The stench of cheap, fermented potato-mash hit Marzell before he even crossed the threshold. The door to the shack was hanging off its hinges, the wood splintered where a heavy boot had kicked it open.
Marzell's blood went cold. He didn't feel tired anymore. The black sludge in his lungs seemed to spark with static electricity.
Inside, the room was a disaster. The small table where Elara did her drawings was overturned. His mother's medicine—the half-vial of serum he'd spent his lifeblood to secure—lay shattered on the floor, the precious liquid soaking into the dirt.
His father stood in the center of the room, his face a mask of drunken, trembling rage. He was holding Elara by her hair, his heavy hand raised to strike her again. She wasn't screaming; she was too terrified to breathe, her face bruised and tear-streaked.
"Where is it?!" the father roared, his voice thick with spit. "I saw you with the King! I saw that golden boy give you something! Give it to me, you freak! I need a real drink, not this swill!"
"Let. Her. Go," Marzell said.
His voice didn't sound like his own. It was a low, vibrating hum, like a boiler about to explode.
"Or what?" The father laughed, a jagged, ugly sound. He shoved Elara toward the corner, where she collapsed near their mother's bed. "You're a left-handed blank! A zero! You're nothing but a mistake I should have drowned twenty years ago!"
The father lunged, swinging a heavy glass bottle.
Marzell didn't move. He didn't have to.
His left wrist exploded with a light that wasn't golden, or silver, or even the bruised violet from before. It was a searing, monochromatic white—the color of a dead star. The heat was so intense it scorched the sleeves of Marzell's coat away.
The "Blank" card was no longer blank.
The silver surface had crystallized. In the center, in sharp, lettering that seemed to move when you looked at it, was a single word:
GUARANTEE
And beneath it, in a script that looked like a jagged grin, were the words:
It can be used as an Extra Joker.
The bottle shattered against Marzell's forearm, but the glass didn't cut him. It simply turned to dust.
Marzell looked up. His eyes were no longer brown. They were swirling pools of chaotic white, his pupils narrowed into thin, vertical slits. A wide, terrifyingly sharp smile cut across his face.
"You wanted to know my value, Dad?" Marzell whispered. The air around him began to warp, the steam from the pipes outside bending toward him as if he were a vacuum. "The card finally told me. It says I'm a Guarantee."
"What... what are you talking about?" The father stumbled back, his drunken bravado vanishing as the temperature in the room plummeted.
"It means," Marzell said, taking a slow, dancing step forward, his movements fluid and predatory, "that whatever I want to happen... is guaranteed."
Marzell flicked his left wrist.
The father's legs suddenly swapped places with the legs of the overturned table.
There was no blood. No scream. Just a sickening pop of reality being rewritten. The father collapsed, his human torso now attached to four splintered wooden legs. He looked down in mindless horror, his brain unable to process the "joke."
"Hehehe... HAHA!"
Marzell clapped his hands, the sound echoing like a gunshot. "Look at that! A sturdy table for a sturdy man! Do you like it? Does it suit your 'value'?"
"Marzell... stop..." his mother rasped from the bed, her eyes wide with terror.
But Marzell couldn't stop. The Extra Joker was in control now. It wasn't just a card; it was a mandate for chaos. He leaned over his father, whose face was turning blue as his internal organs struggled to function in a body that was no longer human.
"You said I should have been drowned," Marzell whispered, his face inches from his father's. "But a Joker doesn't drown. A Joker just... changes the punchline."
Marzell snapped his fingers.
The father's mouth vanished, replaced by a smooth, seamless patch of skin. His nose followed. Then his eyes. Within seconds, the man was a featureless, wooden-legged mannequin, trapped in a silent, eternal scream inside his own mind.
Marzell turned toward Elara and his mother. The white light in his eyes flickered, for a brief second showing the grieving, broken brother underneath.
"I'm going to help us now," he said, his voice cracking. "I'm going to make the world a good place. I'm going to guarantee it."
He looked down at the card on his left wrist. The word GUARANTEE glowed with a sickening, beautiful light.
He was no longer Marzell Côme, the 20-year failure.
He was the Extra Joker. And the world's game was about to be ruined.