System Supervillain, Chapter 136

Chapter 136 – Moscow

Fabricator sighed as she slumped back against the side of the last segment of the massive wall she’d spent all day creating. When she’d heard about the situation in Moscow, she immediately started looking for a flight. Unfortunately, alien invasions cut off most commercial flights to the affected areas. Most businesses did not want to go sending their pilots, or their expensive planes, into those kinds of situations.

Thankfully, her years of work repairing the aftereffects of natural disasters and superhuman battles had earned her a lot of favors and good will from different governments, and super-teams. Frontlinie, the German government’s national super-team, offered her a ride on their private jet. The jet looked like a normal luxury business jet, like corporate executives around the world might take, but Technikerin, the team’s gadgeteer, had built it from scratch, and to her specs, so it was far from normal. As evidenced by how the jet went supersonic moments after takeoff, completing the 1600 kilometer flight from Berlin to Moscow in just under fifty minutes from takeoff to landing.

True to his word, Белый Медведь (White Bear, in English) met her at the airport, along with several members of the Russian army. The country was under martial law at the moment, since the entire government had been taken out. But that wasn’t her problem. She was a builder, not a fighter.

They hadn’t bothered with pleasantries. A quick thank you to the pilots, and she’d been off. The longer they waited, the more likely that some of those undead would escape the city, and then they’d be a problem that might not ever stop.

White Bear had some good news, at least, as they drove towards the place where she’d start the barrier work. In heavily accented English, the burly Russian told her how the animals looked to be unaffected. “Ze ones caught in ze blast are still dead, da? But no zombie dogs, no mutant birds. Ve don’t know vhy, but ze scientists think it is a System thing.”

“Probably right,” she’d nodded. “I’m going to assume that the blast was treated as a pure damage effect, with the fallout being a layered Transform, with two layers, one affecting the living, and the other targeting the dead. The Transform effects probably were defined to only target humans and aliens, and their corpses.”

White Bear nodded. “Zis matches what ze scientists say. But it does not change ze fact that ve must see to it that ze dead of Moskva do not trouble ze rest of ze country, no?”

And so, they’d gotten to work. She’d managed to piece together a device with her powers that Transformed air into reinforced concrete walls. However, even with dumping her entire ‘variable power pool’ into the device, there was only so much she could do with each use. Each activation of the device cost her 9 END, and made a section of wall twenty meters in width, and three in height. The next use would add on to the wall, and so on.

Before the System, she would have easily been able to create a wall around the entire city, no questions asked. Now, she had to go step by step around the city, completing over six THOUSAND repetitions! Even without taking breaks to recover her END, or worrying about zombies and mutants coming around to investigate, that was still over five hours of constant work, given her SPD.

Thankfully, Раптор (the Russian word for Raptor) was on hand. The flying villain traded a day’s worth of flying around the ruins of Moscow for blanket amnesty for all his previous crimes. With him up there playing bait for the zombies and mutants who sensed a living being, the work on the wall was able to proceed without too much trouble.

“Here,” White Bear said, kindly, as he offered her a canteen of water.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the canteen and taking a long drink. “This would have been so much easier before the System. My powers are mostly the same, as far as variability, but the damn System limits how much I can change at a time. Especially when creating something from nothing like this.”

“Da, I’ve felt much ze same. If half of ze old Soviet defenses had still been online, ze krokodily would not have had so easy a time. Zere were many old machines left over from ze old days that ze smart people had not yet figured out how to turn back on, or make work with zis system. A city shield that blocks nuclear missiles was a low priority compared to ensuring zat ze trains kept running, and ze government systems did not crash.”

“I didn’t know that Moscow had a shield system.”

“Untested. No nuclear var to properly try it on, da? But even if it vould not have stopped ze krokodily, it vould have slowed zem down, I think. Maybe enough that leaders could have escaped, and ze heroes could have put up proper resistance.”

“Perhaps. I wonder why the aliens acted so differently in Moscow? None of the other invasion points got blasted like this. They wanted to capture slaves, after all.”

“I have an answer for that, actually.”

Both their heads turned as a male voice surprised them. Standing next to their car were two new people, both in costume. But both were easily recognizable to anyone who was familiar with the world of heroes and villains. Iceblade and Serafina, two members of Devastation.

White Bear moved between her and the two villains. “Vat are you doing here, Iceblade? And how did you get here without us sensing you?”

The villain just chuckled, wrapping one arm around the angel’s waist, possessively. “How I got here is simple. I have certain abilities within areas connected to the System, properly paid for with points, of course, that allows me to teleport to different areas. Web Mistress has been keeping track of your efforts to contain and quarantine what remains of Moscow. I decided to wait until now to show up, because I did not want to interfere or distract from the important work you were doing.

“As for why I’ve come? Unfortunately, despite having access to information that others do not, I am neither all-seeing, nor all-knowing. And I definitely do not have the same kind of foresight that Sibila in Rio has. Otherwise, I would have chosen a different method of attack when I went about keeping my promise to hunt the lizards who did not surrender to those more merciful than I.”

