The Games of Supervillainy (The Supervillainy Saga Book 2) (15 page)

“Point taken.”

“What's the situation?” Mandy asked, still checking on her radio feed. “I know the attacks are getting bad but I don't know how bad.”

“Very bad,” Gabrielle said, looking at me. “We've come here for reinforcements.”

Gabrielle was one of the most powerful superheroes in the world.

That was not good.

Amanda surprised me with her next statement. “Gary, we don't have time to waste on saving people here.”

“Saving people is never a waste,” Gabrielle said, looking down at Amanda.

“It is when it kills other people,” Amanda said, looking back and meeting her gaze head-on.

“What's the biggest target right now?” I asked, wheels starting to turn in my head.

“The Falconcrest Football Stadium,” Gabrielle answered, looking up at the invisible dome above our heads. “When the dome came, we tried to move as many of the unevacuated there as possible except for those we needed to run essential services. There are a few minor supers we've drafted for the defense as well as military personnel but nothing which will hold out against the Brotherhood's necromancers, Amazons, and dinosaurs.”

“Hold up,” Cindy spoke. “What were those last two?”

“Amazons and dinosaurs,” I said, shrugging. “Get with the program, Cindy.”

Cindy shot me a glare. “Excuse me, Mr. I've gone to the moon now I'm too cool to hang with my henchwoman. Some of us are still adjusting to the high-grade stuff. We're going to fighting dinosaurs and feminist separatists now?”

“Amazons aren't separatists,” I said, surprising everyone. “Speaking as a feminist myself, they're also not particularly devoted to the cause of female social justice either—at least beyond believing they're the equal to any man. The Daughters of Ares are a multi-racial tribe of warriors who just happen to restrict their military traditions to women.”

Everyone looked at me.

I paused. “I dated a couple in college.”

Simultaneously.

Fun bunch.

Scary, but fun.

Diabloman looked at me then Ultragoddess, Mandy, and Cindy. “I am confused on every conceivable level.”

“You and me both pal,” the Black Witch said.

“The Amazons are not invincible,” Angel Eyes said, speaking as if he knew their tactics from personal experience. Which, now that I thought about it, he probably did. “They are very well-trained warriors with access to P.H.A.N.T.O.M weaponry, magic granted by their father, and super-tech provided by their alien contacts. They can be killed if the protection spells on their armor can be overwhelmed, though.”

“Why would they be helping the Brotherhood destroy the world?” Amanda asked.

“Most likely money,” Angel Eyes said, shrugging. “The Daughters of Ares will never break a contract even if it is not in their best interest. They have no fear of death, either, since loyalty to the gods guarantees them a place in Elysium—even the God of War and Cowards.”

“Do you think any of the Reaper's Cloak wearers will be joining in the attack?” I asked.

“A good third of the Brotherhood's forces are presence. The rest are spread through the city,” Gabrielle said, frowning. “Why?”

“It's a long-shot but with only a few hours to midnight, we need to hit the cult hard in such a way as to weaken them. I say we go there, wipe out the bastards, and save a bunch of lives. It might weaken their plans to raise Zul-Barbas. If it doesn't work, we'll still have retrieving the book to fall back on.”

“That's an awfully risky plan if they're summoning their god now,” Amanda said, showing, again, she was probably the most ruthless of us.

I didn't want to admit my plan was because I didn't want to leave however many refugees they'd saved to die. I was a bastard but not that much of a bastard. “Every which way we go is risky. I'm asking you to follow m...Gabrielle's lead. Mandy?”

“I agree, we should help,” Mandy said, making me breathe a sigh of relief. With her support, I had everyone.

“Good,” Gabrielle said. “Let's go make some dinosaur steaks.”

Ultragoddess looked at Mandy's torn and battered evening dress. “We should probably get you something a little more functional before we head off. Selena?”

The Black Witch nodded and raised her stage-wand at Mandy before saying, “Abracadabra!”

The Black Witch was the avatar of Hecate or her chosen one, I wasn't sure which or whether it made a difference. Created by Professor Thule in much the same manner as myself, she wielded magic by force of will rather than spells or focus objects. As such, she was prone to using cheap costume shop props and generic wizardry words than things used by more “serious” mages.

I'd, I kid you not, seen her kill a man with an
Avada Kedavra
spell.

The Black Witch's magic whirled around Mandy's tattered attire and then did a swirl of white pixie dust which resembled the effects from the animated Cinderella movie. It was Selena's idea of a joke, I think.

Mandy's attire melted away and she was briefly naked before her outfit was replaced with a black leather costume, long overcoat, and a silver N amulet at the base of her neck. If not for her Eurasian features and the amulet, I’d have said she was a pretty close ringer for Kate Beckinsale in
Underworld
.

“That's your costume?” I asked, blinking.

“Do you like it?” Mandy asked, smiling.

“Yes and no.”

“No?”

“You look outrageously hot. However, now I’m afraid I’ll be utterly distracted during battle.”

Mandy rolled her eyes.

