The air in the command room of Aegis Barracks suddenly grew heavy. This was different from the calm before the storm; it was as if the oxygen in the atmosphere had been vacuumed out and replaced with pure, concentrated fear. General Titan's colossal body lay on the floor, accompanied by oil and sparks leaking from his shattered armor, but Kaelen's attention was no longer on this pile of metal. The Detective felt the sudden pressure change straining his eardrums. His dental fillings ached.
"Jester," Kaelen said, his voice muffled. "This pressure... it's not normal."
Jester didn't reply. That permanent, painted smile was still there on his face, but his hazel eyes were locked on the door. His pupils rapidly dilated and contracted, like a camera lens trying to focus.
The armored door of the room didn't explode. It wasn't torn from its hinges. It simply... melted.
Precisely in the middle of the door, a line of incandescent red light appeared vertically. The thick steel silently parted in two, like a hot knife through butter. Not even the sound of metal liquefying and dripping to the floor was heard; because whatever was coming, it swallowed sound.
The figure stepping through the parted door didn't look like a human or a machine. Unlike Titan's crude, industrial grandeur, this entity was sculpted from fluid darkness. The nano-metal armor covering its body absorbed the light falling upon it, creating a black hole effect in the middle of the room, as if it were a piece torn from the vacuum of space. It had no face. Only a single, vertical optical sensor, glowing with a blood-red light, shone precisely in the center of its head.
Ronin.
When it drew the sword, the sharp clang that metal should make as it left its scabbard was not heard. The sword seemed to be made not of matter, but of frozen shadow. The moment it entered the room, all background electronic hums, fan noises, and even Kaelen's breathing were suppressed.
"Detective," Jester whispered, his voice unusually serious. "Don't blink. You might skip a frame."
Jester didn't wait a second before acting. His body transformed into a cloud of purple static, detaching from reality. At a "glitch" speed that the human eye couldn't follow, he teleported behind Ronin, into its blind spot. He made a move to plunge the pointed metal shard in his hand into the entity's neck joint.
But Ronin didn't turn around. It didn't need to.
The dark figure thrust its sword backward over its shoulder with mathematical precision. Before Jester's attack could reach its target, Ronin's sword intersected Jester's trajectory.
Jester glitched sideways at the last moment, disintegrating into pixels in mid-air, but wasn't fast enough. The tip of the sword sliced a thin line through the porcelain-white paint on his left cheek and the skin beneath.
Jester re-materialized with a somersault at the other end of the room. He brought his hand to his cheek, looked at the blood on his fingers, then tasted it and grimaced.
"Interesting," Jester said, breathless. The purple light in his eyes flickered. He turned to Kaelen. "He's not predicting my moves, Detective. He's reading my code. He sees before I think. This isn't a fight, it's a compilation error."
Ronin was a hunter software with direct access to Jester's "source code." Every electrical impulse, every muscle twitch forming in Jester's mind, reached Ronin's processor as a data packet in advance.
Kaelen drew "The Judge" from its holster. The brute force of the analog world had to answer this elegant horror of the digital world.
"Then let's change his code," Kaelen growled, and pulled the trigger.
The flame erupting from the revolver's barrel briefly illuminated the dim room. The armor-piercing bullet, exceeding the speed of sound, sped towards Ronin's chest plate. This was the wrath of gunpowder and physics, not an algorithm.
Ronin tilted its head slightly. It brought its sword into the bullet's path, not with a superhuman reflex, but with the ease of a pre-written command line.
*Clang.*
The bullet struck the sharp surface of the sword, split in two, and scattered left and right. However, this physical intervention created a microscopic delay in Ronin's flawless flow. A data bottleneck.
"Now!" Kaelen shouted, firing the barrel again. But Ronin had calculated this variable too. It swung its left hand towards Kaelen as if bending the air. An invisible kinetic wave struck Kaelen's chest like a sledgehammer.
The Detective flew backward, his feet leaving the ground, and slammed hard against the metal wall. As the air emptied from his lungs, he felt a sharp burning in his shoulder; his collarbone had cracked from the impact. He collapsed to the floor, his vision blurred. Ronin labeled Kaelen "unnecessary data" and turned its single red eye back to its primary target, Jester.
Jester gritted his teeth, seeing Kaelen lying motionless on the floor. He had no chance in a one-on-one fight. Ronin knew all the moves on the chessboard. For Jester to win, he had to stop playing chess and smash the board over his opponent's head.
His eyes darted to the main command console in the center of the room. Titan's massive panel was still operational.
"Alright," Jester said, talking to himself. "No one's better than you on equal terms, I'll grant you that. But who said the terms would stay equal?"
As Ronin glided towards him, Jester once again detached from reality and teleported next to the console. His fingers began to dance across the keyboard with the speed of a pianist. He didn't access weapon systems. He didn't bypass defense protocols. He attacked the base's fundamental physics engine directly.
On the screen, the warning **"ORBITAL STABILIZERS: OFFLINE"** flashed.
Jester turned to Ronin, putting on that famous, unsettling grin. "If you want to dance, Ronin, let's remove the floor."
He slammed his fist onto the Enter key.
The colossal engines of Aegis Barracks fell silent. The thousands of tons of metal fortress suspended in the sky surrendered to gravity. Freefall began.
The laws of physics in the room were instantly canceled.
