Sonny led me out onto the vast front lawn of Pink Sensation, lit up by a collection of hovering studio lights. This was obviously being recorded, but I couldn’t really back out. Whatever was about to happen, I had to trust my media block to keep it off the news.
Sonny stopped in a brightly lit patch of grass and waved to the crowd as a collection of clients, porn stars, neon girls, and minor celebrities poured out and formed a rough half-circle around us.
Herman stepped up as ringmaster and nodded to Sonny. “You want to explain the rules to him?”
Sonny smiled. “Girls like this don’t fuck you for free, kid. You gotta put on a show first. This is the real reason I brought you out here. Nothing serious, but Herman loves to stage these little sparring matches, and your powers are so much like mine, I want to see what you can do. You up for it?”
“You’re telling me I get to fight Sonny Mao?” I asked, unable to contain my excitement.
Sonny smiled again. “Not a real fight, but we can trade a few bumps for the girls here.”
“Who goes first?”
“You can.” Sonny leaned forward and stuck his chin out, inviting me to punch him as the girls laughed.
But I hesitated. “I wasn’t expecting to fight today, can you give me a minute to…”
But Sonny did not give me a minute. Sonny picked me up and threw me like a piece of luggage, sending me flying all the way back to the tree line.
I quickly cast my strength and ward spells and charged back in, hoping to catch him by surprise. But Sonny saw me coming from a mile away and got me with a perfect cartoon uppercut to the jaw, sending me up and back onto my ass. The audience tittered as I struggled to my feet.
“Not a good start, kid,” Sonny said, shaking his head.
“I was not expecting a fight tonight!” I shouted back, sounding kinda shrill and childish.
“Bad guys don’t make appointments. But if you’re not ready to fight, we’ll warm up to it. Hold your hands up like this, lock them with my hands, and see if you can push me over. Don’t be nervous and don’t hold back. You can’t hurt me, and I’ll stop before I hurt you.”
I took in a big gulp of magic and brought in as much as I could as fast as I could, provoking some respectful murmurs from the crowd as my aura lit up like crackling white fire all around my body. Even Sonny looked impressed.
I braced myself, locked my hands with his, and waited until he yelled “Push!”
And then I pushed. I pushed harder and harder until my aura was lighting up the lawn, but Sonny did not move. He took everything I had and did not move at all.
Then he started pushing back. He was obviously taking it easy on me, slowly escalating as I stumbled back a step. Then he started pushing me down, until my knees started to buckle.
Sonny saw how hard I was struggling and whispered, “Don’t hurt yourself, kid. Just take a knee.”
And something about the way he said it, the gentle, fatherly tone in his voice had exactly the opposite effect on me. I looked up into his tired, red-rimmed eyes and gritted my teeth as more magic came in.
My aura flared as I pushed back and started to rise. Sonny’s expression was changing from amusement to concern, not really because of my power, but because of the look on my face.
The crowd was cheering, but this wasn’t a show to me anymore. I was angry for real, determined to put this movie star on his ass.
I rose until I was fully standing, and kept pushing, digging my heels into the soft dirt of Herman’s front lawn.
Sonny whispered, “Easy, kid,” still not appreciably straining as I growled at him.
Magic surged in until my body was full, then it started to spill over into real space, surging out in perfect circles of fire on the ground. Whump. Whump. Whump.
Something in the back of my mind knew this was dangerous, screaming at me to stop, but I just poured all my power into the strength spell, channeling every bit of it into my hands until the surge stopped.
Sonny stumbled and let go, trying to end this before it got out of hand. But it was already out of hand. As soon as Sonny let go, I cocked my arm back and punched him in his big square face. Not as hard as I could, but easily hard enough to kill a normal person.
Sonny stumbled as his head rocked back, but he didn’t fall. Then something in his eyes flared to match mine, and this was not just a sparring match anymore.
The strongest man in the world punched me in the gut. He wasn’t using all his strength on the new kid, but he absolutely hit harder than Baalphezar, driving me back until I almost fell.
Then I charged at him again, swinging as hard as I could, but Sonny had been in about a million more fights than I had and countered me easily, blocking every one of my wide, slow swings before he planted one foot in my chest and sent me soaring back into the trees again.
I was proud to realize later, while I was absolutely no match for Sonny Mao, at least I made him use his legs.
Extracting myself from the trees gave me time to calm down, as I slowly realized what I had done. The magic left me in a rush, and I came back to Sonny with my hands up.
“Okay, you win!” I gestured to Sonny and said, “Still the king, ladies and gentlemen!” playing to the crowd to cover up my embarrassment.
