by Skyler Grant
They were smart. An unpleasant state of affairs, but one I could adapt to.
“Niles? Anything you can do to jam them?” I asked.
“If I do, we’re going to lose our wireless comms as well,” Niles said.
That was inconvenient. It would keep me from using a drone. On the other hand, anywhere my henchmen were located I had access to a wired comm panel nearby.
“Do it,” I said.
I was wrong about the four squads. Whisper was off somewhere doing his own thing and the heroes had split into three groups of ten, each with five of the pure and five vanguard, and with one of the remaining supers leading.
They were coordinated and disciplined. Cutting the comms wouldn’t greatly trouble the squads individually. What it would do was keep them from coming to each other's aid, or learning what befell the others.
That was important. I had limited tools at my disposal and I needed each to be as much of a surprise as possible.
Feint’s group was just passing near one of my traps and I triggered it. An explosive in the ceiling shattered a glass capsule and a slime fell into their midst.
Two henchmen started to melt at once. Feint rolled away and, bringing up his rifle, snapped off a round that took a chunk out of the slime. There was no other effect.
“Fall back, keep away,” Feint said, tapping his comms. “We need heal support.”
No comms meant help wasn't coming and after a moment he seemed to realize that. The slimed were screaming and making gurgling sounds as more of their flesh melted away. Feint raised his rifle and with two quick shots silenced them both permanently.
Feint told the others as he led the way deeper into the complex, “You hear glass shatter, move.”
The rest of his group was a problem for later. Ariel was nearing another trap. She and her group had already passed one of the unholy water steam traps—I wasn’t going to hit a hydrokinesis-user with water.
Fire was another matter. Her team was just approaching a cutaway wall where I had several henchmen waiting. It was time to bring the darkflame into play.
28
My henchmen had good angles on most of Ariel’s squad. I just had to make certain that they tried to get her as well. I flashed the lights as their signal to go.
The wall panels dropped and the darkflame flamethrowers belched. Six of Ariel's people were doused in flames at once. Ariel and the other four however were surrounded in a shield of water that had formed around them. With a thrust of one hand she drove a shard of ice through one of my henchman's throats.
One of the pure soldiers opened fire with his rifle and another of my henchmen was driven back, twitching before falling dead.
One of my henchmen with a standard rifle fired. Ariel’s water shielded her from most of the rounds, then one caught her in the shoulder and she fell back with a cry.
There was just one real option unless I wanted to call in Ox, and I’d rather keep him in reserve. I already had a timer up and running.
“I need comms back up briefly,” I said.
Niles triggered them.
“Focus fire on Ariel in twelve seconds,” I said to my remaining henchmen.
Another one had died by the time that timer elapsed, the blood in his veins exploding outwards as Ariel took control of it.
Then the first flames began to flare black. None of it was on Ariel, but she was close. Black flame bloomed from the corpses around her and she let out a startled cry.
For a second her defenses slipped, and in that time my henchmen riddled her body with cursed bullets. Ariel's blood flowed around her as if trying to find a way back inside. There was no putting her back together again, and a moment later a henchmen stepped forward and doused her from head to toe in fire.
Things elsewhere weren't going so well. Nina had somehow detected one of my groups behind a wall and ordered her people to open fire first. I had four henchmen dead in an instant. The remaining one sprinkled fire on four before going down. It seemed for a time that she was going to save them, her healing powers neutralizing the wounds as fast as the fire dealt them.
When the fire flared black though, it burned both her and them. She stumbled back with one of her hands charred black. Despite her healing abilities that flesh wasn’t coming back quickly.
There was still no sign of Whisper and that was getting to be a concern. Was he looking for the key? For my server room? If he stayed alive, there was so much trouble that he could do.
I hit Feint with unholy steam when he passed near one of my wall traps. Or at least, I should have. What appeared to be him shimmered and broke apart. A hologram of some sort, part of that misdirection he must be so good at.
Regardless of his lack of actual powers Feint was the one I was most concerned about now. I called in Ox and sent him with five henchmen for support towards Feint.
Jules was getting her bow ready.
“You know you shouldn’t go out there,” I said.
“We can’t afford to lose this and the healer is good,” Jules said.
“Darkflame will do it. It already cost her a hand,” I said.
“Because she wasn’t afraid enough of the fire. Light manipulation—that means she can create energy shields if she focuses. You need a quick, precision kill and I’m your girl for that,” Jules said.
Jules had a point. I didn’t approve, but it was her life to risk. With accelerated healing she was, at least, going to be tough to put down.
There was a disturbance on the second level. Audio coming from where there should have been none—a giddy laugh.
Whisper, he’d made it down to that floor and the drug fumes must have gotten to him. Not enough that he’d let his powers slip, but enough that he had made a mistake.
