by Logan Jacobs
I switched up the volume on the news broadcast I’d put on. It was yet another forty-minute piece called the “Fall of the Shadow Knight.”
The media really churned out that stuff fast.
“I can’t believe this is still all over the news,” Penumbra sighed as she sank down onto the couch next to me.
I could believe it, of course, since this was all part of my plans. Still, I was almost surprised by how quickly it had worked-- within only a few hours, the news was already all over social media on top of the news channels themselves. I’d need to check in with Aileen later to see the specifics, but right now, I was exhausted.
“Does pasta for dinner sound alright?” Norma asked as she shooed Elizabeth out of the kitchen.
“I was going to be fine with a protein bar,” my super-powered girlfriend said as she rolled her eyes. “But I have to admit, pasta sounds way better.”
“Aileen, can you help find me a good recipe?” Norma asked one of the screens I’d installed in the kitchen.
“Certainly,” my AI responded, and she began to work together with Norma to cook dinner.
Penumbra seemed too distracted by the news reports about her previous mentor to think much about Aileen, and although she’d definitely proved her worth against Bogdan, I’d wait until tomorrow to introduce them properly.
“With Bogdan out of the way, we can take the rest of the night off,” I announced, “so let’s all just try to relax a little.”
“If you say so,” Elizabeth said as she leaned over the couch to kiss me on the cheek.
“Then can we turn on something else?” Penumbra sighed. “I don’t really want to watch this anymore.”
“Sure, you pick.” Elizabeth took the remote from me and tossed it over to the blonde.
I felt pretty satisfied about our success with the swamp monster. After the disaster on the bridge, I had wanted a swift victory against Bogdan, and we had certainly gotten that. Plus, we had also gotten Penumbra to join our team, and so far, that certainly seemed like a major benefit.
The bridge had been bad, but now I was glad that we had almost lost the bus. It had pulled Penumbra over to our side, and maybe even more importantly, it had caused irreparable damage to the Shadow Knight’s reputation.
I was about to put my vote in to help decide what the two superpowered women wanted to watch, but a red alert suddenly blared across all the screens.
“Creator, incoming!” Aileen announced. “An unknown vehicle is speeding toward the mansion. It will arrive within the next thirty seconds!”
I immediately pulled up the security footage, but the vehicle in the video didn’t seem like any of the Shadow Knight’s armored cars. In fact, it seemed pretty average other than the fact that it zigzagged back and forth like its driver had just about lost all control over it.
“I’ll handle it,” I told the girls. “Just stay alert.”
I knew the security system would activate if I needed it to, so I just stayed put and watched the footage for a moment. I wanted to see who was in the car before I set off the security, but I had a feeling I already knew who it was.
As soon as the jet black sports car pulled into park, a man stumbled free of the car with his hands clutched to his side like he was covering an open wound. He staggered several steps forward and then collapsed face-up on the driveway before he even made it to the door.
As soon as I saw his face, I jumped over the back of the couch and ran out the front door.
It was Beacon, and he looked like he’d been beaten to a pulp.
Chapter 7
I carried the unconscious and beat up Beacon back inside to lay him down on the couch.
“Aileen, set up one of the rooms upstairs for him,” I told my AI.
“I will inform you when it is ready,” Aileen responded.
I heard the basement door open behind me, and I knew that my robotic assistant had complied and gone upstairs. Luckily, I didn’t have to explain anything about Aileen to Penumbra just yet since she was entirely focused on Beacon. I knew that the blonde thought of Beacon as her brother, so it had to be hard for her to see him like this.
“What happened?” the blonde asked as she tore her eyes away from Beacon to look at me.
“I don’t know exactly,” I replied. “But I’m almost positive that it has something to do with his discussion with the Shadow Knight.”
“He wouldn’t do that…” Penumbra trailed off. “Right? I mean, why would he?”
“Because he’s lost his mind,” Norma huffed as she gently nudged Penumbra out of the way to get a closer look at Beacon.
Once again, Norma’s usefulness showed itself as she used all the skills of an average doctor to examine Beacon’s injuries. She’d grabbed the medical kit already, so she started to treat some of his injuries right away.
The ex-apprentice was in bad shape. His lip was split and still dripped with blood, and one of his eyes was swollen entirely shut. There were severe bruises all over his body, and it looked like one of his wrists had been fractured.
I had expected their confrontation to go poorly, but it was still difficult to see just how poorly it had gone.
Still, there didn’t seem to be a concussion or any kind of life-threatening injury, so Norma was confident that she could handle it on her own at home. That meant we wouldn’t need to rush him to an emergency room, and the less we had to involve the authorities, the better. If we took him to an emergency room, the doctors would definitely try to get the police involved, and that wasn’t in my plans at the moment. If the media got wind of what had happened to the Shadow Knight’s former apprentice, it might help drag his reputation further through the mud, but for now, I wanted to keep Beacon’s involvement with us a little bit more of a secret.
“I still can’t believe that the Shadow Knight would do this to him,” Penumbra murmured. “He never got along well with Beacon, but I always thought he had some kind of affection for him. Like… fatherly, you know? And Beacon really looked up to him, even if he didn’t always show it.”
