I'm the Bad Guy: Bigger, Badder, and Uncut: A Supervillain LitRPG Adventure

by Simon Archer

  “Is dis da mook who tinks he’s got da stuff ta mess wit da Don?” The wide man on the screen’s thick accent could have qualified for its own pizza chain. “Who da falk is dis? Who da falk are ya?”

  “Don Perignon, I presume?” I asked.

  “Who da falk’s askin’?” The Don took a drag of his cigar. “You wanna piece o’ da Don? You wanna go, pal? I oughta break ya legs just for looking at my city, hotshot.”

  “Is no one going to talk about how fat he is?” Natasha blurted out, while the rest of us chuckled a bit.

  “Dis your broad, hotshot?” Don John pointed at Natasha through the screen. “You best keep her zipped if ya know what’s good for her.”

  “I’ve had a hell of a time doing it, so if you think you can, you’re free to try.” I stretched my hands out as I folded them behind my head. “Good luck. She’s a lot tougher than you’d believe.”

  “I don’ tink ya know who it is ya messing wit, hotshot.” The Don pointed his tobacco tube of a cigar at me. “Dis ain’t Ponyville, and I ain’t just the goddamn welcoming committee. I run this town, stretch! Ya hear me, hotshot? Ya don’ just get ta falk around wit dese bots and tink I’ll just roll over for ya. I’m da falking Don! Don John Perignon! Falking memorize it, hotshot!”

  “Did you not like my gift, John?” I leaned over on one of the arms of my chair. “That’s my bad! My fault entirely! I am so sorry! I just thought you were looking for robotic droids for some reason! And it’s not even Secret Santa or anything! Oh, deary me, this is embarrassing! Or is it the fact that they’re destroying your city so easily? That’s understandable, though. With such a small defense, I’m sure your city’s going to just burn to a crisp in no time.”

  “Is dat right?” Perignon cracked a smile over his wrinkled face. “Is dat what da bots are for? Oh, shame, really. Shame.”

  “Why’s that, Don?” I goaded him on.

  “Oh, nuttin’ really,” Don John scratched at his sandpaper face. “It’s just dat ya big bots are gonna get creamed, is all.”

  “How’s that?” I kept egging him on. C’mon, fatty, just say it already. “The police are getting completely wrecked, and your men are nowhere to be seen, I’m afraid.”

  “Dat’s because dey’re settin’ up, ya mook!” The Don laughed until he nearly choked on his phlegm. “Dis is a friggin’ hoot, ya gonna love dis. Light it up, boys!”

  Watching down below, we saw the robots still rampaging through the city, the fires still raging, as everything was getting destroyed. The bots were making it straight to the city hall to claim the city in my name.

  Just as I was planning.

  All of a sudden, in bursts of bright blue reverberating through the city, waves of energy swept through the buildings, shutting down the lights in the buildings. As they passed through the robots, each and every one of them fell down under the might of what was obviously an EMP wave rushing over the city. Motionless and lifeless, the once horrifying monstrosities were now nothing more than expensive paperweights.

  “HA!” Don laughed through the monitor. “Look at dat! Look at dat! Dey’re scrap heaps now! An’ my boys are gonna clean ‘em of every last bolt an’ hock it for booze an’ hookehs! How do ya like dem apples!”

  “They seem fine to me.” I continued to look down at the bots in the streets. “I don’t know what you’re all up about.”

  “Da falk you talkin’ about?” Don chuckled. “Just take a friggin’ look out dere and see-- what da hell is dis?”

  Just as I had said, the robots were already getting back on their feet and blasting through the streets just the same as before. It was like nothing had ever happened to them. I cracked a smile myself, just relishing in the frustrated look he was sporting as he oversaw his city getting wrecked the same as before.

  “What da friggin’ hell is dis shit!” He shouted off to his side. “Somebody betteh get deir asses out dere and friggin’ shoot dese tin cans pronto!”

  “Good luck with that,” I taunted the gangster boss, “I’m sure that they’ll be so easy to take down with your pea shooters. Give it a whirl. I’m curious to see what’ll happen to them.”

