by Simon Archer
“Really, only a dozen?” Nick’s confusion contorted his face. “Would you stop pulling my chain and just tell me what your plan is?”
“These cuddler robots won’t be the ones to take the city for us,” I finally revealed, “they’ll be a placeholder for us to buy some time.”
“You spent all of this time, money, resources, and planning…” Nick summarized my plan for the cuddler robots, “for a glorified distraction?”
“A convincing distraction,” I clarified as the elevator settled on the floor of our destination. “If everything goes accordingly, the Don, his goons, the police of his city, the heroes, and everyone else, will all fall for it just long enough to screw every last one of them.”
“A distraction for what?” Nick seemed insulted. “I put enough firepower and lethal weaponry in those bad boys to make war crimes look like loitering! What could possibly do the job better than that?”
“They’ll be showing up late to the party,” I answered vaguely, walking out into the hallway full of my hardworking minions on their missions. “I guess you’ll have to find out when they arrive on the scene.”
“Why won’t you just tell me?” Nick called out of the elevator.
“Maybe now you’ll read my messages when I send them.” I waved to him as the doors began to close on him. “Have the robots ready to launch in ten hours. We begin early tomorrow.”
“Goddamnit, that’s so early!” The muffled voice of a very distraught Nick pierced through the metal doors. “That’s, like, five in the morning! I sleep until noon most days! What the hell! Stupid boss and his stupid timetables…”
I smiled and moved down the hall towards the sparring room. Part of me wondered if I should have told him that he’d have to wake up at three to prepare for the launch. Maybe I’d send him a message about it.
8
I took a couple of deep breaths and rested for a few short moments. Sometimes, I questioned why I came to these sparring sessions with Anu Bysma. While I was thankful that I had the chance to spar so intensely with anyone, and that this big, grey room had the space to facilitate our more extravagant abilities, sometimes he made the challenges a bit insane. That was good, though. I needed to keep pushing myself, understand my limitations, and move beyond them at all times. I couldn’t let myself get used to being more powerful than most of the people I came across.
Even with three levels underneath my own, the warlock was still just as powerful as when I fought against him to claim his organization for my own. Being a part of the Ghoul really bolstered a character’s strength, it seemed. Comparing him to others at his level would be like comparing dragons to lizards.
Not to mention that he looked terrifying. He had a suit similar to my own, but made of the darkest black silk the human eye could process, with a golden undershirt just to accent all that darkness. As if that wasn’t enough black for him, his skin was also as inky and dark as the rest of his ensemble, save for the skeleton tattoo overlapping his whole body, with a skull polishing his head, exposed teeth covering over his lips, and finger bones stretching out from his sleeves. His long, gaunt face and his tall stature only helped to accentuate the ‘modern reaper’ vibes he was giving off, and his golden staff with the tilted ‘T’ head had me almost believing he was an Egyptian god of death.
What was the real terror-item of the day was all the shadowy monsters surrounding me. Each a different shape and size, from a praying mantis with blade arms to a wolfish hound the size of a bear. The possible shapes were endless, and he made sure to make as many combinations as possible to throw at me.
“Again,” Anu called out, prompting all of his shadow creatures to rush towards me at once.
The blades of the mantis creature were the quickest. They slashed at my sleeve. At the same time, the wolf creature’s jaws were chomping into my other arm, its neck wrenching against me in an attempt to rip something off. Thankfully, my suit, not being just any old suit, resisted both of their attempts to bite through me, holding them off while the cuffs at my wrists began to glow. A jolt of electricity shot out between them, surrounding me with chaotic light. Both the mantis and the wolf beast dissipated into black smoke, destroyed by my suit’s electric aura.
“Depending on your tricks to save you will only get you killed.” Anu flexed his fingers, summoning wisps of pitch-colored magic to his palm.
Another three shadow creatures approached right behind the first two. A clawing ape, a giant centipede, and a charging rhinoceros all charged against me with their natural weapons bared, coming at me from three different sides. It was going to take a couple of seconds before my suit’s electric defense recharged, so I’d have to fight against them myself.
Getting this the way that it is now was harder than it would seem for a business suit, even a high-tech one. I wouldn’t want to bore anyone with the details about how long I spent pilfering shops all throughout the cities I economically conquered, searching for all the best materials to make this. In this game, though, there were several ways to turn regular clothing into combat-ready armor, which I thought would help me out immensely in hiding my best stuff in plain sight. Never knew when someone might have gotten the drop on me, and they were much less likely to take a formal suit away from a guy than a suit of metal armor.
I’d only say that one specific legendary tier material stood out among the others, but it was so rare and so damn hard to find, even with all the reach I had, that I was only able to make one suit out of it. I couldn’t make any variants, and I didn’t have a single miniscule unit of it leftover after we were done to do anything else fun with it.
It was only later after I’d already had the suit built that I learned that the material, being so phenomenally rare, usually only used to make a few tiny things like implants, handheld gadgets, or components to other things, all among the best the game had to offer. No hero player had ever managed to get enough of it to make more than four or five items with it, let alone a whole set of armor. The Forge of Heroism simply hadn’t been out long enough for any player, beta or otherwise, to get any more with its fantastically low spawn rate. I was not as restricted as the hero players in my reach across the world and its many commercial avenues, and so I could get what I needed.
