Yellow Jacket

Dr. Lambert looked over the assembled cadets, her gaze sharp, calculating, and impossible to read. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she studied the line of armored figures before her, taking in every subtle detail of stance, posture, and readiness. "All that told us," she said at last, her tone edged with a dry, cutting amusement, "is that you can all play the system." The way she said it made it unclear if she meant it as praise or as a warning.

Deck's grin spread slow and wide, as if savoring the moment. Smugness rolled off him in waves, and his eyes glinted with that familiar spark of mischief. "I'm so proud it's disgusting," he replied, voice dripping with mockery and genuine pride all at once, a strange blend only Deck could make sound sincere.

Lambert gave a nonchalant shrug, as though brushing the comment aside, but there was the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth. "Well, you broke Lisa," she continued, "so I suppose that's something. Maybe we let Alorna and Theramoor take you for the next test." Her voice carried the weight of someone who already knew the suggestion would cause trouble, and maybe even hoped it would.

A ripple of unease moved through the cadets, subtle but unmistakable. Some glanced at one another, their expressions tightening. "Wait… where's Alorna?" someone asked, their voice quiet, almost cautious, as if the question itself might summon her.

Vaeliyan's stomach tightened in a way he didn't like. He was certain his 360-degree vision left him without a single blind spot. If she were anywhere nearby, he would have seen her. Yet somehow, there she was, suddenly behind them, close enough to lay a hand on his shoulder, silent as a shadow in an unlit room. He blinked hard, eyes tracing the texture of her outline. Was that a ghillie suit so expertly patterned it melted into the environment, or was it her Legion armor reconfigured into something that could make her vanish in plain sight? The realization sent a cold shiver up the back of his neck, a reluctant thread of respect twisting through his thoughts.

Before he could untangle the question, Instructor Sarn moved away from the group. Her steps were slow, deliberate, purposeful. She reached the far wall and placed a hand flat against it. A muted hiss filled the air, followed by the quiet grind of hidden machinery. A panel slid open with mechanical precision, revealing a recessed compartment. From it, another set of armor emerged, suspended on a mechanical arm before lowering to the ground with a heavy, solid thud. This suit was nothing like the cadets' own, it was sleeker in some places, bulked up in others, the plating arranged in a way that suggested it had been built for a very specific style of combat.

"Can I join?" Gwen's voice cut cleanly into the moment, light and casual, though her eyes held a flicker of something sharper, an edge of challenge.

"Sure, why not. Might be good for the test," Dr. Lambert replied without missing a beat. It was the kind of answer that sounded impulsive but carried the undercurrent of someone who had already considered the possibility. There was even a hint of anticipation in her tone, the faint spark of curiosity about what might happen next.

Roan shifted his multi-legged stance, metal limbs clinking faintly against the floor. Tilting his head, he asked, "What is the test, and why would another instructor joining be good for it?"

Theramoor stepped forward, her expression animated with the dangerous cheer of someone about to make life difficult. "Oh, we're doing guerrilla insurgency," she said, almost too brightly. "You'll be dropped into the sim, and your job will be to root us out. We'll be hiding, moving, and hunting you just as much as you'll be hunting us. Should be fun, right?" The grin she wore lingered a little too long, the kind of smile that told them his idea of 'fun' was probably their idea of hell.

Gwen flexed her gauntleted fingers, the sound of metal scraping faintly against metal filling the brief silence that followed. Her eyes swept slowly down the line of cadets, her gaze weighing and measuring them before settling into a grin that somehow managed to hold both encouragement and warning. "Good luck, kids," she said. Then she stepped in closer, lowering her voice until it was almost a whisper that reached only the front rank. "You're going to need it. No one has ever beaten Alorna. And believe me, by the time you realize she's there, you've already lost."

The sim dropped them into a jagged mountain range, the kind where the peaks seemed to pierce the sky and the wind howled through narrow passes like some unseen predator. The air was thin and sharp, each breath biting at their lungs. Lessa crouched low, her eyes sweeping over the uneven ground, every movement methodical. "I think this is the Salidar Mountain Range," she said, tapping the red shale beneath her boot. The loose fragments shifted slightly under her weight, crunching with a sound that carried too far in the stillness. "Judging by the rock and color, if this is anything like the real Salidar, Roan is screwed. Those hindlegs of yours aren't going to find much good footing here."

She straightened slightly, rolling her shoulders in a way that made the servos in her armor hum. "Honestly," she added with a wry grin hidden behind her visor, "I might need my arms for this."