I sent word to Partygurl where she could find him and recommended she go for mass destruction. She was fighting somebody invisible, after all.
Ox and his squad met Feint. Feint had more people, but Ox charged in regardless, soaking up gun shots and sword blows as he went with his head bent low. Bodies went flying. Not Feint, he was already out of the way and sending shot after shot at Ox’s eyes, his throat, his joints, seeking out anything that might be a weak spot. He wasn’t finding them.
The henchmen following opened fire with their flamethrowers. Feint wasn’t expecting it with the risk of friendly fire—none of them were expecting it. Feint wasn’t done though, performing a swivel-turn just before the flames reached him. His shots rang out, each catching a henchman in the throat.
I didn’t know if the fires would burn Ox or not—surely his superhuman endurance had to have a limit? The normal fires seemed to hurt him, he started whimpering again but it was the darkflame that finally killed him along with everybody else it had touched. The entire group transformed into a pile of charred and blackened bones.
That was unfortunate, but Ox had life insurance, we’d made sure of that. Forty-eight hours and he could be back in the fight.
Two groups of the angelic invaders had been stopped, and only the last remained.
I had a last surprise ready. Henchmen didn’t like suicide orders, but they’d take them. Nina was too good at healing burns and she needed something else to take her down. Three henchmen crashed into her squad even as they were peppered with bullets—bullets which passed through them and shattered the glass canisters on their backs. Each contained a slime.
No quick healing there as people began to be consumed. Nina tried, of course, and it provided a moment of distraction that Jules used to put an arrow into her neck. It lodged there for a just moment before the tip exploded, separating her head from her body in a messy spray of gore.
29
The heroes were as good as their word. With the last of their champions down they sent Kleo through a rift within the hour. DTV kept their word as well. They thought the killings would get great ratings. Kleo didn’t seem overly grateful, barely exchanging a word before she stormed off down to her lair.
The angelic invaders had been
equipped with excellent gear, but unfortunately not much of it had survived the battle. Fire hadn’t been good for either their bodies or the equipment. Regardless, I got an extra 5,000 apiece for the bodies from a demonic vendor. I didn’t know just what they had planned for them, but for over 150,000 I didn’t much care. Nothing in my agreement with the heroes said I couldn’t sell their remains to shady vendors.
We’d also effectively lost a day and we only had twenty-nine more until Mastermind's deadline. It wasn’t much time for the targets we’d laid out.
First though, I had some choices to make. Shortly after the battle I got a notification.
Congratulations
Your villain rank has officially been increased
You are now ranked E3
You have the option for two new abilities
Your first ability selection must come from these three
Superb Negotiator
Whenever in a negotiation with another individual key words that may change their stance in your favor or against you will be notated with information. This will help to further your position.
Daily Payout
You will receive your rank times 10,000 credits daily. At your current rank that will be a daily payout of 30,000 credits.
Detect Illusion
As an expansion of your standard analysis vision, you will now have an added ability to detect illusions.
This was unexpected. I had thought when I got power offers again it would be an extension of the last abilities available, perhaps with just one new power to choose from. These were totally different.
Once again they all had some advantages. Daily payout was equal to what I was getting right now for a single month of rent for a floor. It also scaled with my level, and what was a decent sum now would remain one even into the future.
Detect illusion could clearly be useful. We were going to be searching for the site of old ruins for Jules, sites quite possibly concealed with illusionary magic. The ability to see through it could be a big plus there. I’d also just seen how dangerous Feint was, and although I wasn’t sure if this ability would let me see him or not, it might.
Then again, almost all conversations could turn into bargaining and any advantage in them could save my life. I could save everyone's lives.
I ultimately had to go with detect illusion. The payout was tempting, but already I could see just how much a high-paying job could bring in. I thought with time it might be exponential and despite seeming to scale, it really wouldn’t.
Detecting illusions was at least something that I could depend on.
As soon as I made the selection I got a new prompt.
You have the option for a new ability
You may select from these three
Purchase Floor
Instead of buying and upgrading items on a floor individually of a building you control it is now possible to buy and upgrade a floor entirely according to specialized themes.
Distributed Processing
You can now host your core processing across multiple machines simultaneously. This allows you to easily relocate your consciousness, even without an active data-connection, should one of these servers be destroyed.
Interest Bearing
With Interest Bearing you will gain .01 percent monthly interest on all funds banked for at least thirty days.
One of these I’d seen before, and that was interest bearing. I’d been tempted by it, and I still was. Long-term, nothing was more powerful. It was still a paltry bit of interest though, and in the short-term it was difficult just to stay alive.
Distributed processing would help a lot with surviving. My concern was it didn’t seem like something I couldn’t already do. I could create backup servers, I could transfer my consciousness. Perhaps I couldn’t do it in as guaranteed a fashion—I had to be smart and cautious.
