Kaelen, crushed under the weight of his wet clothes, clung to the metal grate. His lungs were filled with the burning scent of nitrogen and decaying data from the tunnels, but he held his breath. The scene below didn't just freeze his shivering body; it froze his very soul.
Chronos Laboratory. An anomaly of sterile white tiles amidst an underworld ruled by rusty pipes and dripping water. And right at its center, that monstrous organ defying gravity: the *Chronos Core.* This organic heart, the size of a car, was fed by thousands of cables hanging from the ceiling, pumping not blood but neon blue, pure energy through its veins with every beat. *Thump.* A mechanical rhythm. *Thump.*
But it wasn't this biomechanical horror that truly punched Kaelen in the gut. It was the man standing before the glass dome.
Chief Miller.
The man who had pinned Kaelen's badge, patted his back when he threw up at his first crime scene, and told him, "This city will try to swallow you, kid; be the bone stuck between its teeth." Now that man was bowing slightly before the Syndicate's Emissary, Nova-Veridia's darkest nightmare. With trembling hands, he extended a hard drive he'd pulled from a black leather bag. The inscription "Unit 404 - Archive," written in red pen on the disk, gleamed under the sterile lights of the laboratory.
"This is the last piece," Miller said. His voice, muffled by the thick glass and the hum of the fans below, sounded as if it came from underwater. "All the shadow records of Unit 404. Everything we know about Jester. His weaknesses, frequency ranges..."
The Emissary gripped the disk with metallic gloves. From beneath the smooth, expressionless mask covering his face, a mechanical growl, an expression of satisfaction, arose. "Good. To erase the past, one must first possess it. Your loyalty is noted, Chief."
Jester touched Kaelen's shoulder. He had noticed the detective's clenched jaw, his knuckles white.
"Easy there, cowboy," Jester whispered. His voice held its usual mocking tone, but behind the wild glint in his eyes, there was a rare seriousness. "Now is the worst time for an emotional outburst. The static level is too high; even anger could disrupt the air here."
"I'll kill him," Kaelen hissed through clenched teeth. The words tasted like ash as they left his mouth. "He sold us out, Jester. He sold everyone out."
"No, we'll interrogate him," Jester said, turning his gaze to the colossal heart below. "But first, we need to get into that room. And give that big hunk of flesh... a little arrhythmia."
Jester pulled a strange, copper-wrapped tool from the inner pocket of his purple jacket. It was a kind of sonic screwdriver; a handmade toy designed to manipulate an analog circuit, a digital lock. "You remember Nena's warning, 'No Glitch.' So we'll do this the old-fashioned way."
He touched the tool to the screws holding the grate. A high-frequency *whine* was heard, and the screws loosened and popped out of their sockets as if dipped in butter. Jester winked at Kaelen.
"I'll target the heart, distract them. You take the Chief. Ready?"
Kaelen drew his weapon from its holster, flicked off the safety. "Ready."
Jester delivered a hard kick to the loosened grate. The metal cover crashed down onto the tiled floor with a terrible clang, tearing through the laboratory's silence. The duo leaped down through the opening, into the heart of chaos.
"Surprise party!" Jester yelled. He landed with feline agility on a table filled with test tubes, performing an aesthetic somersault in mid-air. He pulled an apple from his pocket – how he'd acquired it was a complete mystery – and hurled it at the Emissary's face.
Without even turning his head, the Emissary raised his hand and caught the apple in mid-air. As his metallic fingers crushed the fruit into pulp, his unmasked face turned towards Kaelen and Jester. "I was expecting you."
Chief Miller froze the moment he saw Kaelen. The blood drained from his face, his authoritative expression replaced by deep horror. "Kaelen? You... you shouldn't be here. You weren't on the list."
"Where *should* I be, Chief?" Kaelen roared, leveling his weapon at the man he had once seen as a father figure. His steps were hard and determined. "On the list of the dead? Among Unit 404's other 'unnecessary' files?"
