System Supervillain, Chapter 73 (Patreon)

Chapter 73 – Chicago Supers

Chicago had one of the lowest rates of supercrime activity in the United States. That was, of course, thanks to both the Squadron Supreme and Storm Front, the Illinois state-sponsored superteam, being headquartered there. Sure, regular crime still existed, but the Dambree Act made it so that supers in the state of Illinois couldn’t interfere with normal crimes.

Which isn’t to say that supers couldn’t help out at all with mundane affairs. If they were on patrol, and saw someone getting mugged, then, as a concerned citizen, they could step in, but they could get in real trouble if they caused serious injury or death. If a building was on fire, then a super could help evacuate the building, or look for people caught in the blaze. Things like that.

To get in on something like a bank robbery, or a hostage situation, though, they needed to either have evidence of powers in play, or they needed to be invited in by the local police. If they didn’t have either of those, then they would be personally liable for any damages to persons or property that happened during the attack, and could lose their sanctioned superhero license. And a super involving themselves in crimes without a license was automatically treated as a criminal, even if they were playing vigilante. Too many people were worried about ‘rogue supers’ running amok, and the police certainly didn’t want anyone making their jobs redundant.

Naturally, this led to most criminals in the city being firmly on one side of the super divide or the other. Normal humans committing crimes brought typical police responses, and supers committing crimes brought superhero responses. And if you didn’t have the kinds of powers you needed to rock up against the local supers, then you normally had a very short career before finding yourself in prison.

As for Storm Front, they were headquartered in Chicago, sure, but they covered the entire state. Two to four supers in each of the other big cities was enough to keep things relatively settled, especially with their support staff, and the supers moved around as needed. If something big happened, Storm Front members from around the state would descend upon the location, using the linked teleporters in their bases. Chicago’s team was fairly stable, with Firebug, Impulse, Valkyrie, Patriot, and the Professor having held down the spots for the past few years.

Firebug, as the name suggested, was a pyrokinetic. Not as powerful as Pyra, but he was still strong enough that he’d mess me up if he caught me unprepared. He liked to portray himself as a wild and unpredictable fighter, but I had seen enough fights to understand that he was actually a very calculating individual. His ability to control fire actually made him one of the most popular supers in the city, since he was often seen working with firefighters to save people from burning buildings, opening up safe paths through the flames.

Impulse was a speedster, pure and simple. Her top speed wasn’t publicly known, but everyone knew that she could jog from Chicago to East St. Louis in under two hours, which was less than half the time a car would normally take to make the trip, and she wouldn’t even be breathing hard. She also had some speed-related abilities in combat, nothing out of the normal, save for the fact that she typically used a staff made of an extremely resilient material instead of her fists when fighting, which was atypical for speedsters.

Valkyrie was a winged warrior woman, as you might expect. She could fly, use some energy-based magical effects, and had a shield and armor for defense. For offense, well, she had a weapon that could change shape according to her will. Spear, sword, axe, staff, she could change it to best fit the situation. That, and her obvious martial training, made her a definite threat.

Patriot was, well, one of those archetypical “look at me all wearing the flag’s colors” kind of heroes, at least on the face of it. Super-soldier levels of powers, and a focus on either melee, or using guns, depending on the situation. However, according to Foxtrot, he was also a certified marksman with both pistol and rifle, so he sometimes acted as a sniper on overwatch for the team, rather than getting in the middle of things. That was unusual for one of his kind of super, since snipers were all about NOT getting noticed.

Interestingly enough, there was also a rumor that the super-soldier serum he’d been given had made other changes, besides just making him a peak human, physically, turning him into arguably a bigger horndog than I was. Apparently, he was always ‘ready to go’, and didn’t care too much about who the other party was. That didn’t always go over too well with his big, buff super-soldier patriot image, since the people who responded best to that kind of marketing were also the ones who were most likely to be more than a little uneasy if they thought a guy liked other guys.

Some other rumors suggested he was less than squeaky clean with his hookups, as well. It wasn’t commonly known, but supers talked to each other, and Pyra had been discretely warned about Patriot by a friend in Storm Front. He had a nasty habit of pursuing someone he was interested in until he got them, and didn’t always care about ‘no means no’. The fact that it kept getting hushed up probably was why Lady Avenger, a vigilante that strictly went after rapists and abusers of women, had been targeting him for years.

And then there was the Professor. He was a telepath. Physical combat ability was limited, but he didn’t have to be in melee or holding a gun to mess you up. Even without his mental attacks, the fact that he could use his powers to create a mental network between the rest of the team, letting them communicate at the speed of thought, and see through each other’s eyes was HUGE when it came to having the team fight as a coherent whole. Not someone you could afford to ignore.

So, with them, and the Squadron Supreme, both located in Chicago, it was obvious that super-powered criminals tended to slip out of the city as soon as possible, or they worked hard to keep their powers under wraps. The overwhelming majority of supercriminals in Chicago were those with ‘subtle’ powers, or ones that could be used behind the scenes. A gadgeteer could make good money just outfitting different gangs with gizmos, for instance, and a teleporter or someone who could phase through walls could be there and gone before anyone was the wiser.

