Yellow Jacket

The ground changed as they crossed it. What had looked like ruin from above became a riddle at eye level, a battlefield disguised as debris. The staggered buildings stood crooked and blind, angled not toward defense but misdirection. Barricades leaned like drunk sentries. No clear cover. No single path. And that was the point.

Warren moved first. He didn't speak, but he did gesture.

One signal, sharp and low, sent Zal-Raan, Mabok, and Cu-Lan with their squad toward the southern ridge. Batu moved with Anza, Tarric, and their breacher unit to the far left perimeter, their route slower but necessary. Cassian took the forward wedge, leading one of the frontline squads with Bazaar guard support. Grix stayed with Warren, close as breath, moving with the main team. Warren led them, Nanuk, Isol, Jurpat, Deana, and Wren, through the center line, each step calculated. Wren stayed close, not because she had to, but because she always would.

Then Warren moved. Not with fanfare. Just inevitability.

The expedition followed, one by one, no order shouted, but every motion deliberate. They were not an army. They were an incision.

Styll padded ahead of the group, low to the ground and nearly invisible against the rubble. Her movement was fluid, deliberate, never fast or too loud. She didn't need commands. Warren watched her. He could see what she saw. Smell what she marked. Her tension was his tension. Even Grix, normally first to joke, kept her breathing shallow when Styll moved like that, like the ground itself was speaking through her paws.

From a distance, they didn't look like anything. The compound itself had been designed to shield its blind side, not from invaders, but from perspective. The buildings weren't set to repel, they were positioned to hide. The coastline was completely obscured. Trees cloaked the ridge. The structures on this side were almost useless, deliberately so. Everything here bent away from the sea, as if to pretend it wasn't there.

Because no one sane would come this way. The Cult of Iron never attacked, they held their neutrality like scripture. And even if they had wanted to strike, the eastern compound had cut them off from the rest of the Wilds. No messengers passed through. No witnesses left. The road ended here, and so did the world's attention.

The only road worth using cut through the valley ruins, a cracked but passable path between the mountains. That was where a caravan would travel. That was where a convoy might move. Not here. Not through tribal back country.

And certainly not from the Glass Ocean.

But Warren had.

Each turn through the terrain echoed his visions. Every detail he'd burned into memory now served as blade and blueprint. The fake walls, the exposed cisterns, the sloped ridge. All accounted for.

Warren slowed, then stopped, one hand lifting to signal the halt. The others fanned out without a word, taking cover behind debris, rusted machinery, and low barricades of stone and bone.

He turned his eyes toward the trees.

They weren't much, just a forgotten copse of tall growth at the edge of the compound, branches half-dead, limbs bowed under their own weight. But from the right angle, they reached higher than the outer wall. High enough to see in. High enough to see him.

He moved toward them without hesitation, boots soft over dirt, Wren at his side. She didn't ask. She already knew.

The bark was slick from moss and time, but Warren climbed like it mattered. Like every motion had already been rehearsed. Wren followed, quiet, controlled.

The branches creaked but held. A natural platform, more stable than it had any right to be, stretched between the trunks. Some old hunter's blind, maybe. Or just the way the growth had warped over time.

They laid flat. Hidden from below, wrapped in leaves and shadow. High enough to see everything, close enough to feel the silence beneath it.

Warren took the far side, arms steady, body stretched flat along the limb, his weight spread low and balanced. The branch supported him fully, not just enough to hold, but to rest. Wren settled in beside him, mirroring his position, lying prone, steady, her head low and eyes sharp. She wasn't just with him. She was his spotter. Her gaze tracked with his, quiet and watchful, every breath matched to his rhythm. Her shoulder pressed lightly into his as she scanned.

It was surprisingly comfortable. The kind of perch you could wait in for hours. Watch, listen, breathe.

Below, the others waited in position, still as cut stone. Cassian's squad held the front with practiced tension, eyes scanning for movement. Batu's team crouched behind a sunken section of pipe. Zal-Raan's group faded into a low depression in the earth, shielded by the curvature of ground and wall. Styll still moved, now circling wide.

Warren assembled Betty with quiet precision, each motion practiced, deliberate. Car's long-barrel Foundation Breaker, the thunder lance, locked together in his hands with a familiar weight. It was a high-caliber monster that could fire without charge, but struck with terrifying force when allowed to build. More than a weapon. A statement.

The wind wasn't moving. He held the mist steady.

Below, the compound stretched open. Modular, fortified, sprawling. A few buildings rose above the others, not for defense, but oversight. One central block stood just high enough to command visibility across the interior walkways. The plaza. The watchers. All of it.

He studied the layout again. The rhythm of patrols. The placement of guards. The false cover meant to mislead. The way the watchers looked inward. Every part of the design assumed no one would breach from this side. No one ever had.

