The Supervillainy Saga (Book 4): The Science of Supervillainy

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Casualties are inevitable in wartime. Besides, some of these guys are the worst,” Mandy said, reaching over and snapping the neck of the Slaver before I snapped my fingers, causing the human trafficker’s body to burst into flames.

  “What do you think?” Cindy asked Galahad.

  “I think you should have made a bigger effort to save the lives of your soldiers,” Galahad said. “We’re all heroes today, fighting the good fight. Well, except the guy you just killed. Fuck that guy.”

  “A lot of these people are assholes,” I said defensively. “Quite a few of them deserve to die, but they are people whose freedom I will work to preserve, for reasons I can’t quite explain. Oh right, yes, I can—vengeance. In which case, I am fully capable and willing to sacrifice all of them as long as it protects the people I love and fucks up Other Gary’s shit.”

  “Well, some of these guys are my friends,” Cindy said. “A very small some. So let’s hope they make it through so we can get Gabrielle.”

  “She’s your friend too,” I said.

  “Is she?” Cindy said. “Then where was Gabrielle after she broke up with you? I could have used you both.”

  “I’m sorry, Cindy,” I said. “I am.”

  I had taken Cindy for granted during our friendship, especially when I’d let our relationship progress to the point where she’d fallen in love with me. I realized that was a mistake now, even if I would never regret it due to Gizmo. The prospect of having a child gave me a giddy feeling; it was like someone had taken a syringe of pure joy and jabbed it into my brain.

  “Your metaphors could use some work,” Cloak said.

  “I work with my experience,” I thought back to him. “Besides, winners don’t use drugs.”

  “I have no idea if that means you didn’t use them or use them all the time.”

  “Whichever is funnier to you.”

  “What about Cindy?” Cloak asked.

  “I dunno where we stand,” I admitted.

  I thought back to the conversation we’d had right before the attack. I’d been hoping it would be able to settle things between us, but just the opposite had happened. We were sitting inside one of Club Inferno’s alcoves with Kerri looking after Gizmo nearby. Cindy had spent the past hour helping to assemble Mister Inventor’s cybernetic arm with the aid of Mechani-Carl. Personally, I’d never been too much of a fan of Carl Stringel. There was something about his voice that annoyed the hell out of me. I’d just explained to Cindy what my plans post-overthrowing the First Citizen were.

  “Are you frigging serious?” Cindy said, her mouth hanging open. “God!”

  “Excuse me,” I said, raising my hands. “Which part are you upset about?”

  “The fact that you’re not retiring after Other Gary but continuing being a supervillain?” Cindy said. “Are you mad?”

  I resisted the obvious rejoinder. “I’m not exactly going to be able to disappear, Cindy. Taking down Other Gary is—”

  “That’s not the reason and you know it,” Cindy said, looking away. “It’s because Mandy wants to be a superhero.”

  I blinked. “Wow, you are amazing.”

  “We’ve known each other since we were teenagers,” Cindy said, shaking her head. “You’re a father now, Gary. You’ve seen what this insanity gets us. Your daughter could have died.”

  “I know,” I said, staring at her. “I had to listen to my brother Keith’s ghost tell me how much of an enormous screw-up I was forever wanting to be a supervillain. I’ve lost five years of my life in a prison that closely resembles my vision of hell. Mandy died and became something she hated. I . . .” I trailed off, having a lot more to say but no reason to say it.

  “Then why?” Cindy asked. “Once the First Citizen is gone, we can just stop, can’t we?”

  “Can we?” I asked. “Death has me as her chosen and Lancel’s soul on the line.”

  “Don’t use me as an excuse,” Cloak said.

  “It never will stop,” I said, staring at her. “Even if we did retire, it would just come after us. I was ready to stop after Mandy died and the damn president of the United States bombed my house.”

  “Our house,” Cindy said.

  I closed my eyes. “It’s not as easy as you’re making it out to be.”

