Four small, red dots from laser sights danced among the dust motes in the room, finding their targets. One was fixed on the heart-protecting plate of Kaelen's tactical vest, while the other three were centered on the stark white, cracked porcelain makeup on Jester's forehead.
Baron Vex leaned back, waving the remote control in his hand like a scepter. The air in the room hung heavy with ozone and expensive cigar smoke.
"One step..." Vex said, his voice a greasy mechanical rasp. "A single twitch, one wrong breath... and this room becomes the tomb of Unit 404's two most famous failures."
Kaelen slowly withdrew his hand from the hilt of *The Judge*. His fingertips tingled, but his face was masked by the years of stoic expression. He glanced at his partner. He didn't expect Jester to be afraid, of course, but he at least hoped he'd grasp the gravity of the situation. Yet Jester, despite the three red dots on his forehead, smiled faintly, as if he'd just heard a bad joke.
Jester's mind wasn't concerned with the physical threats in the room. He saw *Static*. He perceived the cables behind the walls, the data flowing from the turrets' processors, the radio waves flitting through the air like neon-colored threads. Vex thought the turrets were connected to a local network; he trusted that a closed-circuit system couldn't be hacked. What a 1995 mindset.
"I won't move, Baron," Jester said. His voice rang out like shattering glass in the tense silence of the room. "But I'm afraid your 'insurance policy' will activate."
Vex frowned. "What are you babbling about?"
Jester's pupils, for a moment, shifted from hazel to violet, then to a faint gray static. He hadn't accessed the room's local network. He hadn't even deigned to. He had launched his mind to the satellite receiver on top of the building, and from there, to the cloud server of *Aegis Defense Systems*, the turrets' manufacturer. He glided like a software update package, descending into the turrets' root directory.
Changing the "Friend/Foe" protocol would take minutes. He didn't have that much time. But the "Target Prioritization Parameter" was just a simple line of code.
`[CURRENT TARGET: HUMAN THREAT]`
`[NEW TARGET: HIGH DENSITY GOLD (Au) CONCENTRATION]`
`[ENTER]`
A thin, high-pitched whine rose from the turrets' motors.
"Fire!" Vex yelled, unnerved by the unsettling smirk on Jester's face.
The turrets obeyed the command. But their barrels weren't aimed at Jester or Kaelen. All four barrels simultaneously, with a synchronized mechanical whir, swiveled to the right, towards the brightest, densest concentration of gold in the room: Baron Vex.
Vex's one good eye widened in horror. "Stop! Cancel! CANC—"
His words were cut short by the deafening roar of .50 caliber rounds.
Vex, with an agility unexpected for his bulky frame, threw himself behind the massive mahogany desk. As the bullets shredded the desk into splinters, the expensive vases, paintings, and sculptures in the room were reduced to rubble in seconds.
"Now!" Kaelen roared.
The Detective exploited the vacuum created by the chaos like a sledgehammer. As Vex's two bodyguards stared, bewildered, at the turrets, Kaelen lunged forward. He delivered a sharp blow to the right guard's temple with the hilt of *The Judge*, and as the man collapsed, Kaelen spun and kicked the other's kneecap. His movements were fluid, brutal, and merciless.
Jester, meanwhile... was walking.
Bullets whizzed through the air, and splinters of wood flew from the desk where Vex was hiding. But Jester was calm, as if strolling through a park on a rainy day. A bullet whizzed past his left ear, shattering the mirror behind him. Jester didn't even flinch. He knew the mathematics of chaos. The turrets were locked onto gold; Jester had not an ounce of it.
Slowly, he crouched behind the bullet-riddled desk, next to Baron Vex, who was trembling on the floor.
Vex was trying to shield his head with his arms. His synthetic skin was torn in places, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. The turrets fired incessantly, melting through the desk to reach the gold-plated body behind it.
"I can stop the system, Baron," Jester said, leaning into Vex's ear. His voice was clear despite the din of gunfire. "I just need a small donation."
Vex lifted his head, pure hatred and fear in his eyes. "What do you want? Money? Take it all! Stop them!"
"Money is so banal, Vex. I prefer souvenirs."
Jester didn't wait for Vex's answer. He grabbed the Baron's left arm—that enormous, solid gold, intricately engraved prosthetic—by the wrist. Vex screamed, trying to pull his arm away, but Jester's grip was as strong as a hydraulic press.
Jester's eyes scanned the hidden mechanism at the arm's elbow joint. A normal person might have mistaken it for a screw or an ornament. But Jester saw the *Emergency Ejection Latch* there, glowing bright red like an "Eject" button in a video game.
"You know," Jester said, reaching for the latch with his free hand. "It's heavy."
