Either way, the five of us would be more than a match for anything that the Maniac could throw at us.
The only real question was whether or not the five of us would be a match for the Maniac himself. I didn’t think that he had anything technology-wise that was a match for the super suits and weapons I had designed for me and my team, but that sure as hell didn’t mean I could underestimate him.
The Maniac might be unhinged, just like he was definitely a full-on fucking psychopath, but he was still smart as fuck, and he still had some kind of superpower that I hadn’t identified yet.
The fact that I still didn’t know what his superpower was about to drive me crazy, but even though Aileen and I had both studied the Shadow Knight’s files on him, I didn’t feel any closer to figuring out the answer than when I had first started to learn more about the Maniac. It was clearly something that gave him a definite advantage over his enemies, but none of his enemies had been able to figure it out, and that was why he had been able to attack and murder so many citizens over the years.
Okay, so it was that, plus the fact that the Shadow Knight had cared more about protecting the Maniac than he had cared about protecting the actual citizens of Grayville.
Oh, well. All of Slade’s goddamn ideals were even more useless to him now than they had been while he was still alive.
“The warehouse is one block up and two buildings over from here,”
Aileen announced from the back of the van.
“Then I should go ahead and park now, so we can proceed on foot from here,” I said. “I’d hate to ruin the surprise and let them know we’re here before we actually walk through the door.”
I pulled into a spot on the side of the road, but there were no other cars around, so it certainly wasn’t difficult to find a parking space. Like most of the Maniac’s hideouts, this warehouse was in a shitty part of town, so there wouldn’t ever be a lot of witnesses around to notice anything that he might get up to… and even if there were, the people who lived around here knew to look in the other direction if they wanted to keep their own skin intact.
“Okay, Aileen,” I said as I turned the engine off, “you stay in the van, but I’ll tell you if we need you to come in as backup. And if you see anyone else approaching the warehouse or anything else suspicious, then just tell us through the comms, alright?”
“I understand,” Aileen responded.
“Penumbra, I want you to float yourself and Norma over the top of the warehouse and see if you can come down through the door on the roof,”
I said. “If there’s no roof access, then just fly through one of the windows up top and then crash down to surprise anybody who might be inside.”
“Should we just go for it when we, like, get there?” Penumbra asked.
“Or do you want us to wait for your signal?”
“Better wait for my signal,” I said. “So just get into position above the roof and then once you figure out how you’re going to access the warehouse from up top, then just wait for me to give you the word.”
“So does that mean that I get to kick in the front door with you?”
Elizabeth smiled.
“You know it does,” I said. “I know we don’t know exactly what’s inside the warehouse, but I’m sure the Maniac won’t leave us totally empty-handed. Everybody ready?”
“Hell, yeah,” Norma said as she whipped out a pair of nunchucks from a holster on her back.
“What are you, like Bruce Lee or something?” Penumbra grinned.
“Well, if I’m average at all martial arts, that also includes all martial arts weapons,” Norma said with a shrug. “So I figured I might as well give every weapon a fair chance.”
“This’ll probably be a good opportunity for you to try them out, Michelangelo,” I said. “Now let’s move.”
The four of us hurried out of the van and closed the door before anyone could spot Aileen. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had seen her, since she just looked like an exceptionally beautiful woman with perfect curves and perfect waves of dark blonde hair. But still, I didn’t want any cameras to pick up on her presence.
She needed to remain a complete surprise until I used her against the Maniac.
“Oh, and one more thing,” I said as I watched Penumbra and Norma start to float up into the air. “If there is anybody inside, we need to leave at least one of the assholes alive, so we can ask him some questions.”
“If we have to,” Norma sighed.
As Penumbra and Norma floated up toward the rooftop, I nodded to Elizabeth and then started down the block. Since it was now close to midnight, the whole road seemed extra dark. The streetlights worked fine, at least most of them, but they really just made the darkness in between the streetlights seem even more dark than usual.
I half-expected some of the Maniac’s hired goons to jump out of the shadows on our way to the warehouse, but everything was quiet except for the soft sounds that our boots made on the cracked sidewalk. I adjusted my
helmet a little as we walked, just to make sure that the screens inside my helmet were in the exact right position for me to see on almost every side.
My helmet was one of my better designs, and I was glad that I’d been able to repair it so quickly after it had been damaged in the fight with the Shadow Knight. Since I didn’t have Elizabeth’s regenerative powers or Penumbra’s ability to float up out of danger, I had to take extra precautions to protect myself in fights against supers.
After all, I was just an ordinary human… well, except for the fact that I was smarter, richer, and more hard-working than any super I had ever met.
So not only did my helmet protect my skull from any potential damage, but the screens that I had built inside it allowed me to have the full range of vision that I would have even without the helmet. Plus, the horns on it made me look really badass.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I told Elizabeth once we reached the front door. “Penumbra, Norma, are you in position?”
