Chapter 182 Imagination.

Chapter 182: 182 Imagination.

"Time to die, Polaris," she said.

Her voice wasn’t her own. It was utterly devoid of humanity as she drew back her construct mace once more.

Oh, fuck that!

I slammed my fist directly into her face. Though I was pretty buff, to an S-class heroine a mere mortal’s physical punch probably would have felt like being slapped by a wet feather.

That is, it would have, except I simultaneously threw a massive, concentrated blast of magnetic force directly through my gauntlets.

The point-blank impact slammed into her magical shielding with the force of a wrecking ball, violently ripping her off me and sending her flying backward into the plaza’s center fountain with enough momentum to completely level the stone structure.

"Miles!" Rhea cried.

"Stay back!" I yelled, pulling myself away from the cracked wall, even as Mystic casually threw off the heavy slabs of the fountain’s rubble and rose back to her full height.

She glared at me, her eyes completely devoid of pain or disorientation.

"Attention, customers!" the mall PA system suddenly blared, the automated voice heavily distorted. "We have an unscheduled Super Battle occurring in the main plaza. Please move to the emergency exits in an orderly fashion."

For once in my life, I was actually glad for the corporate intercom.

In the normal course of things, having a bunch of bystanders hanging around with their smartphones out to watch me fight was exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I was paid for.

But I wasn’t getting paid for this, and this wasn’t some random-ass street vigilante looking to make a viral name for himself.

I was dealing with a founding member of the Bureau, one of The Five, and she was out for blood. And, evidently, she had come prepared to kill.

"Boss!" Psyren shouted, ripping off her headphones and glaring at the hovering magician, her eyes blazing with glowing neon-pink hearts.

"Bitch, you are gonna pay for that!" the psychic cried. She pressed one hand to her brow and pointed the other aggressively at the heroine.

I actually felt the invisible, concussive pulse of psychic power ripple outward from Psyren like someone had just clocked me.

But Mystic didn’t even flinch. She just looked over at the punk psychic with a wry smirk.

Oh, something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

Psyren’s fiercely scrunched face fell into a look of absolute panic.

"I... I can’t read her, boss," she gasped, taking a step back. "It’s like there’s nothing there! Her mind is just... empty!"

I narrowed my eyes at Mystic’s pupils. They were almost like Psyren’s neon hearts, but rigid. Mechanical.

Wait.

Wait a second. Was she...

She was being fucking mind-controlled!

Oh, that was just fucking perfect!

Mind control on heroes was hardly a new concept in Metropolis. Pretty much any cape who’s been in the business for more than a year inevitably ends up getting their brain scrambled by some villain. It’s practically a corporate rite of passage.

There were more than a few ways it happened. Between genocidal florists breeding brainwashing pollen and B-list psychics getting bored of bending spoons and trying for minds, you didn’t lack for potential suspects, that was for damn sure.

But though that might give some legal leniency to the heroes at trial, I sure as fuck wasn’t going to get the benefit of the doubt.

Oh yes, officer. The S-class superhero that brutally attacked me, a well-known supervillain, was simply mind-controlled. I certainly wasn’t doing any crimes that might have drawn her attention and led to her getting impaled by a steel girder in self-defense. I swear!

Yeah. That’d play real well with the jury.

If this was some fucking streeter, I’d be considerably less worried about the legal fallout. But this was one of the biggest, most heavily sponsored heroes on the planet, and even if I could somehow take her down easily, things were about to get very complicated.

"Why are you coming after me?" I demanded, shouting over the alarms to try and draw Mystic’s attention back to me and away from the girls. "What the hell did I do?"

It worked. Mystic zeroed in on me again, her smirk falling away and her face growing grim.

"You shouldn’t have kept looking, Polaris," the machine-voice grated from her lips as she rose slowly into the air, sharp constructs magic weaving around her hands. "You shouldn’t have made it come to this."

What the fuck did that mean? The Brain Trust was dead!

"Rhea! Psyren! Get the hell out of here!" I shouted.

"Boss!" Psyren cried, refusing to back down.

"She’s after me! Run!" I commanded.

Psyren bit her lip, but Rhea grabbed the psychic villainess by the arm and forcibly yanked her toward the nearest emergency exit.

Good. That was one massive problem out of the way.

Now, to deal with Mystic.

Man. This would be so much simpler if she had a skeleton made of adamantium (fuck, wolverine). But the structural steel in the mall might just do the trick.

"Alright then," I said.

I threw my hands forward, sending a massive, localized wave of my magnetic powers straight at her, trying to violently rip the structural rebar out of the floor to cage her.

But my powers broke around her, radiating outwards like ripples in a pond. My magnetic fields just slid helplessly off her. She had conjured a glowing magical ward around her body that was acting as a perfect, frictionless null-zone.

I knew her magic could bend reality, but I’d been really hoping whoever was currently puppeteering her didn’t know how to deploy anti-magnetic shielding.

Mystic smirked, the code spinning in her eyes as she clearly realized exactly what I’d been trying to do.

She spun her hard-light scythe, raw magical energy gathering around the curved head.

Uh oh.

I immediately spread my hands wide, letting my magnetic field stretch out in a massive radius all around me, grabbing literally every piece of loose metal in immediate reach.

Heavy steel trashcans, iron benches, racks of cheap clothing, made-in-China electronics from a nearby kiosk—I violently ripped it all into the air in a swirling, metallic mass.

Mystic narrowed her eyes, her grin becoming a snarl, and she hurled the glowing scythe directly at me like a missile.

It boomed through the air, ripping towards me so incredibly fast that the shockwave tore the floor tiles to shreds in its wake.

I pushed my hands down, violently repelling my armor off the pipes buried beneath the floor.

The weapon screamed right beneath me, the vacuum of its passage sending my legs flying out from under me. The world spun in a blur of motion, vertigo instantly sending my stomach bouncing between my throat and my boots.

Hurp.

I absolutely hated that feeling.

I managed to reorient myself mid-air, whirling around and flinging my hand back towards where Mystic still floated.

In answer, the massive, swirling cloud of metallic debris I’d pulled in suddenly flew at her in a devastating barrage. I essentially threw half the mall at her face.

Mystic tensed. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides, and geometric bands of magical energy surged up her body, gathering with a sharp, crackling hum.

She suddenly threw her arms out. A massive, expanding shockwave of hard-light magic blasted outwards from her core, violently smashing the entire rain of metal aside like it was made of papier-mâché. Shrapnel embedded itself deep into the walls and storefronts.

She exhaled slowly, blew a stray strand of dark hair from her face, and then casually reached her hand out.

The scythe boomeranged perfectly through the air and snapped right back into her grip.

She smirked at me again.

Fucking show-off.

But she’d earned it, dammit. This wasn’t going to be easy by any stretch of the imagination.