Villains Don't Date Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  “That was me fixing the problem you haven’t fixed on the fusion reactor in that wrist unit. So the way I figure it is I can either levitate the unit into the upper atmosphere off of your arm and save the city or I can levitate the thing with your arm still in it attached to your body and save the city minus one idiot who doesn’t know to test things before using them in a real world scenario.”

  My every word seemed to hit her like a slap to the face. Good. That’s exactly what I was going for, after all.

  She stared for a long moment. A moment that was getting too long for comfort. I raised my arm and activated the antigrav unit. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taking some small pleasure at the thought of reducing her to her component parts courtesy of a bit of my tech she hadn’t reverse engineered quite as well as she thought.

  “I figure we’ve got maybe five seconds before it’s too late for you, and ten seconds before it’s too late for all of us. Rest assured I’m not going to wait around until it’s too late for all of us.”

  Her goons were shifting and shuffling, glancing around nervously. Clearly they didn’t like the idea of being vaporized along with this idiot.

  I wondered if they were students who’d been pulled in with promises of credit for an intro Applied Sciences course. It wouldn’t be the first time some poor freshman ended up in mortal danger to tick a checkbox on a survey Applied Sciences course.

  She growled and pulled the thing off. It landed on the asphalt which started to shimmer and bake under the heat being generated.

  Damn. We were cutting this one a little too close for comfort.

  20

  Cleanup

  At least the thing was on the ground. If it was on the ground I could take care of business and not worry about killing the good doctor at the same time.

  She might be one of my oldest enemies, but that didn’t mean I wanted to go around turning her into her component atomic parts courtesy of her being too stubborn to admit when she was wrong.

  That might be a fitting and poetic end, but I’d feel bad about it. For maybe five minutes.

  She hadn’t tossed the thing down a moment too soon, either. I’d spent so much time worrying at this problem that I could tell how close the thing was to going critical by a look. By the smell.

  There’d been a couple of times when it was really touch and go and I’d nearly vaporized my lab. I was pretty sure some of the fields I’d put up for security purposes would be enough to hold the blast, but I’d ejected the failed experiments into the upper atmosphere just to be on the safe side.

  There were no safeguards in place this time around, so you bet your ass I was going to be ejecting this one into the upper atmosphere.

  I just hoped the idiots at NORAD keeping an eye on this sort of thing would register that it was happening over Starlight City and so they didn’t need to scramble to turn the world into molten slag and radioactive dust.

  I activated my antigrav actuator and tossed the thing up as fast as I could go. I also added a touch of the anti-Newtonian field around the thing because I figured there was no time like the present to test that out.

  Using that field along with the antigrav would mean there were no external forces acting on the faulty blaster. That would mean less force required to get it up to escape velocity.

  “You boys might want to turn away,” I said. “This is going to get pretty bright.”

  Sure enough about a minute after I sent the thing packing there was a flash of light somewhere in the upper atmosphere. Sure CORVAC could probably tell me exactly how high it was, but I didn’t want to give away that I had a support team hidden away somewhere so I’d figure it out later.

  For a moment daylight came to Starlight City. It was about what I imagined the night sky would look like if Betelgeuse ever got off its ass and went supernova in my lifetime.

  Not that I thought something that interesting would happen in my lifetime, but a girl could dream.

  My mask automatically adjusted for the excess light raining down on me. A good thing too. That stuff was damn bright, after all. When the show was over I looked down at Dr. Laura who hadn’t pulled her attention from me this entire time.

  “You nearly killed everyone in this city with your stupidity,” I said.

  “And I wouldn’t have had to do it if you weren’t flying around the city menacing everything. That’s just like a villain to blame the victim for what you do,” she hissed.

  I shrugged. “Call it what you like. The point is we can’t have your friends walking around in this tech.”

  I executed a couple of commands using eye movements built into my mask. It was a hell of a lot more convenient and effective than trying to push buttons in the middle of combat, that was for damn sure.

  The wrist blaster going critical in the upper atmosphere hadn’t set off any sort of EMP, but I set one off now. Highly powerful and highly localized to a small circle immediately surrounding me.

  Followed by another blast that was designed to interrupt the neural pathways of a healthy adult human without doing any sort of permanent damage.

  Collateral damage. It was more trouble than it was worth.

  All around me the goons Dr. Laura had been using to try and take out Fialux fell. I heard a couple of loud hits and at least one snap of a bone as someone landed on the ground the wrong way, but that couldn’t be helped.

  I figured this was a lot better than trying to kill all of them, at least. A broken bone was better than dead, that was for damn sure.

  Surprisingly Dr. Laura didn’t seem to be affected by my neural interruptor. I would’ve given a few of my stolen pretty pennies to figure out how she did that, but I didn’t have the time.

  She arched an eyebrow. “I guess the vaunted Night Terror isn’t as all powerful as she’d like the world to believe.”

