Villains Don't Save Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  She also had something in her hands. That gun. My eyes narrowed. I was going to get that motherfucker if it killed me.

  Though it wouldn’t do either me or Fialux much good if it killed me getting the thing since I was the only one other than Dr. Lana who was remotely qualified to figure out what made the thing work.

  So maybe revise the plan just a little. I was going to get the thing even if it took extreme effort on my part, but I was definitely going to live so I could figure out what the hell made the thing tick.

  What to do about that robot holding Fialux though?

  So far I’d been hitting the things with energy weapons and projectiles and antigravity missiles, but what if I took it on one on one? There wouldn’t be any risk of explosions or anything like that if I duked it out with the thing. I figured I could take it in a fist fight.

  After all, before she’d had her powers taken away Fialux had been giving as good as she was getting in a physical rumble with these things. Who’s to say I couldn’t do the same?

  If I could go toe to toe with Fialux in her prime using the strength augmentation in my suit then I figured I could sure as hell do a little bit of the same with some robot that thought it was big and bad.

  I pointedly ignored the part where I was only able to go toe to toe with Fialux in all her power for a few minutes, tops, before reality reasserted itself and the strain of fighting her completely drained my one paltry reactor and pushed my strength augments past the breaking point.

  The thing braced itself as I got closer. Surprisingly it moved Fialux behind its body as well. As though it thought I was going to lash out with energy weapons and projectiles again. Though of course my quiver was empty considering I didn’t have an easy way to safely transport munitions without a more advanced computer.

  Transport. Munitions. That brought me up short. Mentally, that is. I was still totally hurtling at the thing like a human missile, but I needed to do some fancy targeting work with my wrist computer before I hit.

  I was such an idiot. Such a fucking idiot!

  I frantically worked my teleporter interface as I hurtled towards the robot. I’d been so preoccupied with fighting these sons of bitches that I hadn’t stopped to think things through. I could just teleport Fialux out of the damned thing’s hand!

  Dr. Lana threw her head back and cackled. She even threw her arms to the side too. It made for an impressive image, but it was also a distraction while I was busy working. I homed in on the targeting chip I’d put on Fialux, I figured a teleporter target wasn’t quite the same as tracking her and I figured the current situation bore that out.

  I hit engage. The robot turned slightly. Dr. Lana stopped laughing. I couldn’t see what was going on behind the thing, but the green light that meant a successful teleport came up on my wrist computer telling me there was one damsel in distress who wasn’t in nearly as much distress as she’d been seconds ago.

  Was it a little anticlimactic? Maybe. Did it lack the style that a hero might’ve shone while rescuing the damsel in distress? Most certainly. Was it cheating on some level? I’m sure Dr. Lana would agree with that assessment.

  That’s the thing though. I wasn’t a damn hero. Cheating was in my nature. I was playing by one set of rules, and those were my rules. I was fucking Night Terror, and if my enemies had a problem with the rules of engagement I played by that was only because they kept losing the game.

  Besides, now I was free to beat the ever loving crap out of these robots and Dr. Lana. Safe in the knowledge that Fialux was safe and sound.

  For certain definitions of safe. She was still jumping around according to my wrist computer, but it wouldn’t be long before she landed in my dummy lab with all the unfortunate enemy killing tricks there.

  Luckily for her, and for me, after the last jaunt to that lab had nearly ended up with every nasty trick I’d developed firing on her I went ahead and added her new biosignature to the friends list. A damn good thing too. When she got there she’d be greeted by a friendly computer that would show her the drone feed, but she wouldn’t be able to get out until I let her.

  Which gave me even more incentive to survive this battle. I hadn’t conceived of a situation where I might end up dead while she made it back to the emergency teleport stop without me, but this fight clearly indicated I hadn’t thought far enough outside the pine box I could still wind up in if I didn’t get my head in the game and kick some ass.

  The robot turned back to me and braced for impact. The fact that it was bracing for impact told me I was getting predictable though. I smiled. All the more reason to do something unpredictable for a change. That’s what’d made me the best, after all.

  So I took all of the frustration that I felt over everything. Knowing that it was partially my fault Fialux wasn’t here to help me save the day, the frustration that I was even forced to be out here saving the day in the first place rather than taking over the world, frustration over Dr. Lana besting me again and again, frustration at having a computer that betrayed me so I was operating with a handicap, and I poured that into the augmented nano fibers of my suit as I hit the robot with one hell of a punch.

  It was incredible. The energy I used for the strength augments wasn’t nearly as powerful as the stuff I used for some of my more interesting toys, but when I pushed everything I had into that hit it resounded through my body and even the inertial dampeners built into my suit to make sure I didn’t shatter every bone in my body when I took or gave a hit like that weren’t quite enough to keep up.

  It was bone jarring. It ran down my spine and rattled my teeth.

  Damn.

  It also had the effect of knocking the robot back and slamming it into a wall. Just in time for my sensors to tell me there was a new danger nearby because I suddenly jerked through the air like a fighter pilot desperately trying to avoid a missile, only my hand wasn’t on the stick.

