Evil Genius: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

  “Oh yeah,” Optimo scoffed and then pointed at me, “and this is the guy that’s going to offer you... what? Moral clarity?”

  Dynamo glanced over at me and smirked. “Nope. But he’s going to provide me with the tools and the freedom to figure out for myself as best as I can what I think is best for Pinnacle City in any given situation. Then I can act on it.”

  “Look, Dynamo,” Optimo sighed. “I know you haven’t been a Warden for very long, and sometimes it’s hard to understand why we do things the way we do them. The justification behind every seemingly trivial rule or regulation. I get it. You’re young, you’re hotheaded, you think you know everything. I used to be exactly the same way. But once you gain the maturity and the experience to recognize--”

  “Look, Optimo, why are you here?” Dynamo interrupted. “What do you want? The Wardens didn’t send you to track me down, did they?”

  “No!” he exclaimed indignantly and then he chuckled. “I think somebody’s been reading a few too many dystopian novels. Browsing too many conspiracy theory forums.”

  “… Dystopian?” Dynamo sighed. “Well, then, what do you want?”

  “I was sent here in response to a report of supervillain sightings,” Optimo replied. “So if you would kindly step aside, I need to enter that abandoned car tunnel now.”

  “You won’t find anything but corpses and other rotting trash inside, but be my guest,” Dynamo replied.

  “Corpses?” Optimo gasped. “Dynamo, what have you done? This isn’t like you!”

  “This isn’t like how a Warden-run mission would have gone down,” the heroine corrected him. “Besides, didn’t you already see Turbo Torch and the other bodies outside? Actually, where are they?”

  The corpses had all disappeared and somehow the bloodstains had too. Even the grass that Turbo Torch had burnt when he was grappling with Dynamo had somehow magically been replaced.

  “The mess that you left in full view of the public has been disposed of,” Optimo hissed pointedly. “It is currently being assumed that the killings were committed purely in self-defense and that the perpetrator had no other option. And the deceased in question were not registered in any official database, with the exception of Turbo Torch. They have all been transported to Warden laboratories for immediate autopsies.”

  “So, there’s going to be a coverup, and The Wardens are going to appropriate their corpses for research purposes?” I asked. “That sounds reasonable. Probably what I’d do myself under the circumstances.”

  Optimo glared at me and said, “Dynamo, it’s not too late to turn back from the dark path that you’ve chosen. Don’t let yourself be lied to, manipulated, and corrupted any further by this… this…”

  “Handsome devil?” I offered.

  “No!” he spat. “He is an evil genius! He has more in common with the supervillains of Pinnacle City than with the superheroes, even if he doesn’t identify with either faction, which makes him most dangerous of all.”

  “Are you done yet?” Dynamo asked. “Can we get on with our lives now?”

  “If I cannot convince you to remember your better nature, then I fear that the next time we meet, it will be on opposite sides of a battlefield,” Optimo told her sorrowfully.

  “Oh please.” She rolled her turquoise eyes.

  “Which is all the more tragic because we would have made a phenomenal power couple, you and I,” he continued. “But maybe this little foray into the dark side is exactly what you need to refresh your perspective a bit and return to work a more humble and committed Warden than ever. So I won’t stop you. I just need you to surrender your prisoners to me, and then you and your evil genius sugar daddy can walk away.”

  “I’m not a prisoner,” Norma groaned as she lifted up her head momentarily from Dynamo’s shoulder. Then she set it back down. “I’m Miles’ assistant. My leg just hurts. And my ribs. Everything hurts actually. But I’m not a prisoner.”

  “The young lady needs medical attention, and you sir are delaying her from getting it,” I said and hoped that Optimo would forget to inquire about the limp body that I was carrying.

  He may have been dumb, but unfortunately it seemed he wasn’t that dumb.

  “And that guy?” he demanded as he pointed at The Chief, whose unmasked head was hanging behind my back out of the superhero’s sight. “Who’s he?”

