SYSTEM ALERT: Critical Damage Protective Cross - Durability Depleted (0/9)
Item Status: Invalid - Cannot offset damage
Special Judgment Activated: Shatter Protocol Chance: 5% to eliminate damage instance
Result: JUDGMENT PASSED Damage negated.
Item destroyed.
Jude didn't have time to celebrate his miraculously good luck.
The Joker was already on him.
How good was the Joker in close combat?
In some versions of Gotham's history, the Clown Prince matched Batman blow for blow. In others, he fought dirty and won anyway. The consensus among those who'd survived encounters—a tragically small sample size—was that hand-to-hand combat wasn't his greatest strength.
It just wasn't a weakness either.
Jude's system analysis pinged back a single, unhelpful assessment: Master-level close combat proficiency.
Great, Jude thought distantly as the first knife stroke opened his shoulder. Just fantastic.
The Joker stood between 6'0" and 6'2"—taller than Jude, with longer reach. He fought with a dagger in one hand and a crowbar in the other, weapons that complemented each other with brutal efficiency. The dagger carved. The crowbar crushed.
Against an unarmed opponent, he had every advantage.
Against an opponent wearing a limited-time buff and supernatural healing?
Well. That just made it interesting.
"Why!" The Joker's shriek pitched higher, manic glee cracking into genuine outrage. "Why are there no fireworks?!"
He lunged forward, dagger flashing. Jude stumbled back, barely avoiding a thrust aimed at his ribs.
"I get it now!" The Joker cackled, spinning the crowbar like a baton. "You're the Grinch! You hate Christmas! You ruined all my surprises tonight!"
The crowbar came down hard.
Jude raised his arm to block. The impact sent shockwaves through his ulna, and something in his wrist made a sound it absolutely shouldn't.
"Come on, Grinchy!" The Joker danced forward, slashing and jabbing. "Let me see if you can bleed!"
The dagger found gaps in Jude's defense—under the arm, across the ribs, a shallow slice along his forearm. Each cut burned like liquid fire. The thick red cotton coat provided some protection; it was bulletproof, after all, a system purchase specifically designed to stop the Joker's oversized hand cannon.
But stab-proof?
Not so much.
The knife punched through fabric and flesh with sickening ease. Blood welled up, soaking into red cotton that hid the damage beautifully. Jude had chosen his costume well—you couldn't see the arterial spray against Santa red.
The crowbar was worse.
It targeted joints with surgical precision—knees, elbows, wrists, ankles. Each impact sent white-hot agony radiating through nerve clusters. Even through the padding, the blunt force trauma restricted movement, locked up his legs, made his hands shake too badly to grip anything.
Jude had never been in a real fight before. Not like this.
Gun battles involved hiding behind cover and hoping nobody noticed you couldn't shoot straight. Survival meant running, talking, or—his personal favorite—simply not being there when violence happened.
This?
This was intimate.
Pain came in waves. The dagger drew lines of fire across his flesh. The crowbar delivered earthquakes of blunt force trauma. He retreated step by step, barely maintaining balance, while the Joker pressed forward like a purple hurricane of knives and laughter.
"Hahahaha! The Grinch is a bad boy! But fortunately—"
A crowbar strike to Jude's thigh nearly buckled his leg.
"—he's easy to teach a lesson!"
Another slash, this one across his abdomen. Shallow. Painful. Bleeding.
"Come on! Show me what other fun Christmas gifts you're hiding! Hehehehe!"
Jude didn't answer.
He couldn't. Speaking required breath, and breath was a limited commodity when you were being systematically carved apart.
Instead, he focused on the hard candy in his mouth.
The fruit candy—made from Horn of Plenty produce—dissolved slowly on his tongue, releasing sweetness and life. The juice trickled down his throat, activating the artifact's vampiric healing properties. Flesh knit together in the Joker's wake. Blood stopped flowing from cuts seconds after they appeared.
It wasn't instant. It wasn't painless.
But it kept him standing.
Thank God he's not using nitrous oxide toxins today, Jude thought with distant, hysterical gratitude. Otherwise I'd need to drink the milk, and I do NOT have time to grab the bucket while he's stabbing me.
"Hahaha! The neck is showing!"
The crowbar caught Jude's knee mid-retreat. His leg buckled. For one terrible moment, he lost balance, torso twisting, throat exposed—
The dagger flashed silver.
Blood sprayed.
Jude's hand flew to his neck, feeling hot wetness pulse between his fingers. His carotid artery. Cut clean through. The world tilted sideways, vision greying at the edges, strength draining with every heartbeat—
Then the candy activated.
Flesh writhed beneath his palm like living clay. Muscle fibers reconnected. The severed artery sealed itself with a wet squelch that Jude felt more than heard. The bleeding stopped.
He could breathe again.
The Joker stood frozen, watching with wide, delighted eyes.
"Oh," he whispered. "Oh, that's wonderful."
He tilted his head, gaze tracking across Jude's body. Every wound had stopped bleeding. Cuts were closing. Even the bruises from the crowbar seemed to be fading, swelling reduced, color returning to normal.
"Whoo—" Jude gasped, barely staying upright. "Whoo—"
His vision swam. The pain hadn't stopped—God, it hadn't stopped. The healing closed wounds, but it didn't erase the memory of being cut open. His throat still remembered being slit. His joints still screamed from crowbar impacts.
