by Simon Archer
As if to answer the question, galloping on a fluffy alicorn made up of a massive cloud, Natasha flew by the heroes, with Kate sitting right behind her to rain down powerful storms of fire down upon the hero forces. Well, that wasn’t going to work out well for the heroes.
The alicorn was one of the deadliest of the shapes that Natasha could make her cloud look like. Granted, the shape of the cloud didn’t really affect how much damage the cloud itself could do, but that wasn’t the point, nor was it that Natasha still believed in a mystical grove of alicorns living somewhere beyond the ocean. No, the problem was that Natasha was an absolutely firm believer that alicorns were predatory creatures. No amount of fire from Kate was going to be as scary as a giant horse just chowing down on people like they were fine, screaming oats.
Not to say that the inferno from the heavens wasn’t terrifying and destructive. It was like a miniature doomsday, the way the top of the cloud continuously spat out boulders of flame to rain down on the people. No patch of air within half a football field of her wasn’t rippling with the intensity of the heat she was pouring out through her bright, hellish flames.
I figured it was about time that I contributed to this little shindig myself, instead of just watching. What heroes did we have here to play with? No one particularly fun, it looked like. It was a real gallery of random people in tights. We had many classics, like a guy trying too hard not to be dark and edgy but still just in the same black tights and shadowy hood they all get, or the shirtless guy in ripped clothing, and a guy in a suit of hi-tech armor again. There was a guy in a sleeveless karate gi, a guy trying really hard to look like a devil but only really looking like the red-pajamas version, and another guy in a suit of armor, but much more medieval. That last one brought up some memories.
The highest leveled sucker here was a Superman-type in a blue cape, some red tights, blue underwear-on-the-outside, and everything. As a hero, he was Blue Maverick, and ‘P!zz&zforL1fe’ as a gamer. He seemed to be taking charge of the situation, leading the charge against my forces from the front and flying high above everyone else, harassing my girls. Based on the way he fought, he seemed to have superstrength, flight, and a myriad of ‘visions,’ some of which were deadly and colorful lasers. With mobility and range like that, he was the biggest threat.
To the girls, anyway.
Not quite as much to me, especially if I singled him out.
“Minou, start turning them against each other.” I gave the kitty a scratch under the chin. “If there’s any trust between them, I want it gone before the fight is over.”
“With pleasure, my master,” Minou spoke through her fuzzy cat lips as she slid off my shoulder, her long tail lingering by me before she scampered off towards the heroes.
Not even seconds after she was joining the fray, she was slithering her way through the enemy lines, unnoticed like a shadow in the night. Whatever whispers she was spreading through their ranks, or little scratches she was inflicting as she passed through them, was more than enough to distract a yellow-clad hero into firing a bolt of electricity against his own teammate. That was all that it took to convince the second hero that the first shot to turn around, striking out with blue energy through his fingers. As the blue energy flung about, the ricochet of the blasts flung out towards surrounding men in spandex, who turned their attention to the fight as well, primed by Minou’s dance of dissolution.
Blue Maverick saw the chaos beginning to unravel his team of heroes, turning his attention from the girls and down towards them. He wasn’t a fool, however, and wasn’t going to just let the girls take a shot at him with his back turned. With a flashy explosion from his laser eyes, he managed to distract the girls enough to buy him the space he needed to fly down safely, finding only warring heroes at his feet.
“C’mon, bros!” His modulated voice was still in the golden-age heroic setting, but his words didn’t quite fit the forceful and manly tones. “Like, what the hell, bros! Quit being such little babies, bros! Bros!”
“This guy’s trying to PK my hero so he can take my stuff!” one of the heroes shouted over the growing noise. “Fuck off, Chet!”
“Like you weren’t just saying the same thing, fucknard!” another hero shouted.
“I’ll rip out your throat and fuck your skull with it!”
“Not if I do it first to your slut mom!”
“Whatever, bitchbag, just try it! See what happens?”
