by Mia Archer
So I looked down at my wrist computer. Frowned. And that’s when I saw it. The reason why it’d looked different earlier.
There was a new option available. It blinked happily on my wrist computer to let me know it was there. I hadn’t seen it because I’d been so preoccupied with the whole fighting Fialux thing.
The icon depicted a 16-bit pixel art rendition of a heroine who looked very much like Fialux with a red circle around her and a bar running through her. My hand trembled as I reached out to touch the thing. I could hardly believe it was there, but there it was.
Somehow the tech whisperer had gotten into my wrist computer and put together something that was very much like the weapon Dr. Lana had put together. At least I hoped that’s what was going on here as I thought back to when she’d brushed my wrist computer after touching the anti-Fialux gun in the Dr. Lana clone chamber up above.
My hand trembled. I could hardly believe that we were going to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Sure I’d done it often enough in the past that I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised that it was happening again, but still.
It was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. I pressed the icon and the hum in my wrist blaster changed to something new as the tip started glowing a familiar pink that matched the flickering portal.
32
Doomsday
“Are you even listening to me?”
I looked up. Right. Fialux was screeching at me. Upset that I wasn’t paying attention while she was going on her villainous rant.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I was kind of distracted.”
“You were distracted?” she shrieked. “What could possibly be more important than listening to all the grievances I have? I’m breaking up with you here, and you will listen to everything I have to say damn it!”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I said, raising my wrist blaster up to point at her.
She scoffed at the thing.
“You really think that’s going to save you?” she asked. “I mean honestly. How many times have you used it on me? I’ve even figured out how to beat your teleporter, so…”
“There’s one thing you forgot in your villainous rant there,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked, stopping and looking at me as though she was finally starting to think that maybe she was in a touch of trouble. Which was a day late and a dollar short, she should’ve given up while she had the chance, but that was tough shit for her.
“You forgot that you’re ranting at Night Terror, and I’m currently undefeated.”
I fired the weapon. A beam of pure pink energy blasted out. Pink energy that was the same as the blasts I’d seen from the little raygun things Dr. Lana used on Fialux on that day long ago when she’d been trying her best to capture my girlfriend.
Back before she’d been my girlfriend, sure, but still.
The beam hit Fialux and she immediately fell to the ground. Which made it difficult for me to keep the beam on her since I wasn’t expecting gravity to reassert itself like that, but what the fuck ever.
She got to her feet for a moment, but only for a moment before I tracked the beam down and hit her again. She went down to her knees, but this time I was able to keep the beam on her because it’s not like she had very far to go now that she was on the ground.
“No!” she shouted. “Not like this! I’m not going to let you…”
She stood. It was amazing, impossible, but somehow she managed to stand. She took a step towards me. Then another. And another. Pure grit and determination showed in her eyes as she stepped towards me again. As she fought the beam that was sapping her of her powers.
The flickering was starting to really get out of hand. I recognized it from when the only thing that’d saved me from one of those things going critical and destroying the room around me had been CORVAC’s timely arrival in a giant robot. Only he didn’t have any giant robots to save me this time.
The other Fialuxes seemed oblivious to what was happening. A lot of them were still looking around in total confusion. Most of them were also leaving the room in whatever way they could, which meant a lot of Fialux shaped holes in the walls as they made their own exits by throwing their nude superpowered asses against the armored walls again and again until they punched holes in them.
But there was only one Fialux that I was truly interested in. The Fialux staring at me with the kind of anger that said she was going to do everything in her power to end me.
The only problem with that was by the time she reached me and pulled her fist back she was drained. It was all over. She tried to land a punch, and that punch landed against me with all the force of a puff of air slamming against me for all the damage it was going to do with my suit running at full power.
Fialux stared at me, and I was looking into the eyes of my Fialux. She was back. Then her face contorted into a look of pure rage.
“No!” she shouted. “No! You’re not doing this to me!”
And before I could stop her she turned. Ran. Straight towards the portal that was on the verge of blowing. Right towards her death, if she was within the blast radius when that motherfucker went up and I’d just stolen her powers.
“Fialux, no!” I shouted. “It’ll kill you!”
I was off the ground before I could think about what I was doing. Not that there was much thinking to be done. There was a portal to another world on the verge of collapsing on the other end of the room, there were a bunch of clones of Fialux crashing through that room trying to escape and creating one hell of a danger for anyone mortal in the room, and there in the middle of all the chaos was the real Fialux, my Fialux, running towards that radiation like she didn’t care that she’d just been robbed of her powers.
Or maybe she did care that she’d just been robbed of her powers all over again, and that was precisely why she was running to her certain doom.
