by Logan Jacobs
I launched myself up into the air again and used the momentum to soar the rest of the way toward the dead end of the alley where we’d set up our final spider trap. It wasn’t exactly a flight so much as it was a giant leap through the air, and I was soon on a very fast collision course with the ground, so I set the thrusters in my palms to maximum, angled myself as I descended, and prepared to land right on top of Tarantulator.
Tarantulator stayed exactly where he was on the ground beneath me, and he appeared to be frantically searching for some sort of way to escape. He didn’t even see me coming, but I trusted Aileen to warn the two girls of my approach so I didn’t have to use my voice and ruin the surprise.
Right on cue, the two girls backed away from Tarantulator, and the spidery supervillain had only enough time to look up just as my heavy boot slammed into his face.
His nose broke and immediately started to spurt thick, green blood that splattered all over the bottom of my suit. His head ricocheted against the brick wall as I kicked his temple, and he fell to the ground as I landed safely off to the side.
I was pretty sure that my last kick had made a small hole in his skull itself.
Tarantulator staggered as Elizabeth and Norma closed in on him, and his reflexes were much slower than before. Thick green blood dripped slowly out of his crushed nose, and each thunderous punch from Elizabeth slowed him down even more.
Now that the Tarantulator was close to defeat, there wasn’t much chance of civilian or property damage, and that meant it was time to break out the big guns. I felt almost giddy as I raised my blaster to aim it straight at the supervillain’s broken face.
It was a fucking relief that we weren’t bound to the Shadow Knight’s absurd code anymore.
“Back up!” I yelled to the girls.
“W-wait--” Tarantulator sputtered out through a mouthful of syrupy green blood and shards of crushed teeth. “Where’s Shadow Knight? Ain’t you guys--”
Yeah, I’d had enough of this guy.
I fired off a single shot from the blasters embedded in the suit on my palm.
The supervillain’s entire head exploded in every different direction. Thick green blood and brain matter flew one way, and the shards of his skull flew another way as the end of the alley turned into one giant gory mess. The headless body tottered about for a second, and then it finally collapsed to the ground.
“He was a tough one,” Elizabeth said after the smoke had cleared.
I bent to look over the body at our feet. I hadn’t had the chance to get a better look at Arachne’s web-shooters, but she hadn’t augmented them the way Tarantulator had anyway. His gauntleted arm would be useful to study, since the webs he used would definitely be a useful thing to add to my own suit in the future. Of course, I wasn’t planning on mutating myself the way he had, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t benefit from his ideas.
“Norma, surgically remove his right arm at the shoulder so we can take it back with us,” I instructed, since I wanted most of his arteries and veins to remain intact so I could tell how much of his power was biological and how much was augmented by the gauntlet.
“Yes, Miles,” Norma said, and then she darted back to the van to grab her bone saw and other surgical tools.
“Really?” Elizabeth sighed. “You’re so strange, Miles.”
“Am I?” I asked her with a smile.
“Well, no one else would think to try and figure out how his abilities worked since he’s already dead,” she explained. “They’d just leave it at that and move on to the next one. You’re always constantly improving yourself. Even if it means building off of your enemies.”
“If everyone was like me, the world would probably be a better place,” I laughed. “But people are complacent when they think something works. I know better than that, of course. Everything can always be improved. Especially me.”
“That’s why I lo—like you,” my girlfriend stuttered.
“Oh?” I asked as I raised an eyebrow. “Lo—like me? Interesting word. I’ve never heard it before.”
“Don’t be an ass,” my girlfriend grumbled as her pale cheeks turned a dark shade of red.
“I think you lo—like it when I’m an ass,” I snickered, and her face just blushed deeper.
Norma returned with the surgical tools to remove Tarantulator’s arm, and after I let her get to work, I glanced around the alley. The walls were splattered with green blood, scorch marks, and dents from the blast, but it was nothing a few phone calls couldn’t fix, so I told my AI system to take care of that before she let the police know about the dead spider-villain.
