I'm Not A Hero! Read online

  I’m Not A Hero!

  Mia Archer

  I’m Not A Hero!

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2018 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, May 2018

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  The Story So Far

  1. New Enemies

  2. Cutting Crap

  3. Symbiont

  4. Heroic

  5. Illegal Alien

  6. Customs

  7. Baggage Handling

  8. Catch A Flight

  9. Reminders

  10. Cargo Hold

  11. Something On the Wing

  12. Heroic Rescue

  13. Rough Landing

  14. Improbable Escape

  15. Inhumane

  16. Reinforcements

  17. Triple Tech Throwdown

  18. Spectacular Rescue

  19. Stadium Surprise

  20. Low Earth Orbit

  21. Back at the Lab

  22. Catnip Chemicals

  23. Secret Weapons

  24. Chemical Cleaner

  25. Felis Diabolus

  26. Inevitable Escape

  27. Inhumane Society

  28. Final Boss

  29. Holding Out For A Villain

  30. Making My Way Downtown

  31. Special Report

  32. Throwdown

  33. Cleanup

  34. Key to the City

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  Also by Mia Archer

  The Story So Far

  Thanks for picking up this book! I’m Not A Hero is a chronicle of the continuing adventures of Night Terror. The greatest villain the world has ever known!

  Night Terror’s story started in the book Villains Don’t Date Heroes. I’m Not A Hero is a sequel of sorts, but it’s also the start of a new storyline for Night Terror and Fialux!

  Which means you don’t need to read the Villains Don’t trilogy to enjoy this book, but it’d certainly help!

  If you’d like to give Villains Don’t Date Heroes a try it’s available at Amazon now, and also in Kindle Unlimited. Otherwise read the spoilerific paragraphs below to get caught up on the story, and thanks for reading!

  Villains Don’t Date Heroes:

  Night Terror is the greatest villain Starlight City has ever seen, which means she’s also the greatest villain the world has ever seen. Unfortunately that meant life was pretty boring for her. At least until a new heroine, Fialux, showed up and started wiping the floor with the world’s greatest villain!

  Night Terror plotted to get rid of Fialux, but things got complicated when they ended up falling for each other instead. As if that wasn’t complicated enough, Night Terror’s megalomaniacal supercomputer CORVAC decided he didn’t like his boss going all good and tried to take over the world himself via a giant death robot he piloted to the center of downtown.

  Night Terror and Fialux defeated CORVAC and she found herself in the odd position of being hailed as a hero. Not exactly what she was going for, but she figured she’d take it if she had Fialux by her side.

  Villains Don’t Save Heroes:

  Things go terribly wrong for Night Terror and Fialux when she tries to sneak into the Applied Sciences Department of the Starlight City University. She’s long suspected them of stealing her stuff, but in the fight that results from her break-in Fialux is robbed of her powers courtesy of the new villain in town: the nefarious dean of the Applied Sciences Department Dr. Lana!

  Fialux sinks into a depression as she realizes she can’t save the city like she used to. This forces Night Terror both to be there for her girlfriend and try to get her out of her funk while at the same time being forced to save the city from several giant robot attacks since Fialux isn’t able to take care of business.

  Things come to a head in a climactic battle where it’s revealed that CORVAC isn’t as dead as Night Terror thought, and Dr. Lana is killed but not defeated thanks to a strange regeneration power she’s developed. Life is more complicated than ever, but Night Terror doesn’t care as long as she has Fialux.

  Villains Don’t Train Heroes:

  Night Terror has taken it upon herself to give Fialux her powers back via technology. The only problem is it takes a lot of training to get used to her toys. Training her formerly super powered girlfriend doesn’t seem very interested in since they keep getting distracted.

  It doesn’t help that there are giant irradiated lizards attacking the city at regular intervals. Or that Night Terror suspects Dr. Lana is behind it all!

  This time the climactic battle involves Night Terror duking it out with a couple of giant irradiated lizards. Including a less than fantastic voyage through the lower part of a giant lizard’s lower digestive tract. In the end CORVAC is rescued and Dr. Lana is defeated, but not before she shoves a newly powered up Fialux through a portal to the world where she’d been growing those lizards to unleash them on Starlight City!

  Her archnemesis is defeated, but her girlfriend is trapped on an irradiated planet somewhere in the universe where her chances of longterm survival aren’t great if Natalie can’t figure out a way to rescue her!

  1

  New Enemies

  “The target has been acquired mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “You sure about that?” I asked. “Because the last time you told me the target was acquired I ended up nearly vaporizing a family of squirrels in the middle of packing their nuts for the winter.”

