Yellow Jacket

After a little while, Alorna waved them over to follow her. She didn't say anything, just the smallest flick of her wrist, like a command born from muscle memory rather than conscious thought. They followed. No questions. No hesitation. Her silence carried the weight of finality. It was the kind of silence that said more than a speech ever could: You're done. Move.

It took less than fifteen minutes of trailing her through the forest to arrive back at the exit pads, though it felt surreal how quickly they made the return trip. After everything they'd endured, every mud missile, every tripwire, every humiliating trap, it seemed almost insulting that the path back was so simple. A straight shot through the trees. Just a quiet walk in the woods, like none of it had ever happened.

No one said a word.

Not even a breath of thanks. They were too tired for sarcasm, too sore for smugness. Just a silent goodbye to the forest hellscape and to Alorna herself. Then they were off, dismissed with no ceremony, scattered like exhausted debris to whatever the Citadel dared to call a class next. Even the sound of their boots felt muted, like the forest had taken a part of their volume along with their dignity.

They arrived at their next location still covered in mud, swamp scum, blood, rope burns, insect bites, and a lingering sense of betrayal from nature itself. They looked like survivors of something apocalyptic, like they'd been spit out of the earth itself. Vexa had dead leaves in her hair. Wesley had a centipede still climbing his boot. Torman looked like he'd gone a round with a ditch god.

The room they stepped into looked like something out of a sterilization nightmare. A clinical box of cold steel and scrubbed surfaces. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic. Hazmat suits, sealed and waiting, lined the walls like executioners in rest. There was a reinforced steel airlock, and a wide view window into what looked suspiciously like a dissection lab. The walls were smooth, the lighting too clean and bright. The kind of space that didn't just want to erase dirt. It wanted to erase humanity.

Inside the chamber were steel tables with locking wheels, surgical lighting rigs overhead, and trays of shining instruments laid out with the kind of obsessive care that only made them more terrifying. There were no chairs, which brought Fenn the first wave of relief he'd felt in over an hour. He still couldn't sit if his life depended on it. The bruising from the logs had settled into a deep, throbbing ache that made his lower spine feel like a war crime. Standing was agony. Sitting was extinction.

The view window flickered.

It shimmered, then shifted, becoming a screen. On it appeared a woman.

She looked young, but again, this was the Green Zone. Appearances lied more often than most people did. She had clean, symmetrical features and a sharpness to her presence that no cosmetic could fake. Her eyes were scalpel blades. Her voice, when it came, was honed to surgical perfection. She had the kind of beauty that didn't invite compliments. It invited obedience.

"Welcome, Class. You look like Alorna did her job well. This is the perfect time to explore the nature of applied violence to sensitive regions of the human body."

No one moved. There was a moment where even blinking felt like a risk.

Her tone didn't change. It was the kind of voice that assumed you would listen, and made you regret it if you didn't.

"First," she continued, with the calm finality of someone preparing a live specimen, "you will all shower."

The left wall split open to reveal an industrial-grade decontamination chamber. Steam drifted from the vents. Rows of nozzles waited. The lights inside buzzed with that sterile, soul-crushing glow that always accompanied places where bad things happened under the illusion of order.

"Then," she said, her voice never changing tone, "you will each get into a hazmat suit. Don't worry, they resize. You will get dressed and enter the airlock as one unit. Once inside, you will join me for your first lesson."

The screen went dark. Just like that.

Fenn groaned softly but didn't even have the strength to swear. He just leaned his head against the nearest wall and let the ache consume him. The others didn't laugh. No one smirked. Whatever part of them processed humor had been drowned in swamp water and smothered under the weight of rope and logs.

They looked around at each other, their silence louder than any scream. There was a collective awareness settling in now. This was the next form of suffering. The Citadel didn't pause between horrors. It just escalated.

No one dared ask what the lesson actually was. They didn't need to. The nameplate on the entryway had already delivered the answer.

