Yellow Jacket

Vaeliyan sat on a throne, watching his new subjects shuffle forward with offerings in their arms and desperation in their eyes. They brought him tribute like he was some ancient warlord returned to glory: burnt synth parts, fried chips, busted output cores, all laid reverently at his feet. They begged for mercy, for calibration, for access to pancakes.

Vaeliyan the Bringer of Plenty.
Vaeliyan, Ender of the Bugbar Blight.
Vaeliyan, Ass-Kicker of Deck.

That's what they were calling him now.

In reality, he was slouched at Merigold's kitchen table, sleeves rolled up, grease on his fingers, surrounded by the shattered guts of food synthesizers that had been yanked out of dorm walls across the Citadel. The place looked like a junkyard had exploded. Tools, parts, and half-finished mugs of whatever coffee substitute Merigold drank were scattered everywhere.

Cadets from every year group were lining up, shoulder to shoulder, whispering nervously about who was next. The 91st had started spreading the word faster than wildfire on dry grass: someone had cracked the code. Someone could fix your synth and unlock actual food.

At first, Vaeliyan had treated it like a casual favor. A side project. He wasn't in it for the credits, he didn't even know what fair pricing was. He charged a few credits, barely more than what you'd pay for a nut bar. But then Rokhan and Xera showed up.

The two of them stood behind him like mob lawyers, arms crossed, eyes calculating. They didn't even ask what he was doing. They just watched him for two minutes, then started scribbling numbers on Merigold's whiteboard.

"This is a business now," Xera said.

"An empire," Rokhan agreed.

A repair empire, they called it. Built not just on skill, but on spite. On vengeance. On the sacred mission of utterly screwing Deck.

Because yeah, Vaeliyan wasn't the only cadet who'd figured out the hidden code and the way to bypass the Citadel's food restrictions. But he was the only one dumb, or bold, enough to go fully public with it. Most of the others were being quiet, taking bribes, keeping their heads down. Vaeliyan didn't care. He wanted a line down the hall. He wanted Deck to feel it.

Why wouldn't he? Deck was cool. The kind of cool that taught you how to cheat the System with a straight face and a casual nod. But even he had limits. Like "don't get caught."
Unfortunately for him, Vaeliyan's spite was weaponized honesty. The kind of honesty that carried a biometric case full of receipts.

Once Lisa saw the compiled haul of hidden notes, two hundred and ninety-eight weeks of no punishment laps logged across dozens of synths, all personally signed by Deck? That kind of cool might just shatter into ice.

Solid. Icy. Paralyzed-by-regret kind of cool.

Deck was going to shit himself.

Vaeliyan couldn't wait for class tomorrow.

He imagined Lisa's face when he handed her the notes. Imagined the twitch in Deck's eye when she read out the total. Imagined the silence when she asked him how he got his hands on this and he just smiled.

But until then, he had work to do.

He wasn't letting those notes out of his sight. Not for a second. They were locked in a reinforced pouch at his hip, inside a case Merigold had lent him, equipped with a biometric lock keyed to his pulse and a failsafe that would lock down fully and transmit a live feed of any tampering attempt straight to Lisa's personal console, flagged as a top-priority alert.
Because, as it turned out, she was Lisa's apprentice for her year and had a direct line of contact to the instructor.

Deck would try something.

And Vaeliyan was ready for it.

The party was actually a party now. Not just a quiet gathering. Not just two classes standing awkwardly in a hallway with smuggled bottles and half-charged synths. This was real. Loud, chaotic, and completely out of hand in the best way.

And it wasn't in the dorms either. This was Merigold's beach house mansion, massive, elegant, and currently being treated like the scene of a rave hosted by starving revolutionaries. Gleaming white walls were now cluttered with discarded jackets, makeshift seating, and the remains of what used to be a very expensive piece of sculpture someone had mistaken for a chair. The marble floors echoed with laughter, stomping boots, and the hum of overworked synthesizers now outputting food like their lives depended on it.

This wasn't just a celebration. This was liberation.

Real, messy, over-the-top freedom from the Citadel's worst, most insidious torment: bugbars.

Now, food, glorious food, was finally at their fingertips. Synths unlocked. Settings restored. Entire menus laid bare after being locked down for years. After endless months of eating industrial protein bricks flavored like sadness, and state-sanctioned misery, the cadets were going feral.

Some were crying, honest-to-gods tears running down their faces as they cradled pancakes or seasoned fries in trembling hands. Others were yelling across the room, trading synth recipes like spell scrolls, adding modifiers, and experimenting in real time with mixtures of spice, sweetness, and pure culinary chaos. There was a drumbeat made from silverware and tabletops. There were conga lines forming in hallways. People were dancing on furniture. It had gone from social to spiritual.

