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

by Simon Archer

  No… wait… it wasn’t just moving around…

  It was also getting bigger…

  No… wait… closer…

  Nevermind… it was falling…

  It was a GODDAMN AIRPLANE--

  My reflexes must have been rustier than I thought. I couldn’t move quickly enough out of the way before a couple of tons of steel, circuitry, and engine parts had surrounded me, eclipsing me in a fiery explosion as the fuel inside ignited. The entire plane pancaked on top of me, pushing all the weight possible onto my comparably tiny frame.

  Hotshot, color me impressed. It could only have been him. My short conversation with him was more than enough to tell me that he’d be the only person to be crazy enough to attack me so openly. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone would have those kinds of balls to take us both out in one fell swoop. An interesting tactic, to be sure.

  However, against his better wishes, I survived the crash of the plane. Maybe a bit bruised and stiff for the experience. It hurt like a bitch, like any plane crash would, no matter who you were. My body wasn’t as out of shape as I feared, either, and my enthusiasm was returning. I didn’t get to be an executive of the Ghoul by being flabby and weak, and that didn’t just go away with a little lounging. It would take more than that to kill me. On most other people in this world, this would have worked famously. But, I wasn’t most people.

  Picking myself out of the wreckage, I bent a metal plate around, crawling up and out from underneath it to look at the damage. Disappointing, now that I had witnessed this all firsthand. It was enough to warm me up, I supposed, but I had almost expected a real fight from him today. All of that talk, all of that riling me up to hate him, and he just killed himself trying to win against me. If he were just a bit stronger, that might have been just the kind of fighting spirit I really needed to push me back into my former fighting prowess.

  Suddenly, another shape appeared, bursting out of a different metal plate just a few feet away. My heart leapt, hoping that the hotshot really was strong enough to survive the crash. But, sadly, I couldn’t just let him go so easily. With La Dorada in hand, I unload five shots of flaming buckshot into the space that burst open, cooking the bastard to death before he could even look in my direction.

  “Oh, thanks!” a familiar voice spoke through the flames, though it wasn’t the hotshot, or even a man. “I’ll probably need the power boost for this fight. How courteous.”

  As if to confirm my suspicions, the flames condensed into a single area, disappearing entirely from the wreckage to not leave a puff of smoke behind. As they grew into a bright sliver, the shard of light reshaped itself with an hourglass in the middle, then thick legs and a shapely ass, divine breasts, and a punkish, short haircut. The light faded away as the color returned, revealing the broad that was sitting on the hotshot’s lap.

  “The broad!” I shouted at her, to which she giggled in response. “Where’s the other guy? Is he dead? Or did he leave you to die?”

  “No, he’s dropping in soon,” the broad answered me, laughing to herself. “Oh, you’ll get it in a moment.”

  14

  Maybe I should have thought this through just a bit more.

  I actually had something I wanted to test out against Don John, and this was the perfect opportunity, flying half a mile over his head and falling fast. I also wanted to get the drop on Don John with this, just like with the plane crash and with Kate’s hidden appearance within the wreckage. A parachute would have just been shot out of the sky like it was a balloon at a carnival fair. I didn’t want to die that way.

  The biggest problem with my plan, which would determine if I started this fight with a major advantage or a massive hindrance, was the simple act of hitting my target. Like a skydiving professional or a flying squirrel, I spread my arms wide to control my steady descent to the plaza just outside Carmanelos’ city hall. I gave my arms and legs a specific lean, corkscrewing around my target from high in the air. As long as I continued to move around and remained untouchable, then he wouldn’t hit me with whatever ranged projectiles he was packing.

  Now was just the time to get my ass in gear and get him some death and destruction all up in this bitch. And by ‘this bitch,’ I meant Don John. Don John was gonna get an ass-whooping like no one would believe. Seeing him in person shifted my understanding of perspectives, as I saw that Don John’s massive shoulders measured a good two heads taller than Kate side by side, and Kate was close to my own height. Shit. A tall motherfucker, to say the least.

