Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 100: Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Paradoxically

***Mass Driver***

“Looks like a used-car lot,” Lord Of Annihilation sneered.

The kid’s name was terrible, but respect for another’s Super name was part of the culture, so Mass Driver refrained from taunting him. The kid would figure it out as soon as his nuts finished dropping.

“Mhmm,” Mass Driver said absentmindedly. The two of them were standing on top of a nearby building overlooking Oberon’s Scrapyard.

“You needed help with this?” Lord of Annihilation asked, pointing at the balloon covered spectacle filled with gawking civilians and seemingly no defenses whatsoever.

Given how young the kid was, Mass Driver gave into the instinct to teach the pimple-riddled boy.

“Paradox is good at invisible defenses. He’s also got a weapon I’m on the lookout for. When someone has their guard up, you can’t just rush in. That’s a good way of getting killed or humiliated. What we’re going to be doing is setting the stage and flushing out Paradox’s defenses.

“I have to get him to reveal his big guns, so he doesn’t use them on me.”

“I see why you brought me. I’m freakin’ invincible,” Lord of Annihilation said, preening.

Mass Driver cocked his head. Expendable, more like.

These kids are getting dumber every year. Mass Driver remembered when he thought he was invincible, like…fifty years ago. He’d learned since then.

Assuming he didn’t get his head disintegrated, Lord Of Annihilation would, too.

“Send in the minions,” Mass Driver said into his radio.

Minions were helpful in a variety of ways. In this case they did an excellent job of setting the stage and flushing out the civilians.

The masked minions streamed out of the neighboring building and into Oberon’s Scrapyard, their shiny automatic weapons firing blanks into the air.

As expected, the civilians scattered, emptying out the courtyard in a matter of seconds.

In less than a minute, there was nothing but supers and minions.

Mass Driver’s gaze picked out Hardcase, Wraith and Paradox. All of them were out of uniform, but they were fighting the minions all the same. The tiny Tinker girl had some kind of strange gloves she was using to control metal scrap and flinging it into the minions

Paradox was easily judo-chopping hapless minions on the neck, moving gracefully from one to the next.

The shapeshifter was swelling up her arms to deliver bone-crunching punches.

It wasn’t quite enough to keep up with the swarm of cannon fodder. Eventually they’d have to deploy countermeasures.

Something’s off, Mass Driver thought to himself, but he wasn’t sure what.

Still, it seemed like things were progressing well.

“Deploy the Wacky Waving Arms Flailing Inflatable Tube Men!” Paradox shouted, audible even from their distant vantage.

Mass Driver’s brows rose as he watched a bunch of tube men on land-based drones be released onto the battlefield, each equipped with a wacky waving tube man.

They streamed out onto the battlefield and began whipping the minions violently with their arms and torsos, their patterns seemingly totally random. There was quite a bit of force to it, too. Mass Driver saw a minion catch one in the jaw and slide five feet before going limp.

After about thirty seconds of that, the minion’s morale broke and they scattered.

“You’re up, Lord of Annihilation.” Mass Driver said, scowling at the name.

“About time!” Lord Of Annoyances said, jumping off the side of the building, a massive green wave of flora shooting up to catch him before withering and letting him down gently to the ground, in a move that admittedly looked pretty smooth.

The kid was a plant user, and seemed to think using an edgy name would hide his shame at having a girly power.

Shame at having a ‘girly power’ was something the kid would have to grow out of. Superpowers were superpowers, and there was no such thing as girly superpowers.

Case in point: There was a serial killer who could turn things into stuffed animals. He had a collection of a hundred and forty children turned into trophies by the time Nexus caught onto him.

The Velveteen Killer had turned his prison cell into a stuffed animal and escaped with ease until Solaris vaporized the man’s head.

It’s not what power you have. It’s how you use it, Mass Driver thought idly as a massive wave of vines crested over Oberon’s scrapyard.

RIING

Mass Driver glanced down at his phone, showing the old man’s smug face on it.

“What’s up, Bossman?” Mass Driver asked, bringing the phone to his ear.

“Hey, MD, you busy?” Solaris’s rumbling bass echoed through the phone.