“I’mma fucking facefuck you with my blaster fists!”
Dear God in heaven, Minou, what had you been telling them?
“Bros, c’mon!” This guy said ‘bros’ way too much. “Bros! Bros! What the actual fuck, bros! Can’t you just chill for two seconds while we finish this event raid?”
“Fuck you!”
“Suck my nuts!”
“God, bro. Bros.” The guildmaster’s way with words astounded me. “You can all suck my dick, bros. Bro.”
That was just about the time that the fighting really broke out among the heroes. Most gamers were usually assholes, but sometimes I was happy that they were just so damn predictable. Not that I was going to take any chances with this flying leader among imbeciles. I could only hope that he could survive long enough for me to bring the pain.
6
Just to make sure that Blue Maverick didn’t make any foolhardy attempts to quell this beneficial violence, I threw a rock at his face. I might have just shot him with the gun I picked up if I felt that a bullet was going to do more damage, but I had a feeling that he’d gotten a few hero upgrades to keep that from happening. It was a half-assed side-arm throw, but with my pumped strength stat powering it, even a musclehead like him was feeling it. He spun in the air, flipping over his center as his hovering flight floated him backward a couple of feet.
As he recollected himself, he flipped back upright, throwing his cape off of his head and scanning the crowd. My men, including Joe, Cane, Kate, Natasha, and Minou, were wrecking shop through their ranks now that they’d broken formation. All the fresh carnage made it more than a bit difficult for him to find me, especially since I wasn’t in the crowd at all.
“Over here, Blue!” I shouted over to him, watching his eyes shift about like a manic coke addict looking for another score. “Lower, over more, to your left, a bit more, there you go!”
Using my directions, the flying man finally met his gaze with mine. I was paying careful attention to retract my ‘menace’ power back into myself, not even letting the ambient fear aura linger so he’d make his approach.
Which he did.
“Who’re you, bro?” Blue Maverick landed a few yards away from me, standing next to the chaos of heroes that was raging beside him. “Did you throw that rock just now, bro?”
“I did.” I popped my neck with a twist of my head. “Are you the next guy in charge of the Retributioners?”
“Um, kinda,” Blue Maverick answered, “bro, why’d you--?”
I socked him in the stomach, having moved up to him before he could catch me leaving my spot at all. While he still stood keeled over, grunting a long, pained exhale from his lips, I threw a haymaker across his cheek, sending him spinning around as he tried to regain his balance and stance.
Being the helpful sort, I placed a hand on his shoulder, stopping him from spinning with his back facing me. Being the unhelpful sort, I followed that act of stability with five punches to the left kidney, hitting right underneath his bone as he gasped for breath. A breath of kindness washed over me, and I paused myself from punching him in the same kidney for a moment. The moment passed, though, and I resumed punching him in the kidney another three times.
Finally realizing that we were fighting, he tried to strike at me and spin around at the same time, throwing a blind elbow towards me while his injured kidney turned away from me. I caught the elbow, striking him a few more times in the other kidney with my other hand while I had the opening and the time.
Still spinning himself, he threw his opposite arm in a cros
sing punch, throwing his full weight into the fist aimed at my head. Before the fist got into full swing, I slammed my head right into the point of his nose, staggering him backward and stopping his fist from flying forward at all. While he was falling backward, I grabbed the free-floating fist in the air to pull him in and throw my own cross, striking his nose again.
Like an idiot’s reaction, both of his hands ended up reflexively slapping up against his face, leaving his stomach completely unprotected. I abused the amateur exposure with four quick jabs to his stomach, forcing the same reaction again out of him to protect the spot being currently attacked. With his hands now around his gut, I struck at the sides of his head with cupped hands, popping his eardrums like little bubbles and following up with a palm strike straight up from his chin. Oh, I knew that he had his tongue out at the time, too, and it was glorious to watch him nearly bite it off.
