Yellow Jacket

The wind shifted just before dawn.

Camp was already breaking. Gear was packed, signals synced, the final checks passed hand to hand with the kind of silence only high-risk plans could earn. The ridge still held its view, moss-wrapped stone and fungal fans spreading out below, but every step forward would take them past the point of return.

Warren stood near the edge, arms crossed, coat wet from mist. Wren leaned against a half-collapsed strut nearby, quiet, watching him. Grix paced with purpose. Batu tightened the straps on his weapon rig. Cassian muttered to himself while running final inventory on the forward squad. Styll sat upside-down in the roots of a twisted pillar, singing to herself in clicks and hums.

It was nearly time.

And then someone said it.

A voice from the second wave line, someone older, maybe one of the scavvers. He didn't yell. Just asked it like a fact:

"Wouldn't they just call for help as soon as we're inside? Same way they would if we were at the walls?"

The question hung. A good one. A dangerous one. And no one answered for a second.

Until Isol stepped forward.

His voice didn't rise. Didn't crack. Just carried, like the sound of a blade unsheathing.

Isol spoke, his voice level but weighty, shaped by years of knowing exactly how this machine operated, and how it broke people who asked the wrong questions.

"If we're outside the walls, they still have options. They call in Enforcers, maybe a suppressor team. That's politics. That's posture. They can still pretend they're in charge."

He wiped a line of rain from his brow, then glanced toward Warren, just long enough to signal this wasn't theory. It was history.

"But once we're inside? That's not an incursion. That's a breach. That's failure. And the second they admit failure, they're not allowed to fix it anymore."

He paused. Just long enough for the weight to settle. When he spoke again, there was bitterness in it, old, earned, and sharp as rusted steel.

"That's when the Nine step in. And they don't send help. They send Legion."

He scanned the group, gaze level and unflinching, making sure every one of them understood this wasn't theory, it was certainty.

"I trained the Legion. They don't show up to hold the line. They show up to erase the problem. That means everyone in this city. Soldiers. Civilians. Command. Doesn't matter. They burn it down to take the Ocean. Then they pave over the ashes and put a corporate banner on what's left."

His last words hit without ceremony, hard-edged and stripped of emotion.

"So no. They won't call. Not because it saves them, but because either way, they're dead. If they call the Nine, they lose the Ocean, the city, and their place in the chain. Better to die trying to bury us than live long enough to watch someone else take what they are trying to hide."

The silence after that wasn't empty. It was filled with understanding. Dread. And grim commitment.

Warren didn't say a word. He just nodded once, slow, and started walking toward the edge of the Red.

It was time.

As the others began to fall into formation, Warren pulled Isol aside, just far enough from the group that the voices of the morning wouldn't carry.

"You talk about the Legion like they're gods," Warren said. "But I beat you when we first met. You weren't exactly unstoppable."

Isol snorted. "Warren, I wasn't the one fighting you. You know that. I was just observing from the suit. I let the damn thing drive so I wouldn't tear my body apart."

He looked toward the horizon, the fungal blooms catching the light.

"Everyone keeps forgetting, I'm a lot older than I look. Because of this face." He tapped his cheek. "It's from the Exforce program. All of us wear it. Keeps us in fashion. Marketable. But I'm nearly eighty years old."

Warren blinked. "eighty ?"

"eighty -two, technically," Isol said. "And my body's recovering now. Benefits of the Mask. Genetic repair, engineered rollback, the works. They warned me not to overexert while the process runs. But give me another month or two?"

He met Warren's eyes fully now.

"When I'm at my prime again, I'll be the strongest person in this whole region. I'm not bragging. That's just numbers. Level sixty-seven, trained Legionnaire. There's not a soul around here who could stop me, except maybe you in a few levels."

Warren stared at him. "Sixty-seven. That's... insane. If you're that strong, what the hell are you doing in a backwater like this?"

"I wanted out," Isol said simply. "Quiet city. Simple beat. Get my strength back, then maybe head home to the Citadel."

He paused, then smiled faintly.

"But then you happened. You changed that."

Warren frowned. "How?"

"I plan to train you to Legion standards. That's not flattery, it's necessity. Honestly, I wish you had the schooling the Citadel provides. With it, you'd be unstoppable."

