Resistance got a lot heavier nearer to Locust’s lair, and they weren’t falling for the ‘having a baby’ trick anymore. The light had to hit people’s ocular nerves relatively unfiltered for the spell to work, so closing your eyes or even really good sunglasses worked.

On the plus side, the armor is decidedly bulletproof. Aluminum plates are a heck of a lot better than cardboard, Perry thought as bullets pinged off the three people in front: Him, Titan and Hardcase.

Warcry was hiding behind Titan, hands over her skull. The spandex was bulletproof, but it didn’t cover her face, so a headshot would still be lethal.

Perry never really understood why supers didn’t wear helmets more often but for some reason they got by just fine putting their pretty faces out there for everyone to shoot at.

Ping! A bullet bounced off his helmet.

Perry reached out and tapped her shoulder, to get her attention.

“What?” She asked, glancing over at him.

“Use your power!” Perry said, tapping his helmet.

An instant of realization crossed Warcry’s face and a moment later a corona of crackling purple energy bloomed from her head, and she stepped out in front.

And was immediately shot in the shin.

Hyperweave was genuinely bulletproof, but it didn’t absorb all the force.

In short, getting shot still hurt a lot.

“OUCH!” Warcry shouted, nearly faceplanting before hopping on one foot behind Titan and giving Perry a harsh glare.

“Hey, that one wasn’t my fault,” Perry said with a shrug. He wasn’t sure what the brunette had against him, but it had started out frustrating and annoying and was starting to turn the corner to mildly amusing.

Ping!

“Status on the tunnels under Locust’s lair?” Titan asked.

“If they exist, they’re shielded by Tinker tech,” Hardcase said.

Titan clicked his tongue. “I guess we’re gonna have to do this the hard way.”

He lumbered up to the silky black reflective metal doors guarding the entrance to Locust’s headquarters, jammed his fingers into the sliding doors and pried them open, the metal giving off a tortured shriek as it deformed under his fingers.

The moment the doors were open more than a couple inches, a dark rocky fist caught Titan in the face, propelling him violently backwards.

Titan tumbled backwards and crashed into a mailbox on the street, flattening the innocent blue sheet metal against the concrete building beside him.

Steel curbside collection box: $1251

Concrete patching: $800

Perry winced as Titan climbed back to his feet.

At least he didn’t crush Warcry.

Perry’s time for pondering was cut short as a hulking monstrosity of a dark, stony material plowed through the rest of the front door, matching titan inch-for-inch.

“Oh, crap, it’s Tung-Stan!” one of the southeast block bystanders shouted, whipping out his phone and recording the giant tearing his way through the reinforced material like tissue paper.

Perry glanced over his shoulder at the guy with the phone, and back to the minions taking pot shots at the capes, serving more to slow them down and irritate them than anything while their bosses joined the fight.

Things were rapidly getting out of control.

“Are you sure you should be out here, dude?” Perry asked. He wasn’t sure his voice rose over the general mayhem before Tung-Stan caught him with a tree-felling kick to the side of his leg.

Perry spun in midair like a propeller, making three complete revolutions before his neck slammed into the ground, not potentially breaking his neck this time. Instead his neck joints locked up at the sudden pressure, keeping his neck straight in exchange for gouging out a bit of the asphalt.

Pothole repair: $100-$400

Perry flipped to his feet, dug in his toes and lunged forward with his whole body, catching the stony man square in the jaw.

Sadly, the man seemed to have as much inertia in his head as Perry did in his entire body, and his head only rocked back a miniscule amount.

Well, that doesn’t seem fair.

He backhanded Perry, propelling him violently away, tumbling through the air directly towards the guy recording the brawl on his phone.

A spark of panic trilled through Perry’s body as he realized he was about to paste someone.

Reacting faster than he’d thought possible, Perry snaked out a hand as he tumbled, jamming a couple fingers into the asphalt and yanking violently to the side, wrenching his arm and diverting his course from a pasting into a near miss.

“Hey!” the idiot with the phone shouted, flinching as Perry tumbled past him and through a window. “Watch it, jerk!”

Floor to ceiling window: $1600 per linear foot

Average Wrongful death settlement: $500k-1mil

Good choice. Sure the guys was provably risking his own life, standing around watching supers duke it out and FILMING it, but best not take the chance.

Plus, people’s lives are sacrosanct, yadda yadda. Perry groused as he pulled himself to his feet and dashed back outside to give the guy a piece of his mind.