“Like Norma said, the Shadow Knight has lost his mind,” I told her.
“I never should have idolized him the way I did, either,” Elizabeth growled as she watched Norma clean and treat Beacon’s injuries.
“You idolized him?” Penumbra asked.
“He seemed like he had a good head on his shoulders,” my girlfriend sighed. “He wasn’t like the Wardens, and he seemed to actually care about his city and his people.”
“I think he did at one point,” the blonde said as she placed a hand on Elizabeth’s arm. “But now… I don’t know. I guess he doesn’t deserve respect from either of us.”
“You’re right,” the dark-haired woman said and then laid her own hand on top of Penumbra’s.
“How does he look?” I asked Norma.
“Well, it’s nothing he can’t recover from, but it might take a while until he’s in fighting shape again,” Norma said without looking up from her patient.
My assistant had wrapped his fractured wrist and applied salves to most of the cuts and bruises, so now she started to wrap all the rest of his injuries in bandages. When she was finished with the bandages, Beacon looked even worse because now he looked like he’d been through a war and not just through a bad conversation with a crow-feathered bastard.
“Creator, the room upstairs is ready,” Aileen informed us remotely through the screens. “I have set up a basic monitor as well so we can keep a watch on his condition.”
“Good,” I said. “Norma, do you think he’s safe to move?”
“Well…” My assistant frowned as she studied Beacon’s unconscious form, but she eventually nodded. “If we’re careful, we can probably move him.”
“I can carry him,” Penumbra offered. “If Dynamo keeps his body from flipping around in the air, I can levitate him upstairs.”
That seemed like the safest way to transport him that would cause the least amount of movement, so I nodded to allow it, b
ut before the blonde had even started to float the unconscious man into the air, Beacon suddenly groaned and blinked his one good eye open.
“W-what--” he moaned.
“Beacon!” Penumbra gasped. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve just been hit by a truck,” the injured hero rasped and then tried to move. “Ugh…”
“Don’t move,” Norma scolded. “You’re seriously injured. How did this happen?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Beacon tried to open his swollen eye but gave up and just looked at me with his other eye. “That conversation didn’t go very well-- sorry, Miles.”
“It’s not your fault that Slade has lost his mind,” I replied.
“I know, but I was supposed to be the one to bring him in,” he sighed. “He’s my responsibility--”
“Not anymore, he isn’t,” Penumbra huffed. “Really, what made you think you could beat him on your own?”
“I thought I’d finally be able to surpass him,” Beacon mumbled. “I already know that was a mistake, so you don’t need to tell me again.”
“What even happened?” Norma asked before Penumbra and Beacon’s sibling argument escalated.
“It’ll help us get a better idea of his mental state if you tell us everything that happened,” I said.
“Alright,” Beacon sighed. “Well, get comfortable. This’ll be a long one.”
I remained standing and so did Elizabeth, but Penumbra sat down on the couch at Beacon’s feet and leaned in.
“As soon as I hung up with Miles, I went over to the Shadow Knight’s lair and demanded that he let me in,” Beacon began. “Well, I guess that wasn’t the right way to start that conversation.”
“Starting off with a threat is never a good idea against someone like Slade,” I replied.
“I didn’t really threaten him,” he continued. “But, yeah, I guess I was obviously pretty mad about what he was doing. I told him that I’d seen all the news reports about what he’d done on the bridge, and how I thought that was an unacceptable way to behave as a hero. I told him that if he’d killed all those innocent people on the bus, he would have been irredeemable, but I also said that he could still change and it wasn’t too late.”
“He probably didn’t like hearing that,” Penumbra sighed.
“Not at all,” Beacon chuckled and then winced at the effort. “He told me I had been ‘corrupted’ by you, Miles. Whatever that means.”
“It means you’re now capable of rational thought,” I laughed. “Unlike him.”
“Yeah, something like that…” Beacon trailed off again and took a deep breath. “I finally told him that he wasn’t a hero anymore, and that he needed to give up the title of Shadow Knight and stop.”
“Really?” Penumbra sounded awed by that.
“Really,” he said with an attempt at a smile that nearly split his lip open again and sent him into a coughing fit. “It, uh, didn’t go over very well. He said if I wanted his title and wanted to bring him in, I’d have to do it by force… so then we fought. And you can see the results of that.”
“Unfortunately,” I replied. “But now we know we definitely can’t defeat him individually.”
“Right,” Beacon said. “And… you should know, Miles. I caught a glimpse of what he’s working on, and he’s already started to move them out of his hangar bay.”
“Them?” Norma asked, and her brown eyes went wide behind her oversized glasses. “What did he build?”
“For a while now, he’s been trying to use his AI to drive around the armored vehicles and gliders that he isn’t using to better patrol the city,” Beacon explained. “I think he’s going to try to use that system against you.”
“Armored vehicles, hm?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Beacon said. “They’re really advanced, but he’s already moved most of them to another location.”
“Slade Tower?” Elizabeth guessed.
“No, probably not there,” Beacon replied. “I think he’s starting to distribute them in hidden locations around the city, so you should stay alert.”
“We always do,” I said with a shrug.