There we go, some actual retaliation. It was a wild, desperate haymaker, which I easily redirected wide with a guiding hand to his elbow. At the same time, I bent down and struck at the same kidney I’d been punishing at the beginning of the fight, abusing the wound I was developing in him like it was my day job.
Blue Maverick’s teeth clenched, his lips bleeding and his neck muscles tensed as he gritted himself for the pain he was feeling. He was trying to push through the blows I was giving him, now that the initial shock was over, and he was already throwing another haymaker punch with his other fist. For every fist he was going to throw with all of his energy, I had a hand ready to block, and a free hand to sneak in a free shot wherever suited my fancy. Haymaker, block, jab, haymaker, block, jab, haymaker, block, cross, haymaker, block, uppercut, everything he wanted to dish out, I just refused to let land while I served up my own onslaught on the side of his savage swings.
As if suddenly realizing that he was a superhero with powers, the determination in his eyes returned, along with a blue glow that quickly overshadowed all the other features in them. Seeing as he was just firing a host of lasers at my girls, not a minute or so ago, I was willing to bet that this was just another laser. So, I did what anyone else would do in my position…
I took two fingers in one hand and poked both of his eyes before the lasers fully charged. Again, he was reeling back and covering his sensitive spots, exposing the rest of himself at the same time. That seemed like the perfect opportunity to throw a few more shots into his stomach, finishing the combo off with another uppercut to the chin.
The blow had knocked him clear off the ground, or so someone might have thought if they were watching. At that same moment, Blue Maverick got himself some combat instinct for once, and flew himself upwards and backward several dozen feet, well out of the way from what he thought was my range of attacks. His eyes began to glow, this time a ruby red, the heat palpable from here.
Based on the fact that the red beams of light that shot out missed me by a yard without me having to move, I gathered that the targeting was off, since he was literally just aiming by looking, the easiest form of aiming there ever was. No hand-eye-coordination involved. Just point and click. Fortunately, the damage I did to his eyes, along with his head, must have been keeping his vision from focusing. I was probably nothing more than an infuriating blur to him from that distance.
Taking the opportunity as it came, I dashed behind a car, hiding from his other lasers. Before he fired his beam, I moved to the next car, hopefully losing his trail as I blended into the blurred shapes his eyes were relaying to him. Instead of jumping to the next car on the street, however, I jumped into the broken window of the building just on the sidewalk.
Turns out, I was dead on with my maneuver, as he went to blow up the whole line of cars that I was previously hiding behind, not letting a muffler remain unscuffed by the heated laser. Not satisfied by the smoldering, he rained down a stream of blue lasers, freezing the ground and any rolling or twirling auto parts that remained, stopping all motion in place.
It was after that point that I still heard the noises of lasers being fired at the same spot, Blue Maverick choosing to brutalize that patch of ground for letting me step on it, but I was heading up the stairs in the building to get a better vantage point. Thanks to the speed stats that Kate gave me, along with all the boosts I got from being a villain, I was hauling ass like a damn gazelle, making it all the way to the roof in record time to make Olympic sprinters feint.
As I was on the roof, scanning the skies for Blue, I found a surprising lack of said superhero in the space he should occupy. Checking down by where the ground had been horrendously abused for its crimes, I found my suspect standing over his own carnage, breathing with his shoulders in a fuming rage.
What followed had the potential to either be my proudest moment as a battle tactician or my most embarrassing moment as the guy who just tried something so obviously dumb. I was more than confident that I had the stats to survive my idea, but it wouldn’t have been deemed a smart combat strategy by most people. It was going to be cool if it worked, though, and I felt that I had this fight otherwise in the bag.
Yeah, I jumped down from the roof to land on top of him.
