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

  As the party began to deliberate, then argue, and finally break apart into separate corners of the platform they all shared, I sat back and laughed at their misfortunes. The red one thunked his head against a wall, dramatically resting against the side of it. Before he could do anything else, the wall opened up, and a very feline-like woman with raven-black hair and a black suit that couldn't have hugged her hourglass figure any harder if it was a corset emerged. She quickly snatched the red hero in her claws, pulling him into the panel that closed behind them. The other heroes hadn’t noticed the red hero or his lightning bolts leave, but when they noticed that he was gone, general panic returned to the group. They huddled back together, bickering, before fiddling with some kind of device that the green commando hero spoke into.

  “Sir, they’ve called in for backup.” A woman’s voice called in over the coms. “Yomura’s given the alert a wider audience by bypassing the ‘Do Not Disturb’ function that you were talking about. We should expect a lot of company soon from the Retributioners.”

  “Goddamnit, finally!” I stood up from the chair and pressed a few other buttons on the console. “Come to the center admin room as soon as you can, Kate. Fix any of the automated defenses that you can on the way. That goes for everyone else. Switch out any broken parts with the replacements and get as many guns and traps back to functioning order as possible.”

  “Of course, sir,” Kate responded, ending the conversation.

  “Yippy Kay Yay!” Natasha chipped in with her explosive voice.

  “At once, my master.” A third voice, the sultry Minou Rouge, confirmed as well.

  “You sound relieved.” Undersea Man didn’t like my tone, watching me move about the command console. “You’re about to be swarmed by every last Retributioner that’s awake. I’m telling you right now, we’ve got Australians, Koreans, and a shitton of insomniacs! This place is gonna get fucked up before you can say ‘I shouldn’t have fucked with the Retributioners!’”

  “Well, if you were listening to the woman that just spoke,” I finished up the sequence that I was working with, moving over towards the side of the room, “you’d know that I specifically had the call sent out to more people than it originally would. So, even the people who aren’t playing right now will see that there’s an emergency going on, and that their guildmaster is in trouble. Meaning that more people will be here than even you could bring here.”

  “Wait…” He tried ever so hard to put the pieces together, thinking with his face as I moved to the wall, pressing my hand on a panel that began to glow. “You want them all to come here? Why? They’ll kill you! This game has permadeath! You’ll have to start over from level one!”

  “Isn’t all death permadeath?” I told him, “it’s a bit strange to mention it like that? You heroes really are an odd sort.”

  “Why are you still playing dumb?” My insistence baffled him until his eyes widened like they were about to pop out of his skull. “Oh, fuck, are you not actually a player after all? Are you, like, a boss villain who’s somehow aware that you’ll eventually respawn or something, and you’ve gained some kind of sentience? Oh, man, this must be the new AI shit that HunterKiller was talking about? Fuck, this shit would be so cool if you hadn’t pissed me off so much!”

  Now he was going with the AI story, after just saying that the HunterKiller AI was a hoax? Not that I was going to get worked up over it. Whatever helped him cope with his inevitable in-game death wasn’t any skin off my nose, so I decided to just leave it.

  “I mean, I’d be more worried about dying.” I shrugged. “But, you know, we all have different priorities, I suppose.”

  As I moved my hand away from the wall, a section of it telescoped into the adjacent wall, revealing a pod with four leather seats in it. I took a seat, stretching my legs and rolling my neck as I waited for the others to get here.

  Not a few moments later, Natasha came swirling in on her cloud as she burst through the doors opposite of my pod inlet. She stepped down from it, letting the clouds absorb into her body and disappear as she skipped over to me.

  “I could have taken those guys, you know!” Natasha jumped down on my lap, bouncing a bit as she settled down. “Why did you make me go away and then let Minou kill one of them?”

  “Because you were doing too good of a job of scaring them off.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “That’s not what I was going for. You did great, though, excellent work making them work for it. Now get in your seat. We’re about to leave.”

  “Can I wait here until the others get here?” Natasha wrapped her arms around my neck and sank her head under my chin.

  Just as she said that, two girls walked into the room. One of them was the catwoman in the tights from before, Minou Rouge, while the other was a girl with fiercely red hair, fluffed and spiked at the top with shaved sides. She wore a leather biker’s jacket that didn’t quite reach her waist, with sleeves that didn’t quite reach her elbows. Underneath that, she had a leather jumpsuit on, and she had scars on her neck like she’d gotten in a fight with a bear and won.

  “Dang it.” Natasha got up with a depressed stomp, clomping her way over to her seat in the pod. “Did you guys ever fix any of the guns and stuff?”

  “The heroes hardly damaged them,” Kate remarked. “Were they programmed on a timer? Or a motion sensor? Yomura did some good work.”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Now, get in before the other Retributioners get here. This place is going to get a bit more hectic once they trigger the alarm.”

  “Do we not want to take him with us?” Minou Rouge mentioned. “What if he was listening in on our conversations? He could expose our plans to the other heroes.”

  “Oh, he already knows everything,” I told them as Kate and Minou Rouge buckled themselves into the other seats. “Just without any context. It’ll drive him mad trying to piece it all together. It’s not like it changes what’s going to happen, though.”