They were going to hate tomorrow. Every stomach was going to rebel. But tonight?

Tonight was for their new favorite cadet.

Vaeliyan.

His name had already passed into legend. Whispers became stories. Stories became exaggerations. And none of it mattered because every single cadet with a working synth could taste the truth. He was the one who did it. He cracked the code. He flipped the system.

One cadet in particular had entered a different plane of existence entirely. He'd somehow rerouted his synth's ejection mechanism to bypass every safety feature. The result? A direct pipeline from synth to mouth, no plate, no pause, just a relentless firehose of waffles, soup, dumplings, and whatever else he could key in fast enough. His eyes were rolled back in ecstasy. There were crumbs in his eyebrows. It was horrifying. It was impressive. It was possibly the future of food delivery.

Vaeliyan had just finished the last synth he'd agreed to work on for the night. His sleeves were stained with grease, his nails were rimmed in carbon, and his fingers ached like he'd been cracking safes for twelve hours straight.

He'd done what he came here to do.

Now it was time to collect.

The repair empire was thriving. Sure. But that was the side hustle. A beautiful, petty, profitable crusade built entirely on spite toward Deck. But Vaeliyan wasn't here to be a vendor. He had a divine task.

He had work to do. Real work. And for that, he needed Merigold.

So he stood, stretched, popped his shoulder back into place with a grimace, and scanned the room until he spotted Toma, half-buried under a pillow fort in the corner, his plate stacked dangerously high, his synth steaming beside him like a loyal dog.

Vaeliyan wove through the crowd, dodging celebratory shoulder slaps and drunken high-fives, until he reached him.

"Hey," he said, leaning down over the bass-heavy noise, "where'd Meri disappear to?"

Toma didn't even blink. Just pointed upward with a syrup-covered finger, the rest of his face occupied with something that might've been cheesecake but looked more like science fiction.

"Upstairs. With Geo and Kuri, I think. Last I saw, they were on the sundeck. With most of your class."

Vaeliyan nodded and turned to leave.

Time to find her.

Time to begin.

When he finally got to the top of the gods-damned stairs, Vaeliyan was ready to burn down every architect in the Green. Personally. With fire. And maybe a brick.

There were way too many stairs. Not just in number, but in attitude. These weren't just stairs, they were statements. Fashionable, over-designed, meandering spirals with ridiculous flair, like someone had decided stairs should be sculptural commentary on suffering. And they were. Every step had its own opinion. The kind of staircases you were supposed to "appreciate" while walking up them, like that made the climb less excruciating.

Half-steps that led nowhere. Sudden platform changes. One section even made him go down an entire flight just to circle back to the part that finally ascended again. It felt less like a house and more like a labyrinth built by a drunk performance artist. A very rich, very smug performance artist.

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It reminded him uncomfortably of Josaphine's place. There, he was ninety percent sure one of the escalators only moved backward when no one was looking. The first time he'd tried to ride it, he ended up walking in place for six minutes before realizing he was being pranked by architecture.

His AI had pinged the moment as a potential training simulation. Text appeared across his vision in its usual sterile font: [Dream training Stairs of Death. Noted.]

By the time he reached the final curve, he was sweating through his shirt, his calves hurt, and he was in a very specific kind of rage reserved for noble nonsense. And then he saw it.

The rope.

A literal, gods-damned rope dangling from the ceiling like it belonged in a jungle gym, not a mansion. There was no platform. No pulley. Just a rope leading through a skylight opening, swaying slightly as if to taunt him.

"What in the hells is this bullshit?!" he shouted, voice echoing off the high ceilings.

Merigold's face appeared above, framed by the soft golden light of the next floor. Her bright red hair caught the light like something out of a fashion spread. Perfectly effortless. Annoyingly beautiful.

She leaned over the edge, smiling. "Are you coming up, Vael?"

He glared. Hard.

"I was, but I hate your house. Seriously. Why in all the burning stars does it have stairs like this? And a rope? What is wrong with you? There is no way in the hells I'm climbing a rope to get to the next floor."

She blinked at him. "Why didn't you just take the elevator like everyone else? Even I don't take the stairs unless I'm trying to make a dramatic entrance."

Vaeliyan froze. "There's an elevator?"

"Of course there's an elevator," she said, laughing. "What do you think this is, a training dungeon?"

Before he could say something about how yes, yes it very much felt like a training dungeon designed to break his spirit, another face appeared in the gap. Kuri.

She was upside down, hanging over the edge casually like it was her natural state. On her head sat Styll, fur perfectly fluffed, perched like a smug little empress. The ferret wore sunglasses, oversized and unnecessarily glamorous, while a mini drone hovered nearby fanning her with slow, deliberate sweeps of air.

