Guardian nodded back toward the part of the parking lot where the sheriffs’ cars, boxes, reporters, and all of the people from the building stood. There were more people than I remembered and several black SUVs, all of them unlabeled. The people coming out of them wore black jackets and armor with the letters “FBI” placed in the middle of the chest and taking up half of it.
The Probationers, our team, and the Defenders were in and out of the crowd, some of them helping law enforcement, and the rest simply talking. Daniel and Izzy were talking with Ape Nasty and Mistress Madness. Continue reading Older Enemies: Part 6→
I’d have argued with him except that Rook was just a picture on a cellphone screen.
Pausing, possibly to smirk behind his beaked helmet, Rook continued, “We’ve let the Heroes’ League alone despite our conflicts in the last few years. Why? Because we don’t want to kill a bunch of kids.”
It wasn’t all bad news though, because even if Izzy was out, Jaclyn wasn’t. In a blur, she ran out from behind a group of crates, grabbed Izzy, and disappeared before the True could do anything. White light hit the spot where they’d been.
I aimed my sonics at Ana’s suit. Even though firing them off was something of a crapshoot and you never knew what you’d damage, you generally damaged something, sometimes even something important. Given that Ana’s suit was no longer protected by either stasis or a force field, I had a real chance now.
Despite that, it didn’t spark, blow smoke, or stop moving.
It touched the plate, the silvery color wobbling at the edges and then I let more energy through, wondering how long I’d be able to keep it going and how large I could make it. It’s not that I hadn’t experimented, but there was a difference between expanding a mote to include a desk or sphere of air versus an object attached to a person who might choose to move.
What was disappointing though, was how the force field regenerated before my eyes in an instant. Noticing that, I swerved to the right, whipping around her toward the wall behind her with the idea that I’d be able to go around her back.
For a change, an idea that struck me as questionable even as I put it into practice worked. The force field generated a pseudopod and struck at me except this time it missed, possibly because she didn’t have as wide a perspective in her helmet or possibly because I’d moved too quickly. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 8→
Feeling the rockets throw me forward, I weaved through the air, doing my best to be hard to hit, knowing that the True could predict my moves before I made them—if they had enough information.
Half of the True ran forward, but only on this side of the room. It made flying across the room and following the far wall seem like the best option except that the True would be trying to trick me into a bad choice. Flying across the room would allow the whole group more time to fire at me and flying next to the far wall would do more of the same. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 6→
I didn’t need to explain the toxic waste comment, Daniel caught the gist of it from my head.
Got it, he said, but then I felt a pulse of worry from him. One more thing… They’ve got mental shields built into their suits, so I can’t get a read on what they’re thinking, but I did learn something. One of them jumped up and tried to grab me. I knew it was coming before he did, but still, I only barely got away. As he got close though, I got a flash of Rook talking about the armor. I heard one word, ‘stasis.’Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 5→
Looking at the group of mechs ahead of me, I had to ask myself the next question, “How?”
I didn’t have a pile of plastique bots and while they’d worked on one guy, they were designed with unmoving objects like walls in mind. I had a few killbots, but the last time I’d fought people in Rook’s armor, the killbots didn’t work. Plus, I didn’t want to kill them anyway.
So, I decided to target their faceplates with boombots, figuring that killing them wasn’t possible, but it’d at least be a distraction. The only problem was that I’d just done it and bearing in mind that I was fighting True, they’d anticipate it. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 4→
The True didn’t make it easy for me. Even as I swerved toward the far left table in the line, they started running for me—except for the one that was already there and waiting.
The bots hit that one first, exploding and throwing him backward. They hit the other two at almost the same time, whipping around them and shooting them not backward, but forward in a fiery explosion, generally in the opposite direction that I was flying. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 3→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)