The Emissary snapped his fingers with an annoyed gesture. From the darkest corners of the laboratory, four figures detached themselves, appearing as if they were shadows themselves. **Sessizler (Silencers).** As they deactivated their optical camouflage, they emerged with black armor and faceless helmets. The weapons in their hands fired not bullets, but silence.
"Kill them," the Emissary said, his voice icy. "But I want the clown alive. His frequency is essential for the Core."
Chaos erupted with lightning speed.
Jester evaded the charge of a rushing Silencer by knocking over test tubes on a table. Unable to use his powers, he fought with the agility of an acrobat. As he slid across the table, he grabbed a bottle of acid and hurled it at the optical sensors on the Silencer's helmet. The bottle shattered, and the acid hissed and frothed on the metal. The Silencer began firing randomly in blind rage, laser blasts tearing holes in the walls.
Kaelen, meanwhile, was trying to get closer to the Chief, darting from cover to cover. Bullets whizzed past his head, shattering tiles. He took cover behind a metal cabinet and yelled:
"Tell me why, Miller! Why? That badge meant something!"
Chief Miller, hunched behind an overturned computer terminal, clutched the tablet to his chest as if his life depended on it. His voice trembled, not from fear, but from desperate conviction.
"You don't remember, Kaelen! None of you remember! The world is broken! They said they'd bring my daughter... Sarah... back."
Kaelen paused for a moment, his brows furrowed. "Your daughter died, Chief! Five years ago, in that pile-up... I was at her funeral! I carried her coffin!"
"No!" the Chief cried, raising the tablet with tear-filled eyes. The screen displayed complex temporal graphs and fluctuating lines. "She's not dead! She just... remained in the wrong timeline. Reality shattered when the Static Age began, Kaelen! If the Syndicate rewinds time to 1989, to that moment of fracture, she'll be saved. Everyone will be saved! We can fix it!"
Kaelen's mind reeled. *Rewinding time...* It was madness, but in the Static Age, the line between madness and reality was blurred. "Is that why...?" he whispered, his barrel lowering slightly.
This momentary hesitation was a fatal mistake.
A Silencer, approaching silently from behind, brought the butt of its rifle down on Kaelen's neck. Kaelen's vision blurred, his knees buckled, and he collapsed. His weapon slipped from his grasp. When the cold metal barrel pressed against his temple, Kaelen was too dazed to move.
Jester was cornered by two Silencers at the other end of the room. He was thrown back by a shoulder blow, his back hitting the glass dome of the Chronos Core. The situation was hopeless. Kaelen was on the ground, at gunpoint. He himself was trapped.
His gaze fixed on the colossal heart thrumming inside the glass, right behind him.
Nena's voice echoed in his mind: *"If you use a Glitch, you'll be erased, Jester. Your code is already hanging by a thread."*
That sad, painted smile appeared on Jester's lips. The blue and hazel irises in his eyes were slowly giving way to a grey static. *"Well,"* he thought to himself, *"No one remembers me anyway. One less, one more..."*
"Hey, Emissary!" he yelled, his voice echoing strangely in the laboratory's acoustics.
The Emissary turned to him, confident in his victory. "Surrender, Clown. Resistance is inefficient."
"Never," Jester said. He pressed his right hand against the glass surface behind him. "But I can give you a free heart attack."
Jester, taking advantage of the Silencers' surprise, launched himself not backward, not forward, but *inward*. He didn't break the glass, however. His body shimmered, his image distorted, and he passed through the molecular structure of the glass like a ghost. He entered directly into the dome.
The Emissary screamed in horror: "STOP! The Core is unstable! Don't touch it!"
Jester embraced the colossal heart in mid-air. And he broke the taboo.
**XXXQUOTE "Reality is just a badly coded dream, and I'm about to wake up."**
**GLITCH: OVERLOAD.**
Jester's body suddenly lost its physical form. It transformed into a blinding, purple beam of light. The air around him crackled, pixels flew through the air. Jester injected every fiber of his being, all his chaotic energy, directly into the heart.
