Villains Don't Save Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  I had no other choice though. I needed to end this, and unlike Fialux I wasn’t quite ready to risk flying right through one of the damn things considering my hide wasn’t nearly as invulnerable as hers usually was.

  I knew exactly what was happening even if I couldn’t see it happen. This time around it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as when I’d flown down to the giant hole in CORVAC’s giant death robot chassis and tossed in a matter dispersal bomb.

  No, this time the thing materialized in the middle of the robot and there was no way to see the reaction going on in there. No way to see the red LED spinning faster and faster until it became a solid line.

  Though it wasn’t nearly as long between the spinning and the solid line as it had been when, say, I demonstrated the matter dispersal bomb to my class in the journalism department at the university.

  I was in a hurry. The last thing I needed was to continue fighting a giant robot when Dr. Lana was obviously the superior foe on the field right now. Every moment that I was distracted with this robot was a moment when she could swoop down and do even more nefarious things to Fialux.

  That seemed to be the whole plan. If I hadn’t been the one who planned the whole infiltration of the stupid Applied Sciences Department I might almost suspect Dr. Lana had engineered this moment. At the very least she’d obviously been waiting for a chance to take on me and Fialux in a fight.

  She’d probably been biding her time for this moment since we fought off CORVAC.

  No, I couldn’t see what was happening deep inside the robot, but I could sure as hell imagine what was happening. Right about now the red line around the thing’s equator would be solid. The teleporter inside would calculate a sphere roughly five to ten feet in diameter, it varied depending on how big the thing it’d been teleported into was and how much damage the circuits thought they needed to cause based on readings from the outside casing.

  The bomb went off, its constituent parts disappearing on a molecular level as it started to rip everything inside the robot apart at that same molecular level.

  The only outward sign that anything had gone wrong was pretty damn spectacular too. One moment the robot was in one solid piece that was obviously busted in a few places, there were a couple of wires trailing out of it and several of its joints had been knocked to hell and back from the combined force of me firing off nearly everything in my arsenal at the same time, and the next moment its entire midsection, including its chest, ceased to exist.

  I like to think there was a moment of surprise on the robot’s face. The metal eyebrows Dr. Lana had obviously custom fabricated to give it the ability to portray a limited range of human emotion, mostly the more menacing parts of that range, shot up as though it really was genuinely shocked to see its bottom half destroyed.

  For a moment the top part of the robot’s torso, its arms, and its head hung in the air even as the bottom part of its legs just above the knees down to the feet continued trying to step forward.

  Then gravity and physics took over and the thing came crashing down to the ground. It slid maybe a good twenty feet, but it was far enough away from us that the slide wasn’t in any danger of hitting either myself or Fialux.

  Good, because I had ridiculously bigger fish to fry right about now. Dr. Lana was out there, and I was going to take her out even if I had to bring the entire university down around me to do it.

  15

  Villainous Duel

  I looked up to Dr. Lana. She still had her beam weapon out and she was aiming it right for me. Apparently she’d decided if there was something that needed done then she was going to do it herself.

  I sighed. This was starting to get tediously exhausting. Like not even the good kind of exhausting you get right after a workout. We’re talking the kind of exhausting when you’re in the fourth hour of a half hour meeting with all the department heads and Professor Binton who’s in love with the sound of his own voice hasn’t even gotten a chance to go yet.

  I’d expected no less, of course, but it would’ve been nice to have maybe just a little bit of a break after saving Fialux. It looked like there was going to be no rest for the wicked.

  I brought my wrist blaster up and fired at the same time that she did. Maybe if this was some stupid movie there’d be a spectacular light show where both our beams hit at the same time and there was some fancy explosion right in the middle.

  The problem is that kind of stuff might look impressive in movies and comic books where they tried to immortalize the fights that happened in real life in Starlight City on a daily basis, a tasteless exercise in exploiting the tragedies and triumphs of people’s lives for a bit of entertainment if you asked me, but it was one of many things that worked better on the big screen than it did in real life.

  Then again nobody ever asked me or pulled me in to consult on those movies. Nobody ever bothered to send me a royalty statement for all those movies that were so obviously based on my exploits for that matter. I wouldn’t have to rob another bank for as long as I lived if I got even a fraction of those royalties.

  Stupid pesky laws that prevented criminals from profiting from their crimes.

  No, the reality of firing a beam weapon at someone at the same time they fired their beam weapon was both weapons landed where they were going to land, and the beam was so narrowly focused, you needed narrow focus to have a chance of doing some damage unlike what you saw in the movies because that’s sort of the whole point of a beam in the first place, that there wasn’t a chance it was even going to hit the target on the first try, let alone another impossibly focused beam.

  For example this time around the sidewalk next to me exploded while up above the bricks behind Dr. Lana also exploded, and I walked the beam towards her.

