Chapter 173 Direct.

Chapter 173: 173 Direct.

"I wasn’t expecting... guests..."

The voice rasped from the shadows of the chair, heavily distorted and metallic, sounding exactly like a blown-out air-raid siren.

"I would have knocked, but I really wanted it to be a surprise," I said, keeping my posture entirely relaxed as I floated down to the floor plating.

"And here it is... not even... my birthday."

The massive command chair slowly swiveled around.

Aw. I loved that. You absolutely had to have a proper, dramatic swivel chair in your primary lair, and the Mind was clearly a man who deeply respected classical villainy. If he had a mustache, he’d undoubtedly be twirling it.

But he didn’t.

He did, however, have the massive, muscular body of a silverback gorilla.

Sure, the primate frame was wearing a custom-tailored, double-breasted white doctor’s coat, but the massive, furry paws poking out from the cuffs were a dead giveaway.

As was the fact that he wasn’t wearing any shoes, leaving his highly dexterous, ape-like feet on full display.

But the real centerpiece was resting squarely on his shoulders. Bolted directly to the gorilla’s neck was a reinforced glass dome.

Inside it, floating in a faintly bubbling, viscous green solution, was a large, deeply wrinkled human brain. It bobbed gently in the fluid, looking exactly like a shriveled, highly intelligent goldfish.

"And you... must be... Polaris," the synthetic voice grated from a speaker bolted to the collar of his dome.

"You don’t sound very surprised," I noted, which wasn’t exactly an encouraging sign.

"I am not. I... knew you would be... coming... eventually."

"Then you know exactly what I want," I said, crossing my armored arms.

"I... do..."

I sighed heavily. "And you’re not going to give it to me, are you?"

"I... am not. Because I... do not... have it..."

"You don’t have the Override Array?" I asked, my eyes narrowing behind my visor.

"No."

Shit. Well, that was going to complicate things a bit.

"And I don’t suppose you’ll tell me where it is?" I pressed.

"I will... not."

Alright. There was only one reason we were still talking. He had a trap primed and waiting to spring. These kinds of polite, chatty villains always had some nefarious, hidden mechanism ready for moments exactly like this, so it was time to figure out where the hell it was coming from.

I let my magnetic aura stretch outward, resonating with the room’s ambient fields. I wasn’t feeling any hidden weapon emplacements in the walls, but if he knew I was coming, he had probably set something up that I specifically wouldn’t be able to sense on radar.

"Well, that’s going to be a problem," I said smoothly, wrapping my powers tightly around the heavy steel plates making up the floor of the room.

"You intend... to beat the location... out of me?" the Mind rasped.

"Something like that," I said.

"How... unfortunate... for you."

And there it was. That dramatic one-liner could only mean it was officially time to rumble.

Now, where was the attack coming from? Not the Mind himself. Despite his massive gorilla proportions, he showed absolutely no physical signs of lunging at me.

But—

I heard a wet, pressurized hiss directly beneath me. That was the only warning I was going to get.

My magnetic fields violently yanked me backward toward the ruined blast door, mere milliseconds before a massive geyser of thick, glowing green sludge surged upward through the iron mesh floor exactly where I had been standing.

It nearly clipped me, but I just managed to levitate out of the way, narrowly evading a blindly grasping, oozing tentacle.

I slammed to a halt, floating halfway to the ceiling as the gooey mess swirled and coalesced on the floor, rising up into a towering, gelatinous pile of rubbery goop.

Oh, fucking great.

A slimer. Again!

"Meet... the Ooze," the Mind announced, gesturing grandly with a furry paw at the mass of jiggling green horror. "I acquired him... just for you."

"How incredibly thoughtful of you," I said, facing off against the wobbling bio-hazard. "Any chance you saved the receipt?"

"I am afraid... not. Now, my beautiful creation, if you would... be so kind..."

The Ooze trembled violently and started flowing across the floor toward me, leaving a smoking, sizzling trail in the metal plating.

Aw, fuck.

I pulled back, stretching my magnetic powers out as far as they would go. I’d dealt with slime-based mutants before, but this one didn’t exactly look like the highly intelligent, reasoning sort.

Those were always the worst kind to fight, but at least there was a massive silver lining this time around, unlike my last encounter with a slimer, there was a whole lot of industrial metal in this room for me to weaponize.

I thrust my hands out toward the Ooze, my powers thrumming aggressively from my core, making the entire steel floor beneath the slime violently vibrate.

That’s it, you jello bastard. Just a little more... right there!

I suddenly jerked my hands upward. The heavy steel floor plating beneath the creature instantly warped and curved up, ripping free from its bolts with a deafening groan of shearing metal.

The steel violently wrapped entirely around the Ooze, encasing it in a perfectly sealed, floating metallic sphere.

I squeezed my fist shut, magnetically crushing the joints together until the makeshift containment vessel was perfectly airtight.

There we go.

"Oh, dear..." the Mind rasped, rising slowly from his chair.

"Sorry your generic Blob knockoff didn’t pan out," I said, dusting my hands off.

"Is that... what you think?"

It was then I heard the aggressive, bubbling sizzle. I snapped my attention back to the steel orb.

Fuck!

The metal was rapidly turning black, corroding and sloughing off in molten, smoking chunks. The damn thing was highly acidic.

"How very... unfortunate," the Mind said, turning back toward his command console. "I do hope you... and my pet... get intimately acquainted."

As he spoke, the Mind dramatically slammed his massive gorilla hand down onto a hidden button on his armrest.

There was a heavy electronic beep. The floor directly beneath his feet let out a loud, hollow metallic CHONK.

And absolutely nothing happened.

"Technical difficulties?" I asked innocently as his dramatic escape route completely failed to open.

The Mind said nothing. Instead, he lifted his massive, furry foot and violently stomped down on the jammed hatch in the universal, deeply frustrated gesture of trying to make finicky tech work by hitting it.

Ha! Served him right.

But with his raw gorilla strength, he was going to get that sabotaged hatch open sooner rather than later. And before that happened, I desperately needed to deal with the Ooze.

I was rapidly running out of time to figure out exactly how.

A massive hole had already melted through the bottom of my containment sphere, and the gooey bastard was pouring out of it like a neon nightmare, splashing onto the floor and immediately rearing back up to strike.

How was the Mind even controlling it? Did it have actual intelligence? Unlikely. Some sort of crude, pheromone-based impulse system? It didn’t matter. I needed something to neutralize it, right now.

"Rhea!" I barked into my receiver. "I need high-pressure water! Is there a municipal reservoir down here? A discharge pipe? Anything!"

"Uh. Uhhhhh... Hold on," Rhea muttered, the frantic clicking of her mechanical keyboard bleeding through the comms.

"No hurry or anything!" I yelled, violently jerking myself to the left as a pair of acidic tentacles whipped through the air, completely missing my helmet but wrapping around a pair of industrial support beams that instantly hissed and melted into liquid slag. "Take your time!"

"Ummmm. Aha! Got it!" Rhea cheered. "There’s a still-active, high-capacity storm drain pipe about... uh... six feet through the brick wall at a forty-degree angle to your direct right."

"That’ll do," I said, raising both my hands.