THE TOURNAMENT OF SUPERVILLAINY
Book Five of The Supervillainy Saga
By C. T. Phipps
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 C. T. Phipps
Original Cover Design Concept by Jim Bernheimer
Cover Art by Raffaele Marinetti
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
C. T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The Bookie Monster.
Bibliography
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Kingdom of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #4)
The Tournament of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #5)
I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 1)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 2)
Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G, Vol. 1)
Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Assassin (Agent G, Vol. 3)
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 2)
Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 1)
100 Miles and Vampin’ (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 2)
Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight, Vol. 1)
Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight, Vol. 2)
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Table of Contents
Preface
Foreword
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Preface
By C. T. Phipps
MORTAL KOMBAT!
*techno music plays*
Oh, sorry, I was briefly lost in the Nineties. You’ll understand why I made that reference in a bit. When I completed the Science of Supervillainy, I briefly debated having Gary hang up his cloak for good. There’s always the problem of dragging out a series too long. You don’t want to overstay your welcome and it was a decent place to end the story. Gary had defeated Merciful, President Omega, and matured into a responsible adu…okay, I can’t finish that sentence without laughing. Gary didn’t mature in the slightest.
However, I didn’t want the series to become nothing more than a series of constantly repeated jokes and pop culture references. I already had some people saying the formula was becoming stale. I’ll even share a secret with you: I wrote a good sixty thousand words of Supervillainy Saga #5 before realizing I just wasn’t enjoying it. Thus, I scrapped the Kingdom of Supervillainy and decided to make the Tournament of Supervillainy instead. So what is this novel?
The Tournament of Supervillainy is an homage to all the dozens of fighting games I played during my teenage years ranging from Street Fighter II to Tekken to a few I don’t think anyone remembers (Virtual Fighter anyone?). Gone are the days of the arcade and the replacement of fighting online in multiplayer matches just isn’t the same. It’s also an homage to Enter the Dragon and other martial arts movies that inspired the fighting game genre.
Seriously, I must have spent thousands of dollars plugging quarters into arcade machines in order to try to win the various tournaments that countless villains had set up across the globe. I still have a poster of Chun Li on my wall even as I am torn between her and Sonya Blaze. Ahem, sorry, I made it weird. I loved the colorful collection of characters who, somehow, had to save the world by smacking each other around. The similarity to comic books is obvious and, even better, you have a reason why hero fought hero.
It’s also a crossover story and fans of my other works will note Gary is going to be meeting the stars of Agent G, I was a Teenage Weredeer, Lucifer’s Star, and a few other books of mine. Why is this? Well, I’ve always loved works like Crisis on Infinite Earths and it would lose a bit of its oomph if I just had Gary meeting analogues for other superheroes. You don’t need to have read the other books to know what’s what, though. All you need to know is Gary is very good at making friends even in other universes.
This book will also finally get to have Gary take a serious moment to examine just what he plans to do with the rest of his career as a supervillain. It also will give us some insight into how the Society of Superheroes is coping with losing its equivalent to Batman and Superman. *pause* I mean, the Nightwalker and Ultragod have no similarity to either! Honest!
*shoos away DC Comics’ lawyers*
But is Gary going to continue? Yes, yes he is. Much like the comic book stories that inspired him and my idea for “What if Spiderman was a bad guy?”, Merciless is a character who exists within the confines of a single story from beginning to middle to end. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of stories left to tell about him. As long as there’s evil to be fought and money to b
e made from it, Merciless will stand right there in the middle.
Until I get bored or maybe Gary does. Honestly, I’m not sure who is in charge of our relationship.
Foreword
By Jeffrey Kafer
Action Comics #1000. Remember that number.
Charles has lamented, on occasion, when he thinks Gary’s saga should end. I’ve told him that so long as Gary keeps having adventures, I’ll be there to narrate the audiobook version. But how many is too many? At what point do you end at the top? Is The Tournament of Supervillainy his Judas Contract? I don’t think so.
