Of all the days for a bank to get robbed, it just had to be on my day off. The ear-splitting sounds of Lower Olympus were shut off by the headphones firmly planted on my ears, keeping the ruckus noises of gunfire, muggings, every day Normals chatter, and police sirens at bay. But when your ears could pick up the sounds of a single crying baby from halfway across the city, you couldn’t blame a girl for not wanting some peace and quiet for once. I was even being productive, well, sort of, by staring at the blank pieces of paper scattered all over my desk that were due tomorrow.
My comic book wasn’t anywhere near finished, and the stencil of Olympia’s glowering face was clear enough. I sighed, leaning back in my chair, feeling it squeak under my weight. Putting my arms behind my head, I tried to think, to conjure whatever creativity I thought I had simmering inside of me when I pitched the comic to my friends’ agent. But my gut was empty, and my foot was bouncing, and Zeus above, I needed something to do. I had gone out of my way to ask Denny for a day off, doing the dishes until late, mopping the floors and taking out the garbage long after everyone else had left work, earning my time off, but with it, I was painfully bored.
Well, I had a lot I could do, but none of it felt urgent. There was a calling, though, one that came from the crimson and dark blue costume hanging in my closet. Looking across my room, sporadic yellow light illuminated the darkness, watered down only because of my enhanced eyesight. I frowned, straightening in my chair as another soft burst of light shone through my window, catching the sleeves of my gear. Yellow lights? The street lights had been busted for the past several weeks ever since some electrically charged up superhuman tore up the place.
More light filled my attic bedroom, dashing its sickly glow over my unmade bed, the superhero posters loosely tacked up on my wall, and my costume airing out from last night’s use.
Glancing to my right and taking off my headphones, I got my answer: sirens.
“Fuck,” I whispered, reaching for the radio perched on the edge of my desk and turning it on. As I got up, flying toward my closet and sniffing my suit (it was a little hard to send a superhero costume to the laundry without someone noticing; sue me), the radio came to life.
“—in progress, I repeat, a robbery in progress. We’ve got a 10-30, Belcrest Bank building,” a male operator relayed, voice hoarse. Red and blue lights flashed past my window. The SDU and the New Olympus PD working together on this? I groaned, slipping into my gear in mid-air, a hassle to do when bits of whoever’s body I had taken apart last night slipped into the soles of my boots. Have you ever had a finger and strips of flesh in your gear before? The worst.
At least I managed to get the dried blood out of my hair, I thought. Small positives.
“Named suspects?” a woman asked. A grunt, a screech of rubber on tarmac, loud enough that I heard it from both the radio and just outside my window, then a white hot flash of light.
I smiled to myself, sticking a tiny bluetooth earpiece into my ear. Supervillains—now that’s something I could definitely deal with tonight. I’d finish the comic after I ripped ‘em a new one.
Pausing by my window, I waited, making sure no more armored SDU trucks were racing beneath my apartment building. Nothing. The streets were clear, the darkness of night heavy.
A black cat was perched on the window sill below me, staring at me expectantly.
Tiny arcs of golden electricity jumped between my fingers, flickering my weak lightbulb. In a blink, I hurtled out of the window and high into the smoggy Lower Olympus air. My hair whipped against my face as I rose, skimming across the factory brimmed skyline. The lower east end was a darkening shadow of New Olympus, strangled by the forgotten section of Patriot Broadwalk that nobody in their right mind would dare walk down at night. It was a tumor of cracked concrete, reinforced windows, and silent alarms that suckled on the glinting lights of the upper west side. Dark, dingy, reeking of whatever was rotting in the alley beside your apartment, it wasn’t a place you’d keep the lights on in your bedroom at night. It made searching for the police and the SDU a lot easier, not that the supervillains and their thugs made it hard to miss them.
In front of the chaotic, snaking progression blasting away from the police was a large armored vehicle, with thick wheels and even thicker steel panels covering it. Someone was at the wheel of the beast, making sure that any other car—and civilians, I noted, watching as someone got turned to mangled pasty meat—on the road got out of their way. Gaudy laughter came from the cabin. Behind it were three black SUVs, all with gunmen leaning out of the windows, some from the sunroof of the cars, firing at the police and not wasting any ammo on the SDU trucks. Alright, not the most creative robbery in history, but it would make for some fun before going back home.
