Chapter 155 Mulch.

Chapter 155: 155 Mulch.

Either way, I was going in there.

I parked the Crown outside the rusted chain-link fence surrounding the old Metro Greenhouse Complex and got out, looking the place over.

It wasn’t your standard abandoned industrial park; it was a sprawling cemetery of shattered glass and warped iron.

Towering, skeletal domes rose into the sky, their millions of panes blown out or coated in decades of grime. Thick, aggressive vines spilled out of the broken windows, choking the brickwork underneath.

An air of heavy, humid decay hung over the place like a swamp.

"Nice tagging," Psyren noted.

I glanced over and saw she was admiring some spray paint on a crumbling retaining wall.

I recognized the Neon gang’s bright green and purple colors, but the graffiti looked incredibly old, already half-swallowed by creeping ivy.

Hopefully, they had abandoned this territory to the weeds, but it still didn’t inspire me to linger.

"We’re going in," I said, gesturing at the fence.

With a pulse of my magnetic powers, I forced the heavy chain-links to unknit themselves, creating a perfect hole for us to duck through before I seamlessly rewound the metal behind us.

I turned my attention to the main conservatory building as we moved forward. As I did, I locked my plates underneath my suit.

The interlocking plates merged right shut as I opened the trunk and looked at my princess. Bringing out the sledgehammer and flexing it in my arms.

Someone was definitely gonna get their head bashed in tonight. The official suit was for official jobs, this was personal.

"Rhea?" I said.

"Looking over your shoulder, Miles," she chirped through the transceiver in my ear.

"Can you scan this place for any security systems?"

I heard keys clicking rapidly on her end. "Mmm. Not getting much on the external grid. But that could mean he’s running a localized, closed-loop system."

Fair enough. I let my magnetic field expand outward, feeling for the metallic skeleton of the building. There was a lot of it, unsurprisingly—wrought-iron framing, massive sprinkler pipes, rusted catwalks.

But buried within the decay, I felt the sharp, clean hum of new, high-grade steel and copper wiring, free of rust or neglect.

The ruined greenhouse was apparently just a shell for Green’s real work. Fortunately, he hadn’t buried himself in a subterranean bunker like Rhea used to. All the expensive tech seemed to be concentrated right in the central atrium.

I was tempted to just violently rip out every piece of metal in the building and let the glass roof crush whoever was inside, but that would draw way more attention from the capes than I wanted.

Plus, I still wanted to have words with the good doctor first. Most villains simply couldn’t resist the urge to monologue, and I was guessing an unhinged botanist wasn’t going to be the silent type.

You never knew what tactical tidbits you could pick up while they ranted.

"Let’s go," I said, moving toward the massive, rusted double-doors of the main atrium where I could sense the majority of the new equipment.

Psyren and Glacia followed close behind, the two villainesses practically vibrating with anticipation.

I didn’t sense the telltale metallic signatures of assault rifles or tactical body armor, which meant we likely weren’t walking into a squad of hired goons.

That was encouraging. The last thing I needed was a prolonged firefight with random mercenaries.

I raised my armored hand toward the heavy conservatory doors. My powers grabbed the iron hinges, and with a sharp gesture, I ripped them wide open.

A wave of dense, humid air rolled out to meet us. The interior was a post-apocalyptic jungle. Shafts of light poured through the shattered glass roof, illuminating a bizarre fusion of high-tech machinery and aggressive flora.

Rows of glowing, bubbling hydroponic vats lined the walls, feeding thick power cables into a massive server array that was half-suffocated by bioluminescent moss. Thick vines that looked entirely too predatory writhed lazily in the shadows.

"Well, well, well! Fresh fertilizer!"

I looked up toward a rusted wrought-iron catwalk suspended above the vats.

Doctor Green was leaning over the railing, looking exactly as unhinged as his dossier photo. His skin had a sickly, unmistakable green undertone, and his wild, untamed hair hung around his face like Spanish moss.

He wore a filthy, dirt-caked heavy rubber apron over a ruined lab coat, and his wide, manic eyes practically glowed in the dim light.

"Doctor Green?" I called up to him.

"In the flesh! Or should I say, in the foliage!" he boomed, throwing his arms wide. "The greatest botanical architect this dying planet has ever seen!"

"Right," I said, deadpan.

"Once," Green continued, pacing frantically along the catwalk, "I was but a simple academic! Suppressed by the university board! Constrained by ’ethics’ and ’environmental regulations’! But then I realized the true, evolutionary superiority of flora! Humanity paves, pollutes, and destroys! But nature? Nature always reclaims! And with my engineered spores, I shall finally accelerate the harvest!"

Okay. I know I told the girls not to underestimate the crazies, but this was getting exhausting even for me.

"You’re the one looking for Psyren," I stated flatly.

"Ah! The psychic battery! Yes!" Green cackled, rubbing his heavy rubber gloves together as his manic eyes locked onto her pink hair. "I don’t know how you found my garden, armored man, but no matter! You’ve delivered the final component for the Override Array right to my doorstep!"

"So you did help build the Override Array," I said. As I spoke, I subtly fed my powers into the metal railing he was leaning heavily against, establishing a firm magnetic grip on the iron.

"Of course! A marvel of bio-digital engineering!" Green laughed, gesturing wildly to the moss-covered servers below him. "And with her immense psychic output, I will finally broadcast my signal across the globe! I will compel the mindless masses to stop their pathetic industrial lives, march out into the wilderness, and willingly bury themselves in the soil to act as living compost for my beautiful children!"

He gestured lovingly to a cluster of massive, terrifyingly jagged Venus flytraps snapping their jaws near the vats.

I stared up at him in absolute disbelief.

"That’s what you want to use it for?" I asked. "You helped build a machine capable of absolute, global mind control, and your master evil plan is to turn the human race into mulch?"