by Jay Phillips
The Ice Queen is a bitch; that is the absolute most accurate statement I could possibly make about her. She is hateful, arrogant, and conceited. She is also beautiful, sexy, dangerous, and completely loyal to the people she trusts, which as far as I can tell is only Fire and The Agent. But I must say, when she is loyal, she is absolutely loyal. She would die, kill, do whatever for either of them. I doubt she would piss on me if my hair was on fire, and the same probably goes for the rest of The Seven, but for those two, I doubt there is anything she wouldn’t do if either of them asked her.
Strengths: The Ice Queen has the ability to produce sheets of ice from her hands, crafting it as everything from balls to razor sharp shards. She can also create giant slides made of ice that she can use to travel great distances in very short amounts of time. Personally, I feel her greatest strength is her ability to cover her entire body in a thick coating of ice, making the ice into what effectively becomes a frozen suit of armor.
Weaknesses: The list is short. Unlike Fire and Metal Girl, whose transition time is almost instantaneous, the transition time between The Ice Queen’s powered and depowered state takes a few seconds, and if you could get a shot or two (or a hundred) off before she can protect herself, you may be able to end the fight before it starts. Maybe, but it is highly doubtful. The armor itself is more than prepared for any freezing or projectile that she can muster. From what I can tell, barring her making actual physical contact with the suit and unleashing all of her power at once, the armor should, in theory, be able to survive a one-on-one confrontation with her.
The hardest part of this fight will be trying to find a way to hurt her. Despite making another bullet from Hope’s DNA designed especially for Ice, the bullet itself won’t be enough. Even Hope’s DNA isn’t enough to penetrate her frozen shell. To allow the bullet to do its job, one would have to find or make a weak spot, preferably in her chest area near her frozen heart. The Iron Knight armor has the strength to beat a weak spot into her, but it will require getting close enough to her to do the damage.
Also making the task a tad bit easier is the fact that, even though I have never been given the opportunity to study her abilities and their limits, I have noticed that the use of her powers seems to drain her stamina faster than most of us. Whether it’s the weight of the ice shell or the exertion of having to create the ice from her own body, she seems to tire faster while using her power, and that fact can definitely be used in the process of creating a weak spot on her chest.
For this purpose, I have designed her DNA bullet with a small (though large enough to do quite a bit of damage to her inside and out) explosive charge within the bullet itself. The charge is designed to activate once it finds its target, and I only have the capabilities to make one of these; so in a nutshell, don’t miss.
_______________________________________________
“I’m here to find you,” The Detective answered as he rubbed his still throbbing forehead, realizing for the first time that his hat was missing.
The Ice Queen slid down to the ground and depowered in front of him. The frozen covering melted from her body, leaving her completely nude in front of him. Obviously, The Detective noted, she wasn’t shy.
“I told you to run,” she barked back. “I gave you goddamn explicit instructions on how to get away, and I fucking find you here. Are you fucking stupid or something?”
“Are you done?”
“No!” she yelled. “I put my ass on the line to keep you safe, you goddamn idiot, and you’re here. What the fuck are you doing here?”
He plopped down onto the grass. His head continued to throb. “I got your message, made my way to the car, and there was a nice little hit squad sitting there waiting for me.”
“How many men?”
“Three assholes with guns and a teleporter, The Agent sent them.”
“Goddamn it, he must have intercepted my message. Did you kill them?”
He looked up at her. “The three soldiers, yeah, I killed them. I used the teleporter to get me to this wonderful place, and ole shiny metal killing machine over there shot his whiny ass in the head. Of course, it saved me the work.”
“You fucking idiot,” she said in return as she shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose with her forefinger and thumb. “You played right into his goddamn hands. Don’t you understand a fucking thing. Now he has everything he needs. Goddamn it, I did everything I could to keep you safe, and you go and fuck it up.”
“I--”
She cut him off before he could finish a syllable. “You just don’t fucking get it. He sits up there in his goddamn ivory tower, watching all of us with his damn cameras. He has them placed fucking everywhere. There’s no escape. I thought if I let you go, if you went without me, you going one way while I went the other, he would watch me, and you might slip by unnoticed. But no, you had to go and fuck this up.”
“I d---”
“No, you didn’t know,” she interrupted again, cutting him off before he could tell her how little he cared about what The Agent was going to do to him.
“Oh god, he knows,” she exclaimed. “He fucking knows. He intercepted the goddamn message. He knows I was going to let you go. I’m so fucked. You’re dead, and I’m royally fucked.”
“So are you through freaking out yet?” he asked. “Or is this going to last a while?” She turned around and faced the opposite direction, and he found himself staring straight at her bare bottom. He stood up and moved beside her, placing his hands on her uncovered shoulders; she felt cold to his touch. He took off his coat, placed it around her, and turned her around towards him. Silent tears rolled from her eyes and froze to her cheeks. “Why are you crying,” he asked, trying to make his voice as sincere as possible. With his head pounding against his skull, he couldn’t tell if his own sincerity was real or fake, just as he wasn’t sure if he believed anything she was saying to him.
