Incandescent Guardians Read online

  It was a shame, because at least I wouldn’t have to lie to her or appear to flake for no reason. Of course, I had no idea if she was serious about her flirting and seeming attraction to me. She could just be naturally playful. Every woman was different that way.

  She asked, “Anything going on tonight?” changing the subject.

  I shook my head, “I haven’t heard anything. I just needed to clear my head.”

  Sky scoured social media and news sites for information on supervillain movements in and out of the city, as well as breakouts. In truth I didn’t randomly patrol all that often, it was too dangerous, and if the registered superheroes saw us we’d have to jet.

  She sighed, “Damn, and I got all dressed up when I saw you were out.”

  I laughed, “Sorry. The answer to your question is yes. Apparently, I’m a flake. Do I have any competition for your electrifying company?”

  She shook her head and grinned, “Nope. I’ve tried dating, but none of them measure up to you, Mythic.”

  I took that as a flirty dodge, she didn’t want to share her tragic social life any more than I did.

  Sky interrupted through the suit communication device, “Elegant prodigy has been spotted downtown fighting Frostwave, along with another S-class supervillain I don’t recognize with energy bolts. She’s in trouble.”

  Elegant Prodigy was a mad scientist type and another vigilante. Usually mad scientists had no business in battle, even the amazing weapons and protections they could make were usually easily overpowered by supers running on meta-energy. Until they learned how to harness meta-energy themselves for their devices, they were just too weak. It didn’t stop her from trying though, and she did have some creative inventions that used her more powerful opponent’s power against them in clever ways. But when facing two at once she was almost always overwhelmed.

  Her shields for instance. No shields were strong enough to stop a super punch, not shields powered by non-meta-energy power sources anyway. But her shields didn’t try to stop the punch, they rerouted the kinetic energy that it absorbed into one of her weapons.

  I grimaced, “Ele’s got herself in a jam again.”

  I shot off to the south with Lady Lightning right on my tail.

  Elegant Prodigy was easy to pick out. She was five foot six with an extremely lithe and willowy body, except for her generous C-cups which were delightfully and obscenely large for her slight frame. She had straight and long fine chestnut hair, a medium reddish-brown color, with warm brown eyes. She wore a full-body skintight black catsuit and black ankle high boots. Around her waist and strapped to the suit were a ton of silver colored accoutrements that were devices of some kind or another, giving her flight, shielding, and various kinds of weapons. The mask she wore was also silver, and I suspected it had a HUD and control system that put my space suit to shame.

  She was sexy as hell by appearance, with a soft smoky voice, but she was also painfully shy, brainy, and seemed to have no idea how to interact socially with people. A lot of mad scientists were like that. She was a friend of sorts, but unlike Lady Lightning who obviously loved the teasing banter she wasn’t one I flirted with at all.

  I’d tried once, and all it’d done was fluster her. Since I wasn’t an asshole, I didn’t do it again.

  Frostwave was in a light blue and white suit, and his powerset revolved around cold and ice. He didn’t have flight, but he could ride a platform of ice that looked vaguely like a surfboard at a respectable speed. At the moment he was doing exactly that, riding his ice-board in a circle and firing frost down on Elegant Prodigy’s head. Or Ele as I called her, for short.

  At the same time, the second Supervillain was keeping her boxed in with super speed and energy bolts that blasted her in random directions every second or two to keep her under Frostwave’s assault. Her shield seemed to be doing okay for the moment, but she was obviously having a harder time melting ice with her shield than it was at absorbing pure energy. She was also being battered far too wildly to go on the offensive with one of her weapons.

  Lady Lightning said, “I’ll take the newbie.”

  I got that.

  She’d never said as much, but with electricity as her main power she was obviously vulnerable to water-based supers, such as Frostwave. In the two years I’d known her she’d avoided anyone with powers like that, just as I’d avoided any supervillains with gravity or pure magic when I could.

  She flashed brightly and disappeared, only to reappear on the ground. Lightning blasted out of her raised hands and nailed the energy supervillain right in the face. The supervillain running at super speed tripped as his body shook, and he face cratered into the ground and slid into a car crushing the side in.

  Ouch, that had to hurt, partial invulnerability or not.

  At the same time, I waved my hands like a magician as I yelled out the Latin phrase for fire blast. Ice supervillains were almost always vulnerable to fire. I also used my telekinesis to increase the oxygen content over my hand and ignited a ball of plasma in my hands. Further, I used my telekinesis to change the color of the flames to deep purple. A lot of what I did was simply a show, to cover the truth. Then I pushed that plasma with my mind at great speed. It flashed across the distance lighting up the night, and then exploded as I released it from my control as it hit him.

  His board was turned to steam, and he started to fall with a loud curse. It reformed below him before he hit the ground, his shield taking the brunt of the blast. He was off balance and extremely weakened however, and when I waved my hands again and sent a blast of wind straight down, he was pancaked into the cement of the street.

  Elegant Prodigy had recovered from her battering, and she fired two devices similar to the cuff restraints the government had for supervillains. It wasn’t something that would work before the supervillain had been beaten down and their powers temporarily drained, but Lady Lightning and I weren’t weak.

