As Huntress leaped from the next building and crashed through the already-broken window of the seemingly disused warehouse, landing with enough force to crack the bare concrete beneath her feet, a wild, vicious grin was spread across her noble features - though it dimmed slightly at the bleating protests coming through in her earpiece.
'Huntress! Please, wait for backup! Qualia is still out of action, Flamespout and Radiance are being held up by other villains, and Axehead is still a long way out. You're on your own here. It could be a trap. You can't go in the-'
Huntress plucked the tiny device from her ear and crushed it to pieces underfoot. Farsight, the group's coordinator, was always careful - but in this case, far too careful. After all, they had finally tracked The Cobra to her secretive lair. This was their chance to finally take the supervillain down, once and for all. What was Huntress supposed to do? Just sit on her hands until someone showed up to babysit her?
No way. Not in this lifetime. Not after everything The Cobra had done. This was personal.
"Sorry, ladies," Huntress muttered, as she advanced towards the building's depths. "This time, the glory's all mine."
What did she have to be afraid of? The Cobra was a mastermind and a diabolical manipulator, certainly. There was no telling who she might have turned into a mindless, fanatically loyal double agent with that power of hers. But here, now, in the flesh, all those plans and schemes would mean nothing. In a fair fight, The Cobra was little better off than a mere civilian.
Huntress, meanwhile, was a superhero with godlike strength - literally. She'd started out as a mere vigilante, hunting petty criminals and wrongdoers, but her will and determination had soon caught the attention of Dianae, the ancient maiden goddess of the hunt. Dianae had blessed her with many gifts: strength, stature, a hunter's instincts, and her own divine armaments. Now, as the goddess's avatar, Huntress stood seven feet tall, with an amazon's body, clad in an enchanted, steel blue, leather bodice and cowl, with a colossal, heaven-forged war bow strapped over her back.
Yeah. The Cobra didn't stand a chance.
Her resolve set, Huntress moved like a stalking wolf. For years, The Cobra had been a ghost. A curse, weaving her malign influence throughout the world without once leaving herself vulnerable to just retaliation. It was only through happenstance that Huntress managed to track her here, to what seemed like nothing more than yet another abandoned warehouse hidden deep within anonymous urban sprawl. It was the perfect place for a cunning supervillain to hide.
But The Cobra was about to learn that she was no match for the cunning of a huntress who had caught her scent.
The disused building was huge, and as Huntress headed into its depths, the open storage spaces gave way to cramped rooms and narrow, labyrinthine service corridors. Huntress moved quickly, faster than any mere mortal could have, but her senses remained keen to any danger and her hunting instincts guided her along a sure route towards her prey. She expected traps, tricks, maybe even minions - but there was nothing. No impediment to her progress as she made her way toward The Cobra's lair.
Huntress let herself grin. It was so typical of villains. When you finally hit them close to their home, they were all but defenseless.
In turn, featureless, dusty corridors soon gave way to passageways that showed signs of recent use and renovation. Huntress's superhuman ears picked up on the hum of electricity, and the walls were covered with wires; brand new fiber-optic cables, all of which seemed to lead inexorably towards a single point. Eventually, she came to a heavy, metal door, deep within the bowels of the building. Behind it was the nerve center of everything.
This was it. This was The Cobra. It had to be
Huntress swiftly unslung her bow from her shoulder, notched an arrow, and forced the door open with a single, mighty kick.
Inside, it was dark, even to Huntress's enhanced eyes. Light spilled out into the large room only from a huge array of monitors arranged on the opposite wall. Before the monitors was a desk, and before the desk was a woman sitting in a chair, staring up at them. She didn't look round, not even at the sound of the huge, heavy door to her lair crashing to the ground.
But Huntress didn't need to see her face to know that she'd found her enemy. At last.
The woman was brunette and considerably shorter than Huntress; even from behind, Huntress would have recognized her anywhere. The true giveaway was what she was wearing: a tight bodysuit, so dark it was almost black, except that when it caught the light, it was possible to see a scaled pattern etched across its surface in the deepest shade of emerald.
"Cobra!" Huntress roared, as she stepped across the threshold. "It's over! In the name of the goddess, I'm here to bring you to justice."
There was no reply. The Cobra didn't even turn. Information kept flickering across the monitors: maps, dates, statistics.
