I really needed to take out those robots, but I wasn't going to be able to do anything without that control panel. If she was trying so desperately to keep it away from me that was a sure sign it was something I needed to end this fight.

Even if it looked like she couldn't even end this fight with her own damn control panel.

Seriously. The woman was so bad at this it was a miracle she was able to so reliably stand up to me. She was worse than a video game boss telegraphing its weakness with a big flashing light over its weak spot.

I flew up and away from the robot that had been doing its best to smash me, and it was at that moment that more explosions landed behind me. They slammed into the robot and sent me flying even as my shields and the inertial dampeners kicked in to take the worst of the blow.

Where the fuck did that come from? I hadn't fired anything. It's not like my explosives had done a damn thing.

I let out a cry of surprise as I hurtled through the air. I pulled up the satellite display with a quick gesture.

Sure enough, there were a fighter aircraft, or whatever the hell term the guys with boards on their shoulders were using this week to describe the flying money sinks that could do air and ground duty, hovering at a safe distance outside the city. At least a safe distance when you're talking about giant robots who didn't appear to have any sort of long-range weaponry.

It was almost enough to make me wonder if things had been planned out that way.

Though I couldn't for the life of me understand why Dr. Lana would send these robots out to fight in the middle of the city streets if she was expecting the military to get involved. Unless…

Whatever. What she did in the privacy of her own military contracts was her business. The moment that started to get in the way of me trying to keep Fialux alive while she adjusted to her new suit.

More explosions rocked the air behind me, but I figured as long as they were targeting the robots and not yours truly I wasn't going to get too pissed off. Especially when I had other things to worry about.

Those assholes with boards on their shoulders and their flying boondoggles knew better than to take a shot at the queen. Usually. People had been getting the wrong idea about taking shots at me lately, after all.

Whatever. I adjusted my flight path and went straight for Dr. Lana who was also distracted by the explosions.

I slammed into her, and she let out a satisfying "oof" as the wind was knocked out of her. Interesting. Almost like there were no inertial dampeners to keep her from getting knocked around a little every time she took a hit.

She flew through the air and slammed into a building. I turned and fired off an Anti-Newtonian bubble to stop Fialux in the middle of a fall. Well, sort of a fall. It was more like she was hurtling through the air ass over teakettle, but the end result was she was going to slam into something at high speed and hurt herself if I didn't do something.

"What the hell is your problem?" I screamed at Dr. Lana. "Why can't you just leave us alone?"

She stopped. Shook her head. Took a moment to smooth out her hair, because of course that was way more important than answering the damn question.

"Why won't I leave you alone?" she finally asked when she'd gathered herself. "Why won't you leave me alone?"

"What are you talking about?" I shouted. "You're the one who attacked the city."

"And you're the one who's getting in the way of my product demonstration with your stupid heroics! I thought you were a villain! What the hell are you doing trying to save the city?" she shouted back.

The fuck?

My eyes darted down to where Fialux had hit the ground. And when I looked back to Dr. Lana I realized that maybe that glance had given away for more than I'd intended. A grin split her face. A very unpleasant grin. As though a dawning realization was coming over her.

"I see what's going on here," she said. "You and Fialux are knocking leather costume boots! That explains why she's always showing up whenever you're sniffing around. Here I thought you'd decided to do a heel turn to a hero! I can't believe I never put it together before!"

I winced. The last thing I needed was my relationship status with Fialux to be common knowledge. The absolute last thing I wanted was for my relationship status to be in the hands of my arch nemesis.

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There was a good reason there were so many heroes out there who used secret identities, and it had everything to do with wanting to be able to lead a halfway normal life while protecting the identities of those closest to you.

Honestly, though, that'd never been much of a concern for me. My name actually had been Natalie Terror. My grandpa told me something about a relative hundreds of years ago who'd done a little bit of pillaging and thieving and had made a name for himself as, well, you get the point.

With a name like that it seemed only natural that I'd go into a career of villainy. Minus the pillaging and some of that other stuff. It was far more efficient to make a fortune by either ruling the world or taking advantage of the financial markets.

The beauty of manipulating the financial markets was if you were good enough at it then it was easy enough to bribe the right people and make it legal! Which is why I mostly stayed away from that crap if I could avoid it.

Much more fun to occasionally make a forceful withdrawal from a bank when I was either bored or running low on liquid assets.

