That flash and the accompanying sonic boom, a sound that had been terrifying to me once upon a time but was like a sweet symphony to my ears now, resolved into a blur that moved right through the middle of one of the giant robots.

I'd been having trouble fighting it off, but it would appear the city's resident hero didn't have any trouble slicing right through the damned thing.

Typical.

I felt a touch of professional jealousy at that. It wasn't fair that I had all these wonderful toys and I still couldn't manage to pull something off that Fialux could do by simply existing.

Not that I was complaining too much about those abilities now that she was using them to save my ass, mind you.

Not that I was surprised she could slice through that thing's armor like it was butter, for that matter. Any object traveling sufficiently fast would be able to blast through the armor, and it helped that she also had an invulnerable hide to go along with that speed.

An invulnerable hide that was downright sexy, too. I found myself staring as Fialux appeared, seeming to glow in the light filtering down over campus as she floated above the football stadium.

She looked way better than any cheerleader had in that stadium. That was the only thing I ever enjoyed on the rare occasion someone dragged me to a game.

Sure her fighting style was mostly "bull in a China shop smashing everything in her path and ignoring anything that fell on her," but it worked. Not to mention she looked damn good doing it!

There was something about a girl swooping in to save my ass that added a couple of attractiveness points. Though in this case it meant she was going from a solid ten out of ten all the way up to eleven.

Also? It helped a little with my irritation that she was even here at all.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, taking the opportunity of her distraction to get airborne again. "I told you I was handling this!"

The words sounded stupid even as I said them. Yeah, I told her I was handling this. Obviously I was handling it since I was down on the ground about to be smashed under a giant robot's foot.

She winked. "You looked like you could use a hand. Besides, I figured if communications got cut off that meant someone out there had it out for you."

She looked up and behind me. A rapid change in her expression was the only indication I had that something was wrong. That and one of those aforementioned sensors beeping at me. But the robot that snuck up on me while I was distracted was too fast.

See everything I said before about big things not necessarily moving slowly.

Something slammed down on top of me and I was swatted out of the air again. I fell to the ground and hit the turf with a resounding thud and a crack. Again it hurt like a motherfucker.

As far as I could tell it was the turf that cracked under the impact and not any part of my body, but it was a hard enough hit that it knocked the wind out of me. Even with my inertial dampeners and all the other safety systems I'd built into the damn suit to prevent that from happening. Damn it.

No wonder Dr. Lana didn't seem to think those things needed modern weaponry like what I'd put on CORVAC's chassis. Not when they could hit that hard. All they had to do was wade into battle and start smacking things.

CORVAC's body could hit that hard and move that fast too, mind you. It's not like Dr. Lana was doing anything I hadn't already done. Typical. We just put missiles on our robot too out of an abundance of caution and megalomania.

Still. If they were hitting me that hard then they'd be a terror on a battlefield going up against people with more conventional weapons.

I looked up and coughed. I was surprised I wasn't coughing blood. Most of my indicators were firmly in the red. Not good. They hadn't looked like that since…

Well, since the last time I went up against Fialux. Those robots packed a punch, and I was starting to think maybe I'd been a little too cocky and overconfident coming at them with my fists and a couple of plasma blasts and nothing else.

Something whooshed through the air above me. Whooshing wasn't good. That meant something large was displacing air at a fast enough rate that I wasn't going to like it when that air displacement stopped right on top of me.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Another sonic boom. Damn that was loud down here. Even with the sound dampeners kicking on. They weren't kicking on soon enough to completely shield me from the noise.

I really hoped I didn't end up rupturing my eardrums. I was busy here, and I didn't need to spend precious hours in the medbays in my lab regenerating that particular part of my anatomy.

A flash. The whooshing that had been threatening to rain pain down on me stopped, replaced by a loud metallic clang. I looked up and was treated to another view of Fialux looking glorious, her stomach showing in that cute little outfit she'd put together, cape streaming behind her, and both of her hands raised holding onto the robot's foot as it tried to smash me.

My eyes narrowed. I was going to get Dr. Lana for pulling this bullshit, damn it.

"See what I'm talking about?" she asked with another wink. "Someone gets in trouble and I save them. It's business as usual! I told you I should've come down here to begin with!"