  Unfortunately, he noticed me before I landed to do my thing. Still well into the air, I was almost a sitting duck as Don John lifted his humongous golden Tommy gun, grinning as much as his bulldog face would allow him. Goddamn, this was gonna suck.

  HOLY SHIT, it was a thousand times worse than I thought. Holding the trigger down, Don John cackled maniacally as he filled the air with flames and metal pellets. That crazy bastard had turned that Tommy gun into some kind of freakish custom automatic shotgun.

  Yeah, I was channeling my inner flying squirrel, dodging around in the air with some tight skydiving maneuvers like my life depended on it. Which it did, considering the fact that the surrounding airspace was now twenty percent ballistic metal and another fifty percent searing flame. That left me with less than a third of the total available space to not be dead. Were that space all collected together in one breathable pocket, that would have been hard enough to track down and stay in, but that wasn’t how physics worked, video game or otherwise.

  Needless to say, I was glad that I had my best suit on. Completely unique, perked, and kitted out with all the best stats I could afford, which was a whole lot. Hell, I had to take a few perks and cybernetic augmentations myself just to wear the thing around with all the stat requirements it needed from me.

  All of that just to say that it made for damn good, top tier armor and a snappy choice for looking my best while getting shot with a shotgun shooting out more shells than rain from a cloud. Whatever pellets I couldn’t dodge were reflected by the suit, though not entirely negated. Any remaining pellets sneaking their way through the openings in my suit’s sleeves and whatnot were negligible. Stung like a bitch, but didn’t reduce my health enough that I was in any danger.

  Kate reacted fast, though it seemed slow when my mind was processing so much information to make the world move in slow motion, grabbing onto Don John’s leg and lifting him up by it.

  The big bull of a mobster brute tumbled over, his aim suffering from the lack of stability and his position locked by the fiery hands of a flaming supervillainess. While she struggled to keep all of that tanky mafia muscle in check in such an awkward position for both of them, I rolled up one of my sleeves, activating the strings of metal, wires, and nanotech inside, while the other hand began to glow a vibrant jade green.

  A massive sheet of electronic ooze transformed my forearm, a serrated blade left in its wake nearly half the length of my own body. I held it over my head, facing downward like a spear thrown from space. The tight rifling spin I finagled with a twirl of my legs spun me into a frenzied hell dive, my terminal velocity becoming that much faster and crashing down towards Don John before he could recover from Kate’s hold on him.

  The splash of blood that showered over all of us could have filled a bathtub, or fed an obese vampire for a month, from the gash I cut through Don John’s midsection, right down the middle. The son of a bitch, even with fractions of a second to react, had avoided a killing blow outright, and I missed hitting anything vital, but he was keeping that gash for the rest of his life, however long that was.

  Surprisingly, Don John’s skin was so tough that cutting through it had actually managed to slow my fall down to the point of a full stop, and I hadn’t sunk my arm blade into the ground as deeply as I had anticipated. With the added height given by the blade propping me up, my feet hung about well within kicking range of Don John’s face. With a green hand anchoring me against the Don, eating through his rhinoceros-like ski
n and making grooves for my fingers, I threw my ankle right across his jaw, knocking his head to the side.

  The momentum of my kick turned me around, dislodging my blade from the ground, while I used the opportunity to throw my body weight into it for another slash with the blade. He was ready for it this time, blocking my attack with his golden Tommy gun.

  Kate saw the opportunity and took it, spinning herself over my back to throw her own fiery foot into the fray.

  Perignon’s next maneuver baffled me. Instead of blocking with his gun or moving out of the way, he removed the comically large drum magazine from his gun, grabbing onto a handle on the side, and parried the second kick before it came down on him. Taking his gun by the barrel, he had switched his weapon arrangement to a club and a buckler shield in one smooth motion. Considering he looked like he had arms as thick as kiddie park tunnels, I could only assume that any swing would prove to be worse than that plane crash.