He stepped closer.

"You're already atleast tier 5. You fight at least a tier above that. My boy, if the Legion knew about you? They'd either kill you out of fear... or offer you a position so high they'd have to invent it."

Isol's voice dropped, serious now.

"You'd be a High Imperator candidate. No doubt. That's not something I say lightly."

Warren didn't respond right away. He watched the mist drag between the fungal towers, the low glow of the mossline shimmering below.

"What's a High Imperator?" he asked instead, voice low but direct. "Sounds like something they don't hand out lightly."

Isol nodded. "They don't. A High Imperator isn't just a title, it's a force of nature. One person. One command. An army unto themselves. Not a joke. Not hyperbole. When the Empire and the Nine were still at war, I saw one fight."

He drew a slow breath, like dragging old memory through broken glass.

"Her name was Justinia Verdance. High Imperator. She was... something else. I watched her tear through tens of thousands of imperial mech warriors on her own. Mechs. Elite command walkers. Didn't even slow her down."

Warren's brow furrowed. "What was her Skill?"

"Something like yours," Isol said. "She controlled sound. Not just blasts or waves. She was sound. When she moved, it was like the world warped around her. Every noise bent to her will. Every scream, every command, every explosion, they became hers. The way you feel like a storm when you fight? She was noise itself. But scaled to a whole other level."

He looked Warren in the eye.

"There are over a million Imperator candidates at any given time. And Warren, my boy, you are already tracking toward the top one percent of all of them. You're climbing without even knowing the ladder exists."

There was no threat in his tone. Just fact. The kind men like Isol learned to respect.

Warren looked sideways at him. "So why are you still here?"

"Because I want to see what you become," Isol said. "Not just a weapon. A leader. Someone who scares the Nine without ever raising their voice."

Warren exhaled, slow. "You really think the Legion would take me?"

"They'd take you, train you, crown you, and point you at whatever they're afraid of."

"And if I said no?"

"They'd try to kill you. Quietly. Surgically. Efficiently."

Warren considered that. "Sounds familiar."

Isol chuckled. "Yeah. That's why I'm staying. To make sure you are trained to the best of my ability."

A silence passed between them. Mutual understanding between two predators who both knew what it meant to be turned into something and told to smile while the shaping broke them.

"You gonna keep calling me 'my boy' forever?" Warren asked.

"Probably," Isol said. "It suits you. You hate it. That's how I know it's working."

Warren shook his head. "You're a piece of work."

"And you're a goddamn blueprint," Isol said. "Now let's go break the world open, huh?"

Warren didn't answer. He was already walking, already climbing the short rise that overlooked the tunnel into the Red. The gathered ranks turned as he stepped forward, tribesmen, scavvers, expedition members, all watching as the Tidelord took his place.

He stood still for a moment, coat heavy with mist, the light rain threading across his shoulders. Then he spoke, not loud, but clear. Every word landed.

"They say no one comes back from the Red."

His voice cut through the air like a drawn blade.

"That it swallows you. Breaks you. Leaves nothing but a name behind, if you're lucky. That's what the Green wants. That's what they built. A world where people disappear and no one asks why."

He looked out over them, eyes hard.

"But we're not disappearing. We're not scattering. And we're not dying today."

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He let the silence hold.

"We're going through. All the way through. Beneath the walls of a city that never saw us coming. And when we rise inside it, when we come up through their floors, their data centers, their sanctums and boardrooms, they will know what it feels like to be hunted."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.

"We don't march for glory. We don't fight for flags. We fight because we were never meant to survive, and yet we did. We fight because we have no chains left to break, just hands to raise and blades to sharpen."

A breath passed. Rain tapped steel and flesh and stone.

"They think we're the storm outside the gate."

He took a step forward. Just one. Just enough.

"But we're already inside. And we're not leaving until the last goddamn piece of their world is ours."

He turned then. Faced the tunnel mouth. The Red.

"You don't have to follow. But if you do, if you step into the dark with me, then know this: You were never broken. You were buried. And now we rise."

The wall squad was half-asleep.

They always were. Guard duty at the southern metro exit was a joke, more for show than threat mitigation. The tunnel had been quiet for years. Broken didn't come this close to the walls. No one from the Red ever made it far enough to matter.