I shook my head. "This definitely isn't business as usual, and if you'd been down here earlier you could've been in danger!"

"Like you're in danger right now?" she asked.

She had an annoying point. Still, now that it was just the two of us against the best Dr. Lana could throw at us, something that was a lot better than what I was expecting, I had to admit this was kind of nice.

It wasn't the first time we'd fought a giant robot together to save the city, but it was the first time we'd been out together since the last time we fought Dr. Lana. Mostly we'd been spending our time lounging around and pretending we had a halfway normal life on campus.

Or we'd been spending time in the lab watching everyone's favorite video streaming service and chilling.

Or we'd been canoodling in the office I still maintained on campus because it turns out they liked my survival rates for Surviving A Heroic Intervention, and getting paid to work a few hours a week ranting at journalism majors was the best entertainment I'd ever found.

"I'm not in danger right now!" I growled, firing a blast at a robot as it tried to smack Fialux.

"Sure you aren't," she said, rolling her eyes.

It looked like the fun times were over for now, though. It was back to work fighting off the villains of the world.

I tried not to think about how that was very close to something a hero might think.

Sure we'd had a few small skirmishes with a couple of villains who thought they were going to move in on my territory because I hadn't been around as much lately, but they weren't any threat when they were going up against Fialux and Night Terror.

Nothing was a threat to our dynamic duo, if you'll pardon the phrasing.

Nothing would be a threat to me all by my onesies, mind you, but they really weren't a threat when it was the two of us taking on the world.

"If you'd like I could always just take you down to the police station. I'm sure we're doing something that could technically be charged, even if we are trying to save the city," Fialux said.

"Not the city. More like the university," I said. "And no thanks on taking me to the cop shop. I'd rather avoid that expensive attorney fee."

"Come on. Fighting giant robots? This is like our second real date!"

My eyes darted around and I ducked under a metallic arm coming at me. "I don't know. Something's off about this."

She glanced around. Maybe she could tell something was wrong too. Maybe she was humoring me. Maybe she was nervous because I was nervous, but she was also too good at doing her job to let that stop her from the business of fighting off giant robots that would've been terrifying for anyone who wasn't us.

But I couldn't shake the feeling there was something off. It'd been too easy for her to defeat that first robot. Sure it'd been easy for her to defeat just about every mechanical monstrosity thrown at her, including stuff designed by yours truly and I was the best, but still.

This wasn't just my mind, one of the greatest criminal minds this world had ever known, searching for a reason why I wasn't wrong. I was perfectly capable of admitting when I was wrong about something.

"What is it?" Fialux asked.

I didn't admit I was wrong all that often because of the simple fact that I was very rarely actually wrong about something. And I didn't think I was wrong about something being wrong here.

Dr. Lana had shown herself to be adept enough at putting together a plan, and I couldn't shake the feeling there was something else going on here. I didn't like the feeling there was something else going on here that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Whatever. I dusted myself off. Bad feelings were one thing, they could be frightfully useful in this business, but a bad feeling wasn't going to stop the second giant robot that was doing a number on the stadium.

It was ripping up seats indiscriminately and taking out the announcer's box, or whatever the hell they called the thing where people called games where millions of dollars were thrown around to facilitate a bunch of grown men tossing around a ball.

It looked like whoever programmed that giant robot had a grudge against the athletic program. Apparently Dr. Lana harbored the same loathing I did for organized sports.

Something needed to be done to stop her. I hated that I was thinking in heroic phrases like that. I did not think like a hero. I wasn't a hero, no matter what Fialux kept telling me. No matter what the city thought after I helped her defeat CORVAC.

I told myself it was bad business to let someone get away with crossing you in the villainy profession. Taking out CORVAC wasn't heroism. It was taking care of business.

I flew up as my suit came back online. I was really going to have to figure out a way to get more than one mini reactor on my suit without the two going into a resonance cascade that resulted in an explosion that had the potential to take out a good chunk of the region, but that was something to worry about later. I needed to fight this thing with the tools I had at my disposal now.

The bot might've hit me pretty hard. It might've taken something out of the inertial dampeners, but it couldn't hit nearly as hard as Fialux. I'd been hardening my suit to go up against her, which meant these things were nothing.

I could handle this. We could handle this.

I hoped.

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