Evil Genius 4: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

  For the rest of my team, I mostly left their suits untouched. On the extremely unlikely chance that I was wrong and Slade was waiting for us just inside his lair, I still wanted to be prepared for a potential confrontation. The only one I’d given a modified suit to was Norma, so she could assist me with disabling Slade’s security if it became necessary.

  Once we were all suited up and ready to go, I let Beacon direct us toward the lake on the outskirts of Grayville. It was still daylight out, but the time of Slade’s conference had been late afternoon, so I expected us to remain within his lair well past sundown. It was a real Grayville kind of day, so the weather was crisp but not too cold, even though the winds were chilly enough to make Penumbra shiver.

  After Beacon directed us around the edge of the lake for a fairly long time, he finally had me pause the car outside a wooded area. There was a large cavern just inside the trees, but it was covered with brush and vines like no one had gone inside it in years.

  “That’s the entrance to his hangar,” Beacon said. “We’d definitely set off the security and the knock-out gas if we tried to use it, but all those tree limbs and everything are fake. You just pull the whole thing out of the way with a little rope he’s got hidden somewhere.”

  “So you can drive all the way from here to underneath the island?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t know that!” Penumbra exclaimed. “Man, Slade never told me anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s how he drives back and forth from his lair to the mainland,” Beacon said. “Sometimes, he takes a boat, but if he’s in a hurry, he just uses this tunnel.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “But I take it you don’t plan for us to use this entrance?”

  “No,” Beacon said. “But if you just drive a little further, I’ll show you how we’re going to get in.”

  I drove further along the lake and finally parked the van behind some foliage next to a run-down shack. The shack looked like it hadn’t been used for years, and it had almost comically rotted away in a way that let it blend right in with the forest that surrounded the lake.

  “This is where I was told to go if I ever needed to get into the Crow’s Nest alone,” Beacon said. “There’s a boat inside that’ll take us right there.”

  I suppressed an eye roll at the name that Slade had given his lair. Like everything else about the Shadow Knight, even his base of operations had a crow-themed name, and I pictured a room full of wires and screens that just waited for a drifting feather to spark a fire in the middle of all the tech. The Crow’s Nest sounded much less elegant than my Cellar back home, and it even sounded shittier than the version of my workshop that I had set up in my Grayville mansion.

  “I assume this isn’t as run-down on the inside as it looks on the outside?” I asked as I took a closer look at one of the sides of the shack-like boat house.

  “That’s right,” Beacon said. “Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty obvious.”

  “Miles could have figured it out,” Norma said as she rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “It stands out, if you really think about it.”

  “Do you think Slade might have gotten rid of the boat he kept in here?” I asked as I ran my fingers across the wooden paneling until I found the obvious indents that indicated a control panel.

  “Probably not,” Beacon replied with a shrug. “I know Slade uses this sometimes, too, in an emergency or if he wants to be a little more discreet, but I’m sure he’s definitely changed the access code for it.”

  “Not a problem,” I said, since I already had Aileen on stand-by back in the basement of my mansion ready to access all of Slade’s systems.

  “Won’t he notice if we take his boat?” Elizabeth frowned.

  “I don’t think so, as long as we put it back?” Penumbra answered, although it sounded more like a question as she glanced at me for confirmation.

  “Right.” I nodded. “It’s very likely that he has some kind of system in place to track it, but we can use Aileen to override that. As long as we return it when we’re done, he won’t be able to tell that we took it.”

  I flipped open the hidden control panel, and I saw that it was just a simple numeric keypad to put in an access code.

  “Aileen, send over the code,” I ordered.

  “Certainly,” my android assistant responded immediately into my earpiece.

  “Is there anyone else who might use this to get to Slade’s lair?” Elizabeth asked Beacon.

  “No,” Beacon answered. “If anyone is there right now, it’d probably be Julien, but--”

  “Wait, are you saying that there could be someone else in there right now?” My super-powered girlfriend bristled as she narrowed her eyes at the Shadow Knight’s ex-sidekick.

  “Hey, it’s not a big deal if he’s there,” Beacon said as he raised his hands defensively. “He never liked how Penumbra and I were treated, so if he’s there, he'll probably help us out.”

  “And you didn’t think that would be important enough to tell us before now?” I asked with a raised eyebrow as I entered the access code that Aileen sent over.

  The panel beeped in success, and the boathouse’s side paneling slid open to reveal a high-tech, small but sleek motorboat inside.

  “That looks like a pretty tight fit,” Penumbra said. “Are you sure I can’t just… like, levitate to the island or something?”

  “No,” I said. “If you come flying in over the water, Slade’s system might detect you as a foreign entity, and then this whole thing will be over before it begins.”

  “I guess we’ll all just have to squeeze in close,” the blonde said with a little smile.

  “Hold on,” Elizabeth said. “Can we go back to the part about how there might be someone else inside the lair?”

  “Look, Julien doesn’t have superpowers or anything,” Beacon said. “He’s just an engineer who sometimes helps Slade with his inventions. I’ll handle it if he’s there. Julien has helped me out a lot, and there’s no way he agrees with what Slade is doing.”