  In truth, I had no clue how strong I was, I’d never failed to do anything I’d put my mind to doing with telekinesis. I was rated as an SP-Class, special with a deeper power well, but I’d started to sandbag the government tests when I saw the concern on the faces of the testers.

  SE was special class for an energy wielder, and SF was special class with a special force. Meaning that the person had a power that was absolute. Like true invulnerability was extremely rare. Perhaps I was SP-Class, I wasn’t sure. The only thing more powerful than that was Titan, and there’d only been two others in that class. The White Witch in Silver City, and the supervillain Earth Magician who had destroyed cities all over the world, including Washington D.C. two years ago, before he was finally stopped by White Witch and taken into custody.

  Below the special designations, was simply A-Class to D-Class. A-class had four powers while D-class had one power, usually powers that were the standard package of strength, speed, flight, and partial invulnerability. Unfortunately, the last few years those were growing less and less common. Most sixteen-year-old’s who went through a quickening got those powers, but with titans and more and more of the s-class supers quickening later in life, the stronger possibilities were sinking into the psyche of the humans in our planet. As a result, it was just a matter of time until another Titan came along.

  I flew down to join Elegant Prodigy and Lady Lightning.

  “Hey Ele, nice night?”

  Elegant Prodigy replied haltingly, in a voice that was somehow both smoky and awkward at the same time, “Hello Mystic, Lady Lightning, thanks for the assist. The authorities are on their way.”

  Lady Lightning asked, “What happened.”

  Elegant Prodigy shook her head, “Frostwave was robbing the bank down the street. With the other in normal clothes I had no idea Frostwave picked up a partner, or I’d have called for help. I don’t… do well against more than one at a time.”

  Yeah, I was terrified one day I’d find her dead. That night wasn’t the first time I’d saved her life, or Lady Lightning’s for that matter
. Still, I swallowed the suggestion that she should stop doing what she was doing. We all, the three of us, understood why we were doing it. We were all superheroes at heart, to stand by and do nothing while people were hurt or killed wasn’t something we could accept, not when we had the power to stop it.

  We just wanted to keep our families safe too.

  I said, “You know, we could make it official?”

  Lady Lightning smirked, and teased in a sultry almost hopeful voice, “Make what official?”

  I laughed, “Temptress. No, seriously. We help each other out all the time, but we depend on rumors and searching information networks to find out if one of us is in trouble. That’s inefficient. We could be the first vigilante super team in the U.S.”

  It was kind of crazy, vigilante superheroes were loners, and all of us were extremely careful in concealing our identities. The idea of creating closer ties was dangerous, but it’d also make me feel a lot better. I could watch their backs, and they could watch mine.

  She gaped at me, “You’re serious?”

  I nodded.

  Elegant Prodigy said shyly, “I could build a private closed communication system, but you’d both have to trust me that I won’t make it trackable. Unless you activated an alert that you were in trouble, then it could report where you are.”

  That was true, if she wasn’t trustworthy, she could track the device, and easily figure out who we were in real life as soon as we went home, or to our public jobs.

  “I trust you to keep it limited. I’d trust both of you with the truth, if it wasn’t for the damned government telepaths, and I know you both understand why we really can’t extend that trust. Point is, we’ve all had close calls the last couple of years that could’ve been avoided or at least dealt with quicker.”

  The short wistful look in Lady Lightning’s cerulean eyes told me she knew that, and more than that, it told me she did like me after all. I was fairly sure we’d have been dating if it wasn’t for that risk. That look wasn’t her usual flirty playfulness at all. Or… maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to.

  Not that it mattered, it was impossible.

  Still, it tempted me to release the tight hold I had on my empathy, to see what she was really feeling in that moment. But I stopped myself. That power more often than not just made things more confusing when it came to relationships. Women often felt attraction they never followed up on for one reason or another, and that would quickly turn to anger if a presumption was made. There was also no proof any emotions I did feel from her would be about me anyway.

  Empathy sometimes helped in a fight, but I hardly ever let it off its leash otherwise.

  Besides all that, it would make me feel like a creep using it on my friends. In a fight was one thing, but it felt like an invasion of privacy in any other situation.

  Lady Lightning said, “I’ll think about it. It’s a good idea. Shit, the bitch is coming.”

  I looked up to see a glowing white light approach at high speed. The bitch she was referring to was none other than Venus, the premier registered superhero in the city. Her real name was Amanda Davis, and she was the city’s sweetheart. She was also a snooty bitch.

  Don’t take my word for it, the two ladies at my side agreed, and I liked powerful woman as a rule.

  She’d quickened at sixteen, and I could only imagine at the time she’d had an exaggerated and slightly twisted view of beauty back then, and also didn’t like how she looked. The quickening had greatly changed her appearance. Sumptuously and exquisitely beautiful barely even touched upon the truth. She had long curly shiny black hair that hung in ringlets down her bodice, and lovely green eyes. She had a soft and angelically beautiful face, and pouty sexy lips and thick eyelashes.