“Shadow Knight won’t be happy,” Elizabeth said.
“I don’t really care.” I shrugged. “He hates us anyway.”
“Yeah, he was definitely really mad about the prison thing,” Norma said as she sawed away at the arm with the skill of a completely average surgeon. “I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to attack us yet.”
“He’s probably too afraid to go near the mansion again,” I replied as I watched her work. “Hey, Norma. Think butcher. Not surgeon.”
“Huh?” She blinked, but then she glanced down at her saw and nodded.
Her angle changed a bit, and the blade took the limb off in just one more stroke.
“Wow! That was—”
“We were talking about the Shadow Knight,” I interrupted her, since I didn’t want her to do too deep of a dive into how her powers worked for fear that she might mess up her progression.
“Oh, yeah. Maybe he hoped that we got scared away after he warned us.” Norma laughed.
“Maybe,” I agreed, “but he’ll know this was our doing, so he’ll figure out pretty quickly that we’re active again.”
Norma packed the arm away into a sealed bag with the gauntleted wrist still fully intact, and then she stored it in the van before she came back over to my beautiful girlfriend and me.
“That means we should really be careful,” Elizabeth warned. “Shadow Knight is very cunning, especially if he has time to plan his next move carefully.”
“But we have that time, too,” I pointed out. “I’m always one step ahead of Dan Slade, anyway.”
“Well, we should still be careful,” my girlfriend sighed. “Not that you’re ever careless, but if we want to be active in Grayville, we should be ready for a confrontation with him at any moment.”
“He’d have to be a serious asshole to attack us while we’re after a supervillain,” I scoffed.
“He is a serious asshole,” Norma chimed in.
“Well, I don’t think he’d go that far…” Elizabeth trailed off.
“Probably not.” I shrugged. “But don’t worry, we’ll deal with him after we clean up Grayville a bit more. For now, let’s go home and see what we can find out from Tarantulator’s arm.”
We piled into the van, and I drove us all back to the mansion. We’d taken a slight break from fighting supervillains after the overflow prison escape, mostly to regroup and rethink our plan since we had to work around the Shadow Knight now, so it felt good to get back into the action today.
But even though Shadow Knight might try to get in our way, at least Beacon and Penumbra had been swayed over to our side-- for the most part, anyway. If it came to a fight with the Shadow Knight, I knew we could call on them to help out and provide insider information.
I glanced over at Elizabeth as I drove, and I could tell from her pensive gaze that she was still a little bit conflicted over the Shadow Knight. She’d long since accepted that the man she’d idolized no longer existed, and she would fight against him to defend me no matter what, but she was openly hesitant about killing him whenever we discussed what we should do with him.
Still, she had been furious the last time that Shadow Knight had been inside the mansion when he threatened to ‘bring me in’ after I blew up the overflow prison. Of course, he had been all talk and had immediately backed down when Elizabeth and Norma came to my defense.
I could st
ill see the humiliation on his face when he realized he had to leave with his tail tucked between his legs.
That was why I didn’t think he would strike against us at our mansion any time soon, but Elizabeth was right that we should still be on high alert. I didn’t know how she would feel when we finally had to kill the Shadow Knight, but at least she recognized how useless he was as a hero when compared to the real work that we did.
There were a lot of insane supervillains on the loose. I didn’t want to allow them to roam the streets anymore, so obviously my priority was to protect the city rather than going after the Shadow Knight right away.
But I had a feeling his priorities were a little different than mine.
Chapter 2
It had taken me a full day’s worth of work to figure out how Tarantulator’s webbing worked, but once it clicked, all Aileen and I had to do was create an artificial webbing solution and then retrofit it into one of my own suits.
“The biological components are difficult to recreate,” I mused aloud to Aileen as I adjusted one of the gauntlets of my suit to be able to replicate the powerful web-shooting abilities.