Because you still have work to do, and a stupid little bank robbery isn’t gonna stop that.
“Three stolen vehicles,” the operator said through my earpiece. I gained ground easily, the tail end of the police chase right below me now. “Nine hostiles, armed and dangerou—”
The rear doors of the leading armored bank truck swung open. A woman appeared from its bowels, dressed in a deep black dress that seemed to pour down her shapely form. She spread her arms, flicked her wrists, and the tarmac underneath the chasing police cars punched upward, sending cars and officers into the air. I sucked air through my teeth, angled through the sky, and shot down toward them, catching one car by the bumper and another by the bars across the roof. The landing wasn’t gentle, but I set the cars down, stopping myself with a skid, caught another car that forced me into a stumble, setting me two steps back, and leaped to catch the last three officers spinning through the air. Two overweight older men and one young Black woman shook like leaves off a tree when I set them down (again, not gently, but not too hard because humans had a bad tendency of dying if you treated them too roughly). They vomited, swore, and stared at me.
Amazement was in their eyes, as if yes, it really was me standing in front of them. The media called me a murderer, but that was reserved for the bad guys, so I guess it was a surprise.
“You guys sit this one out,” I said, turning away to face the sky. “I honestly don’t know why you still bother.” Pulse racing, I shot down the street, narrowly clipping the side of a building with my shoulder as I caught up. Adrenaline was in my veins now, blood singing in my ears.
I wasn’t excited, because superheroes should never get excited about crime.
But… Come on, playing with humans was just so fun, especially when they fought back.
“Shit,” someone on the comms said. “We’ve got another Supe on our tail.”
“Don’t worry, fellas, it’s just your girl in red and blue,” I said over the wind, though I doubted the police could hear me, close to their windows or not. Two more police cars were ahead, revving madly to keep up. The woman in black swept her arms through the air, ripping chunks of concrete from store fronts and throwing them toward us. I swore, dipped low, grabbed the first police car and the second by their side panels, my fingers digging through the metal like a knife in butter, and flew sideways, narrowly dodging the car-sized boulders that smashed into the road.
Panting, I glanced at the white-faced officers in their cars as I let them drop to the concrete. Civilians, in a mad dash to safety, tripped over themselves trying to get away from the chaos. Some stopped and gaped at me, others simply shrieked. An officer looked me up and down, fury and gratefulness battling it out on his face. I didn’t care much about his reaction—the police were a liability to themselves and everyone involved, and to make sure they didn’t go anywhere, I forced my fist through the hoods of their cars, encouraging them to sit and stay like good boys and girls.
Now it was time to deal with the SDU and whoever else was hiding in the truck.
I was on them in a heartbeat, wind screaming in my ears as I shot toward the armored truck veering wildly from one side of the road to the other. The SDU trucks were trying and failing to get on either side of the vehicle, maybe to force whoever was driving the thing to a halt. I landed atop one truck, crouching low, my lungs burning. This wasn’t going to work out, working with these idiots in the black and blue trucks. My target was the bank vault on four wheels ahead of us, and I couldn’t have the SDU firing their special-grade assault rifles at me as I tried stopping them.
Or, you know, watching as I stuck my hand through a supervillain's chest.
Humans didn’t like seeing the inside of people, apparently. Maybe because it made them feel as mushy and doughy as they always felt in my hands after ramming them through a wall.
Besides, I thought, knocking my knuckles against the hatch below me. The only superhero in the world can’t ruin her street cred. I’ll kill the villains somewhere private, like the Atlantic.
I waited, one knee beside the circular hatch, for the bastards to open it up for me. The last time I tore a hole through one of these trucks, we got into an altercation that left a few people less than able to keep their guts inside of them. It was a mess with these humans, because when wasn’t it? But before I could knock again, the woman in the truck—Witchling, I guessed, judging from her obsidian black eyes, black nails, and spooling scarlet hair—clenched her fists, breaking apart the boulders behind us into tiny shards. My eyes widened, realization clicking moments too late.
