Villains Don't Date Heroes!

Okay. So maybe I hadn't thought this through. I looked at the countdown timer on those bombs and cursed myself for never stopping to think that maybe someday I'd want to be able to stop them from counting down.

Then again, I'd put in the failsafe that they didn't stop their counting down after one particularly pesky hero who'd figured out how to disarm some of my stuff by manipulating the timer.

That was the trouble with the villainy business. Sometimes you were damned if you did and damned if you didn't. Only in this case it was starting to look like my paranoia was going to turn my insides into jelly from the blast wave even as the acid and other more unpleasant things lurking in the lower reaches of this monster's intestines tried to turn me into digested jelly.

Yeah, those bombs were that big. We're talking I was seriously worried they'd be able to blast through my shielding. I wasn't one hundred percent on that, but any chance was more chance than I wanted to take.

But I also needed to break out the big ones to take out something this big. Even blowing it up from the inside.

I fired a couple of shots at a skittering creature I'd discovered lurking in the monster's intestines. Talk about an unpleasant surprise. I had my low light stuff on now and I was targeting and firing as quickly as I could, but they kept coming.

One lurched at me, throwing itself through the wet darkness with an unholy screech. Great. Here I was the greatest villain in the world, and my epitaph was going to read I died surrounded by giant lizard shit trying to fight off the mutated parasites that resided in its lower digestive track.

What a way to go.

It was right around that time that I heard the distinctive sound of high explosives going off somewhere way above me. I looked at the counter as I had a minor heart attack, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the countdown for my own bombs still ticking away.

Sure I only had about a minute left to live, but I still figured that was better than being turned to liquid immediately.

A glance at the news told me the government had decided to do their whole ineffective routine against the fucker, and I decided I just didn't have enough time to do this the old fashioned way. So I pointed down and started firing at the floor.

The insides of this thing were squishy. Which meant I could make my own shortcut.

For the third time since this whole ordeal had started I found myself being covered in muck and goo, but I figured better being covered in muck and goo than having all my internal organs being turned to muck and goo as the pressure wave from all those bombs I'd just set hit me and overloaded all of my systems.

A glance at the readout showed those systems weren't doing so hot. The high levels of radiation on the insides of this thing just weren't something I'd anticipated.

Sure I had radiation shielding. What self-respecting villain didn't? It's just I'd never counted on facing the kind of radiation that could charitably be compared to standing next to the elephant's foot in Chernobyl seconds after the meltdown started.

And it was doing a number on my shielding.

Yeah, this was coming down to a hell of a race to see what would kill me first, and I wasn't sure if it was a race I was going to win. I kept firing and stepped through the hole I made. Great. I was one level lower, though the only way I could even determine whether or not I was going lower was by relying on gravity and turning off the antigrav for a moment.

I kept firing. Goo kept flying at me. Bits of dark brown material I didn't want to think about kept flying at me. I was getting desperate here. I was not going to die in the digestive tract of this thing, damn it, I was not going to…

My first hint that I was finally on the right track came when the goo I was firing at turned from the monster's internal organs to something large, brown, and even smellier than anything I'd encountered so far.

Disgusting, but as far as I was concerned, I'd just hit brown gold. This meant I was in the right place. I'd finally blown through to the large intestine, which meant…

Well I'm not going to say much about what I experienced in there. There are some things that are just too terrible to contemplate, even for a villain.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Suffice it to say, I discovered the one thing more horrifying than finding myself traveling down the gullet of a giant radioactive lizard was traveling down the other end of a giant radioactive lizard's digestive system in an attempt to outrun an explosion that was hot on my heels.

It wasn't pleasant, but I figured if the thing's hide was tough enough that I couldn't blast through it on the outside then it'd be the same trying to blast through it from the inside. Which meant I had to escape through one of two openings on the fucker, and I had to go out the hole that was designed for getting things out of its body.

I was close to the exit in that impenetrable hide that I could get through. Assuming it wasn't clenching because of all the combat.

