I flew up and hit the robot with one hell of an uppercut. I made sure to put every extra ounce of power I could into that physical blow.

I was irritated enough that I felt like beating the shit out of something. I was going to do this the old fashioned way. No fancy plasma blasts or energy weapons or antigrav homing missiles.

I was pissed off. I needed to let off steam. I was going to make this robot my bitch, and the clang it made was supremely satisfying as my fist made contact and the inertial compensators that kept every bone in my arm from breaking kicked into high gear.

The robot's head flew back and it stumbled back into some of the bleachers. I would've winced if I was a football kind of person, but seeing as how I sort of resented the football program for taking away money from more important things, I felt a sense of smug satisfaction as the falling bot caused at least a few hundred thousand dollars of damage.

The thing was just like the smaller robots. It had two arms, two legs, a head on top, and one hell of a glass chin even though it looked like the whole thing was made of some futuristic space-age metal.

Which meant it'd be easy enough to beat the shit out of the thing considering space age technology was about seventy years out of date at this point.

I wondered if she was stupid enough to actually put the brain in the head rather than in the chest where it could be more easily protected.

That was the problem with humanoid robots. They came with all the same structural tradeoffs that regular humans had. That made them that much easier to destroy. Everyone and their mother already knew what those structural weaknesses were since humans had been destroying human-shaped things on a smaller scale for thousands of years.

It made no sense to use a human shape when designing a proper world dominating robot when there were so many better and more efficient designs. That was an argument I had with CORVAC over and over, and I'd ultimately won that argument by kicking his ass.

I never understood why, for example, Skynet didn't just send an atomic bomb back to '80s LA. Sure there was the whole "you have to send living tissue through the time machine so mechanical stuff doesn't work," rule they totally forgot about when they realized they could use primitive CGI to make Robert Patrick look badass, but why not encase a nuke in some of that living tissue it was so fond of putting on its killing machines to take out Sarah Connor?

A nuke wrapped in flesh would've been a hell of a lot more efficient than trying to kill her with a humanoid robot that had to actually go to the trouble of trying to find her instead of destroying everything. If the time machine could send a futuristic cyborg designed in the far future back through time encased in living tissue then it sure as fuck could've sent back an atomic bomb that was basically operating on ancient technology invented in the '40s and perfected in the '50s.

That was in a fictional world, though, and this was very much real life. I figured I'd be able to easily defeat the thing, but if Dr. Lana was going to make it easier for me to easily defeat her toys? I wasn't going to complain.

The robot came at me with one hell of a right hook. And it moved surprisingly fast.

That was another misconception that anyone who didn't live in Starlight City had as a result of watching far too many movies. They always assumed big things moved slower. It was an illusion moviemakers put in to make big things seem more realistic. The human mind didn't want to accept big things that could move fast.

The plain fact of the matter was a thing's size didn't have anything to do with its speed, and this robot was proof of that. I swooped under its fist and blasted it a couple of times at the elbow joint in the hopes she hadn't bothered to reinforce the armor there.

Was that fair? Maybe not, but fair play and a sense of honor is for villains rotting in jail. Or the grave.

The charged plasma glanced off the thing without so much as leaving a scorch mark. Damn. I suppose that was too much to hope.

"Come on," I said. "You have to have a weakness."

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The robot turned. It scowled at me. She'd actually installed eyebrow shutters on the thing. Damn. That was just like that stupid eyelids CORVAC insisted I install on the giant robot chassis he used to try and destroy downtown Starlight City.

I'll admit it had been a little unsettling when that stupid thing turned and scowled at me. CORVAC had totally been right about the intimidation factor. I could appreciate a maniacal supercomputer with a good sense of theatricality.

Not that it'd done him any good, and not that a cosmetic add-on was going to do this robot any good either. I knew it was merely cosmetic, and the thing wasn't going to intimidate me with the mechanical equivalent of parlor tricks.

If it was using parlor tricks then I had a full on Vegas magic show spectacular hidden up my sleeve, thank you very much. I'd been doing villain performance since before this thing's circuit diagrams were an itch in one of the electrochemical gradients in Dr. Lana's brain.