Everybody cheered for Sonny, and a few of them shouted, “Good game!” at me, used as the modern equivalent of “Bravo!” or “Huzzah!” by a generation raised on video games.
I thought that would be the end of it, but Sonny was appraising me as I came back. He was about to say something when one of the neon girls in the front row said, “Look!” and angled one of the studio lights.
There was a perfect circle of burned grass where I had been standing, with a pair of perfect black footprints in the center, to mark exactly where my feet were planted when I surged.
A dozen people leaned forward to take pictures with their POV contacts, and those fucking footprints were around the world before I even knew what happened.
My footprints didn’t include my face or my name, so they weren’t covered by my media block. Those damn things went viral all by themselves, vaguely attributed to “a new guy on Bluestar 7.”
Didn’t immediately give me away, thank god, since most people who saw them thought I had fire powers.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
The crowd clapped for me as I stepped back into my own footprints, and I tried to smile back and wave.
“Been a while since anybody’s hit me that hard,” Sonny said. “Who did you train with?”
“Just robots and holograms, man. Must have spent a thousand hours training myself to punch like Captain Cobalt, for all the good it did me.”
“Which videos did you study?” Sonny asked. “Larry couldn’t fight for shit until DMA convinced him to give up that 1940s boxing stuff. But when he finally started using proper martial arts with those powers… I’ll never be that good.”
“You call Captain Cobalt ‘Larry’? Did you actually know him?”
“Met him a few times, but we were not friends. Every time he saw me, he just made jokes about how he was gonna kick my ass when I finally went villain. Then when he decided that wasn’t gonna happen, he just started calling me a worthless drunk. He was trying to piss me off, but I don’t think he actually hated me. Even came to one of my interventions.”
* * *
“Those big slow haymakers may work on river monsters, but they won’t do shit for people,” Sonny said. “What else you got?”
I rushed in and did a proper combo this time, a couple punches to his ribs, ducking his counterpunch and popping him in the face again. Not as strong as I was when I was surging, but my technique and my control were better, so I was actually able to get a few hits past him.
Then he swung at me a few times and I was able to block and counter like Captain Cobalt did in training videos.
“Nice,” Sonny said. “Who taught you that?”
“You did. I worked with a bot that trained with you, before you had to put it down.”
And I think that was the first time I ever surprised Sonny Mao. “You plugged Wrex back in? Don’t turn your back on that thing. That sneaky little fuck sucker punched me full power in the head. Rang me like a church bell until I went down. Minerva had to pull it off me and hold its arms. Where is it now?”
“Junk,” I said. “But I got a good month out of him before he fell apart.”
“You trained with Wrex long enough to scrap him? That’s nice, kid. I see why Randy grabbed you.”
We had gone too long without punching each other, so the crowd started booing. I held my hands up and offered to do the strength contest again.
Sonny was still too much for me, but I kept my head this time and focused on leverage instead of raw power. I got my feet positioned better and used my whole body to push back, instead of just my arms.
But this training session wasn’t enough for the crowd, who started chanting “Fight, fight, fight!”
I leaned in like I was still trying to push Sonny over and whispered to him, “You are the biggest movie star in the world. Why do you put up with this shit? Why do you let them use you like this?”
“This is how you play the game, kid. Herman works for the people who run shit, and those people can get to anyone, even me.”
“Well, I’m not just gonna stand here and perform for this degenerate piece of shit. We are not his dancing monkeys. We are real goddamn superheroes, and I want to remind him who he’s fucking with.”
Sonny’s face spread into a slow smile, like he was remembering a man he used to be.
“You used to do wrestling, right? Metahuman wrestling, before you got a Bluestar badge?”
Sonny nodded.
I kept my hands locked in his as I glanced toward the giant front window of Pink Sensation. “Take two bumps and put me through that window. Then we’ll take this fight inside, and you can show me some Angel of Death shit.”
Sonny started to kick me away again, but this time I was ready for it. I broke off and stepped aside, then I kicked him in the ribs, and he doubled over like it hurt way more than it did.
The crowd roared.
Then I pummeled him with a mix of face and body blows until he picked me up and threw my whole body over the heads of the crowd, straight through Herman’s front window.
Herman howled and started screaming, “No! No!” as Sonny did one of his awesome superhero leaps and landed right in front of me, in the middle of Herman’s living room.
The crowd turned around and cheered at the prospect of property damage. Even the ones who got sprayed with glass were cheering.
I ran to Herman’s fireplace. Then I grabbed an iron poker and threw it to Sonny. “Show me some sword shit!”
And then I was fighting the Angel of Death, watching the man himself do the precise, long-practiced twirls and sword swings I had copied a hundred times on the playground.
