Evil Genius 4: Becoming the Apex Supervillain

by Logan Jacobs

And I would have agreed with that philosophy even if I didn’t also happen to have a massive crush on my employer. Of course, I still didn’t think I was good enough to deserve him, but lately, I had started to feel that possibly, maybe, one day I would.

  After all, the Norma who accepted those ridiculous purple gift-baskets from super-genius, super-billionaire Miles Nelson was a lot different from the Norma that I was today. Back then, I never would have imagined that I’d get to fly glider-planes or blow up tanks, and I definitely wouldn’t have felt confident enough to actually try it.

  Let alone actually engage super powered individuals in hand to hand combat with my swords.

  It seemed crazy. I was just so… normal.

  Wasn’t I?

  Miles had shown me that I could be a lot more than I ever thought. Before I met him, I’d really hated my abilities because they only let me be completely average at everything I did. My powers allowed me to be a jack of all trades, but a master of none, and I’d been convinced that I would live a completely boring and average life until I died at a completely boring and average age.

  All of that had changed when Miles found me.

  I owed him everything, so I wasn’t about to mess things up in our fight against Slade tonight.

  I brought all of my attention back to the teched-out armored car that I was driving, and I shifted gears as I double-checked the last known locations of all the Shadow Knight’s remote-operated vehicles on the screen in front of me.

  “I think I’m gonna go on ahead pretty soon!” Penumbra’s voice crackled through my earpiece. “These coordinates are accurate-- right, Norma?”

  “As accurate as the latest satellite update,” I replied as I watched the blonde heroine shoot through the sky like a comet.

  Penumbra, Beacon and I had a separate channel where we could coordinate over the earpieces without disturbing Miles, but he could still contact us if he needed to. The fact that we were on our own tonight was even more of a motivation to do our jobs well.

  “Plus,” I added with another glance down at the screen, “most news reports have also been saying that’s the area where his two motorbikes have been spotted the most.”

  “It makes sense,” Beacon replied through our comms. “The streets in that area are way too narrow for his tanks to fit, but he must still want to patrol them.”

  “The bikes are also Slade’s fastest vehicles,” I continued, “so Penumbra, you’ll have to work pretty quickly, since Slade used one of those bikes to escape last time.”

  “Right,” the blonde superheroine replied. “I know. I’ll take care of it.”

  Her confidence was nice to hear. Penumbra had really changed a lot ever since she’d started working with us, in a way that kind of reminded me of myself. It almost made me feel a little bit better about myself to see her struggle to control her powers as a fully-fledged super with a really useful power. If even someone as potentially powerful as her could have really low self-esteem about her powers, then maybe there was still hope for me, too.

  And maybe my powers weren’t as useless as I once thought they were, and I thought once more about going toe-to-toe with the Shadow Knight all on my own on the bridge. He was one of the greatest martial artists in the world, but somehow, even though I was only average at martial arts, I was able to keep up with him, at least for a little while.

  It actually hadn’t really been that hard, either. I just kept switching martial art styles until I found one that seemed to really confuse him: Bokator.

  Maybe I was more powerful than I thought.

  “Okay, this is where I split off from you guys!” Penumbra called as we came up on the city limits.

  “Good luck, Penumbra,” I said.

  “Thanks, Norma!” she responded. “Same to you two!”

  I watched as the blonde heroine flitted through the air and then flew off toward the tightly-packed alleyways of downtown Grayville. As the only one of us without an armored vehicle to protect her, Penumbra probably had the most difficult job, but it would be a true test of her powers.

  And since I knew that Miles was thinking about asking her to come with us after we left Grayville, I hoped she would be able to perform well tonight.

  “Alright, Beacon,” I said as I slowed down the armored car. “We need to split up, too, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Beacon agreed as he slowed down the armored tank in front of me. “At least for a little bit.”

  “Let’s review our marks one more time and where we all agreed to meet,” I said as we pulled both the car and the tank over to the side of the road.

  I double-tapped the screen to highlight the GPS coordinates that we could all access. Our plan required a lot of patience, but once we got going, everything would happen very fast, so we needed to commit every detail to memory.

  “You too, Penumbra!” I called when the blonde didn’t answer.

  “I know the plan,” Penumbra sighed. “We need to chase them as far away from Miles as possible.”

  “Exactly,” I said, “but we can’t just chase them anywhere. We need to herd them all back toward the edge of town, and that means right about here.”

  “So like, we’ll be careful when we chase them down, right?” Penumbra asked.

  “Are we sure it matters if we chase them back here or not?” Beacon demanded. “Isn’t Miles going to use that signal jammer thing from Aileen as soon as the Shadow Knight falls into his trap?”

  “The signal jammer won’t last forever,” I explained. “So we need to destroy the tanks and other vehicles before the signal can reactivate and reach them.”

  “I just hope it jams the signal long enough for us to take care of the vehicles,” Beacon said. “Miles hasn’t given the signal yet, has he?”

  “You’ll know when he does,” I laughed. “Until Slade is in the warehouse with Miles, we can’t start chasing down Shadow Knight’s vehicles, or else he’ll know something is up.”