  “Maybe,” I said, stalking up to her and pulling my fist back. “But there are more direct ways of dealing with my troubles.”

  I hit her with one hell of a haymaker. I didn’t bother augmenting it. I was looking to take her out of commission, not kill the lady. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head as she fell to the ground, and at the last moment I used a quick blast from the antigrav unit to make sure she didn’t hit as hard as some of the others.

  She wasn’t wearing that funky copied armor, after all. The last thing I needed was to really hurt her. Getting punched to the point of being knocked out was already dangerous enough.

  Yeah, she was going to spend some time in the hospital because of that, but I figured it was the least she deserved for all the bullshit she’d pulled tonight.

  “Right. Have you been watching everything CORVAC?” I asked.

  “Of course mistress,” he said, sounding mildly insulted that I would ever think he wasn’t keeping track of everything.

  “Good. I need you to transport the suits off of all the goons surrounding me. We’re going to have to take that back to the lab and figure out if they’re really using my stuff or if Dr. Laura here is reverse engineering my stuff.”

  “Do you want me to transport the good doctor out here as well mistress?” he asked.

  I frowned down at her. It was tempting. I could put her in a regen tube and have her as good as new. It’d certainly take less time than what she would have to endure with the witch doctors at the local ER department.

  But no. That was a complication I didn’t need right about now. Not to mention it could be dangerous.

  “Best not to let her anywhere near the lab CORVAC,” I said. “She stood up to a neural interruptor. I don’t know what else she might have hidden on her person that could do some serious damage.”

  “An astute assessment mistress,” CORVAC said.

  As always I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or if he was blowing smoke up my skirt, so I decided to take him at face value.

  “Now to get down to the real business of this evening,” I muttered.

  I had what I’d come for tonight. Maybe it wasn�
��t exactly how I planned it. Maybe someone else had done some of the legwork and wore Fialux down.

  That didn’t change the fact that she was right behind me and ripe for the picking. All I’d have to do was turn around…

  And see her floating there in front of me with one leg slightly raised. She regarded me with an odd look, and there was a slight shimmer surrounding her that said she was doing that weird molecular manipulation thing she did to hold herself in the air.

  The important thing was she was floating there though. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to catch her unawares.

  There was a good chance I was going to end the night in the middle of the police station though. I wondered if they’d even bother to wait around for my lawyer to show up or if they’d just let me go the moment Fialux was gone.

  The cops had to realize by now that even if there was a new sheriff in town, the bad guy that sheriff was fighting was still well beyond any of them.

  Fialux looked at the goons surrounding us and her mouth curled down in obvious distaste. That distaste only seemed to grow as their clothes shimmered and a moment later we were surrounded by a bunch of college students in their skivvies.

  It would’ve looked like the aftermath of one hell of a party if we weren’t in the middle of a parking lot in the quad immediately in front of the Applied Sciences building.

  As it was it just looked like a bunch of college kids who’d maybe had a little too much or maybe tried something they weren’t used to and things got really weird.

  “You hurt them,” she said, the anger clear in her voice.

  I rolled my eyes. Sure I was facing down a living goddess who could snap me over her knee if she so desired, but a good eye roll seemed in order.

  “I just saved you from these assholes and you’re worried about hurting them?” I asked.

  Obvious anger flashed in her eyes as she looked at me and I resisted the urge to take a step back. I was not going to act intimidated around this woman.

  Even if she was the most beautiful and the most intimidating thing I think I’d seen in my entire villainous career.

  The fact that she was so intimidating was no reason to show her that intimidation.

  “You shouldn’t hurt people, and you shouldn’t talk to me like that,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? And why shouldn’t I talk to you like that?”

  “Because it’s not nice.”

  Her lip jutted out in a petulant little pout that was the cutest thing ever. I made sure the old visor was recording this because that was something I was going to save to rewatch later.

  I couldn’t believe it. Here I’d just saved her life and she was acting like I should do what she said because I wasn’t being very nice.

  She knew what I did for a living. She’d seen the outfit. Did she think I was suddenly going to be nice or something for the sake of being nice?

  “Puh-leeze.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but these assholes were going to do some serious damage to you if I hadn’t swooped in and done something about it.”

  I was stalling for time more than anything. Your classic villain gambit. Keep them talking long enough and you might figure out a way to defeat them before they had a chance to defeat you.

  Sure every other time I’d done this with Fialux I hadn’t come close to defeating her, but whatever. That didn’t mean the plan wasn’t sound.

  Just that I hadn’t figured out a way to make it work. Yet.

  She glanced down at the college students surrounding her again. The corners of her lips turned down in a slight frown. Oh yeah, she wasn’t happy about what they’d pulled either, but she was trying to hide behind that holier-than-though sanctimonious hero routine that they all did so damn well.

  I hated it when they pulled their sanctimonious hero routine.

  “It’s not like you’re any stranger to doing some damage to the normies yourself,” I said.