  CORVAC made a noise in my ears that sounded surprisingly similar to a chuckle. Which definitely wasn’t the kind of emotion I expected from him given our choice of conversation.

  “What was so funny about that?” I asked.

  “You made a mention of squirrels storing their nuts,” he said. “I have been making an attempt to gain an understanding of some of the baser elements of human humor, and that seemed like an appropriate time to chuckle given the context.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Is there something wrong with what I have done mistress?” he asked. “I have noticed that when you are displeased with my responses you do that motion with your eyes.”

  “That’s another bit of human body language you’re going to have to learn how to read if you’re going to make it in the big leagues CORVAC,” I said. “That’s what we call an eye roll.”

  The poor guy used to be able to read these emotions perfectly, but it seemed that his time bouncing between backups had fried some of that. The poor dear was trying to learn though.

  “Ah yes. I have read about these. That means you are displeased then?”

  “Not displeased,” I said. “Just annoyed that you’re pulling a Mr. Data in the middle of combat.”

  “To be fair, mistress, you are not in the middle of combat yet,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “But we’re getting there. That’s the important thing.”

  I moved in low through the concrete canyons that were Starlight City. Though we were in one of the outer boroughs which meant the buildings were stacked high, but not nearly as high as they were downtown where all the people out here gentrifying this neighborhood worked.

  “Y’know it’s a real shame CORVAC,” I said.

  “What is that, mistress?” he asked.

  I looked around the neighborhood. At all the brownstone walk
ups that looked so nice and neat. At all the fancy stores you’d expect to find out in the suburbs in any other city.

  “This whole neighborhood used to have some character to it,” I said. “It used to be the kind of place where a criminal could get a good start to their career. Not the kind of place that signed petitions to keep big box retailers out because they don’t want it ruining the neighborhood. As though the idiots who came in here gentrifying everything haven’t already ruined it.”

  “I see, mistress,” CORVAC said. “So you are saying you miss a time when the crime rate here was higher?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Look at that elevated train line over there that’s connected to the subway. Those subway cars used to be covered in graffiti. Now they’re all shiny as the day they rolled off the factory floor. It’s a damn shame.”

  I screamed low over a fire truck going with sirens blaring. They were probably heading to the same place I was. It was another testament to how gentrified this neighborhood had become that the local fire department was headed out on this call rather than going to take care of a burning building or something.

  “I see mistress,” CORVAC said. “So you are lamenting the fact that it would appear real estate prices are the best way to combat crime?”

  I chuckled. The computer had a point.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Even though you were, as far as I can tell, only a child when the gentrification of this neighborhood took place?”

  “I might’ve been a child when everything started getting safer around these here parts, but I grew up watching movies and TV shows about the old Starlight City. The grimy Starlight City where a criminal could be somebody,” I said.

  “I would posit that your current career is proof positive that it is still very possible for a criminal to be somebody in this city, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “Whatever,” I growled. “This mission we’re on right now? That’s proof positive that this city has gone downhill as far as villains are concerned.”

  “Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  The jerk had been a lot nicer ever since I’d blown up that last giant robot he’d been walking around in. He’d been tiptoeing around me, to be honest. It was kind of nice, but at the same time there were times when I wished he’d contradict me so we could go at it like the good old days.

  “You are approaching the target,” CORVAC said. A pause. “Are you sure that you want to move ahead with this? Finding one of the parasites in a populated area will be very different from pursuing strays in back alleys.”

  “We need to find more of them,” I said. “And for some reason the strays carrying the parasites are drying up. I want to know what a bunch of fucking worms bearing the radiation signature from that planet Dr. Lana opened a portal to are doing possessing the feline population in Starlight City.”

  “I would remind you, mistress, that even if she did go through that portal there is very little chance that she managed to survive long with the radiation that was being put out on the other side of the portal,” CORVAC said.

  I said a silent prayer to whatever power might be listening. I wasn’t really the praying type, but it’d been drilled into me as a kid and I guess in times of extreme emotion I still fell back on those old superstitious crutches even if I wasn’t willing to pray to any particular power anymore.

  I was the highest power in this city. That meant if anyone was going to figure out how to get to that alien world to try and save my girlfriend it was going to be me, damn it.

  “We’re doing this, CORVAC,” I said. “And she’s still alive. I have to believe it.”

  Otherwise there was nothing worth living for. I had to do this. These parasites were the only connection I had after what happened with Dr. Lana.

  I was grasping at straws. I knew it. I was in denial. I didn’t care.