I was ducking and dodging and blocking with my arms, as he forced me back into the floating glass stairway. I started grabbing stairs and smashing them on his head, hard enough to make him jump back and say, “Hey, easy with those!”
We rampaged through Pink Sensation for a good ten minutes, smashing collectibles, ruining hideous modern artwork, and ruining a dozen pieces of overpriced furniture until it looked like the house had been hit by a tornado.
But the crowd never stopped cheering, and Herman got it all on camera. I told myself revenue from the video would probably be enough to pay for the damage, and if it wasn’t, well, fuck this guy. This slick jumped-up pimp who had reinvented slavery.
The green neon girl ran up and threw her arms around me as I was stepping back through the ruined window. She leaned in for a kiss, but I stopped her.
“You’re very pretty, miss, but human girls don’t really do it for me anymore.”
The girl’s expression slowly changed to a look of resentment and disgust, like I had just told her I’d prefer to fuck horses.
I reached up to gently pull her arm down, and noticed a weird flash of light, like touching her had broken some kind of optical plane and fucked up a hologram. I traced a pattern on her arm and watched the illusion struggle to keep up.
These neon girls were actually using the kind of technology I had accused Lydia of using the night we met, using some kind of projection stuff to hide what they actually looked like. They didn’t wear enough clothes to hide a full projection rig, so this had to be implants, millions of subdermal implants all over their bodies, so they could look like whoever they wanted, or whoever you wanted them to be.
Donna came up and touched my shoulder. I thought she would be mad, but she was laughing really hard, surveying the destruction.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, and pecked me on the cheek.
As soon as she did it, something in my head went pop, and I got a vision, clear as day, rising from the back of my brain like I was watching a montage from part of my life that hadn’t happened yet.
I saw myself walking down to the basement with Donna, putting my thumb on a glass plate, then rolling around with her in a shiny satin bed, whispering secrets in her ear while she held me.
Then I saw myself in a cheap suit, sitting at a long wooden table, testifying before some kind of Bluestar discipline board. Then I saw myself climbing into a long black car flanked by DMA agents, carrying me off to god knows where.
All these images flashed in my brain in just a few seconds, until I snapped back to looking at Donna, who was staring at me with a concerned expression on her face.
“You okay? It looked like you went somewhere else for a minute.”
“Yeah, sorry. I think maybe Sonny hit me a little harder than I realized. It was great to meet you.”
Herman was screaming at Sonny, jabbing a finger in his chest like he was scolding a waiter, instead of provoking the strongest man on Earth.
Then I saw the smug, gleeful look in Donna’s eyes and realized she hated him. She had spent most of her life working with Herman, but she hated him.
They weren’t lovers, or partners, or friends. They were a pair of predators who had been using each other for twenty years.
I caught up to Sonny as the crowd parted for him. Herman was still screaming as I climbed on the back of Sonny’s flying motorcycle.
Sonny waved his Mitsumi and yelled, “Put it on the card!” as we soared off into the night.
* * *
“Hey Sonny, I’m sorry about what happened back there,” I said as we touched down on the roof of Berkeley Street HQ. “I’m sorry I lost my temper.”
Sonny smiled. “Didn’t hurt me and the crowd loved it. Don’t worry too much about getting angry. Men are supposed to get angry when they see fucked up shit in the world. Anger gives us the power to get off our ass and do something about it. If you had just dropped to one knee and taken that loss like a little bitch, I would be on the phone pulling your badge right now.”
“Still,” I said, “it was not cool to surge out like that, in front of all those people. I try really hard to control it.”
“Don’t be afraid of your anger, kid. Be afraid of picking the wrong target.”
“Sonny, I need to ask you a question. I’ve been trying to ignore it, but if we’re gonna be working together, I have to know. I need to know if you really did kill a family while you were driving, and I need to know why you settled with all those women out of court.”
Sonny did not seem offended by the questions. “I hit their car, but they didn’t die. I called in Doctor Baggage to heal them at the scene. As for the women… I don’t remember everything I did. I know I paid them five hundred dollars each to see their tits, but I was never alone with anybody, and I didn’t take my pants off.
“I wanted to fight the harassment charges, but my lawyer said it was hopeless, since I had naked pictures of all of them on my phone. Easier to just pay. I can’t always remember stuff I do when I’m drunk, so they have a camera follow me everywhere now.”
* * *
Lydia was waiting on the wall when I got home, horns and tail popped out, wearing the little black nightgown she had worn the night we met.
She gave me this placid look of invitation as I walked in, but I stopped her. “Yeah, I can’t describe how I’m feeling after a night in that fucking house, but it is definitely not horny. Can we just lie down for a while? I just learned there are way worse things I could have had a contract with.”