With a smooth mechanical grinding, the cannons that served as her primary arms disengaged from their mounts. Pistons shifted and plates slid with a precision click, the heavy barrels rotating back over her shoulders. At the same time, her prosthetic arms extended forward from their mounts on her back, fingers flexing experimentally. Now the cannons rested above her, ready to track targets from behind while her hands were free to grip, climb, or strike.

"Honestly, that's such an awesome suit," Sylen said, admiration dripping from her tone as she tilted her head to take in the transformation.

The rest of the class voiced similar agreement, a low ripple of approving murmurs moving through the comms. Several helmeted heads turned toward Lessa, some with curiosity, others with the faint envy of those wishing their suits could do the same.

"What else do you know about this place?" Jurpat asked, his voice steady but carrying the weight of someone already calculating how to survive in the terrain.

"Well," Lessa began, glancing out toward the distant cliffs and shadowed valleys, "it's riddled with caves, hundreds of them. You could lose an entire platoon in there and never see them again unless they wanted you to. The good news is there aren't any really dangerous species in these parts…" She paused, a faint chuckle coming through her comms. "At least, not like the Kolanit."

Several cadets shifted uneasily at the mention, the scrape of boots on stone loud in the quiet air. Above them, the sun cast sharp shadows over the jagged terrain, and somewhere far off, the wind caught in a narrow cut, creating a low, mournful wail that could easily be mistaken for something alive.

Chime's voice crackled over the comms, carrying that same dry, unhurried tone she always seemed to have, no matter the situation. "Isn't the Salidar supposed to be the place where even the smallest quake can set off massive landslides across the entire range?"

Several helmets turned toward the ground as the team took in their surroundings. The red shale beneath their boots shifted and crunched with every movement, an unstable surface that felt like it might give way at any second. Thin rivulets of moisture glistened between the fragments, giving the ground an oily sheen and making the footing treacherous. Far above, jagged ridgelines cast sharp shadows across the slopes, the light turning the shale a deeper crimson. Rokhan crouched down, letting the loose rock sift through his gauntleted fingers. "Makes sense," he rumbled. "It's moist shale, and from what I've read, this place was mined hollow long ago. As far as I know, the mountain's basically empty inside, just a network of caverns and thin support ridges holding it together." His deep voice echoed off the cliff faces, the sound bouncing back with a hollow timbre that made the emptiness beneath them feel uncomfortably real.

Jurpat tilted his head, visor catching the dim mountain light as he considered the implications. "Um… doesn't that mean we could just..."

Lessa's smirk was practically visible through her helmet. She didn't wait for him to finish. The heavy cannons mounted on her back rotated into position with a mechanical purr, their weight subtly shifting her stance. Servo motors whined as they adjusted, locking into a calculated firing angle. With a scream of hydraulics and a solid metallic click, the weapons locked in place. A deafening boom shattered the mountain's stillness as both cannons fired in perfect unison, targeting a section of cliff that already looked one bad breath away from collapse.

The resulting shockwave ripped through the slope, vibrating under their boots. Shale broke free in slabs, tumbling into an escalating roar that rolled down the mountainside. The air filled with the grinding and crashing of stone, and clouds of dust swirled upward, catching the sun in a haze of red and gold. The slope began to peel away like skin, the collapse spreading to lower ridges that smashed apart before spilling into the valleys below.

And then, the sim froze. The sudden stillness was jarring, the dust clouds suspended midair, each tumbling rock frozen in place like a painting.

"Alright," Dr. Lambert's voice broke the silence, flat and edged with the brand of disapproval she reserved for the most spectacularly bad ideas. "Let's try this again, shall we? And maybe this time, Lessa, don't kill your whole team in the opening seconds."

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Lessa gave a light, unapologetic laugh. "Was worth a shot."

Jim's laugh followed, deep and amused. "Honestly, it was a solid idea. Technically, you would've killed every living thing in the area. Which isn't the worst plan… unless, of course, survival was part of the mission parameters. Then, yeah, maybe not so great."

"Hey," Vaeliyan cut in, tone matter-of-fact. "They never said we needed to survive. So I think we did win. Which means Gwen was wrong, we did beat Alorna."

The class turned to look at him. Rokhan's visor tilted slightly, and then he gave a short, almost reluctant nod. "You know what… he's right. They really didn't say anything about us needing to survive. So yeah, I guess we did beat Alorna."

Through the still image of the frozen sim, Alorna's figure stood on a distant ridge. Even frozen mid-step, she somehow managed to look absolutely devastated, as if the core of her unbroken record had just cracked.

"Wait," Dr. Lambert said slowly, her voice carrying a hint of disbelief and more than a little amusement. "Did they just break Alorna?"