“Because I’ve fucked everything up,” she said as she reached over, grabbed him, and pulled herself into his chest. “You saved my life. No one, other than Fire, ever risked their life like that for me, and I couldn’t just turn you back over to him. I couldn’t. I owed you. And on top of that, I almost like you. I couldn‘t just let The Agent have you.”
“Beautiful, just beautiful,” the computerized voice from the Iron Knight armor said; it hovered twenty feet in the air and mockingly applauded. “That has to be the acting performance of the year. I hope, for your sake, Detective, you haven’t bought a moment of it. This, Detective, is what The Seven do. They lie and manipulate, kill and destroy, always doing whatever it takes to get what they want.”
Ice pushed The Detective away and looked up at the suit of armor. “Whoever the fuck you are under that helmet, this all stops---now.”
“Look at that, still acting like you have no clue who I am. Again, don’t let her fool you, Detective. This act is for your sake and your sake alone. She knows exactly who I am, and why all of this is happening. But The Seven have always been taught to protect their own, no matter what.”
The Detective stepped back a few paces, allowing himself the room to move in one of two directions: either into the fight or out of it. This time wasn’t like the last time the three of them had met. Then he was on a mission for his freedom, fighting to protect a woman he hoped he could trust. Now, everything had changed, and nothing he had felt from last night remained. At this moment, he hadn’t made up his mind which way he stood, or if he was even a part of this anymore
Ice never noticed his backwards movement, or at least she didn’t let on to him if she had. She was too busy staring down the metal figure in the sky above them. “Where’s Quincy and Hope?” Ice shouted.
“In the mansion,” the machine answered, “dead.”
“Dead?” Ice asked as the realization of being one of the final two slowly crept across her pale face. “Both of them?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” The Detective interjected loud enough for the other two
to hear.
Ice turned sharply in his direction. “What in the fuck do you mean, ‘good?’”
“After the mental mind fuck your decrepit, psychic friend gave me, you’re lucky I didn’t fucking kill him myself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she asked, a confused tone in her voice.
The Detective shook his pounding head from side-to-side; he wasn’t used to feeling pain while his adrenaline was surging. “The story’s too long. I’ll have to tell you later.”
“I’m sorry, Detective. There won’t be a later.”
The Iron Knight opened up its right hand and pointed the palm at The Detective. A repulsor beam fired from the armored gauntlet, striking The Detective square in the chest. The impact sent him flying across the forest; his back and head slammed hard against the broad side of a large oak tree. He began to black out, but he fought it off, forcing himself to stay awake.
Ice threw the borrowed coat aside and held her hands out in front of her nude body. Frozen particles flowed from her palms and fingertips, coating her in an icy sheath. She created an ice slide in front of her, rising into the air until she stood as high in the air as the metal suit. It opened fire on her, spraying her with enough bullets to kill dozens of ordinary men. The high impact artillery shells bounced off of her icy skin as if they were nothing.
“You’re going to shoot me?” Ice asked as she watched several more bullets deflect off of her chest. “You really are just as fucking stupid as I always thought you were.”
“I’m just getting started. I thought I would begin out with the basics and work my way up.”
“Let me know how successful that is for you,” she responded as she created more slide in front of her and swirled around the armor, spraying it repeatedly with frozen beams of ice from her hands. The Iron Knight rose higher into the sky and fired more bullets; The Ice Queen increased her elevation to match, continually firing large shards of ice in the machine’s general direction. They continued fighting across the sky, neither seeming to gain the upper hand on the other.
The Detective leaned up against the tree. At the moment, it was the only thing keeping him upright. Trying to keep track of the action in the sky was almost impossible in his current state. He shook his pounding head, trying to force some of the cobwebs out. He rolled over to his side and pushed himself up into an all fours position. He used the tree for balance as he stood upright. He walked, slow and wobbly, to the clearing below where Ice and the machine fought. He reached down and picked up his coat. He needed it; that’s where he kept his gun.
“You tired yet?” the computerized voice asked his female opponent.
“Not in the least,” Ice answered, sounding out of breath as she made another swirl, covering the armor’s backside in a thick, frozen coat.
The would-be Iron Knight stopped, hovered in mid-air, and lowered its wrist guns toward the ground. Ice stopped as well. It seemed at first glance that she was trying to see what the man in the armor was going to do next, but it became glaringly obvious, as she stood atop her giant slide and her chest heaved heavily in and out, that she was simply trying to catch her breath.
“What?” she asked. “Done already?”
“It was my understanding,” the machine replied in its only tone of voice, “that you become weaker as you expand energy, leaving you more and more vulnerable as the fight progresses.”
“And who the fuck told you that?” Ice responded, out of breath and gasping hard for air.
“Barren did,” the armor said. “Actually, to be exact, it’s inside of the armor’s computer system. There are all kinds of files on how to kill The Seven, with you included, of course.”
Ice bent over and held her knees in her hands but managed to keep her eyes on the machine across from her. “So did you pick up any other brilliant insights from the drunk, or is that it, just that I get tired? Whoop dee fucking doo, you goddamn bitch.”