  “Ya gotta lotta balls to spout dat kinda bullshit wit’ da Don.” Don pointed his cigar at me. “Who da falk do ya tink you are, ya little shitstain? Do ya know who I used to run wit’? Who I worked for? Ya bit off more den you could chew, hotshot!”

  “Was there a bigger, scarier mob boss before you that I should know?” I mocked him more, “so far, I’m not super impressed with what’s happening here.”

  “Dis mook tinks his bawls are hanging low enough to tussle with the Don?” He moved his ass around in a circle. “You tink we gonna jus’ roll ovah and let ya smack us around?”

  “So far, I’ve yet to see any evidence to the contrary.” I was baiting as hard as I could. Just fucking take that bait already, you Looney Tunes gangster! We weren’t going to wait all day for you to get a fucking clue! “All I’m seeing is rolling and smacking. You gonna do something about that? Or do I just get this city for free from you? If I knew it was that easy, I wouldn’t have bothered with all of these robots. Might have gone with rabbits, or squirrels, or girl scouts.”

  “Swiss Cheese, boys!” Don John shouted off to the side, ordering his men to fire. “I’m havin’ motor oil for breakfast tomorrow!”

  Down below, the robots were suddenly met with the fighting force of hundreds of mobsters, each armed with a Tommy gun firing at full blast. Not one of those business-formal criminals was going to let this go easily, and they were all easily around level fifty, with the lowest being about level forty-six and the highest being fifty-three. For those of us doing the math, that was a shit ton of level fifty enemies for my robots to fight, which were all around level forty, the same as their creator.

  Though, Lady Luck was on my side, and my gamble on those robotic upgrades, along with the combat programming from Gorntech, was a smashing success. While my robots weren’t necessarily taking down the mobsters, the mobsters were having equal trouble pushing through the massive block of health that each robot sported. Might as well have been trying to dig to the other side of the planet with those guns, and they’d have had similar success.

  It wasn’t perfect; the robots were still getting hurt, and those health bars I was keeping track of from my character display back on the plan were slowly shrinking at a snail’s pace. It’d take a damn while, but it was inevitable. My robots were all going to die eventually at this pace.

  However, no matter how beefed up their stats were, these mobsters were still just people. People were small, squishy, and full of bones and organs. The values were set for their vitality that’d always work the same, regardless of their stats. Certain superpowers were able to work around that, like superstrength allowing people to lift things thousands of times their own weight, but the regular people were stuck just with enhanced regular abilities.

  In short, it didn’t matter that each mobster had the physique of the world’s most perfect super-soldier. There was just always a certain amount of crushing that a robotic tentacle was capable of that could just bypass all the levels that they’d gained and bring them to their knees. And, by ‘their knees,’ I meant ‘the end of their lives.’ Even if they survived, they weren’t doing so hot afterward. Anything that wasn’t being crushed was being thrown around, and the staggering and stunning effects of being slammed against concrete over and over again were more than enough to allow the robots the ability to keep moving towards city hall. These kinds of little loopholes and cheats in systems like this made video gaming a strange and varied profession.

  “So, I see that you’ve still managed to stay on the line.” I looked at the Don. “Are you sure that these are your best boys? You keep talking big, but all I see down there is just a bunch of wusses getting their asses handed to them by my handy-dandy robot army. Shame. I was kinda hoping that this would be a challenge.”

  “How ‘bout dis for a challenge!” Don pressed a button on th
e arm of his chair. “Prepare for a world o’ hurt!”

  While I waited for whatever next ‘ace’ that our friend John Perignon had available for us, I turned myself around, finding my girls having already pulled out a deck of cards to occupy their time. They were sitting in a circle, each of them with a hand, as they sat around a stack of cards in the middle.

  “Got any threes?” Kate looked at Minou.

  “Here.” Minou relinquished a card, allowing Kate to pair it up with the one in her hand. “Do you have any aces, Natasha?”

  “Go fi-- wait.” Natasha rechecked her hand, shuffling her three cards around a few times to inspect them properly for that ‘hard-to-find’ letter amongst a bunch of numbers. “Yeah, go fish.”