A second shadow passing across the robot was the only indication I had that something was wrong. A proximity alarm sounded, warning me of something coming in way too fast. I went into an automatic dive.

I was really glad I'd put all those extra sensors on my suit. Hey, I figured if they could make cars that let out an annoying beep and took control when it was obvious the person behind the wheel wasn't paying attention then the least I could do was put some of those same safeguards into my suit.

When I wheeled around I saw a second humanoid robot about to swat me from the sky. Oddly enough, the fact that it was swatting was a relief. I figured if they were going for a low tech swat maybe there was a chance they weren't armed with real weapons.

These things were already proving to be tough enough to get a hit in without adding things like explosives and missiles and crap like that into the mix. On their side, that is. I was about to add a hell of a lot of that shit into this fight on my end, thank you very much.

"Is that the best you've got?" I shouted at the robot, not entirely certain whether or not it even knew what I was saying.

If I were Dr. Lana? I wouldn't have given any of these monstrosities anything approaching intelligence. Then again I wasn't Dr. Lana, and she hadn't had the bad experience I had with artificial intelligence.

Not to mention robots like these always had to walk the line between being intelligent enough to do the job without being intelligent enough to turn on their masters. It was a knife's edge that was difficult to walk, and I didn't expect Lana to walk that line without cutting her feet to hell and back.

A flash of green behind me got my attention. It was reflected off of the metallic hull of the robot in front of me, and I felt a chill.

CORVAC green. He was particularly fond of having a green light that traveled back and forth like a Cylon from the ancient Battlestar Galactica series. I'm not talking the one with Edward James Olmos.

You'd think a supercomputer with access to the sum total of all of mankind's creative accomplishment via the Internet would find something of more recent vintage to obsess over, but no. He'd decided to tap into an ancient TV antenna that came with my house in the 'burbs to watch a cheesy sci-fi show on UHF that would've been nothing more than a footnote in sci-fi history if those Star Trek dudes hadn't knocked it out of the park for the first two seasons or so of the remake.

That weird green glow wasn't there when I turned around. Just the robot that'd been trying to sneak up on me. That was enough to make me wonder if I was starting to lose it.

I'd never heard of villains or heroes dealing with post traumatic stress, although normals dealing with PTSD in the wake of attacks on the city was something of a health crisis in Starlight City.

It was a problem I felt guilty enough about that I quietly funneled a portion of any proceeds I stole to mental health clinics in the city, but this was different.

I could've sworn I'd seen CORVAC's trademark green. There was no mistaking that color. It was the color of an ancient monochrome monitor like the one I'd played with as a young kid when my dad showed me the ancient computer he'd learned on because his dad always insisted on having the latest and greatest back in the '80s.

I hated CORVAC for turning that particular color of green on black from a fond memory of my dad to a terrifying reminder of the time my computer decided to turn on me, and I'm not talking about the terrifying childhood occasions when the A drive would make a groaning noise and tell me it couldn't read the 5.25" floppy disk that contained my favorite game and would I like to Abort, Retry, or Fail?

Also? It was totally enough to distract me just long enough for the robot behind me to smack me down. So much for my safety systems, which were currently redlining. I was going to have to go back to the drawing board on those and make them a little more automatic.

Yet another problem with not having CORVAC around to monitor those systems for me.

I flew through the air towards the ground and barely righted myself before I slammed into the turf. That really fucking hurt.

That was going to leave a mark. My safeties kicked in and redlined again as they compensated for one hell of a smack. I pulled myself up and looked up just in time to see the robot's foot about to come down on me.

Well then. It looked like I was going to get smashed into the turf after all. This wasn't going to be fun.

Then I heard it. A flash and a sonic boom off in the distance. A roar that drew closer faster than any technological marvel ever created by man could ever hope to travel.

I grinned. It looked like this giant robot fight had just turned into my favorite kind of date night with my best girl. Even if it was in the middle of the day.

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