Villains Do Date Villains!

  Villains Do Date Villains!

  Mia Archer

  Contents

  1. Aftermath

  2. Shopping

  3. Fight

  4. Criminal Ring

  5. Knock Knock

  6. Freedom

  7. Ass Kicking

  8. Reunited and it Feels So Bad

  9. Melee

  10. Supreme Commanderette

  11. Top Brass

  12. Double Cross

  13. Questions

  14. Experimental Game

  15. Distractions

  16. Destruction

  17. Vengeance

  18. Shields Down!

  19. Reunited

  20. Catching Up

  21. Nuke Hunt

  22. Friends in Odd Places

  23. Clone Wars

  24. Boom Stick

  25. Big Bag o’ Nukes

  26. Stay on Target

  27. Unnatural Disasters

  28. The End?

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  Also by Mia Archer

  Villains Do Date Villains!

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2019 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, April 2019

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  Created with Vellum

  1

  Aftermath

  I coughed and spluttered a few times to get some crap out of my lungs. Sure my lungs were as impervious as the rest of me, but that didn’t mean it was fun having nasty little stuff in there.

  I took in my surroundings. They weren’t all that familiar. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember anything that’d happened lately.

  That didn’t seem good. It seemed like I should’ve remembered something that turned a good chunk of the city into a crater all around me.

  I brushed some of the dust and rubble off myself.

  “Hello?” I shouted into the rubble.

  I knew on some level that wasn’t the greatest thing to do in a massive crater like this. There was always the chance that whatever had caused the massive crater might still be lurking and waiting to make more craters with me at the center.

  That wasn’t a concern for me so much as it was a concern for anyone who might be in the vicinity when a new crater was made, but as I looked around I realized that probably wasn’t going to be a problem.

  Whatever had hit this place, wherever the hell it was, it didn’t look like there were going to be many survivors.

  Damn.

  “Seriously, is there anyone out there? Because this isn’t funny!”

  I wondered if this was some joke Natalie was playing on me. She had a room in her lab that allowed her to do immersive simulations. Sure I could sort of see the pixels so it’s not like it was like that thing on that Star Trek show she always tried to get me to watch with her and we always ended up making out before they figured out what the bad guys’ plan was or how the characters from their simulation room were taking over the most powerful ship in their fleet again, but still.

  There were no obvious pixels here. No, Natalie couldn’t make something this real. Not unless she’d really developed some impressive stuff since…

  I felt like I should be remembering something. Like there was an important memory that was almost there in the back of my mind, but when I tried to grasp at it the memory flitted away.

  Why would I have the feeling I’d been away from Natalie? That made no sense. The last thing I remembered was…

  Something flashed in my mind. Natalie pointing a weapon at me. Which could’ve totally been something from when we were fighting each other back before we got together, but why was it in a dark room surrounded by a bunch of glowing cylinders and…

  Then the moment was gone. Talk about freaky. This didn’t seem like a good time to be losing it, damn it.

  I floated up to get a look around. The first order of business was figuring out what the hell was going on here and where the hell I was. The bad thing about craters in the middle of an urban area was they all looked the same.

  When I floated up a chill ran down my spine. This should’ve been impossible. I didn’t recognize any of the rubble around me, but I sure recognized the crumbling tower off in the distance. The one that had stood at the center of Starlight City University once upon a time.

  I say once upon a time, because there clearly wasn’t a Starlight City University anymore. Something terrible had happened here, and…

  I looked past the tower that’d sort of survived. The top was blown off, but there was still enough standing that I could sort of recognize it. That wasn’t what caught my attention though. No, I was more interested in the glowing pink portals all around the city, and the flying saucers and strange small black specks floating over Starlight City like someone had kicked over a hornet’s nest and really pissed the things off.

  “What the ever loving fuck is that?” I growled, for all that they looked familiar somehow. Like I should’ve recognized them, but again every time I tried to think of where I recognized them from the memory slipped away as soon as it was there.

  Talk about fucking annoying.

  One thing was for sure. Aliens shouldn’t be hanging around Starlight City, damn it. If there were aliens out there, and I was pretty sure those had to be aliens even though I had no way of knowing why I was so sure, then something had gone terribly wrong.

  Fear clutched at my heart. What if that something that’d gone wrong was something had happened to Natalie? She was always talking about fending off alien invasions, so if they were here then it stood to reason something terrible had happened that was preventing her from doing her thing.

