Villains Don't Do Time! (Night Terror Book 6)

by Mia Archer

  Now there was something I was never doing. I had some dignity, after all.

  Dignity and a wrist blaster, but she didn't know about that second part. So I allowed myself to be roughly perp-walked out and escorted towards my fate. Towards our fate, now that Technomancer was with me.

  I pointedly didn't look at the warden as I was escorted out. The show was in his hands now, him and CORVAC, and he knew what to do. I just had to hope he wasn't full of it with that song and dance about caring about his prisoners and getting them safely out of here.

  27

  Arena

  "And now," the voice boomed through the arena. "The moment we've all been waiting for!"

  I looked around at an arena packed wall-to-wall with people. Say what you will about the people of Starlight City, but their ability to be complete fucking dumb asses when it came to self preservation certainly hadn't been affected by an alien invasion.

  If I was a normal I wouldn't be caught dead near any place where villains and heroes with superpowers were going at each other on the regular, and I figured it was only a matter of time before some of the attendees at one of these things were caught dead.

  Whatever. Not my problem if they were stupid enough to come out here.

  "In one corner, we have the most dastardly villain Starlight City has seen in recent history. Night Terror!"

  I frowned. The most dastardly villain Starlight City has seen in recent history? What the hell was that supposed to mean? I was the greatest villain Starlight City had ever seen! And I was about to show them exactly why I still deserved that title.

  The reaction from the crowd was mixed, at best. Clearly there were people out there who still remembered all the good I'd been doing for the city lately. People who didn't like the idea of me being thrown to the wolves. People who clearly thought I was going to die out here.

  There was a nice vote of confidence from my adoring public. Not that I could blame them for thinking this might finally be the end of Night Terror. After all, they thought I was down here without any of my toys.

  There were other voices out there in addition to the cheering. Voices I didn’t care for. Jeers. Boos. People who obviously didn't care for me.

  Probably people who'd had their cars smashed in one of the many battles I'd been a part of. Though it's not like it was my fault those assholes had parked their cars in the middle of a giant robot invasion or bought a building in the middle of a known destruction zone downtown or whatever the hell it was that got their property smashed up.

  I didn’t like those jeers, but I had to deal with them. Dealing with people who didn’t like you without immediately leaping to kill them was what separated the truly great villains from the ones who were mere flashes in the pan destined to be killed off.

  Not me. No thank you. If I needed to debase myself and look like an ineffective idiot in the name of staying on top of my game then I was more than happy to do what needed to be done.

  So I kept up with the act I’d been running since I was first brought in by Sabine and her jackbooted alien thugs. An act, I might add, that wasn't all that difficult considering I'd been pretty much living the part of a terrified and depressed bucket of emotions lately.

  I only had to reach back a couple of days to when I was still suffering from a little bit of defeat shock and that was all she wrote to get into the proper mood. Not a lot of method acting with this one, is what I'm getting at.

  I looked up at the surrounding arena and tried my best to cower. I was just a mortal woman in a prison jumpsuit about to be thrown to the flaming wolves, after all. Not exactly a pleasant scenario.

  "And in the other corner," the announcer said, leading me to think about how ridiculous this whole thing was. We weren’t in corners at all. We were on opposite ends of a former basketball court. And it looked like when they set this place up as a gladiatorial arena they haven't bothered to change things like they would for, say, a concert.

  No, the charred ant bent stumps that had been the basketball goals, or whatever they called those things, told the story of a couple of heroes and villains who’d ripped the things down and used them as massive oversized weapons.

  "Your hero! The lady who's been cleaning up the villainous scum threatening our city and the glorious new order! Firebrand!"

  I could've done without all the platitudes for Firebrand, but what the fuck ever. If that guy wanted to heap praise on her while he shoved his brown nose so far up Sabine’s ass that he could charge her for a colonoscopy that was his business.

  None of that mattered. I was about to show them who was boss. I was about to show them who was the true villain in Starlight City, damn it.

  The cheers this time were deafening. If the crowd seemed ambivalent about Night Terror, well there was none of that ambivalence when it came to Firebrand. They were on their feet. They were stomping in the stands. Shouting her name.

  It was disgusting. The lady was an old bitch using her media platform to do harm to others, and yet the people in the arena seemed to love her for it. It made no fucking sense to me, but then again the stupidity of your average Starlight Citizen had never made all that much sense to me to begin with.

  Firebrand stepped out into the arena, her hands held high. She paused to look at me from across the basketball court. She smiled a cruel smile. The kind of smile that probably would've had me shaking my prison jumpsuit if I'd been out here without my toys.

  I tried to harness that feeling. I tried to act like I was legitimately terrified of her.

  Again it was the kind of emotion that wasn’t too difficult to dredge up considering some of the shit that’d gone down in the past few days. Her smile only grew more cruel as she saw just how worried I was.

  The bitch. I told myself to bide my time. It wouldn't be much longer. I wanted to blast her now, but I couldn’t do anything until CORVAC was ready to spring the big surprise and occupy Fialux.

  "Hello everyone!" Sabine said, her voice echoing through the arena.

