Chapter 196 Big.

Chapter 196: 196 Big.

I lifted myself into the air with a heavy push of magnetic force against the rebar buried in the street, Glacia joining me on a rushing updraft of arctic wind.

Together, we floated out over the gap between the skyscraper and the Metropolis Police Department.

Naturally, our approach did not go unnoticed. As we drifted into the plaza’s airspace, a guttural shout went up from the Brute. The enchanted behemoth had probably smelled the ozone rolling off my magnetic field.

I came in slow, letting the heroes scramble and form their defensive line in front of the precinct’s reinforced glass doors.

I finally came to a halt hovering over the empty parking lot, leaving a fair bit of open asphalt between me and the assembled cape blockade.

My black tie whipped violently in the wind, my arms clasped imperiously behind my back.

Without my armor to absorb the glare, the precinct’s heavy spotlights were blinding as they snapped onto me, illuminating my suit.

"Rhea?" I murmured into the transceiver on my collar.

"Locking down all external communications from the MPD mainframe... now," Rhea said, her keyboard clacking furiously. "You’ve got thirty minutes, Miles, before the federal monitors notice the blackout."

I nodded. Thirty minutes. More than enough time for me to either win, or end up pasted to the pavement by a dozen S-class heroes. Better get started.

I didn’t have my helmet to artificially project my voice, so I forcibly vibrated the magnetic particles in the air directly in front of my mouth, turning the atmosphere itself into a massive, booming megaphone.

"Micheal!" I roared, my voice echoing off the surrounding skyscrapers like thunder. "I have a bone to pick with you!"

Mister Invincible laughed. The golden boy rose into the air, crossing his massive arms over his chest in a picture-perfect, textbook hero pose.

"I’m afraid your business is with us first, Polaris," Rick boomed.

The bastard was still hiding behind his fucking meat-puppet, eh? Well, that was fine. Less than ideal, but it meant it was going to be incredibly easy to stall him.

Evil monologue time.

"Polaris isn’t here, Rick! It’s just Miles and all I want is my girl back, no one has to lose their head today." I demanded.

"Got one, Miles. Eleven o’clock to the north, upper exosphere," Rhea chimed in my ear.

I mentally thanked her. I kept my posture rigidly confident, but beneath the surface, I narrowed my powers, threading my magnetic field like a massive, invisible fishhook straight up into the night sky.

God, this was a tough one to pull off. I never did it. Not since the very first time I’d discovered I could. It was too volatile. Too dangerous. Too unbelievably destructive.

It was a terrible, unhinged thing to do in the middle of a populated city, but it was absolutely necessary here to break a line of this caliber.

But I had to keep Micheal talking while I reeled it in. That was the trick.

"Come on, guys. I’m not here to fight you or tell you ’this isn’t you’! All you have to do is return Psyren to me, and I’ll leave the precinct intact!"

"A bold threat, villain," Rick said, his perfect smile remaining in place, but his eyes narrowing just a fraction.

No surprise there. Micheal was too much of a calculating tactician not to recognize the absolute basics of warfare.

When a man in a suit, vastly outnumbered and entirely outgunned, is acting this wildly confident, it’s because you’ve overlooked something catastrophic.

"please don’t make me do it, man." I bellowed, only half listening to myself as my magnetic hook breached the atmosphere.

I felt the frozen, dead objects drifting seventy miles above the Earth. If I was right... Ah. Got one.

I locked onto the metallic signature of a derelict, four-ton weather satellite.

Instantly, the sheer weight of it tethered to my mind, the Earth’s gravitational pull trying to snap my spine and drag me out of the sky.

To pull something this far away had me completely defenceless against even a pebble to my head.

I gritted my teeth, violently forcing my localized magnetic field downward, anchoring my boots to the massive steel sewage pipes buried deep beneath the asphalt to keep myself from being ripped upward.

"Don’t say I didn’t warn you, man." I shouted, stalling for time, slowly, agonizingly reeling the massive satellite out of orbit.

Ohhhhh, fuck, that was a heavy one.

"How bout you, Cloud?! I respect the hell out of you, you really want to level this place."

Cloudfire scoffed, shaking his head with a perfectly engineered look of heroic pity.

"Polaris, Polaris, Polaris. It seems you’re badly mistaken! Such a shame. But if you don’t remove yourself from federal property immediately, we will be forced to assume you are here to attack us."

"That’s not what this is and you know it!" I shouted, feeling the migraine as it inched down each closer.

But, more importantly, the magnetic pull of that hand was aimed directly at the sky.

I felt the bones in my forearm literally creak as I pulled.

Come on, baby. Come to daddy...

"I just hope everyone in the BSA has health insurance!"

Mister Invincible laughed throatily, throwing back his head with booming mirth. Looked like Micheal’s tactical algorithms had finally decided I was just bluffing after all.

"And do tell, Polaris?" Rick challenged. "How exactly will you do that? You have but a single villainess at your side, and we have all the forces of justice. The BSA shall never falter!"

"Yeah!" Divina shouted from the barricades, pointing a glowing gauntlet at me. "Justice will be done here tonight, villain!"

I smiled behind my invisible shield of sheer adrenaline. "Alright, that seems close enough!"

Rick was still smirking, but the expression faltered when he suddenly noticed his own shadow stretching rapidly across the concrete beneath him. His brow knit, puzzled by the sudden influx of light.

And then Cloudfire broke formation.

The elemental hero, who had been hovering lazily near the golden arches with the apathetic posture of a man nursing an invisible hangover, suddenly jolted.

The glowing white fire in his eyes flared with unadulterated, primal panic. He abandoned his mind-controlled stoicism, his flaming hair erupting wildly as he pointed a burning hand straight up at the sky.

"Incoming!" Cloudfire roared, his voice cracking.

Rick looked down at the elemental, then snapped his head up toward the sky.

And when he saw the miniature sun screaming down from the heavens, every last ounce of smugness was wiped right off his golden face.

I never got to do this. Not just because it was physically excruciating, but because pulling a satellite out of orbit is a massive logistical headache.

Finding a derelict one was annoying, and wrenching it out of gravity’s pull without burning it up entirely was a nightmare.

But more than that, a crashing chunk of space debris tended to leave a crater, and NASA always followed up with some very serious, highly litigious questions.

"No!" Rick yelled, whirling back around, staring at me in sheer, naked shock. "You didn’t!"

"Oh, I absolutely did," I whispered. "Glacia?"

"With the greatest of pleasure, sir," she said. She was no longer trying to hide her aristocratic smile.

She cast both her hands forward. A blinding ray of sub-zero energy blasted the asphalt directly in front of us, rapidly flash-freezing the moisture in the air and raising a massive, fifty-foot-thick curved wall of glacial ice between us and the precinct.

And just in time.

I watched through the translucent blue ice as the superheated satellite screamed down like a flaming hammer of the gods.

Ooooh, this was gonna be a big one.