“No, there was more. He explained in full detail how, even with a special bullet he designed to pierce the outer shell of your powered form, that you would have to be placed into a weakened state before you could be truly damaged.”
“Wha---” she started to ask, only to be interrupted by the armor raising its right hand and firing a repulsor beam directly into her chest. The blow knocked her off of her slide, and she fell for almost three seconds before coming to a hard stop against the ground below, landing nearly thirty feet from where The Detective stood and watched.
The Iron Knight flew straight down and rammed the armor’s right shoulder directly into Ice’s frozen sternum. A look of pain covered her crystallized face as the machine straddled her and began to punch her in the area around her chest. Left, then right, the machine let each metal fist take turns ramming into her frozen skin.
“You see,” the computerized voice said as it continued punching, “according to Barren’s intel, even with an explosive bullet made specially from Metal Girl’s unique DNA, the area which is about to be penetrated, in this case the area around your heart, will have to be properly softened to allow the bullet to pass through your ice covering. Interesting, isn‘t it?”
Ice turned her head towards The Detective and mouthed the words, “Help me.”
The Iron Knight stopped punching and placed a hand on each side of Ice’s head, turning her face back towards him. “You need to be focused on me; you need to look at me as you die.”
“You need to go fuck yourself,” Ice said as she reached over and grabbed the machine’s left arm with both of her hands. She let loose with as much power as she could produce, freezing the machine’s appendage solid. She fell back against the ground, exhausted.
“You froze my arm?” the computerized voice asked. “Really? That’s your last ditch final plan to keep me from killing you?”
“No,” The Detective said in return from twenty feet away, his gun held firmly in his hand. “This is the last ditch final plan.” The Detective fired the pistol, and the bullet slammed into the armor’s frozen limb, shattering it into hundreds of crystalline pieces. As The Detective looked into the interior of the armor, into the hole left from where the arm had once been, he realized what he had been missing this entire time.
Inside of the hole, he saw nothing, no man, no body, no person inside telling the armor what to do. He remembered firing into the armor the first time they had met, firing into a crack left from the armor’s fight with Billy North, and finally, at this moment, it occurred to him that he had seen no blood, no signs of pain, nothing from the man inside after he had fired three bullets into the interior of the machine. Only now did it dawn on him, almost twelve hours later, that there was no man within the suit to damage; the Iron Knight was nothing more than an empty shell.
Memories poured through The Detective’s mind, memories that were only hours old yet seemed to be from another lifetime. In the hospital, he had asked Emily about the killer who had shot her sister, and she answered, telling him she had felt a sense of sadness from the armor, a longing, a hopelessness. The Detective remembered watching the security cam footage of Adam Rogers’ suicide, the moment before Adam fired the bullet into his brain, when he had grabbed the computer monitor and held it between his hands for over ten seconds with his eyes rolled into the back of his head.
“He’s a technokinetic,” Ice had said last night.
And finally, it all almost made sense. The armor without a man inside, the three day old corpse sending a message to his best friend, the suicide, the note, the intimate knowledge of The Seven that only one of them could know, all of it pieced together into a half finished puzzle. The Detective now knew the who and the how, but he couldn’t find the why.
“Adam!” The Detective yelled as he aimed the gun at the armor’s helmet. “You don’t have to do this; you don’t have to kill her. We can find another way.”
“That’s impressive, Detective.” The armor stood up. “An outsider with no intimate knowledge of The Seven, and you, single-handedly, work
ed out my identity. Truly impressive, I really must say.”
Adam bent down and lifted the half conscious Ice Queen by the throat and tossed her ten feet behind him. The armor now stood between her and The Detective, forcing The Detective to have to go directly through the machine if he wanted to attempt a rescue.
“As for your statement, Detective, on how there’s another way; well, there isn’t. Adam Rogers is dead; he no longer exists. When I transferred my consciousness into this armor, this glorious piece of technology, I forfeited life, love, hope, and everything else that defines humanity. I am no longer a man, Detective; I am now nothing more than the sentient operating system of a machine, and when the machine ceases to function, I will no longer exist.”
“Fine then,” The Detective answered, trying to come up with something to say that would get the machine away from Ice. “There’s no hope, and you’re damned. You’ve sacrificed everything to destroy The Seven. In the end, I can’t blame you; I’ve even considered it a few times myself, but you can stop now. You can walk away now without anymore blood on your hands.”
“It’s far too late to stop, Detective. Besides, I can’t quit now. There are still two of them left.”
“Hell, kill The Agent. I wouldn’t even think of stopping you. Shit, I’ll help you out if you need it. But let Ice live. You’ve hurt her enough; you’ve sent your message. Let her live like you allowed Fire to live.”
“Fire treated me with kindness for as long as I have known her. She welcomed me into her family without any hesitation or desire for anything from me in return. She is a good person who was usually pressured into helping The Seven commit their atrocities against the world. She earned the life I granted her.” The armor pointed its remaining arm towards the still grounded Ice. “This one, on the other hand, was usually the one forcing Fire into doing acts she didn’t agree with. This one is a self serving manipulator who will do or say anything to further her own agenda. This one is The Agent’s most loyal soldier, and you expect me to let her live?”
