I'm the Bad Guy: Bigger, Badder, and Uncut: A Supervillain LitRPG Adventure Read online

  I’m the Bad Guy

  Bigger, Badder, and Uncut

  Simon Archer

  Contents

  For more great reads!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  3. Chester McFeeley

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  10. Tad Smittyson

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  13. Don John Perignon

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  20. Hen Tye-Dye Man

  21. Ambassador Anori Rimdalan

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  24. Mtdn

  Author’s Note

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  1

  “Do you think I’m going to talk?” The hero tried to spit in my face, missing me by a figurative mile as he strained against the thick shackles clanking against the table they were affixed to. “I won’t tell you anything. You won’t get a single peep out of me! You hear me, asshole! Nothing! NOTHING!”

  “What makes you think this is an interrogation?” I chuckled as I laid back in my swivel chair. “Seems a bit optimistic, don’t you think?”

  The hero, a ‘lovely and quiet’ fellow by the heroic name of ‘Undersea Man’ and the gamer tag of ‘B00GAB00GA234,’ didn’t quite have the stats to get out of the restraints I’d put him in on the giant operating table. Can’t say I was a fan of the purple scales on his outfit, though they did match the fins on his arms and legs. He looked like some kind of aquarium pet someone would keep instead of a goldfish, like a betta fish. I’d have stripped him of his costume so he couldn’t use any hidden gadgets, but he hadn’t had any hidden gadgets on him. All my scans and my big muscleman Joe’s pat-down proved that. Joe’s specific style of body searching technique tended to not so much find gadgets as it did render any gadgets very broken and crushed. This purple fish guy could only thank his lucky stars that he didn’t have any secret tools next to his bait and tackle.

  Not that it mattered, Undersea Man couldn’t get out of Nick’s restraints, anyway. Nick’s crafting skills had really gotten good since I’d recruited him, and now he never dealt in anything that didn’t exceed my expectations. I just hoped that they weren’t expensive. For all of his genius with gadgets and chemicals, the man had no sense of financial delicacy.

  Whatever, they were getting the job done for a level thirty-five hero with a strength score well over one hundred and a superstrength multiplier of five, which was a feat in and of itself. To accurately gauge that, one just had to remember that the average person got a strength score of five, with no multiplier, and a weightlifter might get away with a twenty. If he wasn’t getting out of them with his strength, I doubted there were many heroes around that could.

  “Do you have something for me, though?” I leaned forward, fingertips pressed together. “If you do, that’d be great. Sure would be nice to pass the time while we wait for the ball to get rolling.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Undersea Man had that heroic filter over his voice, forcing his vocal inflection all over the place in a robotic, manic pattern. “You’ve got me on this table, at your mercy, in a dark and scary room, and you’re not trying to interrogate me for information or something?”

  “Not in particular.” I popped my knuckles with a push of my palms outward. “You don’t really have anything that I’d want to know, or that I don’t know already.”

  “Then why are you keeping me alive?” he begged the question.

  “Oh, that’s a bit complicated,” I finished popping the rest of the joints in my fingers. “But you can be happy to know that I need you alive for the moment.”

  I sat down in my swivel chair, looking at the several monitors displaying several parts of the complex, all lined up in a huge square as they showed a dozen different rooms filled with saws, automatic laser turrets, pits of various mutated animals with laser guns strapped to their heads, spike pits, hidden pressure plates, and just about everything else I could have crammed into this mountain lair while still remaining on budget. Having full economic control of several large metropolitan areas by way of criminal extortion, said lair budget was big, thus the many traps.

  One of the screens showed a relatively empty room, save for a group of men in multicolored costumes of various levels of spandex, each with a different theme to them. The red one had a full spandex suit covered in white lightning bolts, while the blue guy covered most of his body with a dramatic, hooded cloak. The green guy’s spandex suit contoured to his weirdly toned muscles, making the commando pouches and grenade belts covering him from head to toe all the more warped on his body, and the yellow guy wore only yellow sweats to show off his over-swollen and tan muscles, like a swarm of mutant bees had stung him. By any obvious measure, they were exhausted, standing back-to-back at one end of the room, watching every corner of the empty room.

  Sitting opposite the color-coded men in the room and garnering their nearly undivided attention was a girl in a dark grey, sparkly unitard that left none of her slim figure to the imagination. Letting her hip-length red cape drape wherever it may fall on her supernatural throne, she lounged on a cloud-like floating structure that just sat in the air. She was blonde with a high ponytail that flared out like an explosion and a few loose hairs that dangled in very loose curls around her face. This girl was decidedly not tired and giggling. I pressed and held a button on the command console underneath all the screens.

  “Take a dive, Natasha,” I told the cloud girl through the communication device in her ear. “We need them to get further into the facility before they give up, or they’ll just turn around and call for reinforcements.”