“But it only took you, twenty-three hours, Creator,” she purred.
My chrome-bodied robotic assistant was helping me with the upgrades, while Norma and Elizabeth looked through files of supervillains upstairs to figure out our next target. I enjoyed working with Aileen as I’d designed her brain to compliment mine perfectly. Now that she had a body and hands of her own to work with as well, it felt as though my production speed had doubled.
The dead supervillain’s severed arm was laid out on the table in front of me along with the rest of the tech I needed to work with it. I had sliced down the middle of the forearm to access the veins inside, since I’d suspected that was how he used his powers. After all, that was how Arachne’s mutation had worked. I’d been proven right immediately, but the difficult aspect came from figuring out how to replicate a biological process using technology.
“The artificial veins are similar to my own processes,” Aileen observed as we placed the veins along the arm of the suit to be hidden by metal plating.
“Yes, that was convenient,” I replied. “Your artificial veins were a helpful base while we figured out Tarantulator’s, so we were able to create some veins in my suit pretty easily.”
“I am happy to be of service,” Aileen said.
“Actually, you’re a helpful base for any biological components we might want to add to our suits,” I said as I adjusted the position of the gauntlet and several of the mechanisms inside.
“But I am easier to upgrade than your suits, aren’t I?” she crooned in a low, sultry tone.
I still hadn’t had time to work on perfecting Aileen’s skin covering, but I’d worked on it during our down time. Of course, we hadn’t really had a lot of down time lately, and since we needed to prepare ourselves for the inevitability of a showdown with the Shadow Knight, I always used our free time to upgrade our suits first.
“You know you are,” I laughed. “After all, you’re still my secret weapon. One day, maybe you won’t have to be so secret, but for right now, I’d rather keep you remote and all to myself.”
“But I could be so much more useful in… other ways…” She sauntered around to my side of the table and touched her android fingertips gently against my arm.
Well, I’d definitely designed her to be eager to please.
“I know, I know,” I replied, because as tempting as it was to indulge in her, I hadn’t yet perfected the technology to allow her to please me physically. “But for now, let’s finish the upgrades here.”
“Yes, Creator,” she obliged.
I could tell she wasn’t very happy about it, or at least, she was as unhappy as a robot could get. At the end of the day, she was always glad to follow my commands.
“How is the webbing solution coming along?” I asked.
I was very eager to try out my own version of Tarantulator’s webs, since of all the villains we’d fought so far, the spidery types were by far the most powerful. Indestructible webbing that allowed them to climb up buildings and trap their enemies was far too useful for me to disregard, and I really wanted this to work.
“I successfully reverse-engineered the remnants of the chemical we found within Tarantulator’s web veins,” my robotic AI said as she placed a vat of white liquid on the table. “Once this material passes through the web refinement mechanism in the gauntlet, it should replicate the chemical reaction used to create the webs that both Tarantulator and Arachne used.”
“Hm, well, the tank needs to connect to the suit somewhere so it can shoot out through these artificial veins,” I said, “but it can’t be too bulky.”
I hummed thoughtfully as I looked into the vat of strange white liquid, and I considered how best to attach it to my suit. After I studied it for a few seconds, I turned over the arm we’d been working on and followed the implanted veins. The easiest place would probably be to place the tank on the back of the suit, but the jetpack was wasting space there.
“Perhaps we scrap the jetpack?” Aileen suggested.
“I still want to be able to fly.” I was very reluctant to get rid of the jetpack, but I did have to admit that it hadn’t worked out exactly the way I wanted it to.
“We could further refine the thrusters in the boots of the suit, as well as the ones in your palms,” my AI continued. “We could add more power to give you more airborne ability.”
She had a point since so far, the thrusters had proven to be much more useful than a jetpack. They doubled as weapons, but even though the idea of adding more power to them was exciting, more power also meant more energy, and they might drain too much from the suit in a longer fight.