  “I hate waiting,” Penumbra groaned.

  “Yeah, well sometimes it’s necessary,” Beacon said.

  “But it’s just, like, really boring,” the blonde said.

  “You could alway review--”

  “You know what?” I interrupted Beacon so the two ex-apprentices would stop arguing like a brother and a sister. “Why don’t we go ahead and get into position? We can’t start the chase yet, but we can at least be ready to attack right away when Miles tells us we can.”

  “Works for me,” Penumbra said. “I’m already almost in position.”

  “We will be too, pretty shortly,” I said.

  Beacon and I split up and headed down different roads toward our separate designated hunting grounds. Each of the AI-controlled tanks had a predictable area that they patrolled, so we would be able to get close to our targets without actually having to cross into their territory until Miles gave the signal.

  I hoped Miles would be alright. I knew that he had Dynamo with him, and that she was strong enough to help him defeat the Shadow Knight once and for all, but I was still worried. The only thing that made me less worried was all the updates that Aileen continued to send to us, since they all confirmed that the Shadow Knight was acting exactly how we’d expected him to be so far.

  “Nearly there,” Beacon said after a few minutes. “How about you, Norma?”

  “Getting closer,” I answered. “I’ll let you know as soon as I’m in position.”

  My hunting ground was a little further off the highway than Beacon’s was, so it would take me a few extra minutes to get there. As long as I was in position before Miles gave the signal, I would be able to face the AI-controlled tank on my own terms, and that made me pretty damn excited.

  I was ready to blow some more shit up.

  As I drove toward my target, I found it strange how few people were out on the roads. Of course, the sun had already set, and Grayville was always weirdly quiet at night, so it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. After all, the city was known for its ridic
ulous crime rate, so most people didn’t really leave their houses after dark, and if they did, it was usually suspicious.

  I turned my armored car onto the next road, and it brought me into Midtown Grayville. It was one of the more expensive areas in the city, so there were more high-rises and storefronts here instead of the factories and slum-like housing that populated so much of the rest of the city.

  Of course, Midtown Grayville also included the apartment building where Miles had killed Arachne.

  As I remembered the incident with Arachne, I felt my face turn so red that it felt like I was on fire. I wasn’t sure if I was more embarrassed by the fact that the supervillain had trapped me in a cocoon so I hadn’t been able to help Miles, or if I was more upset by the fact that… well, that I wanted Miles to want me as badly as he’d wanted Arachne.

  I gripped the steering wheel as I took another turn based on Aileen’s data.

  There weren’t a lot of places a tank could hide in the city’s midtown, so it hadn’t been too difficult to track it with satellite imagery plus Aileen’s image-recognition technology. The last reported sighting placed the tank beside one of the tall corporate buildings, so before I reached it, I pulled over into a side street to wait for Miles’ signal.

  “Alright, I’m in position,” I finally said through the earpiece. “Beacon?”

  “Me too,” the ex-apprentice replied.

  “We’re still waiting for the signal, right?” Penumbra asked. “I haven’t missed it or anything?”

  “No, you haven’t missed it,” I chuckled. “While we’re waiting, I’m going to send you both a suggested path based on Aileen’s algorithms.”

  “Sounds good!” the blonde called.

  I knew that Penumbra and Beacon could have figured out their targets’ paths just based on sight, but since we had a little extra time to kill, I decided that I might as well send over Aileen’s latest suggested routes. Since they were based on the most recent satellite images, they should give us the best chance of quickly intercepting the AI-controlled vehicles.

  The sooner we took them out, the better.

  Once they were out of the way, Slade himself would be the only thing between Miles and victory, but it was also important to take them out quickly because… well, because even though the vehicles were controlled by a primitive AI system, they still had some serious firepower behind them, and they would also require some serious firepower to bring them down.

  After I sent over the suggested routes to Beacon and Penumbra, I tapped my foot impatiently inside the armored car. I was glad that Miles had trusted me with this car, and I knew that meant he thought I could take out the tank myself. Otherwise, he never would have trusted me with it.

  “Um, so you both got the directions I sent, right?” I asked.

  “Received,” Beacon said.

  “Yup!” Penumbra agreed. “We’re all ready to go, just as soon as Miles tells us we’re clear.”

  I wondered how close the Shadow Knight was to the warehouse. I didn’t think he would decide not to come because even though it was hard for me to understand why Slade was so obsessed with the Maniac, it at least made the Shadow Knight predictable.

  I was just glad that Miles had found a way to use that obsession to his advantage.

  But then again, nothing ever surprised Miles. That was part of what made him so impressive. He seemed to always know what was going to happen, and even when something unexpected changed his plans, he just came up with a new, better plan right on the spot.

  My foot tapped a little more impatiently inside the car, and I ran my fingers over the wheel that controlled the guns just to practice reaching for it while I still had one hand on the steering wheel. I didn’t have a partner with me to control the swiveling gatling guns on the sides of the vehicle or even the single front-mounted gun, but I didn’t really need that because of all the new upgrades that Miles had installed.

