what that beam weapon had done to Fialux, but I well remembered that the last time Dr. Lana used something like this on Fialux it had weakened her a hell of a lot.

  I wasn’t sure what getting hit with a much more powerful and refined version of that weapon would do to her. I knew it couldn’t be anything good, but the question was had it done something to her invulnerability? Like making her far more susceptible to a long drop with a quick stop at the end?

  Fialux was an exception to all of those rules. As far as I could tell whatever had given her those amazing powers had pretty much made her invulnerable. Like I’d seen her stop a train by standing in front of it and punching the thing.

  Honestly. Who punches out a freight train?

  My girlfriend, that’s who. But now she was falling and she might be in a hellaciously weakened state. She might barely be more powerful than a model locomotive tooling around on HO tracks in some boring middle management puke’s basement.

  It was like the old saying went. It wasn’t the fall that killed you. It was the stop at the end. And the last thing I wanted to be was the reason for that quick stop at the end.

  So I had to match my speed to hers. Had to make sure there was enough time to do this, though to be perfectly honest if I ended up smearing myself against the pavement in an effort to save her it would be more than worth it. I’d dive into pavement at full speed over and over again if I thought it would save her.

  It was a damn shame I’d never been able to actually figure out the Omega Thirteen protocol that would allow me to pull a Groundhog Day on situations like this that could potentially lead to my untimely demise.

  To match speed I looked at my heads up display. There should be enough time for…

  Something lashed out at me. A beam weapon of some sort. It wasn’t particularly concentrated, but it was enough to distract me.

  I wondered if that robot had been loaded with weapons after all, but when I glanced at the source I saw none other than Dr. Lana firing at me with a more conventional weapon. Conventional by villain standards, at least. An old fashioned gun firing bullets that thing wasn’t.

  The raygun in her hands looked like it was designed for killing people like yours truly moreso than it was designed for taking away powers from godlike beings who probably came from other worlds, though Fialux had been surprisingly cagey about her origin story with me so far.

  It’s not like I could blame her for being a little sensitive about that. After all, it was still a new relationship, and on top of that it was a new relationship where we’d kind of sort of had a love-hate thing that bordered on being archenemies for a little while there at the beginning.

  To say “it’s complicated” would be one hell of an understatement is what I’m getting at.

  I matched speed as I swooped down and went into a graceful arc where I was surprised my toes didn’t scrape the payment.

  Basically it was another bit of perfect flying from Night Terror. I had plenty of practice doing that sort of flying, after all.

  I flew over to the sidewalk and placed Fialux down gently. I looked up just in time to see the giant robot tottering and stumbling around like a drunk college student who’d had way too much to drink at the campus village before deciding to go back to their apartment for the night to sleep it off.

  Finally the thing turned and stumbled towards me. Damn. It looked like it was going for a kamikaze run even if its systems had been heavily damaged.

  14

  Bot Stomp

  I stared up at Dr. Lana. She was still perched on top of the bell tower holding her weapon. Not the best imagery in the world, someone on top of a bell tower with a rifle, but she probably didn’t know enough history to appreciate just how tacky she was being.

  Not that she ever had the self-awareness to appreciate just how tacky she was being with everything she ever did.

  “Are you fucking serious?” I shouted at her.

  “I’m serious about kicking your ass!” she shouted down to me.

  I stared up at her and blinked a couple of times. I couldn’t believe she’d actually dare to talk to me like that. No one had ever dared to talk to me like that before. No one had looked at Night Terror, the greatest villain in the history of villainy, and thought to themselves “Huh. Y’know what would be a really good idea? Insulting that crazy flying lady over there who can materialize pure death out of the thin air around her!”

  But somehow Dr. Lana had done it. It was infuriating. It was pissing me off. And it maybe made me go a little crazy.

  “I hate you!” I screamed.

  As I said it more of my arsenal appeared. Missiles and antigrav explosives and plasma bolts and beams all fired out.

  It did a hell of a job of taking out the top of the bell tower. The only problem was Dr. Lana was able to fly up and avoid the conflagration as the rest of the tower exploded in bits of concrete
all around her.

  Whoops. Looks like I’d just given the university’s giant phallic symbol a bit of a circumcision. Whatever. The thing looked stupid even without its tip chopped off.

  A giant thud next to me brought my attention back to the more immediate danger and I cursed myself for getting distracted in the first place. Of course she was trying to distract me, and I was letting my anger get the best of me.

  I looked up at the giant robot bearing down on me. It looked obviously damaged, but for all that I got the feeling it could still deal some damage if it really wanted to.

  I should’ve hit the thing with everything I had to begin with. Then Fialux wouldn’t have been so distracted that she didn’t see that beam weapon firing at her. I wouldn’t have been so distracted that I didn’t realize exactly what was going on here for the critical moments that were needed to save my girlfriend.

  And now there was a robot coming right for us. It was going to try and smash her, and if it could still hit even half as hard as it was hitting moments ago then that would be a problem, because I saw some scrapes and bruises on her that had no business being there.

  Not good.

  A girl who had invulnerable skin shouldn’t have scrapes and bruises. Not when she’d never exhibited anything like that before.

  That told me maybe there really was something to that strange ray gun Dr. Lana hit her with. Maybe she’d stolen Fialux’s powers, maybe she’d just weakened her for a moment, but either way a direct hit from that bot when she was in this condition was the last thing either of us needed right now.

  I sighed. I really didn’t want to use my matter dispersal weaponry in front of Dr. Lana, but there was nothing for it. I pulled up my wrist computer, pointed a laser sight at the thing’s chest, and hit a button to send off one of the bombs that was hiding in the pattern buffer on my belt.

  The only consolation I had was that the matter dispersal bomb wouldn’t be obvious when it went off since it was materializing inside the robot. The problem with that was it was entirely possible Dr. Lana had sensors in there that might tell her how the damn thing worked before the robot keeled over from suddenly having a lack of any insides.