Chapter 142 Car.

Chapter 142: 142 Car.

One of the toughest things about being a freelance supervillain is the downtime.

When heroes get bored, they just go on patrol. They wander around the city, waiting for someone else to break the law so they can punch them in the jaw and pose for the cameras. But when you’re a villain, you’re the one who has to actively initiate the trouble. No one ever factors in the logistics.

The amount of careful planning, supply chain management, and sheer administrative drive required to execute an evil scheme properly is a staggering amount of work. And does it get appreciated? Pft. Not damn likely.

A hero will smash your doomsday device without even a passing thought as to how hard it was to source the parts.

Come on, weapons-grade plutonium doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and the shipping costs on the dark web are extortionate.

And are you ever given even a single word of acknowledgment for the color-coordinated, breathable tactical outfits your henchmen are wearing? Ha! You wish.

This was a major reason I primarily stuck to organized robberies. Actual super-terrorism was just too expensive to pull off on a freelancer’s budget.

But I digress. The point is, downtime really is one of the true enemies of the villain.

You absolutely needed a hobby in this industry. Some guys tried to make villainy itself their hobby, but the lifestyle inevitably pulled them into a full-time, 80-hour-a-week gig.

Once you experience the adrenaline rush of holding a municipal water supply hostage with a giant robot, there’s no going back to stamp collecting. So it was much better to get a hobby rather than let the hobby get you.

Fortunately, the girls already had their own things to keep them busy between jobs.

Psyren had Nibbles, her rapidly growing social media presence, and highly toxic feuds with various other Gen-Z influencers. Rhea had her MMO raids when she wasn’t in the basement building some new mechanical abomination against the laws of man and God.

And Glacia? She did ice sculptures. Which was not only thematically appropriate for her brand, but also helped her hone her fine-motor control over her powers.

I really, really should have asked what she’d been sculpting.

One morning, I rolled out of bed, walked over to the window, and pulled open the heavy blackout curtains to check the weather.

I instantly shut the curtains again.

I stood there in the quiet of my bedroom for a long, silent minute. I’m hallucinating, surely. I’d been overworked, and the frankly absurd amount of blunt-force trauma my head had taken over my career had finally caught up with me. Maybe I was still dreaming?

I slowly reached out and pulled the curtains open a second time.

...Yep.

Sitting directly in the center of the newly repaired front fountain was a twenty-foot-tall, crystal-clear ice statue of me.

I was depicted in full Iron Polaris armor, my metallic cape frozen in a dramatic, gravity-defying billow. My helmeted head was tilted skyward toward the heavens, and a massive ball of ice—clearly representing the Earth—was held tightly in my tyrannical, conquering grip.

Well.

Well, well, well.

I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes, making slow, deep, circling motions against my temples.

Okay.

I should... I should probably have a quick chat with HR about this.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to wonder where Glacia would be.

The back of the chalet sported the remains of the old hedge maze, which had never quite recovered from her father’s imposed magical winter and was still little more than a sprawling grid of dead, woven branches.

The open grounds doubled as our practice yard, where I trained with Psyren and Glacia to make sure our combat skills were sharp.

Complacency got you killed in this business. You’d think a simple bank job is going fine, and then bam! Some overzealous security guard with a shotgun decides to play hero. It sucks, but that’s the industry.

Recently, the backyard had begun serving a third function: Glacia’s open-air art studio.

She was in the midst of working on a new piece as I walked out the back doors, and I had to stop dead in my tracks at the sheer scale of the operation.

Woah.

She’d been busy.

Dozens of half-finished statues of solid ice filled an entire corner of the sprawling grounds. Some were just armored torsos.

Others were giant, floating heads, or massive gauntleted hands crushing things, or a dozen other variations. Now that I was getting a good look at them, I realized with mounting horror that they were all of me. Poses of my hands, my helmet, my body.

A hundred different interpretations scattered around like some sort of three-dimensional, deeply obsessive stalker sketchbook made of glittering permafrost.

Many of them were beginning to melt, and a good number of chunks were already shapeless puddles surrendering to the inevitability of the summer sun. But others had clearly been carved recently, still flashing and sparkling like immense, jagged diamonds left tumbled on the lawn.

The sheer volume of frozen water added a violently pleasant chill to the humid morning air. I spotted Glacia easily enough.

She was currently floating ten feet off the ground before her current piece, her pale face furrowed with intense, aristocratic concentration.

Thin, surgical rays of absolute zero flashed from her fingertips, moving over the structure of the sculpture like she was carving it in reverse with a 3D printer.

"Glacia!" I called out, my breath pluming in the localized winter.

It took a few tries to break her focus, but when I finally got her attention, she positively beamed. She stopped her work at once and floated gracefully down to the grass.

"Sir! So glad to see you awake. How may I serve you this morning?"

"Yeah, hi," I said, stuffing my hands into my jacket pockets. "Listen, I wanted to talk about what you put on the front fountain."

"Ah!" she gasped, landing lightly with a crisp flutter of her snowy white coat, her face absolutely alight with pleasure. "Thank you for noticing, sir. But I already know what you’re thinking."

"You do?" I asked cautiously.

"Oh, yes, sir. I was quite pleased with how the structural integrity turned out, but I fully recognize that my artistic skills require much more practice before I can truly capture the imposing, unfathomable evil of your being."

"...Come again?" I said, blinking.

"Oh, yes, sir!" Glacia said, nodding quickly, her icy blue eyes wide with earnest devotion. "I do apologize. Despite my utmost efforts to properly capture the sheer menace which you exude, I fear I have failed. My skill is simply not up to the task yet to demonstrate your overwhelming presence! To illustrate the dark glory of your supremacy! To show how you inspire all mortals to kneel before you in absolute fear and obeisance!"

"Uh..."

"But do not worry, sir!" Glacia suddenly stepped forward, grabbing my hands. Her face was set with iron concentration and downright fanatical conviction. "I will succeed! If even a shred of your awe-inspiring terror can be immortalized in ice, I shall see it done! And though I may not have succeeded with this first pathetic attempt, tomorrow’s iteration shall be vastly superior!"

"Sorry, tomorrow’s?" I repeated, my brain snagging on the logistics of my water bill.

"Oh, yes, sir! The ice naturally melts in this climate, of course, unless I expend energy to maintain it. So, by tomorrow morning, I shall shatter the fountain sculpture and have an even more imposing, permanent image of you in its place! I believe I shall have the next one standing victoriously upon the crushed skulls of your enemies. What do you think?"

"I uh..."

I desperately tried to think of a logical, HR-approved argument against this, but Glacia’s eyes were so filled with eager excitement and a desperate need to please her ’evil overlord’ that I couldn’t quite push the words out.

"Maybe... maybe let’s hold off on the skulls?" I said weakly.

"No skulls?" Glacia repeated, tilting her head in confusion.

"No. No skulls."

She paused, then nodded in sudden, dark understanding. "Ah. Of course, sir. The freshly severed heads of your enemies would send a much more forceful message. I shall adjust the detailing on the facial expressions of the corpses."

"Uh, no, wait, that’s not what I mean—"

Bzzzt.

"Hey, uh, Miles?" Rhea’s voice suddenly crackled in the comm receiver tucked into my ear.

I tilted my head, looking up at the sky. Good God, if it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

"Rhea?" I sighed, pressing a finger to my earpiece. "I’m kinda busy managing the grounds at the moment."

"Yeah, quick question," the mad scientist chirped cheerfully over the static. "Does that mean you’re currently fucking Glacia? Or is it Psyren today?"

I felt my entire face immediately flush violently hot in the freezing air.

"That... no!"