  Unfortunately she jerked out of the way at the last moment, she had no trouble flying around with her antigrav which told me she’d been using it for awhile, and managed to avoid getting destroyed just like I managed to avoid getting blasted by her beam.

  I did a little duck and a roll and when I came back up I was scanning the area for any sign of Dr. Lana. Both with my eyes and with every sensor suite that was a part of my suit. At least all the parts that still worked without having a borderline symbiotic relationship with CORVAC’s traitorous circuits.

  But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She wasn’t registering anywhere along the electromagnetic spectrum, for that matter.

  Something made a small scraping noise behind me. I picked it up with my enhanced hearing module. I smiled. Sometimes if you couldn’t see something it was better to listen for it.

  It had been a real bitch trying to figure out the exact balance that made the thing turn off when the decibel level got too high while also leaving it sensitive enough that I could pick up interesting things when I needed to. Like, say, in the middle of a pitched battle.

  There were still times that I figured I might be filtering out a part of the auditory world that I needed to be hearing, particularly in the middle of those pitched battles, but that was neither here nor there.

  The point is this time around I heard the distinct sound of someone trying to sneak up behind me. And so I was able to whirl around and point my weapon at a spot that held absolutely nothing. Well, almost nothing. There was a familiar shimmer there characteristic of a field bending light around it to hide whatever was inside that field.

  “You have a cloaking device,” I said. “I’d say that’s clever if I hadn’t invented the damned thing myself years ago.”

  The field shimmered and she popped into existence in front of me. She winked. “How do you think I got it?”

  I growled. I probably should have fired off some more of my weapons, but this felt like the kind of fight that needed to be a little more personal. The kind of fight where I needed to get my fists a little dirty.

  More than a little dirty. By the time I was done with this I wanted her to have one hell of a bloody nose and I wanted to have some of that blood on my knuckles, damn it.


  I did have a brief moment where I considered whether or not I was doing the right thing here. After all, I’d had the same thought about facing down those robots, and look where it’d gotten me. Fialux beat up and unconscious. Me duking it out one-on-one with the woman who was my true archnemesis.

  It’d been a hell of a day, and ultimately I was pissed off enough that I didn’t care if this might be a stupid idea. I needed to throw down.

  I roared as I slammed into her and we both went flying up and over the edge of a dorm. I slammed her down onto said dorm roof and she let out a satisfying grunt. I’m sure the college kids below us trying to work or sleep or fuck or whatever the hell it was college students did in the dorms these days, probably just sitting and staring at their phones like the mindless zombies anyone over the age of twenty had become since the advent of the smart phone, were getting a hell of a surprise.

  That or they thought there was one hell of a massive raccoon running across their roof.

  She skidded under me and I activated my antigravity units in reverse to give her an extra push down into the roof which only caused us to skid even farther. Dr. Lana let out a surprised scream and I slammed my fist into her face a couple of times.

  Of course it added to the freakiness factor that no sooner had my fist slammed into her face than I could see some of the wounds I was creating starting to heal in real time. Huh. Now there was something you didn’t see every day.

  Outside of one of my medbays, at least. I saw stuff like this all the time in the time lapse videos I took of my time in those things, but those were supposed to heal you.

  She wasn’t supposed to slowly start healing as I was punching her, damn it. Though it did make it easier to keep punching her very punchable face if I knew it was going to get better.

  We reached the other end of the building and went off the edge, but I didn’t care. She’d already shown me she didn’t rely on any sort of technology to protect her ass, so I was going to drive that ass right down into the pavement. At full speed.

  We slammed into that pavement and she let out a cry. I heard a couple of sickening crunches as presumably a few bones in her body were broken under the force of the impact. I could only hope that they would stay broken for a little while.

  I liked to think I was a glass half full kind of villain. The way I saw it the sudden revelation that Dr. Lana had some sort of weird healing power, whether it was something she came by naturally or nanobots reconstructing her or some sort of cellular manipulation technology didn’t really matter, meant that I could do all sorts of fun experiments to figure out exactly how much damage I could do to her before it killed her.

  Yeah, I was in the sort of vengeful mood right about now that I figured an experiment like that could be fun.

  The problem was right about now I wasn’t doing so hot either. Again I was greeted with a cacophony of red and yellow warning displays telling me nothing good was happening to my suit. If I took a hit right now I’d be in trouble, but I didn’t care. I was so blinded by rage that I’d do anything to take her out, or at the very least injure her to the point that she couldn’t do any more damage for a little while.

  She looked up at me. Blood trickled down from her nose, and her face was black and blue. I raised my fist and I was ready to pound on her some more, but for some reason seeing her looking up at me like that, completely broken, took all the fight out of me. Poof. Just as quickly as the rage filled me it was gone.

  One thing was for certain, at least. I’d managed to get the upper hand on Dr. Lana. Again. Besides, the more pragmatic part of my mind was taking hold. Telling me that if I was going to have a chance at figuring out what the hell she’d done to Fialux I was going to have to have her in one piece with a sound working mind.

