Dashing Devil Omnibus 2: Books 4-6, page 4
He’d briefly considered using The Authority’s rules and regulations to get her and every other Hero and the citizens they were meant to protect out of the Last Dragon’s path. There were a couple of options he could pursue, with assistance, that would force an evacuation in a situation like this, even against the local Heroes or Director’s wishes. He wished to avoid them as they would damage his public image, especially with the golden boy Archangel having declared his intent and ability to counter the mythic beast and protect his assigned city.
Boyd also considered just flying out and killing it while it was on the way. That wouldn’t be as damaging to his reputation. He would have killed the ancient threat after all, but it would violate guidelines laid down in the Hero’s Handbook. Failing to respect Archangel’s claim on the beast now that he made it would cause some rumblings, especially given what little Boyd knew about the up-and-coming Hero.
Archangel was not likely to react well to another Hero swooping in and killing a creature he had publicly announced he planned to slay, so Boyd would wait until after his failed attempt and upstage him. He predicted that the showy Hero would hate that even more, however, he could not publicly decry Boyd’s actions if they resulted in preserving New Eden after he failed to do so.
Which aligned perfectly with Boyd’s plans for The Authority’s current “Shining Light,” or at least that’s what his supporters had taken to calling him. Boyd knew better. The man wasn’t worthy of his position as a Hero, let alone being called something like a “Shining Light.” He was a showman who was liable to get those he was meant to protect killed. A charlatan, and a good one, who used his position for personal gain and to live out his twisted fantasies.
He couldn’t do it right away, but Boyd would eventually unmask the pretender and allow those who fell for his charismatic manipulations to see the truth of the man. Before that, he would use him to further his new objective to make himself a household name across the world. Getting him to play his role would not be too difficult, given how he normally behaved.
‘Oh, that’s good!’ Mindy’s mental voice contained excitement. ‘That’s very good… do that.’
Boyd was a little surprised. He’d assumed Mindy would react as poorly to his plans regarding Archangel as she initially had for the Last Dragon. He was almost as dangerous, given his ability to teleport and his high-energy short-range attacks. It was a deadly combo that allowed the man to be a front-runner to be officially recognized as a World Hero.
‘Sure, but he’s an untrained puppy compared to you,’ Mindy’s voice held onto its excitement, “you’ll mop the floor with him and we both know it. I’ve seen some of your anti-porter drills over the last few days, remember? You’re damned impressive, even compared to where you were six years ago, which was exceptional. You have my full support, do it.’
Well, it was good that she approved. He wouldn’t have to talk her into it, not that he expected it to be a hard sell. At least, not when compared to the Last Dragon, which had been less difficult than he thought it would be already.
‘Your plan is good, a little risky which I’ll try to moderate, but good,’ Mindy sent the mental equivalent of a shrug. ‘You gave me more reasons to support it than fight it. Just like with Archangel. Plus, with him, there are some things you don’t know about which makes your plan even more delicious.’
Boyd smiled in victory, successfully getting around his media blackout, mostly by accident. It was still active, and every day it lasted caused him to put a little more thought into what might be happening on the other side of the artificial wall. He’d kept this pondering to himself but determined that there were only about a dozen Heroes that might be behind it, Archangel being a front-runner on that list as well.
Mindy’s mental statement settled it for him. Archangel was trashing him in the media, which made his plan a little more delicious. Not that it really changed anything. However, having information on what the golden prick had been saying about Boyd might be helpful.
‘You’ll have to discuss that with Royce,’ Mindy sent him the telepathic equivalent of a sigh before saying, ‘I’m not sure if the fact that you’ve gotten so good at hiding things from me thrills me, or pisses me off. I would have been a lot more careful if I knew you suspected him already.’
Boyd imagined it would probably be a mixed bag for her, but the ability would likely make maintaining a healthy relationship with a mind Powered more possible. He was glad he spent extra time on mental-based training to feel closer to her after she had been taken from him.
‘Okay, first, awww…’ Mindy cooed with only a touch of irony. ‘Second, you’ve already agreed to let me set up in your brain once you Enhance me. I doubt our relationship will qualify as healthy in any conventional sense at that point.’
He shrugged his shoulder; they would figure it out. He was less worried about that than he was about fighting Archangel, and Mindy was right about him being like an untrained puppy.
‘Kuh-he! Silvie is going to lose her mind, I swear.”
Boyd hadn’t thought about Silvie’s reaction to Archangel when he got brought up around her at all when forming his plan. Nope, not even a little.
“Kuh-he! Liar. Speaking of which… you should keep it from Silvie, it will be a lovely surprise and I was looking for something like this to help with her recovery.’
Boyd was immediately concerned. Silvie was more or less back to her not-quite-overconfident normal self with what was probably a healthy amount of self-doubt. Just enough that she was considering her actions and words a little more before committing to them. He assumed that meant she had recovered from the after-effects of the removal of the behavioral construct that made deceiving him easier for her.
