There was a long pause where they seemed to be seriously considering whether or not they wanted to take me on. The fact that they were seriously considering it rather than running in terror like they should've been was a sign that my reputation had fallen way too far.

I was never going to take time off to go canoodling with Fialux again. I could do that in the evening when I got back from work, but no more vacations lasting the better part of a month.

A wise person once said that it was nothing but work once word got around that you'd gone soft, and I was learning that firsthand here. I can't say that I cared for the experience.

"You heard the boss!" the one who'd mentioned the bounty said, and there was something about his tone that said there was going to be a lot more work now.

Also? I really wanted to know who was out there putting a bounty on Fialux. I had a pretty good guess, but I really wanted to know for sure.

Not that me really wanting to know for sure was going to save any of these assholes.

"What the hell is he doing?" Fialux asked. "I thought you had the criminal element in this city on lockdown?"

"No honor among thieves," I said.

"Which means?"

I looked the guy right in the eyes. "He figures I'm going to pay particular attention to him if they ended up getting captured and he doesn't want to find out what it meant to have Night Terror paying particular attention to his criminal ass."

"Huh. I guess I can understand that," she said. "He's trying to take heat off of himself by ordering his fellow thugs into action."

"Exactly," I said. "Pretty smart when you think about it."

At least it was smart up to the point I started spilling his plan. His friends didn't like that idea judging from the glares he was getting.

I could respect him throwing his compatriots under the bus, or the murderous villain in this case, to try and save his own bacon. It wasn't going to work, but I could respect it.

"Don't listen to her!" the guy shouted, though a bead of sweat running down the side of his face showed he was getting nervous. "She lies! Get her!"

Clearly the order was enough to get through any misgivings they might have about their leader. They jumped into motion even though they were obviously terrified. Maybe they were more terrified of him since they'd seen the consequences of disobeying him directly in the past.

I was a more esoteric threat. They knew in an academic sense, which was probably the closest any of these jerks ever got to doing anything academically, that it was a bad idea to cross me. I was still a more vague threat they hadn't experienced directly.

Yet.

I figured some of them were probably soiling themselves as they came at me, but that wasn't enough to stop them from coming at me.

I sighed. I really needed to get back to the way I used to do things, even if I couldn't quite figure out how I was going to do that and also keep Fialux happy.

"What are you waiting for?" she asked.

There'd been a lot of calculated death and destruction involved in maintaining my reputation before Fialux. I could already hear the bitching out she was going to give me later tonight because I vaporized that one guy. For all that she sounded a touch nervous. A touch like she wouldn't mind me vaporizing at least one robber if it meant we didn't have to fight them.

Was she losing her edge because she was in my stuff? These guys weren't any danger if she was wearing my stuff, and I was vaguely insulted that she thought they were.

The bank robbers raised their weapons and fired. It was almost like a volley from an old-style military. Back when guns had been so inaccurate that the only way they could guarantee a hit was by sending out a mass of bullets.

"Oh, so now you want me to get violent," I said.

Unfortunately for them they were using shotguns, and the way the pellets spread out from those shotguns meant it was a hell of a lot easier for me to stop them. Even if they usually had a hell of a lot more stopping power than your typical bullet.

My heads-up display filled with too many targets for me to keep track of myself. Which is the whole reason I'd given this over to the computer.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"I want you to do something," she said. "I mean… they're coming right for us! Just maybe… I don't know."

She didn't know now when we were in the heat of the moment, but I knew at some point she was going to be unhappy about how I was handling things here. That one dude getting vaporized was going to cost me.

Thankfully I could do something non-lethal to stop their attempt to use lethal force against us, as much as it irritated me.

I'd slowly been making more and more improvements to the suit. Giving it new safety protocols and other features that CORVAC used to handle, but that I didn't trust an external artificial intelligence back in the lab to handle in real time any longer.

To be honest? I'd been lazy. I had an AI who was capable of doing all this stuff, so I'd left a glaring weak spot in my defenses. Mostly because I didn't want to do the work to go through and program those defenses myself.

I'd learned the hard way what a bad idea that was.

The computer attached to my suit automatically targeted each individual pellet coming at me and little micro shields appeared in their flight path. Not enough to stop them, but enough to slow them down to the point they landed well short of us. The one or two that did get through were moving slow enough that they bounced off of me like little pebbles that had been thrown by a toddler.