I hated fighting certain supervillains for certain reasons. Most times, I barely broke a sweat fighting any villain ranked B and below, but Witchling was one of my least favorite, simply because, if she spent time training instead of doing crime, she could very easily be an S-Grade.
Currently, every S-Grade in history was either dead or missing. Until I did a superhuman aptitude test in the Olympiad, I wouldn’t know what grade I was, but I doubted Witchling needed a test.
The shards of stone zipped toward us, then paused beside the truck. In the split second it took for me to watch the first of them glow white hot, I glanced at her, seeing her widening smile.
A fist of heat punched me off balance and slammed me into the tarmac. I rolled, landing hard on my shoulder. Getting my bearings, I forced my fingers into the pavement, flipping myself over into a sliding crouch until I was firmly on all fours, panting, sure, but not spinning head over heels anymore. My head buzzed, my ears whined. Grit lined my teeth as I spat saliva and knuckled spit off my lips. The white hot flashes from earlier must have come from her. The power to manipulate matter into anything she wished was a dream come true for dozens of superhumans.
It was just a pain in the ass for me.
I staggered onto my feet, my temples pounding painfully. Smoke rolled off my uniform, barely scathed apart from the soot dusting my shoulders. Nothing substantial, but the truck was worse for wear. It was a molten slag heap of black metal and rubber slumped beside a flower boutique, a pillar of smoke rising into the sky from its carcass. I didn’t pause to check whether anyone in the armored truck had survived. What was the point in even bothering, anyway? I couldn’t hear a single heartbeat from inside the sludge, and checking would only make my gut turn at the sight of the soupy, visceral mess that the supercharged heat would have done to their little human bodies. The special crimes unit wouldn’t be here quick enough to stop people from taking photos and posting them online, but that was the least of my worries as I rose higher into the sky.
Enough games, and enough wasting time. First, the three SUVs, then I’d pop Witchling’s head clean off her shoulders and send it to the chief of the SDU as a summer solstice gift.
More electricity leaped between my fingertips, glinting off the shattered glass of storefronts and shop windows, parked cars and office buildings that littered the street. I flew, low and fast, bullets prodding my shoulders and cheeks, thumping pointlessly against my skin in rapid fire succession as I grew closer and closer, meters turning to inches, then I smashed straight through the three gunmen jutting out of the sunroof of each SUV. Upper bodies turned to crimson mist and shattered bone, bursting over me like organ-filled zits. I spat flesh from my mouth seconds before I reached Witchling, then flew straight down at a right angle, slamming into the tarmac with such force that I cratered the street. I had a split second to brace my shoulders and square my feet.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Then the first SUV slammed against me full force, the second ramming directly into the first. The screeching sound of shredded iron was dampened by the soft squelch of bodies flying through windshields and smearing across the pavement. The third SUV screeched around the mess of steel and flesh, barely avoiding the pile up that consumed most of the tiny two-way street.
“Gods, that freaking hurt,” I muttered, rolling my shoulder. A dull throbbing ache ran across my arm as I raised it over my head, stretching the muscles and testing out my collarbone.
Luckily, the final SDU truck juddered to a halt just behind the pile up. Other cars had gotten involved, with civilians stumbling around with blood streaming from wounds sliced across their heads. Some groaned, holding limp arms. Others rushed to gather friends and family from the back seats of their cars. The SDU would prioritize dealing with the civilians before pestering me.
Superheroes were illegal, yes, but without me, who knows what could have happened? They would be dealing with Witchling and the truck driver for the whole night, raising millions of dollars in property damage because, at the end of the day, they were just humans in high-tech Kevlar with special-grade assault weapons; a lot like mystery meat stuffed in a can just waiting to be popped open and scooped out by the bear hands of any superhuman higher than a C grade.
I pointed at a reasonably conscious-looking guy as I started jogging down the street. “Call Damage Control!” I yelled over my shoulder. “Be a superhero and save the day, too!”