  Her body was sumptuous and waspish even at her generous five foot eight height, with rounded double D breasts, a sexily rounded ass, and the valley of her waist was mouthwateringly thin. She was right on the edge of caricature, without going over the edge, but I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t the most beautiful and sexy woman I’d ever seen.

  Too bad she was such an arrogant bitch. Although, I imagined after seven years of being hit on by every man in sight, I could almost understand her reaction to men and even some women after growing up and figuring out beauty wasn’t everything after all.

  Her outfit as the Goddess Venus was a skintight bright white suit, that revealed the creamy skin of her hips as it flared up as it went around her. It left her toned and deliciously long legs completely bare, much like a leotard, and showed almost half of her vast cleavage. The rest of her outfit was all jewelry, she had thin armbands of twisted gold that spiraled from her wrist to elbows, and gold up-swept wings on her shoulders. She also wore a matching gold necklace, dangling earrings, and gold rings with rose quartz love stones.

  Her powerset was flight, and she could fly at Mach speeds which was rare. She also had variable strength energy blasts greater than the norm, as well as a shield that made her invulnerable to all but shadow energy. The final power was the one that urged the press to dub her Venus, the goddess of love. She could mesmerize anyone she could get to look into her eyes, except those with protection from mental affects like my own. It didn’t just make people compliant to her wishes, it made them follow her around like love-sick puppies until she withdrew her power.

  Most of her super fights were extremely short.

  I said, “Go, we’ll talk later.”

  My mental powers made me immune to Venus’s mesmerizing power, as did one of the devices on Elegant Prodigy, but Lady Lightning wasn’t immune at all. The two of them really hated each other, and they had a twitter war going on. Venus was fast, but not nearly fast enough to catch lightning.

  Lady Lightning disappeared in a flash.

  The black-haired beauty landed with a scowl on her face. Her naturally soft and soothing voice was twisted with annoyance as she spoke.

  “I should take you two in as well.”

  I smirked in challenge, “You can always try… again.”

  Venus was extremely powerful, perhaps the second most powerful super in the city.

  I wasn’t the infamous Mythic for nothing.

  She sighed, “Eyes up here, asshole,” and she kicked Frostwave in the face while releasing an energy bolt that knocked his ass out.

  She scowled my way.

  I held up my hands with a grin, “What? My eyes are at eye level.”

  I could see all her wonderful assets using my peripheral vision just fine. Honestly, she was a total bitch, I wouldn’t touch her if I was paid, but she was still nice to look at.

  She snorted, “I’ve got this, you can both leave. I’ll leave Prodigy’s restraints in the usual place, once they’re in the Supermax. You know, the place you’re going to go one day.”

  The registered supers would try to take us in if we were vulnerable, but she knew I’d just teleport us out if she tried.

  I rolled my eyes, “Always a pleasure, Venus.”

  Both Elegant Prodigy and I took off into the sky, both of us silent until we had several blocks and buildings between Venus and us.

  She said, “I’ll work on that communication system. I think I can add secure data access as well that will disguise all of our locations. We’ll still need that part to find the supervillains, if not each other. I don’t think Lady will say no, and even if she does…” the stunningly lithe and beautiful woman trailed off uncertainly.

  It truly was a mystery, she was far too hot to be so nervously shy, but maybe that was just part of the package when meta-energy turned you into a Brainiac.

  I smiled, “Yes, we should still do it even if she says no. I agree with you though, she won’t say no once she’s thought it through. How would the data part work?”

  She said, “I’ll make three wireless ear pieces, and some wireless data ports for internet access. I’m not sure how you do it now, but a lot of our kind get busted from data tracking.”

  It was true enough, all those specific
searches for supervillain activity left trails behind.

  I shrugged, “My A.I. does crazy internet things, VPNs and the like. So far it seems to be working to keep the government from tracking me down.”

  She asked curiously, “An A.I.? I have one too, we could put them both on the system and let them share data. Even send out alerts to all three of us.”

  “That… sounds fantastic. As long as it can’t be traced. I don’t want to find you either, although I don’t plan on ever getting caught.”

  She giggled, then there was an awkward silence.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make it untraceable. Just don’t forget to turn your GPS off when you’re done patrolling. Even then, I’ll have my A.I. scrub any data from mistakes like that, before I see it, but it’s a point.”

  I nodded, “What will be the range on the system?”

  She said, “Planetary. Further than that really, and untraceable and impossible to intercept or jam. It’s not radio.”

  I shook my head a little amazed, if she was ever caught, she’d be working for the government, not in a jail cell.

  “Team name?”

  She said, “I’ll give it some thought, but we should wait for Lady Lightning. Give me a week if I don’t see you until then.”

  I nodded, “Katie’s pub next Friday night?”

  It was an Irish bar on Wabash. We’d gone there a couple of times after a big takedown, but we’d stopped after going the third time and almost getting caught. There was almost no point anyway, since we couldn’t share our real lives with each other. I was also sure Lady Lightning would show up once a few pictures of us were posted on Facebook and Snapchat. Same way she found me earlier that night.

  She nodded jerkily, and then waved in an awkward way that was adorable.