Evil Genius 4: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

  I didn’t want to take too much so that it would still look like the Maniac’s work, but I wanted to reverse-engineer most of his technology to use for my own suits. Most of Slade’s gadgets were intended for non-lethal purposes, so I guessed he really had just planned on punching me to death.

  “I see,” Elizabeth murmured.

  One day, we would have to kill Optimo. That felt just as inevitable as our confrontation with the Shadow Knight, but maybe even more so.

  It felt like everything would always lead me on the path to kill Optimo, in the end.

  But I didn’t need to worry about that for now.

  After I used my thrusters to fly back to the rafters, I disabled the security system so we could leave through a side door. As I helped Elizabeth back out into the street, she suddenly stopped and glanced up at me.

  “Oh, you should contact Norma!” Elizabeth said. “I’m sure she’s worried.”

  “Good idea,” I said, so I finally reconnected my comms system back to Norma’s team.

  “Miles!” Norma exclaimed as soon as I connected. “What happened? Did you win?”

  “We did,” I said. “It’s over.”

  “That’s wonderful!” Penumbra said. “We did really well, too.”

  “Good, then why don’t you gather what you can and meet us back at the mansion?” I asked.

  “Already done,” Norma replied. “Penumbra, uh, kind of crushed the tanks, but I think some of the tech might still be working?”

  “She really did a number on them,” Beacon laughed. “But you can see for yourself when you get back here.”

  “We’ll be there soon,” I said and then switched off the comms.

  “It’s really over,” Elizabeth sighed. “I still wish we could have reached some kind of compromise, but what’s done is done.”

  “It’s only temporarily over,” I replied. “Grayville is still a mess, and we can’t leave here until we’re sure it’s a safe place to live.”

  “You can plan more later,” my girlfriend said as she rested her hand on my arm. “Today’s work is over.”

  “But my job is never done,” I said with a grin.

  We took the Shadow Knight’s own armored car back to my mansion. There was still a lot left to do, but at least the difficult part was over. Now all I had to do was figure out how to handle Slade’s assets, plus how to handle the future of Grayville. The city still needed protection, and I didn’t intend to stay around forever.

  But now that the Shadow Knight was dead, Grayville was at least just a little bit safer.

  Chapter 18 - Maniac

  My worst nightmare had become a reality.

  When I’d received the alert that one of my warehouses had been taken over, I hadn’t thought much about it. Many supervillains in Grayville prefered the use of abandoned warehouses for their hideouts and various supervillain endeavors, and since I basically had a monopoly on all the abandoned warehouses in the city, it was quite common for my warehouses to be taken over by minor supervillains. I didn’t particularly mind it, since it let me know what was happening in the city, and if it was one of the warehouses where I’d set up cameras, it also gave me a show to watch.

  I usually loved watching the Shadow Knight fight against the weaker villains of Grayville, but this time, I chucked the remote at the old, dusty screen so hard it cracked right down the middle. Nothing in my bunker was particularly high-tech, nor did I particularly care about a security system. If anyone was going to break into my hideouts, I would know about it and be able to get out before anyone caught me. Not that anyone ever managed to find my hideouts, since I changed them up pretty often.

  This one was temporary, so I could destroy the old television as much as I wanted to.

  And I did want to destroy it. Actually, I wanted to destroy everything.

  The Shadow Knight was dead, and it had happened right in front of my eyes. I could usually see everything coming from a mile away, but this…

  I had known that Miles Nelson would be bothersome from the moment he first stepped foot into Grayville, but this was worse than anything I’d expected to happen. No one should have been able to kill the Shadow Knight. It should never have even been a possibility.

  But Miles Nelson had never understood the game, and he’d never understood that the Shadow Knight was mine, and mine alone.

  Of course, he hadn’t understood our relationship. No one had ever understood it. It was a special relationship between two unique and powerful people who had understood each other like no one else in the universe ever would.

