Chapter 109 Beautiful.

Chapter 109: 109 Beautiful.

Gravel crunched under the tires of the Crown as I rolled to a stop, the headlights cutting through the heavy, oppressive darkness.

Desolation was everywhere. Politicians loved to get on the news and preach about how Metropolis had heroically bounced back from the alien invasion a few years ago, but the truth was, large chunks of the city had simply been abandoned.

Once the BSA and the military had hauled off the crashed spaceships, fixing what remained just wasn’t deemed economically viable.

Case in point: the old Metropolis Zoological Gardens.

I stepped out of the car, eyeing the ruined, overgrown landscape.

Collapsed aviaries, rusted iron bars, and hollowed-out concrete habitats surrounded us. Craters blistered the cracked asphalt pathways, overgrown with mutated weeds.

The occasional shadow of a scavenger or a desperate squatter shuffled through the ruins. It was the sort of place normal people avoided during the day, and only the actively suicidal wandered into at night.

Which, I suppose, made it the absolute perfect hideout for Delirium. And it certainly explained where the madman was sourcing all the exotic animals for his twisted biological experiments.

Glacia stepped out of the passenger side. It was genuinely jarring to see her dressed in sleek, tactical black clothing; her normal, flawless snow-white aesthetic wasn’t exactly conducive to a stealth mission. I’d left Psyren back at the chalet. Steve had swung by for some instrumental practice, and those two didn’t need any distractions before their hijacked concert debut against the Songbirds tomorrow.

As I stood there, looking out over the scoured ruins of the zoo, I couldn’t help but notice the distant, glittering skyline of downtown Metropolis, a stark contrast to the graveyard we were standing in. Ah well. Nothing I could do about urban decay. I rolled my shoulders, took a deep breath, and deployed my armor.

With a heavy, metallic snick, the interlocking magnetic plates underneath my suit, locking securely over my torso, arms, and legs.

"Comms check. Can you hear me?" I asked, tapping in the comm within my ear.

"Loud and clear, boss," Rhea’s voice chirped in my ear, accompanied by the frantic clacking of a mechanical keyboard.

"So this is the place?"

"Sure is. The last encrypted signal I traced from Delirium’s holoprojector bounced directly from those coordinates."

"Sounds good," I said. I looked back at Glacia. "Watch the car. Keep the engine warm and your eyes open."

"Sir," she protested instantly, taking a step forward. "I really think my combat skills would best be served at your side—"

"Glacia, if this is a trap, it won’t do me any good if you’re stuck in the crossfire with me," I said, gently shutting down the argument we’d been having ever since Rhea burst into my room. "If things go sideways in there, I’ll need someone on the outside to bust me out. And I can only trust my Number Two with a tactical extraction."

She didn’t look entirely happy about it, but the title did its job. Glacia straightened her posture and gave a firm nod. "I understand, sir. I will not let you down."

"I know you won’t," I said. I leaned in, gave her a quick kiss, and then turned toward the ruined zoo. I fed a magnetic pulse through my suit, lifting smoothly off the cracked asphalt and rising into the night air.

The ruins looked even worse from above. It was a bird’s-eye view of what happened when hostile extraterrestrials decided to skip the probing phase and go full Independence Day on a primate enclosure.

My spine tingled with the familiar unease of being airborne. I doubted there were any capes patrolling this specific airspace—especially after the Human Owl accidentally fried himself on a damaged powerline two weeks ago—but you could never be too careful.

Fortunately, finding Delirium’s exact location was going to be the easy part.

I stretched out my senses, letting my magnetic field wash over the landscape.

The sheer volume of rusting, degraded iron in the old cages grated against my mind like sandpaper. But beneath the decay, I felt it. A dense, perfectly organized pocket of pristine metal. Reinforced steel beams, copper wiring, server banks.

Gotcha.

"Found it," I muttered, floating down toward a massive, collapsed rock formation that used to be the subterranean Reptile House.

I landed silently near a massive fissure in the artificial rock wall. The pristine metal signature was coming from a sprawling underground cave system beneath the enclosure. I sighed.

Seriously, what was it with megalomaniacs and subterranean lairs? Was there some sort of villainous union mandate I missed? Did digging a giant hole in the ground come with a bulk discount on brooding, dramatic lighting?

I floated into the darkness of the cavern, my armor silent. I didn’t do stealth missions often—the whole point of freelance villainy was to get noticed, be bombastic, and generate viral clips. But sometimes, you had to be a ghost to set up the perfect dramatic entrance.

As I drifted deeper into the cave, my powers brushed against a network of security cameras bolted to the cavern walls. I stayed in their blind spots, hovering near the ceiling.

Then, I sensed movement.

I paused, pressing myself into a rocky alcove. Down the tunnel, a humanoid silhouette was patrolling the entrance to a reinforced blast door. It moved with stiff, unnatural precision. A robot. Probably a decoy sentry.

Instinctively, I reached out with my powers, trying to grab hold of its chassis to crush it or toss it aside.

Nothing happened.

My magnetic field washed right over the sentry without catching a single thing. No iron. No steel. No magnetic resonance whatsoever.

What the hell was that thing made of? Carbon-fiber composite? Some sort of advanced ceramic polymer? Whatever synthetic alloy Delirium was using, it made the creepy, Ultron-knockoff entirely immune to my primary offense.

I kept my distance, floating silently along the upper ridges of the cavern until I completely bypassed the sentry. Just above the reinforced blast door, hidden behind a stalactite, I found what I was actually looking for: a thick bundle of circuits feeding the cavern’s security grid.

Careful not to drift into the camera’s line of sight, I pulled one of Rhea’s custom hacking transmitters from my belt. With a soft snick, I clamped the device onto the cables, driving the bypass pins directly into the wiring.

"Rhea?" I whispered.

"I’m in, Miles. I’m hooking into the mainframe now," she replied, her voice tight with concentration. "Give me a sec... routing through the firewalls... and... got it! Sentry patrol loops are frozen. Alarms and cameras are down."

"Beautiful."