The Charger galloped on to the pit. The bestial noises coming out of the darkness were louder than ever.

Ralphie pulled the reins, bringing the steed to a stop. ‘Your move, Fangirl. How are we supposed to scare the nasties away?’

Kazé dismounted. ‘Like a lot of regular animals, most monsters are very sensitive to high-pitched sounds. According to the pictures on the buttons, my Megafan doubles as a kind of air-based megaphone. If you can summon a shrill noise, I can blast it into the pit; the racket will be unbearable for them down in an enclosed space like that.’

‘Wow. That’s really smart.’

Kazé grinned. ‘I spend most nights writing superhero fan fiction; I’ve gotten used to thinking up crazy solutions to crazy problems.’

Ralphie patted the Charger’s neck. ‘Time to go, mate; you’re not going to want to hear this.’

The steed sighed.

Ralphie unsummoned the warhorse beneath her and fell into a standing position. Vanishing her sword, she then willed a guitar-shaped video game controller into her arms. A line of provocative album covers bobbed up on her glasses’ heads-up display; she found she could scroll through the selection by moving her eyes. As she did so, the related rock music played in her headphones…. ‘Uh oh.’

‘”Uh oh”?’ said Kazé. ‘What’s “Uh oh”?’

 ‘All of the songs on my Guitar Hero account are too low pitched! “Iron Man”, “Godzilla”, “Cowboys from Hell”; it’s all worthless!’

‘Do you have any glam rock?’ 

‘Fuck no!’

Clangs sounded from the abyss at their feet. Ralphie felt her heart trying to break out of her ribcage; the monsters were climbing the manhole ladder!

Kazé thumbed a button on her Megafan, and its fan blades whirred to life. ‘Any shrill noise will do!’

‘I know!’ said Ralphie. ‘I’m trying to think! Maybe another music game…. How is Lego Rock Band on Level 2?!’

Red eyes flashed within the darkness.

‘I’m really not picky!’ said Kazé.

Ralphie beat her head with her fists. ‘I can’t think of anything! Stupid, stupid, stupid!’   

The red eyes flew at them. Sunlight revealed a ginormous, rotting baby face. Ralphie and Kazé shrieked, and the Megafan amplified the noise into a blast of soprano. The corpse baby cried, clasped its ears. Ralphie brought her guitar down on its head with a thwack. The monster lost its footing and plunged into the obscure shapes beneath it, all plummeting into the gloom. Other-worldly yowls preceded a meaty splat. Then there was more baying and rapid footfall, soon waning into inaudibility against the screak of the fan.

Ralphie and Kazé ran out of breath. The Megafan’s soprano concluded. Ralphie summoned 100 giant wooden Half-Life crates on top of the pit.

Both of them breathed deep.

‘High-pitched yelling works too, I guess,’ said Kazé, laughing nervously. The girl slid her fan into the holster at the small of her back with a trembling hand.

‘Yep,’ said Ralphie. ‘That was my ploy all along.’ She unsummoned her guitar. ‘Let’s deal with the Canine before I have a well-deserved heart attack.’   

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They trudged to the last of the monsters. The devil was lying on its side, breathing shallowly. Its eyes were open but vacant. Most of its teeth had broken or broken off, exposing patches of mangled pink flesh.

Kazé covered her mouth with her hands. 'I didn’t realise we’d hurt it that badly. Poor thing.’

'”Poor thing”?’ Ralphie crossed her arms. ‘What about poor Gamer Girl? This mutt tried to eat me alive! And it almost took my head off just a few minutes ago! Now that I think about it, it’s way too dangerous to live!' She summoned the SOCOM pistol from Metal Gear Solid and pointed the suppressor at a spot of bare skin on the monster’s scalp. ‘Sayonara, you toothy son of a bitch.’

Kazé’s eyes widened. 'What on Earth are you doing?!'

'What? It's probably going to be put down by the Zoo anyway. I might as well put it out of its misery now.... What?'

