Attack the Geek by Michael R. Underwood

three. But going the Spider-Man or Buffy route again wasn’t going to cut it. She needed to think non-Euclidean, get sneaky on the situation. Every single time they’d gone out to clean house, Lucretia had answered with another wave of nasty, and it didn’t seem like she was running low on cannon fodder.
    So what, then? Ree thought, browsing her media list.
    It didn’t seem to matter what power she had, they would just keep coming. So either she needed to get past them and find Lucretia, which would mean leaving the rest of the group another person down, or she had to change the way that she fought.
    She scrolled past clips of superheroes, detectives, psychics, and chosen ones.
    And found herself a winner.
    The last fights had all been about endurance, about pressing on no matter what happened.
    She didn’t need super-power; she needed staying power.
    Ree plopped onto a chair by the nearly bare weapons table and fired up a clip from Die Hard . John McClane, the patron saint of action heroes, the man whose ingenuity, inexorable will, and smart-assery had carried him through endless trials and launched Bruce Willis’s seemingly unkillable career as an action hero.
    She’d picked out two clips from Die Hard for her power playlist. One for his MacGyver-ness (taping the gun to his back), and one for his indomitable will (walking across broken glass). She played the latter, and did her best to feel McClane’s pain, use it to fuel her own determination, make the hero’s will her own. Internal powers seemed to last longer than the external, flashy stuff. If she could dig into Die Hard well enough, she should be able to fight on even through the exhaustion of a dozen skirmishes on top of working on her feet for six hours.
    Die Hard had, for Ree, opened the doors for action movies where it actually seemed like the hero was in pain, that he’d really struggled through, and that struggling made him all the more heroic. It was that grit she needed. The kind of grit that Eastwood had earned over years fighting in the astral plane of the World Wide Web, that Talon had earned on the battlefields of Pennsic and Pearson both. Ree was still in her rookie year as an urban fantasy heroine. It seemed like she’d seen more than most in that time, but she needed to dig deeper than her reserves would allow, the way that McClane had.
    The sound of cracking wood pulled Ree from her media communion, and she accepted the jian straight-sword pressed into her hand by Drake.
    “Good luck,” he said, then dashed back into the office to join Grognard.
    Ree stood, set her phone back on the table, then hustled over to the crew by the door, which now had a splintered head-size hole around shoulder level. A broad blade hacked into the wood again, widening the gap.
    “Go time?” Ree asked as she stepped up.
    “Go!” Eastwood said, undoing the locks as Talon stabbed back through the hole in the door with the naginata .
    The door swung open, revealing another adventure module’s worth of nastiness.
    That would have normally been the time when her stomach sank at the vastness of the creatures’ numbers, the skeletons, gnomes, eagle-size winged lizards, and especially at the purple hippo ( WTF? ).
    But not this time. This time, she had the determination of John McClane. The power of Die Hard was different from most of the others she’d taken on using Geekomancy. When she channeled Buffy, Trinity, or Spider-Man, she felt the power buzzing in her mind and in her body, always just right there waiting for her to tap into it. This was more like a solid sense of certainty, a cool well of confidence buoying her up.
    I could get used to this, she thought.
    Eastwood dove forward, lashing out with sword and long dagger. Ree pegged his style as the Niten-do of Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings , though he was using western weapons instead of the samurai’s daisho .
    Chandra followed, moving more cautiously than Eastwood, her kukri spinning in tight