Cindy interrupted our moment. “Cool costume, but can you do anything?”

“I kick a lot of ass,” Mandy said, staring. “That's enough.”

Cindy looked at her, blinked, and then shrugged. “Works for me.”

“I'm not comfortable teaming up with these guys,” Bronze Medalist said, surprising me. “Gary is okay, he's not like most supervillains. However, Diabloman is a murderer and a madman. I knew the Guitarist and Spellbinder. They were good people and he took their lives or as much did.”

“We don't have a choice,” Gabrielle said, staring down. “We need all hands on deck. Besides, I made this team to redeem the wicked as well as fight evil.”

“There is no redemption in Hell,” Diabloman said, his voice cold but certain. “That does not mean I will not help.”

Bronze Medalist didn't look happy but I doubted anyone would given the situation. It wasn't like the friends and family of the Black Witch or General Venom's victims would feel any different than he did. He would let it go, though, because he was a professional. Both he and the Silver Lightning had worked with worse than Diabloman in New Angeles to protect the innocent.

“Hell is for other people,” I said, making light of his statement. “Also, Heaven. Let's get going.”

Gabrielle nodded and extended the Ultraforce around our group, raising us all up in a bubble behind her which carried us in much the same way as the Shadow Seven. Much to my surprise, Mandy took my hand and stepped forward through the bubble's exterior.

It sloshed around us and I briefly thought we were going to fall before finding myself floating through the air at speeds identical to what we were travelling at. An aura of Ultraforce was clinging to us and Mandy took us down into a swimming like pose before speeding us up fast enough to come just behind Gabrielle's flying form.

“I thought you'd like a chance to be up front,” Mandy said, smiling. “Gabrielle taught me how to manipulate her aura through thought.”

“Wow,” I said, staring forward, blinking. “I'm flying for real. This is...wow.” I then blinked, doing a double take. “Wait, are you two friends now?”

Cause that wasn't awkward.

At all.

“Oh yes,” Ultragoddess said, hovering directly in front of me. I briefly wondered if this was why she'd switched from a skirt to shorts. “Your wife is a fascinating woman. I've completely forgiven her for trying to kill me with the Black Witch.”

“What's that?”

“You knew I was in love with her,” Mandy said, looking away.

“There's a difference between being in love with a supervillain and aiding and abetting a murder,” I said, with a great deal of hypocritical moral outrage.

Mandy looked at me.

“Yeah, I've not got a lot a leg to stand on, I know,” I said, still troubled by it. “I'm just not a very forgiving sort. I don't know how you can work with so many people who have tried to kill you, Gabrielle.”

“Of course not,” my wife grumbled. “You're Merciless.”

“Forgiveness is the path to healing. It's also the path from turning an enemy to a friend, which is the sweetest victory,” Gabrielle said. “It's not just a song by Survivor.”

Silent, I looked down and saw the beating my hometown had taken. It looked arguably worse from above than it did on the ground. With only a few superheroes to guard against the hordes of supervillains, zombies, and zombie supervillains—plenty of them had chosen to go to town. The WFCR Radio Station was covered in a glacier, for example, and I could see places where fires were still burning unattended.

The one saving grace was it didn't look like they were anywhere near the city's population in undead shambling down below. As bad as the deaths had gotten, it seemed the vast majority of the population had been evacuated. There were thousands of shamblers below, tens of thousands even, but a good number of them were raised from the existing dead. I wanted to believe not that many had been killed.

“
Eighteen thousand, seven-hundred and fifty-two
,” Cloak said, his voice low. “
That's how many the Brotherhood of Infamy and their monsters have murdered in the past month. That's not counting those who have died from starvation, exposure, thirst, accident, disease, lack of medical attention, or suicide
.
I can feel their spirits calling thanks to your pact with Death
.”

Sometimes there were no words.

Then there were.

“We're going to kill these bastards,” I said, my voice low and cold. “Every last one of them.”

“Yes, we are,” Gabrielle said, her voice surprisingly calm and cool.

“Isn't that against the superhero's code?” Mandy asked.

“Not during war,” Gabrielle said, her voice cold.

Mandy gave my hand a squeeze.

She'd killed her first person to save my life.

Now I was going to ask her to kill more.

This whole superhero and villain thing wasn't working out nearly the way I'd wanted it to.

“
It just took the end of the world to make you realize that
,” Cloak muttered.

“Oh like that doesn't happen every Thursday,” I muttered.

“We're here,” Ultragoddess said, slowing us down.

The sight which greeted me was less like a superhero battle and more like a war zone. The Falcons Stadium had been barricaded up by a gigantic wall of cars, presumably moved by Ultragoddess and Black Witch's powers, with lots of towers manned by courageous mundanes fighting with weapons taken from the National Guard Armory.

Laser bolts sailed through the air against the thousands of zombies formed into a horde by the black robed-necromancers interspersed with them. They weren't wearing the Reapers' Cloaks, I would have felt it if they were, but their clothing was clearly inspired by the Nightwalker's attire. Hundreds of them were present, many using scavenged weapons in place of spells or staves. They had managed to roll over a number of ground based defenders and were either eating them, hacking them to pieces, or just celebrating their kills even as the horde was shot at from above.