Down the street I shot, left and right through the maze that was the upper west side. The further I got from Lower Olympus, the shinier the buildings became, the more expensive the cars parked along the pavement were, and the louder the shriek of laughter coming from the armored bank truck grew. Witchling had her hand pressed against the sidewall of the truck, keeping her balance as it swerved. Another figure appeared beside her, cursing something I couldn’t hear over the wind screaming in my ears. The traffic, though, was a lot heavier than in Lower Olympus, and by my guess, it was what the other person in the truck was yelling about. Just as I swung around the side of a skyscraper, so did the armored vehicle, right into the stalled flow of beeping cars.
A roadblock dead in the middle of the city. People in their cars and all over the streets.
They only started screaming, panicking, when the bank truck screeched onto the sidewalk, smearing half of a woman’s torso along the pavement as the truck ran over her midsection.
The driver didn’t slow down. The engine roared, dropping the remaining SUV by a dozen paces. Witchling flicked her finger, and a lamp post slammed into it, stopping it dead. I frowned, briefly wondering why she’d stop her own goons (hired or not, it didn’t matter) from following, before dozens of high pitched squeals of terror pierced through the wind’s howl and into my ears.
No matter how fast the Normals would try to run, they wouldn’t escape the truck.
A tiny, sickly part of my brain told me to stop in the air, watch them scramble like ants as some of them were trampled and crushed by cars getting shoved out of the truck’s warpath, watch until they screamed my name to the sky, pleading for me to save them. I would be all over the news, the billboards, the magazines and social media for days on end. Olympia Saves City, the headlines would read, and I’d rip it from the newspaper and stick it on my wall with the rest of the less savory tabloid headlines I’d been able to gather about myself. I shuddered, smiling to myself.
But that part of me was a silent mistress whispering deadly nothings to the deaf.
The superhero inside of me won out. The… human part, I guessed.
“Let’s hope this works,” I said, words lost to the wind as I blew toward the street.
Witchling saw me first, then the other superhuman beside her. For a moment, I thought she would throw a car at me, or a person, but instead, she turned away, as if she hadn’t seen me at all.
I took the small win and carved my fingers into the thick roof of the truck. I groaned, gritting my teeth as I gasped under the weight of the behemoth of a van. Closer to the traffic. Wheels hardly off the ground. Godsdammit, Rylee! I thought, pulling upward, trying to get a grip on the metal, trying to yank on several tons moving faster than it ever should. Normals ducked, throwing themselves to the pavement as I lifted the truck off the tarmac. Inches, that’s how much I skimmed the top of cars, the space between us and the streets slowly growing as I used our shared momentum to fly above the line of traffic and the broken down jumble of trucks stuck on the street.
My muscles strained under the weight, my shoulders burning with effort. Someone inside the van wasn’t making it easy for me, but they were in the air now, dozens of feet above New Olympus. My territory. I continued rising, flying away from the city and nearer to the rocky beaches at the east of the harbor. Exhaustion was catching up to me, my body burning up more energy than I had in my gut. Head pounding, stomach turning. The urge to puke came and went as my fingers trembled. Dropping the truck now would kill them, sure, but it would kill civies too.
So when we got to the jagged, vacant, frothing beach, I let the truck go with a thud.
The front end punched into the sand, digging its nose into the moonlit beach. I landed beside it, taking a moment to catch my breath. I should have eaten before dealing with this mess, because now my heart was pounding against my ribs, my stomach doing much of the same.
The thought of having to kill these villains nearly made me—
A figure lunged from the rear of the truck. I snorted with pitty, flying backward, then felt as if an invisible truck had slammed into me as I suddenly jerked forward and ate a right hook to the jaw.
My canines chewed into my tongue, and blood gushed into my mouth. I swallowed the hot liquid iron, gasping at the taste and the sting aching across my face. Witchling, I thought, glaring at the new superhuman facing me. She’s working with whoever the hell just made me bleed.