Grabbing onto my heels, I pointed two dinosaur-killing knees straight down on my unsuspecting victim, letting the dreadfully consistent pull of gravity accelerate me those few three stories onto the base of his neckbone. Even with the enhanced strength and durability I knew he must have had, I could still hear the breaking of spinal columns and shoulder blades as I made contact with him. No fiber in his body was tensed in defense or preparation of my assault, and his bones took most of the brunt of the cascading damage. As his loose muscles failed to suspend him upward, his crumpling body only managed to cushion my fall by the springing of his tendons in his bizarre contortions. Every limb, every bend, every moving part, moved almost exactly wrong, overextending and ripping wherever it could.
As I rolled away the rest of the momentum, standing back up on the powdered asphalt that Blue Maverick had previously created, I turned around to anticipate any attacks he might have thrown out. But, as I thought, I was overly cautious, as the hero had yet to regain his stance after my literal crushing blow. He’d yet to even regain a shape that I could have identified as humanoid, the contortions that I’d forced upon him still leaving him broken and abused.
“Wwwwwhaaat tttthhheeeee ffffffuuuuck, bbrrrrrooooo?” Like squeezing an accordion, the steady breath only allowed a faint voice just above a stage whisper, and the pain must have made every word a full-contact sport to muscle through. “Bbrrrrroooooooo!”
“Because fuck you.”
I stomped on his neck, ending the suffering that was making everyone uncomfortable. Still hearing a quiet wheezing from the body, I took to stomping on the body a few more times, attempting a thorough squelching of the lifeforce in the avatar’s body. Considering that he probably didn’t have the ability to speak, let alone call out for an emergency log out, this was the closest thing I could do to showing him mercy at this point.
Did I care about showing him mercy? Not particularly, but I also didn’t particularly not care about showing mercy to him, either. At the end of the day, this was a game, and no one was here to be fucking tortured.
Though, at that level, given how long the game had been out, there was no way that he wasn’t part of the beta, and therefore one of the gamer saints. I hadn’t thought about gamer saints in some time, but I wasn’t about to forget my roots. Any beta saint that I came across was fair game to any kind of torture I could come up with.
In conclusion, I didn’t feel bad about any of this.
Then, a popup came up in my vision, an update from the game:
Hero Slain!
All the items and assets of Blue Maverick have been transferred to your inventory.
My stomping now fully and thoroughly stopping any subsequent noises, I scraped my foot on the ground to get rid of any residual body nastiness left over. Then, like any gentleman after a scuff, I made sure that I still looked presentable elsewh
ere, removing any excess gunk and cleaning what I could off of my suit. That’d take some heavy cleaning to get out these bloodstains.
That fight was a bit disappointing, really. I had hoped that Blue Maverick would have forced me to at least break out one of my fun tricks. I had all different kinds of things I wanted to use in a real battle, like the gadgets hidden in the suit, the tattoos that contained some powerful magic spells and glowed when I used them, the cybernetic implants, and the biological augmentations. Throughout that whole battle, I’d barely used the amplified physicalities from some of the biological augments, which were mostly complementary to the stats I already had. I was more than willing to bet that I didn’t even need them to beat this guy the same way I did.
What surrounded me after that was an eerie quiet. The kind of eerie quiet that completely contrasted what a war in the streets should sound like. No shouting, no firing of guns, no blasting of flames or cries of pain. The dust lingering in the air was louder than anything else right now. I smiled, knowing that I had been successful in my multitasking.
The wide eyes of dozens of battle participants, both my own soldiers and their heroes alike, met me as I looked around. Their arms were hanging on their sides, limp and without a tinge of rage. Not one of them was staring anywhere else but directly at me, the fear almost dancing on my tongue.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d have said that they had witnessed the tail end of that battle, including the finishing, possibly gratuitous stomps to the man’s skull. Their reaction was understandable. The death alone was brutal, not to mention that it was clearly the most powerful person on the heroes' side of the conflict, and that I was leaking out ‘menace’ like it was raining down from the sky, and no one was wearing their raincoats. It was working perfectly, and I was going to use it to my advantage. I looked to my soldiers.