  Her eyes flashed as she turned back to me and I was reminded of a couple of occasions when she’d been able to turn up the heat vision or whatever the hell it was she used to try and fry all the lovely systems I’d worked so hard to build into my toys.

  Only there were no lasers or heat vision in evidence this time around. Merely annoyance. Annoyance I could deal with.

  The heat and laser vision I could also deal with as long as I knew it was coming. The problem was she didn’t exactly telegraph when she was going to use one of those powers.

  She didn’t have giant dorsal cooling plates that glowed with the force of the nuclear reaction going on in her body like all the giant irradiated lizards that stomped through the city with surprising regularity, for example.

  Though her backside was a lot more fun to look at than those lizards’. That was for damn sure.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  Her nose turned up. A moment ago she looked like a petulant child accustomed to getting her way and she was upset when someone told her no for the first time in her life. Daddy’s little girl being told she couldn’t have something.

  Now she was still that same petulant child used to getting what she wanted, but this time around she was a child who decided to have a tantrum when she wasn’t getting what she wanted.

  The upturned nose looking down on the world. It was obvious.

  Then again who was I to tell a woman who was the next best thing to a living goddess that she couldn’t have what she wanted? Who did I think I was?

  I frowned. I was fucking Night Terror. That’s who I was. I ruled this city. I was going to rule this world. And I wasn’t going to let some strange beautiful woman with superpowers get in my way.

  “You cause more damage with one of your fights than I think I’ve ever caused in my entire career,” I said, the disdain dripping from my voice.

  It’s not like I even had to act. I was disgusted with all the damage she caused. All the damage she forced me to cause when we fought one another in the middle of the city streets.

  She was damaging city streets that belonged to me, damn it, and I didn’t like messing up my playground.

  “If you wouldn’t attack me then…”

  I held up a hand and for a surprise she actually shut up. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting the temper tantrum that had been threatening this whole time to finally erupt.

  Huh. Maybe this conversation was actually going to go somewhere productive. A girl could hope.

  21

  Hero’s Dilemma

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” I said. “What about that big ship you took out? The old one flying through the air that couldn’t possibly stand up against you? They’re going to be repairing that building for weeks! What about that time you ripped a bank vault right out of the bank basement and nearly collapsed the building above it to get some robbers out? Everywhere you go you create nothing but damage!”

  I was laying it on thick. Also? It was totally a line of bullshit. I was well aware that if there weren’t any robbers in that vault there wouldn’t be any need to rip it out. Especially when they claimed they were packing a nuclear weapon.

  A ridiculous claim, but apparently Fialux didn’t know any better.

  And I don’t think I even need to address just how much the people floating an ancient pirate ship through the air in the middle of downtown deserved what was coming to them. Still, there was a chance she might listen to my unhinged villain ranting and that was a chance I was willing to take right about now.

  The shimmering around her had slowed. Just a little. Not a lot, but enough that I almost felt secure in using the Anti-Newtonian field.

  The trouble with that is there’d been plenty of times when I almost felt secure using the damn thing, and every time “almost” had turned out to not quite be enough.

  I didn’t want to make that mistake again. Not when those mistakes were so costly and, usually, so painful as well.

  “I’m just trying to do what I can to help,” she s
aid. “There’s so much about this world that’s unfamiliar. These people attacking me…”

  Now she wasn’t looking like a petulant child so much as she sounded like a toddler who’d lived a sheltered existence with mommy and daddy and didn’t know there were bad things out there in the world that might do her harm.

  Well she’d found out the hard way that there were plenty of bad things lurking out there in the world. I’d vaporized one of them earlier tonight in a back alley to keep him from doing more harm, come to think of it.

  “That’s all well and good,” I said. “But there are times when…”

  “No.”

  I blinked a couple of times. Any uncertainty that might’ve been lurking under the surface was gone. She looked at me and there was a quiet strength there. Also, that weird shimmer that always surrounded her when she was about to do something that involved superpowers was starting to ramp up.

  Okay, so maybe she didn’t have dorsal cooling plates that showed off when she was about to use one of her powers on me, but I guess I could use that shimmering motion as a good stand in to try and figure out when she was about to hit me with a super powered sucker punch.

  “No?”

  “No. I reject your way of looking at the world,” she said. “There are bad people out there who do bad things. You’re one of them. Why should I listen to you?”

  The sneer on her face cut me to my core. I’m not sure why a sneer like that should cut me to my core. I mean it’s not like I should care what she thought of me. She was a hero. I was a villain. We fought each other and that’s the way the world worked.

  It’s not like I was going to be inviting her over for tea anytime soon. Sure I might give her some tea once I had her good and captured, but the longer this conversation wore on the less and less likely that scenario seemed.

  My fingers flexed. I thought about activating the anti-Newtonian field, but without the certainty that I could do something I wasn’t going to make a move.