  I didn’t like going into a situation where I didn’t know a possible opponent, but I just nodded and pretended to believe in Beacon’s blind faith in this Julien person. Maybe the ex-apprentice was right and Julien would help us, but if he didn’t, I would not hesitate to kill him if he seemed like he was going to notify Slade.

  We dragged the boat out to the water and got in, even though Penumbra was right that it was definitely a tight fit for all five of us. At the most, the boat was meant for two people, so it put all of us in very close quarters, but Beacon and Norma squeezed into the front so he could pilot and Norma could assist, and I sat in between Penumbra and Elizabeth in the back, with both of their bodies pressed tightly against mine. The blonde took the opportunity to cuddle as close to me as she could, and even though my girlfriend rolled her eyes, she pressed herself closer to me, too.

  So all in all, not the worst boat ride.

  “This boat is keyed to Slade’s security,” Beacon explained as we sped across the water. “I assume he still uses it every now and then, so just having it will let us get past a lot of his traps.”

  “Not all of them?” Norma asked.

  “Some of them might still activate,” I said. “We can’t be entirely sure of any changes he might have made, so just stay alert.”

  The small motorboat moved more slowly across the water than I would have thought, but we still sped toward the island off in the distance. There were several entrances into the cave system that sprawled beneath the island that Slade had built his lair inside, but only one of them would take us where we wanted to go.

  According to Beacon and my own assumptions, the rest of the cave entrances were rigged with non-lethal traps that were intended to capture any intruders.

  I had researched the island while we made our preparations, and I had found that there had been some people who came to the island to explore the cave systems. Every time they stumbled into one of the cave entrances, they experienced s
ome version of knock-out gas that they assumed was just a natural phenomenon of the island’s caves, so most of Grayville’s population stayed away from the caves, since they were considered so hazardous.

  When we finally reached the island, Beacon guided us through a narrow entrance into the small mouth of a cave, and when we didn’t get hit with any knock-out gas, I knew we were one step closer to our goal.

  “The system recognized us,” Beacon said as he maneuvered the boat through the narrow tunnel.

  “I figured, since we’re not all stuck in a trap or unconscious somewhere,” I laughed as I glanced to the side at a glimpse of metal.

  That was likely part of the system that released the knock-out gas. Slade must have put a lot of faith in his ability to hide this motorboat behind multiple layers of security that I’d already bypassed, since it didn’t seem like there were many other systems in place that could be activated. Our last hurdle would be the entrance into his proper lair, but I knew that was deeper into the cave system.

  But even though we had gained entrance to the Crow’s Nest, I knew that Slade would definitely have layers of security in place even inside his lair, so we wouldn’t be able to really relax until we had left the island and were back on the main shore.

  Once we were in the cavern tunnels, the boat slowed down to a crawl as Beacon and Norma worked together to maneuver it through the darkness. We had a single light on the front that didn’t illuminate very much, but it did catch on the reflection of a few other bits of metal that meant this cave wasn’t a natural one. It appeared to be entirely man-made, and that meant we were definitely on the right path.

  “Okay,” Beacon exhaled as we approached a rocky outcropping and two large, steel doors up ahead. “We’re almost at the entrance.”

  As soon as we reached the rocky platform, Beacon hopped out of the boat and tied it up to the side so we could all climb out of it and survey the steel doors in front of us.

  “I can’t get you further than here,” Beacon admitted.

  “No need, I’ll take over from here,” I assured him as I approached the large steel doors.

  I knew that if we got this wrong, there would be some kind of massive self-destruct signal from inside that would cause a cave-in of the entire system. We would all probably be crushed in the resulting explosion, since even Elizabeth and Penumbra’s powers wouldn’t be enough to protect us from a cave-in of that size.

  Aileen’s total and complete supremacy over Slade’s systems was going to be put to the test.

  “Okay, Aileen,” I directed as I stepped toward the combination scanner and code input off to the side of the steel doors. “Let’s open it up.”

  “Understood,” my android replied through my earpiece.

  There was nothing we could do except wait for her to plug into Slade’s AI systems to open up the steel doors. Aileen had full access already, so with all of our preparation over the last few weeks, it shouldn’t be difficult for her. We hadn’t tested out my robotic assistant’s control over Slade’s systems or his AI yet, but I had complete faith in Aileen’s abilities. After all, I had created her with my own intellect, and she’d never failed me before.

  I didn’t expect she would start now.

  There was an echo of a beep and a clicking noise as the steel doors began to separate.

  “You are in,” Aileen purred into my earpiece. “Welcome to the Crow’s Nest.”

  Her tone was about as sarcastic as an android woman’s could get, and I was a little bit impressed.

  “Is that it?” Norma asked as the steel doors opened up in front of us.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Stay alert. We don’t know what else he could be hiding.”

  As we took our first steps into the Shadow Knight’s lair, I fully expected alerts to blare in our faces about some sort of self-destruct mechanism that Slade had installed, but nothing did.

  Instead, before I could even get a good look at the Crow’s Nest, several hovering robots surrounded us.