"You're finished." Huntress advanced another step. "I'm going to make sure you spend the rest of your life behind bars - and even that's better than you deserve. You've killed a lot of good heroes. You killed my friend. Come on. Come face your reckoning."
The Cobra still didn't acknowledge her presence. She remained completely focused on the screens in front of her, and constant flickering as they chanced and scrolled. Huntress felt her choler start to rise.
"Face me!" she yelled. Another step. "I want to see the look in your eyes when you realize you've lost."
Still, nothing. Huntress's temper flared, and anger drowned out her more cautious urges. She'd had enough of this childish game.
"Face me!" she repeated - and as she stepped forward, she loosed an arrow from her bow. Thick as a spear, it flew through the air and hit square its target: one of the monitors to The Cobra's left. Impaled, it flickered black and shattered, showering the supervillain in sparks.
But she still didn't move
Huntress frowned. She stepped forward, reached out to put her hand on The Cobra's shoulder, and spun the chair.
It wasn't her. It was some stranger, a woman Huntress had never seen before, with a passing similarity to the supervillain, dressed in her costume and sat in her chair, a telltale look of glassy-eyed, insensate pleasure on her face.
Huntress barely had time to process the sudden, sinking feeling in her gut before the trap was sprung.
The superhero wheeled and instinctively raised her bow - but without a notched arrow, it was useless. Before she could prepare one, she caught a glimpse of a slender outline, darting towards her from the shadowy corners of the room, holding some kind of large weapon that was already trained directly at the superhero. Huntress braced herself - but still, she wasn't worried. Her divine gifts made her bulletproof. She was ready to take a blow.
What she wasn't ready for was for the weapon to launch a set of long, segmented, metal cables at blinding speed. Huntress made to dodge - but caught off-guard, she was just barely too slow. The cables slammed into her with the force of a speeding truck. Huntress was able to hold her ground even against that, but she had no defense when the cables started to wrap around her body, flexing with their own momentum and pinning the superhero's limbs to her sides. She dropped her bow and stumbled, and, before she knew it, Huntress was wrapped up tight from her shoulders all the way down to her knees.
"That's better," said The Cobra, as she dropped the heavy cable-launcher. She sighed with relief. "You're not an easy woman to catch, you know. Even faster than I'd thought. But maybe now we can have a civilized conversation."
Huntress just glowered furiously at her. The sight of The Cobra's face made other faces flash through her mind. People she'd lost. People The Cobra had taken from her. At last, she was getting the confrontation she'd long craved, and Huntress wasn't going to let anything hold her back. She started flexing and straining against the coils of metal binding her, drawing on all of her righteous anger and all of her divine strength. The cables didn't break - but they groaned from the strain.
"This won't hold me," Huntress warned. "Not for long."
The Cobra just shrugged. "Adamantite. It'll hold for long enough."
"We'll see," Huntress countered. "Backup is almost here."
Infuriatingly, The Cobra wagged a finger and tutted. She turned her head, letting Huntress see the earpiece she was wearing. "I'm tapped into your comms. Backup is not almost here. Backup is being misdirected away, on a wild goose chase. No, it's just the two of us."
Huntress flashed her a nasty grin. "Bad news for you, once I break out of these."
It was strange that The Cobra didn't seem frightened. She hardly had the look of a larger-than-life supervillain. Compared to Huntress, she was slight and slender, with nondescript brown hair. Only her scaled bodysuit and the dark glint in her eyes hinted at her true nature. Huntress knew better than to underestimate the woman standing before her. She knew full well how many lives The Cobra had ruined.
"We'll see." The Cobra started walking towards Huntress, preening like a peacock, her voice soft, with just a hint of an alluring, sibilant, hiss. "Actually, I was hoping that if we spent a little time together, you might realize that we really don't need to be enemies."
Huntress just laughed. "Don't be ridiculous."
Huntress's hatred for the villain was so thick she almost choked on it as she spat out her words. The idea that they could be anything but mortal enemies was absurd.
"Now, now," The Cobra chided. She was within arm's reach, and Huntress hated that she couldn't reach out and strike her. The hero redoubled her efforts to break the metal coils around her body. "You never know. I might just turn out to be your type."
Humor could only stretch so far. "Listen here," Huntress growled. "I don't care what you say. I don't care what you do. No matter what, I will never, ever- mph!"
For the second time in as many minutes, the superhero found herself taken off-guard - this time, as The Cobra lunged forward and pressed their lips together in a kiss.
