Vaudevillain

Chapter 68: To War

John hadn't sat idle while Dylan made his plans. As Dr. Zlo and Dextra talked, John went searching. The factories and disassembler sitting inside the man were useless if they didn't have materials. And John had the perfect idea that would show Dylan the correct way to use his power.

The junkyard in the factory district held all sorts of discarded materials. Materials John planned to use. The decrepit cars scattered around the yard held all the scrap metal and electronics he needed to make an entire army.

The first order of business was building something that kept tabs on his former friend. Opening his power, John merged the two factories, the combination allowing him to customize the minions he wanted and doubling the output. The man's body shifted as a computer formed on his arm, and a hole appeared in his torso. With the practiced ease that only came from years of IT work, John typed in the specifications for a small drone.

Once done, the computer created a list of needed materials. John went to work scouring through the junkyard with the disassembler technology, separating everything he could into component pieces. The factory went to work, parts moving through John's transformed body. Soon, a small silvery drone wirelessly linked to a computer sitting on the ground nestled itself onto the man's head. John bent down to absorb the computer and shooed the drone away, telling it to follow Dr. Zlo. The small creature buzzed sadly from the lack of affection and flew off into the distance.

After that, John spent the next few days disassembling every material he could find to create his robot army. The factory limited him in some wayshe couldn't make self-replicating robots or androids with powersbut there were plenty of materials sitting around in the various junkyards. While he worked, a part of John kept asking why he had to go so far. He tried ignoring the feeling with his stubbornness, but the thought kept nagging at him.

So John thought about it, but he kept refusing to be in the wrong. Conversations in his memory warped to show Dylan in a negative light, the result of John's brain hard at work twisting the truth. In the end, John convinced himself that his friend denied John's help through fear of some sort, and John's plan to attack would show Dylan just how much he needed his friend. When Dylan fell to John's tactics, he'd come crawling back, begging for forgiveness.

Finally, the computer inside John revealed the perfect location for the plan. Dylan had joined up with those other two players and went on an excursion to do, of all things, a bout of PvP. John scoffed, Dylan's choice showing how much his friend needed him. Player vs. player fights were probably the worst way to gain reputation now, as there was no guarantee you could face off against someone of higher ranks. The new meta for villains was to find ways to cause as much destruction as possible, precisely what John planned on doing.

John looked back at his army of robots and admired his handiwork. With a command like this, he didn't even need Dylan to create tech; he could steal what he wanted. And what better way to start than by taking Dylan's target right out from under him. That would show his friend how the game was meant to be played.

"Destroy Dr. Zlo!" the robots shouted.

Fiery red eyes burned aggressively as the chrome automatons marched down the pavement behind the speeding truck. Instead of a left arm, Dr. Zlo saw each robot had a slender barrel shaped like a rifle. The villain's gaze switched over to Cass as the butler slammed on the gas. The truck wheels skid across the pavement as the minion twisted the car around a curb, dodging a burst of small-arms fire in the process.

Riptide blinked, the motion lost under his helmet, "Dude, who did you piss off?"

"Obviously, this is someone jealous of my success!" Dr. Zlo declared.

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Inwardly, Dylan didn't have a clue. This assault didn't seem like something random, since the robots shouted his name. But Dylan didn't think he'd upset a player so much to make them send an army after him. No wait, there was that Heroic character, the one Dr. Zlo had turned female. That player seemed pretty angry, though their power was nowhere close to creating attack robots. But the player might have switched characters to deal with him.

A volley of bullets peppered Dylan's shields, and the man realized flying out in the open might be a bad idea. "We should get behind some cover and make a plan."

"Got it, dude." Riptide flew off toward Sweet Dream and the heroes. Landing behind the battered truck, he called Sweet Dream over. She jogged over, arriving with the heroes as Dr. Zlo touched down.

"Your friend is a real *sshole," Sweet Dream said to Dylan as he landed.

"What?"

"The tech assimilator."

Dylan looked confused, "Why do you think he's the one doing this?"

"Gee, I dunno," Sweet Dream complained. "Maybe because he stole the factories, which made a ton of minions remember? There's also the fact that he's the only one who might have a grudge against you."

"A grudge?"

Sweet Dream groaned, "Have you never dealt with his type before?"

"Dream, calm down," Riptide said.

The woman took in a deep breath, forcibly exhaling to relax. "Sorry," she said to Zlo. "But I was having a lot of fun with this fight, and I'm getting real tired of everything stopping right before we finish."

"I get that," Rampart said. "I don't know what's going on with you guys, but I agree about the fight. That giant cake monster was awesome. But we should focus on the robots. If we mop these up, we can reset the fight, or head out to the wilderness where others won't bother."

