The wind whipped through my hair. CORVAC was always going on about how dangerous it was for me to have my hair out like that. People could grab it in a fight. It wasn’t aerodynamic when I was flying around.

  He’d even done wind tunnel simulations and everything and tried to show them to me, but the plain truth was that, just like a good cape, there was no substitute for making a dramatic landing with your hair whipping in the wind.

  Just like I did now. The pavement didn’t crack under me like it did when Fialux came in for a landing, but that was fair. Even with all the enhanced stuff I had going in my suit it’s not like I had the power she had to be packing to pull off some of her tricks.

  I looked up at Professor Laura Anderson. It’d been far too long since we’d seen each other, though of course she had no way of connecting Night Terror to a wayward student who’d been kicked out of their precious program once upon a time for messing with powers beyond man’s understanding.

  Though I was pretty sure from the shocked look on her face that she had some suspicions about who I was. It’s not like there were many people in this city with a knack for the sort of megalomaniacal mad superscience that had always interested me.

  “Night Terror!”

  The whispers went up all around me. I basked in them. Welcomed them. Reveled in them. They were the whispers of an adoring public. Of minions who knew they were facing down their true doom.

  They might have special toys that helped them take on Fialux, but they also had to know I was more ruthless than the beautiful hero of Starlight City.

  “You can’t have her,” Dr. Laura said.

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. I’d long ago learned how to use my eyebrows to substitute for a dangerous gleam in my eyes that could be obfuscated by the contacts that ran my HUD and some of my other protective tech.

  “Funny. I was about to say the same to you,” I replied.

  She took a step forward, her hand going to her side. Like she was about to pull a weapon.

  “You can stop right there Dr. Laura,” I said, holding up my wrist blaster. Tines of electricity arced as I flicked it into threat mode, telling the good doctor exactly what would happen if she crossed me.

  The ominous hum helped. There was nothing like the ominous hum of the sort of energies that turned the universe at the atomic level charging up and readying to be unleashed on whoever was irritating me at the moment.

  And at this moment the person irritating me was Dr. Laura.

  She frowned at my cavalier use of her name. I knew it irritated the fuck out of her, that people in her department knew better to use it, and that I was no longer in that department so I was going to do whatever I could to irritate the hell out of her.

  “I’d like to see you try, Night Terror,” she said.

  I shook my head and clicked my tongue. I wanted to make it clear I was more disappointed in her than anything.

  “Come on Dr. L,” I said. “We both know the best you can come up with is cheap copies of my best stuff. There’s no way for you to stand up to the original.”

  Now it was her turn to arch an eyebrow. She was a study in being perfectly poised and in control of a situation she shouldn’t have any control over whatsoever.

  Then again if she was the one stupid enough to send her university goon squad against a woman who was the next best thing this city had to a living goddess then I could understand why she might have a little more self-confidence than was strictly good for your long term survival prospects in a city where living gods were a dime a dozen and often more than willing to crush the normals without breaking a sweat.

  I’d always been unique in my mania regarding collateral damage.

  “Who said anything about making cheap copies of your stuff?” she asked.

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  I narrowed my eyes. I felt like there was something that came very close to an implied threat, but I didn’t have time to react to that implied threat.

  No, she pulled her arms up as her sleeve pulled back, and right there was a wrist blaster that was the same as the one I had on my own hand.

  Well then. So much for cheap copies. That looked very much like the real thing, and the ominous hum it gave off sounded just as threatening when it was pointed at me as I’d always imagined it sounded when pointed at someone who didn’t have all the armor and toys I had.

  I cursed and dove for the ground. Hey. I might be the greatest villain this city has ever known, but I got that way because I survived where a lot of other people didn’t on their rise to the top.

  Which meant I wasn’t above diving for the ground and looking like an idiot when someone was firing on me. Energy crackled through the air where I’d been standing. A damn good thing I decided to duck and roll.

