Chapter 294 BDSM.

Chapter 294: 294 BDSM.

"Alright. Do it."

Psyren nodded, casually slipping her headphones down around her neck. She reached out, placing her hands firmly on the sides of Glacia’s head.

The icy villainess instantly stiffened, staring straight ahead with aristocratic composure as Psyren went to work. I had to admire Glacia’s raw grit.

It was absolutely not an easy thing to just stand there and let a telepath pry open your brain. Even one you knew and trusted.

Psyren’s face scrunched in concentration, the neon pink hearts in her eyes humming with intense psychic pressure. A moment later, she pulled her hands away and nodded sharply.

"She’s clean," Psyren declared. "No mental tampering detected at all. And her internal memories line up perfectly with her story."

"Could a rival telepath have implanted the false memories and covered their tracks?" I asked.

"No way, boss," Psyren said with absolute certainty. "Psychics always leave behind residual traces when they aggressively invade someone’s mind, and every telepath has a totally unique signature.

"It’s exactly like illegally rooting through someone’s underwear drawer. The stuff always gets jumbled around, and you always leave dirty fingerprints on the dainty whites."

Lovely.

"Alright. In that case," I said, tapping my comms. "Rhea?"

"Yeah, Miles?"

"That security footage. I want you to run a deep-dive analysis on it. Check if it was digitally doctored, deep-faked, or manipulated. And see if anyone tapped into the bank’s closed-circuit cameras during the fight. Can you do that?"

I could practically hear her straighten up in her lab chair. "Of course, Miles! I’m already on it. But, uh, you might want to actively remember that this feed is currently being broadcast all over the globe. So..."

"Shit!" I gasped.

Rhea was absolutely right. If this footage was spreading as fast as I thought it was, the hero associations weren’t about to sit around mulling over due process. I was going to have a heavily armed strike team of superpowered freaks banging on my front door in no time flat.

And yeah, that would be a catastrophic PR nightmare if it involved any of the girls. But Glacia wasn’t just some random, street-level villainess.

She was the sole heir and daughter of Captain fucking Zero. And he would absolutely not be happy if she got arrested and thrown into a black site on my watch.

I spun around to face her. "Glacia! Inside the chalet. Now! Get entirely out of sight."

"Sir?" she asked, genuinely puzzled.

"We can talk later. Hide right now! We are about to have a dozen A-list heroes swarming our perimeter to arrest you!"

"Miles! Incoming bogeys on the radar," Rhea called out in my ear.

I hated being right. I turned back toward the reinforced windows and peered out at the distant horizon. Oh, damn it all.

I could clearly see a massive front of unnatural, churning red storm clouds aggressively surging through the sky from the direction of Metropolis.

Which meant Mystic was actively coming to pay a house call. And I had a sinking, heavy feeling this visit was strictly about business, not pleasure.

"Fuck!" I cursed. "Glacia! Inside."

"I can fight them, sir," she said, her hands curling into fists as the air around her dropped twenty degrees.

"Of course you can! But I deeply want to not do that today."

Her pale lips thinned into a stubborn, narrow line, but she finally nodded, turned on her heel, and swept deeper into the shadowed halls of the chalet.

I, meanwhile, threw open the heavy front oak doors and marched out onto the steps. Psyren kept perfect pace beside me, with the horrifying mass of Nibbles trotting aggressively at her heels.

I stopped at the bottom of the stone steps and looked up, grimly watching the red storm rapidly gather directly over my property.

I could make out a number of other flying figures cutting across the horizon as well. Great. She’d brought friends. I was actually a bit surprised by how quickly the hero registry had gotten organized for a rapid-response raid.

Then again, after what I had publicly done to the Bureau, there were plenty of capes out there who would be absolutely thrilled to take a legally sanctioned crack at me.

"Rhea?" I said into my comms.

"Miles?"

"Prep the heavy defenses," I ordered.

"Y-you’re absolutely sure?" she asked. I sighed, mostly because it absolutely wasn’t hesitation I heard in her voice. It was pure, unadulterated, giddy eagerness.

