Chapter 168 Minx.

Chapter 168: 168 Minx.

It absolutely paid to keep your mad science strictly in-house.

Sure, the operational overhead was a nightmare. Your average rogue engineer bending the laws of physics, nature, and federal regulations required highly specialized, heavily restricted equipment, and sucked up more raw wattage than a crypto-mining farm.

But when you really committed to the professional villain business, you didn’t want to be outsourcing your evil tech.

Sure, it was cheaper on the front end, but it was very much a case of ’you get what you pay for.’

The other major reason you wanted your mad scientist on the payroll was because you should never, ever leave those loons unsupervised for too long. Your average evil inventor didn’t really grasp the concept of ’boundaries.’

Left to their own devices, they tended to go pretty nutty. Not to mention, if you didn’t keep a close eye on their schematics, they’d try and sneak undocumented features into your machinery.

An override switch so they could turn your army of warbots to their side. A massive, glowing red ’self-destruct’ button. That kind of crap.

Those were the pragmatic, operational reasons to keep your pet genius close. In my case, the other massive benefit was simply how ridiculously sexy Rhea was.

Not to be crass or anything, but she knew it, and she actively weaponized that fact.

It was absolutely no coincidence she wandered around the chalet in tight crop tops and no bra beneath her work coat. She knew exactly how much of a turn-on that classic, chaotic-evil garb was for me.

And fuck, man. Seeing her dressed up like some stunning escapee from a Hammer Horror Frankenstein production, backlit by sparking Tesla coils and bubbling chemical beakers? It did all kinds of things to my blood pressure.

She was rocking exactly that aesthetic when she called me down several days after my tense driveway meeting with Valkyria. It was sweltering down in the basement laboratory, the air thick with the hum of massive server racks and the flashing lights of towering mainframes.

The concrete walls were lit with veins of glowing neon purples and blues, looking like some underground cyberpunk club, while vats of highly questionable, bubbling green liquids threw eerie shadows across the floor.

"What have you got for me?" I asked as I approached her rolling chair.

"Hold up," Rhea muttered, the tip of her tongue poking out from the corner of her mouth. Her body twisted as she aggressively mashed the buttons on her controller.

I glanced at the massive primary monitor, which was currently rendering whatever hyper-violent shooter game Rhea was hyper-fixated on.

A halo of smaller holographic screens were arrayed around it, streaming complex technical diagrams, facial recognition sweeps, and encrypted data streams, but 100% of her actual focus was on the game.

"Hold up, Miles. Just... about... Gotcha!" she cried, punching the air triumphantly as the screen flashed a victory banner. "Wooo! Top rank! Eat shit and die, you miserable scrubs!"

"Are you running aim-bots on the public servers again?" I asked.

"Miles, please! I am a lady of the highest scientific integrity," Rhea gasped, pressing a hand to her chest as she lifted her nose smugly. "I just happen to be naturally built different."

I let my eyes linger for a second on the deep swell of her cleavage, then pulled my gaze back up to hers, seeing that Rhea had clearly noticed the visual detour. But come on. Who could blame me? By the wicked glint in her eye, she certainly wasn’t offended.

"I hope your gaming didn’t get in the way of syndicate business," I said.

"Of course not, boss! I am a complete professional when I need to be. I pinged you the exact second I finished tracking down the Mind. I was just styling on some twelve-year-olds while I waited for you to walk down the stairs."

"You actually found him? Great!" I said. I reached down and affectionately mussed her woolly hair, scratching her right behind the ear in that specific way I knew she loved. "I knew I could count on you, Rhea."

Rhea actually shivered in pleasure, leaning back into my hand as her wolf tail gave a happy thump against the back of her chair.

"Mmm. Damn right you could," she purred.

I let my hand linger for a moment longer before nodding at the glowing monitors. "So, where is he?"

"Well," Rhea said, her smug grin turning into a grimace. "You’re not gonna like it."

"I probably won’t," I admitted. "But give it to me anyway."

"Your funeral," she sighed, swiping a finger to pull one of the data screens to the center.

"So, I went off the raw data that Steve pulled from Green’s lab," she explained, her fingers flying across her mechanical keyboard with a rapid-fire clicking. "And I drew up the Mind’s last known operational location. Not a lot of hard IP addresses to go on, but high-end evil labs put out some very specific, familiar energy signatures. Little secret of the trade. Don’t pass it around."