Anatomy laboratory.

|They all changed in silence.

No one spoke as they peeled off their ruined clothes, mud-caked, blood-smeared, and stiff with dried swamp scum, and stepped into the brutal decontamination showers. The water blasted down with punishing force, far too hot to be comfortable and laced with biting chemicals that stung open wounds and sensitive skin. It burned. It stripped. It scraped. But none of it mattered. The water couldn't wash away the forest. It couldn't erase Alorna. It couldn't undo the ropes, the logs, the mud, or the sting of being outplayed like children.

Afterward, still dripping and raw, they moved in silence to the suits.

The hazmat suits lined the wall like empty shells waiting for occupants. They were pale gray, seamless, ominously clean. One by one, the cadets stepped into them. They expected discomfort. They expected tight seals and thick gloves. Maybe more sterilization, more containment protocols. What they didn't expect was how quickly the suits sealed around them like second skins, tight, heavy, and absolute.

The moment the final seal clicked shut, the floor opened beneath their feet.

An apparatus rose from below, almost soundless. No warning. No explanation. Just motion. A circular framework unfolded and surrounded them, moving with the eerie calm of something that had done this many times before. Mechanical arms snapped out from the ring, locking into each suit with terrifying precision. Ankles. Wrists. Torso. Neck. Even the back of the skull. Each cadet was immobilized in under three seconds.

Then the room itself began to shift.

The lighting dimmed. The air grew cooler. The ceiling transitioned from matte steel to glowing panel, then flickered into a screen.

And there she was again.

The same woman. The same perfect, unreadable expression. She looked exactly like she had before, only larger now, displayed across the entire ceiling like a god addressing mortals.

"Apologies for the restraint," she said. Her tone was cool, clipped, and utterly without remorse. "Most cadets attempt to run once we begin to explain the spinal drill."

Someone made a small sound. A whimper? A sharp inhale? No one could turn to see. Their heads were locked forward and slightly upward, forced to stare directly at her face on the screen.

"Don't worry," she continued, as if listing groceries, "you will be placed in a med-gel bath afterward you will be in perfect health before your next class."

That was when the panic truly began to bloom.

If they could've looked at each other, they'd have seen it: real fear. Not from the drill. Not from the idea of spinal fluid extraction or muscle biopsy. It was the med-gel.

Being submerged in med-gel was like being dipped in liquid agony. It invaded every pore, every nerve. It soaked into muscle and marrow. It healed, yes, but it shattered the mind while doing so. It was known to trigger seizures, hallucinations, vomiting, and unconscious twitching that lasted for hours. It was effective. It was thorough. It was merciless.

The screen pulsed once, then stabilized.

"We will be extracting blood, spinal fluid, and muscle tissue," the woman said, her tone never wavering. "I am Dr. Lambert. And I will be the one growing and calibrating your new Legion armor."

No one dared speak. Even breathing felt optional.

"For those of you who are unaware," she went on, "Legion armor is tailored to each individual pilot. Each set is unique, designed from your biology. Your tissues. Your nerve patterns. Your pain responses. These suits are not manufactured. They are grown."

She paused for effect, and in that space of silence, the weight of her words settled over them like a shroud.

"Feel honored. This year's formula is new. Experimental, yes. But with unprecedented performance capabilities. These suits will be special, even among the already superb armor currently in circulation."

Then she smiled.

Not kindness. A flicker of pride. A trace of excitement tucked neatly behind her clinical precision. The smile didn't reach her eyes, but it didn't have to. The thrill was there, buried under the surface, an academic delight at the edge of human thresholds.

Efficiency with teeth.

"Now," she said, voice softening by a fraction, "try not to pass out. The process goes much better while you're conscious."

The screen went dark.

A low vibration began beneath their feet. It spread up through the suits, through their boots, through their bones. Somewhere below, something clicked into place. Instruments primed. Fluids were prepared. Needles aligned.

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The hum of machinery thickened.

