Verbal Sparring
I got the call from Steve in the afternoon.
Well, a text, technically, but I’d been waiting for him to get back to me, so was pleased when it finally arrived.
Rumble Ring, six o’clock.
Finally.
Time to meet with Arman.
I got off the bed, Psyren murmuring behind me as she snuggled deeper into the blankets. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight. No sooner had we gotten back to the chalet than she was all over me, and I wasn’t exactly complaining. Carrying her upstairs, the two of us had broken in her new room and its bed as only we could. To judge by Psyren’s current state, she’d been more than satisfied.
But no time to linger. I got up and dressed quickly, knowing I was going into a fight as dangerous as dealing with any streeter. In fact, it was likely to be even worse. I had confidence in my powers, but when dealing with Arman Glint, the outcome wouldn’t be decided with fists. And even if it was, I wondered who would come out on top of that?
I slipped out of the chalet and into my car, starting it and heading back down to Metro City. I drove quickly, and soon was once more surrounded by the skyscrapers and cramped shops of the downtown. The architecture thinned out as I got near to the docks and the Rumble Ring proper. There was a fight going on, that much was clear. The parking lot was absolutely crammed with cars. My own barely fit, but in short order I was making my way up to the main doors of the imposing cement dome. It looked like an old bunker, and had once been a shelter for civilians during city emergencies, but as the years stretched by with no major menace heroes couldn’t handle, public interest in shelters waned to the point it was sold off to Arman Glint, who then turned it into an arena for supers to fight in.
Arman made bank with the thing, that was for damn sure. And it was all technically above board, though not a lot of super groups and others liked it. Heroes had a real thing about people with powers beating the crap out of each other for a paying audience. They weren’t exactly thrilled about what I did either, but since I was a ‘villain’ who lost in the end, and the corporations who hired me paid for damages and used their own heroes, villains like me were generally overlooked. Personally, I was mostly ambivalent to the Rumble Ring. When I first started out, I did matches there, and I didn’t regret it either. It was a good place to practice combat with my powers, but that hadn’t lasted long. There was a lot of shady shit done around the Ring, and one of those was fights to the death called the Nights. Strictly hush hush, and certainly not able to be traced back to Arman, but I was offered a chance to do some of those matches, and that was when I knew I was done. I had no intention of getting into that kind of stuff. I did have standards, and one was I’d fight for money, but I wouldn’t kill for it.
Besides, it was much better being a freelance villain. More freedom. Admittedly, that came with the constant threat of destitution if work dried up, but the world had been pretty quiet the last while. Of course, that usually implied shit was going to hit the fan hard pretty soon. Maybe a multiverse crisis or a bunch of heroes turn out to be aliens in disguise. Well, so it goes. Jobs would get pretty tight around then, seeing as most heroes would be busy, and the public’s interest focused more on the world-ending emergency rather than me ‘robbing’ a bank or whatever, so I needed to save up more of a nest egg now. Feast or famine, baby.
As I got near to the Rumble Ring’s doors, I saw there was a man waiting for me. A big guy dressed in a nice suit which didn’t really distract from the fact his skin was made of what looked like volcanic rock. His face was craggy as a cliff, his jaw huge and his whole build suggesting a powerlifter who’d bathed in cement.
“Victor?” he said, his voice a thick growl.
“Yeah.”
He jerked his head towards the doors with a sound like rocks grinding, and I followed him into the Rumble Ring.
We passed the ticket taker without a problem, the dull roar of the audience echoing down the hallway from the stands. Some screens were planted on the cement walls, showing the ring where it looked like a man with fur and a tiger’s head was getting the shit beaten out of him by a humanoid robot, while a topless woman refereed. Nice. Stay classy, RR.