Healing fixed the damage.
It didn't fix the trauma.
"Haha! So strong! So strong, Santa Claus!" The Joker applauded, crowbar clapping against dagger in a perverse round of applause. "Or should I say—the Grinch?"
He leaned closer, studying Jude with the focused intensity of a child examining an insect.
"You don't normally participate in battles, do you? I can tell. You move like someone who's never been stabbed before tonight."
Should I use it?
The thought cut through Jude's pain-fogged mind with crystal clarity.
The item. The expensive one. Twenty thousand asset points for a single-use defensive measure that would—
No.
Batman had to be close by now. The explosion would've drawn him. Help was coming. Twenty thousand points was too much to spend just because Jude was afraid of pain.
But it really, really hurts.
"It's so touching!" The Joker spread his arms wide, theatrical as ever. "The hero who protects Christmas! Facing the madman with a knife and a gun—all alone!"
Jude gritted his teeth. His face twisted into a grimace so fierce it hurt his jaw. And still—despite every ounce of willpower he could muster—tears leaked from his eyes.
Not from sadness.
From pain.
This was the first time since arriving in Gotham that Jude Sharp had cried. The first time he'd shown vulnerability this raw, this uncontrolled.
Fighting for justice hurt.
Even with healing, even with supernatural recovery, the experience of being stabbed repeatedly was enough to break someone who'd never trained for combat. Every nerve in his body screamed for him to run, to hide, to activate the save point and reload from before any of this happened.
But Batman did this every night.
Catwoman faced these odds and worse. Gordon walked into danger knowing he might not walk out. Harvey Dent had chosen this path deliberately, accepting the cost of violence to protect Gotham in his own twisted way.
They were all used to suffering—physical and psychological.
Could Jude really do any less?
Could he just... give up? Throw Harvey to his destined fate as Two-Face? Reload the save point and try a different approach—one that didn't involve Jude getting stabbed in a clown's living room on Christmas Eve?
How many times would the cross's 5% judgment even activate?
Once had been a miracle.
Twice would be impossible.
"Hehehehe, you're really brave—" The Joker's grin widened impossibly further. "I know a lot of people who aren't afraid of pain. You're one of them."
I'm terrified, Jude thought. Really, truly terrified.
"But you'd never guess—" The Joker's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "—that I'm actually an old dog. And old dogs? We're used to chasing hard bones to chew."
His eyes gleamed with manic delight.
"I know best how to chew a hard bone! HAHAHAHA!"
The Joker moved.
Not toward Jude this time.
Toward Clinton.
The shift happened so fast Jude almost didn't process it. One moment the Joker stood directly in front of him, laughing. The next he was a purple blur, spinning past Jude's guard, racing across the room toward the corner where Clinton Banner crouched with his rifle.
Clinton's eyes widened.
He was an excellent marksman—the best Jude had ever seen. His hands moved on pure reflex, raising the rifle, acquiring target, squeezing the trigger in one smooth motion.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Six shots in two seconds.
Every single one missed.
The Joker flowed between bullets like water, body twisting at impossible angles, movements too erratic to predict. Rounds punched holes in the wall behind him, shattered what remained of Harvey's floor lamp, embedded themselves in the ceiling.
None touched purple fabric.
Clinton didn't even have time to curse.
The Joker closed the distance in three bounding steps, crowbar raised high, dagger gleaming—
One strike. Two. Three.
Lightning-fast, surgically precise.
The crowbar shattered Clinton's right wrist. The dagger opened his left shoulder to the bone. A follow-up crowbar strike destroyed his knee, leg crumpling, body dropping—
And then the dagger was at his face, point aimed directly at his eye socket.
"Merry Christmas! Hehehehe—"
CLANG!
Metal struck metal with a sound like a bell.
The Joker froze, head tilting, gaze sliding upward to find—
A sword.
Not a decorative piece. Not a prop. A real, functional blade with a wickedly sharp edge, currently locked against his dagger, preventing it from completing its thrust into Clinton's skull.
The man holding the sword wore a fat red Santa coat, cotton stuffing hanging out where fabric had been sliced open, the entire garment soaked through with blood. His Christmas hat sat askew on his head, pom-pom drooping pathetically. Blood dripped from the coat's hem in a steady rhythm: drip, drip, drip.
His neck showed fresh scar tissue where the carotid wound had sealed moments ago. His voice came out broken and hoarse, damaged vocal cords not quite finished healing.
Tear tracks cut through the blood on his face.
But the sword in his hand didn't shake at all.
"I won't let my friends die trying to help me," Jude rasped.
The Joker's grin never faltered. If anything, it widened.
Jude's grip tightened on the sword hilt. Pain radiated from every joint, every cut, every bruise. His body screamed for rest, for escape, for mercy.
He ignored it.
"Where do you think you're going, bad boy?"
Master Swordsmanship Experience Card (10 Minutes)
Price: $20,000 Asset Points
Note: A Black Swordsman of kind spirit, clearing the front lines with allies across the hundred floors of Aincrad. He is a 'Beater' yet courageous. He draws a second sword when pushed to the limit. He lives in a world where game over means true death. His promise to protect his partner is the only law he follows