The coordinates, scrawled in Chief Miller's shaky handwriting, had led them deep into the guts of Nova-Veridia, into the "Blind Line" tunnels, erased from maps years ago. Here, purged of the neon-lit lies of the city above, hung the scent of pure, unfiltered decay. Not the acidic dampness of the sewers, but something heavier permeated the air; the metallic taste of stale hope and rusted iron.
Kaelen swept his flashlight across the curved walls of the tunnel. As the beam pierced the darkness, details on the bricks emerged. These weren't graffiti. They were thousands of names, not spray-painted, but carved with fingernails, knife tips, shards of broken glass. Some names were crossed out, others highlighted with fresh blood.
The Detective felt a lump in his throat. "This isn't a sanctuary," he said, his voice weak and reedy in the tunnel's acoustics. "This is a mass grave, Jester."
Jester continued forward, the rhythmic, heavy thud of his newly painted metal leg echoing (*THUMP-clack, THUMP-clack*). The tails of his purple jacket rippled slightly with the tunnel's air current. Without turning his head, he spoke into the darkness.
"You're wrong, Detective," Jester said. His voice wasn't cheerful; it carried the solemnity of a funeral march. "Graves are silent. The dead don't speak. But listen..." He brought a hand to his ear. "This place whispers. The static is alive even here."
At the end of the tunnel, where the tracks terminated, an old, rusted metro car blocked the way. The car's door had been removed, transforming it into a guard post. A silhouette detached itself from the darkness in front of the door. It was human in form, but its lines were distorted; as if its image had slipped in a bad television broadcast.
"Halt!"
The voice was a wet rasp. The guard took a step into the light. Kaelen instinctively reached for the empty holster at his hip but didn't draw his weapon. He froze at what he saw. The left half of the man's face was entirely normal; a tired, grimy human face. But the right half was covered in iridescent green and grey plates, like fish scales. One eye gazed normally, while the other was a vertical slit, constantly twitching. In his hand, he held a crude, sharpened spear made from an iron bar ripped from the metro tracks.
"Those who enter here," the guard said, moving his scaly lips with difficulty, "are considered to have abandoned the outside world. There is no return."
Jester stepped in front of Kaelen. The clown makeup on his face gleamed like an ominous mask in the tunnel's gloom.
"We don't come from the outside world, friend," Jester said, spreading his arms wide. "We are the vomit of the outside world. The pieces it couldn't digest and spat out." He struck his metal leg hard against the concrete. *CLANG.* The echo faded in the tunnel. "Is this enough as an entry ticket? Or do I need to give you the crumbs that remain of my soul as well?"
The guard looked at Jester's metal leg, at the neon-green grinning face drawn on it. His gaze then shifted to Kaelen. He focused on the mark of the torn-off badge on the former detective's jacket. That mark was a brand in Nova-Veridia.
"Police," the guard hissed, the word emerging from his mouth like a curse. He raised his spear.
"Former police," Kaelen corrected, raising his hands in surrender. "Chief Miller sent us."
A flicker of pain appeared in the guard's human eye. "Miller is dead."
"We know," Jester said, his voice suddenly serious. "We are his last command. And if you don't let us in, his legacy will die with us in this tunnel."
The guard hesitated for a moment. Then, with a painful shriek of rusted hinges, he pushed the car door aside.
"Pass," he rasped. "But be warned; you will never unsee what you witness."
***
Inside was a place Kaelen couldn't have imagined even in his darkest nightmares. "Sanctuary 0" was less an old metro depot and more a forgotten village, buried underground. Dozens of cars were stacked atop one another, welded together and connected by makeshift ladders, transforming them into multi-story apartments. Thousands of cables hung from the tunnel's high ceiling, carrying stolen electricity from the city's grid, and everywhere was illuminated by the sickly glow of flickering yellow bulbs.
But what was truly shocking wasn't the architecture, but the inhabitants.
Kaelen had heard of the Syndicate's experiments. He had read the files. But seeing the victims alive and in the flesh was like a sledgehammer blow to his stomach.
