Yellow Jacket

Vaeliyan wobbled into his seat, legs dragging like he'd been stitched back together wrong.

Torman glanced over, eyes widening. "What the hells happened to you? Looks like you got run over by a flaming hauler. Twice."

"Gods that would have been nice," Vaeliyan muttered, voice dry as sandpaper.

As he slumped into the chair, he took a moment to scan the room. A classroom. Just a classroom. No hallucinations. Just desks, tired cadets, and a man in front of them who looked like he'd never once allowed chaos to touch his paperwork.

Isol stood at the front of the room, arms behind his back, unmoving. He was waiting, but not impatiently.

"Everyone take out the textbook and turn to Chapter 1," he said, voice flat but commanding.

Vaeliyan blinked. Textbooks? Here? He looked around and, to his disbelief, everyone else did exactly that. That was... unsettling. But then again, this was Isol. The man who could turn a bureaucratic memo into an act of spiritual warfare. The Paper Angel.

"Look at the picture in front of you," Isol continued.

Vaeliyan obeyed.

It was a picture of a man. One he had seen before. One he had killed.

Or at least... someone who had worn that man's face.

Gregor. The Emperor.

"You must all know who this is and how he unified the world into the closest thing to peace it had known since the Collapse," Isol said, pacing now. He moved like a predator that had already eaten but might decide he was still hungry. Broad-shouldered, old muscle, the kind that doesn't deflate with age.

"You see, the world before the Empire was more chaotic and violent than now. And due to this man. The one who single-handedly brought the known world under one banner. And he didn't do it through conquest."

He paused.

Then shrugged. "Well, that's a lie. He did conquer a lot of warlords, tyrants, and war machines that make the Wilds look tame. But by all reliable accounts, the man was a saint. A real one. He built schools for the poor. He ensured that the roads through the Wilds were maintained, actual supply routes, protected and patrolled. And, most importantly, he founded the Legion. Not as the elite military engine we are now, but as a protective force."

He turned toward the class, expression harder now.

"Against what, you ask? That's the problem. It's hard to explain. Some people called them the Natives. Others called them Whispers. But what matters is this: when humanity first arrived on this world, and yes, we did arrive, we weren't born here, there was already something here waiting."

He let the silence stretch.

"We colonized this world after our home fell. Fell to what, we don't know. But we came here running. And what we found wasn't empty."

Jurpat raised a hand, brow furrowed. "So wait... what proof do you have that we aren't from this world? That we came here?"

Isol nodded slowly. "There are ruins all across the face the world. Structures of non-human design. Materials that resist decay, and resist replication. We've found machines with interfaces we can't read, and some of them still react to us. But the strongest piece of evidence? The nanites in our chips."

Xera narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean? I thought the Emperor created the chips. Don't we still manufacture them now?"

"Yes," Isol replied. "We still make chips. But the chips are just the frame. The structure. The nanites inside them? Those are the real power. And those..."

He raised a hand to halt the coming questions.

"They're self-replicating. And we do know the process to make them replicate more. But we cannot reproduce the original process that created them."

He stepped closer to the nearest row, dropping his voice.

"The truth is worse than you think. The base code of those nanites isn't just complex. It's almost organic. Structured like something grown, not programmed. And more than that... it mirrors the design motifs and physical markers found in the ruins we associate with the Natives."

He stood silent for a breath, letting it sink in.

"Whatever made those ruins may have made the nanites. And if that's true, then we didn't just colonize Hemera. We occupied it. And the foundation of our entire military strength, the chips in your necks, are borrowed power. Power we still don't truly understand. The closest we have ever come to replicating that original process is the development of Legion armor," Isol said. "And even that, while remarkable, is more mimicry than mastery."

Vaeliyan sat back, the pain in his body suddenly distant.

There were worse things than flaming fists. Like finding out the world you fought for might never have been yours to begin with.

"Chapter two, please," Isol said, his voice smooth and deliberate, barely louder than the rustling of paper as cadets turned the page.

They followed the command automatically. The air was still, but heavy.

"Just so you all understand," he continued, tone flat yet precise, "I expect every one of you to read every single page of this textbook. Cover to cover. Annotated. Memorized. We're only going to touch the surface today. This class isn't about retelling old stories. It's about understanding the bones underneath. We're going through a basic historical outline, major conflicts, strategic pivots, turning points. Nothing more. But don't mistake that for simplicity."

The image on the next page wasn't art. It was warning.

