I glared at Dr. Lana one final time. I was starting to think maybe she was going to be more of a challenger to the throne than I'd ever imagined, and I didn't care for that.

Also? I didn't have time to ask her more about that stupid weapon she'd used on Fialux. It wasn't the same as the weapon I'd snapped in two. It wasn't the same as those weird pain sticks they'd used to hurt her.

It looked like it operated on the same principle, but I was basing that purely on the fact that she could take damage now. And they all had that weird pink glow to them. So not exactly great science. I'd probably get a pity C if I used that thesis as my Middle School science project.

I shook my head.

Saving Fialux. I needed to save Fialux. She was helpless on the other side of that massive dorm and there could be a giant robot heading for her right now. Well, half of a giant robot. I didn't know what was happening over there, but it couldn't be anything good from the way Dr. Lana was grinning.

I held out my wrist blaster and fired off one hell of a localized electromagnetic pulse. It probably wouldn't do any permanent harm to her tissue.

At least in my animal testing it hadn't done permanent harm. Plus with her doing that weird healing thing? I wasn't all that worried. It might've been interesting to hit her with some harmful radiation and see if that disrupted whatever the fuck it was that had her regenerating so quickly.

Knowing my luck she'd just disappear in a shimmer like with the first fight with Fialux. The one where she learned if things went poorly enough in a fight Fialux would show up. Which led directly to this trap.

I figured that pulse would do a good enough job of frying any remaining electronics on her person. The last thing I wanted was more surprises, and she'd been full of them today.

Even if she had shit that had been hardened against that sort of thing, it's not like it was going to stand up to what Night Terror was cooking. CORVAC had learned that the hard way, and now Dr. Lana was going to learn the same fucking lesson.

And if it ended up frying some of the nanobots I suspected she was using to heal herself as quickly as I could deal out damage? Well I guess that'd be an oops on my part and she'd have to watch her step until she could get a new swarm swimming through her arteries and veins.

Or maybe I'd get lucky and it would kill her. For good.

I leapt into the air and flew up over the dorm. What I saw on the other side was nothing short of horrifying.

It looked like that giant robot I'd disintegrated through the middle wasn't quite as destroyed as I'd thought. Sure enough, the top had pulled away from the bottom and it was making its way towards my girl.

Damn it. Maybe Dr. Lana had put the brain center for the thing in its actual brain rather than its chest like I'd assumed. Or maybe there were a couple of redundancies in there so the thing could continue operating even if one processing center had been incapacitated. Maybe it was controlled remotely and all the damage I'd thrown at the thing wasn't enough to take out all the antennas it used to phone home.

There were a lot of nasty possibilities. Whatever the reason, it was still very much ambulatory. Sure it was dragging itself, sure there were wires sparking and trailing out its middle, but it was still moving. The robot's arms smashing down onto the pavement to drag it along was the source of the slow rhythmic thumping.

It looked for all the world like a fucked up futuristic cyberpunk rendition of a war movie where someone had been blown in half and they were still crawling along refusing to admit they were dead.

Fialux was still lying on the pavement in a daze. Basically she was your classic sitting duck if she didn't have her powers. Which I was pretty sure she didn't.

Shit.

There wasn't anyone hanging around this side of the building with their phones out recording the show either. No, I guess any students who happened upon this scene had taken one look at the giant robot with death in its mechanical eyes and decided it would be a good idea to be as far as possible from this thing.

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I bit back a couple of curses. I dove down at top speed, thankful gravity was giving me an assist this time around. Though my antigrav units were also doing some work to accelerate me past the 9.8m/s squared you got in Earth's gravity well.

The thing's hand raised and it was about to smack down on Fialux, the thing was a one-trick pony to the very end, but I swooped in at just the right moment for a dramatically appropriate save.

I hated that I was doing a dramatically appropriate save. Dramatically timed saves were the sort of thing heroes did.