The heart convulsed with a terrible, metallic shriek. *THUMP...* Lights exploded. *THUMP...*
And then, gravity in the room was canceled.
Everything—heavy laboratory tables, computers, glass shards on the floor, people—slowly rose into the air. Time fractured. A second stretched like an hour, sounds thickened and distorted.
As the Silencers spun uncontrollably in the air, the Emissary managed to cling to the floor by activating his magnetic boots. "Shut down the system!" he roared, but his voice was like a monster's growl in slow motion.
Chief Miller, floating in the air, his eyes locked onto Kaelen, who lay on the floor (now the ceiling). The Silencer standing over Kaelen, though unbalanced in the zero-gravity environment, was about to pull the trigger. The barrel was still aimed at Kaelen's head.
In that moment, Miller let go of the tablet. As his daughter Sarah's smiling photo floated away, the veil of madness lifted from the old cop's eyes. Only regret remained. He reached for his own weapon, floating in the air. But not to shoot Kaelen.
The Chief, spinning in mid-air, shielded Kaelen with his own body.
*VIZZT!*
This wasn't the sound of an explosion. It was the sound of data being erased. The beam from the Silencer's weapon struck Miller's chest. There was no blood. No wound. Only emptiness. Chief Miller's ribcage pixelated and vanished, revealing the wall behind him.
The Chief collapsed silently, like a puppet. His lips moved as if to say "I'm sorry," but no sound emerged.
"Jester!" Kaelen yelled, swimming through the zero-gravity. He had no time to comprehend the Chief's sacrifice.
Jester was thrown from the heart. His consciousness was fading. Half of his body had become transparent; the tiles behind him were visible through his form. He was being erased.
"It's going to explode!" Jester said, his voice echoing and sounding like a broken record. "The Core... critical... run!"
Kaelen grabbed the floating Jester by his collar. The Emissary, yelling "This isn't over!", entered an escape pod and blasted through the laboratory ceiling, rocketing upwards towards the surface.
The Chronos Core began to throb, emitting purple and blue lights. The heat was rising, reality bending. Kaelen dragged the semi-conscious Jester towards the laboratory's emergency exit tunnel, those disgusting waste pipes. The moment they closed the door behind them, the Chronos Core flared like a star turning supernova.
**WHITE SCREEN.**
...
When Kaelen opened his eyes, the air filling his lungs wasn't clean; it smelled of mud and rain.
He found himself in the junkyard outside the Data Mines, in acidic sludge. The shockwave of the explosion had flung them out through the waste pipes. The sky was still that leaden grey, but for the first time, the rain wasn't burning like acid; it was falling like refreshing water.
Jester lay beside him. Motionless. Kaelen crawled to his side.
"Jester? Hey! Wake up!"
Kaelen gasped when he grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him over. Jester's left leg... was gone.
It wasn't severed. There was no blood, no bone. From the knee down, it was nothing but shimmering, grey and black corrupted pixels, suspended in the air. Reality seemed to have stopped rendering that part. Like a "glitch" in a video game, his leg flickered between existence and non-existence.
Kaelen shook his friend in horror. "Hold on! Damn it, hold on! We'll go to Nena! She can fix this!"
Jester's eyes fluttered open. Those vibrant, lively eyes were gone. His pupils were absent. His irises were grey, filled with the static, "white noise" of an old television channel cutting out.
"Kaelen..." he whispered. His voice was raspy. "I think... I think I'm much closer to being 'no one' now."
Kaelen scooped him up. Jester was light, frighteningly light.
"It's not over," Kaelen said, walking towards the darkness, towards the city's neon lights. His voice was trembling now. "The Chief is dead. The Emissary escaped. And you... I won't lose you. Do you hear me? I won't let you be erased."
In the distance, black smoke rising from the Data Mines formed the shape of a giant skull in the sky, looming over Nova-Veridia.
The first round of the war was over. The second round would be not just a battle, but an existential fight for survival.