  And now the Shadow Knight was gone, and I was alone.

  Miles Nelson would pay for this.

  The second that Miles left my warehouse, I immediately left my bunker to go to it. He obviously intended to make it look like I had been the one to kill the Shadow Knight, to remove any blame away from himself. I would, at the very least, give my poor old nemesis a worthwhile funeral, because I was sure that Miles Nelson meant to leave him there for the police to find.

  I wouldn’t allow that to happen. In life and now in death, the Shadow Knight belonged to me.

  Still, I had to mentally prepare myself before I entered the warehouse. I had watched what happened through my security camera feed, but it hadn’t been a very good angle. The Shadow Knight’s last moments were gruesome to watch even from a distance, and I didn’t know if I would be prepared to see him like that…

  But I entered the warehouse anyway.

  His body was displayed in a heap of blood and gore, and the first thing I noticed was the arm that laid separate from his body. I bent to pick up the severed arm and held it close to my chest, like a child might hug a stuffed toy.

  “Oh, Shadow Knight…” I sniffled as his severed arm dripped blood down my clothes. “My nemesis, my poor nemesis, what have they done to you?”

  I slowly let the arm fall back to the floor and then knelt down beside his body. There was so little left of the Shadow Knight’s once-beautiful face, but I brushed my fingertips gently along the exploded crater that had once been his skull. I felt something gummy and pulled back my fingers to see that they were coated in bloody slime and melted feathers.

  I felt a tear slip down my cheek, and I sniffled again.

  “I will give you the funeral you deserve.” I couldn’t hold back my tears as I gazed at him, disgraced and ruined, dead on a warehouse floor.

  I folded his remaining hand over his chest.

  “Oh…” I trailed off as I wiped the tears from my eyes and spread his blood across my face. “Your other arm. One moment.”

  I gathered up the other arm and placed it against his chest as well. It slipped off and thudded against the concrete floor again, so I just picked it up and held it in place this time.

  “Shadow Knight, how will the world ever replace you?” I sighed. “You were the light of my life. The only one to understand me. The only one to play my game, and to play it right.”

  I breathed out through my teeth as I felt a surge of rage swell inside me. I raised my arms in anger, but the Shadow Knight’s severed arm just slid off his chest again, so I had to pick it up once more and slap it on top of him.

  “You were the light to my darkness,” I continued my eulogy. “And now… you’re gone.”

  His infuriating arm slid off of his chest again, so I grabbed it and slammed it against the Shadow Knight’s chest. I hit him with it again and again, until the fingers of the severed arm were smashed into a bloody pulp, and my own fingers had pierced through the tatters of flesh to grasp the bones.

  I tossed the arm off to the side with a scream of pure rage.

  “How could they do this to you!” I roared. “How? That fucking Miles Nelson, how dare he ruin you! How dare he disgrace you, when you were meant for me, me, me, me!”

  I whipped a sharp dagger out of one of my many pockets and stabbed it sharply into the Shadow Knight’s chest and through his suit. I dragged the blade down his sternum toward his abdomen, and every
time it got caught, I just yanked a little harder as I conducted my gruesome autopsy.

  “Me!” I sobbed as I tore open the Shadow Knight’s chest and peeled away the skin. “Me! Only me! Everything inside of here is mine, it’s mine, your heart is mine, your ribs are mine, your liver is mine…”

  I wanted to see every single part of him. I wanted to intimately know the Shadow Knight like even Miles would never know him.

  I tossed my knife aside and dug my hands into his guts to feel around inside of him, but his body already felt cold. The life had faded out of him, and there was nothing left but blood, guts, and meat. There was nothing left inside of him that had the Shadow Knight’s true essence.

  It was just a body. A lifeless body that would never play our game again.

  I dug my hands further into the Shadow Knight’s dead body. I coated my hands with his blood and dug deeper so I could tear him apart to find his true essence that had to be hiding somewhere inside him. I pulled out his intestines and flung them around so they splattered around us like a gruesome painting, but they didn’t feel like him.