“Yep!” the levitation specialist chirped. “We found a door on the roof, so we can enter the warehouse once you give us the signal and shit.”
“Then hold your positions,” I said.
“Here goes nothing,” Elizabeth said as she took a deep breath, threw her black hair over her shoulder, and then took one step back to get a little extra momentum.
I tried the warehouse door to make sure it hadn’t just been left open for us, and then I stepped out of my superpowered girlfriend’s way. She locked her shoulder into place, adjusted her hips, and launched herself forward into the door.
The door immediately crashed to the ground inside the warehouse.
Elizabeth jumped over the fallen door and headed inside. She glanced back and forth for any signs of the Maniac or his goons, but when no one instantly jumped out of the shadows, I followed her into the warehouse and felt around on the wall for a lightswitch.
I really needed to work on my adjustable night vision contact lenses, so this wouldn’t be a problem. I had a rough design for them that I had used before, but I wanted to perfect them so that they would be just as useful in darkness like this as they would be in strobe lights or the brightest daylight.
When my hand finally reached the lightswitch, I hissed a warning to Elizabeth, told Norma and Penumbra to come in from up top, and then flipped it.
The moment that the fluorescent lights all blinked on above us, the whole warehouse filled with the sound of gunfire.
I dropped to my stomach at the same time I pulled my gun out from my holster, so when I rolled to one side, I could instantly point it at one side of the warehouse. There were thugs all along both sides of the warehouse, so I just picked the left and opened fire.
Elizabeth reacted even faster than I did, so when I glanced over my shoulder, she was already on the right side of the warehouse, and she was throwing one punch after another to knock down the goons before they could even fire off another shot at her.
Her
reflexes really were goddamn impressive.
I fired a few rounds from my gun at the thugs in front of me, and I managed to hit a few of them before I heard a whirring noise above me.
When I glanced up to make sure that the Maniac didn’t have any other surprises in store for us, all the goons suddenly stopped shooting so they could look up, too, and then we all saw Norma’s descent together.
It was a beautiful fucking sight.
Penumbra stayed at the top of the stairs to the roof, but she levitated Norma down to the floor at the same time the omni-average superhero whipped her nunchucks back and forth to create the whirring sound. With
her hooded mask pulled down over her face, and her black super suit that hugged her curves in all the right places, Norma looked more like an avenging dark angel than my mousy assistant, and I had never been prouder.
Of course, the moment that Norma’s feet touched the ground, the Maniac’s goons all seemed to recover from their surprise and started to shoot again. But by then, the four of us were all more than ready for them.
Elizabeth was a blur of dark hair and pale skin as she moved from one asshole to another and beat them to a pulp, and her reflexes were so fast that she grabbed a few of their guns and used them to beat their owners senseless.
Penumbra started to work on the guns from her position up high, so she changed and played with the mass of the guns until the thugs didn’t know what to do with them. Every time she made their mass heavier, the assholes dropped them, so then Penumbra was able to levitate them up and out of their reach.
Then Penumbra just clapped her hands with a little giggle and levitated the goons into the air, only to then let them drop all the way back to the warehouse floor with a stomach-turning crunch of bones against concrete.
I used the thrusters in my boots to propel me back and forth around the warehouse faster than the Maniac’s hired men could shoot at me, and I used the sticky webbing solution in my suit to yank a few of the weapons right out of their hands. So between my palm blasters and my gun itself, I started to put a dent in the number of goons that the Maniac had told to lie in wait for us.
But Norma… Norma was something else.
I had figured out a while ago that my assistant had a thing for torture and violence, especially when it came to our home security system. But it wasn’t just that she liked to come up with the most creative ways to off somebody. It was that she really liked the showmanship of it all because apparently, my sweet, nerdy, mousy brown-haired assistant had quite a flair for the dramatic.
So as she whipped her nunchucks back and forth, Norma looked like she was really starting to enjoy herself. She circled them over her head, lashed out to knock one of the assholes out cold, and then kept circling the nunchucks until they were tucked behind her back. Then she did the same thing to another thug, only this time, she slammed it into his throat instead of his temple, so he staggered backward and clawed at his neck like that would help him inhale more oxygen.
When Norma turned toward another of the Maniac’s goons, she spun the nunchucks around until one end was tucked between her arm and her side, and then she whipped out the hidden end to slam it into some poor bastard’s balls until he dropped to the floor in agony.
“Leave one alive!” I called out before my team of badass women got too carried away.
I fired my palm blaster at a man who was trying to sneak up behind Norma, and it burned a hole in the base of his spine at the same time that my assistant’s nunchucks flipped backward and rammed down on top of his skull.
I glanced at the screens inside my helmet, but it looked like we had just about cleared out the whole warehouse, so there were only two assholes left. Elizabeth grabbed one of them and threw him toward Norma, so my assistant lashed out with her nunchucks just as the man reached her.