  I clenched my fists. My experiences should have broken me, but they just made me angry. Angry that so much of my life had been wasted and nothing seemed to have gotten better. I’d started this whole ordeal to honor my brother, but it’d warped into a burning desire to tear this entire façade of society down to its roots. I wondered how much of it was my imprisonment. Could I really say I was myself after so much brainwashing? Did I want to be?

  “You have a child now,” Cindy said. “We have a child now. We should have put her first.”

  I looked away. “I can’t ask Mandy to try to live a normal life after everything she’s been through. Not when she doesn’t want one.”

  “Did you even ask her?” Cindy stared into my eyes.

  I looked away.

  Cindy took a deep breath. “If you’re going to keep doing this kind of thing, I don’t know if I can keep our daughter around you.”

  I turned away and clenched my fists before unclenching them, feeling like a dozen knives were being stabbed into me. “Please don’t do that.”

  Cindy didn’t respond. “This is literally the first decision I’ve ever made for the good of my child. Well, that and telling her not to try and drill a hole in her head to increase her psychic powers. I think our daughter is kind of weird. Have you noticed?”

  I didn’t respond, though, as I was on the verge of tears. I couldn’t choose between Mandy and my daughter.

  But I had to.

  Cindy seemed to realize just what she was doing. “Gary—”

  “I need to know I can come back to her,” I said, holding back a flood of emotion. “I’ve lost so much.”

  Cindy looked away. “I swear, all of the things that make me love you are the things that make it impossible to be with you.”

  “I’ll always be there for you,” I said. “But—”

  “No buts,” Cindy said, walking past me. “Just don’t die and we’ll see what happens. Just don’t expect my will to state that you should get her if you’re robbing banks and committing urban terrorism on rich jackasses.”

  “You don’t have a will,” I said.

  “That’s not the point!”

  My mind returned to the present as I took a good long look at the power plant we were going to invade. The—I kid you not—Acme Power Plant looked like an ordinary mid-20th-century coal plant. It was ten stories tall with large smoke stacks, transformers, and hundreds of opaque windows, quite a few of them busted. There were numerous fire escapes crisscrossing the place and graffiti painted on the sides. Looking at the place, though, I could see Merciful’s handiwork, as the graffiti included peace signs and words like “groovy” and lacked Falconcrest City’s usual racial epithets.

  Looking back to see Big Ben pilot a teddy-bear-shaped mecha with a glass-bubble-covered cockpit, I shook my head and found the nearest way into the facility. Of course, the doors were reinforced steel and covered in magic runes to block insubstantiality. Cindy lifted a double-bladed laser sword that was entirely not copyrighted by the Disney Corporation and used it to cut a hole for us to pass through.

  “We’re almost there,” Mandy said. “This is the heart of the First Citizen’s power. Why else would it be guarded so heavily?”

  “Any number of reasons,” Mister Inventor said, looking back at the battle behind us. “Frankly, you don’t know Gabrielle Anders is here. You don’t even know if this is the central hub for all of the crystal towers’ gathered energy. You just hope.”

  “Rebellions are built on hope,” I said, trying to avoid thinking about how that movie ended.

  Mandy stepped through the hole I’d made first, followed by me, Cindy, and Galahad. What greeted us on the other side was a perfect contrast to the power
plant’s exterior. The place was a single massive arcane-technology super-engine full of pipes, catwalks, and turbines that processed the life-energy collected from America’s largest cities.

  All of it was gathered in a gigantic blue lake seventy feet beneath us. I could feel the magic beneath us and in the air even as a force field kept it from leaking out everywhere. In the middle of a crystal tube, surrounded by that blue water with hundreds of wires attached to it, was Gabrielle, floating with her eyes closed like a sleeping princess.

  Mandy blinked at the sight greeting us. “My God, this is straight out of Final Fantasy VII. I could make like a hundred jokes now. Me, not Gary.”

  “Please don’t,” Cindy said, stepping forward. “You were right, Gary. Gabrielle has been here all along.”

  “The free energy of the United States comes from vampirizing its greatest heroine,” Galahad said, looking up.

  “Please don’t use hate speech around me,” Mandy said.

