System Supervillain, Chapter 98 (Patreon)

Chapter 98 – Visit

“Appa’s here!”

I chuckled at the little cry that went up as I pulled off my mask. I didn’t need it here, after all. Everyone here was either my slave or my child, after all.

The one who spotted me teleporting into the house I’d bought for my Korean women was none other than Sun-Woo, one of Bulkkoch’s twin boys. Two years old and already so full of life. He was definitely becoming a healthy child.

I laughed as the boy wrapped me in a hug, before three other child-sized missiles all hit me. Il-Song, Bulkkoch’s other boy, was only slightly ahead of Huinnalge’s two girls, Kyong-Ja and Hyo-Rin. Each of them called me ‘Appa’, which was basically the Korean word for ‘Daddy’. Once again reminding me that I would gladly commit unspeakable deeds to ensure they grew up safe and strong.

“Ah, Master. How are you today?”

The next pair to enter were, of course, the retired superheroines. Bulkkoch smiled easily as she greeted him, one of her spirit flames bobbing in the air beside her. She’d always been the more accepting of the two, taking the new status quo much as one would a change in the weather. From her point of view, she still got to spend all her time with her lover and their children. If I intruded about once a week to make sure everything was right in their world, well, that was a far better state of affairs than having to deal with all the hassle of being a public superheroine.

“H-hello, Master. I hope you are well.”

The white-winged Huinnalge’s smile was more forced as she stepped out from behind her lover to greet me. Well, she still had that whole misandry thing going on. Even before we met, she’d been fed up with men as a whole, thanks to all the perverts in power that had tried to get her dance to their tune while she was a government superheroine. My using my abilities to mind control, enslave, and impregnate her hadn’t exactly helped that any. Oh, she couldn’t rebel against me, but that didn’t mean she liked being my pawn, either.

Still, that didn’t mean I needed to antagonize her about it. She was the mother of my children, after all, and one of my pets. “Yes, I’m fine. Just had to stop and have a chat with the Archivists yesterday.”

That caused both former heroines to stiffen slightly. After all, they may have been government supers, but they still knew about the Guild. And everyone who knew about the Guild knew that you didn’t just pop by to speak with the Archivists. That just wasn’t done.

“M-master, what did you have to speak to the Archivists about?”

I stroked Huinnalge’s hair to calm her down, and said, “Oh, just some business with me being the System Administrator here on Earth. They were wondering about the status of the people I tossed in Quarantine for destabilizing things. Offered a nice contract if I could bring them out, or close their books completely.”

Bulkkoch frowned. “Couldn’t you have done that at any time?”

“Yes, but I had no reason to go and look into them, once they weren’t causing problems. Now, however, I’m being paid to do it. Quite handsomely, too. Which is good, since I do have a bunch of lovely women and lively kids to support, and all.”

The spirit flame user blushed, “Master! Not in front of the children!”

“Boo! Stop talking grown-up stuff!” Little Hyo-Rin tugged on my costume. The girl already had wings, like her mother, but apparently they were still too weak to fly with, though she could glide, a little. “We want to play, Appa! Can you make an ice slide like last time?”

I chuckled, and nodded to the girl. “Fine, fine. But what is the first rule on playing with ice?”

“Ice is slippery, so no playing on the stairs!” The children chorused as one.

“That’s right. Don’t want any of you to go slipping and falling down the stairs. Your mothers and I would hate for you to hurt yourselves.”

With that, I led the procession out to the back yard of the secluded mansion, with its high privacy fence. The yard was well-maintained, thanks to the efforts of the service I’d hired. They had actually been vetted by the Guild, and were one of their approved companies for supers to work with. Everyone at the company knew the value of discretion, so they didn’t see anything they weren’t paid to see.

That was one of the benefits of having a Guild account, really. You got access to the list of Guild-approved companies and services that did all those mundane things a super might not have time for, like cooking and cleaning, auto care for their ‘civilian’ vehicles, and the like. All without needing to worry about hiding the secret identity too much. There was even a list of private schools where children of supers could go, starting with Pre-K (or the local equivalent), and going all the way up through High School. It was expected that, by the time kids started thinking about colleges, they’d have enough sense to not go blabbing about secrets in public.

Of course, even the Pre-K services were a couple years off for these kiddos. I chuckled as they chided me to walk faster and hurry up with the slide. Kids were the same all over, no matter their heritage.

Focusing my entire Cryokinetics pool into creating ice allowed me to build a fairly large play space. Roughly five meters on a side, and five meters tall, the space was like one of those play spaces fast food restaurants used to have, only made out of ice instead of multicolored plastic. A big slide went from the highest point, curving around and through the space to the bottom.

The whole thing was nice and cool, and would remain that way, since I then changed my powers to keep the ice from melting. Doing that without also making the children cold took some finagling, but I managed to figure it out. Take the Change Environment power, set it to lower the temperature, but then limit it to only apply to objects made out of ice. Honestly, figuring out challenges like this was more fun than just configuring my powers for combat. Most of those could be settled with ‘make me harder to hit’ plus ‘make them easier to hit’, with any extra points tucked into ‘make me able to take a hit better’. Since I had my sword to provide reliable offense, I rarely needed to use my powers to do direct damage any more.