The weapon broke his nose and bloodied one of his eyeballs, but after he fell to the ground, Norma finally tucked her nunchucks away, grabbed her own gun, and fired it through the center of the man’s forehead.
Then all four of us turned our attention to the last remaining bastard in the warehouse.
The man had thrown down his gun, so now he darted toward the exit like he would somehow be able to make it past one of us, not to mention all four people who stood in his path.
Elizabeth dashed toward the door to block him, while Norma headed to the stairs to block off his escape there. I stayed in the middle of the warehouse floor to wait and see what he did next, but Penumbra took care of that little question for us.
The blonde levitation specialist locked her sights onto him and then just floated him up into the air.
The man was so panicked that he flipped all around until he looked like he might puke, so I signaled for Penumbra to set him down again. But the moment his feet touched the ground, I nodded to Elizabeth, so my superpowered girlfriend hurried over to pin the man’s arms behind his back.
“I assume you know who we are,” I said as I strode toward him, “just like I know that you work for the Maniac, and that he had you all wait here until we showed up. Am I right?”
The man raised his chin like he actually planned to be the tough guy, but as soon as my girlfriend tugged a little harder on his arms, just enough that it looked like they might snap out of their sockets, he nodded and couldn’t get his answer out fast enough.
“Y-yes,” the man stammered. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything.”
“I’m so glad you decided to be cooperative,” I said. “Tell me what you know about the Maniac.”
“I don’t know much, really,” the man said. “I just know he pays us to do a job, and he usually has something new for us to do every couple of weeks.”
“What about his plan to attack Grayville?” Norma asked. “We know it’s happening in less than thirty-six hours, so what is it?”
“Or you can start with an easier question,” I said. “Like what’s his superpower?”
“His superpower?” the man repeated. “Honest to god, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows, or at least, he sure as fuck never told any of us about it.”
“Not a good answer,” I said, and I nodded for Elizabeth to pull back on his arms a little harder. “Try again.”
“Shit, hold on!” the man shouted. “Okay, look, I really don’t know, but it’s just like… he’s just always one step ahead of everybody else. That’s as much as I can tell you.”
“That sounds more like someone who’s always prepared than someone who has superpowers,” Penumbra said as she floated down a little closer to us.
“I really don’t know anything else to tell you,” the man said. “He’s just like… a genius or something.”
“You’re not being very helpful,” I growled.
“I can’t help you with that,” he said, “but you want to know about his plan, right? I can tell you that, just as long as you don’t kill me. And I can even tell you where to get some.”
“Where to get what?” I asked.
“Toxic gas,” the man said and then swallowed. “It’s poison, and it causes hallucinations.”
“Fuck,” Elizabeth muttered.
“He’s gonna unleash it on the whole city at once,” the man said. “I don’t know how or anything, but once everybody breathes it in, they’ll all start to hallucinate, and then the pain that the poison causes will drive everybody insane, so they’ll all kill themselves or each other.”
“I should have known it would be poisonous gas,” I said. “That doesn’t give us a lot of time to figure out how he’s gonna unleash it and stop him from actually doing it.”
“And what the fuck was your plan?” Elizabeth demanded. “Were you just gonna breathe in the gas with everybody else, or did you actually believe that the Maniac would give enough of a shit about you to save your life?”
“He has a bunker,” the man gasped, as my girlfriend bent his arms back even further. “But I didn’t think he would save me or anything… that’s why… fuck, that hu
rts!”
“Ease up a little,” I told Elizabeth. “Let the poor man get it off his conscience.”
“Fine,” she growled.
“So you wanted to tell us your grand plan to escape from all the destruction when the gas goes off?” I asked.
“I have a little boat that I was going to take across the river,” the man said.
“So you could go find some other supervillain asshole to work for somewhere else?” Norma asked as she folded her arms over her chest.
“I’m open to options,” the man said and gulped again. “So if you want, I could work for you because see, the thing is that I kept a little sample of the gas for myself. A couple of us did, actually, and I was… well, I planned to sell it to the highest bidder, and then--”
I shook my head when Elizabeth looked like she would rip his skull off his body right then and there. If this man really had hidden some of the gas for himself, then we could certainly use that. We might even be able to make an antidote in time, but if nothing else, it would help us be more prepared.
“And let me guess,” I sighed. “You don’t care who the highest bidder is, whether it’s the Wardens or a supervillain in some other city, just as long as you get paid, right?”
“Hey, everybody’s gotta make a living, right?” the man asked with a shrug.
“Yeah, but some of us choose not to work for a murdering fucking psychopath just to make ends meet,” Norma said.
“Where is it?” I asked. “Where did you hide the gas?”
I had a feeling that I already knew, but I wanted to see if the man would admit it or if we would just have to pull the shit from his corpse.
There was only one good hiding place for something so dangerous and so valuable, because there was only one place that he could be sure no one would find it or mess with it while he was gone.
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