“I’m on another job to work over the Paradox kid, but I got time to talk,” Mass Driver said, kicking his heels against the side of the building. “What’s up?”

“What’s that?” Solaris said, seemingly talking to someone else in the room. “Right. Hexen says to take it easy on his girlfriend.”

“The little one?” Mass Driver asked.

“The little one?” Solaris asked, before his voice returned at full volume. “Yeah, the little one. Hexen says she’d owe you a small I.O.U. if Paradox heroically saves her.”

“I mean, I’m supposed to break every bone in his body, but…” Mass Driver shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye open for an opportunity to make him look good for his girl if things don’t go as planned.”

Meddling parents.

I.O.U’s from Hexen were worth quite a bit though, and could recoup some losses if by some miracle, Mass Driver didn’t win this fight.

“Anyway, what did you call about?” Mass Driver changed the subject.

“Just wanted to let you know that Jetset is out of the hospital and he’s got your powerset. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s there. I want you to give him some time to recover and get a handle on his powers.”

“What if he sticks his nose into my business?” Mass Driver asked as a tiny green figure swooped down above Lord of Annihilation and the four-on-one commenced.

“Just don’t kill him. I want that kid available next High Tide, you hear me?”

Mass Driver sighed. “Why you gotta make everything difficult, old man?”

“I’m only a couple years older than you, buddy,” Solaris said.

“You know I got polaroids of your stupid ass dressed up in full flower-power regalia, right?” Mass driver said. “You don’t exactly look young in those pictures, either. Freakin’ creeper.

“I thought the hippies would take their vans to my shop if I dressed like them, alright!?”

“Little did you know, hippies don’t have any money.” Mass Driver said with a chuckle.

“A minor miscalculation. I got by.”

“You freakin’ bartered drugs with the local color. High Tide saved your ass, because I was this close to proving it.”

“Sure, man, sure…” Solaris said.

“Oops, gotta go, things are getting interesting.” Mass Driver said, hanging up.

Lord of Annihilation had taken Hardcase hostage, his arms transformed into wrist-thick vines that restrained the little girl and turned her into a human shield. Her metal-controlling gloves were shredded and useless.

Alright, where’s your trump card? Mass driver thought as the Mexican standoff continued. After about thirty seconds of glaring at each other, Mass Driver shrugged ad hopped off the building, swooping down to join the fight. It seemed like Jetset’s new powers were the trump card, and if Paradox still had one up his sleeve, the hostage would help even the odds.

“Good afternoon, Paradox,” Mass Driver said as he arrived between the three Super teens and their restrained compatriot covered in slithering vines.

“Let’s play again. You and me, one on one, or your friend there starts losing body parts.”

“R-Really?” Lord of Annihilation stammered. “But she’s a girl?”

Mass Driver slowly turned in place and raised his brow, fixing the kid with his ‘shut the fuck up’ stare.

Lord of Annihilation gulped and stayed quiet.

“I’m actually glad you didn’t cave after that beating. It makes me hopeful for the next generation of supers,” Mass Driver said.

“It also makes you a ton of money, am I right?” Paradox asked.

Mass Driver felt a grin bloom on his face.

“You think I can get them to hire me to kick your ass a couple more times? I’m hoping you won’t have learned your lesson after this.” Mass Driver said, sliding through the air to deliver a punch to Paradox.

The teen slipped out of the way with a fluid movement that seemed more like he was dancing than anything else.

Oh, crap, Mass Driver suddenly understood what he’d felt was wrong. He charged forward to punch his opponent’s mouth, but it was too late.

“I challenge you to a dance battle!” Paradox said, pointing at him.

A spanish guitar began plucking a languid tune.

As ‘Paradox’ loped forward and caught his hand, Mass Driver glanced over his shoulder and spotted Lord of Annihilation struggling in the grip of ‘Hardcase’, her eyes fluttering in pleasure as a dark, hungry aura around her hands seemed to be siphoning Lord of Annihilation’s vital energy.

“The bolero is a very slow dance,” ‘Paradox’ whispered into Mass Driver’s ear. “We could be here alllll night.”