Wren's hand touched his shoulder. He tilted slightly, letting her line her vision with his.

"Point him out," he murmured.

She scanned, sharp and fast, then slower, settling on the figure moving through the central courtyard. "There, he's talking to someone near the old fountain."

Warren adjusted his aim.

He could see the man now, walking mid-conversation. Not his face, but his posture. The Warlord moved like someone who had never feared interruption. Every step was drawn from arrogance. Every gesture casual. He thought the world could not reach him.

Warren exhaled.

Warren raised two fingers, then dropped them in a silent command.

The forest didn't respond. It shifted.

From the ridge, Zal-Raan's team moved first. Mabok and Cu-Lan flanked the outer path, while Zal-Raan himself climbed the low incline leading toward the closest tower. Their movement was coordinated, silent. Not a single bird stirred. Not a single stone rolled.

Cassian's squad mirrored the motion on the far side. Their target: the tower that overlooked the broken cisterns and central well. Batu led his half with Anza and Tarric, drawing tight to the base, while Cassian and two Bazaar guards scaled the inner side using old latticework and hanging vines as cover.

Batu gave the signal. One flash of polished steel, caught only by those looking for it.

Four towers. Four teams. Each acting in tandem. No words passed. Only breath and shadow.

The kills were clean.

Knives and garrotes. Silence in the throat. Guards slumped without a cry, caught and lowered before they could even twitch. One leaned too far, but Mabok caught him, arms like steel cords, bracing the body as Cu-Lan dragged it backward.

Cassian caught his man by the neck, twisted, and laid him flat behind the rail. The guard never even reached for his weapon.

Seconds, all four towers were quiet. Still.

Then they weren't.

New shapes replaced the old. Zal-Raan and Mabok donned the tattered coats of the fallen. Batu stood in profile, shoulders wide, arms folded like the man he'd watched through his scope. Cassian took the lance from his downed target and leaned it the same way, elbows braced, head tilted to match.

To anyone below, nothing had changed.

Warren watched from the copse. He didn't blink.

The transition was too smooth. Almost unreal. No stumbles. No slip-ups. Every guard replaced with precision. Every corpse either tossed over the wall, hidden by the very design of a compound that never expected company from this side, or folded into blind rooftop hollows. Warren almost laughed. The improbability of how clean it had gone felt surreal.

From within the compound, no alarms were raised. No one looked up. No one noticed the ghosts now watching from above.

One guard twitched as he fell. Not from life. From reflex. A motion his body remembered too late. The knife had already silenced his breath.

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Zal-Raan stepped into the fallen man's position, adopting the same stance, down to the tilt of his shoulders. Mabok followed, moving with deceptive ease for a man his size, slipping the body into the foliage with the help of Cu-Lan.

Below, a dog barked once, then settled. Someone inside the compound shouted something about a delivery. No one looked up.

Cassian wiped a smear of blood on the inside of his collar, then straightened. He checked the horizon. No movement.

Batu's eyes never left the door at the tower's base. When it stayed closed, he nodded once, sharp and controlled.

Anza adjusted the collar of her borrowed coat. Tarric checked the line of his sleeves. Even in disguise, they maintained the role.

No one faltered. No one froze.

The towers became theirs.

Above, breeze stirred the leaves, but even the wind seemed hesitant.

Warren's hand hovered a moment longer before dropping fully.

It had worked.

Not just worked, performed.

It didn't feel like a fight. It felt like a switch had been thrown and reality hadn't noticed.

A thousand things could've gone wrong. A stumble. A call. A tower guard leaning just an inch too far.

None had.

He exhaled once through his nose, then reset his jaw. It was a quiet breath, more calculation than relief.

From his position, he could see the way the compound's internal lights failed to illuminate the towers. A design flaw. Intentional maybe. Maybe not. But exploitable.

One of the new 'guards' shifted weight to the wrong leg. Zal-Raan flicked two fingers in a correction gesture. Immediate compliance.

Deana's whisper came through Warren's comm: "It's too clean."

He agreed. But he didn't say so.

From where he lay, half in shadow, Wren beside him, he watched the night hold its breath.

Styll padded quietly below. Even she seemed disturbed by how little resistance they'd met. She looked back once. Warren gave her a near-invisible nod. Continue.

She vanished into the dark.

He let his vision blur for a second. Echo Vision flickered. Points of movement. None beyond their own.

The line held.

One step of the knife. Just one. And no one had seen it coming.

He imagined the moment the cut landed. How slowly the compound would bleed.

Then he smiled. Just a twitch of the mouth.

Time resumed.

Now came the cut.