  “Okay,” I muttered. “This is bad, but it could be worse. At least…”

  Something caught my attention. Something that was so tiny, so barely perceptible, that I wouldn’t have been able to hear it at all were it not for the fact that my hearing ability was just a little bit better than your average person’s and it was dead quiet around here.

  Even then the sound was something that I could barely pick up on. As though someone was calling out, but it was muffled to the point that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  Not that I had to make out what they were saying. No, if there was someone calling out to me from under this rubble that meant it was someone who’d beaten the statistically improbable hump of surviving whatever the hell had happened here, and that’d be a person who was in need of a rescue.

  If there was one thing I was good at, it was saving the day. Maybe I hadn’t been able to save the day for Starlight City University, I felt a pang of regret at the destruction that’d happened here, but maybe I could save at least one person who was stuck in this mess.

  I flew over to the spot where the noise was coming from and started tossing stuff to the side. I didn’t even spare a thought for anyone else who might be under that rubble. If there were any survivors I would’ve heard them, and it already felt like a miracle that there was one person alive under all of this.

  I threw bits of walls and beams and other building materials off like they weighed nothing. Because, of course, they did weigh nothing to me. Though for some reason I felt more invigorated digging through this rubble than I ever had before. Weird.

  It was getting late, but I could still see thanks to a dull pink glow being ca
st on everything by those portals hovering over the city.

  There was something about those portals. Like there was something about them I could almost recognize. Something about them that tickled the back of my mind, only…

  Again I got the feeling there was something there tickling the edge of my mind, and then it was gone. That was getting really annoying.

  “Help!”

  The voice was faint, but it was still there. And here I was wasting time looking at all the glowing pink portals hovering over the city instead of saving this poor person trapped under the rubble.

  “It’s okay!” I shouted. “I’m going to help you!”

  The voice sounded fainter. As though whoever was down there was losing the will to live. Or maybe it wasn’t that they were losing the will to live. Maybe it was that they’d been crushed under a building and that wasn’t the kind of situation that allowed someone who was a mere mortal to survive for very long.

  Maybe I’d knocked something loose ripping all the rubble to the side and that’d done more damage to the poor unfortunate bastard.

  I cursed and dug even faster. I knew there was a good chance that whatever I was doing could do more harm than help, but then again it’s not like being buried under all this stuff was doing wonders for them either.

  It was like Natalie always told me. You solve the problem in front of you while worrying about the problem coming towards you. Well right now this person was the problem in front of me, and the fact that I was digging them out of this rubble with no medical training and no hope of getting any medical help was the problem barreling down the tracks.

  “I’m going to get you!” I said. “Just hang in there!”

  I lifted off a giant wall that looked like it was made out of cinderblocks. The thing stayed in one piece, at least. That was something. Though I worried the whole thing was going to crumble.

  Lifting heavy stuff wasn’t like in the movies where heroes could lift entire giant islands into the air without the thing crumbling around them. I’d learned that one the hard way when I’d had a couple of encounters with big heavy things that’d turned into lots of smaller heavy things when I tried to lift them and put a bunch of undue stress on the thing.

  The girl was under that cinderblock wall. She was covered in dust and soot, but she looked like she was pretty under all that soot and dust.

  She coughed a couple of times and then looked up at me. She squinted her eyes, as though she was having trouble focusing.

  Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe it was that she couldn’t see all that well because of all the massive damage that’d been done to her. I was a hero, not a doctor, damn it!

  “It’s okay,” I said, leaning down over her and cupping her cheek. “Everything’s going to be…”

  As I got in close her eyes went wide. Then she looked up and let out a final breath, and that was that. I didn’t hear the sound of breathing or a heartbeat.

  I threw up my head and screamed in frustration. I didn’t know what the hell was happening here, I didn’t know where the hell my girlfriend was, and I was trapped in the middle of a crater that’d been my old university.

  And now on top of that this poor girl trapped in the rubble had been killed because I couldn’t get to her fast enough and I couldn’t do anything to help her when I did get to her.

  I looked around at the rubble. Looked down at my current state. Which was a little less than clothed.

  I sighed. There were no more survivors. No one to help. I needed to tell someone about this girl, though, and I needed to find something to wear.

  First order of business in an emergency. Take care of the living. Even if that living was yours truly. So I floated up and headed for the edge of campus where I hoped there’d still be some bookstores that might have some clothes I could “borrow” considering the city was in a state of emergency and I seemed to have lost my own suit at some point.

