Ah yes, the starless sky, the breezy evening wind, the silence of the sleeping city. Very relaxing and peaceful.

Unless you were staring at a superhero base you were about to invade while wearing power-armor, so you couldn’t even feel the wind, and the silence was broken by people talking in your ear.

Which, funnily enough, was exactly the situation I found myself in.

Why the heck was I about to attack a superhero base? What had gone wrong in my life? Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten drunk on finals day. Then I would have actually passed, I would have found a better job, and everything would be peachy.

But then again… if that had happened, I wouldn’t have ever met Iron Pack, Fern, or Fractal. Sure, my current situation was because of Fractal, but other than that, he was surprisingly nice for a villain.

Maybe this was all just a dream. Maybe I had gotten so drunk back then, I actually fell into a coma, and everything since then was a dream. Yeah… maybe…

…

Why the heck was I getting existential now?

Come on, me! It was just Nova and Fissure! I had already beaten them, and back then I didn’t even have this Swiss army knife power-armor! This wouldn’t be a problem at all now!

Yeah, that’s right!

Now, the real potential problem was that… I was casually planning on beating up heroes. There were probably a few things wrong with that, but that was something to think about later.

“Are you ready, Fox?” my boss’s voice came through the comms.

No, I was not.

“S-sure, let’s do this,” I said with a shaky voice.

Although, thanks to the voice modulator in my armor, it instead came out as a freaking statement of a confident woman. Yup, I was totally not using technology to hide my scaredy-fox nature.

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“Good. The operation is a go. Good luck.”

I sighed as the comms went silent.

When he had said I would be the center of the plan, he meant that literally. I was going in alone, while everyone else was on standby, ready to back me up. Apparently, my secret-finding superpower would allow me to find what we were looking for much quicker than if we were to charge in as a group.

Once again, I cursed my lying ass for not saying that I had no powers.

Oh, well! What were you supposed to say in this situation again? Leyor Jeggins? Nah, I needed to personalize it.

Princesssss fooooox!

I sneaked my way to the building and nodded to my co-workers as they worked on making an entrance with the tools Fractal had given them.

The metal popped and the doors parted just enough to let me through. No audible alarm sounded. Good.

“Good luck, Princess.” Rob smiled at me.

“Thanks…” I said, the voice modulator once again turning my squeaky ‘I’m about to pee my pants’ voice to the ‘I’m here to kick ass and pet foxes, and I’m all out of foxes’ voice.

I entered through the newly made entrance and immediately began to take in my surroundings. The lights were out, but that didn’t matter thanks to the night-vision mode built into my visor.

I took a deep breath and ventured on.

Despite what I expected, it looked like a pretty normal house. Well, more like a villa of some rich bastard, but still, nothing superheroic immediately jumped out at me other than the entrance.

That feeling was dispelled as soon as I rounded the corner and saw a freaking spider web of red lasers covering the hallway.

Now I felt like the main protagonist of a spy movie.

Well, I had no idea whether those were deadly lasers or would just activate the alarm, but I wasn’t going to take any risks. Before diving head first into it, I snooped around to look for other places to go.

A bathroom… a living room with a giant TV… Yeah, honestly, other than the death trap back there, nothing unusual jumped out at me so far.

Which, of course meant, that what I was looking for was most likely beyond the laser grid. Great.

I continued searching the house for any alternatives, but to no avail. I only found a room from where I could hear a bear snoring. Or maybe that was Fissure, hard to tell.

With a defeated sigh -- which the voice modulator turned into a thoughtful ‘hmm’ sound for some reason -- I returned to the lasers and began planning on how to deal with them.

I thought back on that one spy movie I’d watched -- Highly Improbable Mission or something like that -- and remembered what options the main protagonist had.

Find the power source and turn it off to get rid of the lasers, or become a ninja and just jump through the lasers without ever touching any of them.

Naturally, there was no question about which option I would go with.

I narrowed my eyes, cracked my knuckles, and worked myself up…

And then turned around to look for that stupid power source.