They weren't the real threat, though, but merely the support for the mounted dinosaurs which were breathing fire and shooting laser-beams from their eyes. They weren't just dinosaurs, you see, but cybernetic dinosaurs which meant the Brotherhood of Infamy either had looted the stash of or had the help of Doctor Dinosaur.

Which was a shame because I liked that guy.

The Amazons on top of brachiosaurs, triceratops, and a pair of Tyrannosaurus Rexes were tearing through the stadium's meager defenses. They were tough-looking women, some beautiful, others not, but all wearing modernized Grecian armor and helmets with specialized lenses which allowed them to see in the dark. They were working methodically, murdering the defenders one by one, showing no sign of the crazy slaughter their associates were engaged in. They were professionals doing a job, which made them so much worse than the insane cultists they'd been bought by.

There were even some supervillains in the air, both living and dead, like long-time Ultragoddess annoyances Nega-Goddess, Xerox, Blood Eagle, and the Smog the Elemental Spirit of Corruption. There were also the dead and zombiefied forms of Canadian heroes Avro Arrow and Ms. Mountie, presumably having come across the lake to help the city with the Backwoodsman. I felt for the guy and hoped he was still alive out there somewhere. Either way, all of this was a massive amount of overkill for butchering a stadium full of helpless people. If this was supervillainy, I wanted no part of it.

“How many people are in that stadium?”

“Twenty-one-thousand,” Gabrielle said.

“Drop me down.”

Like that, Mandy dropped my hand and the battle was joined. I levitated down onto the head of the closest Tyrannosaurus Rex, landing right behind one of the Amazons who was using a weird saddle with levers and buttons to manipulate the creature's brain. I felt guilty placing my hand on her shoulder, filling her lungs up with ice, and then causally dumping her over the side of the creature's body.

The controls weren't terribly complex, a little more difficult to manage than your average video game and I'd played a lot of video games. Moving the central lever to one side, my T-Rex buddy moved in a similar direction and a pulling of the trigger on its side resulted in glowing red death shooting from its eyes.

It was a testament to how thoroughly pissed off I was that
riding a frigging cyborg Tyrannosaurus Rex with DEATH RAY EYES
was not something I could take the time to enjoy. Instead, I turned the monster against the necromancer's down below.

Deliberately targeting them rather than the zombies around them. As they screamed, going up in burning flame, much of the zombie horde below became a disorganized mass of mindless hate-filled monsters which turned on the non-necromancer cultists around them.  Dozens of them died, then perhaps as many as a hundred while the rest of my time went to town on the enemy army.

As Ultragoddess said, it was war and no effort was spared to keep alive the Brotherhood forces. Well, let me correct that, no exceptional effort was spared. Bronze Medalist did his best to knock out living cultists then tie them up against the side of the fortifications outside of the zombies reach with his kinetic energy bands.

He could afford to do that since he could reach speeds of several thousand miles per hour. Ultragoddess, likewise, did her best to knock out the living rather than kill them. None of us hesitated against the dead, though, and no one objected when the Human Tank fired rocket launchers into the gun-wielding black-robed sadists who'd unleashed this horror on the city or their Amazon allies.

Really, I couldn't help but be proud of my henchmen as they showed off their own fighting skill. Angel Eyes floated in the air, blasting zombies with glowing beams of arcane might. Cindy plopped herself down on one of the towers and pulled a Foundation for World Harmony laser rifle from her basket and shot Amazons off their mounts into the zombie hordes below.

Amanda threw big objects around, even grabbing a stegosaurus by the tail and hurling it into the air at Nega-Goddess. I was particularly impressed by my wife. She moved like a ninja, using a pair of eskrima sticks charged with magic that seemed to cause the undead to explode when touched while having a taser-like effect on humans. I'd have to, very reluctantly, thank the Black Witch for providing those.

The one who did the most damage of our group, though? That was Diabloman. He went to town with his summoned tattoo monsters and enhanced strength. A man who had struggled against a super-enhanced gorilla was going to town in a way not seen since his heyday in the Eighties.

I suspected he planned to die here.

“
He has a family, he wouldn't do that
,” Cloak said, conspicuously silent as I launched a pair of rockets on the sides of my mount into the other T-Rex. I ducked underneath the eye beams it shot wildly as it died, collapsing into the ground.

“Unless he thinks he isn't worthy of them,” I said, watching an Amazon run up and jump on the side of my mount. She was climbing up the side of the creature like it was an obstacle in basic training.

She was a rough and tumble dirty-blonde haired woman with an eyepatch, a bloody knife in her mouth (which couldn't be sanitary), and a host of scars across her face. Her armor looked like had been scarred by Ultragoddess’ energy blasts and I was surprised at the vehemence in her eyes. Reaching the top of the T-Rex's head, she stood across from me and pulled the knife from her mouth before holding it threateningly at me.