“FUCK!”

***Heather***

“Breaker learned ballroom dancing?” Heather asked over the comms as she walked up to the elevator and pressed the button.

“Yeah, after I schooled him he started taking lessons. Said he can’t have any blind-spots that big. The instructor says he’s a savant and practically better than she is already.” Perry said.

“Well, it is his super-power.” Heather said with a shrug. “I don’t see why he wouldn’t be a quick study.”

The door dinged open and they walked into the elevator, hitting the button for the top floor.

A moment after the elevator began rising, it locked into place with a metallic THUNK.

The intercom clicked on and Heather cocked her head to listen.

“Ah, Paradox, trying the old ‘counter attack while their guards are down’ tactic. You’re going to have to be a bit more creative than that. You’re currently surrounded by several hundred pounds of high explo-

The disintegration beam popped out of the Mk. 4’s wrist and vaporized a hole in the ceiling in the blink of an eye.

“Wai-“

***Underwriter***

Checkmate, you little bitch, Underwriter thought, looking down at the security camera of Paradox riding up the elevator in his distinctive armor. Attacking another super’s lair alone? Not a great plan.

Especially against Underwriter.

“Ah, Paradox, trying the old ‘counter attack while their guards are down’ tactic. You’re going to have to be a bit more creative than that. You’re currently surrounded by several hundred pounds of high explo-

Rather than wait for Underwriter’s entire villainous monologue like a good sport, Paradox blew a hole in the roof of the elevator and started flying, nearly in the blink of an eye.

“Wait! Shit!” Underwriter hit the button to blow the elevator.

BOOOM!

His entire office shuddered, dust raining down from the ceiling as the elevator shaft shredded anything inside.

Underwriter changed his camera angle from the elevator to the hall outside his office.

Sure enough, Paradox’s matte black armor was sauntering through the hall, casually dusting off its shoulders

Damn!

Underwriter dialed Neuron’s number.

“What?” Neuron asked.

“Paradox is attacking me!” Underwriter shouted.

“I am aware of the situation, however it is not my task to dissuade such behavior from Paradox. It is yours. You assumed the risk of starting a war with a powerful super, did you not…Underwriter?” Neuron said before hanging up on him.

“Asshole,” Underwriter snarled, slamming the phone down. His security detail readied their weapons.

All he needed to do was shut down the armor and his security team of low-grade Bruisers could pummel the Tinker into the dirt. Each of them was only modestly superhuman but a Tinker without their armor was worse than a civilian. Pure nerd.

They waited behind cover for Paradox to blast through the door in a grand display of righteous anger.

The Tinker didn’t disappoint, shattering through the door and scattering wood shrapnel everywhere.

Underwriter took a deep breath and focused all of his power on Paradox’s suit, urging for something to go wrong. It resisted, like all Tinker-tech does, but a heartbeat later, a microscopic part failed to resist Underwriter’s power and caused a cascading failure.

The lights in the suit’s eyes flickered off, it seized up and toppled over.

“Hell yeah!” Underwriter said, fist-pumping. “Peel him out and string him up!”

The three bruisers ran towards the bricked power-armor, wielding man-sized can-openers with every intention of putting them to good use.

“I don’t know what you were thinking, coming after me in power armor, but when I’m done with you-“

One of the bruisers managed to make a hole in the armor using his tinker-tech can-opener, revealing their prey.

This kid’s probably shitting his pants right about now, Underwriter thought, chuckling.

A nearly invisible spike shot out of the hole in the armor and lodged itself into the bruiser’s shoulder.

“AGH!”

What?

The bruiser stumbled backwards as the spike wrapped around his body, morphing into the camouflaged shape of a girl, pouring our of the suit like water.

What!?

Another one of underwriter’s security detail charged forward, blade raised high.

A length of rough iron emerged from the shapeshifters’ foot and she flicked it upward, catching the charging bruiser on the chin. The man dropped like a sack of potatoes as she proceeded to knock out the other two in a matter of seconds.

Once the three bruisers were down, the girl peeled back her hood, revealing a brilliant reddish gold mane.