  “Who’s winning?” I asked them, deliberately ignoring the Don’s efforts to thwart my robots. “I’ll join in the next game.”

  “Ya tink ya got time to falkin’ play games while my boys are gonna trash trough ya men like dey were wet papeh?” Don’s head was freshly decorated with a thick stress vein. “Ya gonna look me in da eye before da end of dis! I’m gonna see da life drain from ya stupid skin as I throttle ya to death!”

  “You’d have to come out first, wouldn’t you?” I looked back to the screen, lounging in the chair as much as a man could possibly lounge in any one location. “I just don’t see that happening. I think I’ll just take this city out from under you, and you’ll just sit there and watch me do it.”

  “Check again, hotshot!” The Don’s dry, wrinkled face slurped into a smile again. “Ya just lost dis fight!”

  Double-checking again, I looked at the battle below to check on the robots and mobsters. Turned out, I was looking at the exact right time for the booming thunder to start. Explosions threw out flumes of fire from buildings all over the city, filling the air with concussive noise. Skyscrapers slowly fell like Jenga towers, leveled down to the ground by the bombs planted by the Don’s men for this contingency of his. The debris from the buildings fell down on my robots, burying them under thousands of tons of concrete and steel. One by one, they began to disappear from the cityscape under clouds of dust, until the whole city looked like something out of an apocalypse movie.

  Gotta say, I did not expect that one. Maybe I was doing way too good of a job antagonizing him than I thought. Who would have guessed that he would destroy huge chunks of his own city just to get rid of some robots? Well, I guess I did push past his dirty cops easily enough, and his mobsters weren’t slowing down my push for his city hall. Still, though, what a drastic upturn. He was either really desperate or more than confident in his ability to recover from this. That meant resources out the wazoo, and I got a little giddy at the vindication of spending so much time planning a Ghoul executive’s demise so I could claim it all for myself.

  “You do realize that this is your own city you’re destroying, right?” I reminded the Don of his brilliant plan’s side effects. “All of these buildings will take a fortune and a half to rebuild, and that’s after the riots die down from all the death you’ve just unleashed. I wouldn’t be surprised if your own men decide they don’t like working for a boss that’s just as likely to drop a building on them as to send them into a battle with war drones armed with only Tommy guns.”

  “Dat’s all nickels and dimes,” Don John chuckled, “a city’s easy to build again, and loyalty’s easy to buy, but no way in hell am I gonna let a mook hotshot like you jus’ take all of this from me. Ya big sci-fi tanks are history, and now dere’s nuttin’ left for ya to take. Go home. Ya done here.”

  “Did you just try the ‘scorched earth’ strategy with me?” I found a laugh escaping my mouth. “But this time, with your whole territory at once! That’s adorable. Simply adorable. Your ability to strategize and outthink your opponents is just… something else.”

  “Laugh it up, hotshot.” He took a drag of his cigar. “I’ve got more dan enough in store to handle a city collapse like dis. You shitstains can’t touch me.”

  “Well, now that you’ve revealed that you have a humongous surplus of resources to plunder, I don’t think I’ll be leaving here without it.” I leaned forward. “I’ve also happened to notice that you’ve coincidentally left the municipal buildings intact. Wonder if I can find something there? Maybe just take the city by force? I mean, their local economy’s now in shambles thanks to you, and they might just be grateful that I managed to save them from your ridiculously shortsighted plans.”

  “If ya tink ya gonna jus’ waltz into city hall now wit’out an army, ya eithah stupid, or ya bluffin’ out ya ass.” Don leaned back in his fancy leather chair. “No way in hell ya got anodah batch o’ bots ready to roll so quickly. Ya done.”

  “I think I’ll just use the first batch, if it’s all the same to you.” I looked over my assets in my character display, finding a healthy supply of robots still online. “They’ll do just fine. No need to get anyone else involved.”

  “Boys, da man’s gone nuts!” He looked over his shoulders to prompt the surrounding mobsters to laugh along with his own dry desert of a chuckle. “You jus’ sit tight, twerp, an’ I’ll have my boys knocking down ya door in a tick with a gift basket of lead.”