  Nothing felt like him.

  The Shadow Knight was truly gone, and this body held no enjoyment for me anymore like this. But even so, I knelt forward and took a deep inhale of the scent of the Shadow Knight’s blood, but it only smelled like rot and iron.

  Those were normally scents I quite enjoyed, but in this case…

  It was unpleasant.

  There wasn’t even enough of his face left to look at and remember as my beloved and hated archenemy. There was nothing left of who he was because Miles Nelson had taken absolutely everything from me.

  So I would take everything from him.

  I grabbed my knife once again and stabbed it into the Shadow Knight’s body. I stabbed it again, and again, and again, and I reveled in the noise of the cold, dead blood as it sprayed in every direction.

  An uncontainable fury rose up in my chest like vomit.

  “I don’t want to say I’ll avenge you, old friend,” I said with another stab of my knife into the body. “I never wanted to have to avenge you. If we died, it should have been together. It should have been glorious.”

  I ripped a piece of intestine out and threw it so that it skidded across the wet concrete.

  “It would have been glorious,” I sighed as I thought of all the ways I could have continued our game.

  At the very least, the final score had ticked in my favor, but I didn’t even care about that. I didn’t want to win because that had never been the point. We were meant to be locked in an eternal stalemate with each other, to chase each other down until the end of time…

  “And then Miles motherfucking Nelson ruined it all,” I exhaled as I laid my head down against the Shadow Knight’s open chest cavity.

  It was not the most comfortable place to rest my head, but it was the only way I could feel close to him now.

  I couldn’t even bear to look at him anymore. I only wanted to feel his blood against the back of my head to remind me of who he used to be. I traced my fingers through the gore on the floor beside me as I considered my new plan for Miles Nelson. My last one hadn’t worked, but that was only because I hadn’t been able to carry it out before the man went entirely apeshit on my beloved nemesis.

  “He works fast,” I said. “Very fast. I guess you learned that, didn’t you?”

  The Shadow Knight must have learned it. My nemesis was methodical in all his plans, but he’d never been what I would consider fast. He had accounted for every possibility and took each countermeasure very seriously.

  I was certain that Miles Nelson was similar, but not to the same extent. It was cruel that Miles was similar to my beloved Shadow Knight in any way, but he was far too different to understand our game. He refused to play it, and since he hadn’t even played it against the Shadow Knight, I knew he wouldn’t play it against me.

  But that meant there was no reason not to kill him.

  I would kill Miles.

  No-- first, I would rape every woman that he held close to him. From what I observed, he had several women that followed him, and he had even managed to pick up one of the Shadow Knight’s cute little apprentices. I couldn’t remember her name, of course. She had never mattered.

  Well, she certainly mattered now. How lucky for the little blondie.

  “How should I do it?” I sighed as I leaned my head further into the Shadow Knight’s chest cavity with a squelch of flesh and blood. “How will I make him suffer as I do? Shall I kill the women he loves? I suppose so.”

  It was my original plan, but I would extend my courtesy to all of the women that hung around Miles Nelson rather than just his dark-haired beauty. None of them would be safe from me. I would defile and ruin each and every one of them just as they’d defiled and ruined my Shadow Knight, and I would leave them somewhere that Miles would be able to easily find their desecrated bodies.

  “Or would it be better to kill them directly in front of him?” I wondered aloud. “I would love to tie him up and have him watch as I rape and kill each of his women in turn, but the odds of keeping such a man restrained…”

  I sighed. It might be impossible to contain such a clever man for so long.

  “Aha!” I announced as I sat up. “Yes, yes, perhaps I’ll record it all, and then I’ll just send it to him. But, ah, that does require more of a plan, since I have to draw them all out… and I would so love to see his face as he watches me defile all of his women…”

  Despite the fact that he had murdered the Shadow Knight, it was clear that Miles Nelson fancied himself as some kind of hero of the people. Did he think that just because he killed off supervillains, that made him better than everyone else? He was basically just a supervillain himself, especially when it came to his latest victim.