  “Can do, sir!” Natasha answered back to me with that chipper attitude she always had.

  On the screen, the green hero with the pouches finally made a move. He took one of the grenades on his pouch and threw it at Natasha. The grenade landed in a flat, extended arm of the cloud that caught and curled around it before it exploded. Like a cartoonish stomach after swallowing dynamite, the cloudy burrito inflated for a moment before smoking out the sides, rendering the grenade completely useless.

  “Dive, Natasha.” I pressed the button again. “That means ‘pretend to lose the fight,’ in case you were curious.”

  “Oh, right!” Natasha’s bubbly giggle echoed through the intercom. “Sorry, sir, I forgot! I’ll fix that right away.”

  Suddenly, the lounging cloud reshaped itself into one of those dramatic fainting couches, like from a theater production, as the girl on the screen put her hand up to her head, twisting and turning in her chair as she let out her ‘dying breaths,’ inaudible through the monitors as I let go of the button. Her couch cloud shifted again, this time consuming her fully as she disappeared into a swirl of cloudy, cotton-candy-like mist that snaked its way into a hidden hatch that opened in the side of the room. We left the discount power ranger heroes alone to contemplate whether or not the grenade actually did anything.

  “Good god, they are taking their sweet time, aren’t they?” I returned my attention to
the captive. “Are you sure you Retributioner guys are ranked in the top fifty in the worldwide leaderboards? Or are these just your C-team cronies you send out when everyone else is busy? That must be the case. Just look at them. I bet that room smells like a high school bathroom right about now, all the sweat and piss. Gross. Remind me to wash that room after we’re done here. Actually, you know what, that won’t be a problem, nevermind.”

  “Chase after her, you morons!” Undersea Man strained against the metal cuffs once again, finding no power in his arms. “Or move, or something! What are you doing? You wait around to recover all of your power after every fucking fight! They’re going to fucking kill me!”

  “They can’t hear you,” I reminded him, “but I’m sure you knew that. How are you holding up? Still feeling anxious and loud? Feeling the psychological weight of your own mortality weighing on your shoulders as you slowly lose grip with your sense of control over yourself and your destiny? I’m sure that performance you just saw doesn’t bode well for your chances of leaving this place alive.”

  “If you don’t let me go right now,” the purple fish of a hero tried to threaten me, “when I eventually break out of this thing, me ripping your eyes out will be the best thing that ever happened to you!”

  “That doesn’t sound very good at all.” I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t like having my eyeballs removed, thank you very much. I think I’ll pass on that, if it’s all the same to you. Thanks, anyway, I guess.”

  “That’s the fucking point, you fucking ass!” Undersea Man was surely living up to his name, or rather what his name sounded like when you said it fast. “Everything else that’ll happen to you is going to be a thousand times worse than that! It’s a clever threat!”

  “Clever is stretching it a bit, don’t you think?”

  Undersea Man lifted his chest out as much as he could, still finding his arms and legs fully bound by the restraints. Like a dog at the end of a leash, he snapped at the furthest extent of his reach, and was painfully far away from anything that mattered.

  “Are those the guys that are going to do the bad things to me?” I pointed at the screen where the rainbow squad had finally started to move towards the room’s exit to the next one, and the traps that would await them. “Can’t say I believe they can get the job done. Not before Christmas, at this rate. Do you think they’ll like all the presents I’ve left for them? Ha! See, now that’s at least a little clever!”

  “Then I’ll fucking kill you myself!” He, once again, tried to break the cuffs holding his arms out, to literally no avail. “How are these so fucking strong?”

  “Custom order,” I answered. “I know a guy.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” The guy rolled his neck around the table. “Like, for real, who are you? You’re the weirdest villain boss I’ve ever seen in this game. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t follow.” I pretended not to know what he was talking about.

  “Look, I know that you’re the new hero hunter that showed up in Damax City.” He elaborated on his question. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “Isn’t that hero hunter myth?” I said, stifling a chuckle at my own rumored existence. He was absolutely right about his prediction, but there was no real proof of a connection between me and the legends surrounding my exploits.

  “There’s no way you’re just a secret event boss!” he continued, “the shit you’re doing is way too weird for that.”

  “How so?” I kept the conversation going, if only to entertain myself.

  “You caught me by surprise, for one.” The captive listed all the discrepancies in my mannerisms. “I didn’t even see you guys coming, and suddenly I’m being carted around in a fucking box I can’t break out of, then when I get out, this big-ass gorilla guy just slaps me a bunch, this other guy with wild hair and welder’s goggles points some Star Trek thing at me, and now I’m strapped to a table I can’t break out of! I’ve got a fucking high superstrength multiplier, man. There shouldn’t be anything I can’t break out of. Did you guys do something to me?”

  “I still don’t understand what your complaint is, my friend.” I leaned back in my chair. “So I have unorthodox friends and quality tools at my disposal. You can say that about nearly anyone.”