"You might want to change," Kuri called down, totally casual. "It's hot up here."

Vaeliyan just stared. The shades. The drone. The relaxed superiority. It was obnoxiously adorable.

He hated how much it made him smile.

"What the hells am I even supposed to wear?" he growled. "I don't have clothes here. I'd have to go back home, and if I leave now, I'm not coming back. I'm covered in grease and bugbar crumbs, and Deck's absolutely going to pull some bullshit the second I step off the property."

Merigold rolled her eyes like it was the most solvable problem in the world. "Just go into the first bedroom on the left. I'll have the staff whip up something more comfortable. You'll look fine."

He stared up at her. Then at the rope again. Then back at her.

He didn't want to climb it.

But now he had to.

Because now he had ammunition. Something to complain about for the rest of the night. Something that would haunt Merigold every time she tried to be smug.

He was going to climb that rope. And he was going to make sure everyone heard about it.

The gods help them all.

"Fuck you, Meri! I'm not wearing this!" Vaeliyan's voice exploded up to the deck above with enough force to make nearby birds flee the roof. He held the offending item aloft like a cursed artifact, the neon purple glittery man-thong the staff had dared try to get him to wear. It sparkled in the light, a mocking, shimmering abomination.

Merigold's face peeked over the edge again, entirely too smug for someone in immediate danger. "Come on," she cooed, "it would really bring out the color of your eyes. You'd be stunning."

Vaeliyan glared up at her with the fury of a betrayed demigod. "If I don't get some real clothes in the next twenty seconds, I'm taking apart your entire staff piece by piece and leaving the pile so mangled it'll become a cautionary sculpture. Touch it, and die."

There was a beat of silence. Then the muffled sound of voices arguing from above.

"Can he really do that?" Merigold asked, suddenly less confident.

A man's voice, maybe Jurpat's, laced with that specific regret you only get after watching an inevitable disaster approach and realizing you helped build it. "I told you we should've just laid the clothes out like normal people. Instead, you let the bots try to dress him."

"You all just had to take it further," Sylen chimed in, dry as desert wind. "It was supposed to be a joke. A simple joke. But nooo. I told you all 'My cousin is scary.' And now look where we are. If he wanted to, he could just head back downstairs and wipe the synths. Full reset. A tragedy of epic culinary proportions."

Vaeliyan cupped his hands, voice sharp as a siren. "I heard that. And you're right, cousin. That is a great idea. I think I'll go do that now."

Above, there was panic. The sound of someone tripping over a chair. A metallic thunk. More cursing.

"Wait! Wait! Just a moment!" Merigold yelled, frantic now.

A second later, something soft fluttered through the air. A pair of swim shorts, simple, dark gray, not glittery, landed at Vaeliyan's feet like a peace offering from the gods.

He picked them up, inspected them for hidden glitter bombs, then gave a single, solemn nod. "That's better."

He turned to walk back inside with all the gravitas of a warlord who had successfully negotiated a ceasefire through sheer intimidation.

From above, Kuri's voice drifted down. "Honestly, I kinda wanted to see him in the glitter one."

Styll added a soft trill from somewhere nearby, which Vaeliyan interpreted, correctly, as ferret for so did I.

War had been averted.

But the glitter would not be forgotten.

Vaeliyan finally made it to the sundeck.

It wasn't just a balcony or a terrace. This was a full-on, engineered beachfront stretched across the roof of Merigold's mansion. Artificial sun bore down from an adjustable sky dome, casting heat that felt just real enough to force a sweat but not real enough to burn. White sand, fine and probably imported from somewhere stupidly expensive, stretched from the sliding glass doors to the edge of a panoramic barrier wall. Beyond that: an ocean view, complete with rolling waves that crashed against a projected cliffside, humming faintly with the rhythm of a perfect tide.

It was hot, yeah, but he was only wearing swim shorts now. And after hauling himself up architect-grade nonsense stairs, followed by a rope climb out of a fever dream, the sun felt practically merciful. The open space helped. So did the breeze that came off the artificial sea.

He'd had the option to take the elevator. It would've been easier. He chose the rope. Because somewhere deep in his brain, the part wired for spite and stupid pride whispered that Alorna would've been proud of him. And that was reason enough to suffer.

His entire class was up here, sprawled across cabanas and beach loungers like this was an actual retreat. There were drink bots weaving between chairs. Music piped softly through hidden speakers buried in the sand. Cooling misters drifted occasional jets of mist over the crowd.

Alongside Class One were the rest of the familiar faces: Kuri, Aluminis, Geo, Fred R, and Fred T. And even Julian was here, that was interesting. Everyone looked relaxed, sun-warmed, and far too comfortable for a place that had tried to murder him with its stair design.

