Breaking off its howl, the Canine lifted its tail and lashed a car at them. Kazé blew the convertible away with her Megafan, but the monster used the distraction to spring forwards and take a swipe at her with its paw. A translucent sphere appeared around the girl’s figure, and the fang-claws scraped across it, arcing towards Ralphie. She jumped, but not high enough to clear the strike.
So she jumped again, in mid-air.
The Canine’s ears pricked up as it missed her completely.
Ralphie grinned evilly. ‘Gotcha.’
She stomped on the monster’s face Super Mario-style, a white 100 floating up from its head. She hopped off, and Kazé blasted the monster’s front legs from under it. As it fell, it headbutted both of them into a taxi. Raphie’s energy shields triggered alongside Kazé’s force field, cushioning them against the collision. They flailed wildly with sword and Megafan. The animal recoiled from the strokes but dragged Kazé along the ground with it, her chainmail leggings having become snagged on a tooth on its neck.
‘Shoo!’ said Kazé, shooting the Canine up into the air.
Ralphie bounced up, drew back a shining fist. ‘Falcon Punch!’ A falcon of fire formed about her swinging hand, and she smashed the falling Canine into an office building.
A cloud of dust soared and settled ahead of them. The monster struggled to stand. Blood trickled down from between the teeth on its back. Then all of its fangs began to shake, making a weird, clicking cacophony as they snapped against each other, and the Canine lowered itself before them. Ralphie couldn’t tell if this was meant to come across as threatening or submissive. Probably threatening, knowing monsters, and even if it was a gesture of submission, she was sure the cur would turn on them the second it got the chance; you could never trust a monster.
Beside her, Kazé was hesitating to make a move.
‘Don’t let it bluff you, Fangirl!’ said Ralphie. ‘Blast it!’
‘Uh, right!’ Kazé opened fire, pinning the Canine to the wall with a continuous, whistling airstream. ‘I’ve got it! I’m really doing it! Like a real superhero!’
The Canine dug its claws into the tarmac and dragged itself towards them, fighting against the air current.
Kazé’s face went from pale to white. ‘I take it back! I’m just a big superhero fan! What the heck was I thinking?! Gamer Girl?!’
‘Just hold it riiight there!’ Ralphie brought her hands to her side as if about to throw a ball, visualised her favourite attack from Street Fighter, and thrust her palms at the Canine while shouting, 'Hadouken!'
Nothing happened.
Text pulsed in red on her glasses’ heads-up display: REACH LEVEL 2 TO SUMMON HADOUKEN.
‘What is this?!’ said Ralphie. ‘How am I supposed to do that?!’
‘Gamer Girl!’ said Kazé.
‘Never mind.’ Ralphie tried to shoot a Magic Missile from her hand, cast Chain Lightning from her fingertips, hurl a Super Mario Bros. Fireball. The same REACH LEVEL 2 TO SUMMON notification appeared on each attempt. ‘Fuck, I can’t do any projectile attacks! What kind of bum deal superpower is this?!’
‘Huh?!’ Kazé looked at her with wild eyes. ‘Th-Then what are we going to do?!’
‘Doesn’t your Megafan have different firing modes?’
‘I haven’t tried any of them out yet! What if I hurt somebody?!’
‘What?! Didn’t you read the instruction manual?!’
‘It was in Japanese!’
‘You are Japanese!’
‘I’m Japanese-American; the only kanji I know is “Toilet”!’
Ralphie snarled and pulled at her hair. Deciding to debut as superheroes the day after she had gotten her superpower had been a horrible idea. Alas, once Kazé had lucked out and found a gimmick-appropriate costume and weapon package going for a measly $200 on the dark web, they had been too stoked to give any thought to further preparation.
The Canine was within three meters of them now; its all-red eyes were oozing bloodlust.
‘Fuck a duck, just try anything!’ said Ralphie, gripping her Wooden Sword in both hands.
Kazé gulped. ‘Oh Buddha. Right, I can do this. It’s just like Golden Boy says: “Half of superheroics is improvisation”!’ She pressed a button on the back panel of her Megafan, pulled the trigger, and was rocketed backwards by the redoubled airstream. The girl screamed like a banshee as she flew out of the Danger Zone.
The Canine rose to its full 7-foot height with a squeaky growl, fangs as sharp as daggers standing on end all over its body.
Ralphie felt a single drop of sweat run down her forehead. ‘I’m not scared of you! I completed Battletoads with my feet! You couldn't beat me in a BDSM club, you big Chinese delicacy!’
The creature seized her head in its toothless mouth.
Ralphie yelled and attempted to batter her captor’s face, but the monster tackled her and pinioned her to the road with its crushing weight, grinding against her so that its teeth raked her front. It was trying to chew her with its whole body! Her energy shields kept its gummy jaws an inch away from her face, but drool seeped through the gold electro-field onto her brow. The stink of fish was nauseating. As the Canine’s fangs scraped the shielding around her torso, the rectangular power gauge on her glasses’ heads-up display shrank towards exhaustion. Ralphie pushed against the monster with her entire body; the hulking flesh wouldn’t budge. She was too small, too weak.
