It was a damn good thing the robot was giant. That meant Fialux had plenty of time to fall. Plenty of time for me to swoop to the rescue. Assuming I could avoid that damned robot long enough to get to her, that is.

I had to be careful. My proximity alarm flashed and I jerked to the side like a fighter pilot trying to avoid a missile.

Another proximity alarm. Another robot hand sweeping through the sky, but I moved with reflexes that surprised even me. It was as though I'd been treating this like a lark, like a fun game I was playing with my girlfriend because I didn't realistically think Dr. Lana could hurt us, but suddenly things had gotten very fucking serious really fucking fast.

Fialux was in serious danger because I'd treated this like something I'd be able to take care of no problem. Because I was overconfident.

"Are you having fun yet, Night Terror?" Dr. Lana called out, throwing her head back and letting out a good old fashioned villainous laugh.

I frowned. Looked down to my weapons. I had numerous options, there was no kill like overkill, and I decided fuck it. I fired everything I had.

At the robot. It would've been fun to blast Dr. Lana, but she'd already proved an annoying ability to return from almost certain death.

Missiles appeared out of thin air. Transported into that thin air by the pattern buffers I stored on my belt where I kept some of my nastier tricks that I wouldn't otherwise be able to store on my person.

Think of it like one hell of a technologically advanced bag of holding with a hellacious carrying capacity filled to the brim with the kind of futuristic arsenal that would make any military puke with more weight on their shoulders than good sense get a half chub thinking about it.

Kinetics that operated with antigrav devices on them materialized right alongside good old-fashioned chemically fired missiles and antigrav missiles. On top of that I fired every plasma weapon and beam weapon I had.

Some of those were designed as countermeasures, something I'd put into place after I found myself dodging a ridiculous number of missiles when fighting CORVAC, but I figured it was safe enough to use them as good old fashioned weapons considering this thing hadn't shown any indication of possessing real weapons.

Yeah, if I fired off everything I had and turned them all up to eleven? They should be more than enough to distract the robot while I concentrated on saving Fialux.

It was a testament to the sheer power the robot was packing when it hit me that I was able to fire off all of those weapons and still not have an appreciable dip in power output.

I'd never identified more with Tim the Tool Man Taylor in my life when it came to the need for more power, is what I'm getting at. Which meant I still had more than enough to swoop in and save Fialux.

I heard a satisfying crunch as the robot finally buckled under one of my shots, but I didn't care. I'd fired everything I had more in an attempt to distract. If the asshole was distracted I didn't have to worry about it trying to hit me while I concentrated on rescuing Fialux.

This was something that was going to take finesse. I might be personally exempt from the laws of physics, particularly the ones that could cause me grievous bodily injury, but that didn't apply to everyone around me.

It was a tale as old as heroes. One of the problems with most heroes and villains was they never stopped to think about the physics involved in their day job.

Like how it was impossible to reach out and lift up, say, a piece of rock the size of a mountain without having the whole thing crumble to giant boulder-sized pieces around you because you were putting all the stress of the force required to lift the damn thing onto a single point that wasn't designed to take that kind of stress.

Seriously. The stuff they showed in the movies? Entire mountains or cities getting lifted in the air? The kind of stuff they still showed despite numerous real world examples from real heroes and villains showing that shit didn't fly, literally?

Yeah, unless the ground beneath those cities was solid rock reinforced with steel beams or something it's all going to fall apart. Imagine trying to hold up a nice squishy cake on the point of your finger and you start to get an idea of what it would look like on a more macro level.

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Unless we're talking about a giant landmass floating through the air that had been reinforced through and through to allow for that kind of lifting, which applied to no giant landmass ever, you were going to very quickly have a situation where one large chunk of rock became many small chunks of rock raining down on the area.

The big problem there was "small" was a relative term. A chunk might look small in comparison to a giant mountain being lifted in the air, but still be pretty big and damaging when it came to rest on the ground. Usually violently.

