by Simon Archer
“But what if one of the other guys gets too close to a grenade or something?” Joe asked a question that only Joe would ask. “Can I jump on the grenade then? I don’t want any of these guys to die if I can do something about it, you know?”
“Only do that if you think you can survive.” I sighed. “Just double-check that these are normal grenades and not special herobuster grenades. Against my own better judgment, I’ll have to trust yours at the moment. Just, please, don’t be reckless about it. Please.”
“Sure thing, boss!”
I’d seen Joe’s ability to survive a grenade firsthand, and that was more than thirty levels ago. Most grenades were like bubbles popping against him nowadays. Even so, I didn’t want him getting into the habit of thinking that everything that came his way was something he could survive. If one of my executives died at this stage of the game, I might have considered this whole thing a failure.
“Girls, how are we doing?” I pressed another button on the machine to open another channel. “Did you lay the groundwork for the assault teams yet, or do you need more time?”
“We’ve been done for a bajillion years!” Natasha piped up over the com. “Only thing we’ve been doing now is waiting for those heroes to show up, which is taking forever, by the way! Forever! Hey, Kate! Look at my stack of cars!”
“Yes, we’d like a chance at the action as soon as possible, if you don’t mind,” Kate added. “As soon as you say the word, we’ll slaughter more heroes than you can count. Just tell us when.”
“Well, at this point, if you see any heroes patrolling alone, you can take them out,” I told them. “I’m sure that most of them are going to be at the pier, if you want to head over there. We’ll be pushing into the city in just a moment, if you’re willing to wait, though. Or, just stay near city hall and keep the shit around there scattered until we get there.”
“Tell Minou to stop hogging your lap!” Natasha shouted, her spiked vocals crackling through the speaker. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair! Rematch! It’s not fair!”
“She won the coin toss.” I stroked the kitty cat on my lap, from her head all the way to the base of her striped tail as she stretched her back legs out. “You agreed to those rules after losing so many rounds of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ in a row.”
“Minou and Kate cheat at games!” the cloud-controlling critic cried out. “How did those floozies win over twenty games against me without cheating? How? I want an impartial judge! I want a rematch! I want a recount of the wins!”
“Did you just imply that I was an unfair judge?” I pointed out.
“I… have…” Natasha tried to form the words to get herself out of the little bind that she had put herself in. “… pushed myself into a rhetorical corner, but I will retain this level of anger that I believe I’ve earned! You are not the problem, then, Dantem, that darn hairball is! And so is that floozy Kate!”
Minou’s kitty head popped up, staring at the command console as Natasha insulted her so openly. After a moment, she settled back down in my lap, content in the knowledge that she was the ultimate victor in this, no matter what names or accusations were being thrown about here or there.
“Um, Natasha,” Kate chimed in, “Minou can hear you, and I’m standing right here.”
“You sure are, you floozy.” Natasha didn’t back down an inch. “You get to sit with him during the next mission, and I’m stuck having to wait until the one after that! When did the world become such a cruel and vindictive place? Sometimes, I wish I was never revived.”
“Are you saying you’d like to give up your spot on the roster?” I clarified for her.
“Fine!” Natasha’s dramatic complaints began to die down. “But the mission I’m on lap duty for better be a long one! The longest one!”
“If the stars align, then sure,” I allowed. “I’ll make it the longest one. Ten times as long as this one ever-- Ow! What the hell!”
I moved my hand away from Minou, who’d just bitten me on the side of the hand. I was just glad she didn’t draw any blood on that one. One might have thought that a completely stacked strength and power stat would make sure that a cat’s bite wouldn’t hurt like such a fucking bitch, but Minou made it perfectly clear that this was not the case.
“Okay, okay.” I scratched under Minou’s chin as she leaned into the finger with closed eyes. “I’ve been reminded by Minou’s ever-so-playful biting that I have to keep things fair for each of you by not lengthening any of your time slots. But don’t think that you won’t be getting punished for that once you turn back to your human form, Minou.” I pointed the sassy cat’s head directly at me so we’d lock eyes. “I won’t go easy on you. Nobody gets to bite me and just sleep it off, cat or otherwise.”