But we weren’t heading for the ring. Instead, I was brought past a number of doors marked ‘Employees Only’ and some huge bruisers whose skin had a distinctly stony look to them. Imposing bastards, I had to admit, and I also noted that they weren’t wearing any metal on them. So that was how it was going to be, eh? We reached an upper floor which was carpeted, the walls paneled with wood as if to hide the grim brutality of the cement behind them. A pair of doors awaited us, and my escort spoke in undertones to another pair of stone-skinned bruisers before they allowed me through.
I loosely rolled my shoulder and cracked my neck. Alright. Let’s do this.
Passing through the doors I entered Arman Glint’s private office. I’d been in there once before, when Arman had made me an offer I couldn’t accept. A huge desk dominated the middle of the room and a large window at the back looked down on the entire Rumble Ring. All around the walls were shelves with glass barriers which showcased a collection of rocks that would give a geologist raptures. Diamond, gold, crystal, granite, and others I couldn’t even name. The lights in the room were low, dulled because had they been brighter, Arman’s skin would have blinded me.
There were a lot of rumors about Arman Glint, but most agreed that he used to work as a hitman for the mob. But that was before he allegedly found a crystal that gave him his new diamond skin. He was absolutely huge, filling the chair and towering over his desk like a statue unearthed from some ancient empire, his silica skin glittering in the gloom. His craggy features shifted like tectonic plates as he smiled a glinting grin. A dark suit clothed him, leaving only his diamond head and hands visible. Hands that were currently toying with a rough, uncut crystal. I wondered if it was the one that gave him his powers?
Instinctively I sensed the presence of others in the room and casually glanced to either side, finding a pair of bruisers standing at attention in either corner, arms crossed. One’s stony skin was red like a brick wall while the other’s was limestone grey.
“Magneron. So glad to see you,” Arman said, rising and gesturing at the chair across from him. “Please. Sit.”
“Sure. Thanks,” I said, taking a seat.
Arman nodded to himself, picking up the crystal he’d been toying with and moving towards the display case on the wall. “I heard you wanted to speak to me about something. I must say, that is a bit of a surprise.”
“Is it?”
“Oh yes. After you stole away my best singer, I couldn’t help but wonder what else you were about.” He opened the display case and gingerly put the crystal on a velvet cushion, his massive hands closing the glass door with stunning delicateness. He turned back to me, his eyes seeming to glow in the fissures of his face. “And that’s after you quit the ring, too.”
“I thought we left on good terms?” I said.
Arman chuckled, a sound that rumbled through the room like the thunder of an approaching storm. He crossed back to his desk, his stride making the floor subtly shake. “Yes. Good terms. Good enough, as I recall. Which is why I’ve agreed to meet you. You could have been great, Victor,” Arman said as he took a seat once more. “We could have done great things indeed.” He cracked open a box and turned it towards me. “Cigar?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Pity. They’re excellent.”
Arman took one out and brought out an old-fashioned and quite beaten-up metal lighter, flicking it open with a hiss of flint and a spark of flame. He lit his cigar, taking a slow drag of it. I could actually see the smoke swirling about inside his crystal body. Had to say, it was a bit disconcerting.
“Mmm. Excellent stuff. Now that I don’t have to worry about lung cancer, it has such appeals to me. But I digress,” he said, flicking shut the lighter. “I’m a busy man, Magneron. I hope you appreciate the favour I’m doing you.”
“I do,” I said. “I need information.”
“Information? Why, Magneron. What a strange request. You make it sound like I’m some sort of broker or criminal.”
“Yes. What a farfetched idea,” I said drily.
Arman chuckled again and blew a plume of smoke into the air. “Indeed. But for the sake of argument, let’s hear what you want.”
“I need anything you know about a man.”
“A man? I know many men.”
He was being intentionally coy with me. I didn’t like it. That wasn’t like Arman. He knew more than he was letting on. Well zippidy doo, what a fucking joy. I leaned forward, resting an arm on the desk. “Let me narrow it down. I need information about a Teklin. A mad scientist and arms dealer.”