  “That’s the fucking thing!” Undersea Man was still as angry as ever. “Nothing about you should be ‘unorthodox’ if you’re just an NPC or a boss! And you fucking caught me while I was in the middle of my own guild hall! That’s a safe zone from unauthorized NPCs and enemies! I shouldn’t have triggered any event quests there!”

  “Bummer.” I clucked sarcastically. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m sure that whatever you’re upset about is completely unfair.”

  I had to hide a chuckle. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and he was completely right about the NPC protection in a guild hall. The thing is, that didn’t apply to player characters. Granted, there were still alarms and such that would go off if a hero player tried to sneak their way through someone else’s guild hall, but there were two big flaws in that security system. The first being that a sneaky player with enough stealth skills could avoid any cheap security measures. Secondly, any and all security measures, including NPC guards and cameras, looked for hero players, enemies, or NPCs.

  I was a new category altogether, the one and only villain player, rendering me completely invisible to guild hall security. As far as the security was concerned, I was a non-entity that the developers in charge of creating the guild hall systems and security didn’t anticipate. I basically walked in there, picked a path only watched by automated security, chloroformed this guy in the middle of whatever he was doing, and carried him out the same way I went in. Super easy, and just one of many ways I took advantage of being something of a malware entity inside the world’s most expensive computer.

  “How the fuck did you do it?” The purple hero flexed his muscles in vain. “What the hell is your deal? Are you a hero player? Is this your guild hall? What’s your beef with me? Is your beef with the Retributioners? If one of my guildmates did some kind of dick move to you, I’ll apologize on their behalf and kick them out of the guild. How about that? Will you let me go, then?”

  “In order,” I held up a finger for every question I was going to answer, “I’m not telling you how I did it. My ‘deal’ is that I wanted you captured, and here you are, so I’m pretty content with that. No, I’m not a hero. No, this is not a guild hall. Finally, it’s not so much a ‘beef’ as it is a ‘coincidental interest,’ if that makes sense. I’m mostly just trying to get a few things in place so I can make a business merger of sorts. And no, I won’t let you go until certain conditions are met.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He rested his head against the table as he gave up fighting the cuffs for a bit. “This has got to be some kind of guild hall or something! All of this shit that you’re doing is just too smart for the game to come up with. And the developers have been just sitting on their asses this whole time, not telling us jack shit about what’s going on about anything! I don’t care how ‘high-tech’ HunterKiller said their stupid new AI NPC programming was for DR games. You’re a fucking player.”

  “Did you forget to take your medications before you were captured?” I faked concern for his well being, mostly as a joke. “Now I just feel bad. What do you need? Antipsychotics? Stimulants? Depressants? I can probably get you hooked up with anything you--”

  “CUT THE SHIT!” Undersea Man was all worked up now. “What kind of cheat did you use to overcome the morality counter? If anyone else tried this, their stats would be in the fucking gutter! They wouldn’t have the sneak skills you’d need to get into a guild hall. So, I ask again. What. The Fuck. Is. Your Hack? I gotta know what it is. Come on. I’ll even pay you real dollars, man.”

  “I don’t know what any of that is,” I lied. “I just have you here, and now everything is going according to plan.”

  “No, o
kay, fucking no!” Undersea Man wouldn’t give up until he’d shot his loaded questions. “You can’t just be a part of the game, you fucking prick! This game’s been out for nearly half a year now, and at no point, in all of that time, has anything happened that even remotely came close to this kind of convoluted. What the fuck are you?”

  I could tell by the way his voice was wavering, even with the filters over it, that he didn’t believe what he was saying. He was just spouting excuses and explanations for whatever was happening to him. He was just like any other gamer I’d met that’d gotten a bit too big for his britches. They couldn’t just accept that they weren’t quite as on top of everything as they wanted to believe they were. This was just like when I crushed gamer saints back in the real world, except now I had much more freedom to do it.

  “Just a guy who’s got a plan that’s finally coming together,” I repeated myself to sound more programmed, turning to the control console again to hold another button down. “Minou, if you could take out one of the heroes for me. The red one seems particularly easy, but I’ll let you pick your favorite.”

  Watching the screens, I saw as the heroes attempted to cross over a massive vat of boiling acid in another room. The blue one in the cloak floated up in the air, simply deciding to bypass the lake of death by flying over it. However, as soon as he moved across to the fumes coming out of the lake, he immediately began to drift down into it, his flight being nullified by the noxious gas. The other heroes frantically reached out to catch him. The big guy in the yellow sweatpants barely grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, but not before the foot of the blue hero got caught in the vat, removing the boot, the sock, the skin, the meat, the veins, the tendons, and the bones of the foot from the leg as it dissolved into goo and joined the pool. What followed was probably screaming, from all parties, for various reasons.