See, that’s the beauty of comics. There is a never-ending world of adventures and traumatic experiences he can subject his hero/villain to. If things get stale, just resurrect a character who died an emotionally devastating death and bring him back to life, thereby trivializing the emotional context of said death (I’m looking at you, Batman’s Death in the Family). There are endless characters he can annoy with his pop culture references that come seemingly out of nowhere all to hide his insecurities. Gary’s insecurities, that is. Not Charles’s.
Although, maybe…
Anyway. Action Comics #1000. That’s where Superman’s adventures are numbered this year. One thousand issues of endless stories about the Mary-Suest of all superheroes. And we still don’t have any logical reason why Kryptonite affects Superman. I mean, it’s just a chunk of rock from the place he was born. Radiation blocking his abilities, blah blah blah. Still, makes little sense. I don’t visit the place of my birth, Virginia, and suddenly break out in hives.
But I digress. What were we talking about?
Crap. I was talking about something super deep about why Charles should keep writing this Supervillainy Saga and not stop and consider this book his swan song. So long as there are stories to tell, keep telling them. Let Gary keep bumbling around. But whatever. Now I’m stuck on the whole Superman/Kryptonite dynamic and I need to Google that to find out if there’s really a canonical answer beyond fanboy justifications.
Because after 1000 issues, you’d think they would’ve fucking figured it out.
CHAPTER ONE
WHERE I START TO REVALUATE MY LIFE CHOICES
So, I was getting my ass kicked. It was happening a lot lately. I was laying on the ground in the middle of the display room of W.I.Z.A.R.D labs with the Time Cube on display. It was a glowing little cube in the middle of spinning rings with a halo of blue white energy around it. What did it do? I had not the slightest idea, but the company that manufactured most of the super-technological devices of the world had made it their center display for their annual science expo, so I figured it would be a good idea to steal it.
Did I wait for nightfall when it was being packed up? Did I wait for it to be transferred from the heavily monitored display room to a less-observed armor car? Did I do it at any time other than broad daylight during the grand opening? No, of course not, because I’m a supervillain. I don’t do things the easy way.
I was surrounded by the unconscious forms of Red Riding Hood a.k.a Cindy Wakowski-Karkofsky and Diabloman, who didn’t have a civilian identity as far as I could tell. There was also the Teardrop Man, Mr. Stilts, the Ring-Tosser, and a bunch of other C-listers who had my exact same plan to rob the place. I swear to God, I’m not making this up, but eight different groups of supervillains had attacked the W.I.Z.A.R.D expo at once. That would have been a big enough disaster by itself, but no, there was also a single superheroine there.
Guinevere.
“Gary, we need to talk,” the enchanting voice of the World’s Most Beautiful Ass-Kicker said, picking me up by the back of my hood and lifting me up to her face. Guinevere was a 6’2 woman who, in her natural form, basically looked like Pryanka Chopra if she was a buxom professional body-builder. Originally, Guinevere’s appearance was just whatever the viewer thought was their ideal partner but she’d got herself shoved into a new body during a fight with Mr. Magick because weird stuff like that happened with superheroes more often than not. She’d also gained a boost in strength making her as strong as Ultragoddess.
Guinevere was dressed in a form-fitting suit of armor with a tabard on the front while Caliburn was sheathed beside her. A little crown rested on her forehead, marking her as Queen of Camelot. She wasn’t the mythological Guinevere, but was Mordred Pendragon’s sister and the daughter of Morgana Le Fey. She’d left the paradise of Otherworld in order to help regular humanity against the horrors of war. Guinevere was one of the two strongest superheroines in the world and well out of my weight class, even with the power of Death backing me up.
“Hi Gwen,” I said, trying not to look at the dozen unconscious crooks surrounding me. My team had arrived late to the party and missed most of her massive beat-down of bad guys, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t had plenty more to share. “How’s it hanging?”
I tried to turn insubstantial, in order to escape her grasp, but her magical gauntlets prevented me from doing so.
Crap.
“Do you know what it’s like having to deal with you, Mr. Karkofsky?” Guinevere asked. She was using my real name, which was never a good sign with superheroes. It meant they felt they knew you personally and were inclined to take their beatings of you personally. If you were the Ice Cream Man or Big Ben, it was just a job, but if you were Gary Karkofsky then you were someone they felt connected to.