Her mind raced through video game player character items and abilities, seeking anything that would make her bigger, stronger. The solution hit her like a freight train.
‘You’re dead meat!’ said Ralphie, summoning a pixelated Super Mushroom to her hand. She squashed the orange fungus between her fingers and absorbed the power-up, growing as large as the monster on top of her in three quick, chiptune-accompanied spurts. After shoving aside its front legs, she hammered the hilt of her now jumbo-sized Wooden Sword into the Canine’s neck. It released her head with a whine and clambered off of her just as her energy shields burst into streaks of wild electricity. Ralphie jumped up, and the two of them circled each other, panting.
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Going by the rules of Super Mario Bros., if this mongrel so much as scratches me, I’ll revert to my normal size, she thought. That’s not going to happen!
‘Fetch!’ said Ralphie, pitching her sword at the Canine’s middle.
The monster sprang away from her projectile, giving her the opening she needed. She unleashed a high-speed barrage of fists into its face, not relenting for a second. Though her punches were amateur, the advanced strength granted by her power armour in addition to her size made the blows devastating: fangs, blood, spit, and snot flew out of the hound’s head.
Tingles of excitement ran up and down Ralphie’s spine. Now this was a superfight: a no-holds-barred brawl between two supernatural titans! This was the kind of adventure she’d been dreaming of all these years!
The Canine ducked a punch, turned tail, and ran towards the closest throng of civilians.
‘Oh no.’ She gave chase. ‘Bad dog! Take your beating like a man!’
The monster jumped, ducked, and weaved around the empty vehicles scattered about the intersection; the civvies’ screeching intensified. Ralphie vaulted over a tanker truck and fell on her backside. She felt exhausted; 16 years of unwavering sloth and Hungry Aztec Nachos had finally caught up with her.
She gasped. ‘Screw this.’
If she couldn’t match the Canine physically, she’d deus ex machina the situation. What she needed was a barrier to keep the monster from the lemmings.
Ralphie conjured a vast yellow Tetris cube in the sky and mentally lowered it onto the crosswalk behind the civilians. The cube occupied only a fifth of the space between the adjacent buildings, so she summoned another random shape, a giant orange sideways L, and set it down to the cube’s left. As the Canine closed in on the civvies, she placed the shapes faster, rotating them as they descended so that they would fit together perfectly, mounting them on top of each other so the brute couldn’t jump over. By the time the monster had reached the crosswalk, her barrier was a 40-foot rainbow-coloured wall with only a meter-wide aperture on the far right. The Canine darted for the breach.
‘Come on, straight line!’ said Ralphie.
And the cyan monolith appeared in the clouds.
Motioning with her arm, she slammed it into the opening. The Canine impacted against the wall, shook itself, and attempted to leap over the barrier. It peaked at around 10 feet.
‘Yes!’ Ralphie punched the air. ‘Take that, every PE teacher I’ve ever had! I do not need physical fitness to succeed in life; I have reality warping superpowers!’
The wall glowed white once, twice, thrice, disappeared. Something went clap in her ears. A sudden shockwave hurled the Canine away and spread outwards, launching all vehicles before it in Ralphie’s general direction.
She froze in terror. ‘Fuck my life.’
Someone shouted, ‘Watch out!’
It was Kazé. The girl was shooting through the Danger Zone in the stance of a crouching surfer, firing her Megafan behind her to propel herself along the road! She caught Ralphie’s giantess waist in her free arm and shoved her out of the way of a flying motorcycle. Then she shot a howling whirlwind at the sun; it snatched the Canine and the vehicles from the shockwave, spinning them a short ways up before dropping them. Ralphie thrust Kazé to the ground and got on her hands and knees to shield her from the cars and trucks and buses crashing down to Earth. The shockwave slammed against her body, vibrating her very bones; she held firm. Eventually, the sound of rushing wind and crunching metal ceased.
Kazé gradually opened her eyes. ‘Hey.’
‘Yo,’ said Ralphie.
‘I think I worked out what a couple of the Megafan buttons do.’
‘Yeah, I noticed. Good job.’
The girl touched Ralphie’s cheek with her little hand. ‘You’re huge.’
‘Sure am. Absorbed a Super Mushroom. It’s nice being tall for a change.’
‘Are you injured?’
‘No way. Check it out’—Ralphie got up on her knees—‘not a scratch on me.’ A dark shape in the sky caught her eye; she looked up to see what it was, and a bicycle wheel dropped on her head. Amidst the stinging pain, she became small again, flopping onto Kazé’s chest. ‘Ouch.’ It was then that her energy shields chose to recharge, the electricity that had been arcing randomly about her power armour converging as a shining golden aura around her body before fading away with an electronic hum.