‘You don’t need to be concerned,’ Mindy assured him, ‘as you have sensed, she is doing well for the most part. You’ve been handling it perfectly. And yes, I know you don’t enjoy deceiving her, just like she hated deceiving you. That’s the point… to have you hide something that she would consider to be a big deal from her, but have it be something that benefits her. This is perfect because it’s short-term, too. Just a few days.’
Boyd understood what she was going for and would participate if she thought it would help Silvie, but wondered if Mindy had ever heard the term “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Boyd received the mental impression of an eye-roll with her response, ‘Stop being difficult. I might feel a little chastised if even a part of you thought what Silvie did for you was wrong. But yes, this will help Silvie, and you were planning on making it a surprise anyway so you’re just being a little shit.’
Yes, he was, but she loved him for it. Boyd was certain of it.
‘You are insufferable,’ she sighed into his thoughts, ‘but not wrong. I’ve narrowed it down to either wanting a man who will keep me in check by challenging me, given my Power, or that it displays that you aren’t afraid of me altering your cognition without your consent in the least. Unlike most women, I could fix your little shit-ness if I wanted to, and you trust me not to.’
Of course he did. Mindy was the most morally driven person he knew, which was saying something considering the environment he was raised in.
‘Thank you, but to me, that’s you.’ Mindy’s mental voice contained warmth, ‘but Laura is on her way, so I’ll focus on information gathering as you requested.’
Boyd sent his mental thanks as he heard the hum of a grav-cart approaching. His bed was in a little alcove created by heavy curtains that hung on a track from the ceiling. Laura followed it, guiding the floating medical chart to the foot of his bed. She was in a set of light blue scrubs with a vaguely grumpy expression that made him scan the chart for signs of large needles or nerve-stims, fortunately not spotting either.
“Good morning,” Laura said with an odd tone. It sounded like she wanted her voice to be bright and friendly, but it was a little on the stiff side.
“Good morning,” Boyd rumbled back, keeping his voice polite, “is it time for my final check-up?”
“Yes, your feet and legs should have completely healed by now,” Laura confirmed as she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, “and, at a glance, your wings appear to be mostly recovered. Your healing factor really is something. Burns like that never would have healed properly without Powered intervention for a normal person. If anyone else was on my table, I would have had to amputate their legs at the knee and let a Powered regrow them later.”
The words contained no heat, or any emotion, really. She wasn’t in the same type of huff she had been the other day, seeming much more subdued. Her shoulders were stiff, and her eyes stayed on her cart though, as she set up a multi-spectrum hand-held scanner that Boyd recognized from his testing days. It used multiple forms of non-damaging radiation to generate images that showed various types of organic or inorganic materials and any damage they may have.
Boyd decided that he was being indirectly scolded, but in a detached way. She was telling him he got lucky without coming out and saying it. Which wasn’t quite true. Luck had not played a role in it at all—at least not this time. She seemed to be aiming for a professional tone, but her body language gave the game away. She was much too stiff, given the level of comfort he had seen her display in her profession. The detachment came from a different place.
Boyd recognized that a few days ago he would have been pleased about the distance it encouraged, no matter its source. Now, it concerned him. He had been aiming for a professional but friendly relationship with Laura and thought it had been coming along nicely. She was a member of the team, and he wanted their relationship to be collegial, but good.
A professional distance was fine, but this new detachment would interfere with that.
Of course, he knew the likely source and expected the need to resolve it at some point. It would be an ongoing problem if not properly addressed. Doing so was easier said than done, even with all his training in interpersonal skills—mostly because it depended almost entirely on Laura, whom he wouldn’t and couldn’t control. Boyd’s training allowed him to come to this conclusion quickly enough to avoid an obvious pause before he responded.
“My regeneration is likely my most vital Power,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have tried to scare off the Last Dragon without it.”
“I’m sure you would have figured out another excuse to get it done,” Laura responded as she tapped through the options of the scanner.
“No,” Boyd disagreed, “I wouldn’t have.”
Laura glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She bore the signs of a washed face, and her chestnut locks had been brushed before being pulled back into a simple ponytail at the base of her head. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but she wore little makeup—if any—in the first place. She seemed to prefer a simple and clean look.
“You are going to hate hearing this,” Boyd sighed, “but I recognize my limits.” He tried not to think about how Laura had tested those limits.
He coughed into his hand, then continued, “Without my ability to lock away pain and heal from severe damage without outside assistance, I would not have risked it, despite having my Black Flame.”
Laura glanced his way again, eyes quickly returning to the scanner, though Boyd knew they didn’t take that long to set up. She avoided even looking at him, which was a stronger reaction than he’d expected.
“What makes you say that?” she finally asked.
Chapter 4
“I knew about the Last Dragon’s energy attacks and the heat blooms that surrounded them,” Boyd explained. “I knew Silvie could avoid the energy bursts themselves, but would not keep me out of the heat blooms. In the interest of open and honest transparency, I actually expected to be burned worse than I was.”
“Silvie’s recent improvements enabled her to avoid the heat blooms better than I’d anticipated. She’s more than fast enough, as evidenced by her successful rescue of Sinoe. But she doesn’t have the necessary instincts to shy away from the heat blooms because she gained her invulnerability at the same time as her speed.” Boyd said this last bit with a shrug. “I suppose she could do better with a little training, but I knew it would at least be enough to keep me alive—if a little crispy around the edges.”