Corporal Delv sat reclined in her suit, chewing synthleaf while watching a muted holo drama play across the inside of her visor. Her body didn't move much, the suit handled posture correction, vitals, reaction checks. She just existed inside it, along for the ride like everyone else. The armor thought for them, acted for them. All she had to do was breathe.

The others were worse. One was napping, system logged into standby to prevent command flags. Another was flipping through a deck of backlogged game tiles. The last had a comm open, looping a voice call to a girl he hadn't spoken to in months. None of them were watching the tunnel.

They never had to. That was the suit's job.

Until Delv heard it.

Not through the suit. Not through the comms. She felt it first. A vibration in the wall. Subtle. But growing.

She muted her feed and blinked up the local grid.

A low hum began threading through the air. Not just ambient reverb, not pipes or fault lines. This was something else. Something moving.

Then it hit the low band. Rhythmic. Repeating. Loud.

Engines. Not small ones.

"What the fuck is that?" she said, sitting up straighter.

The suit resisted her at first, trying to re-center. She overrode it and leaned forward manually.

"Probably another seismic glitch," one of the others said lazily, not even looking up.

But the sound didn't match any known structure profile. It wasn't a quake. It was coordinated.

Then the comms flickered.

Unit D-4: "Hearing something down the lower lines. You picking this up?"

D-3: "Copy that. Big movement. Can't tell if it's structural or active."

D-2: "Too rhythmic. That's engines. I count at least six signatures, Zoomers? Haulers? No fuckin' way."

Delv forced the suit into full posture control, overriding idle stance. Her visor cleared. Targeting protocols kicked in.

The hum became a roar.

Then the metal started screaming.

Not the wall. The tunnel. Something big was forcing its way around a curve too tight, moving with intention. A high velocity. Not Broken.

"Get up," Delv snapped. "All of you. Now."

That got their attention. The suits re-engaged them. Limbs jerked upright. Systems flicked into combat posture, automatic safeties disengaged.

Then came the landings.

Not crashes. Impacts. Suspension braced. Armor plating locked. Old metro floor groaned under weight it hadn't seen in a century.

D-5: "Multiple contacts. Confirmed visual. Repeat, this is not Broken. These are people, armed. Mass movement."

D-7: "No, fuck that, I see Broken too! Horde-sized. They're coming with the movement. What the hell is this?!"

D-3: "We're under fire! Taking losses, need suppression support now!"

D-2: "We are under attack. Repeat, this is not a drill. This is...."

Comms died.

The static was worse than silence.

Delv's HUD began flickering. Enemy markers spawning too fast to log. Her suit tried to categorize threat levels, but the data came in wrong. Cross-signals. Too many conflicting profiles.

The tunnel ahead pulsed with red light from old emergency strobes. Something moved between the flashes.

Then the Enforcer to her left convulsed. No warning. Just a blur, then a wet line of spray across Delv's visor. The suit hadn't even registered impact before his torso slid off his hips, severed clean.

Kor-Ven walked through the strobe light like it meant nothing, his axe already swinging for the next.

Delv tried to scream. Tried to run. Tried to move. But her suit lagged half a second too long...

And a flechette punched through her faceplate like paper.

The last thing she saw was Warren, stepping through the steam, voice calm.

"All teams in place. We breach in five. Four..."

Warren stepped through the smoke and ruin, the last echoes of his countdown still bleeding into the comms.

Five. Four. Three. Two.

The breach lit like thunder.

Behind them, the Red still screamed. Broken poured upward, not in pursuit, but in frenzy, lured by the convoy's passage, now clawing at the ruins left behind. Warren had never planned to lead them all the way in. Just to stir the nest. Let the Green burn half its forces trying to contain the fallout. Let the flood move on its own.

The green was in front of him.

He had never seen it like this. None of them had, except the former Enforcers. The rest of the world lived in ash, moss, ruin, rot. But the Green? It gleamed.

The moment they cleared the final gate, Warren saw it: towering arcs of hypersteel stretched across the skyline, painted with soft-glow data trails that pulsed in perfect rhythm. Roads floated on grav-paths, bending in clean curves between mirrored towers and lattice-scaffold spires. The sky above them wasn't sky at all, it was filtered by atmospheric lenses, diffused and tinted to maintain perfect artificial clarity. The entire city looked sculpted, like something poured from chrome and algorithm.