A mech. Or maybe a giant wearing metal. Thirty feet tall. Scarred plating that looked like it had survived a thousand wars. The cockpit was embedded dead center in the chest, a bubble of smooth, 360° glass.

"These," Isol said, gesturing toward the image, "are what we lost when the war with the former Empire began. Mech warriors. Thirty-foot relics of annihilation. Most of you know them only by reputation. Most Imperators are called to combat them."

He stopped, just long enough for the weight to settle.

"These are not modern machines. They're based on something older. Something pre-collapse. Built on blueprints we can't even decrypt today. Their activation is bio-locked, imperial blood. If you're not a prince, or someone personally marked by one, you can still bring one down. You can drag it from the battlefield, sit inside the cockpit, even soak yourself in the pilot's blood, but it won't move. It won't activate. The machine doesn't care. It won't respond to anything but its original pilot, and even then, if a defector tried to take it with them, it somehow knows and shuts off.

His eyes narrowed slightly.

"A downed mech warrior still very useful it is more bomb than most high explosives"

He smiled then. Not fondly. Like someone remembering something too real to share.

"Next page."

The room obeyed.

"What you're looking at now," he said, pointing to the next image, "are Mech Knights. Royal guard units. Each one a walking execution order. Unlike the Mech Warriors, the Knights were refined. Personalized. Fewer in number, but more precise."

He paused again.

"The Twelve Princes can't reproduce them. At least, not yet. Thank the gods for that. If they could… if even one princedom cracked the code…"

He let the silence speak for him.

"Best estimates place their total number at around two thousand, give or take a few dozen, depending on intel. All twelve princedoms combined."

Some cadets shifted in their seats, their discomfort obvious.

"Now think about this. There are just over a thousand High Imperators active in the Legion. You do the math. If the Mech Knights mobilized under one banner…"

He shook his head.

"It wouldn't be a war. It'd be an extermination."

Another turn. Another image.

"Now we get to the part they don't print on recruitment posters. The princes, each one, is said to possess a Devilkiller engine. Mech Lords. Towering monstrosities. Living weapons forged for one purpose: to end anything foolish enough to stand in their path."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He tapped the image.

"We've never seen one deployed. Not since the Emperor died. Because they don't just require imperial blood, they require the throne."

He faced them directly now.

"None of the princes have claimed it. None of the princesses either. And they won't. Because the moment one does, the others will burn their cities to ash trying to stop it. They're not united. They're rivals. Born from the same blood, but none of them willing to kneel."

He walked slowly back to the center of the room. His boots made no sound, but his presence pulled all attention.

"So what we have," he said, voice dropping, "is a ticking clock. And when it hits zero, when one of them finally claims the throne, this war ends."

He didn't finish the thought.

Because everyone in the room already knew how it ended.

"I tell you this because the Green is not safe. And anyone who tells you otherwise is already lying."

His expression hardened.

"The Green is a lie."

Silence.

"But the Legion does not lie to Legionnaires. That is the only promise we make. You will not be coddled. You will not be rescued. And there is no failing out."

He looked across the room, then raised a single finger.

"Expulsion means we fire you. From a particle cannon. Into space."

The smile that followed was microscopic. Clinical. The kind a surgeon makes when the cut goes exactly where it was supposed to.

"That's the agreement. The Nine allow us to speak the truth. Because truth, like every other weapon we use, is sacred. But it does not leave the legion."

No one dared move. No one blinked. Every eye stayed locked on Isol, because every instinct told them not to look away.

Because there are moments when a truth doesn't just land, it detonates.

And this was one of them.

The class was fascinating, in that uniquely Citadel way where fascination came bundled with dread.

Isol didn't lecture, he paced, he pointed, he told them what they didn't want to know and didn't flinch when their faces changed. He spoke of the war they would be thrown into the moment they graduated. The real war. The one that had been grinding down the Legion for nearly fifty years.

He described battles with clinical precision, moments where strategy broke the enemy line, where High Imperators changed the course of a year with a single day's effort. Victories, yes, but Vaeliyan could read between the lines. Every win came with the weight of near-collapse. The war wasn't secure. It wasn't even stable. It teetered. One wrong step, one bad shift in momentum, and the whole thing would fall.

And what Isol said next chilled the blood more than any mech or rebel could.

The Twelve Princedoms were just one front.

They were the loudest front. The one with the Mech Knights, the one with fortified cities and airfields full of skycraft. But they weren't the only war Legion bled for.