And far beneath the sterile tiles, the drills came alive.

More than once, Vaeliyan thought about skinning Dr. Lambert alive.

The thought didn't come with screaming or rage, it was quiet, methodical. It bloomed in the corners of his mind while the drill was ripping its way toward his spine. The whine of the machine echoed in the chamber, a rising shriek of steel and nerve, but he didn't try to move. He didn't scream. He was among the few who didn't.

He had known this was coming.

Isol and Josaphine had warned both him and Jurpat on the first day. Anatomy wasn't a class. Not really. It was preparation for surgery. Not optional. Not negotiable. If they wanted to be in the Legion, they needed the armor.

Josaphine had explained it in brutal detail. The suit would be grown, cultured from their own DNA. Not assembled. Not constructed. Birthed. Their flesh, their nerve endings, their rage patterns encoded into a second skin.

And the machine they were now strapped to? It wasn't just for medical extraction. It was a diagnostic torture engine, designed to map their minds during the moment of highest pain. Rage was the metric. The foundation. The data.

The suit's aggression amplification relied on that.

The spine crawler, grown from their own cloned tissue, would act as the neural link. It was housed inside the suit, seated precisely along the length of the spine, directly aligned with the contact point above the chip. Unlike the Enforcer suits, where the link was a one-way override and the pilot a passenger, the Legion suits made the wearer the true pilot. The spine crawler would be lobotomized at the final stage, preserving the perfect mental imprint but stripping all awareness.

Control was everything.

It was better to stay awake.

The machine worked better that way. The data was clearer. The spikes cleaner. Pain, panic, rage, they were valuable, yes. But Josaphine had made it clear: clarity was what made the difference between elite and dead.

So Vaeliyan didn't scream. He focused. He imagined peeling Dr. Lambert's skin off in strips. Imagined her blood, her voice turning to shrieks. But his heartbeat stayed steady. His breathing, even. Murder in theory. Not in actualized.

Because he didn't want to rage like a beast. He wanted control. He wanted domination, precise and absolute.

Jurpat didn't scream either. Neither did Elian. Or Sylen. Or Chime. The five of them held still. Grit teeth. Focused eyes. Steel minds.

Everyone else screamed.

The spine crawler's mapping mental pattern recorded every second. Every twitch. Every fragment of pain.

Then it all stopped.

The machinery fell silent with a mechanical sigh. The drills retracted into their housings, the biting whirr of steel against bone fading into a low hum of disengaged systems. The lights overhead shifted from a clinical, interrogative blue to a softer, warmer white, though the warmth felt artificial. A hiss of pressure release curled through the chamber as if the entire room had been holding its breath. A dull click echoed, followed by a second, and the double doors to the lab unlocked.

Dr. Lambert walked in.

She was short by Green Zone standards, probably just six foot, but every inch of her carried authority. Not the kind earned from command or force, but the cold, cutting confidence of someone who had spent decades mastering every cell of the body and every scream it could produce. Her frame was slight, surgical rather than soldierly, built for precision. Her presence filled the room all the same.

Her heels clicked sharply against the sterile metal floor, crisp and unforgiving. She wasn't wearing a hazmat suit. No gloves, no helmet, no emotion. Just a pristine white coat with high shoulders and razor-straight lines worn over black slacks, her collar fastened with a strip of burnished alloy marked with a fist made of what looked like screaming skulls over a white laurel, the Fist of the legion. That same scalpel-eyed calm she had on the screen remained, collected, efficient, dispassionately alert.

She moved from cadet to cadet with mechanical grace, clipboard in hand, stylus already working. She began diagnostics without any acknowledgment. As if they were machines waiting on post-op analysis.

She didn't speak to them.

She didn't ask how they felt.

She recorded vitals, brainwave fluctuations, muscle fiber tear ratios, spinal reaction latency, and their blood oxygen levels. She ran tests that no one could protest. The cadets were too weak, too stunned, or simply too broken. Most had lost track of how long they had been there. Some hadn't even realized the procedure was over.