‘Never insult bystanders out loud, Perry. No matter how stupid they’re being, it can bite you way harder than accidentally killing them. if you make them feel small, they get personal and NASTY with it. Try to stay professional at all times when trying to get normies to do something.’

-Mom

“Citizen,” Perry said, the sarcasm thankfully filtered out by the modulator on his helmet. “This area is unsafe, seek shelter.”

“Bite me, tin can.” The man spat, still holding the phone’s camera on him.

‘Fear works too.’

-Dad

Blades.EXE

Perry felt a brief moment of cold as the suit’s printer began inking up his skin, then a fan of knives spread out from behind Perry’s armor like a peacock’s tail, fanning out in every direction.

The man’s jaw dropped, and like living things, the knives oriented on the movement.

“This area is unsafe. Seek shelter.”

The gawker nodded and turned to hustle away in a panicked powerwalk, gradually ramping up to a sprint, holding his beanie on his head.

Perry reoriented on the fight.

Titan was relieving Hardcase, who’d been forced to deal with Tung-Stan solo for the past ten seconds or so. She was missing a bit of armor on her mechsuit’s shoulder to attest to that.

Perry glanced around and didn’t see any other supers, so he dropped to one knee and lined up a shot of Dregor’s Flaccidity.

Hardcase backed off, and about six seconds into the slugmatch between Tung-Stan and Titan, the stony fellow pushed Titan away with a front-kick, giving Perry a good shot.

Melt.EXE

The beam took Tung-Stan right in the hip, and he flailed as his leg and lower torso went limp, unable to hold him up.

Titan took advantage of the super’s position and gave the cowl a wicked knee to the face, putting him down.

“Well,” Titan said, panting. “That was-“

A swarm of Locusts poured out of the front door of the cowl’s lair as a flier shot above them, screeching in supersonic tones that Perry swore would melt his brain if he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Screech. Flier, sonic attack. Works for Locust in Southeast Block. Annoying.

Titan, Manic and Warcry fell to the ground, their hands clapped over their ears, rendered temporarily immobile as the villain’s main force arrived.

Hardcase, recognizing the problem, deployed a gatling gun from her mechsuit’s arm and began firing a blistering hail of rubber bullets up into the sky.

The enemy flier only had to dodge for a moment before Hardcase was covered in Locust, who covered her sensors with her hands while trying to shoot important parts of the mechsuit off with her distinctive sidearm.

Hardcase started flailing.

Heather and Jetset swooped up behind the screeching flier and tackled her in a wild flurry of limbs that eventually smashed into the tower’s bulletproof glass.

Perry directed his blades to pop the Locusts. If the woman was fighting him in person, he’d give her the Dumbest Villain of the Year Award. Her grave, anyway.

A sudden impact broke his concentration as something hit him hard from above, bouncing him off the ground like a rubber ball.

In fact, Perry kept bouncing, flailing wildly as he rebounded from surface to surface, effectively taking him out of the fight.

I got hit by some sort of bounce ray meant to take powerhouses out of the picture long enough to disable the rest of the team. I’m honored.

Perry glanced over and saw that Titan was in a similar situation, his eyes wide, limbs flailing as he tried to catch something to stabilize himself.

Perry pulled about six blades back in from where they were trying to pop the rapidly dodging Locust and made them into a girdle of stabilization around his waist, floating in midair and scanning the rooftops.

There. Perry saw a form with an oversized, blocky tinker-tech gun on the roof of a nearby building with an excellent view of the plaza.

“Manic, would you mind?” Perry said, pointing the distant figure out to the team’s speedster.

Manic glanced up and nodded, finishing the last of the PB&J he’d dropped on the ground a moment earlier before vanishing in a brown blur.

The person on the roof also vanished.

I really hope that was just Manic getting him.

POW! There was a harsh impact against Perry’s armor, sending him momentarily tumbling despite the knives trying to stabilize him, putting a huge dent in a street lamp.

Street lamp: $2500+$1000 installation.

Dangit.

When Perry caught his tumble and reoriented himself, he spotted Manic standing where the man had been, scratching his head. In the building across the street, the dark clothed man wielding the blocky gun was lining up another shot.

With teleporters, the only way to beat them is to win a mind game and trick them into being in a place you want them to be, because otherwise they’re just going to keep pecking you to death. Teleporters are so annoying.