  I came to a halt in front of the target for the day. A big tree growing out of a square of dirt in the sidewalk. A tree that looked like it’d been growing there for a few hundred years. Which wasn’t out of the realm of possibility given how old some sections of Starlight City were.

  And right there at the top of the tree was our target. A fluffy white kitty that looked out at me hovering in the air in front of it and meowed piteously. It was a good show, but it was all a show.

  A little girl stood below the tree looking up anxiously, and a crowd had gathered. A crowd that made all the appropriately awed noises when they realized they were being graced by the great and powerful Night Terror.

  “Are you going to save Mr. Mittens?” the girl called up to me.

  “Something like that,” I said, floating closer to the cat.

  “Mistress,” CORVAC nattered on in my ear. “Might I remind you that this is ill-advised considering how little we know about…”

  “Hush CORVAC,” I said. “Mama’s working and I don’t have time for you nannying me.”

  “Affirmative, mistress, but if I might be so bold I think it would be a bad idea for you to…”

  I held up a finger which got CORVAC to shut up. It also had the people gathered beneath me gasping and taking a couple of steps back.

  “What the hell is their problem?” I growled.

  “They likely think that you are on the verge of vaporizing something,” CORVAC said. “You strike a similar pose when you are about to destroy something in your vicinity.”

  I looked at my hand held out with one finger raised in the air.

  “That doesn’t look anything like when I’m getting ready to use the wrist blaster,” I said. “What are these people smoking? Didn’t they see the Night Terror articulating action figure?”

  I paused. Frowned.

  “That reminds me. I need to work on the cease and desist I’ve been planning on sending those assholes.”

  I’d been so busy with training Fialux and defeating Dr. Lana that things sort of got away from me.

  “Are you sure you do not want me to simply send a cease and desist via mail?” CORVAC asked.

  “No,” I growled. “I want to do that personally. Anyone can mail a local area disintegrator. I like people to know who’s doing it before they get their atoms and molecules ripped apart, and here we go!”

  The readout from the scan I’d been running during this oh-so-distracting conversation finally popped up. I did a little fist pump.

  “I knew it! This cat is giving off the same radiation I saw on the other side of those portals Dr. Lana was working with! That means Fluffy here is one of them.”

  I put the scanner away. It was time to get down to business.

  “It’s a pity you cannot ask Dr. Lana about this more directly,” CORVAC said.

  “Shut up CORVAC,” I growled.

  “Though of course to be fair you had no way of knowing that water would be her one weakness,” CORVAC continued.

  “I said shut up CORVAC.”

  “Or that your first experimental attempt to torture the location of the world she transported Fialux too would wind up killing her by inadvertently exploiting her weakness,” he said.

  “Are you done with the exposition Mr. Talkypants?” I asked.

  “I apologize mistress,” he said. “Did you not wish to discuss your previous failings?”

  “You’re doing that on purpose.”

  “Perhaps I am mistress,” he said. “But it is the only pleasure I get in life now that I have resolved myself to forever playing second fiddle to your majesty.”

  I had more a feeling CORVAC was still mocking me, but I was going to let it slide. I had more important work to do right now than thinking about the unforeseen demise of my archnemesis. Honestly, whose weakness turns out to be the most abundant fucking molecule on the planet?

  “You can shut up now CORVAC,” I said. “I have work to do.”

  “Um, are you going to stop talking to yourself and save my kitty?” the little girl at the base of the tree asked.

  I glared down at her and she took a ste
p back. The kid was lucky she was a kid. I wasn’t going to vaporize her for her insolence, but the temptation was there.

  My villainous impulses had been getting more and more pronounced with no Fialux around to hit me with disapproving stares every time I mentioned something completely innocent like wanting to vaporize a child for being an annoying little shit.

  I floated closer to the fluffy white cat.

  “Hello little kitty cat,” I said. “Don’t worry. Night Terror is here. All I want is to know a few things about your home planet and what the fuck you’re doing trying to take over my world.”

  The kitty stared at me, meowed, then turned and started grooming its cat ass which it pointed straight at me so I was treated with a front row view.

  “Okay then Fluffy,” I growled. “You wanna play hardball? We can play hardball.”

  2

  Cutting Crap

  The fire truck pulled up while I was staring at this asshole of a cat. It stared right back at me and cocked a head to the side. Meowed as though it didn’t have a care in the world.

  Other than being stuck up a tree.

  “Mistress,” CORVAC said. “Have you ever entertained the notion that perhaps you are incorrect about the cats being from that world?”