  I had an idea, and I only had to give Kate a look in order for her to understand what I was thinking. Not a moment later, Kate and I were flipping over each other as we increased the pressure on John with our strikes. My broadsided blade provided defensive counters to John’s gun club swings to throw him off balance, while Kate’s swinging kicks and quick strikes poked through the holes in his defenses to burn black chunks out from his suit. Outshining Don John’s fluid movements just like before, Kate and I wordlessly and seamlessly synchronized our fighting forms into a single unit.

  Wildly swinging his drum buckler, he forced the two of us to dodge the wide plate with his full weight behind it, successfully giving himself some distance. The man was smart, using the time to put a magazine back into his Tommy gun, though it wasn’t the one he was using as a buckler. It was one he pulled from a pack behind him. He had a whole other drum prepared, and he quickly placed it inside the gun while keeping his small shield in play as well.

  “Oh, I’ve got this.” Kate cracked her knuckles, walking towards Don John slowly. “I guess you never learn, Perign--”

  Kicking her out of the way from her reckless taunt, I barely managed to save her from the blast of tundra ice that sprayed out of the gun, crystalizing into a thousand thin, needle-sharp points growing out of a hunk of ice like a crashing wave.

  Unfortunately, my foot had managed to get caught in the freezing cold, and the freezing part couldn’t have been more apt. Immediately numbing my toes inside the block, I gritted my teeth through the pain from the parts of my leg I could still feel. Shoving my green hand through the ice, I removed my foot from the ice just in time to dodge another blast of winter frost. Luckily, my speed helped me to avoid this next flash growth glacier, the pricking spikes narrowly scraping against my suit.

  Looking over at him, I noticed that his gun’s barrel was caught in the ice as he pulled it out with an aggressive tug. Just to the side of it, the other glacier was also broken at the end in the same way, suggesting that these cryo rounds forced him to stop to unstick himself from the ice every time he fired them. While devastating, that pause between shots would prove to be our saving grace in this leg of the fight.

  “You’re a lot better at this than I imagined.” Don John fired another blast of glacial ice into the air, creating yet another sculpture cone for me to avoid. “It’s a shame that you’re a hero. I could have used a guy like you working for me.”

  Not bothering to take the time to talk back to him, I rushed forward while he unstuck his gun again from the ice. My acid hand reached forward, grabbing onto the buckler shield he used to defend against my corrosive fingers, even as they ate a handhold for me. My other hand tried to reach over the shield to stab at the nearest part of Don John’s body that I could find, only nicking at his arm as he twisted me around on the shield.

  Kate found the opening that I’d made just for her, targeting a running kick right at his opposite side. With the gun still inside the ice, Don John would either be forced to either try to swing it out wildly or let go to free up his hand for a counter of some sort. He chose to combine the latter to deflect the kick with his elbow with a cross punch using his buckler hand, which I was still attached to.

  Now, it would have been very dishonest for me to claim that I had planned for this exact sequence of events to occur, along with what followed.

  Completely by accident, I had eroded away enough of the magazine drum buckler to all but destroy the integrity of the side of it, pouring the remaining shells out from their container and onto the street. At the same time, Kate had attempted a counter to the shield bash by jumping off of it with one of her flaming feet. No longer shielded by the metal container, the rounds were exposed to the full explosive force of Kate’s flames, igniting each and every one of them then and there.

  The pellets flew around in as many directions as there were things to look at, bouncing and crashing into anything that was in their way. Even with my armor, the exponential increase in pellets compared to before increased the chance I would get whittled away by all the stray pellets, along with the fire concentrated at one spot, made the situation a little tense.