Kazé had an expression Ralphie had never seen on her before: her eyebrows were furrowed, her mouth was small, and there was no light in her eyes. 'Superheroes do not kill.'

Ralphie tilted her head. 'But it's a monster.'

'That doesn't matter. Superheroes do not kill. Get rid of that gun.'

She regarded at the Canine: fangs for hair, evil red eyes, proportions that hadn’t been seen since the Jurassic Period; the thing was an abomination. She stroked the trigger with her forefinger. All it would take was one good squeeze…. Ralphie made the SOCOM disappear. Kazé was definitely too moral for her own good, but she didn’t want to upset her best friend. 'Fine, whatever. I wasn’t mad keen about getting brains on my dress anyway.'

Kazé exhaled, the intensity fading from her face. 'Thank you. I don't want to see you summon anything like that again, okay? That's not what being a superhero is about.'

'Okay,' said Ralphie, rubbing the back of her head. 'But the Canine still needs to be restrained somehow.... Hmm, I have an idea.'

She magicked up a pixelated Minecraft pickaxe and began tapping the pavement with it. A paving slab fragmented and then stopped existing, leaving a 2-foot deep, cube-shaped hole and a small, grey, revolving cube within. She hopped into the hole and absorbed the cube, which appeared at the bottom of her glasses’ heads-up display as a concrete icon. She kept destroying the sidewalk and collecting its resources in this way until the number overlaying the concrete icon changed to 52. Then she approached the unconscious Canine. One by one, Ralphie summoned 12 cubes in a square formation around the monster, the blocks popping into reality as big as the holes she'd made in the ground. Building on top of her square, she used 36 more cubes to wall the critter in and then clambered onto the structure and made a roof with the remaining four.

Ralphie dropped down and swept her hand towards her creation: a 12 by 12 feet concrete cell. ‘Ta-da.’

Kazé stroked her chin. ‘Could you install a window so the thing can breathe?’

She pickaxed away a single cube from the side, redid her sweeping gesture. ‘Ta-daaa.’ Kazé clapped. Ralphie beamed, bowed, and dematerialised her tool. ‘It isn't pretty, but it should hold it. Game over.'

Kazé took her by the hands and commenced jumping up and down. 'Yay! We won!'

Ralphie rolled her eyes. 'Really, Fangirl. We should be trying to act cool here.'

'I'm too happy to be cool! Yay!'

After a second, Ralphie started jumping too. They laughed.

‘You were so brave!’ said Kazé. ‘I’ve never seen you like that before! What the heck happened to the girl too shy to join the Social Anxiety Club at school?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Ralphie. ‘As soon as I saw the Canine, all that angst...just went away. I felt like I was playing a video game; still do.’   

Voices in the distance.

Hundreds of civilians were hesitantly setting foot outside their shelters all over the intersection—including a mob of superfans from the FAD clothing store. Ralphie scanned the brightly-outfitted menagerie for any beautiful boys or girls around her age. As a superhero, she stood a fair chance of netting a few groupies from the superfan subculture. The people were so enamoured with her kind that they themselves made use of costumes and aliases in their everyday lives just to experience a small piece of the superhero lifestyle. Even a social inept like her could get some nooky from fanatics like that.    

'Come on!' Ralphie said to Kazé. 'Let’s go bask in the limelight—especially near the superfans!'

Kazé’s pupils dilated to three times their normal size. ‘Yeah! I can’t wait to see the look on their faces when they realise my superhero gimmick is being a superhero fangirl! They’ll have no choice but to recognise me as the country’s number one superhero aficionado! Do you think it would be rubbing it in too much if I showed them this?’ From under her breastplate, the girl extracted a photograph of herself grinning like a lunatic while bear hugging her idol at a comic book convention: the golden-haired, golden-skinned, golden-suited A-list superhero Golden Boy, who even in the face of her frenzied adoration appeared as genial and laid-back as ever.

Ralphie smiled. The superfans may have been zealous, but they had nothing on Kazé Maniakku. ‘I think we have vastly different priorities, friend o’ mine.’

‘That’s not a no! Let’s go!’