  “Can you not harvest his organs like you’ve done with the other heroes?” Kate pointed out. “It seems like a waste to leave a perfectly good set of ‘research materials’ lying around here unused.”

  “Eh, he’s not the right type of hero I want for my research,” I explained. “He’s a cyber hero, and I’ve had more than enough of those. I need some bio or mystic heroes for once, and some powerful ones at that. I’ve got enough lowbrow heroes stored up to choke a family of blue whales.”

  “What?” Undersea Man shouted. “What are you talking about? You’re going to kill me? Are you gonna activate some kind of contraption from a safe distance to pull me apart?”

  “Something to that effect.” I pressed a few buttons on the console beside me. “It’s more of a self-destruct feature for the whole facility than just one machine for you. I mean, the results will be similar, but the technicality of the function is simply to blow this mountain off the map.”

  “Oh, fuck!” The purple Retributioner still couldn’t break out of his binds, though he desperately wanted to more than ever now. “How much time do I have? You’ve got to tell me that, at least!”

  “It goes off when all your guildmates get here.” I pressed the final few buttons as the wall began to close once again. “Thanks for being so helpful in destroying your whole guild at once.”

  “YOU MOTHERFUCK--!” was all I heard before the door closed entirely, and our pod closed all the way.

  The pod turned itself around, zooming through the tunnel as lights of the fluorescents that lined it danced around. Eventually, we made it to the automated plane at the end of the tunnel as the pod rested into the special slot built just to dock with it. I unclamped my seat alongside my girls and stepped into the plane, letting the door close behind us. The jet plane took off out of the hanger as soon as we all buckled into the plane seats, the hanger door having already opened, letting us travel through the air at ridiculous speeds. At over a thousand miles per hour, we zoomed through the air, heading to our next destination.

&nb
sp; “Good work, girls,” I said as we reached cruising altitude and speed. “That went off almost without a hitch. We’re just about ready to get our next goal.”

  “Does that mean you’ll eat me out now?” Natasha’s wide eyes unsettled me. “We did good, right?”

  “Um, there was never a conditional--”

  “Me too!” Kate raised her hand, as if this was grade school. “I want to be eaten out, too!”

  “You can always just ask--”

  “Master, may I also be eaten out?” Minou tried to sit politely, but her wiggling butt in her chair gave way to her growing need. “I must make a request as soon as possible.”

  “Yes! Geez!” I put my hands up as the girls brought themselves closer. “Why do you think I had a bed put in an emergency escape plane?”

  “Too long!” Natasha laid down on the floor, spreading her legs open. “Do it here!”

  “Have we forgotten?” I knelt beside her, picking her up and lifting her over my shoulder as she giggled madly. “We do things on my time, my way.”

  That was all the prompting that Kate and Minou needed to run straight to the back of the plane, throwing open the door to the bed in the back. As they stripped their clothes off faster than a peel off a banana, I carried Natasha over to the room, throwing her onto the bed as the girls got to tearing her clothes off of her as well.

  Was I a bad guy for loving what I saw right now?

  2

  A couple of hours of flight time later, each of my girls had finally fallen asleep, thoroughly exhausted and resting off a hard day’s work. I, on the other hand, didn’t have time for anything so frivolous as sleeping. My real body back in that mysterious warehouse was getting more sleep than I would need for the rest of my life, and I couldn’t waste a single moment here in the game if I was going to bring this world to heel like I was tasked with by whoever was behind those messages. Unfortunately for my workaholic state of mind, there wasn’t much else for me to do at the moment except check the nearest reflective surface for my home screen and see how everything was holding up.

  Nice and handy, this home screen. I could check everything about my growing empire literally from here, including the cities and city districts I had control over, and even stuff as miniscule as the individual members of my organization. They spared no detail, from their stats to their loyalty to me, measured in percentages. There weren’t going to be any hostile coups or double agents as long as I kept tabs on who entered my organization and why, and made sure they all remained firmly loyal. Thanks to some iron-fisted command and some easily fulfilled promises, everyone was sporting a minimum of seventy-five percent loyalty to my cause, with little concern for anything outside of being a part of my empire. Even if a few didn’t believe fully in my cause, they were always too frightened to double-cross me otherwise.

  Speaking of loyalties, these girls were all fully loyal to my regime, but that wasn’t what made our particular relationships so crucial to my organization. Besides each of them being a powerhouse in their own right that could rock a small nation, the more our relationships developed, the more in-game benefits that I could reap for myself and my whole criminal family. More on that later.

  After taking over Damax City’s criminal underground, it was quick and simple to turn every economic outlet into a cog in the war complex I was developing. Nearly every criminal was working for me, and through my monetary connections, the politicians were following suit just as easily. From there, the whole city was just one big money-making machine for me and my villainous needs, including taking more districts from more cities. I had over fifteen cities, and a couple of districts in another five. Yeah, I was making some serious cash.

  Not to mention that I got all the assets from the heroes that I crushed automatically transferred over to my personal storage, equipment, and everything. Some heroes were making quite a bit of in-game money that helped me get the edge I needed for my more lofty purchases. Nowadays, the amounts weren’t quite as comparative to the might of an entire city’s cash flow right into my pocket, but it never hurt.

