System Supervillain, Chapter 137

Chapter 137 – Cold

In the end, Serafina’s spell was successful. At least somewhat. According to the System, the disease being cured had two effects. Unfortunately, those effects did not include all the undead just laying down and dying. The undead were still shambling around, but, as far as the System could tell me, they were no longer ‘infectious’.

That sounded small, but it was actually huge. One of the biggest problems with most ‘zombie apocalypse’ scenarios wasn’t killing zombies, so long as they were the slow-movers. They were actually pretty easy to take down, so long as you had decent gear, or offensive powers. The problem with zombies was that any bite, scratch, or blood splatter could potentially infect you. Worse, as what amounted to the apex of pursuit predators, they would wear you down over time, and the moment you made a mistake, or let yourself get cornered, it was all over.

But now, there was a wall around the city, offering safety to those who went in hunting the undead. Given the nature of zombies, the wall actually provided a safe platform for people to shoot from, and with the living drawing their attention, you wouldn’t even need to make trips past the wall, not until enough of the undead were taken care of that you started looking for stragglers who had been trapped in basements or the like. In other words, the Russians could hunt the undead at their leisure, instead of trying to out-endurance the undead.

There was some initial concern about whether the undead might be able to escape through the old subway platforms, but it turned out that the Gel-nak had found them early on, and collapsed them, to prevent any of their slaves from escaping. Even the Metro-2 system, which had been built in secret for the government to escape during a nuclear attack during the Cold War, had been collapsed. While the destruction of the lavish stations was unfortunate, no one complained too much, since it meant that the undead were contained.

But the Undead weren’t the only creatures behind the wall, which some were already jokingly calling the ‘New Iron Curtain’. There were also the mutated abominations. For whatever reason, the undead had been ignoring the mutants, despite the mutants being very much alive. Best guess was that the changes they had gone through made them ‘smell’ undead to the zombies, or something like that.

However, once they were hit with the Cleanse Plague spell, something happened. Good news (for them) was that they were still alive. Bad news was that they were still horribly mutated beings that looked like something out of that horror game franchise about the crazy guy trapped on a ship with a bunch of grotesque abominations that had once been people before an alien artifact changed everyone. Worse news was that they were no longer ‘hidden’ from the undead.

Even with my administrator access to the System, checking on those mutants was difficult, since I didn’t have names to search by. That meant I needed to get close enough that I could target them visually, but without having them, and all the zombies, start trying to turn my insides into outsides. Thankfully, being able to turn into my mist form saved me that trouble.

Basic Info

Name

Aliases

Belomestnova Natasha Valerievna

Height

1.64m

Weight

85.7 kg

Eyes

Black

Hair

None

Base Points

100

Total Spent

200

Max Disadvantages

100

Disadv. Used

100

XP Earned

0

XP Used

0

Looking over the woman’s info page through the System, I realized that this was not going to be a simple fix, if she, or any of the mutants, could be fixed at all. Going back, into her logs, I saw that, before the attack, she’d been at the ‘skilled normal’ level of power, with 25 base points and 25 points of disadvantages. If her previous skills were any indication, then she’d been a secretary. The fallout had created a full, three-layer Transform effect, affecting Body, Mind, and Spirit, and had quadrupled her total points in the process. Effectively, Natasha was gone, and the entity left behind was a near-mindless insane killing machine of flesh and bone. Which explained why her old name was now an alias, and she had no name any more.

The Russian heroes and villains had set up a base camp outside Balashikha, along with the military leaders who were taking control until the government could be reformed. Originally, the base camp had been where the defense against the Gel-nak had been coordinated from. Now, it looked over the Moscow Wall. I’d left Serafina there, while I went to scout the city, allowing her to spend some time healing wounds and the like. Not because I had to, but because it earned me good press with the Russians, and it made her happy to be able to use her abilities like that. And happy slaves didn’t try to rebel.

My appearance in the middle of the compound caused quite a stir. I was not as well-known here as in other places, since I didn’t work in Russia that much, before the System. In fact, I’d avoided the country for the most part, after an unfortunate ‘incident’ when I was just starting out. That incident had cost me two years, a prisoner and lab rat for a mad scientist who hoped to ‘graft’ powers onto members of the local Bratva, but it had boosted my powers substantially, and the way I eliminated the criminal underworld of Murmansk once I broke free had cemented my reputation as someone who took revenge to the next level.

Serafina was the first to my side, but several other supers moved my way. It was quiet for a moment, and then White Bear decided to be the first to break the silence. “Vell? How are things in ze city?”

“There’s good and bad,” I said, before describing what I’d seen. Most of the assorted heroes and villains were less than pleased at the news, not that I could blame them. “So, in short, the good news is that cleaning up the city can proceed at whatever pace you see fit. The bad news is that everyone inside the wall should be considered dead, even the mutated ones. You would be doing them a mercy by killing them.”