"Yes," I said. "Do not open fire until I explicitly say so, but we are absolutely not letting them just walk in here and take Glacia."

"Hell yes!" Rhea cackled like a maniac in my ear. "Time to rock out with our death rays out, baby!"

"Oh, shit! We bustin’ cape heads today?" Psyren grinned, eagerly smacking a fist into her open palm. Nibbles began violently growling and drooling battery acid on the pavement at her feet.

"Only if we absolutely have to," I said.

A sudden, deafening mechanical grinding sound echoed from the front of the chalet.

The massive, reinforced glass windows of the former ballroom smoothly split open, sliding back to reveal the heavy, rotating barrel of a massive orbital death ray tracking smoothly through the gap.

A second later, a rhythmic, mechanical tromping sound caught my attention. I looked over my shoulder to see almost a full dozen chrome Rhea-Search units march out of the front doors.

The android maids lined up in a perfect, flawless battle line, their blue eyes glowing as their internal weapon systems spun up with a lethal hum.

"This is gonna be so much fun," Psyren giggled, bright pink psionic power crackling off her skin.

Fun absolutely wasn’t the point. I really, really didn’t want this fight. But I would be damned to hell before I forked over Glacia to the feds when she didn’t actually do anything wrong.

For one, it would set a catastrophic professional precedent if people thought they could frame my league and jerk me around. But mainly, it was because I had explicitly promised her I would have her back.

And even if I was about to violently torch my career, my reputation, and everything I had meticulously built in this life, it would be entirely worth it to keep her safe.

Still, though. This was going to fucking suck.

I deployed my heavy armor with barely a conscious thought.

The dense layers of ridged iron and steel plating slid seamlessly out from my concealed anklets and bracelets, falling perfectly into place over my suit with a heavy, satisfying series of metallic snicks.

I intentionally left my helmet fully retracted, though. If the iron visor came down, it officially signaled it was villain time. And I would much rather try to talk this out first.

The rapidly approaching shapes in the sky finally resolved. I spotted the dark, rectangular metal bulk of a heavy military-grade hovercraft cutting through the storm, heavily escorted by a four-pack of flying heroes.

The entire formation began a steep, respectable descent toward my front lawn.

I frowned, folding my armored arms across my chest as the massive vehicle glided down. It circled the perimeter for a tense moment, almost as if it were directly daring the ballroom death ray to take a potshot.

I was deeply relieved to see that Rhea maintained her fire discipline and didn’t pull the trigger, though the massive barrel tracked the craft’s every single movement.

Finally, the heavy hovercraft descended. The massive downdraft sent my cape billowing wildly behind me as the landing gear slammed down onto the grass just inside my front gates.

The four airborne heroes touched down a moment later. A blinding, deafening thunderbolt violently blasted the stone courtyard a few yards ahead of me, leaving a smoking crater in the pavement.

I didn’t even flinch as Mystic hovered slowly down into the center of the smoke. The stormy heroine rose to her feet, her blonde hair fluttering wildly in the aggressive wind, her heavy tactical armor violently crackling with arcs of red static.

"Mystic," I said levelly.

"Polaris," she replied, climbing out of the blasted crater with grim, unyielding purpose. Her glowing eyes swept methodically over the rank of heavily armed fembots arranged in the battle line, then paused on Psyren, who was currently standing there looking as cocky and lethal as ever.

"Glacia didn’t do it," I said flatly.

"That is not my decision to make," the heroine replied stonily.

Behind her, the military hovercraft’s heavy hydraulic ramp lowered with a hiss, and several more capes marched out. I instantly recognized a few of the heavy hitters.

There was Strapping Son, his impossibly muscular figure crisscrossed with dense, high-tensile smart cables—which, unfortunately, just made him look like a renegade escapee from a futuristic BDSM dungeon.

Right beside him was American Maid, decked out in her trademark patriotic maid uniform, completely loaded down with enough heavy cybernetics and ordinance to give a Raytheon executive a heart attack, and...

Oh, great.