Chet “Terrifying Explosion” Abercrombie snapped awake to the softest of footfalls on his bedchamber floorboards. The finest stirring of movement wafted several molecules of air, stirring his nostril hairs.

In a detonation of bedsheets he somersaulted out of bed, hands bristling with the fifteen knives he kept sequestered under his pillow, fifteen more embedding themselves in the opposite wall quicker than the eye could follow.

A moment later he withdrew from his crouch, lips curling downwards in fervent disapproval as his unnerving, raptor-like stare surveyed the somewhat startled woman now pinned to the wall. In her hands she carried a ceramic plate covered in a polished silver dish.

“I told you never to disturb me while sleeping,” he shouted, lowering the hand holding knife number thirty-one. “If I’d been a man of lesser skill, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from killing you just then.”

Far from being a lesser man, Chet was in every sense of the word a prime specimen of taut, quivering muscle and raging masculinity.

“One would think,” said the woman, in a bored monotone, “you would install an alternative means of waking you, in that case.” She pulled out the knife pinning her opposite arm and used it to open the bedroom door a crack.

The sound of ear-splitting sirens immediately filled the air.

Chet’s bedchambers were lined with full soundproofing, a necessity for a killing machine of his calibre whose senses were attuned to reflexively slaughter at the merest hint of a threat. Chet had spent many tens of hours training at cop school to become like this. As the youngest ever most accoladed member of the Force, he was the last line of defence against the criminal underbelly of Dismal City, and yea, the world.

“The expertise I gained by studying twenty-one degrees in microbiology from the world’s top universities means I’m aware it’s only the genetically engineered nano-pheromones in your blood that make me so desperately in love with you,” said the woman, Sabine, thrusting her curvaceous hips and ample bosom at Chet in a provocative manner. “And yet oh, you make me feel things that should get me arrested.”

“Calm yourself, woman,” yelled Chet, as he took a running leap off the end of his bed, smashing through the four hundred-year old glass window. He’d never wanted a harem, he thought angrily, as he and several thousand pieces of irreplaceable stained glass sailed majestically through the air. The constant estorgen in this place was so oppressive and he was constantly surrounded by complaining hussies. No wonder he had to throw himself off a tower just to get some peace.

At the last possible second, Chet stuck his hand out and caught the mast of the castle flagpole, halting his descent by crushing it to scrap between his gristled digits. From there it was a mere drop to the pavement with his cat-like reflexes. He took a moment to breathe in the fresh air pumped in by the castle’s non-toxic atmosphere generators, enjoying as he did the sensual brush of his genitals against the tactile kevlar fabric of his trousers.

A roar of a motorcycle could be heard over the ongoing sirens, breaking the peace, and a surprise motorcycle came flying over the row of ornamental hedges, drifting to an abrupt halt in front of him in a scream of sparks and metal. The rider, a small figure wearing a pair of enormous steampunk goggles, took off the googles and flashed him a wide grin.

Felicity had been cursed with a weakling’s build since birth. No one had thought he would succeed in the Force, but Chet and he had been bullied together by the richest cadets and grew closer through bonding. Now that bond was paying dividends, with Chet being the undisputed alpha cop and Felicity his eccentric right-hand man.

“My main man!” exclaimed Felicity, revving the engine of the motorcycle. “The sirens call and we must obey! Give the word and I and my trusty steed, which I won from defeating our cop bully nemeses in a battle of wits before final graduation, will follow you to our next mission!” He revved the engine again.

Chet smirked, and looked up at the tower where Sabine was drooping her pendulous globes over the shattered windowsill. She held out the ceramic plate and lifted the lid. Under it was the latest phone model from Cartel Industries. So secure, every hacker who had attempted to steal its secrets was now dead. Chet’s razor-sharp hearing had identified it was ringing even over the sound of the sirens and the motorcycle.

“If you don’t answer it in ten seconds, it’s going to self-destruct!” Sabine called down, dropping the phone.

Chet rolled over the pavement, snatching the device out of the air a hair’s breadth before it smashed into the ground. “Chet “Terrifying Explosion” Abercrombie speaking,” he roared down the line.

“This is the CEO of the Force,” smirked the clipped voice on the other end. “Sorry to disturb you so early in the morning. We’ve got a situation in the ghetto quadrant of the city. Something big is going down, but every lieutenant we’ve sent in has gone dark. We need a specialist on site to find out what’s going on and shut it down.”

Chet frowned. “The miasma over that part of town –”

“Yes, that’s what we thought too. But we would have heard if it was the rage virus. This is too quiet. We need someone with your track record. We need you, Chet.”

It was a compelling argument. “They’ll never hear me coming,” Chet swore thunderously over the din of the various electronic appliances.

“Good man. Get in, find them, shut them down. Use any means you feel is necessary. And Chet? We need it done yesterday.”

With that, the voice cut off, replaced with a flatlining tone. It would self-destruct in ten seconds, but he didn’t give it the chance, crushing it in the rippling sinews of his impregnable fists.

So they needed it done yesterday? If only the CEO knew.

With his tongue, he felt his way over his back teeth until he found the one controlling the remote castle controller, flicking the switch.

In his peripheral vision, the front drawbridge descended, and two lines of unique women paraded out of the open door holding more ceramic plates bearing various household objects.

“Uh, Chet,” Felicity frowned. “You said you were going to get rid of them. If anything, now you have more women than ever before. This is an impractical number of women.”

“There is no force in this world more deadly than a determined woman,” Chet dispensed sagely, though privately he agreed. “They keep flinging themselves at me. But it was the optimal political strategy. As you know, when the buxom foreign Prime Ministerial coalition escalated their competition over recruiting me into international rivalry, I knew that bringing them here together was the only way to prevent ultimate nuclear war.”