Gregor walked the central courtyard with slow, measured steps, his boots crunching faintly over the red-grit stone. The compound was still half-sleeping, but he was wide awake, sleepless for days. Plans burned hotter than rest. He kept one hand behind his back, the other tracing idle circles against a worn data-slate as he dictated to no one in particular.

"The refinery construction must begin within the week. No more delays. The raw pyro-glass needs sorting before shipment, and the slag runoff will give us another yield if the condenser lines are rerouted through Sector Three."

Behind him, a lean figure in white stepped with caution: the lead scientist, a man whose coat never quite fit and whose eyes rarely lifted. Gregor didn't turn as he spoke.

"You said the new Behemoth would be finished by now."

"It was, my lord," the scientist said. "But the strain..."

"Then why hasn't it been replicated?"

The scientist faltered. "We've tried. The nanite lattices degrade too quickly. The Behemoth and the Flickerborne were outliers, flukes. We haven't been able to reproduce their success. Lucas..."

"Lucas didn't make them," Gregor snapped. "You did. And I gave them to him, thinking they'd be enough to break the Yellow. Now I've lost contact with him, and none of our men returned. A complete waste of assets."

Gregor turned sharply. "The Flickerborne was mine. The Behemoth was mine. And now they're gone."

The scientist opened his mouth. Closed it.

Gregor stepped closer, each footfall deliberate. "Failure is unacceptable. If I hear that excuse again, I won't waste another test subject. I'll start with you."

The scientist paled visibly. He took a slow step back, bowing his head so low it almost touched his knees.

"Yes, my lord."

Gregor turned again, his voice flattening. "We move forward with the refinery. We appease the Lord Mayor. Tell him what he wants to hear. Until I have the vault beneath the Yellow in my hands. When I do, I'll never bend the knee again to anyone. Gods damn whatever relics it holds, if we can't retrieve it yet, we stall."

He paced toward the edge of the courtyard where crude lanterns hung on slack cords. The shadows here were thicker, coiling between the loose bricks.

"But we will retrieve it. I'll send a squad again. And this time, I want results."

He paused, gaze fixed past the walls, toward the far dark where the ocean lay hidden.

"Azolde," he muttered, and the name came out like sugar poured over rot. "That little knife-hearted thing. I should have broken her sooner. She stole what was mine. My property."

His smile crept up slowly, turning his face into something uncanny. Not joy or even malice. Just hunger in a new shape.

"When I find her, I won't kill her quick. I'll skin her spirit from her bones before I take her apart. Slowly. And if I ever get my hands on Calra again, I'll cut her slow. Just to see if Azolde feels it. Just to hear that scream one last time."

He turned slightly, speaking now to his lieutenant who had joined them from the shadowed portico.

"Mel is just in the way. I'll have him gone within the week. Quietly. And Tasina... She's mine already, in truth. Such a rare flower, that kind of innocence. Just like Azolde was, back when I first took her. Sweet. Untouched. She'll be mine soon enough. I'll shape her. Strip away the rot. Teach her loyalty."

The lieutenant didn't speak. Just nodded. Expression unreadable.

Gregor exhaled, then gave a slow nod. "Get it done. And if I hear anything about another failed line of the Augmented..."

He didn't finish the sentence; just smiled again, that thin, deathless smile.

A sound reached him first.

Not footsteps.

Not alarm.

A whistle. Faint. Cutting.

He turned his head.

And it vanished.

Evaporated.

One moment, a man. The next, headless.

The body stood a second too long. Then collapsed backward, arms twitching once.

And from across the compound, in the tree line the towers never saw, a thunder lance began cooling.

The world did not react all at once.

Silence bloomed first, unnatural in its completeness. No shout. No scream. Just the raw sound of absence, as though something foundational had been ripped from the air.

Then movement: quick, confused, delayed. Not from Warren's team, but from the compound. A few guards stumbled, unsure if they'd heard a cannon or seen a trick of the night. One dropped his weapon. Another turned in a slow, stunned circle, looking to the towers, to the sky, to anything that could explain what had just happened.

In the trees, Warren stayed prone, eyes locked on the crumpled corpse below. What was left of the Warlord no longer resembled a man. Just a twitching, spasming ruin collapsing onto stone. The lance strike had been perfect, angled, silent, absolute.

Wren lay beside him, equally still. Her breath came hard, almost ragged. The monster that had taken her innocence and hurt her cousin was finally gone. The world changed with that shot, quietly, all at once. She had never truly believed it would happen. But she had trusted Warren to be the one who could do it.

Behind them, among the copse, Grix let out a low, impressed whistle. "Godsdamn," she muttered, more to herself than anyone else. "Wasn't kidding."

Calra, crouched beside her, exhaled a hard breath and grinned. "Dead. Gods. He's really dead."

Jurpat didn't speak. He looked shaken, but there was awe in his eyes. A quiet, dawning reverence.

