Saving Supervillains 1 Chapter 35 (Patreon)

It took Angelina a moment longer to recognize the villain standing in front of us. “Obsidian. Pleasure to meet you again.”

The super tilted her head, making her overly tight, black ponytail flip to the side. “You are?”

Angelina let go of her faux human form. “Mindfuck.”

“Oh.” Obsidian’s tone didn’t sound very impressed. “What are you doing here?”

“I think you can imagine why I’m here.” I stepped up close to her and opened the conference room she had come from.

I charged in, but the room was empty. Bringing Obsidian along with me, I shoved her into one chair. “Where is Melody?”

Obsidian’s grin only grew as she remained silent.

I knew torturing her would have the opposite intended effect.

“Mind if I?” Angelina gestured to Obsidian.

“Sure, why not?” I realized her abilities might be able to crack Obsidian’s crazy mind. At the very least, it was a better option than what I had on hand.

Angelina sat on the arm of the chair and ran her fingers through Obsidian’s hair. “You poor girl. What has Liberator done to you?”

There was a flicker of something across Obsidian’s face.

I realized Angelina was using her power. She was filling Obsidian’s head with a cocktail of chemicals while she stroked her hair. And whatever she was doing was making Obsidian relax into the chair.

“He’s hurt me. Hurt me so good.” She licked her black painted lips.

“You see, Miles over here?” She pointed at me. “He’s far stronger than Liberator, don’t you agree?”

Obsidian nodded eagerly. “So much stronger. I feel so helpless in his presence, even now.”

It was all a little too weird for me, but I pressed more of my power down on her, locking her tighter to the chair.

She let out a soft moan. She was seriously screwed up in the head.

“He’s even stronger than you know.” Angelina continued to run her fingers through Obsidian’s hair. “He crushed all of my men, pinned me down and forced his will upon me. It was delicious.” There was that awe again in her voice. Her words weren’t entirely for show.

Obsidian made an appreciative moan. “Perfect.” Her eyes were slightly dilated.

“He could crush you, break you anytime he wanted. You wouldn’t even be able to resist, bound in entirety.” Angelina continued to prod her in the direction she wanted. “But that’s not a punishment for you, it’s a reward.”

I cringed, not loving the direction Angelina was taking the conversation. But if it got Melody back, I could do it. I could do a lot of things to get Melody back.

Angelina looked at me, silently asking me to get involved.

I released my power. “Only good girls get broken.”

“Break me,” Obsidian pleaded, her eyes wide and dilated. Angelina’s chemicals, along with her understanding of Obsidian’s psyche, had made a change.

“Only if you tell me where Melody is.” I leaned forward, giving her just a taste of the pressure I could apply.

“If I tell you where his new experiment is, he’s going to stop experimenting on me,” Obsidian pleaded with me.

I wasn’t entirely sure she was aware of what she was saying, but the idea that Melody was being used in an experiment made my blood boil.

Angelina powered through. “If she’s his new experiment, doesn’t that mean you are going to be obsolete for him soon? He’ll forget you, cast you aside like a forgotten trophy.”

Obsidian started breathing heavily with panic. “He wouldn’t.”

“He very well might. What happened to his other, old projects?” I pitched in.

Obsidian was grabbing the armrest on the chair, her eyes darting around the room. I wondered if Angelina had given her too much of the drug.

“No,” Obsidian whined. “I want to be broken.”

“Miles will break you anytime you ask. All you need to do is to be a good girl, then he’ll do it whenever you ask.”

I had Obsidian’s full attention as she panted at me. “Where is Melody?” I asked.

“I’ll show you, but break me first.” She licked her black lips.

I traded glances with Angelina, and she nodded.

Somehow, breaking her bones in anger felt completely easy, but the idea of doing it to cause her pleasure made me feel dirty. But if Melody was currently being experimented on, I needed to get to her quickly.

Focusing, I aimed to cause Obsidian maximum pain. Reaching into her body, I found the nerves leading up to her spine and pulsed energy through them.

Obsidian’s body went rigged and her body convulsed as her head lolled back with a breathy smile. “Yes.”

I decided to amp it up. I overstimulated the base of her brain until she shook hard enough that her mouth foamed. Her body went slack in the chair.

“Whoops, over did that.”

Obsidian’s body melted into shadow.

“Think she’s coming back?” I asked.

Angelina laughed. “What the hell did you do to her?”

“Just tried to light up her nerves; I think I fried her brain stem.”

“Oh, she’s coming back then. Little fucked up minx.” Angelina shook her head.

“Care to explain what that was?”

She cleared her throat and perched on the side of the large office table. “She craved nothing more than attention. It’s likely some events in her life caused her to associate pain with attention.”

“Oh. That makes a messed up sort of sense.”

Angelina nodded. “So the opposite of the pain she loves is being abandoned. Remember, she likes the attention. You can actually help her.”