  The very African American Galahad Warren gave her a glare.

  Mandy blinked. “OK, you can.”

  I ran up a nearby set of metal stairs across a catwalk to what looked like a set of controls for Gabrielle’s prison. It turned out to not be because nothing here was labeled. Still, I was about ready to tear this place apart.

  Gabrielle was special to me. I would never entirely get over the fact that she’d erased my memory of her being Ultragoddess, or the fact she’d dumped me rather than let me be put in the crossfire of her enemies. Still, she was someone I believed to be genuinely good. A person who didn’t just play at being a superhero, but was one when it was hard as well as when it was easy. If anyone could make this world right again, it was she.

  “She’s a hero, not God,” Cloak said, echoing my words. “You’re much the same way.”

  “Not even close. Her father did it. She can too,” I said. “You did, to an extent. You could inspire people. Inspire people to be better. We need some of that now.”

  Cloak was silent for a moment. “Perhaps I should just focus on figuring out a way to unhook Gabrielle from the machinery here. I’m more familiar with magic and super-science than you in the same way a neurosurgeon is more familiar with the human brain than a medieval court jester.”

  “Perhaps you should,” I said, ignoring his insult.

  I found a computer, which I logged into using my dogs’ names. It gave me a thousand possible files to go through to release Gabrielle, but I was willing to do so. I needed to get Mandy over here since hacking was her thing. That was when I noticed none of the others were present.

  Ah, dammit.

  “Hellfire and damnation,” Cloak said. “I should have seen this coming. Other Gary has an agent cloaked here. I can sense the spell work now.”

  “What was that about being more familiar with magic and super-science?”

  “Oh hush!”

  I turned around and saw Shadowman decloak like the Predator, standing on the catwalk behind me. He was holding an unconscious Cindy, Galahad, and Mandy. All three of them were being held in tendrils that looked more ominous than the ones he’d sported before. I could feel him radiating magic and realized the nanite-based superhero had been upgraded with a hefty dose of supernatural power—presumably so he didn’t embarrass himself like he did at the Merciful building. I tried freezing him again and felt the energy getting absorbed into his liquid-metal body.

  “Huh,” I said, trying not to panic. “I would have thought they’d give a bigger fight.”

  “My upgrades allowed me to electrocute them all,” Shadowman said, casually tossing them on a platform below. “Don’t worry, they’ll live. My father gave me orders to kill only you. The rest will be taken off for reprocessing.”

  “Yeah,” I said sarcastically, trying to make it seem like they weren’t valuable hostages. “You’re a real big hero, aren’t you?”

  “Killing evildoers is good,” Shadowman said. “That is the law of Merciful.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief that Other Gary Junior didn’t realize what they meant to me or didn’t care. “You really worship your dad, don’t you?”

  Shadowman shot out of some of his tendrils and I ducked to one side while turning insubstantial. They smashed into the computer behind me and sent sparks flying my way. I could feel the movement of the air from where he struck, letting me know he was enchanted to kill me whether I was intangible or not.

  “He is a hero,” Shadowman said, slowly walking forward like a slasher in a horror movie. “One who will bring peace to this world and an end to crime. Once monsters like you are destroyed, the world will finally know peace.”

  I realized in that moment I was facing a man who took superheroism deadly seriously. Shadowman and his ink-like body of nanites was too strong to beat in a straight fight, but he was eager to prove himself. That gave me the key to beating him. Well, that and the fact that we were surrounded by sensitive scientific equipment and standing above a huge pool of collected magic.

  “Gary, what are you planning?” Cloak said.

  “My most diabolical scheme yet,” I said before whispering one of the few spells I knew under my breath. I called it Merciless’s Malign Margins. I’d created the cantrip after one too many Irish cups of coffee while trying to figure out the rudiments of magic.

  Shadowman leaped at me, only for me to duck underneath his blow before punching him in the face with a flaming fist. Between us, a huge neon-pink sign of the word BLAM appeared.

  “What the . . . what the hell?” Shadowman said, looking as stunned that my spell worked as I was.