  They were small, metallic balls with red lights that shone directly on us like sniper rifles, and I immediately tensed as a red light hovered over my heart. I was backed up against the rest of my team, and they all had the same red lights that were pointed directly at either their foreheads or their hearts.

  “Don’t try anything,” someone said from the shadows, “or I’ll fire.”

  “Elizabeth--” I started, but one of the spherical robots fired a warning shot at the ground in front of us.

  I was going to kill Beacon if we got out of this.

  As I looked around the Shadow Knight’s lair and began to come up with a plan of escape, a man stepped toward us out of the shadows. He had long white hair tied back behind him and seemed elderly, bu looked like he kept himself in good shape. He was dressed simply in a Hawaiian shirt and grease-stained khakis, and he held up a remote in one hand.

  “What is the meaning of this, Adrian?” the man asked Beacon.

  It was strange to hear someone call Beacon by his real name. We’d learned his name before we worked together with him, since it was part of all the intel we’d gathered on the Shadow Knight’s allies, but we’d always just called him Beacon ourselves.

  And that could only mean that this old man must be Julien.

  “We’re here to stop the Shadow Knight,” Beacon replied. “You know that what he’s doing is wrong, Julien.”

  “So you brought outsiders to dig through his secrets?” Julien raised an eyebrow, but he was no longer fully paying attention to me or my team.

  Perfect.

  I nudged Norma and gave a little nod toward Julien and the remote in his hand. It was difficult to convey what I wanted her to do without talking, but I knew that with Norma’s aim, she should be able to quickly fire one of her guns through the remote.

  Still, just in case it wasn’t clear, I made a motion with my hand to signify the remote and not the man’s head. I didn’t want to kill Julien, not when we could use him to better understand what the Shadow Knight was up to.

  “He has to be stopped,” Penumbra spoke up.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Julien sighed. “The things he has had me create are--”

  “Now,” I hissed.

  Norma immediately fired a single bullet at the remote in Julien’s hand, and it exploded through his index finger and the remote that he held. The remote-controlled robots all shorted out as soon as the bullet tore through the device, and their metal carcasses thunked down to the concrete floor.

  Julien collapsed to the ground with a wordless cry as he grabbed his ruined hand. Blood seeped through his fingers as he clutched at the wound, but I knew that it could have been much worse. After all, Norma was only an average shot, so the man was pretty lucky that he hadn’t lost his entire hand.

  And he was very lucky that he wasn’t about to die.

  As soon as the robots clattered to the ground around us, Beacon ran over to the elderly man and helped him wrap up his hand. I followed right behind him, but when I reached them, I just pulled out my gun and aimed it straight at Julien’s head.

  “I won’t kill you,” I said, “unless you have already alerted the Shadow Knight to our presence.”

  “I didn’t,” the old man gasped.

  Penumbra joined us with a medical supply kit that she must have grabbed from somewhere in the Shadow Knight’s hideout, and she knelt beside Beacon to help him wrap up Julien’s busted hand.

  I didn’t lower my gun.

  “Are you willing to help us or not?” I asked, and I didn’t really feel bad about threatening him since he’d almost just killed us all.

  “He will,” Penumbra insisted. “Right, Julien? I’m really sorry, but we had to do this.”

  “I understand,” Julien gasped again. “I would have done the same thing in your situation.”

  I kind of doubted that, but this man could be useful, and I didn’t want to upset Beacon and Penumbra by actually killing him.

  “Then you’
ll cooperate?” I pressed.

  “Yes.” Julien nodded. “I will show you everything Slade has come up with, particularly against you, Miles Nelson.”

  I guessed it was probably obvious who might break into the Shadow Knight’s lair alongside both Beacon and Penumbra, but I pulled off my mask to confirm his suspicions.

  “Alright, then you can both take care of him for now,” I told the two ex-apprentices of the Shadow Knight. “Strip him of anything that seems suspicious and make sure he doesn’t have access to any kind of technology that might be able to contact the Shadow Knight, just in case. I’m going to look around on my own for a bit.”

  “We can restrain him,” Penumbra assured me, “so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll return shortly, and we can discuss the Shadow Knight’s plans then.”

  “Okay, Miles.” Beacon nodded as his face turned red.

  I knew that Beacon was probably ashamed of the fact that he hadn’t warned me about Julien earlier, but I would let it slide as long as the old man cooperated with us now. While Beacon and Penumbra took care of Julien, I led Norma and Elizabeth toward the main computer terminals in the east wing of the Shadow Knight’s lair so we could be out of earshot of Slade’s old teammates.

  “How can we be sure that we can trust him?” Elizabeth demanded.

  “We can’t, but Beacon and Penumbra seem to care about him.” I shrugged. “At this point, they’re both fully on our side, so I’m sure they can convince this Julien to join us, too.”

  “He already seems kind of against what the Shadow Knight wants to do,” Norma said. “But I don’t know.”

  “At the very least, restraining him will keep him from notifying Slade,” I said. “And if he hasn’t alerted him already, then he’s fine.”

  “Slade’s press conference is still happening,” Aileen confirmed remotely. “He has not reacted in any way that implies he knows what is going on.”