Bernard Cork and Lachlin Bailey had tracked the double-crossing middleman Jonah Farias from the Australian Wildlands all the way to the southernmost of the Three Jewels of the CRSS: the city known to most as Shanghai. They sought revenge on him for the murder of their loyal band of brothers, the mercenary group known as the Snatch Bandicoots, and the part Mr. Farias had to play in the bad information he had given the group just before most of its members’ untimely demise. As the two mercs chased their target through a bustling Shanghai marketplace, haphazardly firing their weapons in his general direction, Farias ran smack-dab into Jianjun Wang, a Japanese Buddhist monk with no more order to follow or monastery of which he could call home. Seeking to do charitable works in a world with which he was largely unfamiliar, Jianjun took it upon himself to help the fleeing, panicking man that had begun to beg him for his help.

But Jianjun only gave him harbor for a little while, for as he soon learned of Farias’s underhanded and unjust dealings in the world upon meeting his employer, a Hindu immigrant arms dealer whose name he never learned, he began to doubt his role in the situation. The small-time kingpin captured the persistent duo of Lachlin and Bernard shortly thereafter, and as the Hindu man sat down to tea with the two to threaten them further (adding insult to the injury of their dead brethren), Lachlin, giving little regard to his life or the lives of Bernard, the Buddhist, the Hindu’s wife, or the thugs in the room, sought to take his revenge. Right after declaring “God save the Queen!” he threw his scalding tea into the face of one of the thugs and an intense knife-and-firefight erupted. Among the casualties were the Hindu man (who turned out to be hemophilic), the thugs, and what seemed to be the bullet-ridden remains of Jonah Farias. Jianjun had wisely chosen to take the side of the victors, utilizing his martial arts skills to his best advantage. Bernard fell unconscious from his grievous wounds.

But their victory was short-lived. Three hulking automatons known as turnkeys, powered by miniature orange reactors, arrived at the scene and the first of which opened its “criminal suppression directive” by throwing Lachlin upward clear through two stories of the building, above the roof, and through a glass bay window of the neighboring building. This was luckily a superior vantage point, for Lachlin Bailey was an extremely skilled sniper, and quickly set up position to take out the weak joints of the turnkey that had decided to take hostage the surrendering Buddhist monk. But during his aiming Lachlin was distracted not by the helicopter landing on the roof with black-suited Republic Operatives but rather by the presence of what appeared to be the silent apparition of the Snatch Bandicoots’ recently deceased leader, Jameson. And during that brief moment a second sniper, a mysterious rogue agent known as Nick Labowski, shot the orange reactor of one of the turnkeys as it brought its captive to the helicopter on the roof. The reactor of course destabilized, as anyone who even briefly studied the technology or has seen any sci-fi film ever would have known, and exploded violently. Enough to destroy the brick wall that made up the side of the building supporting Lachlin, which sent him tumbling down to the ground four stories below.