by Mia Archer
I blinked as the dust settled from the exploding cars. This hero, this goddess, this Fialux, still stood exactly where she’d been with her hands on her hips. One hip was a cocked slightly to the side and she had a confident smile on her face as her cape streamed behind her.
That sight was so… no! I squashed the thought before it could form.
She shouldn’t have been able to do that. She shouldn’t have been able to throw herself out of phase with this universe or something allowing that blast to go right through her.
I felt the first beginnings of something close to worry edging through the back of my mind. Just slinking along back there like a thief in the night, barely even recognizable for what it was, but it was there.
I stomped down on it. This Fialux wasn’t special. She was just like every other hero who’d decided to take me on. Every other beautiful and enchantingly confident hero who’d decided to take me on. And I was going to have to wipe that look off her face just like I had with every other hero who’d dared to take me on.
Only I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the hell she’d managed to do that. How those blasts of energy had gone straight through her. It didn’t make sense.
Anything that made it make sense violated the laws of physics. Sure I was in the habit of taking those laws into a back alley and roughing them up a little with my inventions, but there was a big difference between me violating the laws of physics with my superior intellect and watching someone else do it via means I couldn’t begin to fathom.
I didn’t like that feeling any more than I liked the worry worming through me.
I needed to think this through. My rational mind, my ability to stay cool in the most ridiculous of situations, was one of the reasons why I was still the top villain in the city after all.
This was the same. This was an interesting puzzle I had to work out. Nothing more. I needed to ignore the more irrational parts of my mind that were threatening to take control and gawk at this beauty while I should be figuring out how to defeat her.
I was not going to panic. I was not going to give into that quiet nagging voice in the back of my head that said I might have finally gone up against something that was beyond me. That voice was always there when things didn’t go well initially, and that voice was always wrong.
This beautiful hero, damn it I needed to stop thinking of her as beautiful and get down to business, obviously had the ability to manipulate matter around her somehow. People didn’t just go flying without the aid of machinery all willy-nilly like that. Somehow she was managing to manipulate the air molecules surrounding her to create the power of flight.
If she was able to do that then maybe she really was able to somehow set her body out of phase with this universe? Maybe she was somehow able to manipulate the matter in her body so that my bolt of energy went through the empty spaces in between the atoms holding her together, there really was a hell of a lot there if you looked at it from the right perspective, which would explain how it seemed like my energy blasts went right through her.
If that was the case then they did go right through her. Just not in the way most people would imagine.
There was only one way to find out for sure. More experiments.
I grinned. In this case “more experiments” meant more blasting at her with my wrist blaster. I loved it when an experiment involved blowing stuff up.
It sure beat the boring research I did when I was a grad student at Starlight City University.
I fired a few more shots, this time making sure there was nothing on the other side of her but a burning slag of metal that had been a cop cars moments ago. Typical hero not thinking about the damage they did trying to stop me from having my way.
Once more the blasts went straight through her and slammed into the unfortunate burning cop car which moved but didn’t explode this time around. Nothing left to explode, I suppose.
This time I had the recorder in my mask going. I pulled up the recording in my heads-up display for review.
My eyes widened behind the mask as I watched her in slow motion. Even going frame by frame I could barely make out a blur moving out of the way of the energy blasts then moving back in place faster than the unaided eye could see.
She wasn’t moving out of phase with this universe. She wasn’t doing anything fancy with the molecules in her body.
No, she was just ridiculously fast. So fast that she could step out of the way of an energy ball traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and get back in place before I noticed. It was seriously a blink and you’ll miss it type of movement.
It was a seriously pants shitting type of movement. If she had as much mass as she seemed to have and she was moving that fast then by all accounts the world should’ve just been destroyed the moment she slammed into a mote of dust floating in the air at her own appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
Relativity. It was a bitch. Only the fact that the world was still here and not doing its best Alderaan impression meant this new hero was somehow making relativity her bitch.
Heck, my cameras had a ridiculous frame rate and they were barely catching her movement.
I let out a snarl and ran towards the strange goddess. Fine. If energy weapons weren’t going to work because she was ridiculously fast then let’s see how she did getting hit with a good old-fashioned machine enhanced punch.
The carbon fiber weave of my suit tensed, building up energy to augment my punch. The metal exoskeleton hidden in my suit also coiled for the coming blow.
I loved feeling so ridiculously strong. The exoskeleton was hidden so well in my suit that most people didn’t even realize I wore the thing. Most people assumed I had superpowers of some sort.
That was one of the fun things about being a mad scientist. Any piece of mad science, sufficiently advanced, was indistinguishable from superpowers.
I had a moment to take everything in. The cops standing around the edges staring at us with their mouths hanging open. It had been awhile since they’d see me in action against a hero. This was really a special show for them.