There were at least two more.

The second? Nespói. The green nightmare. A place the maps showed in neat curves and borders, but no one believed that. It was a death jungle. A world of rot, wet heat, and movement you couldn't see until it was too late.

Everything in Nespói wanted to kill you.

The animals. The plants. The terrain. Even the air could turn on you if the spores were blooming. The easiest part of going into Nespoi was finding a coffin dealer.

There, a rebel force still fought. Still lived. Still won. Their leader, Kan-Luq, was a ghost in a war mask, and no one had come close to killing her. Her raids on Green supply convoys had become legends, terror stories whispered between legionaries, and no one dared assume she'd stopped breathing just because command hadn't heard from her in a while.

The sim they ran yesterday? The one labeled as a practice exercise?

That was a cover.

The real Nespói run had failed, and failed badly. Almost every legionnaire who dropped into Nespói had died. The sim was a test to see if anyone could figure out how to actually kill Kan-Luq, because that was the only time she had ever been seen. Some said she was in contact with the natives.

Then Isol shifted to the third front. The one that silenced the room.

The Neuman.

An offshoot of humanity, yes, but something more than that. Something older. Or maybe newer. Maybe they were what humanity became when it abandoned its chains.

They lived in the sky.

They built island-cities, vast floating archipelagos that drifted on atmospheric currents. Unlike the Green Zone's luxury towers and cloud mansions, the Neuman didn't build for comfort or decadence. They built for superiority. For war. And most chilling of all, they built in silence.

They believed themselves to be more evolved. Racial supremacists who didn't need propaganda because their bodies proved the point. They had lighter bones, faster healing, more efficient oxygen use. Their lungs processed thin air like it was sea level. Their arms and backs carried membranes, part wing, part sail, that let them glide short distances or catch the thermal shifts of their home islands.

The worst part? It wasn't posturing.

Science backed it. They weren't engineered, at least not in any way Legion analysts could detect. No gene-splice markers. No artificial growth acceleration. Just biology doing something humans hadn't seen before.

They had sixty chromosomes.

Sixty.

Including the forty-six of a baseline human.

They weren't a mutation. They weren't a disease. They weren't an experiment gone wrong.

They were proof.

Proof that humanity wasn't native to Hemera.

Proof that something came before. And something else, something not us, had left the door open.

And now, humanity was at war on three fronts.

One against the remnants of its own fractured empire.

One against the ghosts hiding in jungles that refused to die.

And one against the sky itself.

One of the few good things was that none of their enemies were allies. This was not an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation. It was an "enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but at least they're all distracted enough by each other that I'm not dead" situation. A cold kind of comfort. War by attrition, where distraction bought time and infighting bought survival. It wasn't sustainable. But it worked, for now.

Even Elian was surprised by this. His parents had never spoken of the war. Not in any meaningful way. He'd grown up in polished hallways, surrounded by silence and sanitized patriotism. They never told him what was really happening. Even if they were part of the Nine, they were Legion, and he wasn't. They would not speak of the truths of war with someone who was not bound for it. You didn't hand a scalpel to someone who had never touched a wound.

Isol didn't share that philosophy. If anything, he treated ignorance like a disease to be cauterized.

He spoke passionately about the different issues that had led to all these conflicts. No censorship. No sugar-coating. He spoke like a man who had lost friends to every inch of truth.

The Empire falling was the one they had heard the most about. But hearing was not the same as understanding. Isol didn't speak of dates or treaties. He spoke of fractures, social, economic, cultural. A slow collapse accelerated by greed and pride. And when the last threads snapped, every power that had been barely holding on burst out like a ruptured dam. The Citadels survived. The Nine rose. The world didn't end, it broke into pieces that still bled.

Nespói was about a lumos-crystal deposit, some sort of super-useful material in flight rings, advanced projection cores, even 360° glass fabrication. Vaeliyan wasn't sure just yet, but it was heavily implied that the Green had started The Nespói's raids by attacking, thinking it would roll over and be washed away. It had not. It was a jungle of traps, teeth, and insurgency. But more than that, it was alive. Not in the poetic way. Literally alive. Vines that drank blood. Soil that shifted when you weren't looking. Locals that didn't just fight back, they adapted. Ambushes became doctrine. Dead zones became minefields. The rebels didn't retreat. They turned the jungle into a religion of resistance. And every Legion incursion only made it holier.