  2

  Shopping

  I moved the shirts around the rack. These were the racks I’d never bothered with when I was still a student here because it was all so expensive.

  It was like there were two parts to every store on campus. The part that was designed for the poor college students with all the ten buck T-shirts and the pictures of Belushi in that COLLEGE shirt, and the part that was for all the rich old people coming back to visit the old stomping grounds or parents getting something for their kids to puke into as the semester wore on.

  Unfortunately there wasn’t much that was useful in the rich person part of the store. I floated over to the cheap seats. That felt more familiar anyway.

  I picked out a nice green T-shirt that had the university name on it and a pair of green shorts that mostly matched. Sure they had some Greek letters emblazoned across the ass which wasn’t my scene, but whatever.

  I wanted to keep my old color scheme, and that meant going with something that matched even if I had no idea what the fuck sorority this was.

  A noise in the distance caught my attention before I could pull those clothes on. I turned towards the sound, but hoped whoever it was wasn’t coming towards me. Not because I was worried so much as because if someone was rummaging through these ruins then it probably meant looters.

  I didn’t have time to deal with petty criminals right now. There was bigger shit going down in Starlight City.

  I ducked behind a display of keychains featuring the university logo that’d been way overpriced even before they advertised a university that was now a hole in the ground.

  Though that probably wouldn’t stop the alumni association from calling people and badgering them for money for their reconstruction fund.

  “Over here,” someone said. “I’m pretty sure I heard something in here.”

  “I don’t know why you care about something in there,” another voice said. “Better to hit places that don’t have people in there to fight us, right?”

  “Are you kidding?” yet another voice said. “We might find some sweet young college thing. They’ll be out of it and they go for a lot on the black market these days.”

  Ice ran through my veins. I was a sweet young college thing, or pretty close to a sweet young college thing, but I had no intention of going quietly.

  Though in my current state I wasn’t going to be all that intimidating. I hadn’t had time to throw anything on. I might’ve kept behind the rack of keychains and hoped they moved on, but hearing them talking about taking advantage of girls who might be stuck in the ruins pissed me off.

  Not to mention I felt like I was probably partially responsible for campus being like that, which meant I was as much responsible for anyone who was captured by these assholes as anything.

  I thought of that poor girl buried under the rubble looking terrified with her face covered in soot. I wasn’t going to cause any more suffering than I could avoid, damn it.

  Even if preventing other girls from suffering might mean causing some suffering for these assholes.

  “Help!” I called out.

  I couldn’t help but smile. This felt like the sort of thing Natalie would do. She’d told me all about her early attempts to draw me out of hiding, and they’d all involved her baiting criminals and then taking care of business when it became clear what those criminals were planning on doing to a pretty woman walking through the bad part of Starlight City on her own.

  “Somebody please help me!” I shouted again.

  They were far enough away that they probably thought I couldn’t hear them. Then again anyone but a woman with super hearing wouldn’t be able to hear them. Too bad for them I was equipped to hear exactly what they were up to.

  “I told you it was a girl!” the first voice said. “Come on you jerks. We’re gonna get so much money for this!”

  “You sure we have to do this?” the second voice said. “I don’t like this.”

  “You want to eat tonight or what?” the third one said. “Besides, we’re going to need the kind of money a pretty girl can bring in
if we’re going to make it through the blockade.”

  “Assuming she is pretty,” the second one said. “There are uggos on campus all the time. I used to take my lunch down here so I could enjoy the scenery, and it wasn’t all pretty.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the first one said. “A young college girl will be enough. If she’s a hottie that’s icing on the cake and gets us through the blockade faster.”

  I frowned. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but most of it made the current state of affairs in Starlight City sound a lot worse than they seemed at first glance. That was saying something considering my first glance had revealed alien invaders.

  Three men stepped into the remains of the shop. They looked like rough sorts, though when I looked closer I realized at least one of them looked like he couldn’t be much older than most of the students. Like he had the look of a TA who’d fallen on hard times.

  Then again it looked like everyone in Starlight City had fallen on hard times.

  “Oh boy,” the first one said, hefting a crowbar.

  “Looks like we hit pay dirt boys,” the second one, this one wielding a shotgun, said as he hefted the thing and pointed it at me.

  “You sure we can’t have a little fun with this one before we sell her off?” the third one, the one who could’ve been a TA asked.