Villainess Love Issue 1: Villains and Heroes

by Archer, Lexi

  Villainess Love

  Issue 1: Villains and Heroes

  Lexi Archer

  Copyright 2014 Lexi Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  This novel is based on a previously published work rewritten with all new content.

  First digital edition electronically published by Lexi Archer, December 2014

  Let your fantasies come true with Lexi Archer…

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  Table of Contents

  1: Distractions

  2: A New Challenger

  3: Cops and Villains

  4: Basic Physics

  1: Distractions

  “Night Terror!”

  I smiled as the dust settled around me. I had to admit that was one of my more a dramatic entrances. I always figured if you were going to do something then you should do it with style, and a focused energy blast on a revolving door leading into a bank that wasn’t designed to handle anything like a focused energy blast was always suitably impressive to the normals.

  Tellers and patrons alike looked at me in terror, shying away as I strolled through the bank like I owned the place. Which, for the next few minutes at least, was more or less true. I could do whatever I wanted, and there wasn’t anybody who could stop me.

  Damn it felt good to be a villain.

  Of course that didn’t mean the normals wouldn’t try to stop me. Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and saw a chubby security guard wearing a white uniform and a badge that looked almost, but not quite entirely unlike the police badges from the local constabulary. He was pulling out a gun, an ancient revolver, and moving it towards me. I had to admire him for his tenacity. And for his ability to handle himself under pressure. He pulled the gun without wavering at all. As though he practiced that sort of thing just waiting for a chance to use it.

  Definitely not what I’d expect from an older bank security guard. Maybe he was former PD, though it’d have to be way former PD since everyone on the force since I started working knew better than to draw on me.

  Not that it was going to help him.

  The gun came up, the barrel pointed at me, and he fired. People screamed, as though something as simple as an ancient six shooter could actually be a problem when they had a living god in front of them throwing around the kind of futuristic weaponry that would make Heinlein drool.

  I lifted a hand and flicked as the bullet came towards me. It was easy enough to track it through the heads-up display I had overlaid on my mask. A focused energy field sprang up in front of my hand and the bullet ricocheted away from me with a delightful ting. Only it wasn’t entirely accurate to say that it ricocheted. More that I deflected the bullet away from me, and the energy of that deflection disintegrated it before it could fly away and do more damage.

  Hey, I might be a villain, but I wasn’t completely heartless. Besides, collateral damage was always a pain in the butt. It always got the talking heads going about how heartless and cruel you were. Basically it was a PR disaster that I wasn’t interested in getting involved with.

  Only it was difficult to resist the urge to create a PR disaster by disintegrating the security guard since he insisted on emptying his gun at me. Typical security guard. Shoot first and ask questions later, never stopping to think that by trying to shoot me he was putting the lives of all the innocent people in this bank at risk.

  I resisted the urge to vaporize him, but I did set my wrist blaster to stun and sent off a quick shot. I grimaced and hoped he didn’t have a heart condition. There was only so much you could do with a “stun” setting on these things. He didn’t look like the type to have a heart condition, but that was the best I could do.

  It wasn’t as satisfying as vaporization, but at least it took care of him.

  I looked around the bank lobby and raised an eyebrow. “Anybody else want to be a hero?”

  Nobody moved. Good. The last thing I needed was some normal trying to impress their lady by trying to take me on. The last thing I needed was to rob a bank while there was a real hero in plain clothes hanging out. Not that I was too worried about it, I wasn’t the number one villain in the city for nothing and the real heroes knew to stay away, but it would put a cramp in my plans if I had to take the time to dispatch a hero on the top of doing the usual work of robbing a bank.

  “Good,” I said with a nod. “You all can go about your business. I’ll be in the vault if anybody needs me.”

  I never understand why these banks insisted on keeping vaults full of actual cash money in this day and age. In a world where dollars were created with the push of a button it seemed like a silly anachronism to actually keep the physical paper around. Not that I was complaining. An old school robbery was a nice distraction from time to time.

  Bank patrons and employees alike still cowered behind their desks or against potted plants as I walked through the lobby. I rolled my eyes. They always did that, even after I told them to go about business as usual. It’s not like I was a normal bank robber taking people hostage. I didn’t have any need for something as a brutish as that. And it’s not like I was actually taking any of their money either. Most of their transactions were electronic as well, and I couldn’t care less what the tellers had in their drawers. I was after the bigger bags of money.

  I whistled a happy tune as I raised my wrist blaster towards the vault. Some enterprising bank manager managed to get the vault shut before I blew the doors. I knew they managed to get it shut because it had been sitting wide open when I walked in wearing plain clothes to scout the place before I stepped out and made the switch to my work outfit.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  Apparently that enterprising bank manager was going to make a stand. A young guy in a cheap suit and tie stepped in front of the vault door and held out his arms.