Their costume wasn’t anything worth remembering, with white wrist tape wrapped around their now bloodied knuckles, a full black helmet, and dark red and blue Kevlar body armor. The air surrounding them was distorted, quaking as they lifted their fists and inched forward.
“And who the hell are you supposed to be?” I asked, searching my brain for answers.
The stark white irises shining behind their angular mask gave nothing away as they charged forward. A right hook and a jab, blocked and parried, but before I could kick out, a wave of sand slammed into my midsection. I stumbled, got my arm up to block a kick hard enough to make me—me!—grunt in agonizing pain. Whoever this was, they could hit and hit hard. But at the end of the day, they were fighting the daughter of Zeus herself—luckily for them, we were right next to a beach, perfect for washing the blood off my hands when I’m done with her body.
When they charged again, I anticipated when Witchling would use her powers to force me closer to Knuckles. Stepping back, I dodged a kick to the gut, flipping over them when sand shot upward from the beach below me. I wrapped my legs around their head, spun, and slammed them into the sandy dune. Sliding away, I was quick to grab their wrist, their neck, then throw them as hard as I could against the van still sticking up from the beach like a warped chunk of white steel.
Witchling—that bitch, I swear—caught them mid-air before they could hit the van hard enough to splinter the skull underneath that rigid black face mask. She climbed out, bricks of gold levitating in the air above her head. Sweat glistened on her forehead, mixing with the blood on her temple and the rougé lipstick smeared across her face. Hair billowing over her shoulder, she looked like a movie star, though one with a temper and a flare for violence in her eternally black eyes.
Two more people followed, one leaning against another. Damsel, hard to not notice, with her sunflower-yellow hair and uncanny blue eyes, limped as the man beside her helped put her onto the beach. Ace smiled at me, his grin white, his eyes glinting. His short cropped black hair was wild in the wind, matching his ratty air force jacket that slapped against his bare chest.
“Great, the gang’s all here,” I said, rolling my still aching shoulder. “Let’s get this over with, guys. I’ve got stuff to do tonight, and a meeting in the morning that I cannot miss.”
“You’re right, princess,” Ace said, one side of his mouth quirking into a higher smile. His powers had always been vague, but it was something to do with being able to see the best possible outcome for whatever goal he wanted. A threat to someone lesser than me. “The show’s over.”
“Ain’t you supposed to ask why we stole the gold?” Damsel said, drawling. A B-grade teleporter. I was tense, ready. Waiting. “And ain’t you interested in who we’re gonna give it to?”
“Not so much as seeing how you’d look with your chest caved in.”
“Snarky,” she said with a playful snarl. “I woulda loved playing with you, hun.”
“But we’ve gotta run, superstar!” Ace said. “But it’s not everyday Zeus’ brat fights you, so for that, Witchling, give ‘er a kiss goodbye, and Damsel?” He pulled her close, hand tight on her waist; Damsel smiled at me, wriggling her fingers. “Let’s go to a real beach, why don’t we?”
Witchling snapped her fingers, and the sand at my feet erupted into a blast of fiery heat. I was flung upward and through the air, regaining my balance seconds later. The sea hissed and boiled, steam blowing off its surface as the heat dissipated. I shook my head, blinking the moving blotches of light from my eyes. The sand where I had stood had crystallized, glimmering under the stars and the sea, but doing me no favors in telling where the four of them had disappeared to by way of Damsel’s powers. Great, I thought, perching on the side of the van and checking the emptiness of the cabin. All that was left of the several dozen slabs of gold they had stolen was a single slab, one that had a note attached to it, signed by Ace, telling me to go fuck myself.
I squeezed the metal out of frustration. I shouldn’t have let them vanish so easily. I didn’t really care who they stole the gold for or why; I wasn’t a detective, just a superhero, but losing to a pair of B-grades, a possible S-grade, and some idiot who thought punching me hard would make me leave them alone, was like turning a knife in my gut and making a mess of my pride.
“You’re Zeus’ fucking daughter,” I muttered as the blaring noise of SDU trucks neared. “You’re not supposed to let people like that get away, dumbass. Now they’ll just come back.”