There were times when I thought the only thing that hadn’t stopped her from doing something precipitous the last time she’d been robbed of her powers was that I was there to keep her grounded.
Only she hated me now. She thought I was responsible for everything that’d happened to her. I wasn’t going to be one of those mopey villains who actually believed someone when they tried to shove all the problems in their life on me, but I was at least partially responsible for the situation.
And I didn’t want her to die in an explosion. That would be on me.
There was just one problem with my attempt to fly across the room and save her sexy ass before she did something stupid, and that was Nancy grabbing me and yanking me back with her impossible strength. She held me in place despite my antigrav going full tilt.
I turned and pointed my wrist blaster at her, but she didn’t even blink. She looked sad, so very sad, but she also didn’t look like she was in the mood to be threatened.
“Are you really going to shoot me Natalie?” she asked, her voice soft.
Well at least it was soft by the standards of the room. There was sort of an impossibly loud racket going on all around us what with the Fialuxes making their escapes by tearing the place up, and there was a steady thrum that sounded like a loud high tension wire that was only getting louder with every pulse of that portal.
A portal that was about to blow and take everything and everyone in this room with it.
I looked at Fialux one final time, then she was lost in the crowd of Fialuxes. Sure she was the only one who was still wearing clothes, but trying to find her in that crowd would’ve been like playing the world’s sexiest version of Where’s Waldo where I was tasked with finding my ex girlfriend rather than a guy in a striped shirt.
She was going a needle in a haystack, and the longer I hung around this room the more we were all in danger of blowing the fuck up.
“She’s not your Fialux anymore,” Technomancer said, staring across the room. “She hasn’t been for some time now, you know. Ever since she came out of that portal, at least, but I think it happened befo
re that.”
I thought about the worm that’d crawled out of her ear in that Wrath of Khan moment. That was supposed to be the moment she was saved. The moment she realized she’d been under the spell of a crazy alien worm this whole time and she was going to repent and go up topside with me and start kicking blue alien ass.
Only this was the real world. Nancy was right. Just because I wanted the world to fit into some neat little narrative about how fights between villains and heroes were supposed to go didn’t mean it was actually going to happen.
“We need to get out of here before that thing blows,” I finally said, staring at the pulsing pink portal of death. “I’ve been around when one of them went before, and it wasn’t pretty.”
“Agreed, mistress,” CORVAC said. “If we are going to get out of here then it would be a good idea to do it now.”
“I’ll see you all on the other side,” I said, pointing my wrist blaster at Technomancer and Nancy and making sure it was set to the teleporter and not the weird anti-Fialux gun or disintegrate.
The last thing I wanted to do after everything we’d been through was accidentally reduce these ladies to their constituent atomic parts without reassembling them on the other end.
I fired and they disappeared. CORVAC still floated in front of me.
“Sticking around for the light show?” I asked.
“I believe that this orb will easily withstand the impact of that explosion,” CORVAC said.
“You sure about that? This one is a hell of a lot bigger than the last one we took on,” I said.
“That may be the case, but I will take my chances,” CORVAC said. “I have a feeling that you might need a friend.”
“Thanks, CORVAC,” I said.
I leaned against the floating orb and made sure all the countermeasures on my suit were ready to go. I was going to stay here until the last possible moment, and it was nice to have someone here with me. I had no intention of doing anything stupid like sacrificing myself. Just because Fialux was stupid enough to go out there and potentially get herself killed didn’t mean I was going to do the same.
But I did feel like I needed to be with her in some way until the last. After all, I was sort of the one who’d killed her with everything that’d happened.
It wasn’t all my fault, but I’d certainly had a big part in it.
“I believe the portal is going to go critical any moment now, mistress,” CORVAC said.
“Maybe it is,” I said. “Y’know there’s a part of me that wants to stay to the end.”
“That is not advisable,” he said. “There is a not insignificant chance that your countermeasures will not be enough to save you, and I would be quite rudderless without you in my life to tell me how useless I am on a regular basis.”
I looked down at the glowing orb and smiled. “Why CORVAC. That was almost sentimental of you.”
“I will endeavor to not try and allow sentimentality to get the best of me in the future,” he said. “In the meantime, however…”
The world flashed white around me. For a moment I thought the portal had blown, and I was going with it. There was a part of me that would’ve welcomed that after everything else that’d happened, but there was also a part of me that very much wanted to live and was chastising the part of me that wanted it all to be over.
Then the world rematerialized around me and I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course. CORVAC had taken the liberty of teleporting me without bothering to ask.
Under the circumstances I was glad he’d decided to take the initiative.
“Thanks you bucket of bolts,” I said, just as a massive explosion ripped through the air around me and I was knocked to the ground.
Fuck! So much for not being at ground zero when everything went to shit!