The occasional hum of interest escaped her lips. The quiet tap of stylus against alloy echoed like a metronome of judgment. A few of the cadets had passed out standing up, bodies held upright by the braces. A mercy, in some ways. Others twitched as pain surged again through nerve endings still uncoiled from trauma. The air still smelled faintly of cauterized flesh and sterilizing agents.

She reached Vaeliyan last.

She didn't pause when she saw him. She simply positioned herself in front of him and reviewed the feed. Her eyes darted between columns of data, her expression still composed. Then, softly:

"Subject sixteen," she said aloud, speaking not to him, but to the log. "Vaeliyan Verdance. First place in the entrance tournament. Did not disappoint. Pain tolerance: ninety-ninth percentile. Beyond rare, but within model's expected capability based on psychological profile."

She scrolled deeper.

"Aggression mapping: minimal. Unexpected. And extremely promising."

Then she looked at him directly for the first time.

Sharp eyes met his. No hostility. Just recognition.

"You're still awake," she noted. Not surprised. Not impressed. Just curious. "Son, do you know how rare it is that a cadet goes through this much torture and remains calm, while we actively antagonize them?"

Vaeliyan didn't answer. He didn't blink. His heartbeat had slowed to something almost restful. He had chosen stillness. Chosen focus. Even now.

"This day is not normal," she said, and her voice grew just a fraction sharper. "It is engineered to break you. To reduce you. To strip your mind to instinct and feed your suit on the marrow of that rage. The Legion has no time for peacekeepers. We forge weapons. With no limits."

She studied him again.

"And yet, you didn't rage. You didn't shatter. You held still. Do you know what that tells me, Verdance? That your trigger isn't loose. It's waiting. Weighted. Calculated. That your fury isn't a fire. It's a forge."

Her expression didn't change, but her tone carried something new. Not warmth. Not sympathy. But pride.

"You should be proud of yourself. Honestly, your class is remarkable, one way or another. Some screamed. Some resisted. Some blacked out. Some begged. But you..."

She leaned in, her voice dropping into something close to reverence.

"I cannot wait to see what your armor becomes."

She tapped a final note on her clipboard, turned without another word, and moved on.
As she reached the threshold of the airlock, she paused. Not for drama. Just protocol. Then, without looking back:

"Your pain is in good hands."

The airlock sealed behind her a moment later, leaving only silence, and the lingering hum of what had just been done to them.

Vaeliyan watched Dr. Lambert leave, the sound of her heels still echoing faintly in the recesses of his skull like a ticking countdown. He had been locked into silence for so long that the sharp clack of her footsteps seemed almost intimate, a farewell too neat for what had been done to them. The machine that held him let out a low, mechanical groan, shifting beneath his spine. It tilted until he lay flat on his back, still strapped, still bound. No comfort was offered. No relief. The restraints merely reoriented.

Then the door opened again.

Figures entered, moving with military precision. Silent. Uniformed. Masked. Their presence lacked urgency but radiated something colder: protocol, inevitability, routine. They approached without hesitation, their roles clear, their empathy long discarded. They weren't here to help, they were here to process. They moved like undertakers preparing a corpse for display.

A needle slid into his arm. With no warning.

Cold fire raced through his veins.

His AI pinged, the tone detached and neutral.

Anesthesia has been introduced to the bloodstream.

Then darkness.

But not for long.

He snapped back to awareness with a violent jolt, no easing, no soft drift of unconscious return. One moment gone, the next engulfed in agony. He was naked. The air was gone. The world was blue.

He had been dropped, unceremoniously, deliberately, into a vat of shimmering gel that pulsed with the promise of pain. It looked harmless. It wasn't.

The gel enveloped him in a full-body embrace of torment. It didn't just touch him. It entered him. Forcefully. Eagerly.