For now, it sounded like I needed to keep the thrusters at their same energy level, and since I couldn’t add to them yet, I decided to scrap the jetpack idea until we found a better way for me to fly. Besides, the jetpack had been nice to try out, but I wanted to fly in a slightly more graceful manner than it allowed me to.
“Alright, attach the tank of webbing solution to the back of the suit for now,” I sighed.
“Attach the webbing solution tank instead of the jetpack?” Aileen clarified. “You wish me to replace the jetpack?”
“Yup,” I said. “You got it.”
She got to work installing the tank in the back of the suit and hooking it up to the veins while I continued to tinker with the gauntlet mechanism until it was perfect. I knew it wouldn’t have the same sort of indestructible power as Tarantulator and Arachne’s webs, but I was very unwilling to actually mutate myself.
Still, if I could replicate and surpass their abilities with technology, then I would, and so far, I had. Eventually, there would be nothing that these supers could do that I wouldn’t be able to do with my own technology, and that included Optimo himself.
“Alright, before we test it out, I want to improve the helmet design,” I informed Aileen as she placed a sleek metal covering over the web tank in the back of the suit.
It added a bit of bulkiness to the back that I wasn’t entirely fond of, but the suit was still streamlined and lightweight enough for me to be able to wear it. I could make a better design for the web tank later after we confirmed that it actually worked.
“Understood.” Aileen nodded and pulled up several helmet prototype designs on the screen propped up next to the table.
There were several different designs I’d been working on with a variety of removable masks and eyepieces. I did want to make the suit’s helmet automatic in the sense that it would be able to lift the visor on its own when I activated the mechanism. I wanted the helmet attached to the suit in an elegant manner that also wouldn’t require me taking it on and off manually.
When I was done with it, I wanted everything about my suit to automatically snap to attention whenever I needed it to, but we weren’t quite there yet.
So much work, so little time.
“I like this one best.” Aileen gestured to the simplest of the design prototypes.
It was a basic helmet shape that conformed exactly to the shape of my head with sleek, black metal. Two horn-like shapes poked out from the side, and the eyes were narrowed slits. I’d made an attempt to counter the visibility issue of wearing a helmet by outfitting the inside with small screens on the side, so I would be able to see all angles around me despite the small eye slits.
It also would allow Aileen to send me images and video feed that I could view without having to pull out an external device like my tablet.
The design would be useful if it worked, but I knew that it would require extensive testing and refinement before I perfected it. Still, it was a good start, and I was definitely in need of a better designed helmet to match my upgraded suit.
“I like it, too,” I finally replied. “Let’s finish up that one.”
We got back to work, although I’d already created a prototype base for the helmet, so it wasn’t too much to add. Mostly, our work meant we had to install the screens and set up the remote connection to Aileen’s network. The horns on the sides of the helmet worked well as a conduit, and that made them useful instead of just a showy design element like the stupid feathers on the Shadow Knight’s mask.
“Looks like the helmet of an evil genius,” I snickered.
“Is that what you want to call yourself?” Aileen asked as she looked up at me.
“I’ve grown a little attached to it.” I shrugged. “Might as well make my aesthetic match.”
The helmet’s design did look a little devilish in nature, but I wasn’t actually planning to make some kind of silly “theme” for my suits to follow. Unlike the Shadow Knight with his cape of feathers and Optimo in his bright blue spandex, I built my suits for practicality.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t add a little bit of style to my suit.
“Shall we test it out, Creator?” Aileen asked as she finished her installation of the screens inside the helmet and then attached it to the suit.
“Of course,” I said.
My basement workshop in the Grayville mansion wasn’t nearly as involved as the Cellar at my home in Pinnacle City, but since we’d made improvements on the house in general, we’d also improved the basement. It was decked out with work tables, technology, and testing stations. The only real issue was that it didn’t have as much space as I might have liked, but it still had plenty of room.
