Sector 102 // Karl Raider City Bottom Justice

Peps here. You ever notice how the deeper you go in Mega-City One…the less the rules seem to matter?

I’m talking about City Bottom. The place where the lights barely work, the air tastes recycled twice over, and people don’t call the Judges anymore, they just try to survive. That’s where this one starts.

The Vigilante

Name: Karl Raider. Former Judge. Now? Something else. Word is he got tired of watching the worst scum slip through cracks too deep for standard patrols. So he made his own system. Simple, brutal, and final. His latest target: Murk Derryson, local operator running a protection racket. You don’t pay, you don’t sleep easy. Sometimes you don’t wake up at all.

Raider didn’t negotiate. He hit Derryson’s base hard, twelve men dead before anyone could even trigger an alarm. When it was over, Derryson was still alive…Just missing his hands. Of course, that kind of noise brings attention. Judge Dredd showed up, but Raider was already gone. That’s the thing about ex-Judges. They know the system because they were the system.

Derryson survived. Barely. Ending up in the hospital, but that didn’t slow him down. Instead, he escalates his plans, big time. He arranges for a group of mutants from the Cursed Earth to be shipped off-world into orbit. Not for transport. Not for relocation. For execution.

Plan is simple: throw them out an airlock and use it as bait. Draw Raider out by forcing him to act. Yeah. That’s the level we’re dealing with. But while Derryson sets his trap, Judge Dredd sets one of his own. Enter Lola Palmtree, Wally Squad. Undercover specialist. Her job? Get close to Raider. Find the cracks and Raider’s got a juicy one. Before all this, he fell in love with a civilian. During the Apocalypse War, she didn’t make it. Suffering from radiation poisoning, which was slowly, painfully killing her. Unable to watch his love suffer, Raider ended it himself with a mercy kill. But that kind of thing doesn’t leave you. And Palmtree leans into that. She gets close. Maybe too close and then everything Goes Wrong

Dredd moves first, he and a squad intercept Derryson before the mutants can be executed. For a second, just a second, it looks like the plan might actually work. Then it all blows up. Literally. Derryson had a dead man’s switch built into the whole operation. The trap wasn’t just for Raider, it was for everyone. The explosion hits. The mutants, the Judges all gone. But Judge Dredd doesn’t hesitate terminating Derryson on the spot. No speech. No delay.

Then Raider comes crashing in. By now, he’s figured it all out, Palmtree, the setup, all of it. No more illusions. No more trust. Just two gunslingers who both think they’re right. Raider goes for the draw first but against Judge Dredd that is always a bad call. It’s over in seconds, Raider lays dead on the floor and Mega City One moves on.

Final Thought

Here’s the thing about City Bottom, people down there don’t believe in clean justice. They believe in survival. Raider thought he could fix things by becoming something worse than what he was fighting. Derryson thought cruelty was power. Dredd? He just enforces the law. No matter how broken things get.

End result?

Bodies. Smoke. Silence. Same as always.

So if you’re ever thinking about taking justice into your own hands down in the depths…Don’t! City Bottom doesn’t need more heroes. It barely survives the ones it’s got.