*Click.*
A mechanical hiss was heard, followed by the sound of hydraulics disengaging. Jester detached Vex's golden arm from his body. Vex reeled back with phantom pain.
Jester lifted the arm like a trophy and pressed an imaginary button in the air with his other hand. The turrets' update was complete. The barrels lowered, the motors fell silent. The room was suddenly plunged into a deadly silence. Only Vex's ragged breathing and the sizzling of the cooling barrels could be heard.
"Don't worry," Jester said, looking at the man lying armless and with his fortune shattered on the floor. "You can still count loose change with your other hand. If you have any change left, that is."
Kaelen leaped over the incapacitated guards and joined them. He was breathless. "Jester! The door's open, but the corridor's packed. The arena below is boiling over. We can't just waltz out of here."
Jester looked at the golden arm in his hand, then at the main computer terminal on Vex's shattered desk. The terminal's screen was cracked but still functional.
"You're right, Detective," Jester said, walking towards the terminal. "We can't just waltz out. But perhaps... we can make others wave their hands."
He pressed the golden arm firmly against the terminal's biometric reader. The system instantly recognized Vex's genetic signature and chip.
`[ACCESS GRANTED: ADMINISTRATOR VEX]`
Jester's fingers danced across the keyboard with a pianist's speed. The data streaming across the screen was meaningless green and black lines to Kaelen, but Jester saw the financial veins of the Rust Pit. The betting coffers. Millions of credits accumulated over years, earned with blood and sweat.
"What are you doing?" Kaelen asked, checking the door.
"Robin Hood Protocol," Jester murmured. "Vex's money is digital. But the arena's reward system is set up to distribute physical credit chips via drones. Old school. I love it."
Jester pressed the final key: `[MATERIALIZE ALL ASSETS AND EVACUATE]`
Then he pulled the microphone on the desk towards him. His voice echoed through the arena's massive loudspeakers:
*"Ladies, gentlemen, and those living in the gray area in between! Tonight's champion... IS YOU! Drinks are on the Baron!"*
First, there was a profound silence. Then, the massive ventilation hatches in the arena's ceiling burst open with a roar.
Below, thousands of spectators, expecting blood and violence, tried to comprehend what was raining down on them from above. First, scattered, metallic sounds were heard. Then, a downpour began. But this wasn't Nova-Veridia's famous acid rain. These were credit chips. Millions, billions of credits worth of chips, rained down into the arena like confetti.
"Let's go," Jester said, slinging the golden arm over his shoulder.
Kaelen could hear the noise outside. It wasn't the sound of a riot; it was the hysterical shriek of pure greed.
When they stepped into the corridor, they encountered Vex's private security units. But none of the men reached for their weapons. All of them were looking down over the railings, at the arena floor. Some had taken off their hats, trying to catch the fortune raining from above. A security chief threw his radio aside to grab a chip rolling on the ground.
Kaelen and Jester walked through the midst of this madness.
No one looked at them. No one stopped the clown in the purple cloak or the detective in the gray trench coat. Everyone was after the money, the system's vomit. As Jester said; the house always won, but sometimes the house exploded, and everyone thought they'd won.
***
When they emerged onto the narrow, dark street behind the arena, the rain had started again. Cold drops washed away the sweat and gunpowder residue from Kaelen's face.
Jester placed the golden arm in his hand on top of a dumpster. He connected a thin cable, pulled from a port at the back of his neck, to the arm's data input. His eyes briefly turned white, and his body trembled slightly as data streamed into his mind.
"First Key complete," he said, pulling out the cable. Then, he carelessly kicked the solid gold arm, worth millions of dollars, into the pile of trash. "I hate heavy metal."
Kaelen exhaled deeply, leaning his back against the brick wall. "The turrets..." he said, his voice still tense. "You could have programmed them to kill Vex."
Jester turned his face to the sky under the rain. His makeup ran slightly, making those fake tears even more prominent. "Death is so boring, Detective. If I had killed Vex, he would just be a corpse. But now? Now he's a penniless, armless man with his honor shattered. That's a better story than death."
Kaelen said nothing. He was starting to get used to Jester's twisted sense of morality. And the frightening thing was, sometimes it made sense.
On the rooftop of the building across the street, a silhouette stirred among the shadows. Neither Kaelen nor Jester noticed it. This was no ordinary observer. Raindrops didn't run off the figure; they passed through it as if it were a mirage.
The spy lowered their binoculars and whispered into a comm device on their wrist. Their voice was like the whisper of the wind.
"The rats bypassed the trap, Lady Mirage. They took the first piece."
There was a brief silence.
"Understood," the spy said, watching Jester and Kaelen disappear into the darkness. "We move to phase two. The Badlands await them."