Chapter 211 War.

Chapter 211: 211 War.

"And just who the hell are you supposed to be, frostbite?!" snarled what looked like a swamp alligator crossed with a heavyweight wrestler, jabbing a claw-tipped finger through the bars at her.

Without changing her expression by a fraction of an inch, Glacia raised a slender hand and blasted a concentrated ray of sub-zero air directly into the gator-man’s face. The reptilian villain stood frozen for half a second before the solid block of ice encasing the upper half of his body ruined his center of gravity, toppling him backward onto the gravel with a heavy thud.

"I am Glacia!" she declared, her white coat whipping around her like a royal cape as the temperature plummeted, frost crusting over the grass at her feet with an audible crackle. "Right hand of the Iron Polaris! He has given me an administrative directive, and I shall carry it out! Any who disrespect or disobey my master shall feel my wrath!"

The crowd went dead silent, thoroughly cowed. As I watched, the mob of mutants, psychos, and armored weirdos awkwardly shuffled into a neat, single-file line outside the gate.

Alright, that was one fire put out. Or, at least, delayed until later.

I groaned and rubbed my face. This was going to be an absolute nightmare. I desperately needed a stiff drink, but first, I needed to talk to Rhea about setting up some kind of system to process all the nefarious applications we were about to drown in. It was the exact sort of logistical problem for which I let a hundred-percent certified-sexy dog-girl mad scientist live in my basement.

Making my way through the heavy front doors, I took a moment to admire the foyer’s new décor.

When we first moved in, the space had been dominated by rotting wood panels, taxidermized bear heads, and various Slavic relics from Captain Zero’s glory days. Now, however, the hall had been completely reforged out of matte-black iron like an industrial factory of evil. Intimidating and sleek, with completely unnecessary spikes jutting from the support pillars. Recessed lamps glowed behind heavy metal grilles like a furnace of the damned, casting menacing shadows across the grand staircase.

Ominous. Industrial. Truly the lair of a proper supervillain.

It was good to be home.

I really would have to compliment Lilith on her eye for design. The demoness was the dictionary definition of an HR disaster, but Edna had clearly beaten the fundamentals of aesthetics into her skull. Paying a contractor for a renovation on this scale would have cost me hundreds of thousands. Plus, it finally didn’t smell like burning Edward Cullen in here anymore.

I bypassed the main study, pulling a fake volume of The Art of War on the bookcase to trigger the hidden mechanism. The shelving whirred and slid aside, revealing the cylindrical elevator shaft. I stepped into the capsule and rode it straight down into the sub-basement.

The moment the elevator doors hissed open at the bottom, a wall of noise hit me in the face.

Deafening, distorted punk rock was blaring from a battered boombox perched on a stack of plutonium crates in the corner. The bass was turned up so high it was rattling the wrenches hanging on the pegboards.

In the center of the lab, hunched over a steel workbench, was Rhea. She was going to town on a hunk of scrap metal with a plasma torch, sending showers of bright sparks cascading across the concrete floor.

Even from behind, it was always a treat to get a look at her. Most mad scientists in the industry tended to be old, balding guys who got a little too twitchy around death rays. Rhea bucked the trend entirely. She had a full punk-rock grease-monkey vibe going on—a ripped, grease-stained crop top beneath an open lab coat, paired with tight cargo pants that hugged the curve of her hips. Her fluffy tail was poking out through a custom slot in the back of her waistband, wagging happily in time with the aggressive drumbeat.

"Rhea!" I called out, stepping off the elevator.

Nothing. She kept welding, her face completely hidden behind a heavy, darkened welding mask.

"Rhea!" I shouted louder, walking closer.

Her furry dog ears twitched atop her head beneath the mask’s strap, completely drowned out by the screaming guitar solo. She bobbed her head, entirely in her own world as she fused a circuit board to what looked suspiciously like an anti-tank mine.

Between the chainsaw lunatic at lunch and the freak show parked on my front lawn, my patience was officially tapped out.

I flicked my wrist. My magnetic field wrapped around the blaring boombox in the corner, yanked it off the crate, and violently slammed it straight into the concrete wall.

CRASH.

The music died instantly in a shower of shattered plastic, tangled cassette tape, and sparking circuitry.

Rhea froze. Slowly, she switched off the plasma torch and flipped up her heavy welding mask. Her ears perked straight up as she blinked at the pile of smoking plastic on the floor, then turned her head to look at me.

"Seriously, Miles?" she asked, planting a hand on her hip. "That’s the third stereo this month! Do you have a personal vendetta against rock and roll, or do you just hate watching me dance?"

"Put it on an expense report and invoice me," I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. "You couldn’t hear me yelling."

"You could have tapped me on the shoulder!" she teased, though her grin quickly returned, her tail picking its wagging right back up as she set the torch down and skipped over to me. "Hey, hey! Welcome back! How’d your errands in the city go?"

"Well enough," I said, leaning back against a clean section of the workbench. "Listen, I need you to build something for me."

"Wait! Hold on. Let me guess," Rhea said, scrunching her face in mock concentration and pressing two fingers to her temple like she was trying to channel Psyren. "You want me to splice together... a giant amphibious monster!"

"No," I said.

"Oh! Then you’re looking for a universal microchip you can plant in commercial appliances to turn the city’s toasters into lethal weapons at the touch of a button!"

"No. I need—"

"Ah! Then you finally want me to build you a fifty-foot mech suit with enough firepower to level downtown, complete with a massive, reinforced codpiece so the heroes know you aren’t compensating for anything!"

"I definitely don’t need that."

"Yeah, you’re right. Nobody who’s seen you out of uniform would think you aren’t packing some serious firepower already," she purred, giving me a thoroughly lewd wink and a shameless glance down at my belt.

I sighed, though I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Hell, just watching the way that tiny crop top struggled to contain her chest as she bounced on her heels raised a great many things.

"No," I said again, steering us back on track. "None of that. It’s about the mob of villains currently camping outside the front gate."

Rhea’s ears shot up, her eyes lighting with manic glee. "Ah! Of course. Say no more. You want the Liquidator."

"What’s the Liquidator?" I asked before I could stop myself.

"So glad you asked!"