I was not a hero, damn it, no matter what Fialux said. No matter how much she kept trying to poke me and prod me into becoming a do-gooder.

It just wasn't me. Still, I had to admit it was a damn shame there was no one taking pictures of or otherwise recording my heroics. Threatening an innocent civilian they got, but this? It figures there'd be nobody to witness my heroics.

I swooped in and caught the robot's hand, preventing it from crushing Fialux. Though holding that hand in place was doing a number on my suit that had already taken several beatings during the course of this fight.

I was already running on fumes, even though you couldn't really call the remains of atoms being regularly fused in a miniaturized reactor attached to my suit fumes since it was about as far from fossil fuels as you could get in this day and age.

You get the point. All the connections in my suit had been pushed to their limit multiple times, getting the juice to all the parts without blowing up was more difficult than creating the juice in the first place, and this robot was taking it out of me.

Damn.

Okay. So maybe I hadn't thought this through as well as I should have before I swooped in to save the day. But it's not like I had much of a choice.

The scary robot was about to crush my girlfriend, after all. I still didn't know enough about her condition to be able to say with certainty whether or not the robot would even be able to crush her in the first place.

There was still a good chance it'd try to lay the smackdown on her and nothing bad would happen, but I couldn't shake the lingering feeling something very bad had gone down in superpower town with Fialux, and this robot had been meant to kill her once and for all while Dr. Lana distracted me.

All I knew was when I looked down at her she still had scrapes and cuts and bruises all over her. Which wasn't something that should be happening to a hero who was known for her invulnerability. Which didn't bode well for her survival if she suddenly found herself getting smashed like an insect under a giant robot hand.

"Could you maybe give up?" I asked, turning back to the robot.

It glared at me with eyes that glowed red. Not the green CORVAC preferred. I wished CORVAC was here. He'd be able to hack this bucket of bolts in an instant and turn it on Dr. Lana.

Worst of all was the sure knowledge that this was all my fault. I was the one who'd started this. I was the reason she came out here. I had to come back to try and sneak in when Dr. Lana already knew she could goad Fialux into making an appearance.

I'd tried my best to keep her away because I deep down I'd thought about her other encounters with Dr. Lana and figured it'd be a good idea to keep those two as far apart as possible, but then I'd gone and screwed it up.

I let out a roar and fired off my wrist blaster. Sure it was at point blank range, but it was the only way I could think to get the damned thing off of me.

Sure enough it was enough to knock the robot back. It went flying, and I swooped up and continued firing. Right at the head, and then at every other part of its body for good measure. It flipped over and over through the air, and then I realized what I needed to do here.

The thing had armor. That armor was tough. Tougher even than the stuff on CORVAC's giant death robot. I'd developed that intentionally with armor I could punch through if he ever turned on me, but Dr. Lana didn't have any such design considerations.

The thing landed and went sliding. It hit the math building and the art deco facade started crumbling down around it. I winced. I had a love/hate relationship with the math building, but I didn't want to destroy the place. Math was the foundation of good super science, after all.

The important thing was the sparking opening in the bottom of the thing. It was disoriented for a moment, and I landed right in front of the sparking hole in its torso. I held my hand up and a couple of good old fashioned explosives appeared. I fired into that hole, watching with no small amount of pleasure as the thing rocked with each internal explosion.

The thing rocked and then fell back against the math building as I hit it with everything I had. Which admittedly wasn't much at this point in the fight. That robot might look worse for the wear, but I wasn't doing so hot either.

Finally it fell back and didn't move again. Good. The fucker finally seemed to know when it was supposed to stay down. That or I'd taken out so much of its internals that it couldn't move even if it wanted to.

I slumped in my suit. I hung in midair in that slump because the antigrav units didn't stop working just because I was exhausted.

I needed a rest after all that, but I had a feeling resting was the last thing I was going to get considering Dr. Lana was still out there somewhere waiting to spring some fresh hell on me and my girlfriend.

I wasn't going to underestimate her again, damn it.

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