Also? A good object lesson in why normies shouldn’t take on their betters.
I even caught a glimpse of that asshole reporter Rex Roth with his stupid camera taking video of the whole thing. The jerk must’ve bribed a cop to let him through the line or something.
It seemed like he was always able to get places other reporters could only dream of. It was one of the things that made him such a pain in the ass.
Of course there were advantages to him getting through the line. I had no doubt this was going to be all over cable news tonight. I smiled. That was fine by me. Let them broadcast my victory to the whole world.
That was about the only thing that prick was good for these days. And in front of me I saw, in slow motion, this beautiful new hero who thought she could come out of nowhere to challenge me.
My suit coiled on a molecular level like a snake ready to strike and I released all the power available to me in a punch to her sculpted and oh so sexy stomach.
Her hand flashed out just as I’d expected. I smiled. She was in for one hell of a surprise when my suit made contact with her. Super speed was one thing, but there was no way she was going to be able to go toe to toe with the strength of my augmented suit.
My fist made contact. With her hand. That suddenly held my fist as though it was nothing.
Shit.
5
Unfair Fight
My entire body reverberated with the recoil from her hand slamming into my fist mid-punch. It was only thanks to the inertial dampeners I installed on my suit that I didn’t get a serious case of whiplash as my entire body came to a severe and very quick stop.
Physics. It’d get you every time if you didn’t think of a way to counteract it. Movies where heroes took massive hits or survived massive falls without turning into mush because they had armor on were particularly amusing.
That armor might keep someone f
rom getting bumps and bruises, but it wouldn’t stop the force of one hell of an impact from turning the unfortunate son-of-a-bitch in the armor into the consistency of gelatin.
Not usually the sort of thing that went well with long-term survival, and I was a survivor thank you very much.
A survivor who was in deep trouble, because that punch sent a couple of those inertial dampers into the red before they came back down to normal levels.
My mouth hung open. I couldn’t believe it. She smiled, a sexy half smile that only quirked up at one side. God that smile was beautiful. Being up close to her like this, feeling her so close to me, was pretty damn fun thank you very much.
It was almost enough to distract me from what happened next. Almost.
Her other fist, the one that wasn’t holding my hand in place, flashed out. Again a combination of my suit’s armor weave, the inertial dampeners, and a safety system built into my suit that was designed to raise a shield any time anything got to within a few inches of me traveling at supersonic speeds, saved my bacon and prevented me from getting a seriously bad case of cracked ribs.
Her fist made contact and I flew through the air back towards the bank. I only barely managed to right myself and get my antigravity units in place just before I slammed into the brick wall.
That would’ve hurt like hell considering more inertial dampers were redlining. It took them longer to get back to yellow this time, and a few didn’t go back to the happy green I liked.
Not good.
I floated to the ground. My cape streamed behind me thanks to an antigrav weave worked into the thing that made sure it was always billowing in a suitably dramatic fashion whether or not the wind was around and playing ball.
I eyed my new opponent with new eyes. Eyes that were almost worried. Almost. She was turning out to be more trouble than I would’ve anticipated.
“What are you?” I asked.
“I’m the woman who’s going to save this city from criminal scum like you,” she said. She turned and her voice projected. “The good people of Starlight City will live in fear no longer!”
Huh. Her voice projected. I wondered if that was a trick of the acoustics in the concrete canyon or if that was another power of hers.
Decent speech, too. Pretty cliched, but she was new. She’d get better with time, and it worried me that I was already thinking she might get that time because this fight was not going well for yours truly thank you very much.
And her voice! Hearing that voice made me want to thank a God I no longer believed in that such a beautiful thing existed in this world. I could sit and listen to her talk like that all day long.
Never mind that her words definitely didn’t bode well for my long term career prospects. Especially considering how well she was holding up in this fight.
I couldn’t deny it or rationalize it away any longer. I was getting my ass handed to me for the first time in years. I was getting beat by a girl, to use the old playground parlance. And it wasn’t because I’d gone soft or anything.
No, this woman was a legitimate threat to my reign of benevolent supervillainy.
I’d always believed discretion was the better part of valor, and that was never more the case than when I found myself going up against something I didn’t understand. Something that was beyond my ability to defeat and grind into dust for the moment.
Retreat, regroup, and come up with a plan to come out on top. I smiled slightly. I wouldn’t mind being on top of her if you catch my… Damn it. I was doing it again!
I pulled up my wrist computer and tried to tap into the teleportation system. Only nothing happened.
“CORVAC,” I said. “Run a diagnostic on the teleportation unit in my suit.”
“I’m afraid it was knocked out in that last hit mistress,” CORVAC said.
Damn. No hopping a short distance away with teleportation so she couldn’t follow me. Just my luck.
