Chapter 5: The Jokerbot

X knew he was in even bigger trouble than before. Alia had given a second banshee-shriek, and had caused enough of an overload to his systems that his synthetic reflexes had kicked in, and he had slapped both hands to his ears – with the result that he had plummeted to the ground, thus landing on the only object beneath him: Alia. At least the blow had stunned her for just a few seconds, giving him enough time to test the stress his dashing-mechanism could handle as he sped off in a random direction. Which one it was he did not care, as long as it was away from the leader of the GYF…

Turning around a corner in the corridor in the fashion he by now had started to handle the corners – by crashing into the wall in front of him, stopping his momentum before kicking off from the perpendicular wall and continuing down the new corridor – he suddenly found himself face to face with a door, its sheer size taking up the entire width of the corridor. Doing a brief calculation, X made an estimation of his current speed, the distance to the door, and the speed with which he could break, before he came to one conclusion, closed his eyes and covered his head with his arms to protect the more vulnerable systems stored there.

With a crash worthy of the time where the Eurasia had slammed into Earth, X torpedoed the door at full speed, with enough force to create a dent visible on the other side of the metal. As he fell to the ground, dazed as his systems began working their way around the damages his crash had caused, the door was closed enough for the person behind it to see what was happening.

"X? Wha's happening?" Zero asked, grabbed hold of the blue reploid's arm and hoisting his friend to his feet.

Just then, from the corridor which X had originally come from, a shriek like a maddened hound reached their ears. The two looked briefly to each other, before they, wordlessly, rushed off, Zero clutching his repaired game in one hand, and X holding on tight to his other arm as the red reploid could dash even faster.

However, just a few corridors and a single stairway later, yet another door decided to open right in front of them – but, as this one was made of wood, both reploids tore straight through it in a shower of splinters, and leaving the person opening the door with naught but the handle in his hand.

"I know I asked for someone to be sent up as fast as possible, but I didn't mean it that literally," Cain dryly commented, looking at the heap of reploids and ex-door lying a few feet further down the corridor. "If Signas sent you up with my doughnuts, good. Else, there's a maverick trying to make a new skylight in the roof of the mall, and you two can see if you can round up someone to handle it."

"We'll take care of it!" X immediately cried, spitting out a hinge.

"Coordinates, old man!" Zero voiced in agreement, arms flailing as he tried to dislodge X from his back. "We have to save the people of the city as soon as possible! That maverick can be deadly!"

Cain raised an eyebrow at this, but said nothing as a shill howl from somewhere back from the corridor the two reploids had just left interrupted anything he could have said, and both the human's brows rose in comprehension. Barely seconds later, the two commanders' bodies dissolved into beams of light, soaring towards the heavens and the satellites there, where the data of their molecules would be processed before being sent in a shape that would re-solidify them at a calculated altitude. It was a risky business, although it was without doubts the fastest way to travel, and nearly every reploid had experienced a flaw where they had ended up a few inches into the floor rather than the obligatory quarter of an inch above it. But, as it was, the two reploids reformed in perfect condition at the biggest mall of the city, just in time to find the wreck of an indoor bench exiting the large glass side and spin over their heads.

"I think we've found our maverick," X muttered, ducking as the shards from the glass followed in the wake of the bench. "Who do you propose it is?"

"Judging from the amount of havoc here, I'd say shredded metal," Zero growled, before dashing towards the building and leaping through the hole in the wall.

The blue reploid shook with head with a rueful smile, although he could not help but feel some form of pity towards the maverick, who would now be facing the full wrath of Zero-having-been-bored-for-seven-weeks, and broke into a dash as well, taking care to gain enough momentum for him to jump through the hole in the wall. After all, Zero was the only reploid who so far had mastered the skill of using his dash-booster to basically allow him to jump a second time while still airborne.

It was quite a long drop to the floor, however, as they had managed to go through a hole in the one glass wall that was not right up against a storey, but, instead, lay against the side where a gap of some fifty feet allowed a person to look straight down from the topmost floor to the bottommost, which basically meant a view going twenty storeys or three hundred feet straight down. As it was, however, the two commanders had not jumped off the top floor – which would have been impossible anyway, seeing as the spaces between floor and ceiling was covered with an impenetrable diamond-enforced glass plate, which was so solid that it would be easier to break through the wall – and therefore, X's drop was no more than fifteen stories. At least, he thought to himself as he crashed into the wreck of metal and wood that had once been a free-standing stall – apparently selling corndogs, judging from the sign still standing on what was once its roof – he was not a human, as he would most certainly have broken at least one leg in the process, and quite possibly his arms, ribs, hip, spine and skull at the same time.

Standing up in the debris, shaking his head to clear it of rubble, he was knocked to the ground again when a bench, this time one of those of reinforced-steel, smashed into his back, and an insane cackle told that the maverick had spotted the blue commander's less-than-graceful landing.

"Why oh why didn't I think about calling one of my armours?" X growled to himself, placing both hands against the floor and pushed upwards with all his might, managing to dislodge the six hundred-something pound heavy bench, and felt the familiar drain as the nanobots within his synthetic blood quickly attended the damage done to his systems, but in turn took the energy they needed from his batteries.

