In Gotham City at night, the few pedestrians who dared to be out moved hurriedly, heads down, eyes scanning for threats.
The escalating war between the Joker and the Riddler had turned the Upper West Side, the East Side, and the Park District into active battlefields. This wasn't background crime; this was organized warfare. And when armies fought, civilians died. Therefore, even in this usually trendy boutique district, the streets were completely deserted. Everyone wanted to lock their doors and pretend the outside world didn't exist.
Suddenly, heavy footsteps echoed around the corner of Fifth and Maple.
A group of thirty or forty thugs emerged from the shadows. They wore studded leather jackets, torn jeans, and combat boots. Dense tattoos covered burly arms built from prison weightlifting. But the one thing they all had in common was their weapons: rifles slung over shoulders, pistols tucked in waistbands, and grenades clipped to belts. Desperate men from the East District with nothing left to lose.
"Boss," a younger thug spoke up, his voice carrying in the quiet street. "Why are we going to the cinema?"
Another thug slapped the back of his head. "Idiot! Didn't you hear the boss on the stage? Or are you deaf?"
"I was distracted watching Poison Ivy," the kid mumbled sheepishly.
Several thugs laughed. "We're going to recruit Firefly, you moron," an older thug explained. "The Riddler said to call him 'Mr. Firefly' and show some respect. If you piss him off, he'll roast you to ashes with his military-grade flamethrower, and your family gets nothing but a pile of carbon."
The bald, burly leader turned, his voice carrying absolute authority. "Listen up! Firefly seems to be planning to set fire to the theater. Let him do it. The Riddler's orders are clear: he's to be escorted back safely. Recruited, not captured. But..." the bald man smiled grimly, "if he refuses to come peacefully, we make sure he stays here permanently. We can't let him go help the Joker."
They arrived at the Gotham Majestic, a 1930s art deco theater. It was completely deserted. No staff, no lights except the green glow of exit signs, and critically, no super-criminal in a fly suit wielding a flamethrower.
The bald leader looked at the unnaturally empty street. The pale yellow light of the streetlamps suddenly felt like stage lighting for a trap. His survival instincts screamed.
"Guns out," his voice cracked like a whip. "Something's not right."
Footsteps echoed from both ends of the street. Disciplined. Organized. Dozens of Falcone family gang members emerged, uniformly dressed in black suits and ties. They raised their pistols with practiced ease, completely surrounding the East District thugs in a textbook pincer movement.
The bald man's face went pale. "The Joker figured out our plan. We're fucked."
Three stories up, offering an excellent vantage point of the intersection, Jude knelt beside a stone gargoyle and pulled something from his robe. A faintly glowing, ice-blue mushroom, about the size of a softball.
"Why don't they use machine guns?" Jude asked Batman. "Pistols seem like a disadvantage in this kind of fight."
As if on cue, second- and third-story windows flew open on the buildings flanking the street. In each window sat a belt-fed, heavy-caliber machine gun. The trap was complete. The East District thugs were caught in a killing box.
"I see," Jude sighed through his distorted ghost mask. "This isn't a gang fight. It's direct warfare." He glanced at Batman. "Remember to wait until the mushrooms explode before you enter the fray. The freeze effect won't last long."
Batman's white lenses narrowed. "What mushrooms?"
Jude grinned beneath his mask. "These!"
Ice Shroom
He drew his arm back and threw with all his strength. Not one, but three Ice Shroom—producing two more from the impossible storage of his robe—arced through the night air. They landed perfectly to blanket the left, right, and center of the intersection.
Batman watched the mushrooms rapidly expand in mid-air, growing from softball-size to basketball-size in seconds. A white, freezing aura surged around them.
Then, they exploded.
Not with fire or shrapnel. With frost.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
The temperature dropped forty degrees in a heartbeat. The intersection was instantly engulfed in a flash-freeze. The Falcone gunmen, the East District thugs, and the machine gunners in the windows were all suspended mid-motion beneath a thin, crystalline shell of ice.
Like insects trapped in amber.
"Hurry up and get in!" Jude's urgent voice rang out. "The freeze ends in three seconds. They'll just be slowed down! Window's closing fast!"
Jude didn't wait. He launched his bicycle off the three-story roof—a move that should have been suicide. A grappling hook shot from the rear of the bike, embedding into the building across the street. The line pulled taut, and Jude rode his bicycle straight down the vertical brick wall, defying gravity before detaching and hitting the pavement.
Batman simply stepped off the ledge, his memory-cloth cape snapping into rigid bat wings. He glided silently over the frozen heads, prioritizing the biggest threats.
His hands moved with practiced efficiency. Fwip. Fwip. Fwip. Six custom Batarangs flew from his belt, punching through the fragile ice coating the machine gunners in the windows. The fast-acting sedative injected into their bloodstreams had them unconscious before the ice even shattered.
Exactly three seconds after the blast, the ice vanished. Not melted—just gone out of thin air.
The remaining combatants stumbled, suddenly able to move, but their muscles were sluggish and heavy from the unnatural cold.
Perfect timing.
Jude rushed into the crowd on his modified bicycle. He had swapped his mask during the descent; now, a carved, glowing orange pumpkin head sat on his shoulders. In his hands were two sleek, custom mechanical pistols.
He activated his "I Didn't Kill Anyone" skill For the next six hours, within a twenty-meter radius of Jude, death was strictly prohibited. They could be shot, beaten, and traumatized, but nobody was going to the morgue.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Thanks to the enemies' slow-motion state, aiming was trivially easy. Three bullets precisely pierced three palms. The thugs screamed, dropping their weapons as their metacarpal bones shattered. You can't pull a trigger with a hole in your hand.
The thousands of hours Jude had spent grinding in the System's shooting simulation were finally paying off.
No more Jude the Chandelier Shooter, now he is the Jude The Marksman.
Pushing the bicycle's maneuverability to its absolute limit, Jude became a blur. He wove through the sluggish crowd, occasionally riding vertically up the alley walls using Advanced Climbing Mastery to rain fire from impossible trajectories.
Each shot was placed with surgical precision. Each bullet pierced a palm.
His custom pistols—the Samurai Blades—performed flawlessly, responding to his intent like extensions of his own body. And the best part? The impossible feature that made them worth every single penny of the 10,000 asset points they cost?
Unlimited ammo.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION:
Item: Pistol Baretta 92F - Samurai Edge (Standard)
Price: $10,000 USD Asset Points
Note: What is a Beretta M9? Does that thing have unlimited bullets?
Note 2: Achieving an S-rating in the system shooting game will qualify you for the purchase.