I would need to talk with Aileen soon about the quantum supremacy she’d achieved over the Shadow Knight’s AI systems to see if we could access whatever new systems he’d come up with. I was curious if she’d be able to get into the new system, but I had a feeling that Slade wouldn’t have left any holes in a system like that, and I was sure that he wouldn’t have connected it to an outside source. That meant that it was probably self-contained enough that Aileen wouldn’t be able to get into it without an access point.
Of course, that was even more reason to break into his island-cave hideout, but I’d bring that up later.
“He held nothing back against me,” Beacon sighed and closed his good eye. “Nothing. I really thought he was going to kill me, but I managed to escape. I was running entirely on adrenaline to get back here, so it’s a wonder I didn’t crash my car in a ditch somewhere.”
“Kill you?” Elizabeth frowned. “But that’s--”
“Against his code, yeah,” Beacon exhaled. “He won’t kill supervillains, but that was what it felt like. It felt like he was prepared to kill me.”
We fell silent, and even though Norma and I had already reached this conclusion ourselves, I let the silence stretch long enough that Penumbra and Elizabeth could start to come to terms with it, too.
“No use worrying about that now,” I finally said. “You need to recover, Beacon. If we want to bring the Shadow Knight in, we’ll need all the help we can get.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” Beacon said. “He’s too dangerous to be left alone. We have to do something.”
I didn’t want to say it just yet, but I knew we were all thinking it.
The only way to stop the Shadow Knight was to kill him.
“Alright, let’s move Beacon upstairs so he can rest and recover,” I said.
Penumbra got up and tapped Beacon to levitate him, while Elizabeth remained with her hands braced beneath him to keep him steady and potentially catch him if Penumbra lost control of her powers. I didn’t expect that to happen, but I still followed along after them to make sure that Beacon was as comfortable as possible while he recovered.
As soon as they safely set him down onto the bed, Norma came up and shooed them away so she could do one more check on Beacon’s condition before she let him rest.
“We’ll wait downstairs,” Elizabeth said to me and then glanced at Penumbra.
I figured she wanted to speak with Penumbra alone about what had happened to try to help her get over the shock of the Shadow Knight’s actions with Beacon, and I was happy to give them a moment alone.
“Sure.” I nodded. “I’ll wait up here for Norma’s final assessment.”
After both women disappeared downstairs, Aileen stepped out of one of the other upstairs rooms to join me in the hallway.
“The social media campaign continues to bear fruit,” she said in a low, seductive voice. “The Shadow Knight is getting more desperate and he is actually starting to post a defense on his own media accounts. By my calculations, that conversation Beacon had, was never going to go well.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “But he had to see it for himself, or he’d never join our side.”
“Do you believe they will accept that the Shadow Knight’s death is necessary?” Aileen asked.
“I do,” I said. “I think this was enough to push both Penumbra and Beacon over the edge, and Elizabeth, too.”
“Me, too,” Norma said as she shut the door quietly behind her to Beacon’s room. “I mean, I was already on board, but--”
“I appreciate that,” I said with a grin. “So how long until Beacon can fight again?”
“A week or so, if all goes well,” my assistant replied. “His ribs are bad, but his wrist is only hairline fractured, not broken clean in two.”
“Good.” I was relieved to hear he’d be able to join us soon, since
I knew that defeating the Shadow Knight was going to take all of us together. “Keep an eye on him, Aileen.”
“Do you want me to reveal myself?” she asked.
“No… not just yet,” I said. “I’ll reveal you to him soon enough. Let him rest for now, or the shock of a robot treating his wounds might just kill him.”
“He isn’t that injured!” Norma gasped.
I let Norma give me a little more information on the extent of Beacon’s injuries just so Elizabeth would have some extra time alone with Penumbra, but after I’d stalled enough, I knew it was time to go back downstairs and have a serious discussion with them about the next step in our plan.
Beacon’s injured return was exactly the catalyst that I’d needed to get everyone on the same page, since in a fight against someone like the Shadow Knight, we couldn’t afford to have any doubts.
“Let us know if his condition changes,” I told my robotic assistant.
“I will,” Aileen replied in a way that would have sounded like a sigh if she had been human.
“Tomorrow we’ll introduce you to Beacon and Penumbra,” I assured her. “For now, just stay hidden unless something drastic changes with Beacon’s injuries.”
Norma and I left Aileen upstairs and returned to the living room where Elizabeth was speaking in hushed tones to Penumbra as they huddled on the couch. At our approach, they both looked up, and I noticed a very focused expression on Penumbra’s face that made me wonder what Elizabeth had said to her, but hopefully they had both reached the conclusion that I’d wanted them to.
“We need to go over the plan again,” I said.
“Yeah, we do,” my superpowered girlfriend agreed. “Penumbra and I have reached a decision that I think you’ll be satisfied with.”
“Is that so?” I asked as I raised my eyebrow, like I hadn’t expected them to come to this conclusion.
“I know I said we needed to try and talk with the Shadow Knight first, but obviously that didn’t work,” Penumbra started. “Beacon was probably the only one he’d ever listen to, but if he isn’t listening to Beacon now… then I don’t think we’ll be able to talk him down.”