Иней (Hoarfrost in English), frowned. The Russian supervillainess was one of the respectable sort, in my opinion. An ice-type, like her name suggested, she was sometimes known as the ‘Queen of Siberia’, since she operated at will in the frozen territory, and none could stop her. She didn’t speak in English, but my cowl’s translator allowed us to understand each other. “So, even with your System powers, you can’t do anything for them?”

I shook my head. “The changes are too extensive. I can make minor alterations, without changing point totals. However, to ‘save’ the mutants inside the wall, I would essentially have to remake them from scratch. They would not be the people they were before, even if I wiped all the changes and put their points back how they were before the invasion. And such a major alteration would raise alarms within the System.”

Looking around at the people, I said, “It is like when Overlord took over Stalingrad during the War, and turned the people into cyborg slaves, implanting their brains in suits of iron to fight for him against their people. Except, this time, there isn’t even a brain in a jar. They are just gone.”

Everyone knew of that battle. It was one of the things that had led to Captain Canada putting together the Death Company, gathering supers of all types and all nationalities together, to forcibly put down the Axis supers, and their abominable creations. Their stated goal was to ensure that the Axis supers never felt safe performing their experiments ever again. And some of the things Death Company did to the Axis supers they caught got added to the Geneva Conventions along with the acts that caught their attention.

Kometa (or Comet) shook his head. The fire-type hero was typically a practical sort, and it showed in his suggestion. “Then perhaps the best thing to do is to just burn everything. Turn everything inside the city to ash. The landmarks and historic sites have already been destroyed by the fighting. If the people are no longer people, then there is nothing left to save. We burn everything, and rebuild from the ashes.”

Iskra (or Spark), the electric-based heroine from Omsk, nodded slowly. Her voice was heavy with regret. “We’ll need to clear out the rubble, anyways. Even if we clear out all the zombies and mutants above ground, there are going to be some trapped in basements and what is left of the Metro. We’ll have to clear all of it out before letting civilian workers in to rebuild. Might as well do it properly.”

Yad (Venom, in English) was a murder-for-hire kind of villainess, working throughout the country, normally. But people suspected her base was in Moscow. She’d been in St. Petersburg on a job when the Gel-nak invaded, apparently. Just finished the hit when the Gel-nak leader made his announcement.

Right now, she was looking like she’d been carved from stone. I’d seen people look like that, before. That was what someone looked like when they were desperately holding on to control, because otherwise they were going to completely lose it. If Moscow was her base, she probably had friends in the city, maybe family. At the very least, everything she owned in the city was completely gone. Even villains were still human, after all.

Her eyes met mine, and when she spoke, her voice was frosty enough to make a Russian winter feel like summer in the Sahara. “Iceblade, you are going to go hunting these aliens, yes? Going to their worlds and killing them until either there are none left, or this empire is completely gone?”

The question killed the other whispered conversations that had been going on, as people considered different plans for clearing out the area behind the wall. Now, all eyes were on me. And I noticed that Yad wasn’t the only one who had that dark look in her eyes.

Slowly, I nodded. “Yes, that is my intent. Though it won’t be tomorrow, or even this month. The Mechanics are going to be making me a ship, one that doesn’t require a couple hundred crew to run, and I’m not going to rush into action against the Gel-nak until I’ve learned what that ship can do. Just like you wouldn’t go using a new piece of kit on a job until you’ve practiced with it, and learned its strengths and weaknesses.”

Yad nodded. “That is fine. But when you go, I want in. My family lived in Moscow. My parents, my wife. Our son. I owe them a blood debt, and I will see it paid in full.”

I looked the villainess over, with her green and black costume. I considered what to say, or not say, for a moment, before saying, “The portal in Moscow connected to a planet in the Wolf 359 system, which the Gel-nak call Srusk. It is the same system where the legion that attacked Moscow was trained. According to information taken from their computers before they activated the failsafe, there were roughly ten million slaves taken through the portal, but they were expecting to cull four out of every five to remove ‘genetic instability’, and making it easier for them to ‘order’ the remaining breeding stock.”

The atmosphere was heavy, as everyone knew just what that meant. Still, I saw that Yad’s eyes didn’t waver. “My ship, when I get it, will not have room for that many passengers. However, I would be willing to carry a device to plant in the Srusk system, allowing people from Earth to ‘visit’ an alien world. Perhaps a group of supers, with some ‘tourists’ from the Russian military, eager to show the Gel-nak your appreciation? After all, I just want the Empire to fall. It doesn’t have to be my hand that slits every throat.”

I looked out over the crowd, and smiled behind my mask. Their eyes were eager, hungry, and full of deadly purpose. Heroes and villains alike, they all wanted their piece of the Gel-nak, and probably weren’t going to ask Geneva about whether the conventions applied to nonhumans. I had a feeling they were going to make the lizards rue the day they ever heard of Earth.