Or, for a much more personal and small scale example of the dangers physics posed, take swooping in to rescue somebody who was going for a hell of a fall. Somebody who was suddenly acting like maybe she wasn't as all powerful as she'd been before that blast.

I didn't know that for sure, but I wasn't taking the chance.

It was something people didn't think about. It was the same problem that had caused me to build a bunch of inertial dampeners and anti-physics compensators into my suit.

Suddenly bringing a body to a rapid stop would apply the force of that rapid stop across said body in a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario? All those forces would be brought to bear on a small portion of the body which could be even more disastrous.

We're talking forces that would be enough to break said body in numerous places if, say, it were to come to a sudden stop.

Catching someone at the bottom of a long fall wasn't going to do a damn bit of good. All that kinetic energy is still going somewhere, and getting smashed by getting caught ten feet from the ground was just as deadly as getting smashed zero feet from the ground.

Armor wouldn't do jack shit either, unless you considered spreading out the force of an impact over the entire interior surface of armor and turning someone into human jelly a better outcome than breaking every bone in their body.

Imagine somebody was surrounded in armor and suddenly found themselves surrounded by bad guys firing on them. So they take off in a big dramatic ballistic arc that gets them out of trouble.

They'd still break every bone in their body inside the armor, but they'd be so busy getting turned into jelly that they probably wouldn't notice it anyway.

I didn't consider that a better outcome at all, and it was an occupational hazard I'd spent many sleepless nights in the lab developing toys to avoid. I worked with forces that were very much within the understanding of man, and I did my best to make sure those forces weren't going to kill me.

Plain old physics was the problem with this situation. I didn't know what that beam weapon had done to Fialux, but I well remembered that the last time Dr. Lana used something like this on Fialux it had weakened her.

I wasn't sure what getting hit with a much more powerful and refined version of that weapon would do to her. Had it done something to her invulnerability? Like making her far more susceptible to a long drop with a quick stop at the end?

As far as I could tell, whatever had given her those amazing powers had pretty much made her invulnerable. Like I'd seen her stop a train by standing in front of it and punching the thing.

Honestly. Who punches out a freight train? Even one that was loaded with explosives some terrorists were trying to bring into the middle of the city to set off?

My girlfriend, that's who. Now she was falling, and she might be in a hellaciously weakened state. She might barely be more powerful than a model locomotive tooling around on HO tracks in some boring middle management puke's basement.

It was like the old saying went. It wasn't the fall that killed you. It was the stop at the end. And the last thing I wanted to be was the reason for that quick stop at the end.

So I had to match my speed to hers. The ground was coming up fast, but if I ended up smearing myself against the pavement in an effort to save her? It would be more than worth it. I'd dive into pavement at full speed over and over again if I thought it would save her.

To match speed I looked at a countdown showing me altitude and calculating time to impact for Fialux in my heads up display. There should be enough time for…

Something lashed out at me. A beam weapon of some sort. It wasn't particularly concentrated, but it was enough to distract me.

I wondered if that robot had been loaded with weapons after all, but when I glanced at the source, I saw none other than Dr. Lana firing at me with a more conventional weapon. Conventional by villain standards, at least. An old fashioned gun firing bullets that thing wasn't.

The raygun in her hands looked like it was designed for killing people like yours truly more than it was designed for taking away powers from godlike beings who probably came from other worlds. Though Fialux had been surprisingly cagey about her origin story with me so far, and I had reason to think the whole alien thing might've been made up by that bastard Rex Roth.

I dodged around the beam as I swooped down and went into a graceful arc where I was surprised my toes didn't scrape the pavement. That's how close it was.

Basically it was another bit of perfect flying from Night Terror despite the fact that I was under fire. I had plenty of practice flying under fire, after all.

I flew over to the sidewalk and placed Fialux down gently. I looked up just in time to see the giant robot tottering and stumbling around like a drunk college student who'd had way too much to drink at the campus village before deciding to go back to their apartment for the night to sleep it off.

Finally the thing turned and stumbled towards me. Damn. It looked like it was going for a kamikaze run now that its systems had been heavily damaged when I fired everything at it.

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