“That is a question my wife asks every day,” I said, trying to figure a way out of this and seeing none. “Also, my girlfriend.”
Guinevere wrinkled her nose in disgust. “You’re vile.”
“Hey, they know about each other,” I said. “Don’t be so prejudiced.”
Mandy Karkofsky a.k.a Nighthuntress was a superheroine who’d died and returned as a vampire. That meant, according to Murray v. Harker, we weren’t legally married and couldn’t get married again unless she was returned to human form—which would never happen because there was no cure for vampirism. Cindy and I had gotten together when Mandy was soulless as well as evil. Cindy had given birth to my child, Leia. What did Mandy think of this? Well, she considered Cindy her mortal slave and servant, so she didn’t mind. I had a third relationship happening that was complicating things with the other two. Yeah, I was a pig, but you try and deal with this kind of stuff.
Guinevere pulled me close to her face. “You. Are. An. Annoyance.”
“This is also something they’ve said,” I said, debating my options.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t fight Guinevere, it’s the fact my options were limited to things that might seriously injure or kill the people around me. It also wouldn’t work in terms of winning the fight. I could turn insubstantial (that hadn’t worked), shoot fire or cold, and was a bit more durable than most people. It was times like this that I missed Cloak since he would have known to handle a situation like this. Then again, the ghost of the Nightwalker would have objected to me trying to steal the Time Cube in the first place.
“Do you want to know what annoys me the most?” Guinevere asked, looming over me like a living statue.
“My acerbic wit?” I asked. “My diabolical genius? The fact I look like a model yet can recite every Star Wars movie from memory? Including the Prequels and Rogue One?”
Guinevere face planted me on the ground, breaking my nose then bringing me back up to her face. “The fact you’ve wasted the opportunities you’ve been given. You’ve saved the world twice. You don’t kill innocents. You had a pardon from the government and Foundation for World Harmony after killing President Omega. Yet you threw it all away to become a petty criminal again?”
“I object to the word petty,” I said, pushing my nose back into place. “Also, the Gary who was pardoned was actually a version of me from an alternate universe and—”
Guinevere pulled out Caliburn and held it up against my throat. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now!”
I blinked. Caliburn, as one of the Great Artifacts, was one of the items that could kill m
e with no chance of resurrection or even undeath. I could maybe blast Guinevere with a full dose of hellfire or stygian ice, but that would probably just make her even madder. Even if I did get past her defenses, that would just kill her and I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I relied on my words, as poorly chosen as they sometimes were. “Because you’re one of the good guys?”
Guinevere stared directly at me before dropping me on the ground. She then put her boot around my neck, which seemed to work just as well as her gauntlets in penetrating my insubstantiality. “Yes, I suppose I am.”
I stopped trying to escape and looked up at her. If I was going to get out of this then I was going to need to use my most dangerous superpower: my wits. “You know there are plenty of places where people would pay good money for this.”
Guinevere’s eyes blazed with fury.
“Okay, obviously not something you’d do,” I said, grunting in pain. I’d taken plenty of poundings over the few years but this was particularly painful. Guinevere wasn’t holding back nearly as much as she normally did. I had no idea why but she was furious at me. “However, I’m sensing some latent hostility. Is something wrong?”
Guinevere buried Caliburn in the ground beside my head before taking her boot off my neck. “Yes, Gary, there is.”
I stood up, waving away what felt like a concussion. I’d probably be fine in an hour or two, the aforementioned tougher than normal power, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling every one of my recent defeats. The Prismatic Commando, Splotch, the Bronze Medalist, and even Ultragoddess had all taken turns on the Merciless whack-a-mole.
At least Ultragoddess had taken the time to nurse me back to health afterward, but being defeated by her was no less humiliating. Gabrielle Anders was the third woman in my life but that was a whole other story.
Guinevere pulled her fist back to punch me again. “So I’m going to send you and the rest of these fools to New Alcatraz. Then I’m going to go to the next supervillain bash in what has become a three times a day occurrence.”
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