“You expected to suffer worse than crippling third-degree burns?” Laura set the scanner and turned to face him.
Unfortunately, her pale green eyes were narrowed in a glare and her arms locked over her chest in irritation.
“I did,” Boyd admitted, nodding and keeping a straight face, “because I was certain that I would heal from them and that Silas and Sinoe would not survive if I did not. I didn’t even have to suffer the pain others would have—being able to lock it away and use it on my foe. The cost was negligible and paying it bought a life… though we weren’t fast enough to save the second.”
Boyd rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “You’re a nurse, think of it like I was donating an organ and I’m sure you can understand my decision-making.”
Laura continued to glare at him, and Boyd had to admit she was fairly good at it—her lips were pressed into a thin line and everything. “For one thing, we don’t do organ transplants anymore. It would be barbaric, given our current resources and level of medical technology. For another, you cannot compare donating an organ in a controlled surgical environment to fighting a dragon—especially the Last Dragon! It just doesn’t work.”
“It totally works,” Boyd disagreed with what Silvie called his boyish grin, but Mindy sometimes described as shit-eating. “I just need to explain it better.” He paused, studying Laura. “If a surgeon were going to perform an organ transplant how many hours of training and education would they have?” he asked. “Just a rough estimate will work for my purposes.”
“There would be a lot of factors, but a middle ground would be something like…” Laura’s eyes drifted up towards the ceiling and her stance shifted as she did the math, her lips mouthing numbers here and there.
She focused back on Boyd. “It would be something in the low-to-mid thirty-thousand-hour range… once you account for undergrad, med school, and residency. I think I see where you are going with this, but you’re only going on twenty-two. There is no way you have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in fighting dragons.”
“System,” Boyd’s grin grew to what even he would admit was shit-eating levels, “what are my logged training hours?”
The whole base was wired into a local system that could access The Authority’s systems upon request. This should only take a moment.
“In total,” the synthetic voice was a match for the one back in their suite in The Tower in Glorith City, which Boyd had also learned was local but connected, “you have Seventy-one thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven hours which have been logged across various disciplines. Additionally, six hours are currently pending review by your handler, Royce.”
Laura gaped at him, and Boyd held up a finger in a gesture for her to wait.
“That is misleading,” he admitted, “as the various disciplines I have trained in are far-reaching and a lot of that won’t feasibly relate to fighting dragons.” Boyd cleared his throat. “System, how many of those hours would apply to a mission with a partner to extract a civilian or Powered that the Last Dragon is actively attacking?”
“Such a mission is inadvisable,” the system’s voice replied.
Boyd rolled his eyes. “Please provide an answer for use in a hypothetical mission.”
There was another brief, though shorter, pause. “You have accumulated a total of thirty-four thousand three hundred and six hours of training that might apply to completing a hypothetical mission to extract a civilian or Powered being attacked by the Last Dragon.”
“There we are,” Boyd nodded. “I guess I might just qualify for a PhD in fighting dragons. I know you believe that I was being reckless, but I promise you I was not. I’ve spent my life training to do exactly what I did.”
Laura stared at Boyd, her glare disappearing when the system had listed his total training hours. Instead, her green eyes were open wide and her jaw remained slack, though not enough to gape.
“How in the world did your training hours get so high at your age?” She breathed.
“Dedication,” Boyd shrugged his shoulder, choosing to omit the fact that he had been manipulated into sacrificing any time he might have spent on personal activities. “My numbers are higher than the average PAC kid, as are Silvie’s—though she wasn’t quite as dedicated as I was.”
“Do you not sleep?” Laura gave him a disbelieving look.
“I only need five hours of sleep a night,” Boyd smiled wanly. “If you just take my time in the PAC into account, I averaged something like fourteen hours of training a day, but I’ll admit that there were periods I maintained a less healthy pace than that—sometimes logging eighteen, nineteen, or twenty hours in twenty-four-hour period.”
He scratched the back of his neck and gave Laura a nervous smile. “Sometimes I had insomnia and couldn’t sleep… and no, you don’t need to scold me about it. Silvie has balanced me out since then. I average seven to ten hours of training a day these days, amongst a mix of disciplines. I expect that will drop off as I do more in the field.” His smile was much more solid by the end.
“I don’t even…” Laura’s reply faded off, leaving him to assume she didn’t know what to say.
“I told you before that I couldn’t promise to always be careful,” Boyd rumbled after a moment, ready to drive his point home. “I can promise to be careful when killing the Last Dragon. I have just over three days to prepare and train. That’s forty-five more hours, minimum, I will spend to ensure this specific mission is done safely.”
Laura blinked at him, her lips pursed into a line once more. Fortunately, the glare didn’t return to her eyes.
“Fine,” she stated, “you aren’t being reckless—but that just means you’re being stupid. A surgeon with all that training would never perform a procedure that didn’t need to be done.”