“Help her? I thought we just wanted to get to Melody.”

“I mean, that’s still the goal. But I think she’s probably redeemable.” Angelina paused, thinking. “I don’t think therapy sessions with me will do it, though. She needs to be broken, but then showered with affection and love. BDSM culture calls it aftercare. She craves sexual attention above all else,” Angelina clinically evaluated her.

I thought about it for a moment, but put it to the side. That was a problem for another day.

The door to the room opened back up and a panting Obsidian pushed her way in. “You didn’t leave. Good.”

This one seemed more put together, but still as interested in my attention.

Angelina leaned in and whispered into my ear. “Seems she’s already attached. Just saying.”

“So, how do we get to Melody?” I pushed.

“This way.” Obsidian walked over to the wall mounted TV and twisted it on the wall.

The large office desk groaned, and Angelina hopped off of it as it slid sideways to one side of the room, revealing a set of stairs that certainly didn’t feel like an office.

“Tada. Break me please.”

I did what I’d done before, only I stopped short of frying out her brain.

Obsidian grabbed a chair to steady herself, breathing heavy. “Yes.”

“Good girl.” I pet the side of her face. “Now, let’s go.” I pushed her towards the stairs.

Obsidian collected herself quickly and stood straight with a smile on her face. She was as happy as could be.

“This is very weird,” I muttered to Angelina.

“If you are going to keep saving supervillains, you are going to need to get used to weird. Hell, you have a succubus and a slime girl. A broken goth girl is practically normal.” She laughed as she followed me down. I noted that she’d included herself in the list of my women.

But I followed Obsidian down into Liberator’s lair.

The cold stone staircase emptied into a large room. Wall to wall, it was packed with upright experiment vessels. They were filled with bluish liquid lit from the inside. And each and every one of them contained an Obsidian clone.

“This is my room. It’s where he experiments on me.” She had pulled herself together for the most part, but she still had a few ticks, like how she constantly licked her lips.

“Uh huh. What is he trying to do?” In a very sick way, she made the perfect little lab rat.

“Make me more powerful.” She lovingly caressed the side of one of the testing chambers.

I looked at her power with my own. It seemed normal, but then I looked at the testing chambers. They were actually filled with Obsidians whose powers were bursting or near bursting.

It reminded me of Stella’s power with the crack in it.

“Does he perform these experiments on anyone else?” I suddenly wondered if there was a connection.

“Many,” she answered. “He has trialed some of it by lacing it into party drugs to get broader samples.”

That hit me like a sack of bricks. Stella had been in college when her power had gone haywire, and college girls do stupid things. Like take drugs at parties. Could he have been responsible for the strength of her power and, more so, the defect within it?

The more I looked at the Obsidians floating in liquid, the more likely I thought my theory was. A normal person might have had their power weakened from such a leak, but for someone like Stella with her second power, it became a nightmare.

I clenched my jaw, feeling even more reason to take Liberator down. I pictured Stella how I’d found her, and I nearly lost control of my power.

“Is it all like this?” My voice came out like gravel.

“No, the place is massive and divided up into many different labs.” Obsidian pushed past the current room and opened a door at the far end.

The door slid open to reveal a massive underground structure. It had to go down at least a dozen levels, each of them with their own catwalk around the parameter.

I stepped out onto our catwalk and grabbed the railing, looking down over the edge. Hundreds of villains walked openly in the underground structure.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I cursed. I hadn’t imagined something like this could have been stood up while I’d been out of the villain loop. “Does Liberator control all the crime in Point City?”

Obsidian shrugged. “Before last week, he had maybe a third under his control. But with the loss of Omnigirl, there was a chance to move in.”

I looked at Angelina, seeing if she had known.

“Don’t look at me like that. I only worked with her loosely, paying her to stay off the radar.”

I nodded, processing the new information. Killing Omnigirl had apparently removed his biggest competitor, and he had used that to his advantage. And now, he had a large army of villains under his control.

“Where is Melody?” While the scope of the issue had grown, my main priority stayed the same.

“Third level from the bottom, he has labs that connect directly to his own. Melody will be down there. She’s special to him.” Obsidian wrinkled her nose when she said it.

I grimaced, looking at the stairs. That looked like it would take a while, so instead, I grabbed the two of them. I flung us off the catwalk, wrapping light around us and falling down to the correct level.

“Which door?”

“That one.” Obsidian pointed to a door. “Now that I’ve shown you to her, will you break me again?”

“What will you do if I fight Liberator?” I asked her before I broke her again.

She hesitated and kicked at the floor. “I can’t stop you, not even he can. So I will leave if you promise to keep breaking me.”

“I already said I would. Keeping my promises is important to me.”

“Break me?” She crept closer, licking her lips in anticipation.

I set her nerves on fire until she died and melted into shadows.

“She’s seriously fucked up,” I commented as I moved to where she’d pointed.