  I stared at Shadowman, taking advantage of his confusion. “So, Shadowman, you’ve decided to walk the twilight between truth and twistedness, eh? Well, it’s lights out for you, as your tenebrous tendrils are no match for my tough tenacity.”

  “Why are you talking like . . . what?” Shadowman said, right before I punched him again.

  This time, a glowing WHOOMP appeared between us in yellow. I then blasted him in the face with another round of flames, sending him spiraling backwards as much of his blackish form fizzled. That caused a green BURN sign to appear.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” I said, not actually laughing but saying the words. “Does my churlish cartoonishness confound you? Of course. The confusing conundrums of the Crooked Count of Chaos cannot be countered! Creatures such as myself are capable and collected while capes canter confusedly!”

  “You used confused twice,” Cloak said.

  “Shut up,” I snapped. Then I raised my hands and caused flames to shoot up behind me. “Cower before me, Champion of the City! Cower or be creamed! Children are changing channels when we’re not challenging our chutzpah!”

  “Superheroism is not for kids!” Shadowman screamed and ran at me, wildly.

  I proceeded to take a step back, turn intangible, and blast the emergency coolant container beside me. The grayish goop washed over Shadowman and he screamed, the substance freezing him completely. Unfortunately, it froze him much more thoroughly than my earlier blast, which had only contained him. The Shadowman’s weird nanite body proceeded to crack, splinter, and fall apart before my eyes. To add insult to injury, above our heads the last of the signs appeared with the blue word FROSTY.

  “Sub Zero wins,” I said. “Fatality.”

  “That was a bit like Terminator 2, wasn’t it?” Cloak surprised me by observing.

  “Really?” I asked. “That’s your complaint.”

  “I’m just saying, you had a pair of guns enchanted to kill anything,” Cloak said. “It seems like they might have worked.”

  I blinked. “Oh right.”

  That was when I felt a presence rise behind me. It felt like Gabrielle’s but was slightly off. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Starlight Maiden hovering behind me. Gone was her girlish exterior and idealism, replaced with white-hot rage as her eyes and body glowed with the Ultraforce. She then shouted, “You killed my brother, you craven creep!”

  OK, this was going to suck.
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  Chapter Twenty-One

  WHERE I FACE THE ONE DECENT PERSON IN THE MERCIFUL REGIME

  “Holy mismatch,” I said, doing my best Sunlight imitation. “My carnival of calamity is in crisis! Whatever will I do against this caped criticizer of my cruelty!”

  Starlight Maiden just looked at me. “I normally enjoy a good bit of banter, but that’s just sick after murdering someone.”

  “He’s a robot!” I snapped, refusing to dignify this moment with gravitas. “You can rebuild him! Faster, better, stronger!”

  Starlight Maiden frowned in a way that reminded me of Gabrielle. “Just because we’re androids doesn’t mean that we don’t have feelings. I believe in the Creator and that he gave us souls! They can rebuild my brother, yes, but how will I know if it’s really him?”

  I blinked. “I could probably tell you, actually, what with my being a psychopomp servant of Death. That’s not going to happen, though, because I have to stop you.”

  Starlight Maiden crossed her arms, hovering in the air. It was distressingly adorable. “No, sir, I’m going to stop you.”

  “I’d like to see you—”

  “No, Gary, don’t!” Cloak shouted.

  “What?” I asked.

  That was when Starlight Maiden surrounded me in an airtight Ultra-Force bubble. I considering blasting out with my fire powers, but that would just burn up the oxygen inside as well as kill me. The same thing would happen if I used my ice powers. I tried to turn intangible, but it did no good there either. Dammit. I hated prepared enemies.

  “I jinxed it, didn’t I?” I said, already feeling lightheaded.

  “I’m afraid you did,” Cloak said.

  “I’m going to keep you inside this bubble until you pass out, then deliver you for trial,” Starlight Maiden said. “You’ve killed a lot of innocent people, Gary Karkofsky of this world, and that requires judgment. I just pray we’re able to restore my brother.”