Episode 14 (3/30/01)

Even though she was continually outnumbered, Silverbullet mixed Lily Sloan's martial arts background (a first-degree black belt in kung fu) with her newfound, God-given ability to morph with much success. Side kicks were augmented by her morphing the soles of her feet into something far sharper than anything ever seen (let alone felt) on soccer cleats. Blocks of lunges and thrown punches were augmented by vinyl record-sized buzzsaws suddenly emanating and spinning from her upper forearms (another trick read in a comic). The parking lot of the Sin City Arena that the Wolf Pack helped turn into a blood camp was quickly turning into a bloody mess of fur and rapidly aging corpses (since most of these previously slow, aging white supremacists were bitten as far back as the late 1940s) mainly because of the element of surprise. Who could've possibly expected, even after planning this invasion since the end of World War II, a superhuman interloper?

But Captain Rancor now had an idea of how to fight such an enemy. Though thoroughly on the dark side, most werewolves are fairly undisciplined as soldiers go, and a couple that Silverbullet didn't get around to attacking actually retreated‹even ran‹as Rancor stepped out of the Sin City Arena with a human toddler held high in the air by the scruff of the neck like a cat would hold a kitten. The 3-year-old's brown cheeks were streaked with tears, wailing as if a banshee of ancient Irish lore.

"Miss Silver Lesbian," Captain Rancor yelled over the crying of the child he held hostage. "Or whatever your name is. I have here one of your kind, assuming you are a Negress under all that metal."

By this point, the wolfmen Silverbullet was facing had fled, and Rancor then had her full attention. "The name's Silverbullet, you fascist pig! Let the girl go! You want me, come get me!"

"Nein, Frau Silverbullet!" Captain Rancor's pasty, undead face cracked a wiry grin, seemingly assured of his plan's chances. "Follow me inside!" And with that, the captain‹still roughly holding with one hand the little girl as a hostage‹walked in reverse, back into the arena, keeping his blood-red, pindrop eyes on Silverbullet the entire time.

Fighting back the angry urge to charge, Silverbullet stormed into the Sun City Arena after Rancor and was immediately bowled over by the smell of blood and dead bodies. "Too much for you, eh?" the Nazi nosferatu called out, noticing her sudden discomfort. "Now you know what garlic is to us!" Instinctively putting her hand to her nose and mouth, she was caught off guard all the easier by the clan of vampire officers who surrounded her once she walked in the door‹and all were brandishing fire extinguishers.

Since Sin City was in the desert, and since crowded arenas generate all the more heat, the Sin City Arena's air-conditioning system was second to none. Silverbullet could feel upon entering that someone must have turned it up sky high. Still distracted by the blood camp's charnel house odor, it wasn't hard for her to be bombarded by the even colder exhaust coming from the extinguishers the vampire clan was spraying.

And just as Captain Rancor had planned (or desperately hoped), Silverbullet began to stiffen. As if she were a shirt that had been heavily starched, Silverbullet found it harder to muster much in the way of fluid agility and all but impossible to morph parts of her body into foreign objects. "Keep spraying!" Rancor ordered, but Silverbullet had already caught onto what they had in mind and tried to bolt into a sprint away from the freezing fire extinguishers and their immobilizing exhaust. But then Captain Rancor bellowed, "Fritz! Get her!"

Rancor's personal bodyguard, the 8-foot-tall, 600-pound, stark white werewolf who was once a racist skinhead from East Berlin named Fritz, pounced upon Silverbullet. His size did nothing to diminish his speed or leaping and he came down on her like a wet burlap sack of potatoes. Fritz tried biting her, but still very much in metallic mode, Silverbullet's skin allowed for zero penetration. In fact, Fritz's teeth and jaw were in pain from the attempt, except this only angered him more, so he quickly resorted to simply, repeatedly pummeling her with balled up clawed paws, each the size of ham hocks.

Every blow from Fritz felt like a blackjack or a billy club upside her head or body, and though the few of her blows that she managed to get in did hurt him since silver always will, Silverbullet was starting to black out. The only fuel she had to keep herself conscious was the thought of her beloved Rose falling into the hands/paws of these creatures of the night just because of a moment of weakness.

TO BE CONTINUED