Fabricator sighed as she pulled herself to her feet. “Let me guess, you were in the middle of some sort of attack, and the Gel-nak decided to set off a failsafe device?”

“Indeed. Unfortunately, by the time I learned that there was a failsafe device, it was too late to stop it. I had enough time to slip away, obviously, but there was no stopping the failsafe in the few seconds I had before detonation. But there weren’t any other humans left alive under the shield, so I wasn’t going to stop the enemy from destroying themselves. It wasn’t until Bear, here, came on the forums that I learned there was an ‘unfortunate side effect’.”

“And naturally, you did not bother looking to see vhether your actions had consequences, no?” White Bear said, grumpily. Well, Fabricator couldn’t blame him for being put out, given the situation. But still, she understood that a villain like Iceblade had no responsibility to go looking at whether things that weren’t his fault had consequences.

Iceblade ignored the jab entirely. “Since, from what Oracle said on the Guild forums, it sounds like the zombies spread as some kind of virus, I thought I would bring a healer around, to see if it might not be possible to cure the undead back into death, and see whether the feral mutants might be turned into something other than abominations. Serafina here has a wide-area Transform that heals disease. But we haven’t tested it, so I decided that it was best to wait until the city was properly walled off, just in case it caused everyone afflicted to go running in all directions to try and escape the radius.”

White Bear growled at being ignored, but Fabricator put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. “I agree, it makes sense to wait until the barrier was complete before making any tests. Especially if there is a chance that the creatures inside might make a break to try and escape, all at once.”

“Fine, I admit zat it is ze best choice. But vat about zis healing? Vill it really help ze people of Moskva?”

Serafina shook her head sadly. When she spoke, it was in a beautiful voice, full of sadness. “I do not know, and would not offer false hope. I can only promise that I will try, and do what I can. I do not believe that it will return any of the zombies back to life, but it may allow them to return to death’s embrace, and give the mutants some solace. Beyond that, I cannot say. I only recently recovered this power from what I had before the System, and have not tested it against something like this within the System’s power.”

“And vat do you get out of zis, Iceblade? You are not one to do things for free.”

Iceblade simply shrugged. “I get the same thing I got by sending Stolen Victory and Titania to intercept the battleship that was headed for Cairo. A bit of good press, like every villain who either helped out or stayed out of the way during the invasion. Keeping my pets happy because they get to do something they want to do. Oh, and not having an undead apocalypse ruining the planet I keep all my stuff on, and where all my pets and children happen to be living. There are some things that do transcend the lines between ‘hero’ and ‘villain’, and not wanting to live as the protagonist in a horror movie is one of them.”

The man laughed at the look of incredulity on her and White Bear’s faces. “Sure, there are villains who are perfectly fine being the ‘monster’ or ‘slasher’ in a horror movie. I’ve played that role, myself, just recently, as I hunted Gel-nak room-by-room through their ships. But playing as the protagonist? Especially when you’re talking about a zombie movie? Anyone who looks forward to that needs their head examined.”

Fabricator shook her head. “Going back to what you said earlier. You mentioned that you knew why the aliens who attacked Moscow acted differently from the others?”

“Oh, yes. Web Mistress ripped a lot of information from the Gel-nak computers while we were planning how to take down the Emperor. The Shipleader in command of the destroyer was a more aggressive sort, the kind of person who decides a bit of shock and awe was the proper way to soften a target up for the assault troops. Plus, blasting the center of the city made for a convenient landing place.

“As for the ground forces, they belonged to the 173rd Planetary Assault Legion. They were some of the Empire’s elites, who trained on an icy world called Srusk 4, despite being cold-blooded. Only the strongest survived the training to be part of the legion, and their armor was specially made, including better protections against energy damage, and integrated flamethrowers in their armor, allowing them to use fire attacks in close quarters without risk of friendly fire. That also made them some of the most zealously loyal troops in the Empire.”

“So, ze krokodily sent zeir best to fight us, and zat is why they acted differently from ze others?” White Bear asked. Iceblade’s nod in reply seemed to mollify the big man slightly. “Vell, at least zey knew to send zeir best to take on Mother Russia. Still, ve need to deal with zese zombies, da?”

“Indeed,” Serafina nodded. “The spell I have to cure disease in an area is called ‘Cleanse Plague’. I will need to channel it for a while in order to be sure if it is working or not, but the spell has a radius of twenty-four kilometers.”

“Really?” Fabricator asked, shocked.

“Yes, I developed it back during the 1300s, when a plague spread out of Asia along trade routes. With it, I was able to cleanse cities one at a time, even curing the pests that carried the infection. Unfortunately, I could not prevent reinfection, and travel from place to place was still slow, in those days, so it was all I could do to ensure that Italy remained mostly free of the plague. The pope was most grateful, and gave me a residence in the Vatican as payment.”

“Well,” Iceblade said, clapping his hands. “Let’s see if a spell that impressed the pope can take on magical alien bullshit, or whether we’ll need to find some other solution. At the very least, the problem is contained, for now, so we have a bit of time to properly look for other solutions, if need be.”