Villains Don't Save Heroes! (Night Terror Book 2)

by Mia Archer

She was always so quick to appropriate other people's work, but she never stopped and took the time to figure out what made it tick.

I could already feel the anti-Newtonian field slipping away. It was a strange feeling. At first it was like I was surrounded by a tingle. Now that it was starting to slip it felt like I was diving head first into a pool of cold water.

It was at that moment that the anti-Newtonian field finally gave. The thing seemed to shatter around me and I flew across the room right at Dr. Lana’s smarmy but increasingly surprised face.

A hit totally could wipe out all higher brain function. That was the problem, though. Usually when you saw that kind of thing happen in a movie the person woke up very shortly after with no ill effect. As though nothing bad had happened.

You couldn’t go around making fundamental laws of nature your bitch without a little risk to life and limb, so I’d overengineered the safeties on my stuff to hell and back. It appeared that Dr. Lana skipped that step in true Dr. Lana fashion.

I wasn’t sure if the bigger ass was me for hitting her that hard, or Dr. Lana for bringing her boring normal unenhanced body to an atomically powered supersuit fight.

The only noise she should’ve been making after taking a hit like that was a death rattle.

I didn’t like it when my life’s genre of choice went from scifi to horror.

To have them suddenly come back to life when by all accounts they should be dead or seriously brain-damaged? Well that was an unpleasant cherry on top of the shit Sundae I was being force fed today.

A huge confident grin split her face. I didn't like that she was confident. It was never good when a villain was confident.

If you could call breaking and entering heroic. I suppose it all came down to intent and point of view.

Hey. I might loathe Dr. Lana, but it's not like I was a complete monster.

They basically looked like the kind of busted low technology crap that would impress military types and have them spending billions of dollars to go and play with their new toys in some undeveloped nation that’d still manage to give’em a run for their money despite all their multimillion dollar death toys.

"What makes you think I have a big reveal?" "God. You really are terrible at this. You know that, right?"

"That's exactly how this works. Have you never been in a fight with a hero before?" "I've been in fights with heroes before, and you're no hero,"

I was a villain, damn it, and it didn't matter if I was dating the most powerful hero the world had ever known. That didn’t magically make me a hero by association just because I’d fought off one giant robot with her.

Sure the reason for my disappearance was I’d been busy with Fialux in the lab doing all sorts of experiments, both scientific and otherwise. Booyah.

The greatest hero the world had ever known dating the greatest villain the world had ever known? Yeah, I figured there was going to be some friction there, but I figured the longer I ignored that friction the longer I could enjoy myself.

“There’s totally a script to this and obviously you haven’t been doing it long enough to know how it goes. You tell me you have a big secret. I destroy whatever big secret you're throwing at me. You say you've got another even bigger secret and we go back and forth until one of us has run out of ways to defeat the big reveals we’re throwing at each other."

They might overlook Dr. Lana trying and failing to take over the world, possibly, but they certainly weren't going to overlook somebody fucking with the football program.

She was on her feet now. What the hell was going on to get her up on her feet so quickly? I wanted to have what she was having. The ability to survive a blow like that without a tech assist would be useful.

I would’ve winced if I was a football kind of person, but seeing as how I sort of resented the football program for taking away money from more important things I felt a sense of smug satisfaction as the falling bot caused a few hundred thousand dollars of damage.

That was the problem with humanoid robots. They came with all the same structural tradeoffs that regular humans had.

The human mind didn’t want to accept big things that could move fast.

The robot turned. It scowled at me. She’d actually installed eyebrow shutters on the thing. Damn. That was just like that stupid eyelid CORVAC insisted I install on the giant robot chassis he used to try and destroy downtown Starlight City.

I could appreciate a maniacal supercomputer with a good sense of theatricality.

If it was using parlor tricks then I had a full on Vegas magic show spectacular hidden up my sleeve, thank you very much.

Then again I wasn’t Dr. Lana and she hadn’t had the bad experience I had with artificial intelligence.

Not to mention robots like these always had to walk the line between being intelligent enough to do the job without being intelligent enough to turn on their masters.

I’d never heard of villains or heroes dealing with post traumatic stress, although normals dealing with PTSD in the wake of attacks on the city was something of a health crisis in Starlight City.

It was a problem I felt guilty enough about that I quietly funneled a portion of any proceeds I stole to mental health clinics in the city, but this was different.

There was no mistaking that color. It was the color of an ancient monochrome monitor like the one I’d played with as a young kid when my dad always i...

Well then. It looked like I was going to get smashed into the pavement after all. This wasn’t going to be fun.

It looked like this giant robot fight had just turned into my favorite kind of date night with my best girl. Even if it was in the middle of the day.

I felt a bit of professional jealousy at that. It wasn’t fair that I had all these wonderful toys and I still couldn’t manage to pull something off that Fialux could do by simply existing.

Sure her fighting style was mostly “bull in a China shop smashing everything in her path and ignoring anything that fell on her,” but it worked. Not to mention she looked damn good doing it!

Obviously I was handling it since I was down on the ground about to be smashed under a giant robot’s foot.

I fell to the ground and hit the pavement with a resounding thud and a crack. Again it hurt like a motherfucker.

Or we’d been canoodling in the office I still maintained on campus because it turns out they liked my survival rates for Surviving A Heroic Intervention and getting paid to work a few hours a week ranting at journalism majors was the best entertainment I’d ever found.

Nothing was a threat to our dynamic duo, if you’ll pardon the phrasing.

“If you’d like I could always just take you down to the police station. I’m sure we’re doing something that could technically be charged, even if we are trying to save the city,”

I was perfectly capable of admitting when I was wrong about something. I didn’t do it that often because of the simple fact that I was very rarely actually wrong about something.

It looked like whoever programmed that giant robot had a grudge against the athletic program. Apparently Dr. Lana harbored the same loathing I did for organized sports.

I could handle this. We could handle this. I hoped.

“Exactly! You can’t take all the credit for opening the pickle jar if I’m the one who loosened it up for you!”

My eyes narrowed. Something was wrong here. That something very bad I’d been worrying about was happening.

I also noted that the robot was being very specific in the kind of damage and chaos it was causing. The hard sciences were mostly spared, but it went after the English building with particular gusto. It was starting towards the journalism building, too, though there wouldn’t be many casualties there.

I smiled. No, they’d been taught by Professor Terror. Which, now that I thought about it, would be a pretty good name for an academia-themed villain if I hadn’t already used Night Terror which had more of a ring to it.

The bell tower was ridiculous. They’d built the thing when I was in undergrad. It’d cost a ridiculous amount of money, and the administration had said that had nothing to do with the tuition hike that came along shortly after.

I really fucking hated it when all the indicators on my suit started behaving like indicators in a videogame heads up display at a particularly dramatic moment in the narrative.