“Yeah, but fixable, remember? You should stop just frying her brain, though.”

I shrugged; it got the job done.

The door Obsidian had indicated looked more like a bulkhead that I would expect to see on a ship. I phased both of us through the door.

As I entered, a beeping noise started to pick up at an alarming pitch.

“Huh, I thought I fixed that sensor.” A large woman that was a spindly spider from the waist down stepped over to a cart and picked up a black object, poking at it.

As she lifted it, she happened to point it right at me and it spiked in intensity, sounding a clear alarm.

The spider woman looked up, six more eyes blossoming on her forehead. “It seems it isn’t malfunctioning. I don’t know who you are, but your invisibility won’t work here.”

She was strangely calm. Her eight legs clacked against the white-tiled room as she waited.

I dropped the invisibility, staring at the device in her hand. “There. Now shut that annoying beeping up.”

Given that I had been spotted, I stopped holding myself back and freed my power, letting it rest at the edge of my mind.

The device picked up in frequency of the beeps until it became one long whining noise. Then it crackled and popped, going quiet.

The spider woman’s entire expression changed as it broke, and she stared at me with eight wide eyes. “Forgive me. I think I should leave.”

Her legs clacked, and I realized that one end of the lab led to a corridor that was covered in webs.

I grabbed her with kinetic energy, holding her limbs still. “I’d actually rather you stayed and told me where my woman is being held.”

There was a tense smile on her face. “Woman?”

“Pulsar, the hero captured earlier today.”

Just thinking about it caused electricity to flood out of one of the wall sockets, jumping to the steel bench top and scattering among the metal tools, making them hop around in their trays.

The spider woman swallowed a large lump in her throat. Half of her eyes shifted to watch the tiny bit of my power escaping my hold over it.

“I’m just a scientist,” she replied, like that exonerated her from what she was doing.

“That doesn’t answer my question. Where is the hero that was kidnapped earlier?” I growled.

“In there.” She pointed at the corridor lined with webs.

Pushing enough thermal energy into them, I lit the webs on fire. The spider woman didn’t even flinch.

“I’m not lying to you, I swear.”

Glancing around the lab, I noted a number of vials and microscopes out, but no other people. “There have to be more scientists.”

“Each of the doors on this level and the one below are labs. All of them connect to Dr. Liberator’s,” the spider woman supplied.

“And what’s your role in all of this?” I picked up one of the vials. I slowly tipped it back and forth. It was a sort of green mucus, reminding me of the bactimen.

“Please don’t touch that. It’s very dangerous.” She strained against my powers.

“What is it?”

“Inert bactiman samples,” she answered without hesitation.

I looked at the vials and roasted them. There was no need to leave something like that around. “Disgusting.”

I squished her against the wall like a bug. She splattered just like a spider. Even if she was ‘just a scientist’, she was creating things used to kill thousands. That made her part of the problem as far as I was concerned.

They had created the bactimen. This Libertech lab was producing disasters for the city. I wondered what their goals were.

“That sensor,” Angelina spoke now that I was done and picked it up. “It was like it was detecting your power.”

“Pretty sure that was exactly what it was doing. The strange beeping frequency picked up when I stopped holding my power back.” I wasn’t sure if I disliked the device or the bactimen sample more.

From what I’d seen here, Liberator could detect ki, and he was having moderately successful experiments with increasing the power of supers. He was light years ahead of the Bureau, and I couldn’t help but worry what other monstrosities he had down here.

“Come on. We still have more to uncover down here. Once we get Melody, I’m bringing the place down.” I looked back at Angelina, noting she was in her recognizable Mindfuck form.

I decided that we should both be a little less obvious. I wrapped myself in a bright blue light. “Can you put on a disguise?”

Her face shifted to that of the spider woman. Her body stretched out, completing the disguise with the full spider lower body. “Yeah, but I can’t hold it for too long.”

“This’ll be quick.” I walked down the passage that the now dead scientist had pointed out earlier.

It was a long corridor that opened up on the second floor of another lab.

Laid out below was a massive bank of computers buzzing against the far wall. And in the middle was a large open space with a single surgical table.

My blood boiled as I spotted an unconscious Melody strapped to the table, bright white light shining onto her body.

One figure moved among the lab. It was a bulky robot covered in white plating. It didn’t look up from the tray of scalpels it set down next to Melody.

“Welcome to my laboratory. The level of your superpower intrigues me.” As it spoke, it looked up at me.

Its two eyes were different. One was like a laser pointer, while the other was decidedly human, possibly the last remnant of humanity on that body.

“But how you’ve lived in this city under my scanners without me knowing is a mystery I’d like solved.”

I saw something click on his face as he looked down at Melody. “But you have explained one thing for me. I wondered how this woman’s power had recently expanded. Interesting…”

He could puzzle out everything as much as he wanted. It would do him no good because he had touched my woman.