  “Probably should deal with the robots that you haven’t destroyed yet first,” I rebutted. “Might be a bit more urgent than finding me right about now.”

  Down at ground level, my robots remained uncrushed, pulling themselves out of the debris and rubble lying upon the ground. Sure, there were many scuffs and dents in them now, and a few were missing a limb or two, but they were still more than ready to continue marching towards the goal.

  “What in da goddamn hell is wrong with these bots!” Don John puffed against his cigar enough to turn nearly half of it into ash that fell straight down into his lap. “Dey just don’t stop! Where did ya get these fancy toys?”

  “I got them from the ‘Fuck Off, I’m Not Telling You Shit’ store just a city down south.” I leaned back in my own chair. “They have a special ‘Don John Should Go Die in a Fire’ discount going on over the weekend that I just couldn’t miss out on.”

  “Well, then…” The big mobster cracked his knuckles. “Time to bring the big guns.”

  “You mean ‘toppling the whole city on the opposing army’ wasn’t the big guns?” I asked, “I’m impressed, I’ll admit. You certainly have a flair for drama. Show me what you got, Johnny. This is proving an excellent test for my bots.”

  “Ya haven’t seen guns as big as my Capone Crew.” Don popped his neck with a push of his chin to the side. “Dey’ll wipe dis place clean of any bullshit stunts ya robots got left in dem.” He craned his neck to the side to shout to someone offscreen. “Maxxy! Get ya boys ready to kick some ass! It’s ya time to shine!”

  “They sound like some pretty rough customers!” I played along. “Sure hope they have what it takes to take my robots down.”

  “Why don’t ya see for yaself if dey’re ready for ya little tinker toys?” Don invited me to watch the next battle unfold. “Should be a hell of a friggin’ show, jus’ you watch.”

  Once again, I looked at the battle unfolding beneath me. My robots were fighting the mobsters, just as before, in a lightshow of flashing muzzles and blasting lasers from both sides. Out of one corner of the city came a plume of missile smoke, flying clear across the whole map to the frontline of robots encroaching on the mayor’s office among the ruins. As the projectile shot into the robot, it was completely decimated, vaporized like it was never there. Nearly none of it remained, save for the large hunks that managed to cling together in the explosion of parts that followed.

  Looking back at where the missile was launched from, I had to turn on some of the cybernetic enhancements inside my skull to magnify the area from so far away, but what I saw was clear. There was no launching mechanism at the launch site, only the blackened scorches of a rocket’s afterburners left against the side of a building.

  Back at the remains of the robot, the missile that had destroyed it didn’
t itself get destroyed in the aftermath. Instead, it stood itself up, revealing the warhead not to be an explosive, but the top half of a mobster. With the propulsive jet engine below roaring to life again, the half-rocket, half-mobster flew up into the air, cackling maniacally at the carnage that he had just caused.

  “Hahahahaaaaaa!” Don John nearly fell out of his chair as he watched the mobster rocket do its damage. “And that’s just Rocky! Wait until you see the other four!”

  Alright, that might be a legitimate problem.

  12

  We had a bit of a situation on our hands. If Rocky the rocket mobster was anything to go by, then all five of the Capone Crew would be just as destructive to my robots. I still needed them to last a bit longer if my full plan was going to work without any casualties on my end. Those Capone Crew goons had to go, and I could only hope that they couldn’t repeat those crushing blows for a while.

  “Girls, you’re up.” I turned to their game, which had changed from ‘Go Fish’ to ‘Cribbage’ somehow. How could three people play Cribbage? Anyway… “I need the Capone Crew to go away down there. They’ll be the five mobsters with the crazy-ass powers. One of them’s a rocket.”

  “How does that work?” Natasha scratched her head. “Does he transform into a rocket, or is he, like, a rocket with a fedora?”

  “Kinda in between, cut in half like a mermaid,” I answered. “You can find out for yourself once you get down there. You’ll have to pin him down, though, you know, because of the rocket zipping around the place.”

  “I’m not going,” Kate refused. “I’ll be staying on the plane.”