  Finally the crowd went silent. Well then. Maybe they were excited about their champion getting a chance to go up against Night Terror, perennial thorn in the side of heroes and law enforcement alike in Starlight City, but it would appear that the crowd also had developed a healthy terror of their new overlord, overlady? Was that a thing? Either way their fear of Sabine prevented those same boos and jeers.

  I couldn’t believe they actually liked her enough to quiet down. She hadn’t been around nearly long enough for them to truly love Big Brother, or I guess Big Sister would be more accurate. There had to be people out there who didn’t like the new boss.

  Then again those people probably weren’t as likely to show up at a gladiatorial death match being put on by the new regime.

  Then something happened that chilled me to the bone. Something that shouldn't be happening. Fialux floated up next to Sabine. They stood on a platform that had been made out of one of the corporate suites that used to occupy the fifty yard line, or whatever the hell they called the halfway mark in basketball.

  Damn it. What was she doing here? Sure I had ways of dealing with her, but I didn't want to deal with her while I was also in the middle of taking on Firebrand and trying to capture Sabine. I hadn’t seen her at many of these matches when they were televised, but I guess she decided to make an exception when it was her ex-girlfriend who had her head on the chopping block.

  Fuck. Where the hell was CORVAC with that distraction?

  "I'm so happy that all of you could join us here tonight to usher in a new era for Starlight City! An era where villains like Night Terror finally get what they so richly deserve!"

  Well then. I can't say that I appreciated a line like that. I’d done my best to help save people in this city, after all. Not that they seemed to appreciate everything I’d done for them. No, they were always getting their hate on even when I was busy saving the city from whatever menace had decided to move in on my territory.

  So what if my motivations weren�
�t always pure? The end result was the same whether or not I was doing it out of altruism or a desire to shut down anyone moving in on my territory.

  That line pissed me off enough that I looked up to their dictator’s perch and flipped them both the bird. If there was any reaction then it didn't come through the PA, but I liked to think they saw my little gesture and understood exactly where it was coming from.

  A place of hate. That's where it was coming from.

  "Okay Natalie," I muttered to myself. "Keep it together."

  Keep it together. That was nice and vague. I wasn’t going to mutter anything about the plan. No sirree. Not when Selena was up there potentially listening in on me.

  I'd never been able to pin down exactly how well she could hear, and I figured this was probably one of the worst possible moments for me to learn that her hearing ability was just as keen as I’d always suspected it was.

  "Night Terror!" Firebrand shouted.

  I looked across the arena. To Firebrand who was starting to smolder. It was only a matter of time before it was flame on. Maybe a two count.

  There was going to be no punching her in the face to stop her before she could light up this time around, and from the way her mouth curled up she knew it.

  "I've been waiting for this for a long time," she shouted. "You've been overdue for a reckoning!”

  "You're just an old coward who wasn't willing to take me on when I had my stuff," I shouted back at her. “You could’ve gone after me any time and you decided to wait until someone else did the heavy lifting for you! I wouldn’t call picking up the pieces after someone else does all the real work very heroic!”

  Oops. That wasn't right. I wasn't supposed to be taunting the woman. I wasn't supposed to be confident. I was supposed to be terrified. Shivering in my boots, as it were, at the prospect of facing her.

  She was just so damn irritating. I couldn't help myself.

  "You're going to regret that Night Terror," she said.

  I shrugged. A fatalistic shrug.

  "What?" I asked. "Are you going to make me more dead or something?"

  "That's the idea," she shouted.

  I looked up and around the arena. People were shouting. Screaming, really. They seemed to enjoy this little back-and-forth. I can't say I was enjoying it all that much though. Not when Fialux was still there.

  Sure I might get a good shot off. I might be able to take care of Firebrand before she could move in, but as long as Fialux was up there my moment of triumph wasn’t going to last long, damn it. I needed to buy more time for the warden to get everyone out of SuperMax.

  That's when it happened. Firebrand looked like she was about to burst into flames when a boom hit the arena so hard that it had the whole place swaying and set my teeth rattling. I had to resist the urge to smile. I didn't want to let on that I had any idea what had caused that arena-shattering kaboom.

  CORVAC had finally come onto the scene.

  “Took you long enough," I muttered, forgetting myself.

  "My apologies mistress," CORVAC said. "It does take some time to get these robots up and running for the first time."

  I didn't say anything. I'd already forgotten myself once, and I didn't want to provide another opportunity for Fialux to potentially realize I was in on this.

  There was some clear consternation from the arena. People looked around, clearly confused. Suddenly their reactions were more appropriate for a bunch of squishy mortal normies in an arena where a superpowered fight was about to go down. Like some of those idiots were finally realizing they weren't exactly in the safest place.

  Well that was tough shit for them, because this was about to go down, and I was in a place where the stakes were too high to worry too much about collateral damage.

  28

  Psych Out

  A new thought occurred to me as I looked at the worried crowds. Maybe part of the reason why people were so enthusiastic about new management taking over the city was precisely because they were sick and tired of all the craziness that was always happening in this city.

