Chapter 74 Obvious.

Chapter 74: 74 Obvious.

"Maybe the good professor can explain exactly what the fuck that was about, hm?"

The professor whimpered and tried to pull away, but I wasn’t about to let him go anywhere. I caught him by the wrist and waist and hauled him toward us while using my other hand to wrench several broken pieces of chairs and desks from the wreckage. The scraps of metal rose into the air around me, their jagged edges pointed straight at him.

"Time to start talking, professor," I said, letting the makeshift blades hover menacingly around me. "Or do I have to convince you?"

"Please!" the professor cried, tears running down his face as he clasped his hands together. "I didn’t want to! I swear, I didn’t! He made me do it! He said he’d kill my family if I refused! He’d kill me too! Please, I—"

"Who?" I demanded, tightening my grip on him. "Who the fuck made you do it?"

"Doctor Delirium."

The answer hadn’t come from Kord.

I slowly turned my head.

Rhea stood behind me with her face lowered, her ears flattened against her head and her tail hanging limply behind her.

"What did you just say?" I asked.

"Doctor Delirium sent them," Rhea said quietly, finally looking up at me. There was a miserable look in her eyes. "I’m... I’m sorry, Miles."

I glanced back at Professor Kord. He immediately began nodding, almost frantically, confirming what she had said.

I released him, and the professor dropped heavily to the floor.

The moment his feet touched down, he scrambled away toward the rear exit, practically tripping over himself in his hurry to escape. I didn’t bother stopping him. I had something considerably more important to deal with.

I turned completely toward Rhea. "Who the fuck is Doctor Delirium?"

"I’ll tell you," she said, then glanced around the wrecked auditorium nervously. "But... maybe we shouldn’t have this conversation here?"

I looked around at the destroyed lecture hall, the unconscious monsters, the wreckage, and the general chaos surrounding us.

"Right," I muttered.

I took her hand and started pulling her toward the doors. "Come on. We’ve got some talking to do."

Rhea didn’t argue. She simply followed along, and considering how normally confident and mouthy she was, that meek obedience told me everything I needed to know about how frightened she actually was.

The two very dead monsters lying in pools of their own blood were also becoming something of a problem, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now. The last thing I needed was to stand around admiring the corpses while someone decided to start asking questions.

Whenever a super fight broke out, there was always one thing you could count on: people would come running to watch.

Honestly, my entire profession was built around that instinct. If nobody wanted to watch a hero beat the shit out of me, then my business model had some serious flaws.

The trick was knowing when to leave, and when it came to making an exit after a hero fight, I considered myself something of an expert.

I pulled Rhea away from the worst of the commotion and took us through a fire exit, then led her along a winding route back toward the parking lot. As she climbed into my Crown, I lingered by the open door for a moment and glanced back toward the auditorium.

A crowd of students had already gathered outside, pointing toward the ruined building and excitedly talking amongst themselves.

And, right on schedule, a couple of heroes finally arrived, one flying straight through the shattered window while another scaled the exterior wall in what appeared to be some kind of gecko-themed costume.

The most noticeable was the one who landed like a meteor leaving a crater in the lawn and dusting himself off.

Golden Boy.

They could deal with the aftermath.

I ducked into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and after the usual struggle of convincing the damn thing to cooperate, it finally turned over. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the freeway, eager to get home before someone decided to ask me why there were two dead monsters at a university.

I kept one hand on the wheel as I drove, glancing over at Rhea. She was hunched into her seat with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, looking like she wanted nothing more than to disappear inside her lab coat.

"Well?" I prompted.

"Promise you won’t be mad," she said.

I had never heard her voice sound like that before. Usually, Rhea spoke with the confidence of someone who could build a death ray before breakfast and then flirt with you while explaining how it worked. Right now, she sounded like a kid waiting to be punished.

"Just tell me, Rhea."

She drew in a slow breath before letting it out. "Okay... you know how Patty told you I was hiding from the Feds?"

"Patty told me a lot of things," I said. "The Doomsday Division, making monsters, giant robots, trying to punch through dimensional walls into realms of chaos. That sort of thing."

I gave a small nod.