  I didn’t even have to be there, as evidenced by the update that I just got on my screen:

  Hero Slain!

  All of the items and assets of Undersea Man have been transferred to your inventory.

  Looked like Undersea Man, along with seventeen other heroes, had all met an untimely demise in the explosion triggered by the self-destruct mechanism. Dismissing the seventeen other updates that simultaneously showed up in my face that I had to swipe away with a hand, I checked on my inventory to see all the new stuff I got. Everything that they had, both on their person and in their inventory, was now my property, directly joining up with my inventory and storage spaces. I basically owned the Retributioners, or at least half of their assets at the moment. As a top fifty guild, the money they were making certainly wasn’t anything to sneeze at. Every penny helped, but this many pennies was more than a little boost to the various enterprises I was in the middle of developing.

  Unfortunately, that was basically all that I was getting from them. Sure, I technically got level experience from them, but they were all so low level that it barely made a dent in my overall progress to my next level. I’d have had to do that same thing over a hundred times if I wanted to use this method to level up, then a hundred and fifty times to get to the next level. Not effective or proper use of my time. Any levels I was getting from this point were probably coming from high-end targets, like rival villains, raid bosses, and maybe a few higher tier heroes.

  If I wanted to, I could get the bodies of the player avatars, which was useful for the sake of furthering my research skills. Things like Biology, Gadgets, Computers, and Occultism were all different types of abilities related to superpowers, and I could learn about all of them with high enough levels. There wasn’t any way to develop those levels except through just buying them, and heroes only served to lessen the costs by small amounts. But I’d have to collect and process those myself. Also a bit of a time waste at this stage of the game for every little twerp who got their levels up.

  That wasn’t the only thing that superheroes were used for, though. Anyone with powers, really, not just player characters. If I could get a superpowered individual to my lab and had enough time, I could squeeze a whole host of superpowers out of them, or recreate their powers in the rarer cases. However, that stopped being useful when I had essentially equipped everyone in my syndicate with at least a minor superpower, like enhanced strength, endurance, and stamina, with enough storage to power up any new recruits for another fifty years; twenty years with the rate of growth I was expecting my empire to undergo in the next month or so. Doubling up on superpowers wasn’t possible, and the only ways to upgrade powers were to level up while having them, or to find more powerful powers. Needless to say, the former was happening reliably enough with some of my earliest experiments, namely my main executives, that the latter wasn’t necessary unless it was particularly powerful.

  On top of that, I’d already gotten so many heroes processed for research that catching any more of the low-leveled heroes stopped affecting the cash costs of the research skills by anything significant. The only heroes that caught my eye these days were the guildmasters from the top ten guilds of the world. If I got one of them, I could basically buy a level outright with their cost reduction. When each level cost billions of dollars, a million every here and there from a high-level hero was barely anything I’d considered worth the hassle to stuff into my refrigerator. If it was convenient, sure, but more often than not, it was just easier to kill them outright.

  Even with all of my assets, though, it still wasn’t enough for everything I wanted to do. Simply put, I could get anything I wanted, so long as it was within my reach. As of right now, nearly a quarter of my expenses were being spent on hiding my exploits from the world of The Forge of Heroism, as well as the gamer community that played it along with the real world. Shit was pricey, and people were nosey, especially when I kill
ed off hero characters. While it was true that those player characters wouldn’t be coming back, the gamers playing them were still able to make other characters. The setback was still staggering for any gamer, almost to the point where many would leave the game alone for a while, but the rumors tended to spread from their demises. Most of them were as far from true as the water was from dry, but the difficulty was beginning to mount to keep it that way.

  Thankfully, we’d reached the stage where the rumors didn’t matter, and there were so many theories out there about what the hell I was that no one would have been able to cherry-pick the truth out of it all in time to do anything about it. With that portion of the budget now available to put towards my other projects, we were ready to start work on the next phase of the plan.

  Going down my list of minions, I checked on everyone’s stats and how they were doing. We had Joe Camish, an exemplary musclehead with top tier feats of strength under his belt, along with some enhanced gorilla power and a matching pair of hands for feet. By far the strongest of anyone in my whole organization besides myself, and was technically the first I recruited out of everyone, though his simple demeanor and weak social presence kept him from being much more than a captain in the field:

  Joe Camish, Lvl 40 Enforcer

  Power:25 Menace 20

  Strength: 120 Brains: 10

  Speed: 50

  Loyalty: 99% (39% fear)

  It took a while to figure out exactly what everything did, but the countless hours I’d spent in this game had all but taught me the ins and outs of each of the little stats and what they meant. ‘Strength’ was easy, measuring the physical strength of the person and their ability to take a hit, and speed measured how fast they could move, attack, and dodge out of the way of things. ‘Brains’ was a simple measure of the brain’s power to process information, and didn’t necessarily equate to being smarter, just faster at thinking. ‘Power’ was the resource that powered all the things that someone might want to do, like specific skills, abilities, and also was spent trying to perform beyond one’s natural abilities. Nice to have in abundance.