Then they heard it, a sound that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. It was furious scribbling, sharp and relentless, each stroke of pen on paper slicing through the air like claws raking over steel. The scratch was so forceful it almost had a rhythm, a rising urgency that set teeth on edge. The noise carried with an almost tangible weight, and when they turned toward it, they saw Alorna standing utterly still, except for her hand. Her wrist moved in a blur, faster than seemed possible, the rest of her body locked in a predator's stillness. She didn't speak, didn't blink, she only drew, each line as decisive as a killing strike. In her grip was a sign so massive it could have doubled as a riot shield, and she was filling it with the precision of an executioner chronicling a crime.

The drawing she revealed should have been absurd, something to laugh at, but it radiated a cold, unsettling malice no realistic image could match. In thick, uneven lines, Alorna had depicted herself towering over sixteen corpses arranged in a grotesque pyramid. Every figure was immediately recognizable, armor designs, weapon silhouettes, even exaggerated quirks of stance and movement rendered in a way that stripped all humor from the simplicity. One of the bodies was unmistakably Lessa, illustrated with Alorna's arm thrust straight through her chest, her hand gripping what was unmistakably a beating heart. Somehow, impossibly, the still image conveyed motion; the heart seemed to pulse in their vision, an illusion that made stomachs knot. The longer they stared, the more wrong it felt, like the sketch wasn't just art, but a promise.

The twins spoke in perfect unison, their voices stripped of their usual unnerving harmony and replaced with something colder. "I think we should all just give up now. Can you see that she switched our heads on the corpses? We don't like this." Their identical helms tilted slightly, as though still trying to process the insult of it.

Jurpat's eyes flicked from the sign to the faces around him, his voice breaking the suffocating silence. "Can… we take it back?" There was no bravado in his tone now, only the tremor of someone who had just realized they might have stepped into a nightmare they couldn't walk out of. He turned to the instructors, then back to the other cadets, as if hoping someone would hand him an official loophole, an escape clause. "Please, dear gods, let us take it back. I don't want to find out what happens if she decides to make that drawing real."

In the quiet that followed, the only sound was the faint tap of Alorna's pen against the board, as though she was already considering what detail to add next.

Alorna kept her promise, and the other instructors let her. They didn't stop the sim until she had recreated the image perfectly, every grim detail in place.

"So I guess that makes it one to one," Fenn muttered under his breath, and the whole group immediately scattered from him like he'd been cursed.

"So, what did you learn?" Dr. Wirk asked the group once they'd finally gathered back together, his voice calm but with the weight of a man who had been waiting to hear exactly how badly they'd managed to botch the last run. The question hung in the air, heavy, like he already knew the answer but wanted them to say it out loud.

Ramis didn't even pause to think. "Don't fuck with Alorna."

A ripple of agreement moved through the group, a few cadets nodding while others shifted in place, stealing quick glances toward Alorna. She stood in her usual calm, unreadable stance, hands relaxed at her sides, as if the carnage she'd just caused in the sim was the most routine thing in the world.

"Well, yes," Dr. Lambert said, inclining her head slightly. "That's just a good life tip in general. But we also learned something else, that the new suits are far more durable than the previous models. When Alorna used Sylen's corpse to beat Elian to death, it wasn't the armor that failed. It was the blunt force trauma that crushed his organs." Her tone was disturbingly casual, almost like she was giving a lesson on combat physics instead of walking them through one of the most horrifying moments of the exercise.

Several cadets shifted uncomfortably at the reminder. Elian kept his gaze fixed on the floor, clearly unwilling to relive the moment.

"I think he's got plain old psychological trauma," Jim said, leaning back in his chair with an expression halfway between admiration and disbelief, "from being beaten to death by a corpse used as a weapon. And before anyone says it, yes, this is literally my class's subject matter, we teach improvised killing, but still, there's no combat drill anywhere in the Legion that prepares you for that on day one. Hells, Vaeliyan once killed a guy with a rubber duck in my class, and even that was less disturbing than this."

A low chuckle came from somewhere in the back, quickly stifled. Even the twins, usually unfazed by anything, were watching Alorna warily.

"Honestly," Jim continued, turning toward her with a grin that carried more than a little respect, "it was a beautiful use of an improvised weapon. You took what you had on hand and maximized its potential. Alorna, would you marry me?"

There was a beat of stillness. Then Alorna, without saying a word, reached into her kit and pulled out a sign. It was a perfectly drawn image of herself holding a smaller sign within the picture, her expression in the drawing identical to the one she wore now, calm, unyielding. The smaller sign inside simply read, in bold, uncompromising letters: No.