The crowd fell silent when they saw them. In one corner, a child with completely transparent skin, whose veins and beating heart were visible from the outside, clung to his mother. His mother had no arms; she stroked the child's hair with mechanical, rusted claws emerging from her shoulders. A little further on, an old man floated in the air, defying gravity, but constantly had to cling to something because his feet didn't touch the ground. Some trembled constantly, smoke wafted from the skin of others, while still others looked as if half their bodies had turned to stone.
All of them were living, breathing proof of the 'Frequency Shift' ongoing since 1989 and the Syndicate's ruthless curiosity.
"Welcome."
The voice came not from their ears, but directly from within their minds. Kaelen flinched, bringing a hand to his temples.
The crowd parted. The figure that emerged was like the queen of this freak show. She was in a wheelchair, but it had no wheels; she floated half a meter above the ground on a magnetic platform. The young woman's legs were gone from the knees down. Her face was beautiful, but where her eyes should have been, there was a smooth layer of skin.
"I am **Echo**," the woman said. Her lips didn't move, but her voice echoed with crystal clarity in Kaelen's mind. *Everyone's voice here is mine. And their eyes.*
Jester bowed with exaggerated courtesy, removing his hat and pressing it to his chest. "Pleased to meet you, Echo. I am Jester. And this is my grim-faced, humor-deprived bodyguard, Kaelen."
Echo's mental voice vibrated with a faint tone of curiosity. *We know you, Jester. You are 'The Escapee.' The only glitch who managed to leave the Syndicate's laboratory without losing his mind. Why have you returned? What have you brought us? Hope, or disaster?*
Jester straightened. The smile on his face turned bitter. "Don't they both lead to the same place, Your Majesty? I've brought you a chance. The Syndicate is building a machine in the Data Mines that will 'turn back time.' If they activate that machine, this tunnel, these sufferings, these deformities... all of it will be erased. It will be as if it never happened."
A wave of unease spread through the crowd. Whispers rose like the hum of a beehive.
"Let them erase it!"
The booming voice came from the top of a car. A gigantic man, two meters tall, his torso armored with scrap metal plates, leaped to the ground. The concrete floor shook with his landing. His name was **Titan**, and his rage was palpable in the heat waves radiating from his body.
Titan strode through the crowd towards Jester. "We'll be rid of this cursed life! Why should we fight them? They created us, let them destroy us! I'm tired of seeing a monster every morning when I look in the mirror!"
Jester didn't back down. Despite being in Titan's shadow, he held his head high. "I was decaying too, big guy. Only my prison had no walls. But erasure isn't the solution. If they erase us, our suffering will have no meaning. I won't leave without making them pay."
Titan raised his massive, metal-plated fist. "I'll crush you, clown! You were lucky. You escaped, you played, you had fun. Where were you while we rotted here?"
Kaelen reached for his weapon, about to aim the barrel at Titan, when Jester raised a hand, stopping him.
"No, Kaelen," Jester said, without taking his eyes off the giant. "This is my fight."
"You'll die," Titan said, his voice filled with hatred.
Jester glanced for a moment at the 'Glitch Stabilizer' Nena had given him. He couldn't use his power. If he tried to bend reality here, his body would begin to erase itself. He only had his metal, his wit, and his speed.
Titan's fist cleaved the air as it descended. Jester dodged aside at the last second with a dancer's grace. The fist struck a barrel where Jester had just stood; the metal barrel crumpled like paper.
Jester exploited Titan's exposed defense, sliding between his legs. As he slid across the floor, he swung his metal leg and delivered a hard kick to the back of Titan's kneecap, right at the joint.
*CLANG!*
Metal struck metal. Titan staggered, dropping to one knee but not falling. With a superhuman reflex, he spun and seized Jester by the throat, lifting him into the air.
Kaelen held his breath. Jester's feet dangled helplessly in the air. Titan's fingers squeezed Jester's throat like a vice. Echo and the others merely watched. In this brutal world, leadership was proven with blood and power.
"Now you die," Titan said, bringing his face close to Jester's.