Neon not like a storm, but like a breath, controlled, measured, clinical. The light here wasn't meant to dazzle. It was meant to calm. Meant to pacify.

And beneath it all: silence.

The kind of silence that could only exist in places untouched by weather, by decay, by fear. The silence of a machine world that had convinced itself it was paradise.

Behind him, the sounds of the Red were still screaming, haulers abandoned, Broken shrieking in the dark as others held the line. But here?

Here it felt like a different planet.

Warren moved forward slowly, truncheon sheathed, hand lance drawn, its frame locked tight in his grip. The landing path was narrow, designed for traffic control, not invasion. It forked into a wide plaza rimmed with lush bio-grass and sculpted reliefs of pre-System propaganda. The walls themselves bore no rust, no marks, not even chips from the breach, they had peeled open on command, hacked by Isol mid-charge.

This place didn't feel real. Not compared to the world they'd lived in. Not compared to everything they'd bled for. But it was real. And now it was vulnerable.

Behind him, the first units emerged. Calra. Batu. Grix, bloodied but alive, reloading her lance with a wild grin.

Wren came last, smoke on her coat, streaks of ash down her cheeks, still standing.

"All teams," Warren said over comms, voice flat. "You're in. Hold fast. Spread wide. No alarms yet, but they'll know soon. Move with precision."

He turned his eyes forward again, past the plaza, toward the inner blocks where the real heart of the Green pulsed.

And then the alarms started.

Not sirens. Not screams. Just a sharp rising tone that clicked to life across every visible panel. The bio-grass flickered faint blue. Security lights pulsed from under the walkways. Drones lifted from hidden wells like quiet insects, dozens at first, then hundreds, scattering above the plaza in coordinated arcs.

Warren raised one hand.

"Stay clean. Hold position."

But the plaza was already shifting. A long, low hum began beneath their feet, power conduits rerouting, defense protocols waking up.

A shape emerged ahead. No armor. No fanfare. Just a single Enforcer in full black, suit polished, helmet down, stance perfect.

A voice boomed across the plaza, artificial and hollow:

"YOU ARE TRESPASSING IN A PROTECTED SECTOR OF GREEN TERRITORY. LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND YOU WILL DIE QUICKLY AND WITHOUT PAIN. RESIST, AND YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO FULL LEGAL TORTURE AS DESIGNATED BY SYSTEM LAW."

More Enforcers began to pour out behind the first, suits in perfect sync, stepping to flank the plaza entrances. Drones swept lower. Vehicles, a sleek wedge formation of patrol skimmers, shot into view from the northern path, blue-white lights trailing like surgical blades.

"Anyone else hear that?" Grix muttered. "That wasn't a warning. That was a fucking promise."

"We hold," Warren said.

He stepped forward.

The Enforcer didn't flinch. The drones didn't scatter. The city simply watched. Cold and waiting.

"Cassian, Nanuk, left flank. Wren, get me visuals on the spire entrances. Calra, prep your heavy."

The voice boomed again.

"FIVE SECONDS TO COMPLIANCE."

"No," Warren muttered. "You don't get to count down."

He moved.

The first drone came in high. His lance barked once, cutting it clean from the sky.

The plaza erupted.

Calra opened fire, her barrage slamming into the closest Enforcer and sending it skidding sideways across the smooth platform. Batu brought down two drones in a single sweep. Grix moved like a knife, crashing through the nearest group with her clatterfangs and scatter lance.

The Enforcers returned fire in perfect formation. Lasers marked lines across the field. Two scavvers dropped instantly, armor slagged.

Wren screamed something over the comms and redirected half the med team to cover.

"Push them though!" Warren ordered. "We breach the upper tier now!"

The plaza turned into a war zone in seconds. Smoke bled from ruptured pathways. Screams rose beneath the drone static.

And Warren? He kept moving forward.

Another Enforcer stepped to block his path. Warren drove the lance through its throat, twisted, and kicked it off the edge of the rail.

"Fall in!" he roared. "We take this city by the root!"

The Green had woken up.

And Warren had come to kill it.

Rain fell, pulled from Warren's will, drawn like a blade from the sky and cast down with all the weight of every silence he'd ever held. Rain Dancer had answered.