The entire group flinched as a hail of bullets pinged off the broken truck, accentuating the hero's point.

"I can't do much against non-organic targets," Sweet Dream said. "Maybe I can gunk up their joints with chocolate, but that's it."

"Pretty sure Titan and I won't have any trouble against the weapons," Oro added. "We could easily destroy most of these bots, though it would take a while."

"Give me enough time, and I'll have a spell to obliterate them," Merla said.

Dylan peeked out from behind the truck to look at the oncoming robots. "Um, that's a lot of robots. I'm not sure we can fight that many."

"What do you mean?" Rampart swung around to take a look. "Oh. Yeah, guys? We might want to look into getting out of here. We could probably take them, but I don't want to slog through something like this."

The others all leaned out from behind the truck to see. Gasps of surprise escaped from their mouths as the small mob of robots grew to massive proportions. Chrome arms punched out from under the parking lot pavement, creating holes for more machines to join the army. Each one yelled, "Destroy Dr. Zlo!" as they entered the crowd.

"It might be better to get out of here," Rampart commented.

"Agreed," Sweet Dream said.

Dylan kept looking out into the crowd of robots, trying to glean any information from them. As he scanned the crowd, his eyes caught a chrome figure slightly taller than the others. Dylan squinted, trying to see if he recognized the shape, only for understanding to reach him a moment later.

"You see, Dylan!" John yelled. "This is how you play the game!"

Dylan blinked, it was John! Sweet Dream had been right. The man did make this entire army to attack him.

"What the h*ll," Dylan muttered, so low no one else could hear him over the din of bullets.

Dylan had figured John would get over their argument after a few weeks, maybe longer. Instead, it looked like his friend went off the deep end. How to play the game? Dylan didn't care about that. He'd told John he didn't care about that, multiple times even! Yet, the man kept insisting Dylan needed to play a certain way.

Anger at his friend finally reared its head, a frustrated ball squirming in his gut. John was going out of his way to mess with Dylan's fun to prove a point. It wasn't even a good point! World of Supers didn't have any clearly defined rules. No, John wanted to be right, and he wanted to make sure Dylan's way of gaming was wrong.

"Fine then," Dylan uttered. If John wanted to start a war, he could have it. But this wasn't going to be Dylan vs. John. No, this fight would pit Singularity against the greatest villain in the world, Dr. Zlo. A war of playstyles, and fighting as anything other than his persona would be admitting John had the right idea. Dylan was not about to let that happen.

"How dare that upstart even think about muscling in on my plan!" Dr. Zlo shouted.

The others started from the outburst. "Dude, what?" Riptide asked.

"Don't you see? Singularity thinks he can take the easy route when it comes to villainy. And he thinks he can use me, me! to do it. How foolish. I am Dr. Zlo, the greatest criminal mastermind! Some two-bit robot that steals technology isn't going to one-up me."

Dr. Zlo rocketed off the ground, landing squarely on top of the battered truck the group used as cover. John halted his robots with a quick command.

Dr. Zlo leered, "So! The betrayer returns! Have you come to ride my coattails once again? Or are you here to take the rest of my inventions?"

"I'm here to show you how wrong you are!" John yelled.

Dr. Zlo cackled, "Wrong about what? About the fact that you need me? Or that you need my inventions? When I allowed you to join my evil league, I took pity on you. A poor, hapless machine, barely able to keep itself together. And you repay my kindness with betrayal!"

"Oh, cry more! You had it coming!"

"Oh, I'm not upset about the betrayal," said Dr. Zlo, slow-clapping for effect. "In fact, I applaud it! It shows you know how to be a villain. Lie, cheat, steal, all of it I can forgive. I know what I am and who I interact with after all. But this This lazy plan! An army of monotonous robots? Really? You don't even have unique models scattered around to deal with different threats!"

John scoffed, "I don't need something like that!"

"And that is what I can't forgive! It's so boring, lazy! I thought you had at least learned a bit more from me."

"F*ck you! You're the one that learned from me, Dylan!"

"I'm sorry, Dylan? I am Dr. Zlo! The greatest criminal mind the world has ever seen!" Dr. Zlo sorely wished for some fireworks right about now. He stored the idea in the back of his mind, adding it to the pool of ideas for future crimes.

John rolled his eyes, "Quit it with the dumb roleplaying already. If you admit you were wrong about everything, I'll call this off."

Dr. Zlo sighed, "You really did learn nothing. You didn't even pick up on the first rule of villainy."

Despite himself, John had to ask, "What's that?"

Dr. Zlo laughed, a maniacal sound that bounced across the entire parking lot, "Villains! Don't! Bargain!"

With that, Dr. Zlo fired his monocle laser at John, and the war was on.