With slow, deliberate motions Arman tapped some ash from the tip of his cigar. “And whatever makes you think I have contact with a man like that?” he said as he took another lazy drag.
I actually laughed. “Come on. You’ve got cyborgs and people crossed with animals down in your ring every night. If you’re not paying for some of their alterations, you know where they’re getting them. And don’t even get me started on the Nights.”
There was a subtle change in the air. Arman looked at me, his eyes smoldering in their glow. He took out the cigar, stubbing it out on an ash tray, grinding it down with a sizzle. “An interesting theory,” he said in a tone that implied such ‘interesting theories’ tended to meet rebuttals armed with baseball bats in back alleys. “And perhaps I do know something of this… Teklin.
“But I have a theory for you as well,” Arman continued, folding his hands before him, looming in his seat, looking down on me like a mountain getting ready to bury a village with a rockslide. “Say, perhaps, that you were not the only interested in some information from me. Oh yes. Perhaps another had some questions just like you. A man who, it seems, had been thwarted very recently by someone with powerful magnetic abilities. And this someone was very keen to learn about him.”
I sat up straighter as I heard the heavy tread of booted feet, the two thugs in the corners coming nearer. “Oh?” I said.
“Oh yes,” Arman said, smiling his diamond smile, the gleam of which never reached his eyes. “And suppose this man had come to me with a very generous offer. Not only to glean some information from me, but even more, to perhaps get this someone out of the way in a very permanent manner. And offered a considerable amount of money for it. Now, what do you think I said?”
Ah. So, there it was. I tilted my head, glancing at the two thugs in their fine suits and skin of stone, now standing quite close behind my chair. I slowly looked back to Arman. A roar sounded from the window as the fight below neared its conclusion, the faint sound of the ref counting down echoing from speakers beyond the glass.
“I suspect you said no,” I said.
Silence stretched the moment. Arman raised a brow with a rocky grinding. “Do you now?”
“I do,” I said, my pulse thumping, my magnetic powers building, resonating in the metal fixtures in the room. Humming with any of the minerals in the display cases that had a trace of a magnetic field I could manipulate. “I think you said no because you suspect how powerful I am. I think you didn’t want to try and see if you could come out on top here. So let me ask you a question this time. Do you know how many support beams hold up the Rumble Ring’s walls?”
Arman cocked his head. “Hm?”
“Forty-seven major ones. Plus wire mesh inlaid in the cement,” I said. “A bunker designed to weather the worst of external threats while the city waits for the heroes to deal with whatever monsters are on the loose.
“But what do you think would happen,” I said, tensing as my magnetic powers began to vibrate the girders in the walls around us. “If they suddenly started shaking?”
I started to make the metal hum, the girders in the walls around us shuddering like a plucked guitar strings. The room around us quivered, the thugs behind my chair stumbling before righting themselves, looking at the ceiling uneasily.
Arman was unmoved. “Do you think I would fear this roof coming down?” he mused, smoke swirling through his diamond facets.
“You? Probably not,” I said. “I bet you could brush off anything short of a direct hit from a nuke. But you’d be buried deep under the rubble for a long time, Arman. It could take months for crews to dig you out of here. And once they did, there’d be all sorts of questions. Why did the Rumble Ring collapse? Why was it unsafe? Whose fault was it? And so on. And so on. I imagine the media circus would be pretty dire, wouldn’t it? You’d be lucky if they didn’t give you the death penalty. Then, I guess we’d find out how invulnerable that diamond skin of yours really is.”
“You’d also kill hundreds of audience members,” he noted.
I shrugged. “Well, I am a villain.”
“And you’d die as soon as the walls fell in,” he added.
“Probably. But what have I got to lose other than my life? And what about you, Arman? Are you willing to lose everything for a chance at some pocket change?”
The silence stretched between us. The subtle rumble of the room grew louder, the glass cases of the displays beginning to ring and tinkle. There was a sudden cracking sound as a fissure split open part of the ceiling.