Kazé fingered a bandage from beneath her breastplate, lifted Ralphie’s headphones, and laid it on the crown of her head.
Ralphie managed a muffled, ‘Thank you.’
They picked each other up, stabilised one another. The Danger Zone was riddled with pieces of transport. The civilians outside of it were sprawled on the streets, groaning. Apart from a few cuts and bruises, they appeared to be alright.
‘Sorry!’ Kazé said to the civvies with a strained smile. ‘It’s our first day!’
‘What happened?’ said Ralphie as she looked around the warzone for the Canine. ‘I don’t remember any shockwaves in Tetris.’
Kazé sighed. ‘I don’t know. Your game items seem to just appear in our universe. I guess they force the air out of the spaces where they’re summoned. If something big like your wall vanishes, maybe all the air rushing back into the space creates a seismic wave.’
‘No more big summons. Big summons make big boom-booms. Got it.’
Kazé fell to her knees. ‘Oh Buddha. Look at this mess. We’ve destroyed the intersection, we’ve wounded the civilians, and we’ve lost the monster. We’re the worst.’ The girl lowered her head, letting her hair fall over her face.
‘Ah, from what you told me the Danger Zone gets destroyed every week,’ said Ralphie, ‘and the civvies should be used to superfights by now. I’m sure the Canine will pop up someplace inconvenient soon; that’s what monsters do.’
A chorus of alien growls echoed from the manhole-turned-pit in the middle of the intersection.
Ralphie tugged at the neck of her dress. ‘Sounds like the Canine’s friends heard its cry for help. Bloody hell. With that much noise, there could be a whole pack of them down there.’
A twisted box truck ascended in front of them; the Canine hauled itself from under the vehicle, projectile vomited a stream of milky white sick, and began limping towards the manhole.
‘And there’s the monster of the week itself.’ Ralphie bit her lip. ‘This is bad. Maybe…maybe we should let the police or a more experienced superhero handle things from here. I’m sure someone qualified for this will come along soon….’
‘No,’ said Kazé.
‘What?’
The girl straightened herself up and brushed her locks away from her hard, watery eyes. ‘We may suck at superheroics, but we’re the only protection these people have right now. Happy Place is our borough; we can’t leave it defenceless by just waiting around for someone better to arrive.’
Ralphie glanced at the frightened faces in the upper story windows all around them, at the civilians in the streets as they tripped over each other to get away. She scratched her head. ‘I guess you’re right. But what can we do?’
‘I have a plan to scare off the monsters in the sewer,’ said Kazé. ‘We’ll need to defeat the Canine first, though.’
‘Shit. Well, if we’re going to die young, we might as well do it in style.’ Ralphie summoned her World of Warcraft mount: a great Charger warhorse dressed in gold plate armour and a dark blue cloth cover. The steed snorted at her.
Kazé’s eyes darted back and forth between Ralphie and the Charger. ‘Do you know how to ride this thing?’
‘No,’ she said as she climbed onto its saddle, ‘but my level 60 blood elf paladin does, so I should be fine.’ She held out her hand to Kazé. ‘Ready when you are, Fangirl.’
After a moment, Kazé took hold, pulled herself up, and sat behind her, clinging to her waist with a single arm.
Ralphie grasped the reins in one hand while re-invoking her Wooden Sword to the other. ‘Do you have some kind of battle cry we could use? Something like “Avengers Assemble” or “Teen Titans, Go”?’
‘Uh-uh,’ said Kazé. ‘I spent three hours trying to think of one yesterday, but the best I could come up with was “Girl Scouts, Away”, which sounds more like an order to retreat.’
‘Whatever. We’ll ad lib it. You say “Girl Scouts”, and then I’ll say the next word and set us off.’
‘Right.’ Kazé aimed her Megafan at the Canine. ‘Girl Scouts….’
Ralphie let all her emotions rise to the surface; she verbalised the strongest: ‘DESTROOOY!’
She squeezed the Charger with her legs, and it hurtled them at the monster. The Canine jerked its head around; seeing the armour-plated colossus storming towards it, it rolled on its back and whimpered. When the steed neighed, however, the dog seemed to recognise that it was up against a mere horse and sprang back up. Then it advanced, leaping from side to side on its three good legs, barking madly, and lunged at them. Kazé shot a wave of air that twirled the mass of teeth in mid-flight, allowing the warhorse to ram its stomach with its spiked helmet. As the monster tumbled past them, it lashed out blindly; Ralphie ducked the claws and then cracked the Canine across the head with all the strength she had. It hit the road, where it remained, unmoving.
‘Fuck yeah!’ said Ralphie. ‘Now we’re playing with power!’
‘Excelsior!’ said Kazé.
A clump of blonde hair rolled off Ralphie’s head. She noticed the electricity snaking about her and realised that the Canine had actually split her energy shields, missing her noggin by a literal hair’s breadth. She swallowed her alarm with a loud gulp.