  “Uh...” I began. I was tempted to claim that he was my other assistant, also wounded, but I wasn’t sure if Optimo had some prior knowledge of him that would enable him to recognize the supervillain even without his trademark mask.

  Because as if in response to Optimo’s question, the tall suited figure slung over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes stirred, and then started screaming in delayed onset agony and reaching for the ruined pits of his missing eyes.

  “Be quiet.” I slammed him to the ground with his eyeless face mashed into the grass, and his arm bent behind his back.

  The Chief lying there facedown was a completely different Chief than the one casually demolishing his own safe room without getting up from his armchair. Without his eyes and his telekinetic power, and with all his henchmen having been slain, he really didn’t have much fight left in him at that point.

  “Who is that?” Optimo repeated through gritted teeth.

  “My prisoner,” I said with a casual shrug. “Now, if you’ll excuse us--”

  “You can’t just torture someone, that’s illegal, you need to release him into the hands of the proper authorities, which in this case would be me--” Optimo paused in his lecture as he continued to examine the weakly squirming figure beneath me, and particularly I think the expensive suit and shoes. There really weren’t very many supervillains who dressed classy like that. Most of them just wore pretty much exactly the same kind of suits that superheroes did but in darker color schemes, and the more eccentric ones that wanted a more distinctive look usually went around looking like they’d raided a dumpster for S&M gear. Optimo’s blue eyes narrowed as he started to connect the dots. “Is that… The Chief?”

  “Er, no,” Dynamo squeaked in an unusually high-pitched tone for her before I could even respond.

  I was actually surprised and maybe a little proud that she had chosen to tell a lie. But I wasn’t at all surprised that she turned out to be terrible at lying, given what was probably a pitiful lack of practice. She had all the tools to learn to be an excellent liar, of course, given that she could tell whenever other people were lying and therefore had more reliable data than anyone else on the contrast between body language, verbal tics, manner of intonation and so forth between someone telling the truth and someone telling a lie. On the other hand, maybe she didn’t observe those kinds of details as closely as the rest of us poor mortals, simply because her power meant she didn’t have to in order to distinguish.

  “Yes, it is.” The blue spandexed blockhead towering over Dynamo could tell that there hadn’t been an ounce of sincerity in her reply.

  “No, it’s not,” Dynamo insisted with more confidence the second time around.

  “Yes it is.”

  “No it’s not!”

  “Yes it--”

  “Is that really how superheroes talk to each other?” Norma asked curiously, and both the huge blond and the statuesque raven-haired beauty turned to glare at her. In Dynamo’s case, that put the two women nose to nose. Norma was suitably intimidated by that and quickly laid her head back down on Dynamo’s shoulder.

  “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “Okay, we don’t have time for this sibling rivalry right now, we need to move.”

  “You are free to go,” Optimo repeated, “but the prisoner stays with me, so that he can be appropriately dealt with. He will be questioned, given the option of legal counsel, and if charged with any crimes, then he will receive a fair trial.”

  “How about we agree on a meetup spot and hand him back to you after a few hours with us?” I suggested to Optimo. If Optimo pressed the point, then I was even willing to guarante
e him a living Chief. But I wasn’t going to get too specific about what kind of condition I intended for his brain to be in. “That way, everyone wins.”

  “You’re not taking him,” Optimo stated as he stared me dead in the eye.

  Now, in a battle of wits I was quite confident of my ability to overcome Pinnacle City’s golden boy. But to judge from Optimo’s expression and the way his fists were clenched within their gloves and the ominous way his muscles that I didn’t even know existed were starting to ripple all across his body, it wasn’t a battle of wits with me that he was gearing up for. And brand spanking new super suit or not, my chances against Optimo in the other kind of battle were pretty comparable to those of a snowball in hell.

  I decided to change course. We probably had to leave within the next two minutes if we didn’t want to get tangled up in a bunch of pain in the ass legal shit. “Okay, I’ll just leave him right here with you then,” I said.

  Then I punched The Chief in the back of the skull so hard that my gloved fist sank into a bowlful of wet brains.

