Yellow Jacket

Repar Malcus stood in front of the viewport, watching the skyline flicker like a dying circuit.

The comms were down. Not jammed, broken. Entire systems had failed, one after another, like some kind of rolling neural collapse. The last drone sweep had reported movement in six districts at once. Too organized to be random. Too fast to be civil unrest.

And the wall feeds, static. Not corrupted or hacked. Gone.

"Get me something," he said, not yelling, just pressing the words into the air like they owed him obedience. "Anything. Visuals. Positioning. Confirmation the Warlord is still alive."

No one answered. His aides were gone. His security had fallen back to the central corridors. His private commband lit with six urgent alerts from the lower tiers, but none of them mattered.

He was this close.

This fucking close.

Not to certification. Not to compliance. To freedom.

He'd buried every scan. Bribed every analyst. Had entire R&D clusters wiped after discovery so no one else would see the Ocean's glow. Even P.G.I, the idiots, still thought it was a mineral fault. He'd been deleting internal reports for months, scrubbing mentions from the chip-net, and rerouting expedition logs into cold storage blackzones.

But Repar had seen the threads. The filaments. The power coiled beneath the surface like liquified code. The Ocean wasn't a resource. It was a seed. Whoever controlled it didn't just profit, they ascended.

He didn't want a seat at the Nine's table. He wanted to flip the goddamn board and build his own. The Tenth Great House.

He had already picked the name.

The route through the pass had been secured. The compound wiped clean. The Warlord, his Warlord, had every advantage. Bioweapons, suppressors, prototype augmentation. All of it signed off through buried shell contracts and dead subsidiaries.

It wasn't just plausible deniability. It was architectural. He could've blamed a dozen corps and walked away smiling.

And it hadn't started with the Ocean.

Repar had been corrupt for decades. Espionage, data theft, intellectual poaching, he'd carved out his ascent by gutting other corporate branches from the inside. He never innovated; he appropriated. Bought patents in other people's names, blackmailed rivals, stole prototypes before they were announced.

His first real kill was a city councilor who'd discovered his false ID chains. She'd died of a stroke. Or at least, that's what the coroner reported. Repar had made sure of it.

His entire appointment to Lord Mayor was a fraud. He'd manufactured the civic crisis that opened the seat, an orchestrated sabotage of the city's water purification system. Then he presented the solution.

He didn't want the title. He wanted the cover.

The mayoralty gave him access to city sensors, traffic routes, military networks, and most importantly, chip flow data. From there, hiding the Ocean was easy. Anything too anomalous? Rewritten. Anyone too curious? Reassigned.

P.G.I. only knew what he let them see. A dead-end city. No growth potential. Poor civic morale. Just another quiet node in a dying sector.

Meanwhile, he was rerouting expedition teams to the Ocean, paying scavvers in scraps to dig through pre-System layers and silence anyone who asked the wrong questions.

He'd even partnered with minor cults and fringe groups to use their bodies as test platforms for augmentation tolerance, hiding the data under religious exemptions. A few hundred disappearances here and there. Nothing that flagged central authority.

And if the Broken population started to swell, if strange mutations or structural shifts began to ripple through the lower districts, well, that was just the cost of secrecy.

He killed whistleblowers by career implosion. Had entire families discredited, stripped of System access, or quietly marked for reassignment, flagged as traitors until no one would house them. One researcher, a woman named Callis, had gotten close. Too close. She'd vanished during a border run that Repar himself had ordered.

He'd rewritten entire segments of the city's public infrastructure to keep the lie alive.

Even the warlord had been a piece on his board, not some outside contractor. He had groomed the man for years, fed him just enough tech, pushed him into leadership, and unleashed him like a dog with a gold collar.

And the worst part? None of it was even that unique.

In the Green, that kind of corruption was just politics. The only crime was getting caught. Everyone stole, leveraged, eliminated. Everyone. The game wasn't about morality. It was about execution. Success washed away the blood.

He'd just played better than most.

The bodies didn't bother him. The betrayals didn't weigh on him. The ethics were a myth sold to the lower districts so they'd feel shame when they failed.

He never failed.

Until now.

Now it was all collapsing. Not from a rival corp. Not from the Nine. Not even from a failed experiment.

But from a man no one had seen coming. A myth with a name.

The one the Yellow was rallying behind.

Repar had seen rebel leaders before. Watched them rise and fall like cheap flames in wind tunnels. But this one, Warren Smith, this Aberrant, should have fallen to him. Repar had underestimated him, the way anyone would underestimate a vagrant with a bounty too big to be real. Ten million credits. Enough to live clean in any of the real cities, not just survive, but belong. He'd assumed it was fabricated, some rogue flag or unsanctioned bounty glitch. If it had been real, someone would have claimed it.