The Neuman were, as far as anyone could tell, just a bunch of assholes. The whole race had never been willing to speak, even with the Empire. They were one of the forces that the original Legion had fought against. This wasn't Nine propaganda, as far as Vaeliyan could tell. Isol wasn't one to spout lies just to push a war that needed bodies. His tone made that clear. If anything, he sounded like he hated having to teach this. Like part of him wished they weren't enemies at all, but he knew that was impossible.

Josaphine might have lied to them to get the bodies the legion need, but Isol was about the cold, hard truth in the end. Brutal clarity. Surgical honesty. No comfort, only understanding.

And in the end, the Neuman had a deep-rooted hatred for anyone they saw as beneath them. And that was everyone. They had killed every delegation that ever tried to speak to them. They attacked without provocation. It had been confirmed on hundreds of different occasions that they considered anything below them food. They had human cattle.

The pictures were as bad as it sounds. Pens. Chains. Feeding troughs. Genetic notes scrawled like shopping lists. They weren't savage. They were scientific. Cultured. Horrifically clinical. They didn't kill out of rage. They culled. Like pruning a species tree.

Isol didn't pause for dramatic effect. The material was heavy enough on its own. He moved on because there was more to cover. Because reality didn't wait for comprehension.

Vaeliyan sat back, letting the words sink like rusted hooks. There was no side to take in this war. No clean side, anyway. The Legion didn't fight for a perfect world. It fought for a survivable one.

And survival, in a world like this, was already a kind of victory.

By the time class had finished, it was painfully clear that Vaeliyan wasn't sure where to stand when it came to the Green. He didn't have all the facts. He knew that. But for once, it didn't feel like he was being force-fed propaganda. The Legion, for all its brutality, didn't seem like it was trying to pump him full of bullshit. And if anyone was a symbol of that honesty, it was Isol. At least, as far as Vaeliyan could tell, Isol truly believed in learning the real history of the world, raw, bitter, and ugly, not just slinging whatever convenient lie he could get his hands on. There was a difference between indoctrination and brutal clarity, and Isol stood firmly in the latter.

Vaeliyan's mind was drowning in the weight of it all as he stepped onto the transport pad. His thoughts were fragmented, looping, too heavy to sort. This day had ruined him. First came the realization that the Citadels weren't just elite training institutions, they were vaults. Not exactly prisons, but containment centers for the Legion's strongest nightmares. And then that same threat, Imujin, had somehow made Vaeliyan two insanely strong classes. He still hadn't fully understood how he'd done it.

Then there was history. Isol didn't sugar-coat anything. The class had been one brutal, relentless look at the state of the world. The wars. The factions. The horrors. The cold reality of what they were being trained for. Vaeliyan kept thinking about that line: if you try to leave, you get expelled into space by a particle cannon. That was the deal.

And still... even after all that, the Green wasn't the villain he had expected. It was flawed, yes. Corrupt, definitely. But it wasn't the worst thing out there. Maybe Mara's version of the Green had been rotten to the core, but he had killed it with his own hands. He might have stumbled into the Green with the intention of taking it not becoming part of it. But still if this was what even his god wanted for him, if this was the path laid in front of him, then how could he put down that burden now? There was no walking away from it. Not without betraying something far deeper than himself.

Because it would only be a matter of time. Someone would come for Mara. That was inevitable. Maybe it would be the Green. Maybe the Nine wouldn't bother reclaiming a rogue outpost. But the others... the Nespói rebels weren't a threat to expansion, but they'd fight if pushed. And they had been pushed. Attacked, raided, dehumanized. He wasn't even sure he should call them rebels. They were people like those back in Mara. People who had something others wanted and had the audacity to defend it. He could respect that.

He wasn't going to lie to himself, if it came down to killing Kan-luq to protect Mara, he would. No hesitation. But at least the rebels stayed in their region. They didn't hunt beyond their borders, Mara might as well be on another world to them.

The other two forces... the Princedoms and the Neuman, they were different. The Princedoms would burn Mara to the ground just for its former ties to the Green. Honor and pride and vengeance, all wrapped in royal blood and steel. They didn't need a reason. They just needed a target. And the Neuman? They wouldn't just destroy Mara. They would erase it. The Neuman didn't conquer. They consumed. They would render the city into cattle pens and breeding farms and call it progress.

Vaeliyan clenched his jaw. His future was bleeding out in front of him, mapped by blood, obligation, and the thin hope of a world that could be better. But for now, all he could do was survive the next class.