"Jay, what do you suggest we do here?" Michael asked.

Jay looked around. Everybody in the team was staring at him helplessly with desperate expectation, as if he was some kind of oracle that held the answers to life. "I... I don't know."

"Maybe it's just the weapons that they want? If we hand them the weapon maybe they will let us walk out in peace."

Michael's words prompted a series of images in Jay's head again — the events that happened before Jay and Violet got them into the fatal situation. "No!" Jay's voice was a lot more stern and commanding this time, "Under no circumstances can we hand out our weapons! That is equivalent to suicide!"

The crowd around them were advancing closer and closer. Then one woman shouted something and charged forward towards Michael. Michael stared right into her eyes, but he couldn't find any signs of hatred or bloodlust. It was pure fear — fear that was driving her to charge forward and eliminate Michael, fear that clouded her judgement and made her believe Michael would murder her if she didn't act, fear that made her seem so brave but when actually she was too scared to not leave Michael unharmed. It was the type of feeling a newly recruited soldier would get before charging into the frontline: one second of bravery on the surface instigated by the fact that she was too terrified to think.

Michael at this moment too was too anxious and scared to process the situation in his head logically. He could only follow his primitive instincts of fight or freeze or flight, and seeing that the latter two options would not be of much effect, he raised his plasma ring and fired at the woman without any thoughts of aiming, just right at the center of the mass.

Due to the severe shaking of Michael's hand, the shot went wild and struck the charging woman at her stomach. Blood sprang out as the organ was punctured. The woman screamed and fell down, and blood kept pumping out. She tried to block the wound, but she had no more strength left in her body, and when she screamed for help, nobody stepped forward. The fear and hatred in people's eyes just intensified.

Michael was transfixed on the ground, the woman writhed in pain in front of him, and then her screams weakened and her movements slowed. The woman would suffer an inevitable, painful death, and Michael would be the cause of it. Was he becoming a murderer as well? He could have shot her legs or her arms, and it would be enough to neutralize her threat, but he had shot her right in the center of her body. Was that shot simply out of fear, or was he seeking vengeance against the mobs who caused all these chaos and put his security in crisis?

That woman. She could have children. How would her children live the rest of their lives without their mother. Her mother was fighting only for survival; she was acting hotheadedly out of the love and care for her children — so that her children could still afford the next day's breakfast and receive protection they deserved in this dangerous society.

Killing a person didn't seem as something so terrible until Michael had actually done it himself. He had seen countless footages and descriptions of homicides: on movies, on news, sometimes even in real life. Homicide has become something so common in today's world that the death of an individual had become no more than a few words and numbers. It had become something mechanical, something apathetic, as if killing a fellow human being was the mere process of stopping the blood from flowing into the organs.

But this time. This time it was different. Michael did it himself. He stared at the woman right in the eye. He fired the shot. He watched everything in slow motion — the plasma concentrating at the emitter, the widening of the woman's eyes in fear, the thin yet lethal beam of plasma zooming right towards the woman's abdomen, the scream that came out before the shot even hit. The millisecond that the woman's eyes connected with Michael's, Michael felt that he could read the woman's entire life story from her eyes. He could see a small girl who dreamed to be a princess, a teenage girl who worked hard in school to achieve something in future, a hardworking employee who wanted to afford more than the next day's meal with her earnings, a loving mother who suffered poverty but still felt great happiness with her family. Now all these shattered.

"This wasn't your fault. She charged at you first, and you were only acting out of self defense." Jay put a comforting hand on Michael's shoulder.

Michael appreciated how Jay was able to notice the weights in his heart, but for this time, Jay's words weren't enough to transform how Michael was thinking. Michael's guilt grabbed and tore apart his conscience and rolled it on a floor with razor shards, letting it bleed out the tears and blood in front of the eye of Michael's mind.

"I hate to break this to you, but the moment we have decided to work for the government, we had become their SWAT team," Jay spoke with an unnatural calmness. "And the first principle a fighter must uphold is to never panic during a battle."

**********

Jay saw Michael blankly stare at the space in front of him. The crowd around was getting more and more aggressive. Many of them were shaking hardly as they saw their fate up ahead, but they knew that staying back would mean getting gruesomely slaughtered by others, so charging was the only option for survival, even if the chance was so slim.

It was perfectly natural for someone to shut down out of shock after their first kill. Jay had experienced it too, thus he knew that it was extremely fatal for it to happen right now. In a barricade situation like this, losing one quarter of the manpower wasn't the best move for survival.

Jay had to take action now. With one swift motion, he slid the plasma ring off Michael's numb hand and let it fall onto his left index finger; meanwhile his right hand reached into the pocket and produced the pack of modified cards and locked them onto a special slot on his belt. Then he aimed his ring at the leg of the frontmost charger and incapacitated him, and immediately ensuing that was a ninety degree turn and another man screamed with a razor-sharp card slicing through his quadriceps.