Arman suddenly smiled a dazzling smile.
“Very good, Victor,” he said, waving off his two thugs. “Very good indeed. I’m so glad you and I have such a thorough understanding of one another.”
I smiled back. Bastard. If I’d shown even a hint of hesitation his goons would have crushed my head like a melon. I didn’t bother looking back to see the pair of toughs retreat to their corners. The thud of their footsteps was evidence enough, but I did loosen my grip on the girders inside the walls, the shaking of the room subsiding. But I didn’t release it all the way. Oh no. I was far from out of the woods yet.
“In answer of your question, I do know of Teklin,” Arman said as he fetched out another cigar and lit it. “An excellent provider of biological and mechanical enhancements. Quite a few fighters use the items he sells to become powered.”
Well, that was no surprise. There was never a shortage of people looking for powers. Regardless of the price. Not to mention copious amounts of real villains who weren’t already mad geniuses often looked to superarms dealers to get more powerful minions. Outsourcing your mad science was often done by the stingier evil overlords. Apparently, the Mad Scientist’s Union had been protesting about that, before their union hall was stepped on by a giant radioactive lizard. They never should have held it in Japan, but that’s what you get when the majority of your members are a bunch of weebs.
“So, you do know him,” I said.
“I’ve had business with him before,” Arman said. “It’s unavoidable in my industry, you understand. Although,” he added thoughtfully, “he also used to provide some quite exemplary cybernetic enhancements as well. Yet strangely, those he has been offering lately have been of lower quality. A curiosity, would you not agree?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. Dammit. How much did Arman already know? Or suspect? Dolly had entered some of her robots into the Rumble Ring years ago. It was how I first met her. But if Arman knew before, I’m sure he would have sold out Dolly long ago, so it didn’t look like he’d made the connection quite yet. But when you had literal rock as a poker face, there wasn’t a whole lot of tells.
“But his monsters are top notch. Top notch indeed,” Arman mused. “I have little use for such beasts, of course. My fighters are all of an intelligent sort. Monsters tend to ignore the ringing of a bell.”
“But not always,” I said, guessing where he was going. Fucking hell. “Teklin has been using the Nights to showcase his monsters, hasn’t he?”
Arman’s eyes glinted. “A most interesting idea,” he said smoothly. “Perhaps there is a way you might find out. Hm?”
Mother fucker. I knew it. This? This right here was why I left the Rumble Ring. Arman had been trying to get me to do Night fights before I finally quit. And I knew that he was enough of a schemer that he’d eventually pull it off. Fuck! Carter and him would be in a dead heat for first prize in ‘Most Infuriatingly Clever Bastard.’ If they didn’t tear each other apart first. I knew he’d figure out a way to force me into a Night fight some day. I just never dreamed it would take me quitting first for it to happen.
“Fine,” I growled. “One fight. But I won’t be coming in as Magneron, and no humans or humanoids. Put me up against a robot or something.”
“Hardly a fair fight, given your powers,” Arman mused.
“I forgot the part where I cared if it was fair or not. But fine! Then a monster. Whatever! You’ll get your damn battle,” I growled, pushing myself to my feet.
Arman chuckled deeply as he rose as well, towering a solid two meters in the air. “I will see it done. So glad we could come to an agreement, Victor.”
He stretched out his hand, and despite every instinct screaming at me to shove him out the window by his fancy metal buttons, I reached out and shook it. Arman didn’t try and squeeze or any other pennyante powerplay bullshit. He just shook on it. The sort of shake that meant more than any written contract would, unless you happened to sign in blood.
“Excellent,” Arman said smoothly. “Come to pier seven tomorrow night. I will arrange everything.”
Wonderful. Perfect. Nothing like a night out in a death match with a mad scientist’s pet monster. I suppressed a sigh.
Looked like it was going to be one of those days.