“Oh, she’s getting punished, too?!” Natasha moaned. “Minou gets all the perks! I wanna get punished! Punish me next! Me! Me! Punish me!”
“Hold on a second!” Kate butted in again. “I get next dibs on any punishments or lap time, as per the ‘rock, paper, scissors’ tournament, and the coin toss! You wait your turn! I get punished next!”
“You’re the worst, Kate!” Natasha’s voice was full of adorable fury. “You’re lucky you’re so pretty! I love your hair! I’m trying to be angry right now, but I can’t stay mad at you for too long because you’re so lovable! I love spending time with you! Even if you get time with Dantem before I do! Grr! And Minou’s sweet, too! I love being friends with a girl who can turn into a cat! Argh!”
“You make it hard to stay mad at you, too.” Kate laughed over the speaker. “I love spending time with you, too, you precious idiot.”
“Grr!” Natasha tried to stay in her negative headspace with a growling voice. “Angry! Hatred! Also, I love your new boots! Did Nick make those for you?!”
“I had Yomura help him with the color design,” Kate answered her normally. “But yes, they are new! Thanks for noticing.”
“Sir, we’ve made landfall!” one of my criminal crewmates shouted from the front of the bridge. “The assault team’s already heading out to the battlefield, Cane’s cleared out the docking strip, and all batteries are firing at full capacity at the ground forces further in.”
“Good work! Sorry, Minou.” I pressed a few buttons on the console before starting to get up, disturbing her position on my legs. “We’ve got to head to the battle now.”
Instead of slumping off my legs like I expected, Minou clawed her way up my suit jacket and onto my shoulders, resting herself against the back of my neck like she was a mink scarf.
“Or you could just milk your ‘lap time’ for every last millisecond.” I moved around the chair, heading to the sliding doors to join the battle myself. “That works, too.”
I was more than ready for some combat experience myself. It’d been a hot minute since I’d gotten my own hands dirty in a fight, and I was more than ready to stretch my legs on occasion like this one. If they thought the army was tough, they hadn’t seen anything yet.
5
“What the fuck! What the fucking fuck!”
As soon as I stepped onto the battlefield, walking down the same hangar doors that Joe’s assault team had gone through before, I saw a group of heroes hiding out behind a bunch of boxes. They were all that really stood after the constant bombardment, and were all that kept these three from the eyes of my troops just a dozen or so feet ahead, each with their in-game nametags floating above their heads.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” One hero, wearing a golden suit of hi-tech power armor, was terrible at hiding with his servo-assisted joints constantly shifting. His hero name was ‘Gilded Avenger,’ and his modulated voice made every syllable monotone and synthesized, but his gamertag had him going by ‘xDasxPiusseyxSleigherx,’ revealing the geek living in a basement that he really was. “These guys are all, like, fifteen levels above us! We’re gonna get fucking shot! What the fuck is going on!”
“This bullshit would never happen in Bloodchurn!” Another hero, Crimson
Crusade a.k.a. ‘Buttbuttbuttbuttbutt5569,’ dressed in a red leather coat like a fabulous desperado, was breathing faster than a hummingbird, made especially ridiculous by the gruff, western drawl that his voice was being modulated as. “Why the fuck did I log in today?! Fuck me! Fuck this game! Fuck everything! Our fucking guild hall is toast, and the next logout hotel is five fucking miles away!”
“Hey! Look at that guy!” Grappling ‘Gag0g0ga’ Gary, the blue spandexed hero reminiscent of a Mexican luchador with a fake Spanish accent to match, pointed to me. “He’s not wearing any armor! Let’s fuck him up and get on the boat! Maybe we can stop this shit from happening! Or take the boat and just fucking go!”
“Are you fucking kidding me!” Crimson Crusade slapped Gary’s hand down. “A guy walks out of the same fucking dreadnaught that the death army crawls out of in nothing but a suit, and you think you can just attack him? There’s no one around stupid enough to do that without being ridiculously strong! Have you watched, like, any fucking action shows ever!”