The material itself was called tetrazium in the game, an impossible synthetic compound that essentially took the best of every other possible material in the real world and combined them into a super thread that just did everything imaginable. According to Nick’s and Yomura’s analysis of it, it was stronger than tungsten and titanium in tensile and impact strength, respectively, meaning it couldn’t be pulled or blasted apart. While being the hardest material, Flamelium was somehow more flexible than graphene, which could tie itself into knots at the atomic level, and conducted electricity better, too.
On top of that, the super threads gave off consistent radiation that could be used to power devices with an output similar to a full-blown nuclear reactor that fit in my closet. I had an advanced mutation in my body and some magical tattoos keeping that radiation from killing me slowly, in case anyone worried that I was basically wearing a portable cancer coffin. At the same time, it somehow didn’t deteriorate from its own radiation, meaning that it required very little maintenance and would probably outlast the earth.
I rolled back both of my sleeves, channeling power into my arms to expose the magical tattoos hidden underneath my skin. The arcane symbols quickly etched into my forearms, sprawling along my fingers as my fists began to glow, one purple and the other green.
As the enchanted fumes poured off my colored fists, I slugged the ape in the face with my purple fist. The energies within my mystical punch overtook the ape’s body, spreading over his jaws and eyes as it slowly became solidified in a crystalline fashion.
Pretty neat, huh? I was a huge fan. Nearly any object I could get a grip on could be turned into this fragile glass and broken with a simple closing of my fist. It had its drawbacks, too, though, since not only did it take
a fair amount of my power to use, the process of transmuting took a while to work through any material, while more complicated or tougher materials could make it even slower. Shadows were simple and easy to turn, since they were basically made of magic. Without a tight enough grip on whatever or whoever I was holding to keep them in place, it’d be a waste of time to use.
My green fist moved over to the centipede before its stinging pincers could reach me, stopping it in place. The emerald lights slowly began to erode at the pincer, then the face of the creature, eating through the shadowy nothingness that formed it.
Unlike the purple hand, the green hand was a lot faster about its business, and a fair bit cheaper, too. There weren’t too many things my fingers couldn’t move their way through when I had the green on them, but it only affected things I specifically touched, without the spreading effect the purple crystal hand had. In a fistfight, both were magnificent to have on at the same time.
Taking both the ape and the centipede in my glowing hands, I slammed them into each other, right in the path of the shadow rhinoceros just before its charge would have crashed through me. Instead, the shadow rhino destroyed the two shadow monsters I’d put in its path, returning them to darkness.
The rhinoceros was not stopped in the slightest, though, continuing through the two it destroyed and straight onto me. I could stop it with two hands, but not without sliding backward a dozen or so feet. Both of my hands were working their magic on the beast the whole time, crystallizing one half of its massive face and dissolving the other.
“At all times, your enemies will surround you, using your limited focus as a distraction.”
Before the magic of my hands killed the rhino, a massive condor-like shadow swooped in behind me, wrenching its claws into my shoulders to carry me upwards into the air. Not to give me a moment to rest, a swarm of tiny bat shadows came buzzing and flapping around me, nipping at my body as they clouded around my body.
I opened my mouth to expose the radioactive power burgeoning within, firing a thin laser between my teeth and straight through the condor creature’s head. As the dark bird’s head exploded, along with the rest of it into shadows, I dropped down to the ground, and my fists curled around each other to slam down on the dark quadruped below me, squishing it into black vapor.
Dammit, I could feel the shadowy bats draining the power from my body, wearing away at my endurance. Without power, none of my special moves would work, and I’d have been quickly overwhelmed by them, along with more than a dozen other beasts of Bysma’s own design.
Thinking quickly, I twisted the rolled-up cuff of one of my sleeves to activate the gadgetry within. Veins of metal and electricity connected with veins opening up from my own skin, forming a silver coating that inflated into a powerful cannon barrel.
With my free hand, I deactivated the magic creating the purple glow and reached into my belt to pull out several vials of white liquid, quickly attaching them to the slots appearing at the top of the barrel. As soon as the last was set in place, a burst of white flames spread about from the tip of the barrel, catching several of the bats, along with several of the shadowy creatures, on fire with the ghostly fire.
There goes a good patch of fuel for that attack.
My purple fist reignited just in time to catch the swinging mallet hammer of a hulking shadow warrior, stopping it in its tracks. Apparently, Anu wasn’t limiting himself to simple beast forms and had moved on to humanoid soldiers. The hammer quickly turned into purple stone, cracking under the grip of my fingers and bursting into a flurry of powder as I crushed it.
Rushing my hand forward, I grabbed at the shadow man’s neck, turning my other cannon hand towards him to fire a blast of red energy. With the neck of the shadow warrior turning to a fragile crystal, the head quickly blasted off, killing it in a puff of smoke.