Instead, he'd watched Lucas. Lucas who spoke in fire and had followers. Lucas who threatened structure and stirred momentum. Lucas, who was loud.

Repar had feared him. Thought he was the real threat. So when Lucas tried to seize the market, Repar had made sure Carmine was in charge good old predictable Carmine. A buffer. A leash.

He thought that would be enough.

And Warren? Just a shadow in the background. Just another wild dog in the ruins.

He'd watched him. Curious, maybe. Amused. He should have given the order then. Tagged him. Had his enforcers erase the threat before it ever learned to speak.

He should have crushed the man then. Had his enforcers close in, break him, erase the body, and rewrite the event logs. Or better, claimed the bounty himself. Ten million credits. Even if it was a glitch, he could've fabricated the order retroactively and filed the claim. No one would've questioned it. That amount of money could rewrite a man's life in the real cities. He could've bought loyalty, silence, everything. Warren Smith should have made him rich. Instead, he made him vulnerable.

But he didn't. He'd watched. Amused.

And now that oversight was the blade in his ribs.

Repar reached for the emergency override key.

His hand closed on nothing.

Just the hollow space where control used to live.

He turned toward the door.

And for a moment, he considered it. Really considered it. Just walking out. Slipping down into the emergency tunnels, rerouting a shuttle, forging a new ID, and vanishing. He'd done it before. More than once. Burned an identity, vanished into the cracks, resurfaced three zones over with a new face and a falsified past. Sometimes he even let himself start small, assistant roles, off-grid contracts, just long enough to blend in before clawing his way back up. It wasn't reinvention. It was camouflage. Survival. A predator in new skin. His family name opened doors, even in exile. Malcus carried weight. High nobility always did. All you needed was a blood signature, and bureaucrats stepped aside. No one ever questioned the pedigree. They were too afraid of what it meant.

What was one more name?

There were still forgotten cities tucked between shattered transit lines. Quiet places. Failed sectors the Nine didn't bother to track anymore. He could find another one, just like this. A backwater no one watched. Install himself as a logistics overseer or security liaison. Maybe even mayor again if the setup was clean enough.

There were still caches. Blacklisted ID chains. Enough blackmail data buried in city servers and chip-voids to buy him silence and maybe a few weeks of safety.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Start over. Lay low. Build again.

The game wasn't lost, just this round.

But as he stared at the door, something inside him stalled. A bone-deep recognition that this time, the weight might not lift.

He'd always believed he could outthink collapse. But this didn't feel like collapse. It felt like judgment. Just the quiet hum of failing infrastructure and the flicker of emergency lighting.

He took one last breath and keyed the internal line.

"Assemble in the lobby. Immediate extraction. Full combat dress. We're leaving."

His voice barely cracked as he gave the order, but his hands trembled when he killed the channel, and for the first time in years, the silence that followed felt like something pressing inward, not lifting away.

They would be there. His bodyguards. Ex-Legion mercenaries bought through backdoor contracts and long-dead favors. Men like the Warlord once was, trained, obedient, made for war and paid to be silent. Hardened. Precise. Loyal to credits and consequences.

He gathered his coat, the encrypted case, and two vials from his private lockbox, fail-safes keyed to his own biometric signature, embedded with data keys and last-resort overrides, each one the kind of tool meant to survive betrayal, not confrontation.

The elevators still worked. Of course they did. The Green built its infrastructure like a nervous system: reactive, redundant, built to pulse long after the brain was dead.

He rode down alone. Past sealed floors and flickering lights, past memory. Each level passed felt like another version of the city dying above him. The heartbeat of a place he had once thought permanent.

When the doors opened, the lobby greeted him with silence.

Not tension. Not warning. Just a silence thick enough to suggest absence, of life, of movement, of order.

"Status," he said, into the comm.

No response. Not even static.

The floor was wet.

Not flooded or damaged by the storm. Wet in patterns too random to be maintenance, too deliberate to be accidental. Wet in arcs. In trails.

Then he saw the first hand.

It wasn't attached to anything. The fingers were still curled, reflex locked, as if grasping for something it never reached. The wrist was bone, bloodless where it had been cut clean through.

Then another. A torso. A leg. The chrome glint of reinforced plating, torn from the man who used to wear it.

Repar froze mid-step.

They weren't just dead. They were taken apart. Dismantled like machines. Shattered was too soft a word.

Blood had been flung, not spilled. It painted the walls like a diagram. Not chaotic. Instructional.