Jester couldn't breathe, his vision beginning to blur. But his eyes, devoid of panic, scanned Titan's armor with analytical coolness. He was a 'Glitch.' He saw the world as pixels, code, and weak points. Where the metal plates on Titan's arm joined, on the inside of his elbow, he saw a blue light seeping from beneath the armor. The hydraulic system's power cell.
He struggled to reach into his pocket. Not his famous rusty spoon, but this time, the small, black device Nena had given him when he left the workshop. A 'shock-inducer.'
With his last remaining strength, Jester plunged the device into that small gap in Titan's elbow, where the blue light shone.
*ZZZZT!*
A high-voltage electrical arc enveloped Titan's arm. The giant's muscles locked, the metal plates vibrated. As the power cell overloaded, Titan roared in pain and involuntarily opened his hand.
Jester fell to the ground, coughing and gasping for air. Titan, meanwhile, couldn't move due to his locked system, trembling on his knees.
Kaelen breathed a sigh of relief. Jester got to his feet, rubbing his neck. Titan was completely defenseless. Jester could have pulled a knife from his pocket and finished the job. The crowd expected it. That was the rule of the underground.
But Jester did something different. He extended his hand to Titan.
"Get up," Jester said. His voice echoed in the tunnel. "I am not the enemy, Titan. The enemy is above, those suited figures sipping whiskey in their plazas. I want you to throw that punch not at me, but at the Envoy's sterile face."
Titan lifted his head as the shock wore off. He looked at Jester's hand, then at his eyes. There was no mockery in those eyes. Only a shared rage. The giant extended his trembling, massive hand and gripped Jester's wrist. Jester pulled him up.
Echo glided silently on her magnetic platform to their side. Her face was expressionless, but her mental voice resonated in everyone's head in the tunnel like a soft melody.
*You chose mercy, not power, Escapee. You gained a brother, not a tyrant. We will follow you.*
Kaelen came to Jester's side and touched his shoulder. "How did you do that?" he whispered. "He was going to kill you."
Jester brushed the dust from his purple jacket and clapped Titan on the shoulder in a friendly manner. "People don't follow the strong, Kaelen, they follow their own kind. He's like me. Just a little more... metallic."
Echo gestured towards a massive tarp at the back of the sanctuary. With a mental command, two mutants pulled back the tarp.
The sight revealed beneath dazzled Kaelen's eyes. This wasn't a junkyard, but an armory. Plasma rifles stolen from the Syndicate, homemade explosives, modified armor, and strange, incomprehensible technological devices...
"We've been preparing for years," Echo said. *We were just waiting for a sign. A spark.*
Jester walked towards the table laden with weapons. He picked up a heavy plasma rifle, its barrel sawn off and extra batteries taped to it. He weighed the weapon, held its barrel to the light.
"The sign has come," Jester said, the *click-clack* sound of cocking the rifle satisfying. "Its name is Vengeance."
Kaelen approached the map on the wall. It was a detailed plan linking the city's sewage system to the Syndicate's buildings. "Where's the target?"
"The Syndicate's Main Tower," Jester said, pressing his finger to the skyscraper at the very top of the map. "But we won't go through the door. We won't take the elevator. We'll enter through their favorite way: from within the System."
Echo warned, *The Tower's defenses are impenetrable. Even within the walls, there are sensors. Shadow entities patrol.*
The most dangerous smile Nova-Veridia had ever seen appeared on Jester's face. His pupils flickered as if watching an invisible screen.
"We won't bypass it, Echo. We'll *crash* the system," he said. "Tomorrow night, Nova-Veridia will be plunged into darkness. Even the White Noise will fall silent. And when the lights come back on, we'll be sitting on the throne."
Titan seized a massive sledgehammer and raised it into the air. "Death to the Syndicate!" he roared.
This roar was echoed by hundreds of "freaks" in the tunnel. The sound was like an earthquake wave rising from the depths of the underground. A torrent of rage that would shake the city's foundations, that would make those sterile skyscrapers tremble.
Jester turned to Kaelen. "Ready, partner? The party's just beginning."
Kaelen checked his weapon and nodded. There was no turning back now. They were on the edge of a precipice, and Jester promised to make them leap not down, but across.
The darkness of the tunnel descended upon them like a harbinger of the coming storm.