  There was a familiar hitch to the ominous hum that made it sound decidedly less ominous for a moment. As I came out of my roll, judo was a terribly useful skill to hone if you were going to go into heroism or villainy, I couldn’t help but smile.

  Dr. Laura pointed the weapon at me again. It made the odd noise again. A noise that was maddeningly familiar to me because I’d spent so many sleepless nights trying to figure out how to overcome the problem that came with that noise when I first left the Applied Sciences department and struck out on my own in the private sector.

  The other goons around me raised their weapons as well. Sure they were designed to take down Fialux and whatever the hell she was, I was going to have to get one of those guns before I blew this popsicle stand, but I had no doubt they would do some nasty damage to yours truly under the right circumstances.

  And it looked like they were thinking the right circumstances were right about now. I could understand the eagerness.

  Take out the greatest hero and the greatest villain the world had ever known in one night? By a bunch of university goons using technology developed by the Applied Sciences department or stolen from yours truly?

  That would be a recipe for selling that program to people for at least the next couple of generations.

  “I have you covered Night Terror,” Laura said. “And I think you’re going to come in and have a chat with me. There’s a lot of unfinished business between us.”

  My smile turned to a full on grin. Teeth showing and all. Sure I knew it was so much bullshit that showing your teeth triggered some ancient monkey brain response where bared teeth were considered a threat, but I couldn’t help but do it from time to time.

  Besides, right now I wanted her to know that a threat was the last thing on my mind. Especially from her.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” I said. “I’m giving you this one chance to give it up. Otherwise this is going to turn into an evening you’re going to seriously regret for a long time.”

  Laura rolled her eyes. About what I expected from her. The confident cocky head of one of the most prestigious programs in the country was so sure of her wonderful toys that she couldn’t imagine a scenario where one of those toys might not work.

  That was the problem with letting yourself become a glorified administrator working off the reverse engineered stuff other people built instead of doing the work yourself.

  She squeezed her hand. The wrist blaster crackled, sputtered, and fizzled out.

  “That’s going to be getting pretty hot right about now,” I said. “Would you mind taking it off?”

  “Never,” she hissed.

  “Look,” I said. “Remember a few years back when there were all those airbursts over the city that didn’t actually rain down any electromagnetic interference or bust any electronics?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Oh yeah. She remembered. I remembered one interview in particular where she tried to play it off as a natural phenomena and nearly got laughed off by Rex Roth when it became obvious she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “That was me fixing the problem you haven’t fixed on the fusion reactor in that wrist unit. The way I figure it, I can either levitate the unit into the upper atmosphere and save the city, or I can levitate the thing with your arm still attached to you and save the city minus one idiot who doesn’t know to test things before using them in a real world scenario.”

  My every word seemed to hit her like a slap to the face. Good. That’s exactly what I was going for, after all.

  She stared for a long moment. A moment that was getting too long for comfort. Like long enough that the fusion reactor in her early model wrist blaster with a very fatal and explosive flaw might actually blow.

  I raised my arm and activated the antigrav unit. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taking some small pleasure at the thought of reducing her to her component parts courtesy of a bit of my tech she hadn’t reverse engineered quite as well as she thought.

  “I figure we’ve got maybe five seconds before it’s too late for you, and ten seconds before it’s too late for all of us. Rest assured I’m not going to wait around until it’s too late for all of us.”

  Her goons were shifting and glancing around nervously. Clearly they didn’t like the idea of being vaporized along with this idiot.

  I wondered if they were students who’d been pulled in with promises of credit for an intro Applied Sciences course. It wouldn’t be the first time some poor freshman ended up in mortal danger to tick a checkbox on a survey Applied Sciences course.

  She growled and pulled the thing off. It landed on the asphalt, which started to shimmer and bake under the heat being generated. I frowned as I looked at her arm, which didn’t seem any worse for the wear despite that intense heat.

  But I was worried more about her flawed wrist blaster. We were cutting this one a little too close for comfort.