Styll was the only one who looked like royalty. The ferret was curled up in Kuri's arms like a pampered goddess, sipping a drink out of a hollowed-out coconut. There was an umbrella in it. Tiny sunglasses rested on her snout. She even had a miniature towel wrapped around her like a bathrobe.

Vaeliyan squinted. "That better not be liquor."

Kuri didn't blink. "It's just coconut milk."

He stared a moment longer, suspicious. But she looked genuinely innocent. Or practiced. Either way, he let it go.

"Anyway," he said, stepping onto the sand like it had personally insulted him. "I'm here to collect. What in all the hells is the Ninth Layer? And who the fuck is Lord B?"

Merigold groaned dramatically. She was a little drunk, maybe more than a little, and waved a half-empty glass at him. Something neon pink sloshed dangerously close to the edge.

"Ugh, you're no fun," she sighed. "I thought I'd at least get a picture of you in the glitter, but noooo. Ruined my night."

He ignored her and waited. He was good at waiting.

She sighed again and sat up straighter, shaking off some of the haze. "Fine. The Ninth Layer. It's a cadet secret. One of the real ones. The kind not even the instructors admit exists. You have to go to this shop in Kyrrabad, it's called The Ugly Mug. Worst mugs you've ever seen in your life. Hideous, stupid, genius. They have one shaped like a screaming toad with three handles. It's amazing."

Fred R nodded solemnly. "I bought one with a cursed proverb on the bottom. Still don't know what it means."

Merigold continued, "Anyway. The shop's a front. Go to the back. There's an elevator. Ask the clerk for 'Lord B' and they'll let you in. But if you ask to meet Lord B, they'll let you fight."

Vaeliyan raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean fight?"

"The real way," she said. "No limits. No safety protocols. No System restrictions. It's full combat. Your Soul Skill? Fair game."

"Sounds like a bloodbath," he muttered.

"It is," Merigold said, entirely too casually. "And not everyone comes back. No one knows why. It's part of the myth. But the fights... the fights are glorious."

He stared at her. "So. Who is Lord B?"

Kuri jumped in, shifting Styll to one shoulder like a furry epaulet. "They say he's the owner. And the grand champion. But no one's seen him. Not in years. Maybe never. None of the current cadets have, anyway. Some say he isn't real. Just a title, maybe. Or a boogeyman for the pit."

"The instructors hate it," Geo added, from where he was building an actual sand fortress. "They treat it like it's cursed. You get caught going down there? Weeks of punishment laps. Months, if it's your second offense."

Aluminis perked up. "I knew a guy who died from punishment laps. Heart gave out. Or at least, that's what Lisa said."

A long pause followed that.

Then Merigold stood. All the warmth and haze dropped from her expression. She looked like someone used to being obeyed.

"So when we go, and we are going, you all keep your mouths shut. Got it? No bragging. No slipping up. No talking to instructors or hinting at anything. This doesn't exist unless we're in it."

Everyone straightened. Even Vaeliyan, who didn't straighten for much.

He didn't mind following someone.

But only if they'd earned it.

And tonight?

Merigold had.

"Are we going now?" Julius asked.

"Oh fuck no," Geo said immediately. "We've got class in the morning. You think the instructors won't notice if we all show up beat to shit? And that's if we just watch. Imagine actually going down and fighting tonight. Half of us are already going to need a handful of stim pills just to function tomorrow."

"Yeah," Kuri agreed, lazily swinging her legs from a lounge chair. "It's more of a seventh-day thing anyway. That way you get your ass kicked in the morning, then crawl into a med vat for a power nap before the instructors realize you're missing skin."

Elian frowned. "Are you telling us the crowd is that violent at this place?"

"Oh, hells yeah," Fred T said with a grin. "Last time we were there, I got into three fights before I even made it to the pit. All because some jackasses wanted to see what a Class One cadet could do. It's like walking into a betting den made of teeth. You'll love it."

Vaeliyan didn't say anything.

But his thoughts were moving faster than the conversation.

If Isol and the instructors knew about all this, and they definitely did, then this had to be a setup. There was no way a place like this stayed open without at least some level of sanctioned oversight. The Citadel didn't ignore threats. It weaponized them. Which meant the Ninth Layer wasn't a secret, it was a forge.

And Lord B?

He also knew that Lord B, if he was lucky, was Lord Barcus. And if that was the case, he would definitely be real, why would Steel tell him to end his reign otherwise? Or did she want him to end the whole establishment? This was way more complicated than just killing some random dude. But at least he had a lead now, and a plan to at least figure out what was happening down there.