A red bolt shot past the pile of mixed stall, reploid and bench, screaming a string of obscenities which could have made even the most hardened robot flinch, and sent a string of white-glowing lights towards the fourth storey – or, more specifically, X saw once his optical sensors straightened, the small ledge running between the third and fourth storey. The maverick situated there was more or less shaped like a vaguely humanoid ant, using its four hind legs to run and having the foremost two legs as arms and hands. Its colours, however, consisted of a dark plum for body, with white shaping its clawed hands and face, and a triangle of green crowned its head. It darted along the ledge, sometimes running on it, sometimes running on the wall, and sometimes doing a strange kind of jump that almost made it look as if it was flying. A fact not helped by the small detail that it indeed had two wings – small, cardboard-like and definitely not suited for flying – which it flapped vigorously every time its feet was not in contact with something solid.

Suddenly, about the same time as the blue reploid had managed to climb out of the debris, the maverick turned and flung its hand in the direction of the two hunters, sending out a volley of small, square projectiles, and X found himself knocked into cover behind the corndog-sign by Zero, who had reversed direction almost faster than the eye could see.

"Playing cards?" the red reploid asked in bafflement, reaching a hand out from behind the safety of their cover to pull out one of the card-shaped projectiles from where it had firmly lodged itself one-and-a-half inch into the floor and, turning it over in his hands, gave a guffaw.

"The Joker," he continued, holding up the card for X to see. "Looks like this one's creator was a fan of Batman, although he seems to have gotten a few ideas from Gambit. I say we call it Jokerbot until we find out more about it."

"Batman?" X asked with a frown, taking the card and examining the thin piece of metal. "Gambit?"

"Twentieth century comicbook characters," Zero explained with a roll of his eyes, and snatched back the card with a grin. "The Joker was Batman's main antagonist. And a psycho. He's always been my hero."

"You know, if you were human, you'd have long since been given one of those nice jackets with long sleeves and a comfy, padded room to sleep in," X chuckled as Zero flicked the card over his shoulder, and an ear-shattering explosion followed in its wake.

"Aww. Now you're making me blush," the red reploid replied, smirking, before pulling his Z-sabre from its sheath on his back and leaped over the sign.

X sat back on his haunches, and mentally began counting. Exactly thirty-eight seconds, five minor explosions, one giant flash of light and the sound of a wall falling down later, Zero dived back into the cover, barely missing another volley of the part-explosive playing cards.

"Technically speaking, you ought to be a better strategist than me," he said, giving two of his fingers a lick and extinguished a small flame in his hair. "So come up with a strategy we can use."

"Firstly, we need to get him down here," X replied. "When he's as far up as now, he's got enough time to avoid our busters, and he's too far away for us to reach in any other fashion. And no, before you ask, we can't drop the entire mall on his head."

"You're no fun," Zero moaned, his shoulders slumping. "But then how're we supposed to get him down?"

"Don't worry – you'll get to destroy things," X soothed, patting the other reploid's hand, and fought hard not to laugh at the way the red hunter's eyes lit up at those words. "In fact, that'll be required. If we can get one of those heavy benches out through the glass of the fifth storey, it'd be able to knock this Jokerbot down. And that's where you come in – you need to find a way of getting the bench down to hit the maverick, without collapsing the entire building in the process."

"Will do!" Zero agreed with a happy grin, leaving into the air and grabbed onto the wall, climbing up it with all the speed he could muster, although X mentally lamented the loss of the mall's elevator. As it was, he knew that it was the only hole in the protective glass, and also that Zero knew the same as well.

With a shrug, figuring that they had done worse damage to buildings previously, the blue reploid charged his buster and dashed from his cover, zig-zagging through the debris while he avoided the madly cackling maverick's cards, and released his charge when he deemed he was as close to the Jokerbot as he could be while still being able to aim. As he had expected, the maverick quickly moved out of the way to dodge the attack, and the blast instead struck the glass behind it, where the energy was released in a powerful flash and a sizzle, although the glass remained without even a dent. However, X had not aimed for the Jokerbot with the intention of hitting it, but, instead, had aimed with the intention of driving it in a specific direction, and he gave a victorious grin when the maverick did exactly as he had planned. Breaking into a run, he let forth a continuous stream of small shots, driving the Jokerbot in front of him, and yet taking care that the attacks landed close enough to it that anyone would claim he was aiming straight for it.

The blue reploid quickly dashed forward the second the maverick came between the small pillars forming the frame of the elevator, and released a blast right in front of the Jokerbot, causing it to break its momentum and stop dead in its tracks. It turned, giving him a yellow-eyed glare, and its hands twitched as it prepared to launch another volley of the deadly playing cards. But, before it managed to throw them, a twang followed by a large, whirring noise caused it to look up, just in time to see a solid enhanced-steel-and-glass elevator filled to the point of bursting with metal benches came crashing towards it at a speed of a few hundred miles per hour. X was certain he heard the maverick make a noise like that of 'oh, shi..' as the elevator struck it, not even slowing its descend as it thundered towards the ground, and smashed into the floor, burying itself four feet into the tiles.

"Crude," the blue commander said with a grin, looking up just in time to see Zero dropping down from the seventh floor and crash through the top of the elevator, sending up a cloud of dust and small shards of metal. "But effective."

A red arm merely stuck up from the smashed, bent and mutilated elevator, flashing a thumbs-up to X before it vanished again into the rubble. Smiling, X activated his comlink to the headquarters.

"HQ, this is X. We need a cleaning team sent over ASAP, as the..," he began, and then flinched as a shill voice began screaming into his ear in a volume that not even his systems was capable of overwriting. He guessed that he ought to have thought better than having called headquarters while Alia was on the watch…