Bulkkoch sighed happily as she watched the kids start to play. “It always surprises me that you are so good with the kids, despite being, well, you. With the whole ruthless supervillain thing.”

“First off, those kids have never done anything wrong, to me or mine. Secondly, they are mine, which means I’m going to do my best to look out for them. But as for my being a ruthless supervillain? That still hasn’t changed. I learned a lesson a few years back, when I was just making a name for myself. At a certain point ruthlessness is mercy for yourself.”

“Hmph,” Huinnalge grunted. “Sounds like a prettier way of saying ‘hurt others before they can hurt you’. But that only makes more people start gunning for you.”

“Only if you are not ruthless enough. The reason I have cultivated such an extreme reputation for revenge when someone wrongs me and mine is to keep people from thinking that something like that is, or ever will be, a good idea. A good example is with the recent party I went to for Stepford, a mind-controller based in the US. There were plenty of villains there, but the only one who even considered betrayal only did so because he had called in a veritable army of superpowered heroes to try and crash the party.”

“Oh, I heard of that!” Bulkkoch nodded. “That led to all those explosions in the US and Israel, right? Something about people with a certain power source all exploding because of a magical backlash?”

“Yes, that’s right. We had intended to just destroy the heroes’ connection to the power site, and hopefully strip them of their powers, or at the very least prevent them from adding any new initiates. However, it appeared that, when that connection was severed, the individuals lost their powers by the magical energies literally ripping out of their bodies in an explosive display that caused far more collateral than any of us would have liked.”

“And now most Israeli superheroes are gone, along with the entire Order of St. Iacopo, and the Denver Heralds,” Huinnalge said, dryly.

I waved a hand, dismissively. “Well, the Heralds were mostly second-string players, only good for city-wide affairs, and Colorado is a slower state in general for super-fights. The state government put restrictions on superpowered combat that keep them from really trying to track down supervillains unless they are caught in the act. That’s why there are several prominent supervillains who have Colorado as their base, and why the Heralds mainly fought gang violence and the like. So, they can be replaced with another hero group easily enough.”

“I see,” the winged woman said, unhappily. “So, what are your plans for the rest of the day, Master?”

“Well, I intend to get started on seeing whether it is possible to safely edit the quarantined individuals and return them to the world, without them doing something to destabilize everything. However, I haven’t un-quarantined someone before, so there are a lot of unknowns.”

“And what are these unknowns?” Bulkkoch asked, before her head snapped around to the play-space. “Il-Song! Stop running around on the ice! I know you don’t slip like the others, but that is no reason to not be careful!” She looked back at me, and said, “Sorry, Master. Il-Song has inherited at least some of your power, allowing him to walk on any slick surface like it was nothing, but we’re trying to keep the children from showing off just yet.”

“No, the children come first, obviously. As for your question, there are two main unknowns I’m facing. First, I don’t know if I can edit them while they are still in quarantine. Having to pull reality warpers back into reality in order to keep them from warping things is a bad idea, as a rule. Too much can go wrong.”

Huinnalge nodded. “And I doubt they’re going to be entirely happy about being quarantined so long. Probably even less happy about having someone go in and… changing them.”

“Yes, which brings me to the second major unknown. I don’t know whether I can control where they come out, or whether they will just reappear in the place where they disappeared from when they went into quarantine. Which means I have another reason for wanting to come here today.”

The winged woman stiffened. “One of the reality warpers lived here, didn’t they? That’s why the ‘movie star’ who used to own this place disappeared all of a sudden after the Initialization!”

“Full points on that answer. And yes, the movie star Rang Su-Yun, who was lesser known as the reality-warping vigilante Lady Abstract, was the person who owned this mansion before. She has been in quarantine since the System came online. And I want both of you to get back into your old costumes when I pull her out, just in case.”

Bulkkoch nodded. “Because she’ll know us, at least, and believe that we’re still government heroines, so she might pause before trying to obliterate you?”

“Exactly. I’m allergic to obliteration, so I really would like to avoid that, if possible.”

“What about the children, Master?” Huinnalge asked. “If a super-battle happens here…”

“Don’t worry about that, my pet. Aunt Crystal is going to come and take them to the movies, in a virtual theater where they can see any movie they like, and eat all the popcorn and snacks they can handle, without ever spoiling their dinner or getting sick. I destroyed an entire supervillain organization on the chance that they would inconvenience some of my girls and our children. Naturally, I won’t put them in harm’s way.”

“I hope my costume still fits,” Bulkkoch fretted. “I still haven’t gotten fully back into shape post-pregnancy.”

“You’re a lovely little MILF. Both of you are. In fact, after we deal with Lady Abstract, I’ll have quite a bit of fun ‘capturing and interrogating’ two poor superheroines who fell into my clutches.”

“Master! The children are right there!”