  “I’m not going to let you do this,” he said. I cocked an eyebrow at him and he swallowed.

  “If you’re going to be standing there in a minute then you’d better hope you have superpowers,” I said.

  He swallowed again. “You won’t shoot me. You don’t kill civilians.”

  I cocked my head. Now there was an unpleasant development. The moment it started getting around that you tried to avoid collateral damage it gave the collateral damage an excuse to get in your way in an attempt to stop you from world domination. It was that old quote about having nothing but work once word got around that you’d gone soft.

  Of course there was an easy solution for that. I cocked my head and started charging my wrist blaster. It was going to take one hell of a blast to knock that vault door off its hinges.

  “Now you put me in a difficult position,” I said. The ominous hum of my wrist blaster filled the room, filled the silence. He tugged at his tie and a bead of sweat ran down his face. “Now that I know you have absolutely no plans of moving, that you’re using yourself as a human shield for a bunch of paper and metal, I have more incentive to just blast you along with the door and use you as an example than I do to spare you.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said.

  I held my wrist blaster up. Energy crackled and little bolts of electricity arced back and forth in front of the barrel. The ominous hum was growing louder and louder, sounding like the sort of electric hum you’d get from a high tension electrical wire with a couple of angry killer bee hives hanging from it and magnified by about a hundr
ed.

  “Care to try me?” I asked.

  The suit swallowed one last time, that must be a nervous tic with the guy or something, and then he thought better of playing a game of chicken with the most powerful super villain in the city and the dove out of the way. A good thing too, because I was completely serious about him being more valuable as an example than anything else.

  I glanced at the indicators on my wrist blaster. The ominous hum was louder than I’d ever heard before. Strictly speaking it was probably more charged than I needed even for this thick vault door, but I was in the mood for a little theatricality now that the stupid suit dared to defy me. It had put me in a mood. And that hadn’t happened in a long time.

  A little yellow warning light flashed on the wrist blaster. That meant we were about five minutes away from a meltdown that would take out a few city blocks at least. I let loose. A bolt of crackling energy flew across the room and slammed into the door. Solid steel, I figured it was going to take a lot to get it off, but apparently banks had started cheaping out on vault doors. It slammed into the metal and the entire damn thing just disintegrated. Disintegrated!

  Either my stuff was a hell of a lot more powerful than I thought, or somebody had decided to save a little money by getting a vault door that looked impressive but couldn’t hold up to your average super villain with a futuristic charged energy weapon. Which was a major mistake if you wanted to hold onto your physical cash reserves in this city.

  I stepped through the vault door and put up a force field behind me with a casual wave of my hand. My force field generator really only worked in small directed bursts, good for things like deflecting those bullets the guard shot at me with his little pea shooter, and if somebody really wanted to get in here while the field was spread across the entire entrance they’d be able to.

  Only who would be silly enough to try something like that? They just saw me blow the vault door aside like it was cardboard, and then they saw me put up a force field that shimmered with just enough translucence to make out shapes on the other side. Why on earth would someone be stupid enough to go against that? How could they know it wasn’t going to do something like disintegrate them if they touched the field?

  They didn’t. Theatricality was as much a part of being a good super villain as actually having gadgets that could follow through on some of my threats. If one out of five gadgets worked the way people expected then they started to think five out of five gadgets were capable of vaporizing them or doing otherwise nasty things if they dared defy me.

  I glanced around the vault. There were some gold bars that had been rattled loose by the door being disintegrated. There were great piles of cash in giant bags. They didn’t have anything as silly as a giant dollar signs on them like cartoons would lead you to believe, but I’d stolen enough of them over the years to know the telltale signs.

  I held up my wrist computer. “You ready, CORVAC?”

  “Ready mistress,” CORVAC’s metallic voice came through the wrist computer.

  I moved over to the back wall and leaned against it. I watched the translucent shapes of people running around outside, no doubt trying to get out of the bank while the employees tried to figure out how the hell they’d get rid of me. I’m sure the police were being called and I’d have to deal with that once I was back on the other side.

  I slumped down against the wall and sighed. This wasn’t nearly as distracting as I’d hoped. I tapped a button on my belt and a long range teleportation unit that was about as tall as I was materialized from the pattern buffer in one of my belt storage units.

  “Do you have the coordinates CORVAC?”

  “Yes mistress,” CORVAC said. “Remotely programming the long range unit now. I still don’t understand why you needed to make a personal appearance for this.”

  “Just transport everything out of this room in about five minutes,” I said.

  “You’re not coming with?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m going to take the long way out.”

  “Whatever you say, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “I could do without the sarcasm CORVAC,” I snapped.

