I growled and threw myself at her. I was going to show this woman why I was the best villain in the world. I was going to show her why…

Several things happened in rapid succession. Not all of them were necessarily good for that whole plan to show her why I was the best villain in the world. If someone was watching from the outside then some of those things might have then questioning whether I was the best villain in the world.

My suit appeared around me along with my contacts, earbuds, wrist computer, and gloves, but they appeared in the wrong order. Damn it. It wasn't exactly going to affect my ability to do my job, but it was a distraction I didn't need.

CORVAC would've gotten it right. The problem was I was afraid of allowing the new AI too much autonomy considering how giving a computer too much autonomy had backfired spectacularly the last time I tried it.

I just couldn't be sure if megalomania was an emergent property of all AI, or if I got unlucky by digging CORVAC out of some ancient villain's lair who'd programmed him that way.

No, from here on out I needed my AI heavy on the A and not so much on the I. Which led to that AI screwing up more often than not. Sort of like the villainous computer equivalent of putting too many fingers on the artwork.

The next thing that happened really ruined my day though. Dr. Lana held up another device that looked surprisingly familiar. Familiar enough that I wondered how the hell she got access to the damned thing considering I'd come up with the Anti-Newtonian field well after I finished my tenure here at the goddamn Applied Sciences Department.

I hadn't even conceived of the thing until I'd moved to my own secret lab under the Starlight City suburbs. So how the hell was she standing there with one in her hands looking at me with a supremely self-satisfied smirk?

The only thing I could think was she'd somehow been monitoring me at the exact moment when I captured Fialux in the journalism building. It seemed impossible, but that was the only explanation that made sense.

I guess it wasn't too far outside the realm of possibility that she'd be monitoring most of the campus for any signs of people using tech she'd want to get her greedy little hands on. She'd seen a grainy security cam video or something and decided she wanted what I had.

That had to be it.

Otherwise I'd have to seriously consider the possibility that my systems had been compromised. Again. I was still going to have to look into that possibility, leave no stone unturned if you wanted to survive in this business, but right now denial and disbelief were taking over as I looked down the barrel of a device that could seriously fuck me over.

There was only one small problem with Dr. Lana's master plan to get rid of me once and for all via hoisting me by my own petard, and it was the same problem with all her master plans.

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. Which meant that while she'd been quick enough to appropriate my design, she likely hadn't bothered to learn the ins and outs of how it worked.

I could tell because she wore a triumphant smile as she aimed at me. The sort of smile that said she clearly thought she'd already won. Only that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Because she was currently suffering from the same fatal flaw I'd run into when I used the damned thing fighting Fialux. A fatal flaw that resulted in me getting the shit kicked out of me a couple of times before I finally came up with the plan of using it on campus which is probably what allowed this bitch to steal it in the first place.

To be fair to Dr. Lana, it's not like she had a superpowered individual to go up against. The limits of the Anti-Newtonian field, particularly the way objects in motion tended to stay in motion, spectacularly so if you were dealing with someone who hit like Fialux, had been glaringly obvious the first time I used it on her precisely because she was so powerful.

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I hit the field and it slowly started to shift. Dr. Lana's smile was still there, but it looked sickly. Like maybe she was starting to realize how fucked she was.

Fialux was so far off the scale that she was able to blueshift the Anti-Newtonian field almost immediately. I was coming at Dr. Lana's field with a little less power, but the principal still held. And I could put out a respectable amount of power.

There's a reason I was a one-woman superpower nobody wanted to fuck with before Fialux came along.

An object in motion tended to want to stay in motion, and putting an object already in motion into an Anti-Newtonian field only delayed that motion. It didn't stop it entirely. Unless there wasn't much motion to begin with.

Sure it might slow someone down for a little bit, something that had saved my bacon a couple of times when I was trying to figure out a way to fight Fialux, but the process still had the same fatal flaw with yours truly. Even if it was taking a little longer than it did with Fialux and her superpowers.

After all, I was fighting with an appreciable fraction of her power thanks to the modifications I'd made to my suit. Modifications that were possible because I'd been able to get a far more up close and personal study of the world's newest hero thanks to new developments in our relationship.

Modifications I'd made with hard won experience as I got my ass kicked again and again by a goddess come to earth.

Of course those modifications came with a cost. A cost I hadn't realized when I was fighting Fialux with my newly enhanced suits precisely because our fights tended to end embarrassingly quickly even with those enhancements.

I frowned as I looked at my power readout. Allow me to make a video game comparison. Usually that power bar looked like a mana bar in an RPG where the player character has been tricked out in just about every mana regen enchantment in the game.

After making some modifications from my extensive study of Fialux in action, though? Well let's just say my power reserves, always a dicey proposition when I was in a nasty fight to begin with, were starting to look like a mana bar on a low level character who'd just discovered they could cast Healing while they were in the middle of a fight with a tough damage sponging boss.

The modifications I'd made were outstripping my ability to power them, and the thing was going down faster than a giant floating metaphor for man's hubris that just plowed into some ice, is what I'm getting at.

Still, I had plenty of reserves left to get out of my current scrape. I might be having a little smidgen of trouble with my power reserves, but that just meant I couldn't stay in action for as long as I was used to. I figured the increase in fighting ability more than made up for it.

I smiled, and I wasn't sure if the smile was because I knew Dr. Lana had already lost, or if it was thinking about some of the fun I'd had with Fialux doing "research" to up my game.

Either way, the smile was enough to make the grin on Dr. Lana's face falter.

"That's the problem with you," I said.

"What's the problem with me?" Dr. Lana asked.

"You're always in such a hurry to steal other people's ideas that you never bother to stop and figure out how those ideas work."

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.

Or at least what I imagined diving headfirst into a pool of cold water might feel like. Admittedly that wasn't the sort of thing I was prone to doing all that often. Not voluntarily at least.

Sure I'd been tossed into water a couple of times by heroes who foolishly thought I didn't make all of my suits adhere to IP68 standards, which was a nice try on their part but not enough to stop me.

The point I'm getting at is the sensation of slipping out of the Anti-Newtonian field was weird. I guess this was what it felt like to suddenly have the laws of physics reassert themselves around me after telling them to take a hike.

"You're bluffing," Dr. Lana said. "You can't possibly escape this. You're not as powerful as her!"

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "Let's see."

An awkward silence settled between us. I'd really hoped the dramatic breaking out moment would coincide with my pithy one liner, but apparently the Anti-Newtonian field didn't have the same sense of dramatic timing I'd developed over a long and prosperous career as a villain.

Instead I was left with a long awkward stretch where Dr. Lana tapped a finger impatiently against her arm as though she was starting to think I'd been full of it when I told her she was about to lose. The field turned blue, but it did it a whole hell of a lot slower than it did when Fialux was the one breaking free.

Not that I could blame Dr. Lana for being skeptical. I well knew the terror of having a cocky smartass hero telling you that you'd screwed up when you were sure everything was going right. It was never pleasant.

"Look, if you're going to lie about this sort of thing you're only wasting both our time," Dr. Lana finally said. "If you'd just surrender and…"

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.

Okay, so the dramatic timing was off by just a little, but I figured it still worked well enough.

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