While it didn’t seem like the obvious choice to me, I liked the floor option. The fact was if I could quickly choose between floor templates and buy the appropriate one, I didn’t think I had to do every bit of micro-management myself. Even if I did, viewing some default templates might help to inspire my own creativity.
I selected it.
That was it for my new abilities. I was already a little stronger. I wondered if any of the others had gotten stronger. Both Ox and Jules had gotten kills on camera, and that publicity seemed to count for a lot in terms of rank.
Rank seemed like a mix of advantage and cost. We could raise our power without raising rank, if we were quiet about things. That would make us more powerful than others expected, when raising rank actually made us more powerful directly.
I thought we’d play it safe and do it both ways. Anything that could be public, I’d try to find publicity and any profit from that. But obviously we didn’t want to put everything out there.
Our next goal was going to be upping Niles. He was the most in need of a power boost. That meant stealing from Disaster. I didn't know how we’d do that and keep it a secret.
Disaster was scary enough. We didn’t need her as an enemy.
30
With funds once again in our accounts we were able to buy me a replacement drone and hire some new henchmen from the guild to replace those we had lost in the assault.
We needed transport as well. There were cheaper options available, but we were in a hurry and that meant a teleporter. We soon had a portable server, henchmen, my drone, Jules and Niles in a warehouse and surrounded in a glowing green bubble of energy. Disaster's family were quadruplets, all four of them scattered in different cities and providing transport between them by way of a “shared space” they could all access. It worked. We’d entered Disaster’s territory and skipped any red tape to do it.
As soon as we stepped out of the warehouse the differences were striking. Mastermind’s territory looked like a thriving metropolis—and largely it was one. Villains might have been in charge and crime was one of the major industries, but still society functioned. Disaster’s territory looked like a war zone. Burned-out husks of buildings, twisted and ruined remains of armored vehicles in the streets, and what people we saw were watching us warily from behind barricades.
“Well, this is just terrible,” Niles said.
“Mastermind rules his territory because nobody puts together a plan like he does. Every piece moves like it is supposed to. Disaster rules because she’s able to blow the hell out of anyone that thinks she shouldn’t be in charge,” Jules said.
That might be so. I still wished that at some point she hired somebody to do some cleaning. We’d been responsible for a lot of corpses in our front lobby and we cleaned them up, that was just good business.
We’d made some calls through Villainet and set up a two-night rental through AirLair. It was a stupid name, ours was much better.
The bunker let us in once we keyed the proper digits on the keypad. The place was nicely done. A large video display and conference room, a fully equipped armory.
“Hey, they have rocket launchers,” said one of the henchmen.
“And photon cannons,” said another.
It was like managing a herd of children.
“Don’t take those. They probably charge us for anything we so much as look at,” I said.
“They’ve got a better wifi connection than you do too,” Niles said, after tapping away a moment on his phone.
“Yes, yes, if everyone is quite done being impressed by the competition, get your gear set up. Uma, I don’t believe for a second they’re not spying on us,” I said.
“I’ll crack the systems and lock them out if they are,” Uma said cheerfully from a speaker.
I wasn’t sure Uma wasn’t spying on us. That was a problem for another time too.
When we finally got around to our meeting the room even had a holo-projector so a tiny holographic fairy could pace up and down in the middle of the table. Uma had her own body, of sorts.
“So can I just say how nice this place is? We should really do something
similar,” Jules said.
“We’re paying fifty thousand for two nights. When we’re rich enough to have equipment like this we will,” I said.
I hadn’t wanted to spend that much, but villain-on-villain violence was even worse in Disaster’s territory, especially for those visiting from out of town. This lair came with its own defense contract from a private army that discouraged any unwelcome guests.
“So Uma, you’re spearheading this plan since it's your idea. Hopefully it doesn’t involve feeding us to your creator,” I said.
“She doesn’t actually eat people. That's just a rumor. Disaster just kind of dissolves them,” Uma said with a weak smile around the table. “Okay, I’m kind of made from spare code from some of Disaster’s maintenance systems. When her support team needs to over-ride a lock or system, they use a sort of universal software key. That key was sort of my mom? I guess?”
How messy and unpleasant it was for software to think of itself in biological terms like that.
“So you’re still able to access Disaster’s systems?” Jules asked.
“Not exactly. I think I can get the maintenance system at least to recognize me as a part of itself. That won’t get us all the way where we need to go, but it will at least open the door,” Uma said.
“So what is the rest of what we’re going to need?” I asked.
“Once inside I’ll need security clearance for us to go further. That means getting me inside a security mainframe. I think I can crack her low-level security, but that's going to require I be manually uploaded to the mainframe,” Uma said.
“If you can get us a maintenance pass I should be able to do that. Even a secure room is going to need maintenance to visit it,” Niles said.
That sounded hopeful to me, it also sounded like his problem.