It wasn't just weather. It was war.

The Green didn't know how to fight the fury of a world they ignored. They had trained against dissidents and simulations, not against the raw, unrelenting violence born of ruin and hunger. But Warren? He carried that fury like breath. Like armor.

Behind him, the combined force advanced.

Batu surged through the chaos, his form no longer just man but beast: a winged giant, his bear-shape crowned in storm. His Skill had answered, and in it he became something primal and unstoppable. Drones shattered like glass ornaments beneath his paws. Enforcers were torn apart in swipes that flattened haulers and split pavement. Wings of shimmering force arched behind him, sending out shockwaves with every movement. Calra unleashed her barrage again, heavier this time, planting shock grenades under their hover lanes, sending skimmers twisting into the sky before collapsing into wet wreckage.

Grix laughed as she moved, her Skill surging in her blood, Ricochet at full tilt. She bounced off walls, Enforcers, drones, even water itself, movement a blur too fast to trace. Her lance crackled with scatter bursts, turning once-lethal precision suits into twitching heaps.

The Green's defenders tried. They brought more drones. Deployed grav-tanks with active field suppression. They even launched crowd pacifiers from the upper terraces.

None of it mattered.

Wren surged forward with her medics, not behind the line, but through it. Her hands were stained, her lance always hot. The wounded rose because she fought like she would drag them up herself. One hand clutched Stick, her legendary pipe, and the other fired clean shots from her hand lance, every burst finding soft gaps in armor. A fighter cried out, bleeding out from his thigh, and Wren didn't pause, she swung Stick once, cleared a drone from the air, dropped to her knees, sealed the wound, and kept moving.

Nanuk's blade dragged sparks as he moved, cleaving Enforcers in half with terrifying precision. Cassian called targets over comms while firing blind, coordinating the left flank with Isol's backup fire.

And Warren? Warren didn't stop.

Rain Dancer was no longer a silent promise. It was unleashed. The full breadth of the flood broke loose, his Skill not just altering the battlefield, but consuming it. Sheets of water fell in rhythmic pulses, each crash masking his movement, veiling allies, distorting every sensor the Green relied on.

The Green had superior tech. Better weapons. Smart drones. But none of it mattered under the weight of the deluge.

Warren moved like the end of a season, cleansing,and final. Every swing of the truncheon felt earned, each step a sermon. Lightning cracked not from the sky but from impact zones where his fury landed, where broken metal met soaked concrete, where a city that had ignored the world now had to drown in its return.

"Push past the north corridor!" he called. "We drive them inward! Don't let them regroup!"

The Green's enforcers staggered.

They'd been trained to handle riots. Domestic unrest. Rogue Broken at the border. Not this.

A wall of Enforcers tried to form at the next junction, twenty strong, suits in full sync, backed by drone netting and turrets. They expected resistance. They expected a siege.

They got the Tidelord.

Warren's truncheon struck first, a blur of matte-black death in the flickering haze. The first Enforcer's skull cracked under the blow, helmet folding inward like paper. The second lost both legs to Yeri. The third didn't even see Calra's shot before the shockwave took his squad out in a single blast.

Drones spiraled out of the sky like birds with clipped wings. Power junctions sparked. One of the skimmers tried to lift, and was slammed back to the ground by a pulse of directed rainfall that hit like a waterfall off a rooftop.

"Do you see them falter?" Warren barked. "They don't understand the shape of our hate!"

He reached deeper. Rain Dancer no longer calmed the field. It cut through it. Pressure shifted. Pavement cracked under his feet. The storm turned surgical, mist for cover, droplets to blind optics, condensed arcs cutting into enforcers.

And still his forces pressed on.

The Enforcers tried fallback patterns. Reinforced the west corridor. But that was where Deana had gone, silent, zealous, moving with three other believers behind her like a blade in the dark.

"Cleanse the gate," she said once.

They did.

Warren reached the central plaza in the next breath. A pool of silence opened before him. Enforcers dead. Civilians screaming behind sealed barriers. Skimmers mangled. Blood mixing with the artificial grass that no longer glowed.

He stood in the rain, the last echoes of battle still echoing off the spires.

The storm bowed to him.

The Green had been breached.
And judgment had come.