Kaelen's body, Titan's massive armor, tables, chairs, and shattered concrete blocks... Everything lifted into the air simultaneously. Kaelen felt his stomach lurch; as if he were falling down an endless elevator shaft.
Zero gravity.
Ronin's feet left the ground. Its perfect stance was broken the moment it lost the support of the ground. Its fighting style was built on balance, center of gravity, and ground friction. But Jester... Jester was an error. For him, there was no up or down.
"Welcome!" Jester cackled. As his voice echoed in the room, he propelled himself like a bullet, pushing off a piece of debris floating in the air.
Zero gravity was Jester's playground.
Ronin spun in the air, trying to regain its balance, but Jester had already bounced off the corner where the ceiling met the wall. Jester saw Titan's massive battle-axe, suspended in mid-air. That mass of metal, normally too heavy for a human to lift, was now as light as a feather.
Jester gripped the axe handle. Spinning his body like a propeller to gain momentum, he hurled the axe towards Ronin.
Ronin detected the approaching threat. It swung its sword, splitting the colossal axe in two in mid-air. Behind that cascade of sparks where metal cut metal, there was something Ronin hadn't calculated: Jester was coming right behind the axe.
As the two halves of the axe glided past Ronin, the sole of Jester's boot landed squarely in the center of Ronin's chest plate. This wasn't just a physical kick; a purple shockwave emanating from Jester's boot created ripples in Ronin's nano-armor.
"System error!" Jester yelled.
The impact was so severe that Ronin was flung backward. It was hurled through the room's shattered wall, out into the cold void of the sky. As its red eye disappeared into the darkness, the Barracks continued to rapidly lose altitude.
Kaelen spun helplessly in the air, trying to grab onto the wall. "Jester! We're crashing!"
Jester bounced off the ceiling and glided next to Kaelen. He grabbed the Detective by the collar. "I know! Isn't the view magnificent?"
The sound of the wind outside the base had now turned into a deafening roar. Below, the hazy lights of Nova-Veridia approached with deadly speed.
"We can't stay here!" Jester yelled, to be heard over the wind. His eyes fixed on the open hangar door. A "Drone-Jet" was preparing for takeoff on autopilot, but it too was being tossed around due to the loss of gravity.
"Do you trust me, Detective?"
Kaelen was used to Jester's madness, but this was different. "Do I have a choice?"
"No!"
Jester pulled Kaelen closer, and together they leaped from the crumbling fortress into the terrifying void amidst the clouds.
The cold air whipped their faces as the world spun beneath them. Jester, in mid-fall, extended his hand. Purple energy threads, emerging from his fingertips like a spider's web, locked onto the wing of the Drone-Jet, which was drifting uncontrollably below.
"Grab on!"
Jester pulled the energy tether, altering their descent trajectory. The two arced sharply through the air, hurtling towards the jet. Jester slammed his boots into the cockpit window. The reinforced glass instantly cracked and shattered under Jester's "glitch" effect.
He threw Kaelen inside first, then plunged into the cockpit himself.
As soon as Jester got into the pilot's seat, he plunged the cable emerging from the port on the back of his neck into the jet's interface. "You're mine!" he growled. His mind seized control of the vehicle's simple software in seconds.
The jet's engines screamed to life. Just a few hundred meters from the ground, they pulled their nose up. Gravity pressed Kaelen into his seat.
Behind them, Aegis Barracks crashed like a meteor into the middle of the desert, on the outer perimeter of Nova-Veridia.
First there was silence. Then, a colossal explosion that obliterated the horizon. A nuclear mushroom cloud painted the night orange as it rose into the sky. The shockwave rocked the jet, the metal fuselage groaned, but Jester didn't relinquish control.
The jet broke free from the smoke, landing hard but controllably on the barren lands. Its landing gear dug into the sand, and the vehicle skidded for a while before coming to a stop.
Kaelen groaned as he unbuckled his seatbelt. His entire body ached. "We're alive," he said, finding it hard to believe.
Jester sat motionless in the pilot's seat. His head was leaned back. The paint on his face had run from sweat and soot, distorting that perfect "sad" expression. His eyes had turned gray, that lifeless, static color. His energy was depleted.
"The keys..." Jester whispered, reaching into his pocket with a trembling hand.
Three small data chips gleamed in his palm. Data from the Golden Arm. Data from Titan's eye. And the last remaining piece from the Emissary.
"Ronin will survive that wreckage," Jester said, his voice a mechanical rasp. "But its processor will have a headache for a while. It'll take time for it to recompile itself."
Kaelen looked out through the jet's broken window. On the horizon, behind the silhouette illuminated by the explosion, rose the heart of the city: **The Core Building.** It was a colossal, monolithic structure, its lights piercing the sky from its peak.
Kaelen's wrist communicator crackled. Echo's voice, anxious but clear, came through the static.
*"Jester? Kaelen? Do you hear me? Hurry. Three hours left until the Great Reset. The Architect is waiting for you. And... he says he's not alone."*
Kaelen looked at Jester as he loaded new bullets into "The Judge." Despite his exhaustion, the clown curled the corner of his lips upward. That familiar, dangerous glint was beginning to return to his hazel eyes.
"Three hours," Jester said, getting to his feet to leave the jet. "Quite a generous amount of time for a final act. Come on, Detective, let's take our bow before the curtain falls."