  Miles had taken some of Slade’s auto-aim technology from the glider and installed it into the guns of the armored car, so it should be relatively easy to use the huge guns, especially since I’d already had so much practice with that technology in the glider.

  “He’s in,” Miles’ voice suddenly crackled through the car speakers. “I repeat, he’s in. Strike now.”

  “We’re on it,” I said and then slammed my foot down onto the accelerator and sped out into the streets of Midtown Grayville.

  I swerved around the corner of the shiny corporate building, and I knew that one more turn would bring me face to face with the massive AI-controlled tank. Since we didn’t want to cause any civilian deaths, I wouldn’t be able to just shoot up the streets to draw its attention, but I figured that if I just fired off a few rounds directly at it, that would accomplish the same thing.

  After all, the Shadow Knight had programmed his remote vehicles to chase after anything that seemed criminal, so all I had to do was act like one.

  Then as soon as it started to chase me, I just had to lead it toward the empty fields just outside of Grayville, and I would have to hope that Penumbra and Beacon would already be there with their targets, too. Since Midtown Grayville was the farthest away from the empty fields, I knew that my chase would be the longest and also the most dangerous, but I could handle it.

  I rounded the next corner and immediately saw the tank parked halfway down the street. The tank’s headlights blinked red every few seconds to indicate that the AI system was switched on inside, so it should give chase just as soon as I opened fire.

  I slammed on the brakes, activated the front-mounted gun, locked on, and fired.

  A spray of bullets exploded from the gun mounted to the front, and the recoil sent a tremble through my armored car even as the bullets ricocheted off Slade’s tank and clattered harmlessly to the pavement.

  I was about to fire again when the tank’s headlights stopped blinking. Instead, they flared solid red as the engine roared to life, locked onto my location, and pulled back the protective covering over the stun gun on its roof.

  I spun the wheel and veered off to the side just in time to avoid the stream of electricity that burst past me and then slammed straight into the side of the shiny corporate building. The electricity exploded the windows, and glass shattered into the street behind me, but that didn’t seem to faze the tank at all.

  I was just glad it was too late for anybody to be inside the building.

  As another blast of the supercharged stun-gun fired in my direction, I spun the car again to avoid it, but the electricity only slammed into a lamp post this time. The bulb exploded and went dark, but at least it caused less damage than the last hit.

  Part of me couldn’t believe that the Shadow Knight allowed his tanks to be so reckless, but it was just more proof that he had lost his mind. Not only was the stun-gun able to shatter an entire floor of windows, but it was also a lot more powerful than just bullets. After all, my car was armored enough to stand up against a hell of a lot of bullets, but if a blast of electricity hit it, it might be able to short-circuit the car completely.

  I took another turn before the tank could charge up the stun-gun again, but before I took the next corner on my planned route, I glanced in my rear-view mirror to make sure that the AI-controlled vehicle was right behind me. It had started to gain ground, and its red headlights looked like angry eyes as it followed close behind me.

  I pushed down a little harder on the gas as I tried to get us out of Midtown Grayville as quickly as possible. Every time I took a corner, I glanced back to make sure that the tank was still there, and then I immediately looked ahead to check for any civilians or police cars that might be in my way. There was no one else around, but that was what I figured.

  From the way that the Shadow Knight had been fighting lately, I guessed that the cops were even more reluctant than the citizens to get in Slade’s way.

  A bolt of electricity hit the ground just beneath my front left wheel, and the armored car bounced against the ground. Since the whe
els were still detached from the main body of the vehicle, they absorbed the impact so the car remained stable, but I curled my fingers even more tightly around the wheel as I led the tank around the next corner.

  I might have only had average driving skills, but so far, I was actually pretty impressed with myself.

  Another jolt of lightning slammed into the back of the vehicle, and this one sent my car into a tailspin. The controls were all still active, so it hadn’t been a critical hit, but the street whirled around me as I tried to lean into the spin in order to come out of it.

  When the back of the car slammed into the window of an expensive clothing store, that was all the extra help I needed. I used the force of the impact to correct the car’s wheels, and then just before the tank caught up to me, I sped away from the broken window and massacred mannequins in their stupid sequin dresses.

  It was a little satisfying to ruin a whole storefront of dresses that would never fit my very average size.

  As I started to regain my lead on the tank, I glanced back down to make sure I was still on Aileen’s suggested route. I was going exactly the direction that I was supposed to, but we were about to enter a residential district, and that meant the streets were about to get a lot smaller, and the buildings were about to get a lot more populated.

  “Any other possible routes, Aileen?” I asked the android.

  “This is still the optimal route,” she chimed in immediately. “There are two others, but both will also take you through residential areas, and they will both significantly delay your arrival at the empty fields past the edge of town.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just stick to the original plan,” I muttered.

  “It will be the fastest way to reach the fields,” Aileen agreed.

  “And that means it’ll be the fastest way for me to explode the tank as soon as I get there,” I said.

  But since the tank continued to shoot jolts of electricity at me, I knew that I needed to do something to disable that fucking stun-gun before we got too far into the residential area. The tank’s AI system had already proven that it didn’t care about collateral damage, so it definitely wouldn’t hold its fire just because any civilians might happen to be around.