The ticker reached zero. I flew out of the thing's back end going as fast as I could, and even then the shockwave from the internal explosion was licking at my heels and giving my shields a run for their money. But I was far enough away from the center of the explosion, and there was enough lizard between me and the explosives to absorb some of that shockwave, that my shields held as I was expelled along with all that brown gold.

Talk about an explosive shit.

I hit the ground and tumbled end over end. I came to rest against a city bus and looked up at the business end of the terrible radioactive thunder lizard that had been giving me so much trouble for the last…

I glanced at the timer. I'd only been in there for ten minutes. Ten minutes that felt like an eternity in my own personal radioactive hell.

Though I imagine suddenly finding fire coming out of your ass end, and not the kind that comes from chili, was probably a special brand of hell as well. The giant lizard was breathing fire from both ends thanks to the explosives I'd set off.

Okay then. Maybe I'd gone for some overkill, but if I'd learned anything in my recent fights? It was that there really was no kill like overkill when you got down to it.

The lizard lurched forward a couple more steps as I stood there under its back end contemplating all the life choices that brought me to this moment. It paused and wavered for a moment, and then it fell to the side. Which meant it slammed into a couple of buildings and sent shockwaves running up the front face of a skyscraper that was mostly all glass.

Well it was all glass until the lizard brushed against it, at least. After that it was all broken glass. Glass was a pretty bold and stupid design decision in Starlight City.

Not that the all stone art deco buildings would fare much better if a giant irradiated lizard slammed into them, but whatever.

Finally the thing came to rest on the street. I was left standing there wavering back and forth and feeling like disgusting shit. I looked down at myself. I was covered in disgusting shit. Literally.

Hey, you try going on a fantastic voyage through the digestive tract of a monster like that and see if you smell like sunshine and rainbows when you come out the other side. My only consolation was that the shielding that was meant to keep the radiation away was also keeping most of the smell away.

Not all of it. Some air had to get through the shielding so I could breathe. After it'd been thoroughly scrubbed. Still. There was no taming a stench that powerful. Even with my shield tech.

A shadow appeared over me. I sighed. There really was no rest for the wicked.

Given recent experience I figured that was none other than Dr. Lana coming along to finish what she'd started, but when I turned around and looked up I saw several drones from the Starlight City News Network pointing their cameras at me. I guess I was far enough away from the radioactive gooey center of that giant lizard that they could operate around here.

Or maybe the shot of me standing around covered in literal radioactive lizard shit was worth losing a few drones.

"What the hell do you want?" I growled.

I glanced at the news feed in my heads up display. I'd been so preoccupied that I'd been ignoring what was going on with the chatting heads. It said something about the state of journalism in this city that I found a trip through the colon of a giant radioactive lizard to be a more pleasant experience than watching the anchors at the Starlight City News Network twist my adventures to fit their narrative.

The drones didn't answer. A glance at the anchors showed they were a little disappointed that I wasn't deceased, a dead celebrity was always more interesting than a live one after all, but they were also delighted that I'd come back to the land of the living via a giant radioactive lizard's poop chute covered in all the disgusting muck and offal that comes along with that mental image.

It wasn't one of my better days, but I was still alive. That's all that really mattered, damn it.

Though there were other things that mattered almost as much as the fact that I was still among the living. Like the question of where the hell Fialux had disappeared to while I was inside that lizard.

Downtown was eerily quiet. Sure there were air raid sirens going off to let everyone know shit was going down, but even that was a little weird. Usually they didn't set those sirens off unless there was a clear and present danger to the city, and I'd just taken care of the clear and present danger.

I flew up to get a good look at what was going on. Also so I could have a bird's eye view of any fight that might still be ongoing between Fialux and Dr. Lana. The only problem with that idea was as soon as I got to altitude I saw plenty of danger hitting the city, but none of that danger was in the form of two powerful human-sized beings duking it out.

There were several of those giant radioactive lizards really ripping into shit though. I guess after the failure of her giant robot army Dr. Lana had decided to go back to basics in the kaiju department.

Fuck. I counted at least two of the bastards, and there were more portals opening in a straight line that led to Starlight City University.

I guess she was going back to her lair now that I'd spanked her first giant pet, and she was leaving behind more distractions for me.