Shoot and throw. Shoot and throw.

Jay transformed into a war machine.

People continued to charge at him, but the number thinned down as more got crippled and more got waken up with some sense and ran away in fear.

Nicholas and Alexandra stared at him with confused shock. Oh yeah, that was right. His identity was supposed to be a street magician and con artist, not some kind of elite soldier. He didn't intend to reveal his identity this early, but under this situation he had to.

It was kind of nice to have a portion of his old life back — not the things that he didn't want to remember about Violet, those things got emotions attached to them, and he couldn't bear it in his heart, but this was something a lot more mechanical: muscle memory instead of actual memories. It was the same kind of inner pleasant feeling as a retired basketball player finally getting his hand on the ball again.

Jay's finger slowly caressed the smooth metallic face of the ring. It felt so familiar.

Who are you? Agent Davenport's roaring voice echoed in Jay's mind again. Jay's consciousness traveled back to the day of the recruitment trainings.

"I am a soldier," Jay mouthed the words silently as he aimed another crippling shot at a charging target.

What is your mission? This felt just like shooting the moving holographic targets back at the training camp. People always said that shooting a real person felt different, that it carried a ton of emotions, but in the end, under the massive impending threats, the emotions would shatter and all that was left was the mechanically trained action. Human beings and holograms, they made no difference, except the former would shoot you if you didn't fire first.

"Kill one to protect many. Sacrifice the smaller for the greater." In this situation, it seemed like the opposite — Jay was immobilizing a bunch of civilians, ruining his chance of escape, revealing his identity, and giving a lot more just to protect the lives of three individuals, but he knew that the lives of these three individuals mattered. They would be the clue towards the real cause behind the incident at the Mort Street bar that killed Violet. Everything just for Violet? Yes, and it would be worth it.

There was something else as well. Guilt. Guilt towards Michael. Guilt towards Alexandra. Guilt towards Nicholas. The reason behind the guilt was so complex that Jay didn't want to think about it for now. Avoiding reality wasn't part of his persona, but sometimes he knew that taking a break from reality could help him stay sane. He would find a day to explain things to them, but not today.

Right now, the only thing that mattered was making sure his three teammates could stay alive.

Then among the mess of blood and bodies, a path was cleared out with the speed and neatness of an avalanche invading a pine tree forest. Standing in stark contrast to Jay's ripped shirt slaves and tattered suit, the new group was armed with military order — black bulletproof and plasma-proof uniforms, multi-functional headgear, and giant ballistic shields. From the sound emitting from their rifles, Jay could easily tell that the fire power was set to the maximum charge, the combat mode that was designed to kill.

It didn't take long before the group killed their way to Jay. Jay instinctively fired a shot at the leading member, but he merely raised his shield and absorbed the shot.

"In formation, extract the four VIP!" That was Marcus Johnson's voice. Jay rubbed the sweat and dust off his face to take a closer look.

Marcus Johnson the Hypersphere executives were standing in the middle, and the armed guards formed a phalanx of shields around them. Jay recognized some of them as the team of security that Hypersphere brought along, and some were the ArtTech guards standing next to the walls with the droids. What was this alliance?

"We will explain when we get out. Right now we need your team to come along with us."

Jay looked back towards his team, now already encompassed by the wall of guards. Michael was still standing there in daydreaming mode, though he began to move his feet towards Johnson already. Alexandra and Nicholas, on the other hands, were staring at Jay in absolute shock over what he had just done, but they nodded and followed.

The phalanx was like an aid van at a war zone, a raft at a shipwreck. Some violent mobs still futilely tried to attack the group but were quickly gunned down. The others that ran over, however, were the helpless victims crouching on the floor or hiding under chairs, the one who prayed not to be involved in this chaos. They were running along, crying, shouting, begging to be taken along outside the room. Some were desperately crying about how they still have children at home that they must take care of, and some were holding out their wallets and piles of cash. They knew that the emergency exits of this auditorium didn't open throughout this chaos for a reason — they didn't know exactly why, but they were intelligent enough to figure out that Johnson didn't want them out, maybe out of fear for media exposure or legal punishments — and they knew that once the important ones were escorted outside, the exits might never open.

A raft that took too many survivors would sink. Jay knew that, Michael knew that, Johnson knew that. They couldn't stop for a single second. The phalanx fought their way to the exit, and Johnson stepped over and used his own retina to unlock the door.

Seeing the door opening, the mobs gushed over like a tsunami pushing through a bottleneck, but all of them got shot down by the guards. The instructions were clear — only the four VIP, nobody else was allowed to get out of the room.

As the last of the group left the room, the titanium door closed and locked itself from the outside.