“You must be the Underwriter,” she said, the rough iron rod crawling up her leg before settling into her hand. “I’ve got some questions for you.”

“Fuck!”

***Neuron***

“Sir, The mechanaut is destroying another of our buildings.”

“Yeah, it’s on the news. You know the drill. Scrub the records and have Incognito wipe any memory of being insured by us.” Neuron said, hanging up then approving the access request from Database.

It was cheaper to erase all record of insurance and hire Incognito to do a little cleanup than it was to rebuild an entire building.

It also had the added benefit of making The Mechanaut look like an asshole who only attacked uninsured building, like some kind of kneecapper for the government.

Neuron had run the numbers. The Mechanaut targeting uninsured buildings scared enough people into seeking insurance with Big Brain Energy that his costs were flat.

Mechanaut could go crazy all he wanted, believing that Neuron’s business practices would bite him in the ass someday. Mechanaut didn’t understand that even the inevitable blowback could be cheated. That was the purpose of cheating, after all.

Neuron’s screen lit up with a request for Greg to see him again.

Ah, good timing. Nothing like a little revenge against the Mechanaut to take the edge off.

Send him in.

‘Greg’s’ overweight mass shambled into his office, body jiggling with adipose tissue.

“Greg, pleasure to see you again, twice in a week, even. I suspect you’re gunning for promotion to middle management.

“You know me, ladder climber extraordinaire.” ‘Greg’ said with a shrug before waving a piece of paper clutched between thumb and forefinger. “I brought something for you to take a look-“

“I’m going to stop you right there, Greg. Before you show me your newest scoop, I want to show you mine.”

With a thought, Neuron activated the massive wall-to-ceiling monitor on the opposite wall.

With a flicker of light that bathed the darkened room in luminescence, the massive monitor revealed…

A fat man tied to his chair in the living room of a middle-class home.

‘Greg’ cocked his head and gave Neuron an incredulous look. Presumably, since he was still wearing the employee mask.

“You surveil your employee’s homes?” Paradox asked, a trace of disgust in his voice.

“And rig their masks with tetrodotoxin.” Neuron said as he activated the killswitch on Greg’s mask.

Paradox stiffened in place before staggering backwards.

“Wow, that’s a whole new level of douchebaggery,” Paradox said, staggering backwards, his voice slurring.

“There’s no such thing as over-the-top security protocols when it comes to Supers.” Neuron said as Paradox slumped to the ground, twitching violently.

“You were scanned head to toe the moment you entered the building. I know you stuffed your body with C-4 like a human pinata. You intended to disable my office’s defenses with blunt force trauma, then attack me physically. What a naïve plan. Did you think I would let you waltz in for a face-to-face if I didn’t have a way of deadening explosives?”

Paradox’s heart and lungs began to fail so Neuron did him a favor and stimulated them with electricity. The nodes on the walls released arcs of lightning, massaging the upstart’s vital organs.

“It’s called a Null Field, by the Field Guy. Doesn’t allow explosives to begin their chain reaction. Even if they’re hit by bolts of lightning, they would just sizzle slowly, burning you out from the inside.”

“You didn’t even wait a whole day to attack me, so that stupid HP system that your father implemented hasn’t even had a change to recover!” The lightning erupting from the walls lifted Paradox into the air, a massive plume of smoke and sparks erupting from inside the super’s clothes as the C-4 hissed and sputtered.

Paradox raised a hand, and Neuron slowed the lightning enough to allow the wretch to speak.

“I had this great C-4 pun lined up for the climax of the fight, and you ruined it,” Paradox said weakly.

“Oh, I’m sorry, you wanna do it now?” Neuron said, slowing the lightning even more.

“Sure,” Paradox muttered, taking a steadying breath.

“You’re always thinking in absolutes. Only focusing on one enemy, one goal at a time. You only see one problem at a time. I C-4.”

“And this is where I would explode and disable the lightning thingies and stuff, and then I’d kick your butt.” Paradox continued, his jaw stiff from the paralytic.

Neuron went back to electrocuting him.