  I flew down and into a dive that was apparently away from danger as my emergency safeties took the wheel. I could still see Dr. Lana hovering on the drone display, so I took a wild shot with my wrist blaster as I tumbled around. None of them hit, but I did have the satisfaction of watching her jerking through the air to get out of the way.

  I turned to face the other robot that’d managed to sneak up behind me despite being a towering hulking monstrosity. It stared down at me with a glowing red circle around its head.

  I fired every blast of energy I had, no time to get physical with this one when it was so close, and the thing staggered back, but it wasn’t enough to completely take it out. And meanwhile the sound of crumbling rubble behind me told me the robot I’d just punched was getting back up and would be back in the fight soon enough.

  I growled. The last thing I wanted to do was give up, but at the same time this was getting bad. There were two of them and I was already having difficulty, and if that third one that’d gone hurtling across the city showed up I’d be well and truly screwed.

  It didn’t help that right about that moment explosions started raining down on all sides as missiles streaked in and slammed into the robots, the buildings around me, and my shields barely went up in time to prevent me from having my insides liquefied from the shockwave and my skin burned to a crisp from the resulting fireball.

  Damn was I glad I’d had the foresight to put in systems that reacted faster than I could ever hope to in an emergency.

  If there was any justice then Dr. Lana would’ve been fried by those missiles, but somehow I didn’t think I was going to be that lucky. I’d already gotten one gimme from the universe when I teleported Fialux out of here.

  It was impossible to see anything in the explosions. I wondered if the robots could’ve possibly had some more advanced munitions after all, but a look at my heads up display showed that it’d been tracking several inbound and I’d been so overwhelmed trying to survive the bots that I hadn’t even noticed.

  Sloppy.

  Also? I couldn’t shake the feeling they were firing at me
more than they were firing at these robots. Something told me it was no mistake that they’d decided to choose the one moment that a couple of robots and Night Terror were all conveniently close together to fire off those missiles.

  The sons of bitches.

  Also? Their little plan to get rid of me totally didn’t work. The robots were still standing, which had me wondering if the government got off a lucky hit the first time around with the robot they managed to off.

  Or was it that Dr. Lana was the one who decided when the bots went up? I thought to that remote in the last fight. I’d bet other people’s good money that I stolen fair and square that she had another one of those somewhere on her person right along with that strange gun she still carried.

  I needed to get both of them, damn it. One was the key to winning this fight and the other was the key to getting Fialux’s powers back.

  First I needed to take out these overgrown metallic assholes though.

  I zeroed in on the one that had snuck up on me. Grabbed it by one of its clawed arms while it was still disoriented by the missile impacts. I figured if Uncle Sam was going to give me a convenient distraction then I was going to take missile impacts and turn them into missile impactade, or something.

  Give me a break. I’m into the science stuff. Not the writing thing.

  I took the robot by the claw and poured energy into my strength augments as I swung it around. I couldn’t exactly throw it over my shoulder, it would take Fialux levels of strength to do something like that, but I could whirl it around and slam it into a building.

  It’s not like I was trying to slam it into the building. More like the building was sort of there. Which wasn’t surprising considering we were downtown and surrounded by buildings.

  I saw something flitting beside me. I looked up fully prepared to throw down with Dr. Lana, so imagine my surprise when I saw a drone that looked unfamiliar. It wasn’t one of mine, and it certainly wasn’t US government issue.

  It looked like a prosumer model. Expensive enough that your average Joe wasn’t going to go for it, but not so expensive that it was unattainable. The sort of thing that someone with too much money might pick up. Or an organization who could write it off.

  My eyes narrowed as I realized exactly which of the two it was. The thing had the Starlight City News Network logo plastered all over the side like a NASCAR that learned to fly and developed a taste for cable news.

  I thought back to one of the Surviving A Heroic Intervention classes I’d taught. Particularly one where I’d talked about how helicopters were ridiculous in an era when drones could do the job cheaper and safer.

  Sure it lacked the immediacy of a reporter putting themselves in mortal danger to chatter over the steady thump of helicopter blades whirling in the background, but it was safer.

  Just my luck that one of my students would take my advice now when news coverage was the last thing I needed.

  47

  Trapped

  This was going to be all over the news. Night Terror destroys part of downtown accidentally. Or maybe not so accidentally considering I was trying to destroy these robots while avoiding the fight spilling out of this area, even if it meant destroying my immediate vicinity.

  Knowing how the news coverage had been going lately I’m sure they’d cover everything I destroyed without covering everything I saved. Or the fact that there was another villain in the area who was controlling the giant robots that were destroying everything.

  Was it really too much to ask that Starlight City News gave me the benefit of the doubt now? A lifetime of villainy didn’t seem like a good reason to always paint me as the villain now if you ask me, but of course no one from SCNN had ever bothered to ask me.

  And now they were going to get coverage of this whole fight thanks to a suggestion I made to my students.