I also couldn’t very well try to fly out of here. That sort of thing worked when I was dealing with the cops and their mundane transportation like an ancient helicopter from the ‘70s with a spotty maintenance record thanks to an anemic public safety budget, but something told me flight wasn’t going to be as effective an escape with this super powered beauty able able to fly behind me with super speed.
I was fast when I really got the antigravity units cooking, but I’d seen her approach on satellite. I was nowhere near as fast.
No options. I was backed into a corner. I absolutely hated being backed into a corner.
“Mistress.” CORVAC’s voice came through my communicator.
“What is it?”
“I could bring the giant death robot into the city mistress? I’m sure that would take care of this creature with no problem,” he said. “I know it’s untested, but what better way to test a roving weapon of mass destruction than on a hero like this?”
“I thought you were supposed to be a logical computer CORVAC,” I said.
“I am mistress,” he said. There was just the hint of a pout in his mechanical voice.
It was a voice that sounded like something out of an Apple advertisement from the mid ‘80s back when the idea of voice synthesis was so novel that it was enough to sell people on a piece of machinery that cost as much as a budget car.
Not so much these days, but the voice was sort of nostalgic so I kept it, and that creepy green moving light thing he did on his displays that made him look like a CGA Cylon, in place. A tribute to whatever mad scientist had invented the murderous pile of circuits way back when and then left him buried and unused since at least the late ‘70s given his fondness for old school Battlestar Galactica theming.
Until I found him and put that murderous impulse to work for yours truly. Not that he was helping me much right now. The only person he was killing out here was me by not coming up with realistic solutions.
“Obviously you’re not thinking logically if you think that unfinished useless hunk of metal will be able to go toe to toe with this girl when I’m having trouble defeating her. That’s a triumph of optimism over logic if I ever heard it,” I said.
“You don’t have to be mean mistress,” he said.
Something flashed in front of me and I immediately knew I’d made a mistake by sitting here kvetching with CORVAC for so long.
My foresight to program safeties into my suit’s AI, a rather stupid and pliable AI compared to CORVAC since the last thing I wanted was my clothing rebelling against me in the middle of a fight, saved my bacon by throwing up shields at the last moment and activating the inertial dampeners in all the right places.
I felt the tingle of the shield going up next to my left cheek just before stars appeared in my heads up display. That was odd. I didn’t remember programming a star field screensaver into my mask’s HUD.
I might like CORVAC’s voice for nostalgia’s sake, but I’d never been big on star fields or flying toasters back in the day thank you very much and…
Oh. Right. I’d been hit so hard I was seeing stars. And flying without the aid of my antigravity system. And sliding on the ground. And slamming into a very solid building that seemed to think about crumbling on top of me as I hit it.
Let’s just say that was one hell of a punch.
I looked up, fully expecting to see this new hero shaking out her fist. That had to hurt her as much as it hurt me, Newton’s laws about actions having equal and opposite reactions and all that.
Only she was just standing there as though Newton and normal physics weren’t a thing for her. Well, it would be more accurate to say that she was floating in a dramatic pose with her hair and cape billowing behind her as though Newton, normal physics, and the need for makeup and hair product to look good weren’t a thing for her.
I knew this totally wasn’t the time for it but damn did she look good!
I shook my head. I needed to stop this! I needed to stop getting distracted. Getting distracted by CORVAC and his stupid solutions. Getting distracted by how godd
amn beautiful this woman was.
I did not get distracted by women in the middle of a fight! At least I never had up to this point which was practically the same thing, right?
Right.
Time to get down to business.
Only business was coming to me. She was flying straight at me, fist outstretched, with a half smile and half grimace plastered on her beautiful face.
Huh. Well at least if I was going to go then I was going to go a happy woman with that last beautiful sight to send me into whatever was on the other side of death’s door.
6
Curb Stomp
This was going to really hurt if she made contact. Alarms were going off all through my suit. All the major readouts on my heads-up display were in the red, blinking, or had gone dark entirely.
I was on the verge of a critical systems failure. I designed the suit to take on anything this world could throw at me, but I was starting to have a sneaking suspicion that this beautiful heroine was not of this world.
And her out-of-this-world fist attached to an out-of-this-world body was about to put me completely out-of-this-business if I didn’t think of something to save my ass.
Fast.
I gathered all of my strength as she flew towards me and formed a desperate plan. I felt a rush as I started working out that desperate plan. It’d been a long time since I’d had to put together a desperate plan in the heat of battle because I was in very real danger of losing. Much as I hated to admit it, this was giving me the thrill I’d hoped for when I got out of bed and decided to rob a bank this morning.
Fialux didn’t seem to be moving nearly as fast as she could potentially move. That just made planning easier. I had to conserve all my energy for this last futile gesture of defiance, and that meant I couldn’t use the heads-up display for my calculations like I usually did. I had to do all the calculations mentally which delayed me a little bit.