I put all the strength I could muster into one hell of a right hook that landed across her cheek.

And wouldn't you know it? She didn't even bother to use any sort of inertial dampening field that would stop that hit from slamming into her with its full force. The practical upshot being that her head jerked to the side with a sickening crunch as she slammed against the wall.

Also? I wasn't really a fan of all those movies and comics based on my adventures with the serial numbers filed off that seemed to think blood spatter was cruise control for gritty and realistic, but I felt some small measure of satisfaction watching blood fly from her mouth.

Damn. I hadn't intended to hit her that hard. After all, a hit like that could kill a person.

It's not like this was one of those movies going for gritty realism. Hitting someone in the head wasn't a magical knock out button which immediately and safely caused all higher brain functioning to cease to exist.

"Damn it," I growled, watching her sway.

Well, scratch that. 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.

But I knew from hard-won experience that hitting someone hard enough that it knocked them out meant potentially doing the kind of brain damage that could really fuck someone over. We're talking an interruption in higher brain function that could be permanent unless doctors got in there to cut out parts of the skull and alleviate swelling fast

The only gritty realism involved was a trip to the ER followed by a long debate about when to pull the feeding tube if the person you were fighting didn't leave behind a living will.

I wasn't in that nasty business, even if she did sort of deserve it.

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, then she crumpled to the ground. Like a heap. Which wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to see from a human.

"Well shit," I said.

I hadn't intended to kill the woman. Blood trickled out of her ears and nose. That couldn't be good. I hadn't meant to hit her that hard. Besides. After the last fight we had I should've assumed she wasn't using the stuff that allowed me to safely use that tech as well.

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 guess that just went to show that the old thing about assuming making an ass out of you and me had never been more true. I wasn't sure if the bigger ass was me for hitting her that hard and assuming she somehow learned her lesson since the last fight, something she never seemed to do since she was so sure of herself, or Dr. Lana for bringing her boring normal unenhanced body to an atomically powered supersuit fight.

Then I heard something coming from Dr. Lana. Which was totally impossible and raised my hackles. The only noise she should've been making after taking a hit like that was a death rattle. She didn't even disappear in a teleporter shimmer this time around.

Maybe because we were in the middle of the goddamn Applied Sciences Department?

I leaned in closer, wondering as I did if I was about to get myself caught in some post-death trap she'd put together to spring on whatever poor unsuspecting bastard, or bitch, had the audacity to kill her.

But as I leaned closer I realized it was a quiet laugh. And it wasn't even a laugh coming from an electronic laugh box or something cliched like that. Talk about tacky.

No, she was laughing by pushing air past her voice box. Sure it sounded like she was a little worse for the wear, but that was her laughing.

She was still alive. No teleportation. She took that hit and she was still kicking.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Well, she was still death rattling.

I jumped back as she turned and stared at me, her eyes wide. The way she turned her head shouldn't have been possible in someone who had a fully functioning and undamaged neck. It was like she was still moving the muscles in her neck, but her spine wasn't held together to stop her from flopping her head around unnaturally.

Though how she was even able to flop her head around like that with a severed spine was beyond me. Talk about freaky. Like something straight out of a horror movie.

I didn't like it when my life's genre of choice went from sci-fi to horror. It'd happened a few times early on in my career, and I made sure to carry enough firepower these days that I'd never stray from action scifi ever again.

Or at the very least if I did move into horror territory it would be my enemies feeling the terror while I methodically stalked them and ended them. Minus any machetes or hockey masks or killing people in their dreams.

I had invented a device that let me step into dreams, but it turns out it was only good for freaking them out. Not so good for committing murder, bitch.

The point is, I didn't like it when my opponents started acting like something straight out of a horror movie. It was difficult enough to maintain my composure when I thought I'd just accidentally killed somebody.

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.

"That's the thing about you," Dr. Lana whispered.

I licked my lips. Decided to ignore the fact that her ability to speak was medically impossible and go with it. After all, this was hardly the strangest thing I'd seen in my career.

"What?" I asked.

She was mirroring what I'd said to her earlier. I didn't like that she was mirroring what I'd said to her earlier. That was something I did all the time with heroes, and it usually meant I had something up my sleeve that said hero wasn't going to care for.

It was a little weird to think of myself in the heroic role, and I didn't like that she was acting like I was the one who was about to have a very unpleasant surprise.

"All I had to do was distract you," she whispered, pulling herself up against the wall.

She trailed some blood. Like we're talking the kind of blood that belonged on the spread at a vampire buffet. The amount of blood that would've made any self-respecting human body stop working.

What the fuck had she done? I missed the teleporter, as frustrating as that was.

Normal people didn't recover from hits like that. It was enough to make me wish I'd done a scan on her right after she got hit with that punch just so I could figure out what the hell was going on here, but of course I hadn't thought to do a scan because what was the point of doing a scan on a dead person?

You only run scans on people who are mostly dead. I'd figured she was all dead. Which sucked, but it wasn't going to stop me from rifling through her lab and look for evidence of tech toys she'd stolen from me.

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

As weird as it was to think that I was facing down a villain. Which I suppose made me the hero. If you could call breaking and entering heroic.

I suppose it all came down to intent and point of view. Maybe I was the antihero. Antivillain?

I don't know. I could go ask the nerds in the English department, but not right now.

Sure everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story, but I'd always been more than willing to call a spade a spade and admit that I was the hero of a story where I was the villain for everyone else.

What can I say? I always figured you should be brutally honest about your position in life.

I knew I was going to regret saying this, but at the same time I knew it had to be said if I wanted to keep things moving.

"What did you have to distract me from?"

She glanced up. That was all the warning I was going to get. And again, I knew it was an action I was going to very much regret, but I had to follow the script. I'd done this so many times before with heroes, and it was always so frustrating when they didn't follow the script.

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

So I slowly looked up. The ceiling was opening. That was interesting. It looked like one of those ridiculous stadiums that opened or closed depending on the weather that cities were always making taxpayers foot the bill for even though they were footing that bill for literal billionaires.

Only in this case it was something far more sinister than turning a private temple of profit into a public expense because sports.

I found myself wondering exactly how far we'd gone in that elevator. It felt like it was moving down, but obviously the elevator had been using some technology that masked the direction we were moving. There was no way going straight down from the Applied Sciences building would've put us in a location like this where it could open up onto a massive room.

If this massive room was right under the Applied Sciences building it seemed like an invitation for disaster. I could just imagine the entire building falling down into said massive room in the middle of some unfortunate attack. In a city where unfortunate attacks happened all the time that kind of construction was asking for a hike in your insurance rates.

My mind ran at a million miles a minute, I still thought that way despite multiple science degrees thanks to being raised in the USA where they used freedom units thank you very much, but all those thoughts left my mind as I looked up and saw several giant robots staring down at me.

Well shit.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.