Chapter 64 Octoporian.

Chapter 64: 64 Octoporian.

The last time I’d seen the place, it had been covered in glittering ice, with a huge section of the floor completely destroyed.

I didn’t come here for two reasons.

One, I’d been too busy dealing with everything else to properly inspect it since then, which had clearly been a mistake.

And secondly, Rhea was like a teenage girl fighting for dominance of her space, and I wasn’t in the mood for bitching.

But she’d done a great job fixing the place.

The hole had been repaired, but in its place now stood a large antenna that what was unmistakably the controller of a metallic octopus doohickey hovering outside my house.

Its needle-shaped tip rested on a metal platform, pointed toward the section where the windows were still being repaired.

The machine was nowhere near finished, with most of its metallic framework still exposed, wires and machinery hanging from it like mechanical organs spilling out of an open body.

Several of Rhea’s robots were crawling over the structure, their spherical bodies fitted with single red eyes and numerous metallic tentacles.

Welding torches spat sparks from their claws as they assembled what appeared to be a brand-new doomsday weapon.

"Rhea!" I shouted over the noise of clanging metal and blaring music. "We need to talk!"

I had no answer but from her piercing alone and the movements inside the machine, I knew she was there.

"Rhea!" I screamed again but still no answer. Then I turned to the boombox in the corner and smashed it against the wall.

The music stopped and so did the bots welding and moving, and before long a head popped of the exposed machinery and looked right at me.

Wearing a welder’s mask before she plopped it up for me to see her face. She had golden-brown dog ears perched on her head, starting somewhere in her head but buried in hair.

"Hey, Miles!" Rhea said before her eyes trailed over to the pieces of her boombox scattered against the wall. "What the hell?"

"Could I speak with you for a second?" I asked calmly, not to trigger an aneurysm.

I’d been using my powers throughout today without stop. Even now I still had control over Divina’s Cuffs in the other room, and it was never a good idea to keep my powers working for this long.

She dropped down with the reflexes only a cat should.

Up close, Rhea looked less like a mad scientist and more like a delinquent who had somehow been given access to a military-grade fabrication lab.

Her short brown hair was messy in the deliberate, borderline-feral way of someone who had long since stopped caring about combs.

She took off the mask but her signature goggles were still on her head and pushing her ears back. Her eyes were a sharp amber, almost golden beneath the harsh workshop lights, with narrow, animal-like pupils that gave her stare an unsettling intensity.

She wore a battered black sleeveless shirt beneath a cropped utility jacket, its fabric stained with grease. "Alright." She placed her hands on her hips. "I’m here, what you want to talk about?"

What she actually joking?

I gestured wildly around the room before poking severally at the gaping hole and the terrorist-alien device hovering over my goddamn house.

Her eyes followed me. "Don’t you just love it?" She grinned at me exposing her two pronounced canine teeth behind her lips. "You could do some real damage with this baby."

"Rhea!" I said, pointing toward the enormous machine being assembled behind her. "What the hell even is that?"

"An octoporian, of course" Rhea asked, practically skipping toward me. "I knew you would! It’s a classic design. Same one Nectron battled against in Ivy town but I made it even better."

Before I could stop her she was already giving me the full schematics.

"Full-spectrum electromagnetic displacement matrix combined with a twelve-point kinetic vector array, a self-correcting magnetic guidance system, and—" Rhea swept an arm toward the enormous machine behind her, her grin growing wider with every word. "—a whole bunch of really fucking cool shit."

She grabbed a nearby tablet and started tapping through diagrams.

"This beauty is my newest remote assault platform. The antenna outside isn’t just a control relay; it’s the brainstem. It lets me coordinate every arm independently while keeping the entire thing synchronized to within a fraction of a millisecond. Or you, in this case."

She pointed toward the enormous metallic limbs hanging around the machine.

"Each tentacle has its own targeting system, electromagnetic pulse generator, reinforced actuator, and modular weapon mount. So while one arm can punch through reinforced concrete, another can intercept incoming projectiles, another can tear apart a vehicle, and—"

She paused dramatically.

"—the big one can grab something."

I stared at her. "That’s it?" I asked, kind of fucking impressed.

"No." Her grin returned. "The grabbing is just really fucking satisfying."

She spun around and pointed toward the exposed framework.

"And once I finish installing the outer armor, this thing will be able to anchor itself to basically any surface, deploy all eight limbs simultaneously, and hit multiple targets from completely different angles without me having to move an inch."

She puffed out her chest, her golden-brown ears standing proudly atop her messy hair. "Completely autonomous, remotely controlled, mainly magnetic for you, modular, ridiculously overpowered, and entirely my own design."

She spread her arms toward the machine like she was presenting the world’s greatest invention. "Behold: the Octo-Whatever-I-Decide-to-Call-It-Later."

It was feeling worse and worse having to tell her to take it down. "Rhea, Why’d you build this?"

Rhea stared at me as though I’d just said something ridiculous. "You mean you don’t want an octoporian?"

"Uhmm..." I placed a hand on my chin. "Let me think. Do I want the thing that took an A-list hero about a full day to deal with?" I paused for a second to see if she’d get it. "No, I don’t want an octoporian! What the hell would I even do with one?"

"What wouldn’t you do with one?" Rhea asked brightly, bouncing on her heels with an enormous grin. "You could threaten the world for control, hold the city hostage for ransom, order it to go pick up groceries... There are practically infinite possibilities!"

I rubbed my forehead, trying to suppress the headache forming behind my eyes. "Rhea. I don’t need an octoporian."

"Oh, come on, Miles. What self-respecting villain doesn’t have at least one or two doomsday devices?"

"The kind who gets paid to lose fights against heroes," I reminded her.

She folded her arms at me. "Then just think of it as a prop."

"Rhea. No octoporian. Take it apart." I said, turning to walk away. "Now."

"Make me."