Villains were like cockroaches. If you killed one, more would pop up. If you let one live, even more would scurry around, excited by the prospect of being able to win against you.
All you could really do was exterminate them, and make it very clear to the rest of them lurking in the dark what would happen if they dared to show their faces in broad daylight.
But if word got out that Olympia had lost to people so pathetic, then…
More villains, more time in the spotlight as I pick them off, I thought. Not so bad, then.
The thumping of boots against sand pulled me from my thoughts, forcing me to wipe the smile off my face as men and women in heavy blue armor ran toward me and the truck. The SDU were my least favorite anti-crime unit, right alongside the CIA and FBI for how nosy they were, but they were deathly efficient. Soldiers decked in head-to-toe armor circled the van, scanning it with some kind of small silver device before deeming it clear. One of them found the gold bar I’d squeezed in the sand, quickly sectioning it off into a sealed black cylinder. Like ants to sugar, they swarmed the truck, presumably scanning for fingerprints, power residue, or anything of the sort.
They largely ignored me as I hovered just above the beach, except for one of them.
“Is one of your superpowers the ability to induce public terror?” a man asked. I didn’t have to glance to my left to know Lucas was talking to me and only me. The SDU lieutenant was an old friend of mine, but strangely enough, I never got any Christmas cards from him. Tall, muscular, graying, with a dusting of constant five o’clock shadow on his jaw, and piercing green eyes, he was the only one of his agents not covered in full body gear. All he wore was a loose, dusty black trench coat, an even looser tie around his neck, and had his knuckles bunched in his pockets.
“That would be considered terrorism,” I said. “Which isn’t one of them, turns out.”
“Then would you care to explain the millions worth of property damage you left in your wake?” he said, his voice not rising, but lowering to a baritone. “Or the two civilians you left for dead in a crumpled car because, in your mind, you thought stopping a chase dead in traffic—”
I waved my hand through the air. His eyes narrowed. “I dealt with the threat.”
“You got innocent people hurt, others killed. Those thugs are dead and useless.”
I smiled at him. “At least you don’t have to bother trying to identify their remains.”
Lucas stared at me, expressionless. “Care to tell us where the villains went or how they got away?” he said, finally. “Because the media won’t be saying we lost their tail. It’ll be you.”
I shrugged, yawning behind my hand. “Teleportation. Damsel was with them, and so was Ace and Witchling, and some jackass who split my tongue. Can you see that? I might need—”
“Rylee,” he said quietly, making me pause. We were far enough away from the rest of them to keep it between us, but hearing my name made me sick. “You let supervillains get away, all because you’re not taking this seriously. This isn’t a game, it should never be. Why did they steal from Belcrest Bank of all buildings? Who were they working for? But asking you these questions is made pointless because I’m more than sure you’ve got no answer to any of them. Correct?”
I was silent, a hot anger bubbling in my gut as I watched the SDU agents work.
“Chaos fuckin’ walking,” he muttered. “Some god damned superhero you are, playing dress up.”
“I didn’t let them go just so I can play superhero,” I growled, glaring at him.
“So grow up and understand the consequences of what you allowed to happen tonight, all of which could have been easily avoided,” he said coldly. “The only reason I don’t have you arrested, bound, sent off to court for breaking the Black Capes law several dozen times—
“—is because by the time you even tried, I would have wiped out your entire force.”
Lucas glanced at me, intelligent eyes chilling as they bore right through me. “See that right there? Your anger? Your directed anger? If you wanted to, you could have gotten them.” He lit a half-smoked cigarette he pulled from his pocket. “But you didn’t, because you’re not half as good at being a superhero as you think, Ry. All that power, and it’s wasted on someone like you.”
He walked away, leaving my throat dry and my tongue fat in my throat. Silent. Contemplating. Beyond angry that he even had the nerve to question my fucking heritage.
“Not so much as a ‘thanks for saving all those damned Normals’?” I shouted.
“You’ll get your thanks when you’re deserving of being called Zeus’ daughter,” Lucas said, not turning to face me. “Now fuck off, kid. The blood on your hands won’t wash itself.”