A twist of my wrist within the cannon barrel revealed a coat of spikes around it, throwing the whole barrel wide to the side, meeting with the blade of a shadow ninja. Since the shadow ninja didn’t possess the strength necessary to withstand mine, my swinging barrel club went straight past to the shadow ninja’s face, crushing it into an inky smog.
While the cannon was bashing, it was also blasting, shooting out red bursts of energy like concussive ballistics to keep the rest of the shadows away. The shadow army had its own ranged attacks in the form of several archers, all standing at the back of the room and firing their arrows at me from afar. My purple hand reached out for another shadow monster beside me, a crouching brute of a ghastly beast, and held it up in front of me. Just as planned, the shadow beast served to soak up the arrows while I quickly dispatched the archers with a few careful shots.
Holy fuck, I could have sworn that he wasn’t this powerful when I’d fought against him before. Granted, I’d cheated a whole bunch during that fight, draining his strength from him the whole time we were fighting, but still. However, the improvements in my battle instincts were clear as day. Not even a week ago, I’d been swarmed by these beasts and hadn’t even made it to the point where Anu tried to use shadow warriors instead of monsters.
“If this is all that you are capable of, then you will never--”
Goddamn, that took long enough. This was officially the end of the fight. The shadows were no longer springing up from the ground, instead of fading quickly out of existence as the magic fueling their forms was cut off at the source. The ground shadows drained into the floor while the ones in the air blew away into the air with an unseen breath. As the shadows disappeared from the battlefield, it was only my opponent and me, and my focus could finally be channeled solely in making him suffer.
Anu Bysma himself was experiencing his own difficulties, thanks to me. A shaking hand hovered by his face, a look of anguish frozen upon it. As he grasped onto his skull, he fell down to one knee, holding himself up by his golden staff as the vitality of his body quickly drained away from him.
As I stepped towards him, I continued to funnel the mysterious flow of malicious energy from my ‘menace’ into him, swarming his mind with doubts and fears. His will was strong, and he knew how to use this power as well, but mine was stronger still. And, with this feat of mental strength, I’d proven that I was better at using this ability than he was.
“I cannot believe it.” Anu’s deep voice had an uncharacteristic waver in it, brought upon by the supernatural fear that I was forcing upon him. “I have not experienced this same feeling since Mr. Yin himself was with us. To have mastered your aura of menace so well in such a short time is… astonishing.”
“Is that you giving up?” I politely inquired, “I’mma need you to specifically say that you lost this time.”
“Yes, indeed,” he conceded. “You have done well. It seems that you do not require much instruction from the likes of me. I had thought myself to be the one to guide you along your development as the newest head of the Ghoul, but you are more worthy of becoming its leader than I could have realized.”
I usually skipped tutorials in games, anyway.
“Now, do you think that’s going to work on Don Perignon?” I lent Anu a hand in standing back up as the menace died down. “He’s a tough son of a bitch, from what you were saying. What exactly can I expect when I’m fighting him?”
“He will attempt to hinder your mind.” Anu leaned against his staff as he returned to his full height. “Much like you can create a debilitating aura of fear, he can create his own area of debilitation.”
“I imagine that it’s going to feel similar to being hammered.” I returned my arms to normal, the spiky cannon retreating back into the adaptive cybernetics within my clothing. “We’ll just have to make sure that he doesn’t have the opportunity to do that when we fight him.”
“When you fight him,” Anu corrected me, “it is imperative that you face the executives of the Ghoul alone if you wish to win their support.”
“And if I don’t necessarily need their support?” I asked, “could I use my people to back me up then?
”
“Are you not going to assume the leadership of the Ghoul once more?” Anu asked in return, “how do you plan on reassembling the Ghoul from its pieces if you do not collect them?”
“I don’t need to necessarily keep them alive to get everything I need from them,” I reasoned, “to be perfectly frank, if the old Ghoul was so damn impressive, it’d have survived the heroes suddenly appearing. This new world of heroes is going to need a new world of villains to accommodate. I think I can provide that with my people. If your old pals think they want to join us, they’ll have to play ball. If not, we’re going to strip them of their powers, their forces, and their dignity before they can blink.”
“Why did I expect anything less?” Anu laughed from deep within his chest. “Only someone with the same spark of unending greed that Mr. Yin had once possessed could be his true successor, and why would you settle for something so small as his old throne of the world?”
“Exactly!” I walked towards the door to the sparring room. “I’m making something new here, something that’s going to outlast all the political powers today.”
“Do you expect to do such a thing with your people here?” Anu followed me out the sparring room as the sliding doors opened to the hallways of the complex. “I mean no offense to your organization, or to diminish your accomplishments, but they are simply not the typical force for such a task…”
“They’re unorthodox.” I finished the sentence for him. “If you just look at any one of them, like Nick, or Natasha, or Joe, or Cane, you might think that they’re too silly to be the force that’s going to conquer the world. And that, my friend, is part of the point.”
“You mean that you purposefully chose these people for their lack of intimidating looks?” Anu asked.
“Why is everyone questioning my decisions lately?” I realized a growing pattern. “No, I didn’t pick them out because they weren’t going to scare people. I picked them out because they’re all the absolute best at what they’re doing.”