"My lips are sealed."

"With mine, hopefully," Rhea teased playfully. "But anyway, his last known location is still drawing a massive amount of power from the grid, but the energy signatures are all artificially spoofed. A decoy. So his old location isn’t where his real lair is."

"Great," I said, grabbing the back of her chair and leaning in closer, our shoulders brushing as I scrutinized the flickering screens. "Then where the hell is he?"

"Well," Rhea said, her nose wrinkling in genuine disgust. "He’s in the sewers."

Oh, I didn’t like that. Not at all.

"The sewers?" I echoed, groaning. "What the hell is a telepath doing down there?"

"I mean," Rhea said with a shrug, "your guess is as good as mine, Miles. But a lot of old-school bad guys go strictly underground the second they feel threatened."

That was true. And unfortunately literal.

When the heat got turned up, a certain breed of villain tended to immediately duck down into either reinforced bunkers, the sewer systems, or convenient limestone caves to force alcoholic geniuses to build suits of power armor. It was practically an instinctual defense mechanism.

But if the Mind was operating out of the Metropolis sewers, then the odds were incredibly high that the mutants were actively helping him out.

Ugh. I could feel my skin crawl just thinking about them.

Don’t get me wrong. I had absolutely nothing against mutants as a demographic.

I knew a lot of solid, professional villains whose DNA had been scrambled in a lab accident, and very few of them came out looking half as gorgeous as Rhea did.

But sewer mutants were a whole different, highly toxic breed of annoyance. Literally.

A lot of them mutated back in the sixties and seventies, when the EPA regulations were so aggressively lax that chemical plants could essentially dump raw radioactive sludge straight down the municipal drains.

Forget rivers catching on fire—back then, if you went for a swim in certain industrial waterways, you were coming back out with functional gills and a third eye.

The hippie communes hadn’t exactly helped things, either. There were a lot of weird, off-the-grid groups having fun near the bay area back in the day, cooking and consuming a lot of highly experimental hallucinogens.

Allegedly, a significant portion of the current crop of underground mutants were descended from those groups.

But far more likely, they were just the desperate and the homeless who had slipped through the cracks of civilization, only to get violently rewritten by whatever toxic soup was pooling down in the dark. Or they were the results of corporate bio-experiments—like the kind Doctor Green used to run—who had escaped and didn’t want to be found.

And that was all before you even factored in the giant rat-men and the bipedal gators.

So, yeah. Overall, the sewers were among my absolute least favorite biomes to operate in. Mutants did not appreciate surface-dwellers wandering into their territory at all, and they guarded their little irradiated slices of real estate fiercely. Given the option, I avoided them like the plague.

Too bad that decision was now entirely out of my hands.

"Great," I sighed, rubbing my forehead. "Have you managed to get anything more accurate than just ’the sewers’?"

"Miles, please! You do realize you are currently talking to a certified genius, right? Of course I did!" Rhea scoffed.

I gave her head another appreciative pat. "Attagirl. Where?"

"Mmm. Well, if you really have to know, it looks like he’s hiding out deep under the bay area bridges," Rhea said. Her mouse clicked, and the screen dramatically shifted, rendering a massive, highly detailed 3D model of the municipal sewer system.

She pointed a perfectly manicured finger at a tight conjunction of tunnels meeting in a large, reinforced concrete structure right in the middle of the grid.

"Sonic imaging?" I asked, genuinely impressed. "How’d you get ahold of municipal ground-penetrating radar?"

"I have my ways, Miles. I have my ways," Rhea said with a slow, lazy grin.

"Highly effective ones, too," I noted.

"Really?" Rhea practically purred. Her whole body seemed to twist fluidly toward me, her shoulders deliberately shrugging just enough to make her plush lab coat slip down her arms. The movement perfectly framed the deep, bare valley of her breasts. "You really think so?"

My eyes were instantly, helplessly glued to the tempting display.

"Very," I said, my voice dropping a fraction.

"Mmm. Does that mean I get a reward from the boss?" she asked coyly, looking up at me through her eyelashes.

Saucy minx.

"A reward, eh?" I murmured, my fingers gently playing with the ends of her hair again. "And I wonder just what exactly it is you’d want?"