  Dynamo gasped, but Optimo let out a yelp.

  “You can’t do--” he began.

  “What I just did?” I asked sweetly as I surreptitiously pressed the button to signal for our vehicle. “Dynamo, come on, we gotta roll.”

  “Dynamo, listen to me,” Optimo said urgently. “Is this what you want your life to be? Running from the cops, instead of running to the aid of the cops?”

  “I don’t have my whole life planned out, but for now, I just want to run in my own direction,” she replied.

  “His direction!” Optimo insisted as he pointed at me. “Not yours! He’s manipulating you! He’s playing you like a puppet! Don’t you see that?”

  “Give me a little credit for being able to think for myself and take accountability for my own actions,” Dynamo groaned.

  “Your own actions… such as complicity in a murder?” Optimo asked as he pointed at the corpse of The Chief.

  “Murder?” I asked. “That was clearly self-defense, we were attacked by a dangerous super-villain.”

  In response to the signal I had sent it, my beat-up minivan rolled up and opened its doors for us, although not the trunk since it detected that Aileen’s body was not present.

  “I shouldn’t let you go, I should arrest both of you now, too,” Optimo said. He was standing between us and the car, and I knew better than to make a dash for it. Optimo’s face was extremely conflicted, but if he saw a fast moving object his primal instincts would probably kick in, and he’d violently capture and subdue both me and Dynamo before he even realized what he’d done.

  “The Wardens wouldn’t want that,” I said. “Look at how they dealt with those other three supervillain bodies already. They won’t be pleased if you ruin their perfectly good crime scene coverup just because of one silly little extra corpse. You know why they’re doing it this way? It’s probably because they don’t want the public to know that someone who was so recently one of their own was involved. The concept of Wardens going rogue and killing whomever they please probably wouldn’t make the public sleep sounder at night, would it now? And you know what else? If you disclosed all the unnecessary details about the death of The Chief, then it makes you look… either guilty, or pretty damn incompetent.”

  “Me?” he sputtered. “How? I didn’t do anything!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You’re you, Pinnacle City’s preeminent superhero, the envy of Olympic athletes in every sport, and I’m… a ‘tech dweeb,’ I believe is how our deceased friend described me, with no super powers whatsoever. And yet you allowed me to kill an unarmed prisoner right in front of you? Within an arm’s length of you? How could you possibly let something like that happen? Shame on you.”

  Optimo turned red and started working his jaw, but no words came out. Eventually he spat at me, “This isn’t over.”

  I smirked at him.

  Dynamo stepped forward, patted him gently on the mountainous shoulder, and said, “I’ll be seeing you around, Chad.”

  Then she got into the waiting car with Norma. I waved at the still frozen, malfunctioning Optimo and got in after her.

  As we drove away, I looked in the rearview mirror and could see his always perfectly puff-chested posture slump.

  Optimo Chapter Nineteen

  I wanted to pop that skinny little bastard a good one right in the nose. Actually, what I really wanted was to wrap my hands around his throat, start squeezing, and keep on squeezing until his brain started spurting out of his nose.

  But that wouldn’t be very heroic of me.

  He didn’t have any superpowers, just a fuck ton of money and a know-it-all attitude, so he wasn’t a threat to me. I had to keep reminding myself of that. Also, the people he had just killed were supervillains, and although you still weren’t supposed to do that, and it was still legally considered murder, well, the media probably wouldn’t be all that sympathetic to someone avenging the death of The Chief.

  What I really needed was for Miles to fuck up and harm someone innocent. Preferably a little old lady, a hot teenage girl, or a couple of kids. If he did that in front of me, then I’d have all the excuse I needed, and then some, to take him out. And my uptight asshole supervisors wouldn’t get on my case about it.

  The interface on the wrist of my suit pinged, and I saw that I was instructed to remain on scene and field all police and reporters’ questions. It made the public feel safer that way, when a violent and open ended case like this had the involvement of someone like me. My supervisors knew that they could count on me to resolve it. Besides, I didn’t really have to solve anything. People just liked to look at me on television, regardless of the context. It didn’t even really matter what I said, any clip with my face and body in it would still get millions of views and comments about how amazing and wonderful I was.

