Practice shooting.
Sure. Absolutely. He'd get right on that.
Jude told himself this while also acknowledging, in the quieter part of his brain, that Philip wasn't entirely wrong. His marksmanship was objectively catastrophic. The only reason yesterday's chandelier round hadn't taken the supervisor's head off was the Basic Firearms skill he'd purchased from the system—some foundational scaffolding of muscle memory that had, apparently, aimed the bullet up instead of sideways. Without it, he probably could've hit someone standing in the kitchen. Through a wall.
The mental image of Philip's expression, interrupted mid-sentence by applied physics, made his stomach settle into an uncomfortable position.
The genuinely skilled shooters in Gotham—the ones who'd survived long enough to be called skilled—had built that over decades. Thousands of hours. Thousands of situations where flinching meant dying. He couldn't compress that into a few weekends.
He opened the system and found Intermediate Firearms Mastery.
$5,000 asset points.
Stared at it. Closed it.
"I don't take shortcuts," he told the empty apartment. A sentence that would have been more convincing if the system hadn't bought him fluent English overnight, but he was keeping it anyway.
That evening, Jude took the Death Car out to a shooting range in Burnley.
Philip's petty revenge for the chandelier situation: the range was a forty-minute drive from the East End. The supervisor had given him the address with the specific expression of a man assigning the world's most inconvenient errand. He'd also, without explanation, written his name on a card for the range's front desk, which resulted in a 70% discount that nobody questioned.
The discount was appreciated. The location was not.
Burnley spread around him through the windshield—glass towers, clean sidewalks, the corporate skyline lit up in evening blue. Gotham's prosperous center, where money accumulated in towers and stayed there. Entertainment complexes, private clubs, restaurants where the entrée prices could cover a week in the East End. All of it polished to a finish that felt slightly hostile, like a surface designed to reflect rather than invite.
He had roughly seven thousand dollars in his pocket. Real money by any East End standard. Here, it was enough for a few weeks of rent and a restaurant meal that would still embarrass him when the check arrived.
Philip definitely lives out here, Jude thought, watching a couple in tailored coats disappear into the kind of establishment with no visible menu by the door. Should've let him stay mad. Cardiac event, problem solved.
He stayed at the range until dark, put every dollar's worth through the targets, and drove home.
The Death Car handled fine. His Basic Driving skill topped out around sixty miles per hour before his hands started registering complaints, so the return trip took the better part of thirty minutes—slow crawl back east through Burnley's thinning evening traffic.
He was crossing a section of road near a drainage ditch when the puddle caught him.
The tire hit standing water and sent up a fan of it—not much, just spray—toward the curb. The man standing there yanked back.
"Hey! Watch it, you broke bastard!"
Jude looked over. The man had a woman on his arm, and he was glaring at the car like it had come specifically for him. The trench coat was wool, expensive, probably. The suit beneath it was tailored. Belt, real leather. Shoes with an actual shine.
There was a small splatter of muddy water near the toe of the right shoe.
Jude weighed the situation for about one second.
Then he raised his left hand, extended the middle finger, held eye contact for exactly that long, and hit the accelerator.
The engine took it. The man pulled the woman back instinctively as the tires threw up another sheet of spray, both of them stumbling from the curb.
"East End trash," the man muttered, steadying the woman. "You alright?"
"I'm fine." She settled against him, the concern on her face softening to a smile. "Richard, what were you saying before?"
He stroked her hair, already done with the car. "Oh—I was thinking we should get out of Gotham for a while. Actually get out. Paris, maybe. Find a little apartment there, see the autumn. Decent wine, no gunfire..."
"Richard—" Her face went luminous. "Yes. God, yes. Let's do it."
Jude heard the name float back on the wind. His hands tightened on the steering wheel for half a second.
Richard.
Common name. Hundreds of Richards in Gotham. He'd know if it was someone from the DC roster. He'd have recognized the face.
He made himself look at the road.
"Richard Daniel!"
The shout came from somewhere ahead. The man behind him turned, confused.
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
Jude's entire body locked up.
He'd driven forty minutes across Gotham specifically to practice shooting because of last night's shootout. And now there was a practical examination on the way home. Gotham's educational system: comprehensive, immersive, non-optional.
He floored it and watched the mirror.
A black car at the curb, already pulling away. A submachine gun barrel retreating back through a passenger window. The man on the sidewalk—Richard, wool trench coat, expensive shoes—had gone down in the kind of way that meant there was no question about the outcome. Muzzle flash had strobed in the dusk for maybe three seconds. The car was already turning, disappearing toward central Burnley.
The woman was still standing. She went still first, then dropped to her knees.
Her scream made it through the closed windows.
Jude kept driving.
There was nothing to do—the timing, the volume, the way the man had fallen. No Fast Life Recovery left in the system, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Some things moved too fast for intervention.
They'd actually been planning Paris, he thought, which was an odd thing to get stuck on. She'd looked genuinely happy about it. Not a performance. A real couple with a plan that was now not going to happen.
Gotham was Gotham. Physics didn't make exceptions for feelings.
The rest of the drive back was quiet. The death itself bothered him less than it probably should have, which bothered him more than he wanted to think about. He'd been in Gotham less than a month. His calibration was already shifting.
Mostly, though, he was furious about the timing.
Ten seconds of interaction. Maybe less. And now he was on the traffic camera that covered that stretch of road, in a grey car with no plates, visibly present at the scene of an assassination. The GCPD would pull that footage. They'd find the car, find the apartment, pull him in for a full day of questions about why he'd had an altercation with the victim immediately before the victim was shot.
His entire day off, gone.
If this costs me a work shift, he thought with genuine feeling, I will do something I'll regret.
He parked the Death Car and went upstairs.
Drake looked up from the table. "You look terrible. What happened?"
"Nothing. Witnessed a shootout on the way back from the range."
"Another one?" Drake's brows went up. "That's, what, three this week?"
"Don't." Jude dropped into a chair. "I've been here less than a month. I'm not attracting these things. Some guy named Richard Daniel got shot. Nobody I know."
Drake went very still. The kind of still that meant he'd just heard something his brain was trying to process.
"Who died."
"Richard Daniel. Why?"
"Fuck." The word came out flat. "They killed the president of Gotham Bank?"
Jude's fork stopped.
Then he put it down.
Oh.
Oh no.