None of them reached Fialux since she was standing a little behind me and well out of range. At least when I was using my shields to stop them.

"Holy shit," one of the robbers said.

Another one threw his gun down and held his arms up, but then he got a glare from one of his buddies and sheepishly reached down to pick it up.

I locked eyes with the guy and grinned. "You were a hell of a lot better off when you threw that thing down, buddy."

I raised my wrist blaster and fired. I didn't have it on disintegrate right now. I wanted to make a point. The gun blew into a puff of smoke and metal shards. The guy went down screaming, and the heads up display showed me that the shrapnel had hit his leg.

A quick report showed I hadn't hit anything vital. He was going to have a bad day, but he'd live. One less bitching out from Fialux later.

"Anyone else want to cause some trouble?" I asked, moving my wrist blaster so it covered all of them.

Someone appeared beside me. It wasn't quite the green blur that had been in the habit of appearing next to me once upon a time, but it was close enough that I flinched away before my rational brain caught up with the instinctive side of my brain and reminded me that not only was Fialux not going to hurt me, but she was wearing a safetied version of my tech which meant I was currently more than a match for her.

"What do you think you're doing?" Fialux hissed.

"I'm taking care of these are bad guys," I said. "Doing the whole hero thing? Isn't that what you wanted? You told me to do something!"

"Well yeah, but you killed that one guy! Can't you like… do something non-lethal to stop them?"

And here we were. I guess I wasn't going to have to wait until we got back to the lab to get bitched out. Great.

This was getting really old.

"What?" I asked, hitting her with my best sweet and innocent look. A look she wasn't buying if the glare she gave me was any indication. "I promise it didn't hurt when that beam disintegrated him. At least not all that much."

It had hurt, a lot, but she didn't have to know that.

"That's not how you do the hero thing," she said.

"I thought I made this clear," I said. "I might do heroic things, but I'm no hero."

She put her hand against my chest. Right over my heart. "But you are. I know that deep down you are. Besides, we already settled this when you swooped in to save me from those giant robots Dr. Lana kept throwing at us."

I rolled my eyes. "Are you really trying to Anakin Skywalker me in the middle of a job?"

I paused to reach out and grab a guy who'd been sneaking up on me. His shotgun had been pointed right at my head, and I figured I couldn't let that stand. Sure my shields would've deflected the shot and sure I had sound compensators that would've dulled most of the tinnitus-inducing blast, but it was the principle of the thing.

Not to mention Fialux was standing close enough while she griped at me that she might've been caught by a glancing blow.

I squeezed and he let out a satisfying cry and dropped his shotgun as I crushed his favorite piece of anatomy. Then I turned and punched him hard enough to throw him across the room where he slammed into the wall and slipped to the ground unconscious.

I winced. That was going to leave a mark. Knocking someone out like that wasn't without consequences, but I figured it was better that he was out than to be awake and feel the aftereffects of the world of hurt I'd just introduced to his pain receptors.

With any luck he'd wake up in a hospital where he'd have plenty of nice drugs being pumped into his system to keep him from feeling the worst effects of getting punched by the world's greatest villain. And he'd have a hell of a story to tell when he was in the clink.

It turns out even having a brush with Night Terror was enough to give guys and girls some status in there. Who knew?

I turned to grin at Fialux. "Was that awesome or…"

I cut off. Her look said it all. Damn it.

"Come on. What was I supposed to do? He was trying to shoot me in the head! He deserved it! They're using lethal force and you're hamstringing me."

"This is…" she said.

I put my hands on my hips. I was starting to get really frustrated with this holier-than-thou hero routine she was pulling on me. Frustrated to the point that I was going to give her a piece of my mind, damn it.

"Fine," I said, gesturing to the rest of the bad guys who were standing there looking perplexed as we had our argument and ignored them like the nothings they were. One dude scratched his head with the barrel of his shotgun, which showed the level of idiocy we were dealing with. "If you want to take point, then by all means do it your way. Treat the nice criminals with kid gloves and see where it gets you without your powers to throw around."

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she smiled. I smiled right back at her, though probably not for the reasons she thought. No, I was looking forward to watching her fall flat on her face.

"Fine," she said. "Watch how it's done."

I was going to watch, all right. My only regret was I didn't have any popcorn on hand so I could really enjoy the show.

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