It crawled into his mouth, his nose, his ears. It slithered behind his eyes and tunneled down his throat. It infiltrated the softest membranes and the toughest tissues alike. It tore through him like smoke through a broken window.

He tried to clench his eyes shut. It didn't help.

The gel was already behind them.

Then the healing began.

His skin shivered. His bones cracked. His tendons pulled taut and then screamed as they reknit. Every wound he'd ever received, small or large, replayed itself backward, undoing years of scar and strain. Even his breath was stolen, held hostage by the fluid crawling into his lungs.

His muscles jerked as microtears sealed, then stretched again. Blood vessels erupted under the stress, only to be stitched shut moments later by the med-gel that burned and pulsed like fire ants crawling across nerves.

His eyeballs seared as the micro-lacerations were fused. Pain bloomed and faded and bloomed again in waves, each crest sharper than the last.

He tried to scream. The gel smothered it.

He tried to move. The pressure made sure he wouldn't.

He tried to panic. But even his fear was muted by the clinical, suffocating perfection of the process.

This was healing, yes, but it was deliberate punishment, too. A forced reset of everything that made him tolerable in his own skin.

No escape. No mercy. Just correction.

He floated there, suspended in sterilized horror, his nerves alight with every sensation they could produce.

And still... still he didn't scream.

He simply endured.

When Vaeliyan was removed from the vat, he was placed on a metal table beside another chamber. This one glowed red and orange, lit from beneath with pulsing bio-luminescent light. Inside floated something he wasn't ready to see.

An embryo.

Suspended in gel, hooked to dozens of fine wires and thick nutrient cables, the mass pulsed with slow, eerie life. It was unmistakably not human, humanoid, maybe, but unfinished, fetal, and growing. The fluid around it rippled with each twitch of development.

He wasn't strapped down. He wasn't even naked. Someone had taken the time to dress him in his own clothing, pressed and cleaned. Standard-issue Citadel blacks, but not generic issue. These were his. The ones he'd arrived in, mended and laundered like he hadn't just been skinned alive and rebuilt.

A speaker cracked to life, voice crisp, confident, and familiar.

"Hello again, Subject Sixteen," came Dr. Lambert's voice. "I would like to introduce you to your Mk1 armor ."

Vaeliyan blinked slowly.

"The thing you see before you is your legion armor... well, not formed. Not yet. But I believe it's good for cadets to see what all the pain was for. If you look to your right, you'll see a display case. Inside are previous Legion models, alongside holos documenting the armor growth process."

He turned his head.

The case was filled with segmented relics: helmet plates, fractured chest cores, spined boots from generations past. Alongside the physical models, holos cycled through growth stages of former suits. Embryo. Growth chamber. Structural layering. Biofeedback bonding.

Each one looked the same at the start.

And that was the point.

His didn't.

He turned back to the embryo floating before him.
Black and yellow marbling ran across its nascent armor-plating. Not paint. Pigment. Born into the flesh like it belonged there. The forming helm already showed protrusions at the temple ridges. Horns. Or something close. Not decoration, something biological. Something meant.
No other embryo in the holos looked like this.
Even the monstrous ones, four-armed, spider-legged, blade-tailed, had begun as featureless cores.
Vaeliyan's didn't.
It had shape. Direction. It was choosing a form before it had a mind.
Not random. Not reflex. Instinct. Identity. Something deeper.
He leaned in, breath fogging the glass.
And then he saw it.
The twitch of motion inside wasn't spasmodic, it was rhythmic. Slow. Measured.
Breath.
Not his. But close enough.
The embryo moved like him. Its twitch, his heartbeat. Its stillness, his own.
Like it was waiting, not sleeping. Watching.
He could almost feel it... not touching him, not yet, but aware of him. As if it recognized his silence, mirrored his focus, matched the held violence behind his calm.
It should have been revolting, uncanny, like watching something grow into his shape before it was even born.
But it wasn't.
It was right.
Like it had always been there. Waiting for him to catch up.
Not a suit. Not a tool.
Kin.