-Dad

Well, let’s see, what’s their mission statement? Stop us from getting inside, right?

Perry flared the jets on his suit and angled toward the front door. A Locust clone tackled him from the side, causing him to spin in midair without losing too much of his Inertia.

The woman tried to peel at his armor, but the aluminum was simply reinforced far too much to bend to low-level super strength. She was no Titan.

“Ma’am,” Perry said, popping the clone with a polite shivving, reorienting on the front door.

Locust formed a wall of bodies, and Perry put on extra speed, straightening his body into a spear.

The extra fifty pounds of armor finally came in handy, allowing him to knock Locust aside and sail through the front door.

Perry skated to a halt in the foyer, his metal-coated limbs screeching against the fancy marble surface.

“Aw, man,” a Locust said from behind the reception desk. “I’m gonna have to get that fixed.”

Marble flooring: ~$60 per Sq ft.

“You can afford it.” Perry said, uncrouching. You wouldn’t mind directing me to the real you, would you?”

“In a DQ about five miles away, watching all this go down on her phone while eating a mud pie.” She said, leveling her sidearm at him.

The sleek curves of her pistol had a somewhat retro-futuristic look, making Perry think of those old black and white sci-fi-movies from before the Tide.

Perry tried to dodge, but he didn’t have even the most negligible cover.

The laser caught him in the upper torso and superheated a bit of the seawater inside one of his battery cells, exploding outward in a blast of superheated steam that actually released the heat and prevented the laser from making it through the second aluminum wall of the armor.

Interesting bonus, also, that is a nice gun.

“Steam?” Locust asked, cocking her head to the side.

“Haven’t you heard about steampunk?” Perry asked, scanning the room. “It was all the rage before I was born.”

Now where can I go that the enemy definitely doesn’t want me to go? Perry thought, scanning the lobby. There were a dozen or so paths he could take, and Perry was fairly certain that all of them led to aboveground offices or traps. The doors to the secret lair would by necessity be secret.

Just bulling through one of the doors and wrecking things wouldn’t provoke the response he was looking for. They’d be happy to leave him to do nonessential property damage while they dogpiled the rest of his group.

No, he needed to make them panic.

Perry glanced down.

On the streets, the chances of Locust’s secret lair being underneath them was negligible, but Perry was willing to bet there were secret rooms directly under the building she owned.

Perry triggered Melt.EXE, his arm pointed at the ground under his feet.

“So we’ve got a talker, huh?” Locust asked. “I’m not a fan of talkers. They’re often far less clever than they give themselves credit for and it winds up devolving into name-calling.” As she spoke a half dozen or so Locusts from outside flooded in and leveled their weapons at him.

“That is a nice suit, though. I put this through six inches of steel once.”

“Maybe after this is over, I can sell you some,” Perry said with a shrug as Melt.EXE continued to soften the ground under his feet.

“Are you – are you serious?”

“I’m Paradox,” Perry said, pulling in the rest of his blades that were hovering outside, shredding the Locusts that flanked him as they whizzed inside the building.

Then they began carving their way through the softened floor like balsa wood.

Skyscraper infrastructure repairs: Est $500,000

Locust’s eyes widened, and she got off three shots, generating a massive plume of steam from Perry’s armor before the floor fell out from beneath him.

Perry landed in a massive underground laboratory, riding a sheet of the ceiling, scattering hapless scientists and minions out of their professional gear. (I.E. Masks).

Gosh, I hope I didn’t crush anyone, but this is the kind of lair I want, Perry thought as he spun around and put his finger on the trigger of Dregor’s Flacidity.

The teleporter appeared in Perry’s field of view, leveling his bounce-gun at the armored cape.

The teleporter’s eyes widened a moment before he took a blast of melting in the upper torso.

Having less mass than the giant and the floor, the teleporter was rendered into a pile of jello in an instant before he teleported away, leaving behind the floppy bounce-gun.

Huh. His super powers still work, but he won’t be causing too many problems as a teleporting limp noodle. If his powers still work…do the floppy bouncy gun’s powers still work?

Can I render high-tech constructs into a liquid and still use them in such a state? Liquid computer? Printable non-euclidian microchips? Food for thought.

Perry scanned the R&D facility and switched to his radio.

One of the most important improvements to the MkII.

“Titan, we’re in. Join me at the hole in the lobby.”

“Roger.”