I stood. Brushed myself off. Looked at the mounting charge display for my shields with a great sigh of relief. A sense of relief that was interrupted by incoherent screaming.

"No, no, no, no, no!"

I looked up to see Dr. Lana hovering looking down at me with pure fury. Which was a nice look to be getting from her. It was good to know I could piss her off for a change.

"What now?" I asked, rolling my eyes to let her know exactly what I thought of her tantrum.

I wasn't sure what this lady's issue was, but I was pretty damn sure I was sick of her shit. Sick of it to the point I was willing to get a lot more violent than usual. Which was saying something considering the typical baseline of violence when I made an appearance.

"You ruined my demonstration!" she said. "Now they're going to look at the news footage and see that two women survived!"

"So that's what that was all about?" I said, letting the disdain drip from my voice. "You send a couple of robots out to attack the city and then blow them up when the missiles fly in? Make it look like the bullshit you sold them is more effective than it actually is?"

"Exactly!" she said. "And you had to ruin it by surviving! Now it looks like those missiles weren't even enough to blow up a couple of regular humans!"

I looked down at Fialux who was still a little wobbly, but she was on her feet. I wanted to make sure I knew exactly where she was before I went saying anything cocky considering the nasty habit she'd had of getting in the way at the worst possible moment in this fight.

"You're forgetting one thing," I said. "I'm not a regular human."

I raised my wrist blaster. Pointed it right at her. Set it to its highest setting, and it made a pleasant little ominous hum which I always loved. There was nothing like a weapon that sang to you before it unleashed its fury.

"I'm Night Terror."

I fired off a single shot. A shot that connected with Dr. Lana, and of course she wasn't wearing any of the shielding technology I used. Why would she when she had the ability to regenerate herself almost instantaneously?

The only problem with that calculus was I'd just fired a shot on a wide enough beam and with enough power that it took out a good chunk of her insides. We're talking I could see right through her, and the wound cauterized so there was a big circle where her middle should've been without all the unsightly dripping gooey bits you'd expect from someone getting their midsection blown out.

The important thing was there was an open circle where all her vital organs should've been. Where they were no longer there to keep her alive. I'd like to see her recover from that.

Maybe I was letting anger get the best of me, but I was a villain after all. Maybe an antihero at best, but I'd never admit that to Fialux. Which I figured meant I had some leeway to deal with my enemies in an unconventional manner.

"I'd like to see you survive that, bitch," I growled.

Clearly she hadn't been to my Surviving A Heroic Intervention class. She was the kind of STEM asshole who probably looked down on the humanities, so she didn't get valuable lessons like "you can't outrun the speed of light, so don't be in front of a beam weapon when it goes off."

Dr. Lana looked down, and her mouth went wide in surprise. As though she was having trouble believing I'd actually shot her and left a giant hole in her midsection.

Why did so many people have trouble remembering they were dealing with a villain? Did I get "hero" tattooed on my forehead in special ink that everyone but me could see?

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I'd heard of more ridiculous plots from other villains, but somehow I doubted that's what was going on here.

Only even now it looked like she refused to die. She looked at me and there was surprise there, to be sure, but she wasn't keeling over dead like I'd expect from somebody who'd just had most of their vital organs reduced to their constituent atomic parts.

No, she was stubbornly staying alive. That's not what I wanted from her, damn it. It also meant her regeneration ability, however she was achieving it, looked to be a hell of a lot more robust than I'd thought.

"Why won't you die?" I screamed.

She smiled. I heard the steady thumping of helicopters moving in and looked up just in time to see another chopper from the Starlight City News Network moving in. I was surprised those idiots were willing to risk themselves in a hot zone like this considering what happened last time they twirled the rotors, and of course they were probably getting a lovely shot of all the damage I'd just done to Dr. Lana.

The idiots still didn't use drones even though that'd dramatically increase their survivability.

"You know, I think that sounds like a grand idea now that you mention it Night Terror," she said with a wink that didn't belong on someone who was dying of a massive lack of internal organs.

I didn't bother to try and puzzle out how she was able to say that considering her lungs were cut halfway off and cauterized shut. Maybe there was just enough air left in them for her to say her last words. Then her eyes closed and she fell to the ground.

We're talking a hard fall. Not an antigrav assisted fall. This was the kind of fall that looked like it hurt. Then again, she already had the pain of having her entire center being destroyed to contend with. Even if she did regenerate, that couldn't be a pleasant experience.

I wanted to walk over to her and finish the job I'd started, but I saw another readout on my display that told me there was another set of missiles coming in hot. Maybe the military idiots decided they hadn't taken out the robots entirely. Maybe they wanted to try out their new toys some more and figured a live fire exercise in one of the most densely populated cities in the world was a good place to do it.

Maybe they figured if Dr. Lana was taken out in a convenient accident they wouldn't have to pay for all the designs she'd sent them to test out.

Or maybe they'd decided they were going to start taking shots at the Queen again. There'd been an informal truce between me and the government ever since they realized they couldn't take me out, but maybe they were taking advantage of the opportunity that had suddenly and nicely presented itself.

That was going to be a huge mistake on their part getting back on my shit list, but I had to survive this to put them on that shit list.

Whatever the reason, we needed to get the hell out of here now. My only hope was that the resulting explosions from whatever they were firing would be enough to finish off Dr. Lana once and for all, though I had a hard time believing I could be that lucky.

I wrapped an arm around Fialux and shot into the air. It was a good ten seconds or so before explosions started going off from Uncle Sam either trying to do a cleanup or trying to take me out.

Either way, we got out with time to spare. That's what matters. Not that I was actually worried any military around the world would be able to take me out.

"I totally screwed that up," Fialux said.

I set my jaw. If I opened my mouth then I was going to say something we might both regret. Something that was the truth, but there was nothing that said the truth couldn't be regrettable.

I figured it was better to say nothing rather than lay into her about how stupid she'd been in that fight. How she'd put both of us at risk with her stupidity. How I couldn't do anything to stop the robots attacking the city if she was constantly getting in the way.

"I don't have my powers and I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have tried to get in the middle of a fight when I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

Again I didn't say anything, but my silence seemed to say more than any words I could've come up with. Fialux didn't say anything else either. Instead she started to quietly cry.

I knew I probably should've said something. I should've tried to comfort her, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Not after the way she'd royally screwed up. Even though it was as much my screwup as it was hers.

She was the one who'd gone off using a tool she didn't understand to try and fight something that was beyond her without her normal powers, but that was nothing compared to me being the idiot who gave her that tool in the first place. I shouldn't have let her convince me to hand over one of my suits when I damn well knew she didn't know how to use the thing.

We'd both made some pretty big fucking mistakes, but instead of crying I was just angry. Angry at her. Angry at myself. And unsure of where the hell to go from here since I'd gotten in yet another dustup with Dr. Lana, and I couldn't shake the feeling it'd come out as a draw.

Again.

So I flew off to a safe location far from prying eyes and activated my emergency teleportation protocol to get us back to the lab. Where we went our separate ways, her back to her room in the medical wing and me to the firing range to blow off some steam shooting at holographic projections of Dr. Lana's face.

At least the holographic projections stayed dead when I fired at them. Unlike the real version.

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