Felicity batted his eyelids. “Now, that’s the kind of genius strategy I can’t help but admire. There’s always been something different about you, Chet. You’re not like the other cops. Maybe these luscious ladies are onto something, if you know what I mean.”

“Alas,” cried Chet. “’Tis naught but a foul curse. They’re getting smarter, growing in number. I fear it’s only a matter of time before one manages to slip past my defenses.”

“Heresy! No wanton floozy could ever match wits with the King of Cop Chess!”

Cop Chess was like regular chess, except played with criminals instead of pieces, legal jurisdictions instead of squares on the board, and the whole thing took place in real time with very heavily armed cops. Chet thought it was important to note that women and other minorities could also play cop chess just as well as men, it was just that there weren’t any female cops in his district because they chose not to for some reason.

They had arrived at the lines of women, Chet casually running like a handsome mountain stallion next to the motorcycle. There were plenty of blondes and brunettes and some minorities because he wasn’t racist.

The Russian one, whose name he couldn’t remember, had been a spy sent by the female buxom foreign Prime Ministerial coalition to infiltrate the cops and steal their secrets, all the way down from the true identity of the Force CEO to the top-secret list of inter-street missile caches.

The Russian temptress shot him a dirty, if somewhat longing, look. “Svetlana,” she snarled. “And I’m Ukrainian. And also psychic, bound to you forever by an unexpected mutation of the rage virus combined with the overwhelming force of your unrelenting will. Take me with you and I will tease your enemies’ thoughts from their simple minds as their heads explode into crimson mist. Or just take me.”

She lifted the silver lid from her plate, revealing a tube of toothpaste, her languid pools sizing up the perky young bulge in his trousers.

Backup would only slow him down at this point, Chet thought, crunching the lid in his powerful jaws and smashing the pale froth against his blinding grimace. The other women were all staring jealously at Svetlana, no doubt already plotting ways to dispose of his new favourite. But Chet had enacted a strict pastoral care policy to prevent such behaviour, and also nuclear war.

Just as things seemed about to degenerate into chaos, a great horn sounded. Felicity lowered the bugle from his overpowering moustache and slapped the flank of his motorcycle. “Tally ho, my bro! To the time tear!”

“The time tear!” several of the women swooned gaspingly.

The time tear was Chet’s best kept secret, the skeleton in his closet and the deep, dark guilt that stabbed at his heart. The mask he put on to those closest to him was but a terrible façade, for he had not earnt his status in cop school entirely fairly, but by precipitous fortune. One day the time tear had simply appeared in the catacombs of his windswept castle inheritance, and being unable to comprehend fear, he had entered.

The time tear had sent him far into the future, where humanity had become a barren shell of its former glory days; broken, beaten and full of weaklings who ran from the sheer sight of his glorious personage. Their history erased by the slippery slope of political correctness gone too far, he had had to teach them how to fight again. It had taken years, but eventually he had led a small army of the newly liberated to victory against their oppressors and planted his foot upon the golden throne of justice, claiming the future for the triumph of order over crime and extended jail terms over megalomaniacs who brewed antidotes to the rage virus with even worse side-effects, like turning into a bus. You only had to see it happen once to know enough was enough.

Then the inbuilt timer had run out, dumping him back in the catacombs. That was how he’d found out there was a two-week time limit.

Felicity, bless his congenital disease-ridden heart, had attacked the tear with a spanner and towed it via motorcycle out of the catacombs where it could be tinkered with in their shared garage. Between their combined efforts, they had turned it into a functioning time machine. Although he burned with shame in his darker moments at using a cheat to solve some of his more high-profile crimes, Chet reconciled himself that it was all in the name of the greater good.

And as every true cop had to learn sooner or later, the greater good demanded exponentially increasing amounts of blood sacrifice and pain.

At a time like this, when the defenders of all that was right were being snatched by a dangerous, unseen menance – why, it was his duty to shoulder the burden.

Shaking himself out of his dark reverie, he felt around with his tongue for the other tooth controlling the time tear remote control and flicked it back. On top of the castle roof, a sound like six hundred and fifty sawguns boomed through the air, echoing into the valley of Dismal City in its swirling miasma below. A roiling abyss of pure negative energy fifty metres high exploded into being. Floating above it, emblazoned in shining gold lasers, hung the Force motto: In Lumis est Criminalis Defeatum.

The presence of the vacuum whipped up a suction wind nearby and gently caressed his face, sending fleeting pleasant sensations down his legs as the fabric of his trousers massaged the tip of his crotch in the breeze.

“Get ye hence, things are about to get gnarly over here,” Felicity warbled, patting at the edge of his vibrant moustache as if it had come slightly loose in the whirling maelstorm.

No sooner had the women stepped off the drawbridge than Chet flicked back the first remote control tooth. The spring-loaded drawbridge responded in an instant, slamming shut against the stone castle wall. A lesser man would have been instantly crushed to death, but each individual one of Chet “Terrifying Explosion” Abercrombie’s two hundred kilograms’ worth of molecules were composed of pure hardened masterwork.

Bending his knees, he launched off the giant platform, catapaulting through the air into the heart of the enormous wailing secret black hole. “For the Force!” he screamed in incoherent, jubilant frenzy.

The motorcycle’s engine revved, sailing through the air next to him. With one swift movement, he grabbed onto the seat, flipped himself head over heels to displace Felicity, and took his rightful place at the handlebars.

They disappeared into the time tear with a pop, leaving only the caterwauling sirens to fill the silence.

The women slowly came to their senses, free at last of the love pheromones.

“Well,” said Svetlana, pushing a matted bunch of tousled hair clumps out of her face. “That should keep them busy for the week. Want to indulge in a round of Cop Chess before they come back?”

All the other undercover female cops nodded.

Nobody turned off the sirens.