  Sure something like a massive arena fight was pretty crazy, but it was the kind of craziness that only affected the heroes and villains who made the city crazy in the first place. Not the kind of craziness that affected the normals.

  Until it did.

  It was just my luck that these assholes didn’t appreciate everything I did for them. I was the one keeping all of the craziness down, for the most part, and they jeered at me and acted like I was some hideous ogre or something.

  But have a bunch of invading aliens doing the same job and suddenly they’re greeted like fucking saviors. Or at the very least the good people of Starlight City seemed to tolerate their new authoritarian dictatorship even if they weren’t all enthusiastic about it.

  Which was rich considering Fialux, Sabine, and their alien buddies had done their best to blow the city to smithereens on their way to conquering the place.

  There was another blast. People cried out this time. Sabine held up her hands.

  "Don't worry," she said. “I’m certain everything is fine, and the match is going to go on as planned. Please, we even have a surprise prepared for you!"

  Surprise? I didn't like the sound of that. Something opened up in the center of the arena. A platform rose. And standing on that platform was none other than Technomancer looking around like she wasn't particularly happy to be there. She was in a pair of high-tech cuffs complete with blinking lights and everything, which was ridiculous.

  Cuffs with blinking lights were a ridiculous trope in sci-fi and they were a ridiculous trope now that it was happening right in front of me. This was coming from a person whose entire life was one ridiculous sci-fi trope after another strung together in something that sort of resembled a screwed up life, so you know when I’m bitching about something it has to be pretty high up the bullshit-o-meter.

  I mean honestly. What's the point of adding a bunch of high-end electronics to a pair of handcuffs? All they are is a hunk of metal with a simple locking mechanism to keep people from using their hands, but clearly whoever was in charge of keeping villains under lock and key had decided that wasn't impressive enough for the whole image they were trying to project at SuperMax, or wherever the hell Sabine had picked up those cuffs.

  Maybe they were from the aliens, even, in which case the same stupidity applied. It’s just that it was a stupid trope of extraterrestrial origin rather than a stupid trope of more terrestrial origin.

  "Oh boy!" Firebrand shouted across the way. "We get to have even more fun!"

  There was nothing but cruelty and anger in her voice. Clearly she'd given over entirely to whatever hate had filled her heart.

  I wondered what horrible thing some villain had done to her in the past that she had such a hate boner for villains even to this day, well after her retirement. For that matter it made me wonder why she’d gone into retirement in the first place if she was still in such an obvious mood to kill villains.

  Then again, with the way she'd been acting since I met her, these days she’d be the villain rather than the hero. It might take a little time for the public to realize just how crazy she was, but it’d only be a matter of time before they turned on her.

  Live long enough and you become the villain and all that. From the looks of things she'd done a lot of living before she wound up in this arena playing Russell Crowe or Kirk Douglas, depending on your age, in front of a crowd of cheering, if not exactly adoring, fans.

  Another thump off in the distance told me CORVAC was still raising hell somewhere. The familiar old villain sirens, at least the ones that were still standing after all the destruction the aliens had brought down, started to go off all throughout Starlight City. That or the bombs were finally flying, but I seriously doubted that.

  There were so many superpowered individuals in Starlight City and in this country that mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrence had pretty much been single-handedly eliminated by a serie
s of powerful beings long ago.

  You’re welcome, world. Another thing that people didn’t appreciate about living under my benevolent carbon-fiber fist.

  No, that whining siren had to be thanks to CORVAC tooling around in a giant robot, one of his favorite things to do, and really fucking with Sabine's day.

  "Don’t worry," Sabine said. "All is well. I can assure you that…"

  Whatever assurance she was about to give the crowd was lost in another thump. This time something slammed against the arena and caused an even louder whump. The roof overhead crumpled in as though something particularly large had slammed into it, denting the solid construction like an aluminum can which caused more screams. The resulting sound from that impact was loud enough that it caused the entire building to shudder.

  "Apologies mistress," CORVAC said. "But I thought that throwing an eighteen wheeler at the arena might finally get their attention."

  "No problem," I muttered, still trying to keep things on the down low.

  That finally got Sabine's attention to the point that she made a couple of quick and curt gestures towards Fialux. They seemed to argue back and forth for a moment, Fialux looking down at me with an unreadable expression, and finally she sighed. She turned and floated back into their suite they’d converted to their co-empress pavilion.

  Sabine turned back to the arena and tried her best to keep the crowd under control. Some of them were already making their way for the exits, though that seemed like an even more ridiculous plan. At least this building could sort of keep them safe from whatever was going on out there. If they were out in the streets they’d have nothing between them and whatever was attacking the city.

  "Again, there is nothing for any of you to worry about," Sabine said. “We are protected in here. Now let the games commence!"

  Firebrand erupted into flames on the other side of the arena. I guess it was game on, but I needed to let this ride for as long as possible. Fialux was probably still near enough that she could turn around if she realized this was all a distraction. I needed her so preoccupied by her fight with CORVAC that she wouldn’t have time to get back here before I’d done my business and gotten the hell out of Dodge.