Honestly, none of that was particularly surprising anymore. From everything I’d seen of Rhea’s work, there was no question that she was a technical genius.

Unfortunately, it was becoming equally obvious that her particular brand of genius leaned heavily toward the evil side of the spectrum.

"So, who exactly is Doctor Delirium?" I asked.

"He was my professor when I went here," Rhea said, her expression darkening. "A man who was probably more brilliant than God ever intended a human being to be."

Oh dear.

I could already see where this was going.

"I see," I said.

"Yeah," she muttered, sinking further into the seat. "He was incredibly smart, and at first he actually seemed like he knew what he was doing. So when he asked me to join him and start working independently, I jumped at the chance. We started our own super-arms business. Weapons, monsters, cybernetics, all that fun stuff."

"I’m guessing that partnership didn’t exactly end well?" I asked.

"Not even close." Rhea gave the glove box a miserable kick. "He was always kind of a dick, but I could tolerate that because he was brilliant. Once we started working independently, though, he got so much worse. He was always talking about these grand plans and big ideas, but underneath all that, he was just an absolute asshole. Eventually I learned that being a genius and being completely fucking insane can apparently go hand in hand."

"You’re also insane," I pointed out.

"Yeah, but I have standards." She folded her arms defensively. "I mean, he was selling weapons to actual scumbags. Even by supervillain standards, these people were awful. Terrorists, mutant supremacists, mass-murdering clowns, guys who kick dogs and steal candy from babies. Actual babies, Miles! Who does that?"

She huffed indignantly before continuing.

"They were seriously fucked up, and Delirium himself was even worse. He talked down to everyone, and if he didn’t like somebody, he’d feed them to his monsters. When he started grafting cybernetics onto people, he wouldn’t even bother using anesthetic!"

I winced.

Yeah. That sounded unpleasant.

There weren’t many things worse than having machinery attached directly to your nerves, and doing it without anesthesia seemed like a particularly effective way of making the experience memorable.

My thoughts drifted back to the two monsters I’d just fought in the auditorium, and for a moment, I actually felt a little sorry for them.

Not enough to regret killing them, obviously. They had tried to eat me.

When a giant mutant creature is attempting to turn you into lunch, that’s generally not the ideal moment to start contemplating the circumstances that led it there.

"So you left?" I asked.

"I tried." Rhea grimaced, clearly remembering something she’d rather forget. "But Delirium wouldn’t let me. He needed me. He was a brilliant bioengineer, but he wasn’t a machinist, and he was impatient as hell. Whenever something didn’t work, he’d blame one of his assistants and kill them."

She shook her head.

"Then I’d have to train someone else to replace them, which was a complete waste of my time. And to make things worse, he kept taking credit for my inventions. Those were my ideas! I tried to quit, but he wouldn’t accept it. He said I wasn’t loyal enough and that he’d have to force the loyalty into me."

The meaning of that finally clicked.

I looked over at her dog ears.

"So that’s why..."

"He scrambled my DNA," Rhea finished with a sigh, letting her head fall against the back of the seat. "Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. The experiment didn’t even work properly. And it did leave me with these cute ears and the ability to maul a grown man, so I suppose there were some benefits."

She rubbed one of her ears absentmindedly.

"More importantly, it meant he couldn’t track me the way he normally would. He had mutant hounds, DNA scanners, all sorts of things. But after what he did to me, none of them could identify me anymore."

"But you still didn’t want to take the chance," I said.

"Exactly." Rhea’s voice dropped again. "I didn’t want to risk him finding me. So I kept my head down and went to the next smartest inventor I knew."

"Patty."

"Patty," we said at the same time.

Rhea continued before I could say anything else. "She told me she was leaving, but she knew someone strong enough to protect me. Someone who’d actually take me in and keep me safe."

She looked at me. "You."

"So that’s why you were so insistent that I come to the talk with you," I said, piecing it together. "You wanted me there in case something like this happened."

"Yeah." Rhea looked down at her hands, fingers nervously picking at the hem of her sweater. "I’m sorry, Miles. I didn’t think he’d find me. I thought everything was going to be fine."

She swallowed. "But it wasn’t. It was all a trap. He set the whole thing up just to find me."

"That much seems pretty obvious," I said.