by Logan Jacobs
“Yeah, I agree,” Norma said as she flopped down onto the couch next to me. “I would have been able to kill that swamp monster if he hadn’t interrupted us. Now that guy is still free to hold more buses over bridges, and we barely accomplished anything.”
“Does that mean you think we should kill him?” Elizabeth looked at me and narrowed her turquoise-blue eyes.
I took a bite of my sandwich and slowly chewed on it so I didn’t have to answer right away.
My immediate answer was yes, the Shadow Knight needed to die, but that wasn’t going to be an easy task. It especially wouldn’t be easy if I didn’t have Elizabeth and Penumbra entirely on board with the idea, and then there was also the question of whose side the Shadow Knight’s old apprentice, Beacon, would take. I doubted that the Shadow Knight would want to involve him, but Slade seemed like he was getting desperate.
I needed to cut off all of his potential allies.
“Yeah, I do,” I finally admitted. “I think for the sake of Grayville, the Shadow Knight needs to die.”
The girls all fell silent, and although I knew Norma was already on my side, I let Elizabeth and Penumbra have a few moments to think it over and come to terms with the idea.
“I don’t know…” Penumbra was the first to speak. “Maybe we should try talking to him first?”
“As if he’d listen to me,” I said and then rolled my eyes. “Not after the explosion at the overflow prison. That was the last straw for him.”
“I thought that was because of Slade Industry’s faulty wiring?” the blonde heroine asked with wide eyes.
“Nope,” I sighed. “That was us.”
“So that’s why he’s after you…” she trailed off again.
“How do you feel about that?” I turned to face the blonde.
Penumbra immediately glanced away as a pink blush spread across her cheeks, and I had almost finished the rest of my sandwich by the time she finally looked back at me with her answer.
“I guess I don’t mind,” she murmured. “While I was working with Dynamo, I kinda realized… well, like, I realized that these people, uh, don’t really deserve to live, do they?”
I glanced over at my superpowered girlfriend with an immense amount of pride, and Elizabeth met my gaze with a small, self-satisfied smile.
“They don’t,” Elizabeth agreed, “but I’m still not sure if the Shadow Knight deserves to die yet.”
“Yeah,” Penumbra said. “If he won’t listen to you, maybe one of us could try to talk to him?”
“I still don’t really think he’ll listen,” Norma piped up. “I think Miles is right, and I think we should kill him.”
“Not without giving him one final chance,” Elizabeth replied as she turned her turquoise-blue eyes to me. “He sees you as the superior threat to his city, so he’s willing to make sacrifices to get you, but it’s still out of a desire to protect his city. If someone could just talk some sense into him, we might be able to get through to him.”
Elizabeth didn’t think he’d fallen off the deep end into villainy just yet. I understood why she thought that, but I also didn’t think there was anyone who was capable of talking sense into the Shadow Knight, not now that he’d made his mind up about us. He was known for being stupidly stubborn, so I doubted he would listen to anyone.
But even though I disagreed with my superhero girlfriend, I didn’t feel like I needed to argue too much about it. I knew that eventually, the Shadow Knight would reveal his true colors to everyone, and that included both Elizabeth and Penumbra.
“Alright, so we won’t kill him until we try to talk to him first,” I sighed. “That still doesn’t change the fact that he’ll be after us from now on, so we need to remain prepared for that. I think we should finally try and break into his lair to see what we’re up against.”
“His lair?” Norma asked. “The one that’s probably on that secretive island that Dan Slade showed us?”
“Flaunted in front of us, you mean,” I laughed as I recalled the trip we took on Slade’s boat with the various beautiful models. “He was practically asking for us to break into it.”
“He showed you the island?” Penumbra pouted. “I’ve only been allowed to go there once, but I know Beacon has gone there tons of times… or at least, he did until Shadow Knight cut him off.”
“I don’t know why he showed it to us, honestly,” Elizabeth said. “It felt kind of like a threat, or maybe just like he wanted to brag about it.”
“It was a challenge,” I replied. “He was daring me to try and break in.”
“He was not,” Elizabeth laughed.
“Well, he might as well have been,” I snickered, “because that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t really know if it’s a good idea,” Penumbra warned. “Slade is always two steps ahead of everyone else. He plans for, like, every possibility, so if he showed you the island at all, it means he’s ready for you to try and break in.”
“I can handle anything he can come up with,” I said. “I’m confident of that.”
I had mentally begun to come up with a plan to break into the Shadow Knight’s lair ever since he’d shown us the island while we were on his yacht. The major issue I could see was simply how to get over to the island in the first place. A break-in would require both a boat and some kind of cover that would enable us to travel to the island without being spotted.
And there were only so many places to hide in an open lake.
But what Penumbra didn’t know was that Aileen had already achieved quantum supremacy over Dan Slade’s systems, or at least over the ones we could access remotely. I was sure that as a failsafe, he had some parts of his system disconnected from the Internet and also from each other, but I could handle that easily once we’d disabled his main system.
“What do you know about his lair?” Elizabeth asked Penumbra. “It would help even if you could just tell us about the layout.”