  It was good to be me.

  I flipped on my phone, turned on the forward facing camera, and checked my hair while I wondered what to tell the reporters when they showed up. The problem was, that if I admitted a scrawny guy like that dickwad bajillionaire had killed someone right in front of my face, and I hadn’t been expecting it and hadn’t been able to stop him, I’d be a laughingstock. The Wardens would probably put me under performance review, since I knew they’d had future plotlines in mind for The Chief and weren’t pleased about his untimely demise.

  But if I concealed his role in the killings, then I would be giving Nelson exactly what he wanted. Would that be like protecting him? Would that be like letting him get off scot free? I’d definitely rather turn him into a wanted murderer and never let him have another day’s peace. Let him rot in a jail cell. That would show him where disrespect for The Wardens, and for me in particular, got you.

  But there was also Dynamo to consider. Her fate was linked with the rich nerd’s now. She definitely took herself too seriously and could be a bitch sometimes, but she had a killer body and a gorgeous face. She might even be hotter than the Kitten, by a slight margin. I mean, part of that was just the fact that I was getting kind of bored of Helena and her Russian bad girl shtick. Physically they were probably pretty equal. But Dynamo was younger, seemed like she had a slightly more interesting personality, and was more mysterious. I liked the way she kept playing hard to get with me. On one hand she was driving me nuts by not returning my flirts, but that just meant it would be a whole lot sweeter when I slammed my big cock into her pretty mouth.

  I wondered if she was sleeping with the rich dweeb. He wasn’t even a superhero and wasn’t even close to worthy of her. I mean, if she was choosing him over me, that was a fucking insult. She had no right to do that. I was literally the perfect man, and he was a douchebag who would never treat her right. What kind of dumb slut would ride off with him when I was asking her to stay?

  Dumb bitch. Ugh. Someone should teach her a lesson about manners.

  Was it just because he had a lot of money? I mean, I had a lot of money, too. I was way better-looking th
an him and had over a hundred pounds of muscle on him, and I could fucking fly and I had saved Pinnacle City from supervillains more times than I could count. So I had always assumed that either Dynamo was planning to give in to my advances eventually, or that she was secretly lesbian. But if she was going to let any guy fuck her, then it definitely should have been me.

  Definitely.

  I deserved her. Heroes always got the girl, and since I was the best hero. I got all the girls.

  If Dynamo came to her senses relatively soon, I was prepared to forgive her, but if she thought she could just go off with this random unlicensed superhero wannabe and fuck him and help him murder more supervillains? If she thought she could just do whatever the hell she wanted, even though she’d taken the Warden Oath just like me?

  Then supervillains were going to be the least of their worries.

  The cleanup crew returned and began to take care of The Chief’s body. Their activity broke me out of my deep and important thoughts, and I let out a sigh as I checked myself one last time in the phone camera. Then I saw the news vans begin to arrive, so I practiced a quick smile in my phone’s camera, put the device away, flexed each of my biceps to make sure they looked pumped up and veiny for all my fans, and then strode toward the gathering reporters.

  I had some important work to do now, but if Dynamo and her pathetic new boy toy thought they could continue on their crime spree, they were going to deal with the valiant champion of Pinnacle City.

  And that was me, Optimo.

  Miles Chapter Twenty

  First we got Norma checked out at my trusted, and very discrete, doctor’s office, but it turned out her injuries weren’t anything serious, just bruised ribs and a mild ankle sprain. My physician just wrapped her ankle and prescribed rest, ice, and painkiller meds, and said she didn’t even need to use crutches.

  But Norma was uncharacteristically quiet in the car as we started driving back to my house. I could tell that something was bothering her, and I wondered if she had been shaken up both literally and figuratively by experiencing The Chief’s brutal usage of his telekinesis first hand.