Deana made the sign of some prayer not known outside the cults, but said nothing aloud. Just breathed through her clenched teeth, almost in disbelief.

Nanuk knelt with blade in hand, eyes never leaving the compound. Alert. Steady. Ready for a reaction.

Tarric, just behind a low ridge, didn't move. His face was neutral. Too neutral. But his eyes, his eyes flicked to Warren, and then to the corpse in the courtyard. That was not awe. That was fear. Real, gut-level dread. Mabok, too, looked frozen. Cu-Lan did not.

"What now?" Zal-Raan asked, voice barely above a whisper. "Do we breach?"

"Not yet," Warren said quietly. "Let them feel it."

And they were feeling it. Inside the compound, two guards had broken ranks entirely, bolting for the inner doors. Others just stared. One woman, the one who had been walking beside him just moments before, stood silent. Then, with no ceremony and no hesitation, she spit on his body. Most of those nearby did not react with grief, just relief. Even the ones closest had hated him.

Still, Warren waited. Measured. Watching the ripple as understanding spread. Like a toxin in water.

"This is it," Isol said, barely audible. "The moment they break."

"Not yet," Warren replied.

Styll padded across the courtyard below, unseen and low. Her small form dipped behind crates and rubble, never drawing attention. She paused beside the flechette's impact point, sniffed once, then vanished into deeper shadow.

Wren raised her scope again. "They're trying to rally. One of them's calling out orders. The others are too stunned to obey."

Grix muttered, "That'll change soon. If they've got a second in command."

"They don't," Wren said. "Not one that matters."

Below, the corpse of the Warlord lay still. A man who thought he could carve a kingdom out of ash and fire. A man who thought the Nine were distant enough to defy. A man who thought he owned people.

Warren smiled.

In that moment of triumph the world froze.

Then came the movement.

It began as a flicker at the compound's edge. A wavering of shadow where no wind stirred. Then a shiver, not of silence. As though reality itself fractured, the sound of sound collapsing in on itself.

A ripple, invisible to most, passed across the air like water pushed by something that should not move.

Warren tensed. He knew what this was. Not from experience. From instinct. From the way the world itself seemed to resist.

And then it appeared.

At the far end of the courtyard, where the Warlord's blood still pooled, the air began to twist. Not with heat. Not with light. With unmaking.

Fog rolled in, but not fog. It was dark, but not shadow. A mist that ate the edge of form, that erased the outline of stone, of body, of memory. And at its center, a shape began to walk.

Cloaked. Not in cloth, but in concept. In the void between being and no longer being. Older than old. The sound it made was not footsteps. It was the sound of noise folding inward. The hush of erasure.

The Elder had come.

The world paused. Time held its breath. Only three beings saw it clearly: Warren, Styll, and Grix.

They did not speak. They did not move. They only watched.

Warren knew.

This wasn't over.

The Elder raised one hand.

And the distance between them collapsed.

Warren and Grix were no longer hidden in the trees. They stood in the courtyard, standing where no sound had warned, where no motion had bridged the gap. One breath, and they were simply there.

The Elder's voice struck not the air but the concept of hearing itself.

"This will not stand."

He did not shout. But the tone cracked the edges of reason.

"You do not get to take my new contender off the board the way you did my first. I am Umdar the god of Erasure, and I am its final arbiter."

His head turned, though it had no face.

"You freak, Aberrant, forsaken. You have no right to take my piece of the board. You should not even be allowed to play the game."

The world pulsed at the word Aberrant, like a heartbeat skipping.

"And yet," he continued, voice growing more distorted, "here we are. I am now stuck. I must grant my contender a boon he has not yet earned. But once you are gone, that will no longer be an issue."

He spoke a word then. Not in any tongue. Not sound, but the sound of sound collapsing, of unmaking given voice.

And the damage reversed.

The shattered ruin that had once been the Warlord's skull began to pull itself together in defiance of death. Bits of blood, bone, and brain reversed their flight, coalescing in midair, threading backward into shape. His head reformed with impossible precision, sinew and skull reknitting, eyes rolling forward from ruin. The body twitched. Stood frozen.

He screamed silently. Mouth wide. But there was no sound. Just the horror of it. Of motion run in reverse, of death undone not as mercy, but out of hunger. Greedy, desperate hunger to reclaim what had been taken.

He lived again.

Grix's eyes lit up, flames not hers. And a voice, sharp, dripping and layered, spat from her throat.

"You step too far, Umdar. And there will be sanctions for this if you fail."

Umdar turned his gaze. "I know the rules. He will not fail."

Grix's body jolted. She staggered back a step and spat. "That was gross. Felt like being god drool."

Warren didn't blink.

The Elder's challenge had been made.

And Warren intended to answer it.