“You present a rather vexing problem for me, you know that?” Neuron asked as Paradox’s limp body was suspended in midair with chains of raw electricity searing into his wrists. “On one hand, I could kill you for attacking me in my base and no one would officially be able to hold me accountable.”

“Buuut, we all know there’s an enormous difference between official and practical. As it stands, Hexen and your grandmother are neutral towards me, and Mechanaut treats our battles as a game, infuriating as it is.”

“So I can’t kill you without risking overwhelming retribution. Normally this is where I would torture you until you’ve learned your lesson, but if Mass driver breaking all your limbs had the opposite effect, I feel like it would be a waste of time.”

“Destroying your business ventures is also pointless, because you made them with the change in your pocket…all your friends are supers, except Brendon, and he’s too valuable to target. Also, civilians are off limits…”

“You could always surrender!” Paradox shouted over the lightning. “I’ll take it easy on you if you do!”

“I’m pretty sure you’re not winning.” Neuron said.

“Of course I’m not Winning, I’m Paradox!” Paradox said.

“Sure, sure,” Neuron mused, his Big Brain Energy seeking out an alternative solution to the Paradox Problem.

There were only two things he could see being done about the irritating young man. His public image was free game. Hexen and Mechanaut would most likely stay neutral even if he launched a vicious smear campaign against their son. As far as they were concerned, P.R. attacks were kid’s games.

The other option involved hiring a powerful Minder to make some beneficial modifications to the young man. That was a fair bit riskier, wasn’t it? Hexen might have a way to detect it, and it might trigger retribution if it came to light. From the community at large.

Could solve all my problems, though…Nah, too risky. I’ll keep it in mind if making Paradox a Villain in the public eye doesn’t have the desired effect.

Option #1 it was, then.

“I’m going to let you go now, but your punishment isn’t over,” Neuron said, “Not by a long…shot?”

Paradox hung limp from the lightning chains, his heart long since stopped.

Shit. Tetrodotoxin must have been too much for his body mass. The fake body had been folded around nearly a hundred pounds of C-4, so his actual body mass had been much lower, and Neuron hadn’t bothered to correct the automatic calculator between the scale in the lobby and the mask.

Neuron went to re-start Paradox’s heart, when Paradox burst out of his own chest, bloody, naked and covered in gore, sporting a manic grin as he flew through the air, useless bricks of half-burned C-4 tumbling to the ground behind him.

Neuron tried to grab the Tinker, but the living lightning slipped off the air around the young man’s gore-covered body.

“Gah!” Neuron groaned as Paradox’s foot made contact, slamming his tank backwards, nearly impacting against the wall.

“I’m insulted, you know!” Paradox said, sprinting to catch up with Neuron’s tumbling case. “You shouldn’t be afraid of retribution from my parents!”

Neuron flew up into the high ceilings where Paradox couldn’t reach.

Paradox seized a pen from Neuron’s desk that he kept for guests, bit it, then flung it at him.

The pen pierced the tinker-made bulletproof glass, sticking halfway into Neuron’s tank, where it began leaking ink into his carefully calibrated cerebrofluid.

“You should be afraid of retribution from ME!”

Neuron’s brain ran at full power as he tried to figure out the best way to deal with this new threat. Why wasn’t his lightning working? Was the boy some kind of natural insulator? Did his HP come back upon emerging from the Greg flesh-puppet?

How much damage would the ink do to his brain before it was filtered out? Were any bacteria introduced to his tank?

If the Tinker continued his assault, Neuron would have to unleash the big guns. Paradox likely wouldn’t survive, but if Neuron had to choose between himself and the little punk the choice was easy.

Just as he was expecting Paradox to continue his assault, the gore-covered young man relaxed.

“Alright, I got what I wanted.” He said, turning on his heel and sauntering towards the exit, the lightning sliding off his body, failing to find purchase just an inch or so above his skin.

“What!?”

“Oh, you don’t remember giving Hardcase access to the database?” Paradox asked over his shoulder. “Yeah, she scrubbed everything. Big Brain Energy insurance doesn’t exist anymore. Later!” Paradox sprinted for the exit, leaping through the door moments before Neuron recovered from the shock.

“Fuck!”