The room went silent for a heartbeat before a few stifled laughs escaped from the edges of the group. Even Dr. Lambert cracked the faintest of smiles. They all knew the conversation was over, Alorna didn't need to say a single word more to make her point.

"What's the next test? Because that was not at all what I was expecting," Theramoor said as she stepped forward, shaking her head and brushing a layer of grit and dust from her armor. Her tone carried that uncertain balance between disbelief and curiosity, like she wasn't sure whether to be impressed by what had just happened or to file it under nightmares she'd be unpacking later.

Velrock folded his arms, the movement slow and deliberate, tilting his head toward the cadets. "How about we just have them play instead of trying to get them to do something so painfully ordinary? They're clearly not ordinary, so why pretend otherwise?" His voice was calm, almost lazy, but it had a sharpened undertone that slid under the skin, making several cadets instinctively straighten their posture as if bracing for impact.

Dr. Lambert glanced at Velrock, then back at the assembled cadets, her eyes scanning over each one in a way that felt less like she was looking at people and more like she was assessing a collection of rare specimens. "Honestly, that might not be the worst idea I've heard today," she said at last, her lips curling into something that might have been encouragement if not for the thin gleam of anticipation in her gaze. She turned toward Deck, who was leaning against a console with a smirk that said he already knew she'd say yes.

"Alright, cadets," Lambert continued, clapping her hands once with a sharp crack that echoed in the training hall. "Forget the scripted drills. Forget the scenarios. Just go wild. Test every limit you've got, push the suits, push yourselves, push each other if you have to. I want to see what happens when you stop holding back entirely. The only rule? Don't kill yourselves. I wouldn't get much useful data if you did… though, I suppose, if one of you did die, I could dissect you. And that might be worth it, if only to see whether the new models have changed your internals."

She let the statement linger, her smile widening just enough to make it feel more like a dare than a rule. The silence stretched, every cadet processing the fact that she wasn't joking.

Then, almost too cheerfully, she added, "So, maybe not all of you die. But if one or two of you could? That would be perfect."

A faint ripple of uneasy laughter passed through the group, the kind that carried no real humor. The silence that followed was heavy, pressing down on them until even the most reckless among them reconsidered just how far they were willing to go in this so-called test.

The cadets of Class One scattered across the wide expanse of the testing chamber, each immediately finding their own way to push the limits of their newly issued armor. Lessa tested the balance between her prosthetic arms and back-mounted cannons, firing controlled bursts at distant targets while leaping between platforms. Jurpat charged headlong into walls to see how much force the suit could absorb, laughing each time he left a fresh dent in the reinforced plating. Sylen became a blur, exploiting every ounce of the suit's speed to dance through mock combat drills. Vexa and Leron moved in eerie unison, swapping entire suits mid-motion with unsettling precision, as if each had been made for both of them from the start.

Elian adjusted the adaptive plating on his armor, testing how it shifted to counter incoming impacts, while Chime experimented with her suit's climbing and grappling functions, scaling walls and swinging between structures. Wesley braced himself against simulated shockwaves, pushing his suit's stabilization to the limit. Xera worked her targeting assistance for precision throws, hitting multiple moving drones from impossible angles.

Roan tested strength over finesse, hefting and throwing chunks of debris with amplified servos. Torman locked his armor's stabilizers, deliberately walking through uneven, crumbling terrain simulations to test balance under extreme disruption. Ramis used his suit's environmental sensors to stalk and locate others in a mock pursuit. Rokhan focused on raw mobility, making massive leaps across the chamber to simulate rough terrain advances. Varnai pushed her suit's endurance and agility, forcing it through constant movement and evasive maneuvers without a single mechanical failure. Fenn took a lancer's stance with his lance, firing precise, rapid shots while monitoring how the armor's recoil dampeners and targeting stabilizers handled sustained fire, adjusting his footing and grip to see how well the suit compensated for repeated impacts.

Vaeliyan worked in the shadows, quietly testing stealth systems, pressure tolerances, and precision strikes while observing the chaos around him.

The chamber rang with impacts, shouted challenges, and the hiss of servos under strain. Scuff marks, shattered debris, and deep gouges decorated the floor and walls, but none of the armor failed, the suits proved far more durable than the cadets piloting them. Dr. Lambert observed from the control booth, eyes narrowed, logging every stress spike and system response. By the end, the chamber looked like a warzone, the cadets were sweating, grinning, and very much alive.

In the end, Dr. Lambert was disappointed, not with the tests those had been a rousing success, but with the fact that no one died.