  “So terribly sorry mistress.”

  Not for the first time I regretted installing that extra module that gave him the ability to feel emotions. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I figured it’d make him happier. I thought it might make him a more enjoyable conversational companion since he was the only person I had to talk to when I was busy at work in the lab.

  Damn were there times I wished I had someone other than that stupid computer to talk to when I was working.

  But no. Adding in that emotion chip seemed to turn him into a miserable, depressed, misanthropic, and overly sarcastic pile of circuitry. And it’s not like I could go back in and remove that emotion chip since I’m pretty sure he had safeguards on most of his systems that’d vaporize me if I ever got close enough to his hardware for anything other than an authorized upgrade.

  No, CORVAC definitely wasn’t the kind of computer to idly set by singing Daisy while someone ripped out his circuit boards because they were displeased with his performance or annoyed by his homicidal streak.

  I glanced through the shimmering shield and sighed again. They definitely called the cops. At least there were darker shapes that looked very much like the local constabulary lining up to do their impotent best to stop me from doing whatever the hell I pleased.

  To be perfectly honest this job could’ve been a hell of a lot easier. I could’ve hacked into the bank computers and created some money for myself and transferred it, all anonymous and friendly like, into my untraceable bank accounts where nobody would ever know the money was even missing. I could’ve cased the bank, gotten the coordinates of the vault, walked into the lobby in civilian clothes with my belt on, materialized the long range teleportation unit into the vault using the short range teleporter built into my belt, transported all the contents out, and then rolled in the money without anyone knowing the great Night Terror was in their midst.

  Sure there was always the risk of also transporting some unfortunate bank employee along with the cash, but a quick transportation back to the old coordinates minus all the cash usually took care of that.

  Only then the crime would go down and no one would know the great Night Terror had been in their midst. Every two-bit villain in the city would step up and take credit for the job and there would always be some doubt I’d actually done it even if I took credit. No, my reputation prevented me from doing anything other than a personal appearance for a job.

  Of course the main reason I was out today was boredom. This whole thing he had gotten too easy. There were no new worlds to conquer. I was the top villain in a city that was filled with villains and heroes, and there was nobody who dared challenge me.

  Boring.

  I mean sure the local cops dared to challenge me from time to time, but that was usually a token show of resistance and it’s not like they even tried that hard anymore. We both knew the score. They didn’t overwork themselves trying to grab me, and I made sure I didn’t cause too much collateral damage, make them look too bad, or accidentally vaporize one of them while I was trying to make an escape.

  No, you definitely knew you’d made it as a villain it when you went toe to toe with the cops so often that you gave one another professional courtesy.

  But the flipside of that professional courtesy was that it made the whole damn thing so boring. It was nothing like the early days when I was making a name for myself. When the people had no idea who Night Terror was. When I still had to prove myself against the best heroes the city had to offer. When I still had to fight for territory against the best villains the city had to offer.

  I smiled as I thought back to those days. Now that had been fun. Now those heroes ran in the other direction when they heard I was around, and the criminal element in the city was well aware that Night Terror’s territory was wherever the hell Night Terror decided to be at a given moment.


  And it was all so damn boring. There wasn’t any challenge anymore. There was no fun in it.

  I’d hoped getting out and doing a good old-fashioned bank robbery would be a nice change of pace from the boring research stuff I’d been doing recently. Stupid CORVAC and his obsession with having me build him a giant death robot so he could get in on some of the city dominating fun. Not that I planned on ever letting him actually get out and take the thing for a spin, but drafting the plans for a pointless giant death robot was the same exhausting work whether or not you intended the thing to actually see use out in the real world.

  So much for a distraction. Now I felt more depressed than I’d been before I made this run. I’d hoped it would perk me up, but it was having the opposite effect.

  I reached down and made sure my wrist blaster was good and charged, that my shield was ready to go, and that the antigravity units and a strength modifiers hidden in my suit were good to go.

  Hey, I might be bored, but I wasn’t going to go into a fight with a handicap and throw the game. I was never so bored that I’d deliver anything less than a total curb stomp to my enemies. Well, maybe not the cops. They were just doing their job after all. But I still had to be good to go and ready to take on whatever they threw at me.

  Everything was in order. Everything was always in order. It’s not like I’d leave my lair if my reactor wasn’t working properly or one of the other numerous bits of body enhancing technology that adorned my suit weren’t good to go.

  I sighed. It was time to go out and be the scariest villain in the city. Again. It was time to make the police run in terror. Again. It was time to show any heroes who might be working in the vicinity exactly how futile it was to take on Night Terror. Again.

  Yeah, just another boring day at work.

  I let the force field drop.

  2: A New Challenger