  A superhero that killed superheroes. It made me want to laugh. I probably could have found a lot of amusement in such a scenario, if only Miles Nelson hadn’t chosen my beloved Shadow Knight as his target.

  It was a shame. A terrible shame that would result in the death of him and everyone he’d ever loved.

  I calmed down enough to be able to plan properly.

  As long as I didn’t have to look at the dead body I rested my head against, it was like it didn’t exist.

  “Luring him out is the best idea,” I said again. “I know, Shady. I know. You’ve tried that. But you didn’t quite try hard enough, did you? You never set any real traps for him. You just waited for Miles Nelson to act on his own. That was your mistake.”

  One of the many mistakes he’d made against that man.

  I could feel the fury rising inside me again and shuddered to try and calm down again. I couldn’t plan when I wasn’t calm. I had to remain calm.

  “I’ll set a trap,” I continued. “I’m sure it won’t be difficult to lure him somewhere. Perhaps I could even capture an entire yacht to use against him. I could hold them all hostage…”

  It was an idea in the works.

  I would have to be incredibly secretive and lay very low, since their decision to frame me for the Shadow Knight’s death meant they would already be well aware that I would be after them for revenge.

  But that reminded me.

  “Ah, they’re all going to assume this was my doing, aren’t they?” I sighed as I flipped over onto my stomach.

  By now, my clothing was entirely covered with the Shadow Knight’s blood. I would have to take off these clothes and frame them so that I would never forget the smell of him or how rich and red his blood was. I would frame the entire body if I could, but I didn’t think even I was capable of getting his body out of this warehouse and into one of my many hidden bunkers.

  Besides, I had no embalming tools.

  But I could still take one thing from him.

  I pulled myself up toward his head and picked up my knife again. His skull had been blown to pieces, but his jaw was still intact, and both of his ears were still in one piece, even if brain matter had leaked
out to cover them with a gummy residue.

  I scooped up a handful of his sticky brains to rub between my fingers. This was his true essence, and yet I still felt nothing. This was the brain of the only man I had ever considered my equal, but it wasn’t good enough.

  Nothing would ever be good enough again-- except perhaps killing Miles Nelson.

  I stabbed my knife into what was left of the Shadow Knight’s neck and began to sever his skull from his body. A piece of his jaw was already on the floor from where Miles had blown apart his skull, but I didn’t bother with the shattered piece or with the few teeth that had rolled free like a pair of gambling dice.

  I would have enough to honor the Shadow Knight with the pieces of skull that still remained intact. I would keep his lips that never smiled, and I would keep his jaw to remember the rest of his features. Even if I could never look into his hate-filled eyes again, I would have this much to remember him by.

  “This way, we can still talk,” I told the head as I picked it up and turned it over in my hands.

  Blood and brain matter poured out from the top of the skull, and I emptied what was left to the ground in a splatter of dark red paint. I would have to clean his skull some more so it didn’t leak blood everywhere I took it, but I never wanted to be apart from him again. There were no more games to be played, and I supposed this was my victory trophy.

  “I’ll cherish your skull,” I assured the Shadow Knight as I stood back up and pocketed my knife into my blood-covered pants. “But don’t worry, I’ll dispose of Miles’ skull entirely. I’ll cut off the skulls of his women and pile them around him while he writhes in agony, so he has someone to talk to while he’s dying. That’s kind of me, isn’t it?”

  I petted the side of the skull. The bones were burnt black, but I thought that suited my nemesis better anyway.

  Miles Nelson would pay for what he had done to my beloved Shadow Knight.

  I wouldn’t just kill him.

  I would destroy him. I would erase him. Miles Nelson and anyone who defended him would suffer for what they’d done.