“Yeah, I think I remember the layout,” the blonde replied. “Plus, I know the code he uses to get inside.”
“He’s probably changed it by now, but it would be a good start,” I said.
I doubted that Shadow Knight was careless enough to keep the same passcode for his secret lair after he gave it out, and he’d probably changed it as soon as Penumbra left. He was the paranoid type, so he wouldn’t have even trusted his allies with that information.
“So you said you think you can remember the interior layout?” Norma asked. “If you think you could draw a basic blueprint for us, I can get you a pad of paper and a pen.”
“Oh!” Penumbra’s pale blue eyes lit up. “Yeah, I can do that.”
Norma got up and disappeared into one of the adjacent rooms to look for a pad of paper. It would be a huge advantage if we had an idea of the layout of Slade’s secret Shadow Knight lair, even more so than the access code that he’d used a long time ago.
My assistant returned and handed over the paper pad to Penumbra. The blonde frowned and tapped her full lips with the pen, and then she levitated herself down onto the couch next to Elizabeth so she could start on her sketch.
“So, why were you only allowed to see it once?” Norma asked after she’d also sat back down and helped herself to one of the remaining caprese sandwiches.
“I asked too many questions, I think,” Penumbra replied as she continued to draw lines over the page in a careful and precise manner. “He didn’t like that. I guess I was, like, supposed to just be awed by it and say how cool I thought it was? But I was curious about some of the stuff he showed me.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“He has a lot of very cool vehicles locked up in a hangar,” she explained. “One even looked like it could fly, so I asked if he wanted my help to try and figure out how to use my powers to improve it.”
“I guess he didn’t want your suggestions,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess not,” Penumbra said as she paused her work on the lair’s blueprint. “He
had a lot of weapons around, too, and I really wanted to try out some of them, but he said I wouldn’t be able to lift any of them, so…”
“Didn’t you tell him what your power could do?” Elizabeth asked.
“At the time, I didn’t really understand it myself,” she admitted. “So I didn’t know that was something I’d be capable of.”
“Why did he even take you as an apprentice if he wasn’t interested in training you to be a hero?” Norma frowned.
“I guess because I had powers?” Penumbra shrugged. “But my powers didn’t work the way he wanted them to, so the few training sessions we had went poorly.”
“No super strength, so I guess he wasn’t interested,” I guessed.
“I thought he was pretty good at thinking outside of the box,” Elizabeth said. “The Shadow Knight can defeat anyone if he has enough time to come up with a plan, and your powers seem like they could be really useful.”
“At the time, he was fighting a lot with Beacon,” Penumbra said. “He was the Shadow Knight’s full apprentice back then as the Silver Squire, but he was almost at the end of his apprenticeship. I think that’s why the Shadow Knight took me on in the first place, because he was looking for a replacement that might be more obedient.”
“And were you more obedient?” I asked.
“Kinda,” she replied. “But I wasn’t really what he wanted anyway, so he just sort of… I don’t know, he just kind of made me do whatever Beacon was doing. We trained together and put up with a lot of the Shadow Knight’s bullshit at the same time, so Beacon’s basically like my brother.”
I was definitely going to need to give Beacon a call and see where he stood on all of this, but that was something I could do later. Ideally, I’d be able to isolate the Shadow Knight from all of his allies and sidekicks, but for now, I wanted to focus on how to best break into his lair since that was going to prove to be a lot more difficult.
“Here,” Penumbra announced as she reached around Elizabeth to hand me the finished sketch. “This is basically the layout of the Shadow Knight’s lair.”
I held it out so we could all look at the simplistic blueprint that Penumbra had drawn up. It wasn’t perfect, but it did give me a pretty decent idea of what his lair looked like, and it was a hell of a lot more than we had known just a few minutes ago.
There were multiple entrances into the underground caves of the island, but all of them led toward the main front door that Penumbra had labeled as ‘reinforced steel,’ and she told us that it could only be opened by a specific code combination.
The blonde also noted the location of several traps throughout the caves around the entrance, but I was sure there were a lot more than just the ones she knew about. Dan Slade was not the kind of man that left anything open or unsecured, so I would need to analyze every single possibility.
For example, I was very certain that the combination lock needed more than just a code to open it. It probably required some kind of fingerprint or subtle eye scan that Penumbra hadn’t noticed, and that probably also meant that the wrong code would activate the Shadow Knight’s security system.
The one thing I could appreciate about the Shadow Knight was that most of his security probably wasn’t meant to be lethal. After all, he always wanted to save even the supervillains, so his security was probably meant to contain more than it was meant to kill, and it was also likely designed to self-destruct any sensitive information if intruders were detected.
Past the combination-locked reinforced steel doors, Penumbra had drawn a main circular room that branched out into different tunnels. The hangar was situated down a tunnel to the left, and since that was where Slade housed his armored vehicles and gliders, it was a lot wider than the main circular room.
There were several other tunnels that branched off of the main room and led to other areas labeled as computer hubs, workshops, weapons, and that type of thing. I was curious what kind of technology Slade hid on the island, and I definitely wanted to know more about the vehicles in the hangar, but for now, we would probably just need to investigate the computer hub for the information that we needed.