  I stood. Wavered just a little, I’m not ashamed to admit to that, but then managed to stand tall. I raised my chin high.

  I’d won this round, after all. Now it was time to play that shit up and let her know who was the greatest villain in this city. Besides, we had some unfinished business the two of us.

  I looked down at her and shook my head. Tried to look as menacing as possible. I had a lot of practice looking menacing, and even through the obvious pain haze she looked good and intimidated.

  She damn well better be intimidated after that finale to our little fight.

  “Well? Where is it?” I asked.

  She coughed a couple of times. Some blood came out. I would’ve been worried about that were it not for her performance in the Applied Sciences Department earlier and the freaky way I’d seen her bruises trying to heal even as I made new ones on her face.

  There was something going on with her, and I didn’t feel nearly as bad now about doing grievous bodily harm to her as I had earlier when I thought I’d almost killed her.

  Apparently killing her was a lot more difficult than I could’ve imagined. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that now that the weird rage had drained from me, leaving me drained, but right now I was more annoyed than anything.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Your move,” I said. “This is the part where you give me the line that tells me why I haven’t actually defeated you.”

  I threw my hands out. I was in a mood to throw down a challenge even though hard won experience had taught me that throwing out a challenge like this was practically begging the universe to smack you around a bit.

  “So where is it? Show me what you’ve got.”

  16

  Showdown

  I’m not sure what brought on this combination of bravado and irritation. Maybe it was that I was annoyed with myself more than anything. This was a problem I’d created, after all.

  I was the one who came to the Applied Sciences Department looking for trouble. I was the idiot who told Fialux not to come along in the first place. If she’d been there when the fight started then maybe we could’ve taken out those robots before Dr. Lana had a chance to fire off that weapon.

  I had serious doubts about that, but it’s not like reality ever had anything to do with beating yourself up with hindsight.

  I was the one who was stupid enough to not look into what made her anti-Fialux weapons tick. Though thinking about those weapons did give me an idea now that I had her here completely and totally at my mercy.

  I scanned her for the familiar signature that would indicate she had a pattern buffer hidden somewhere on her person, but there was nothing. Damn. Maybe she hadn’t borrowed my teleporter technology and figured out how to use it to store her personal arsenal on her person.

  She did still have that blaster though. The whatever-the-hell-it-was she used to try and take me out. And she brought it to bear on me as I stood over her posturing.

  Huh. That wasn’t good. Generally you didn’t want a high energy focused weapon pointed at you like that.

  Then again I wasn’t like everyone else. Sure there was all that advice I gave the students in my Surviving A Heroic Intervention class. If a beam weapon is pointed at you it’s already too late, so you don’t let things get to the point where the thing is pointed at you in the first place.

  That was for mere mortals. I was so much more than that.

  Apparently she’d managed to hold onto the thing through that whole maddening skid across the top of the dorm. It let out a nice ominous hum as the thing charged, a sure sign it was my design since I loved nothing more than a nice ominous hum to let people know they’d made a mistake standing in front of one of my weapons, but I wasn’t intimidated in the least.

  No, the problem for Dr. Lana right about now was I was completely over this shit. I reached down and snatched the blaster out of her hands faster than she could react. Held it up. Looked down at her in disgust.

  And I snapped the thing in two. Sure I had to turn up the strength just a little, and after that skid where my suit helped me take the laws of physics into a back alley and rough them up a bit I barely had the power recharged to the point I could do it,
but it looked suitably impressive and right now that’s all that mattered.

  Dr. Lana’s eyes went wide and clearly she was a little worried about suddenly finding herself face-to-face with a villainess who was obviously very pissed off.

  She licked her lips.

  “No more bullshit. What did you do to her?” I asked.

  “Do to who?” she asked.

  “To whom. You’re supposed to be an academic. And you know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about,” I growled.

  A crowd was starting to gather. I heard a murmur that was my first indication something was off, and when I looked up there were students working up the courage to move in all around us.

  I looked up and met their eyes. Several of them brought up those damned phones that were so omnipresent these days and they were snapping pictures and taking video.

  Okay. Maybe they weren’t working up the courage to approach us. I had to remember I was dealing with the Internet video generation and not the more sensible older generation who knew better than to stick around when the villains and heroes were fighting.

  I let out a disgusted noise. Kids these days. Rather than experiencing something, really witnessing it, their first instinct was to hold up their phones and document the history they were witnessing for the rest of the world to see on a camera that wasn’t anywhere close to up to the task.

  Whatever. They could go right on taking their stupid pictures and their stupid videos. I had adult work to do here, after all, and so I reached down and picked up Dr. Lana. Lifted her in the air.

  I was so pumped on anger and adrenaline that I doubted I even needed to use the strength enhancement in my suit to lift her, but it helped.