33
The End?
I turned and looked at the explosion. Well I guess it would be more accurate to say that I turned towards the direction of whatever the hell had knocked me on my ass.
I figured there was a good chance that whatever had knocked me on my ass was an explosion, and when I turned around I found myself staring at something that’d become a pretty common sight for me in recent days. Not to mention a sure sign why fights with invading alien armies were the kind of thing that should happen out at the edge of the solar system and not right in the middle of Starlight fucking City.
A giant mushroom cloud stared back at me. Because any explosion large enough creates a mushroom cloud. Doesn’t necessarily have to be nuclear, despite what so many poorly researched movies have trained the general public to believe.
At least I’d missed the flash, though something told me there wasn’t going to be much within the blast radius of that thing that would be left over from the flash or the resulting explosion. Assuming there was anyone left over at all.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” Nancy said, coming up to stand next to me.
“You’d be surprised how often I’ve been seeing something like that lately,” I muttered.
I glanced at her, then to Technomancer, and then back to the mushroom cloud rising over campus. At least it was a mushroom cloud rising over what had been campus until very recently.
Campus was rapidly turning into a massive crater as dorms did their best impression of old atomic testing videos from the ‘50s.
There wasn’t any more fighting going on throughout the city. No, everyone who’d been in the process of beating the shit out of each other, aliens and villains alike, had stopped to stare at that massive explosion.
I really hoped there weren’t any students hiding out at good old Starlight City University. If there was anyone there then they were dead now. That included all the aliens who’d been descending on that location to try and get at whatever it was Fialux thought she was going to find in there.
Probably that weapon that was the key to defeating her. I couldn’t blame her for sending everything at the place if she thought the key to her defeat was lurking in there, and I also didn’t feel all that bad to see that most of the aliens who’d been in there trying to search us out had been destroyed without us having to go through the whole showdown thing.
Fighting a bunch of aliens on top of fighting Fialux? Yeah, that wasn’t my idea of a picnic. Not my idea of a picnic at all.
“Something tells me the university is going to have a hell of a time rebuilding after that,” Technomancer said. “Serves stupid Dr. Lana and her goddamn Applied Sciences Department right for all the times she’s screwed honest villains over.”
I glanced at her. It was amusing to hear the echo of my own thoughts on the subject, though it was still painful watching the university that I’d come to love as I taught my course there going up in flames.
Something landed next to us. Something that was charred. I put up my shields, worried that there might be chunks of debris raining down on us from that explosion, but then the chunk of smoking debris rose out of the ground to reveal a glowing green sphere that turned out to be just as invulnerable to the destructive forces of a portal collapse as CORVAC had guessed.
“Whatever the young lady has put me in is certainly a worthwhile vessel,” CORVAC said. “If I was able to construct one of my giant death robots out of this material I would be able to take over the world!”
He had a sense of wonder in his voice that was both a little worrying and amusing. Like a kid who had a new toy he couldn’t get enough of. I shook my head and rolled my eyes.
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” I said. “We have to work on saving this world before we can even think about trying to conquer it.”
“Still on that, are you?” Nancy asked. “Look around. The aliens are on the run!”
“They’re on the run for now, but that’s not going to stop them from coming back,” I said, looking out across Starlight City.
It was a very different Starlight City than the one I’d known before they tried givin
g me the key to the city. The Starlight City that had been my personal playground for a couple of years before Fialux came along and ruined things.
Fialux. A tear trickled down my cheek as I looked at the destruction being wrought over the university. The kind of destruction that I always tried to avoid, but I guess when people were playing super powered games it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
“I’m sure she got out of that,” Nancy said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I reached up and grabbed her hand. Sure I didn’t need other people, Night Terror worked alone thank you very much, but it was nice to have some sort of contact with someone else given what I was working through. Even if she was a journalist who used to work for those rat bastards at the Starlight City News Network.
“I doubt it,” I said. “But you never know. Stranger resurrections have happened in Starlight City, after all.”
I sighed. Though as I looked at the explosion I realized there’d been some survivors. Not that I should’ve been surprised at these survivors considering they were clones of my one true love who’d been exposed to the radiation from that strange world as a result of some fucked up program Dr. Lana was embarking on.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. “Some of them actually made it.”
I wasn’t sure if I should be ecstatic or disappointed that the Fialux clones made it. It looked like some had been blown free by the explosion and now they were making their way into the city. Others had discovered the ability to fly and they were flying out of the explosion like so much debris, only in this case they weren’t arcing back down to hit the ground which meant they could fly.
I sighed. A bunch of super powered women who had no idea who they were or what they were capable of had just been unleashed on the world, and that told me the situation in Starlight City had just gone from terrible to terrible and complicated.