Still, there were always those who thought they could succeed where no one else had. Those types quickly found that, when things got bad, not only did Chicago still have a full team of Storm Front there, but all the supers from the rest of the state joined in. And if that wasn’t enough, the Squadron Supreme also could join the party.

Or, at least, they used to. Apparently, half the team getting killed, and the other half becoming my slaves made their response time for future events questionable. Which is why the Squadron had been rebuilding in the last few months, reaching out to supers from across the country, and around the world, looking for new members.

Unfortunately, finding supers of the caliber needed to uphold the name was not exactly easy. They only had three members, so far. Kensei was a swordsman from Japan, who, by all accounts, lived up to the translation of his name, Sword Saint. Hammerfist was the physical brawler turned up to 11, with super-strength, super-durability, enhanced speed and reflexes, and even a bit of flight. But Silver Blaze was the leader, a magic user from England who had a variety of spells that took the form of silver flames.

Overall, the three were roughly as powerful as the individual members of the former Squadron Supreme, but they were still lacking a lot of critical pieces, and weren’t up for full operations at the moment. Too many holes in their roster, and their power sets. Sure, they had someone who could slice through a building in one swing, and someone who could give as much of a beating as he took, and someone who could had magic at their command, but they still didn’t have a tech specialist, or a solid supporter, or anyone who could really work underwater or in space. They needed those holes filled before they could truly take up the mantle again.

Now, why did any of this matter to me? Well, the Squadron Supreme being reduced to a shadow of its former self had caused a serious spike in superpowered crime in Chicago. Anyone who had stayed out of the city because they didn’t like their odds if Lady Victory came crashing the party now turned fresh eyes on Chicago, and wanted a piece of the action.

The city had turned into a war zone, with seemingly every supervillain organization and criminal syndicate hitting the city and making a play for power. Storm Front were holding on where they could, even calling in the teams from other cities to help, but they were outnumbered, and sometimes outmatched. The best they were managing was to drive off some of the villains before too much damage was done. And there was a knock-on affect hitting the smaller cities, since their protectors were in Chicago, trying to stop the big guns.

Personally, I had no interest in taking over a city. Sure, taking over was easy enough, but running a city was a shit ton of work, and I wasn’t here for that. No, my main interest in this little conflagration was in some of the people mixing it up in the fray.

Mis Ion was one of the strongest energy manipulators around. Her full range of powers wasn’t known, especially since the System took over, but she was damn powerful. It wasn’t just electricity, like Electra, but the full EM spectrum. She’d even been able to do things with gravity and magnetism to replicate other powers, at least before the System. Definitely a villainess worth keeping an eye on.

Dark Shaman was another heavy hitter. A mage of some sort, her powers were focused on hexes and other ‘debuff’ spells, though she obviously had offensive magic of her own. While she was more of a support than a personal powerhouse, I had made enough use of support-type powers, even since the System came out, that I wasn’t going to discount them. After all, half of my battles since the System were as easy as they were because I used ‘support’ effects to weaken my enemies while temporarily making myself harder to hit. Only the losers called it cheating. Winners called it proper planning.

Of course, not everyone I was paying attention to were potential recruits to Devastation. The Killer Klown Klan were there, and up to their usual antics. That bunch of psychos was what happened when you took a bunch of bigoted, racist shitheels, and then dressed them up in clown costumes instead of their hoods. Sure, they were slightly more intelligent than the normal bigoted, racist shitheel, but they turned that intelligence to creating bonkers carnival death games that they threw people into and streamed for the internet to watch.

Another group of problem children were Greenworld. They were a radical eco-terror group that were big fans of the idea that what Earth really needed for the planet to heal was for all the humans living here to be turned into fertilizer. Since they made no distinction between humans and any other supers, and they certainly did not care if children (like mine) died, I naturally did not care to see them succeed in their plans. I was allergic to being dead, after all, and anyone who threatened my kids was going to have a bad day. Their love of chemical and biological weapons, among other attack vectors, also made them too dangerous to just leave running around.

Which is why I was in the Windy City, now, with Web Mistress, Titania, and Foxtrot. The others drew short straws, and had to stay home with the kids, but I promised to call them in if there were any big threats that needed taking down. Of course, part of the reason was that Titania and Foxtrot were better at hiding in plain sight. Both had shapeshifting abilities that allowed them to instantly disguise themselves as other people in their ‘civilian’ forms. That made them more useful for poking around and finding trouble than the more visually distinctive girls.

After all, every last member of Devastation was wanted by several different organizations at this point. We all had prices on our heads, and most of them were ‘dead or alive’. Which meant bounty hunters with no morals and less concerns about damaging the ‘merchandise’. No sense waving a steak in front of wolves if you didn’t have to. Sure, I was certain I could take down any bounty hunters we would reasonably expect to find, but I hadn’t survived this long by simply relying on that.

But that was something for later. Right now, we were on a group date, and I wanted pizza. Actual pizza, not a casserole with a crust on it. Fortunately, there were some places in the city with actual culture in this godforsaken hellhole, where I could get some actual, New York-style pizza.

I breathed deeply as I walked into Jimmy’s Pizza Café, and silently promised swift death to anyone who tried to prevent me from getting my pizza.