Supervillain Soulmate

Chapter Three

Nora froze, eyes open wide in disbelief as her pulse hammered in her ears. No no no no no. This couldn't be happening. She hadn't waited all this time for her soulmate to be a villain?! Was this some sort of a cruel joke?

"Well, aren't you going to say anything?" The villain asked, a smirk playing at the corners of his full lips. He crossed his arms and waited, the sky behind him as dark as Nora's inner turmoil.

"This isn't happening." She muttered, glancing at her bed. Surely this was all just a cruel dream, one that she was going to wake up from any second when her alarm went off. Any second now.

"Oh, but it is." The villain told her, finally stepping down from the ragged brickwork and into her bedroom. Nora instinctively took a step back, but the Villain only smirked and continued closing the distance until he could lift his sleeve to reveal the timer that matched her own.

Seeing the flashing zeros there, Nora raised her own wrist towards his. Touching two soulmate timers together after meeting each other synchronised themm, and instead of counting down, from that moment on they would count upwards.

Pain ripped through her shoulder as she was wrenched away to the side before her wrist could make contact with the Villain's.

"Get away from her." The hero had pulled himself to his feet and had put himself between the two of them.

It wasn't until he'd stood between her and the villain that Nora realised she recognised the design of the costume in front of her. Radiant! It was Arjun. She'd looked him up online the day after she'd run into him at the hospital, curious to see what his hero persona was like in comparison to the boy she'd known at school.

The stats of most of the Saviours were readily available online, along with their popularity ranking, headshots, past costumes and you could even look up whether any of them had met their soulmates yet. (not many of them had, which Nora found shocking.)

Staring up at his broad shoulders, she was grateful that he didn't hold a grudge. For all the times that she'd rejected him in school he could have easily just walked away from this and left her to fend for herself.

Instead, here he was. Already injured from a few days ago, with more injuries from being flung through a wall after fighting this guy, and he was still willing to put himself between the two of them to try and save her.

Pulling her powers into the palm of her hand, Nora reached out and gently placed a hand on Radiant's back. He tensed up when he felt her hand but didn't shrug away from her touch so she continued, pushing a little numbing into him.

It wasn't enough that he wouldn't be able to feel anything, that was dangerous. Especially if a fight broke out because the last thing Nora wanted to do was to make him feel like he was invincible when he wasn't, but enough that all of his current aches and pains were reduced to a dull, background throb.

Radiant spared a glance back at her over his shoulder and nodded slightly in what she assumed was a thank you, and a subtle way of telling her that it was working.

"And what if I don't?" The Villain asked, his voice laced with amusement. "You really think you can stop me, Radiant?" The way he said Radiant's name led Nora to believe that this wasn't the first time the two of them had crossed paths and it likely wouldn't be the last.

"I've stopped you before, Cataclysm." Radiant shot back, squaring his shoulders to appear taller and more imposing. "And I can do it again."

"You had help, then." Cataclysm made a show of looking around the room. "But I don't see anyone here to help you now. You better run along before you do something stupid like piss me off." At his words, some of the black clouds from outside started to seep into the room, swirling around his arms like spectral snakes, tiny thunderbolts shooting out of their sides. "Don't forget, I know your weakness. How are you supposed to harness the power of the sun when its rays can't penetrate my storm clouds?"