“Hey, man, you know I don’t have a TV.” Grappling Gary looked to the gold-plated robo-hero. “I spent most of my money just to get a coma helm, man.”
“If you guys are too scared to fight me,” I shouted over to them, much to their collective, jolting shock, “feel free to take a crack at my cat here.”
I shifted Minou off my shoulder, letting her slink through my hands and onto the floor. As she touched all four paws down onto the ramp, she took one lap around my feet, rubbing her body and scent as much as she could against me, before tiptoeing over to the heroes and their feeble hiding space.
“Jesus, he saw us.” Crimson Crusade was visibly shitting himself as he stared straight into my eyes. “He saw us, fuck me and my whole life, he fucking saw us! Sleigher! Aggro! Aggro!”
“Okay, how the fuck is the cat level forty?!” Gilded Avenger was too hung up on other matters to be listening to his comrade’s commands. “This game is bullshit!”
“Do your damn job as a tank, and fucking pull them away from us!” Crimson tried to push his way behind the other two. “What are you waiting for, you goldtard?!”
“Whatever, I’ll just shoot this cat.” Gilded Avenger’s mighty suit shifted a few servos and gears, and his arm turned into a powerful tube of a cannon, glittering with the same sheen as the rest of it, but with more blinking lights. “Goodbye, weird guy’s cat.”
As the cannon’s barrel glowed with bright, white energy, I looked out towards him, wondering if he was serious about this. Judging by the look on his face through the plexiglass wind mask over his face, I was sure that he was. Whatever. He’d learn soon enough. The cannon fired, the pure energy singeing the metal of the ramp Minou and I stood on. Though the scorch marks on the ground were smoking black, neither of the gold hero’s targets were.
“How the fuck did you miss?” Crimson Crusade, always full of complaints, slapped one of his cyberpunk pistols against the chassis of the shiny stormtrooper. “The cat’s right there! Get something bigger and blow it up! Or just fucking step out there and take some hits, for god’s sake, goldtard!”
“It’s just a cat!” Gilded Avenger argued. “Lay off, dude!”
“Yeah, man, leave the cat alone!” Grappling Gary advocated for the cat’s survival. “What did they ever do to you that you want to shoot a harmless little puddy tat?”
“Normal cats don’t get to level forty, you shitheads!” Crimson Crusade shouted at both of them. “And they don’t just follow around guys in suits who live on aircraft carriers hauling a death army around! What the fuck is wrong with you two? Quit dicking around and shoot the--!”
Minou had all but vanished from the spot she was just at while the boys weren’t looking. Each of the heroes looked to me, and I only shrugged in response. I mean, I knew where she’d gone to, but these guys were way too slow to catch on that quickly. If they couldn’t even see her move around the battlefield, they were less than unworthy of my time in a fight. I’d wait at least for someone with some gumption before I really cut loose.
“What the actual fuck?” Crimson Crusade was ruining his futuristic western badass look with his whining. “Where the fuck is the cat?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Gilded’s arm cannon pointed in every direction except where Minou was, desperately searching for the strange feline from hell. “Why don’t you fucking do something, you useless fuck!”
“I can’t believe you killed a defenseless puddy tat!” Gary was nearly brought to tears at the perceived atrocity that had come about. “You’re a monster! A monster!”
“I didn’t shoot at it when it disappeared, you dillhole!” Gilded smacked Gary upside the with the side of his arm cannon’s barrel. “Shut the fuck up and look for the--”
“Hello, boys.”
Right behind the three of them, Minou, now in her hybrid werecat form, perched at the barest tip of one of the boxes behind them, balancing on a needle’s head’s worth of space. Needless to say, the heroes all screamed at the sight of her.
What followed was a flurry of limbs, scratches, bent gold plating, broken pistols, shredded spandex, and blood-curdling shouts from three boys that were in way over their heads with this one bad roll of the dice. And I may have helped them along a tad by enhancing their fears with my menace power. It was a hoot watching people scramble for their personal sense of calm and safety again. Fuck them all, I guess.