And across the lobby, near the glass exit that still shimmered with emergency lockdown protocols, a shape stood still.

Warren Smith.

His coat was soaked, but it wasn't the kind of soaked that came from rain alone. It was heavy. Weighted. Blood ran from the hem like ink across old pages.

He stood with his back to the room, facing the door, unmoved by the carnage behind him. He didn't look. Didn't flinch. He breathed in rhythm with the storm outside like it had answered to him, not the other way around.

Repar didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't even breathe at first. His mouth was dry, and his pulse didn't rise. It dropped.

There was no protocol for this.

Just instinct.

He stood there, half-shielded by the edge of the elevator's open door, case still clutched in one hand, his whole body locked under the weight of realization. There was no escape. There was no protocol. Only the reckoning he had long postponed.

The wind outside shifted in pulses. It struck the glass in intervals, like something rhythmic and living. The city's climate system began to whine trying to counterbalance it. Its sensors weren't used to failing. The Green never failed. Until now.

Repar stepped out onto the lobby floor. He didn't even realize he was doing it. His body moved because it didn't want to be in the elevator anymore. As if proximity to escape made his failure louder.

Warren didn't turn. Not yet.

The bodies hadn't fallen together. They weren't collapsed in some last stand. They were scattered. Disassembled. Their final positions told no story except the one written in force: none of them had landed a single hit.

Repar's breath caught. Not in his throat, but in his ribs. It seized. The kind of breath that belongs to men watching their own failure take shape.

He gripped the case tighter. One of the vials inside tapped the lining. A sound that had never frightened him before. Now it sounded like a countdown.

Still, Warren didn't turn.

This wasn't a mistake. This wasn't a storm event or rebel breach. This was surgical. Specific. Personal.

His men were ex-Legion. Trained for this. Trained for more than this.

It didn't matter.

Something twitched to his right, he caught the movement in the corner of his eye. A jaw. Still connected to a head. The teeth clacked once, involuntarily. Nerve death reflex.

Repar looked away quickly. It wasn't disgust. It was guilt.

The storm outside pressed harder against the glass, then released. Like breath. Like patience thinning.

And Warren exhaled.

It wasn't a sigh. It was an exhale that pulled the world inward for a moment.

Then, finally, he turned.

Deliberate. Clean. Without menace. Just presence.

His face was expressionless. Not cruel. Not triumphant. Just... calm. Like someone doing exactly what needed to be done, with nothing left to justify.

His eyes carried all of it. Not rage. Not pity. Just truth. Cold, unwavering truth.

Repar opened his mouth to speak and found no language ready.

Warren raised a hand and pointed.

At the door.

A message: run.

Repar didn't.

Not because he chose not to. Because his legs failed him. Because his body remembered something his mind was still refusing to admit.

Warren lowered his hand.

The lights flickered.

Something groaned behind the walls. Structural fatigue. Or something else moving through the storm.

Then the air shifted, and the storm didn't stay outside.

It entered.

Not through the systems. Not through cracks.

Through Warren.

Rain slipped down his coat. Steam coiled from his collar like breath from a furnace.

It wasn't weather anymore.

The blood and the water moved around him, not away from him, not passively, but in slow, impossible spirals, rising and threading the air like veins of light in stormclouds. The droplets bent around his limbs without touching him, drawn into his shape, guided by something deeper than gravity. It looked unnatural, but felt, somehow like this was how the world had always meant for water to move, if only someone like Warren had been there to show it.

Repar stepped back, instinct returning for just a breath.

Still, Warren said nothing.

He didn't need to.

This wasn't combat.

It was judgment.

The doors to the mayoral lobby stood half-open, wide enough to suggest welcome, narrow enough to scream trap. The storm whispered through the cracks in the building, a low hum that slid against the walls like a breath waiting to become a scream.

Repar Malcus didn't flinch when the rear doors opened behind him. He turned with practiced annoyance, expecting more excuses from his guards, more delays, more incompetence.

Instead, three Enforcers entered from the back.

They looked like any other Enforcer squad: faceless, armored, expressionless beneath their visors. Just tools. Just weapons with state-sanctioned legs.

Repar's voice cut across the room, dismissive. "Kill him."

He pointed to Warren.

Warren didn't move.

Tarric's voice was calm. "That's the issue, Lord Mayor. We already failed the first time."

Repar blinked. Confusion flickered. "What?"

Isol stepped forward.

He reached up, slow and deliberate, and removed the outer layer of his gauntlet.

A platinum ring glinted beneath the emergency lights.

Tarric visibly stiffened.