Only now I had someone I cared for, and the real ironic bitch about it was it was someone everybody associated with me because of all the time we spent fighting each other when she first showed up in Starlight City.

And that fight with the giant robot. They associated her with the real me, that is. Night Terror. The villain who was destined to rule the world someday.

Shaking brought me out of my reverie. The other robot had finally got to its feet, and the one I'd tossed into a building had extricated itself. Both of them were moving in on Fialux. Where she was sitting prone on the ground, still a little dazed.

Not good.

Meanwhile my satellite feed showed me Uncle Sam was firing off a couple more shots at the giant robots rampaging through the city. Clearly they didn't care that Fialux would get caught in the crossfire.

Or they thought she'd be fine if she was caught in that crossfire because of her previously invulnerable status.

Dr. Lana smiled. It wasn't a pleasant smile. Her hand hovered over a button on her control panel.

"I'm actually kind of glad this wasn't working quite right earlier," she said. "Stupid AI."

"I know, right?" I said. "I mean you come to rely on it for everything and then it tries to betray you and…"

"Exactly!" Dr. Lana said. "Is it too much to ask for an AI who's only third law safe for its master?"

"I totally get where you're coming from," I said. "I mean with…"

I cut off. I'd been having a conversation with her when I should be trying to stop her. Her thumb hovered over a big red button on her wrist computer equivalent. The button was a picture on a touchscreen. Which didn't have the same class as a big red clicky Cherry MX Blue button, but if there was ever anyone I expected to have a lack of class in the villainy department it would be Dr. Lana.

And either way I wasn't going to get there in time to stop her. So I dove for the deck. Dove for Fialux. She was just starting to look around. Just starting to realize she was about to be double teamed in a very unfriendly way by a couple of giant robots.

I landed on top of her just as all of the munitions that were being fired off by the military went off. Munitions, I might add, that didn't seem to be traveling with chemical trails behind them. As though they were using antigrav tech.

Great. Not only was Dr. Lana copying my stuff, but she was also selling it to the highest bidder. The last thing I wanted was my technology in the hands of the world's militaries.

The highest bidder for that stuff was always the U.S. Military, and from there it always proliferated out to whatever vassal state they were trying to prop up over in some part of the world that otherwise hated the U.S. because they were always propping up puppet states.

Not a business I wanted to get into. I wouldn't have puppet states when I ruled the world. I would rule the world as a benevolent but iron-fisted ruler. Keep things nice and simple.

I landed just in time to fire up the shields on my suit in a bubble around us, and then I remotely put up the shields on Fialux's suit as a second outer barrier. I prayed to a higher power I didn't particularly believe in that it would be enough to save us as explosions rained down. First from the munitions, then from a couple of giant explosions as the robots went up around us.

Which was odd. Those weapons shouldn't have been enough to take out either of those robots. Not with the kind of armor they were sporting.

No, if my far better, far more advanced, and far more streamlined designs weren't enough to take out those robots then whatever piss poor knockoffs the government had managed to come up with from Dr. Lana's piss poor knockoff designs shouldn't cut it either.

But they still made for a hell of a fireworks show. I held myself on top of Fialux. I wasn't sure if it would do a damn bit of good, but I figured it was better than nothing if those shields went down. At least there'd be another set of reinforced carbon fiber weave in between her and whatever shrapnel was raining down on us.

Not that the carbon fiber weave was going to do much to stop those shock waves if the shields went down and my inertial dampeners went down with them.

That was the thing people never thought about with explosions. The thing they never addressed in movies and books. The shockwave, the physical force of the explosion, was way more dangerous than the fiery bits.

It'd turn your insides into jelly. A big enough explosions would straight up rip your lungs out, Jim. I imagined it wasn't a pleasant experience for the half a second it took for someone to completely lose consciousness after having their lungs ripped out and their insides liquefied.

I watched the readout for both my shields and the remote connection I had to Fialux's suit. They went down to yellow. The outer shield went to red and flickered, then there was no red at all because the system couldn't monitor shields that didn't exist. The second shield, mine, went yellow then red then…

Nothing.

It stayed red, then started to recharge.

I breathed a sigh of relief. "We're not going to die today."

Then I looked down at Fialux who stared up at me in wide-eyed terror and realized maybe that wasn't the best thing to say given the circumstances. Especially to someone who was still dealing with her newly minted mortality.

Whoops.

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