  Dodging them all was nearly impossible, my only saving grace being the buckler that I managed to hide behind while flying away from the impact of the explosion. Like a turtle shell, it helped to keep me safe from my enemies. I initially assumed that it also kept me safe from the fire, too, but found that the fire wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as I built it up to be in my mind.

  As I landed several dozen yards away, I slid against the ground as I landed with my acid-hand breaks, surviving the accidental bomb we’d made. Looking back towards the center of the fight, I saw that Don John had been moved back as well, about half as far as I was with his girth. Just like an ancient animated cartoon, he looked like he had just tried to use a stick of dynamite as one of his cigars with all the soot covering his body and the frayed clothes peeled back all over him. He was getting himself up from his back, having lost his impromptu shield but not his loaded gun in the scuffle with his own bullets.

  On the other hand, Kate had not moved from ground zero, standing right at the epicenter of the explosion. Well, not standing, actually, but floating, arms open and fists closed, with an intense glow of fiery orange and yellow that had her looking like a second sun in the shape of an attractive woman. Her now unearthly beauty juxtaposed with the terror of the aura of rippling waves warping air and melting any ice they passed through, no matter how thick they were. Anything that got near her would be destroyed in a fire that could have boiled skin. That probably included me, fancy armor and stats or no.

  As an aside, her new predicament explained where all the fire went.

  Jokes about hotness aside, she did not look happy, and Don John was right in her sights as she shined even brighter with scorching heat. I, for one, welcomed our new solar overlord, and would only serve as support as she showed everyone just what she could do with enough firepower to burn a major city to the ground.

  I wasn’t gonna lie, though I wouldn’t have told anyone this if they asked, I was chubbing a bit, too.

  15

  In a burst of flames that formed a charred circle behind her, she rocketed forward, as if the space within the circle was a springboard for her to bounce off of. Between frames of the eye, she closed the gap between herself and Don John, slugging him in the gut with an explosion in the form of a fist. As it turned out, her new overclocked flame form turned every concussive blow into an explosive one as well. Her barrage of lightning-quick kicks and blisteringly fast punches clouded over Don John’s chest, obscuring him from my view.

  In retaliation to all the bombs blowing up in his face, he fired off a round from his Tommy shotgun, but the result was as hilarious as it was impotent. Not only did the ice never form, or even a whiff of steam from the moisture for that matter, but the pellets had also only petered out the barrel of the gun, barely qualifying as ball bearings in a kid’s toy. Apparently, part of the special process that created the explosion of ice also propelle
d the pellets inside, meaning that Kate had essentially disarmed him for the time being.

  Turning off my green hand and retracting my sword back into its sleeve form, I switched the two around, rolling up the other sleeve to spawn the cannon arm from tendrils of metallic fluid and turning my other hand purple with the power of eldritch magics stored in my hidden tattoos. I wouldn’t have considered taking a ranged approach to this fight with that massive Tommy gun still in play, considering that any amount of focused fire would probably end Kate’s life or mine.

  Things had changed, however, and now ranged was not only the more useful option to help Kate while she was blitzing an inferno, but it was also the only one available to me with how deadly Kate had become at close range.

  With my arms shifted around to a better ranged support, I took aim at Don John, who had his own problems other than assaulting me with his submachine shotgun. Instead of shooting the Don himself, I decided to aim for that pack of his with the extra drums. Without those, he would just be a schmuck with a paperweight, and we could lead him anywhere around town that we wanted to after that as we slowly killed him with the cannon.

  This also seemed like a good opportunity to test out another set of devices that I had tucked away in this suit. Given how fast Kate had become, there simply wasn’t any real way that I was going to keep up with her with my current speed. But where regular feet would fail, hover shoes may have succeeded.

  Clicking the heels of my boots, I activated the hovering pads on the soles of my shoes, simultaneously preparing the tiny mechanisms inside the sleeves of my shirt. It was very important to get the grappling hook out before the hover boots were fully on, or the slipping and falling would start right from the beginning, and there was just no substantial recovering from that emotionally.