Even Warren tilted his head, something unreadable behind his eyes. Jurpat just looked on, clearly unsure what the ring meant but sensing the shift in atmosphere.

"That's... That's not real," Repar said, the words catching.

"You didn't know who you sent," Isol said, voice flat. "You didn't even check. You pulled files and threw names at the problem, thinking it would die like every other cover-up."

Repar took a step back.

Tarric was pale. "You're Platinum. That ring... That's the Legion's highest tier. You were on the High Imperator track."

Isol didn't look at him. His eyes were fixed on Repar. "I was more than on the track. I had the throne in sight. And I stepped off it. By choice. I thought power was the path. I thought being at the top would mean control, clarity, and respect. Then I saw Justinia Verdance fight, truly fight. And I realized I couldn't keep up with monsters like her. I wasn't born to rule over blood. I was born to teach others how not to drown in it. Knowledge, not dominance, was always my gift. That moment rewrote me."

"Why?" Jurpat asked, his voice small.

Isol exhaled. "Because someone had to make sure the next wave wasn't monsters. I trained them instead. The Paper Angel, they called me. The one who clipped wings so others wouldn't burn the world down."

Repar's eyes widened.

"You burned my vacation," Isol continued, tone rising slightly. "I had a plan. A real one. Not just days off. Life plans. And you threw me at a red flag mission without reading the name on the bounty. Without reporting it. Without claiming it."

"I thought he was..."

"A problem," Isol finished. "And you thought problems could be buried with authorization codes and plausible deniability."

Jurpat stayed quiet.

Then, almost hesitantly, he spoke. "I used to watch the holos. The Paper Angel tournament fights. You're a legend."

Isol glanced at him, and for the first time, there was a faint flicker of warmth behind his eyes. "That was when I was young and full of fire and brimstone."

Repar's eyes darted to him. "You're a recruit, right? I can pull strings. Get you into the Legion next term, real candidacy, not this bottom-rung posting. You want a future, don't you?"

Jurpat blinked, the offer hanging for a breath.

"I wanted the Legion," he said. "This was a shortcut. Until it turned into the real thing."

He looked at Warren.

"And now I know what adventure actually looks like."

Repar turned to Tarric again. Desperate. "You get it. Green politics. You know what it's like. I needed silence. I needed the pressure gone. You understand."

Tarric stepped forward, jaw tight.

"You picked the wrong squad. That's your real mistake. You thought the mask was the man. You didn't check the names."

"You still need me," Repar said, voice thin. "You want System control. The city's override. My codes..."

"You still think that's why he didn't kill you," Isol said, a flicker of cruel amusement. "You really don't get it."

Repar looked at Warren.

The man hadn't moved.

Rain beaded along his coat, but the water and blood no longer obeyed gravity. They hung near him, curled like breath in waiting.

Warren looked up.

"I waited," he said. "Because I thought they deserved to see you."

Repar's shoulders sagged.

"I didn't sign up for extermination," Isol said, stepping back. "But if you're waiting for permission, Tidelord, you have mine."

Jurpat said nothing. Tarric didn't move.

Warren stepped forward.

The exit sealed behind them.

And the storm answered.

Repar took one last step back, hitting the wall like it might open, like there was still some hidden corridor left for men like him. There wasn't. He was trembling now. Not at Warren. Not anymore. His eyes kept drifting to the ring. To the man who wore it. Isol hadn't moved again, but his presence had already split the room in two, past and consequence.

Warren approached, slow and silent, each step deliberate, each motion too fluid to be human. Rain and blood spiraled around him in controlled arcs, hovering like coiled wire, like breath held just shy of release. The storm bent toward him now, not just following, but obeying.

Repar's voice cracked, desperate, raw. "We can make a deal."

No one answered.

"I can give you the codes. The vials. The back routes. You need me alive."

Still nothing.

"I wasn't trying to kill him!" he shouted, pointing at Warren. "I was trying to survive!"

Warren paused.

"That's the difference," he said, voice low. "You survive by feeding the fire. I survive by walking through it."

He stepped again.

Repar tried to run.

He didn't make it halfway across the lobby before the water surged, not like a wave, but like a hand, like something alive. It struck his legs with perfect timing, catching his sprint in the worst angle possible, pitching him forward into a slide across polished marble. He tried to rise, but Warren was already above him.

The truncheon dropped from his coat.

He caught it mid-fall.

One blow. Clean. Controlled. Final.

The storm didn't roar. It exhaled.

Repar Malcus didn't scream. He simply stopped.

And when Warren turned, the water followed, leaving the mayor's blood behind as tribute.

The city had a new name now.

Mara.