  Well wasn’t that just great? Hoisted by my own petard. Night Terror brought low by public opinion that’d turn against her thanks to a suggestion she gave a bunch of journalism students because the people working in the industry itself were too stupid to think of ways to save journalists themselves.

  Probably because the higher-ups of those organizations weren’t the ones footing the bill with their lives when shit went bad during a heroic intervention. And I was doing a pretty bad job of the whole heroic intervention thing right now.

  “Oh look. The news is here!” Dr. Lana said. “I so enjoyed everything they said about you the last time we fought!”

  “Why do you even care?” I asked. “I was always a villain. Why do you think I care if they hate me now?”

  Dr. Lana swooped in closer. Close enough that she didn’t have to shout, but still far enough away that she’d be able to swoop out of the way if I decided to fire on her.

  “Because I can tell it bugs you. Because I know that deep down you want their approval, their attention, and this is my way of twisting the knife by making them hate you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Someone’s projecting.”

  “Am I?” she asked, crossing her arms and hitting me with a self-satisfied smirk that made me want to slap that smile right off her face.

  Though I figured there were far more productive ways for me to take out my aggression. Ways that would save those people she was trying to turn against me.

  I growled in frustration and turned on one of the robots since I couldn’t very well go after the drone without seeming like even more of an unstable danger. I also figured it would be pointless to go after Dr. Lana right now. She had too much maneuvering room. I had to figure out a way to corner her, but I had no idea how I was going to pull that off.

  Add it to the massive todo list I was already racking up as a part of this confrontation.

  I flew directly at the bot as fast as my antigrav units would carry me. I let out a good scream, because there was nothing like a good scream when you were really frustrated about some bullshit. The bullshit had sure been piling on today.

  I wasn’t going nearly as fast as Fialux could when she was really moving. Back when she had her powers, that is. I’d clocked her and it was like nothing I could ever hope to achieve.

  She was even faster than that asshole I’d run out of town whose sole claim to fame was he could run faster than everybody else in defiance of all known laws of physics. It still irritated me that I never trapped that prick long enough to figure out what made him tick and adapt that technology to my own stuff, but oh well. He was out of my hair at least.

  The point is I really laid on the speed, and I poured all of my remaining energy into the directional shields pointing them right above my head.

  I still had the same old problem I’d always had with my shields. I didn’t have enough power to have them running at full power constantly, and the trade-off was to have directional shields that I could either guide or, in cases when I was about to be hit by something particularly nasty I didn’t see coming, I had failsafe sensors in my suit that would kick on if the antigrav couldn’t push me out of the way in time.

  The shield failsafes were even more sensitive than the ones that knocked me out of the way when I was about to get hit. It was another one of those trade-offs. It was a hell of a lot cheaper in energy to knock my ass out of the way using antigravity than it was to throw up a shield to stop the kinetic energy of whatever the hell was trying to slam into me.

  Only this time around I was doing my best to slam right into the damn thing that was attacking me. If I didn’t have any more kinetic impactors or missiles to throw at the thing then damn it, I was going to make myself the antigravity missile. I ducked my head down and kept screaming as I passed through the armor and chassis of the monstrous robot.

  It was a damn good thing I had the shields up. I felt the impact rattling down my spine as I hit. But the aftereffect? Well that was totally fucking worth it.

  I came through on the other side, all my energy reserves thoroughly depleted and with barely enough to keep myself flying, but damn was it awesome seeing the en
d result.

  There was a giant hole right in the middle of the robot. Apparently its armor hadn’t been able to stand up to me turning myself into an improvised missile. The robot looked down at the hole in its middle, and Dr. Lana was staring with wide-eyed disbelief.

  The robot finally did it, too. The thing I’d been hoping for since the beginning of the fight. It fell down on it knees, arms outstretched in a very Christ motif even though it was a robot so it probably didn’t have religion, and then fell to the ground and raised the insurance premiums for a hell of a lot of poor bastards who’d decided to abandon their cars rather than be out in the streets when there were giant robots attacking the city.

  I shook my head. I really hoped those poor sons of bitches had giant robot attack riders on their insurance policies. It was actually kind of insane some of the cockamamie insurance schemes companies had come up with over the years to milk people who insisted on living in Starlight City despite the constant danger.

  Of course one robot down still left me with a problem. I had two robots that were still very much up, not to mention Dr. Lana staring down at me with pure fury in her eyes, and they were advancing on me from all sides.

  The robots were moving in on me in a flanking pincer motion, and I figured it wasn’t going to be very pleasant at all when they finished that motion. Dr. Lana seemed happy enough to stay back and watch the beating her robots were about to give me. For now. I had no doubt that’d change if she thought I stood a chance of beating her toys.

  I thought about flying away, but they were moving fast. As fast as the one that had climbed up the side of that building doing a fast-forward King Kong routine. They were moving fast enough that they’d be able to smack me down by the time I flew away, even assuming I had enough power to do a rapid retreat.