“Bring their bodies into the ship when you’re done, will you?” I told her as I moved away. “Then you can come to find me.”
Letting the cat play with her new toys, I walked past the three heroes and into the pier, heading towards the main fray of battle. It was actually a few blocks into town before I found where my soldiers had already engaged the police forces head-on in the streets. Like any street battle eventually played out, everyone was using the cars as tactical cover, shooting from behind it as they tried to take out the opposing side’s shooters. Minou, having finished with her playing, scurried back to my shoulders in her feline form to rest and join in the real fight.
My soldiers were the first to notice me, stopping their shooting from behind taxi cabs and such to watch me walk to the front lines. All the bullets stopped flying through the air, including the policemen, as I stepped into the dead man’s zone between my people and the police cars. In waves like tsunamis, I washed my unearthly menace over the law enforcement, watching as they could do nothing but cower before me and my approach.
One soldier had the gall to resist, probably using up every last drop of willpower he had to resist my maddening effect on the battlefield just to lob over one can of tear gas. With a simple grab and toss, I threw the spraying can of gas back towards them, watching it fill up the air behind their cars as they had completely neglected to put their gas masks on beforehand.
While the one side suffered from the gas, the others were slowly starting to reach for their guns, getting ready to pull the triggers as soon as they were pointed at me. I’d already breached past their defenses, though, and found my first victim, a hapless and slightly overweight policeman who hadn’t quite pointed his gun at me yet. With a single punch to his gut, he was down for the count, and his pistol was mine. As for the others next to him, a quick couple of rounds from my gun was all it took for them to fall one by one, with no bullet wasted between them, and the line cleared on the one side. In short order, I cleared out the other side as well with a few more bullets, allowing for my men to move forward into the city that much further.
Like a symphony and a ballet, the surrounding soldiers charged forward, parting ways behind me to push for city hall. I didn’t think wasting the energy to run was necessary. This city was going to fall in no time, anyway. Might as well have taken my time to enjoy the moment while it was here.
As I moved down the streets, Minou caught up with me. I gave her a quick nod as she leapt up onto my shoulder and made herself comfortable.
A moment later, the warehouses turned to apartment and busi
ness complexes, and the complexes turned to skyscrapers, save for the municipal buildings that were my destination. My soldiers set themselves up in key positions, like the police district buildings, to keep any more policemen from spawning from them, and we pushed onward through to the mayor’s office.
It seemed that we weren’t quite bringing the chaos with us as we came to the office. As it so happened, Crazy Cane and his shock troopers had already made a push for City Hall without us, setting the stage and breaking their defenses before we had even arrived. It was easy to tell who he was, since there was only one measured at a full head shorter than everyone else, shirtless, and covered in tattoos, flipping around over the others in a mad acrobatic display of carnage and destruction. From person to person, he swung and slaughtered, never touching the ground as he moved about the battlefield with his death-propelled levitation.
Accompanying Crazy Cane was another frontline brute, Joe, whose massive shoulders were about as wide as he was tall, with a hulking pair of arms and a barrel chest to match. He still wore the combat armor I had forced him to wear, making him look like an ape-man from a post-apocalypse. With his monkey feet grabbing onto the head of a riot officer, and another holding onto a police horse, he quickly switched the two positions, using the man to crash into the side of a car, and the horse to topple over a group of policemen. Not one to let a good horse go to waste, he swung the animal back around, keeping the distance healthy between himself and anyone crazy enough to face him in close quarters.
Finally, we’d run into some heroes around here. I was starting to get worried that we’d actually destroyed all of them before I got onto the battlefield. I was still hoping that we’d still managed to spare at least one or two good fighters before this was over. So far, everyone I’d fought or saw so far was a bit disappointing, to say the least. I was curious why they hadn’t joined the battlefield sooner, since most of the fighting was closer to the water before I was pushing us forward.