“There are also a few more training and weapons rooms that branch off from here, and then also from here,” Penumbra added as she traced her index finger along the page. “But there’s not very much in those, from what I remember.”
“We probably want to get into the computer hubs, right, Miles?” Norma asked.
“That’s probably where he has all of his information stored,” I agreed. “But it’s probably protected by a lot of security and potentially a self-destruct system, too.”
I also didn’t think that he would have only one self-destruct system. I was certain that the computers would have at least one program installed that would completely wipe any important information from them the second that any wrong code was input or any foreign devices were inserted. I would need to work with Aileen to code a counter-program to prevent that from happening, so we could convince Slade’s computer systems that nothing was wrong. That was a task all on its own, and that didn’t even take into account the fact that he’d probably set up physical bombs to explode if the right conditions weren’t met.
I would need to think about this some more. There was absolutely no way we could just walk in there and wing it.
“Honestly, I don’t want him to know we were ever there,” I said as I looked up from the blueprints. “So we don’t want any of his self-destruct systems to activate even after we gather all of his information. If he knows that we know everything that he’s capable of, he’ll be even more careful with his plans.”
After all, Elizabeth had been right about her assessment of the Shadow Knight. If he was given enough information and enough time to plan, he could defeat anyone.
But then again, so could I, just as long as I stayed one step ahead of him.
“So we need to get in and out of his secret island base without anyone ever knowing,” Norma said. “We can do that.”
“How often is he there?” I asked Penumbra.
“Hm…” she trailed off and tapped her lips again with the pen. “Pretty often? But the heat on Slade Industries after the prison explosion probably has him in Slade Tower more often now.”
“Good to know.” A plan had started to come together in my head. “I think I have an idea to keep him away from his base when we decide to sneak in.”
“Already?” Elizabeth asked.
“It needs a bit of work, but of course I do,” I said with a grin. “I’m going to head down into the basement to work on it some more. In the meantime, why don’t you three figure out where Bogdan swam off to?”
“Oh, I almost forgot about him,” Norma huffed.
“Don’t feel bad that you couldn’t get him,” I told my assistant. “You did really well up against him by yourself, and we didn’t know the Shadow Knight would come and fuck things up for us. Besides, you’re the one who came up with the idea to put a tracker on him.”
“Oh…” Norma turned bright red. “Well, I mean, you guys were-- well, thanks, I guess.”
“Still, we should take care of Bogdan before we figure out what to do about the Shadow Knight,” Elizabeth sighed.
“Good idea,” Penumbra said. “Oh, and if we turn him over to the police, then we’d look really good for the media, right?”
“No, we’re definitely going to kill him,” I laughed.
“Oh, right,” the blonde giggled. “Well, then, we’ll just turn his body over to the police. That’ll still make you look really good, and it’ll make the Shadow Knight look even worse.”
I thought about what she’d just said for a moment as another part of my potential plan clicked into place.
“That’s a good idea,” I told her. “Then you three work on tracking down Bogdan’s coordinates. I’ve got an idea.”
“Okay, Miles,” Norma replied.
All three women huddled together on the couch as my assistant pulled out her tablet to pull up th
e tracker on the swamp monster so they could figure out where he was hiding out, and I headed to the basement. I wanted to work on my ideas, but I also wanted to talk to Aileen about Penumbra.
The blonde superheroine had definitely proved her worth, but I wasn’t sure I could totally trust her yet. Since Aileen was always my ultimate backup plan just in case everything went wrong, I always talked to her about every possible scenario, and right now, that included the idea that Penumbra might turn against us and take the side of the Shadow Knight.
But even though I wanted to be prepared, I also still felt pretty confident that I’d be able to trust the blonde soon.
When I stepped into my basement workshop, Aileen stepped forward to greet me.
“If you had developed my skin covering, I would not have to hide at all,” Aileen said in her low, sultry voice.
“The prototype needs more work than expected,” I replied as I glanced toward the worktable that I’d set aside to make upgrades on Aileen.
The layer of ‘skin’ was now complete enough that I could have placed it on her, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how it looked. I had, at least, managed to perfect the facial expression technology, so as she came to stand beside me, Aileen pouted in a manner that was almost cute.
Well, it would have been cute if she’d had skin instead of a shiny chrome plating.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get to it,” I said as I headed over toward one of the computer terminals to start typing. “But right now, we have something more urgent.”
“The Shadow Knight; I am aware,” she replied as she followed me to watch the screens at my side. She didn’t have to stand next to me to access the terminal since it was remotely linked to her, but it seemed to make her feel more human to look at it with me.
“I want to use the news broadcasts to our advantage,” I explained.
“They are already firmly in our favor,” Aileen responded. “Your new suit design has gone over quite well with the media.”
I chuckled when I saw that someone had already taken the design of my helmet and turned it into a small logo, and I felt even more satisfied when I saw that it had begun to go viral on social media in combination with one of the clips where I fought against the Shadow Knight on the bridge.