Yellow Jacket

Warren realized he wasn't the only one cutting down the chaff, not by a long shot. The pit swarmed with killers, and a few of them stood out as more than background noise.

A woman wielded a staff with the kind of practiced fury that only came from years of brutal training. She swung it once, clean and sharp, and a man's skull collapsed like wet paper under the blow, fragments and brain spraying across the sand.

Another fighter, lean and sharp-eyed with a predator's grin, clapped his hands together. In that instant his opponent's body split open in long, jagged cuts as though invisible razors had carved the air itself. Blood sprayed in arcs that glistened under the pit's harsh lights, drawing cheers and shrieks from the crowd.

Then there was the mountain of a man, a towering brute the size of a bear, carrying two colossal hammers that looked more like forged anvils stolen from a god's forge than weapons meant for mortal hands. Each step he took was a promise of ruin, each breath an omen of destruction. Even among killers, he stood out, a nightmare of raw power barely caged in flesh.

Warren's lips curved into a faint smirk. Time to let the hammer drop. His storm-grey eyes fixed on the giant, and the vultures, those weaker fighters who had been circling the edge of the melee, waiting for scraps, scattered as soon as they realized what was about to happen.

None of them wanted to get caught between these two. This wasn't prey circling predator. This was predator meeting predator, apex against apex, and everyone else in the pit knew better than to step into the crossfire. The crowd sensed it too, their shouts rising, their stomps rattling the steel rails as they leaned in, hungry to see who would survive the clash.

The hammer-man charged first, every step like a thunderclap in the sand, shaking the boards beneath their feet. He swung one of his massive weapons in a brutal arc, a swing meant to cleave Warren clean in half and scatter his remains across the pit floor. The sheer force of it made the air shiver, the whistle of steel like a banshee's scream.

But Warren was already moving. He slipped under the hammer's path with effortless grace, the motion so clean it looked rehearsed, a dance he had practiced a thousand times in silence. He rolled forward across the sand, fluid as water, and popped up behind the giant with predatory precision.

The man pivoted with shocking speed for his size, his bulk turning like a fortress on wheels, but Warren was already ready, already setting the trap. A burst of sand erupted from his hand, his Skill flaring to life. The grit streamed forward in a vicious spray, aimed directly at the giant's eyes with surgical cruelty.

The man managed to deflect most of it with his forearm, but the damage was done. His vision clouded, grit tearing at his corneas, and the sting of sand forced his eyes to shut against the searing pain. For a heartbeat he was blind.

In that split second of hesitation, Warren struck. He drove one truncheon upward, stabbing for the man's jaw from below. The giant reacted on instinct, bringing one of his hammers down to block. Metal slammed against steel, sparks spitting from the impact and scattering like fireflies into the night.

The giant expected Warren to falter, to stumble back under the sheer force of the clash. That was how this fight was supposed to go. He had size, weight, and power. He had the strength to grind lesser fighters into the dirt with brute force alone. Against anyone else, that hammer was law.

But Warren didn't falter. Instead, he held his ground with unshakable poise, body braced as if the hammer's weight were nothing more than a passing breeze. His stance was rooted, balanced, immovable, the structure of his frame refusing to yield.

The giant gritted his teeth, thinking Warren had trapped himself in the deadlock. But then pain cut through his certainty like lightning through storm clouds. Out of nowhere, a second truncheon whipped down in a vicious arc, smashing into the side of his knee with bone-shattering force.

The crack of cartilage and ligament giving way was sharp and final, echoing louder than the crowd's gasp. The hammer-man bellowed in rage and agony as his leg folded beneath him, his massive frame sagging dangerously. What had been an unstoppable tower of muscle was reduced to a staggering, wounded beast, each breath a ragged snarl of disbelief.

Warren's storm-grey eyes never wavered. He stepped in close, too close for the hammers to matter anymore, his expression unreadable but his movements surgical. He drove one truncheon straight up under the giant's chin with brutal force, snapping bone with a sickening crack.

The sound carried across the pit as the man's head whipped back violently, his body crumpling toward the sand. But Warren wasn't finished. He followed through without hesitation, striking again and again with the precision of a butcher cutting meat from bone.

His arms moved like pistons, each strike deliberate, each impact reducing the giant further until there was nothing left but ruin. The final blow caved in the giant's skull, spraying fragments across the pit floor until nothing recognizable remained. His colossal hammers fell with a resounding clang, ringing like funeral bells as they hit the sand.

The crowd erupted, their voices a mixture of awe, terror, and delight. What they had thought would be a contest of giants had become a slaughter. The massive fighter who had looked invincible minutes before now lay in a ruined heap, his legend drowned in blood and broken bone.

Warren stood over him without a shred of hesitation, his yellow jacket catching the light, his storm-grey eyes scanning the field as though already hunting his next prey.

There would be no scraps left for the vultures this time. Warren didn't leave survivors, didn't leave half-finished kills. He didn't fight to wound or maim. When he struck, it was to end.

And so the bear-sized man who had once looked unstoppable was reduced to a cooling corpse in the sand, his name already forgotten as the Ninth Layer roared and Ruby's voice sharpened the moment into legend.
There were not a lot of opponents left alive. The pit had thinned dramatically. The chaos gave way to scattered clusters of survivors hacking and clawing at each other in desperate bids to outlast the bloodbath.

The ground itself had become treacherous. Blood pooled in shallow rivulets, soaking into the sand until every step squelched wetly beneath the fighters' feet. Red tracks smeared behind them like signatures of violence.

The roar of the crowd, once a deafening wall of noise, dulled into a lower, hungrier murmur. It was the kind of sound a predator makes when it knows the feast is nearly finished but still savors the final kill. The gallery's eyes scanned what remained, restless and eager. They leaned forward as though their collective will alone could determine who would crawl out alive.

The man who clapped, once terrifying in his precision, had been silenced. His murderous spectacle ended when his hands were severed clean off at the wrists. Reduced to pitiful agony, he screamed and writhed, spraying crimson across the sand as his life drained away with every twitch. His menace was gone. His power, nothing but a memory.

The woman with the staff, fierce in the beginning, had fought like a storm. For a time, she was unstoppable. Her swings cracked bone and splintered skulls, scattering enemies with every strike. But even storms are drowned when the sea rises too high. The mob came for her, relentless and overwhelming. They dragged her down beneath grasping limbs and gnashing teeth. They tore into her with the savage desperation of hyenas. Though she fought until her last breath, she was devoured by their hunger. And when she was gone, they began to turn on each other. Cannibals without the meat, tearing scraps from scraps for the illusion of dominance until nothing but ruin remained.

Beyond that carnage, only one other combatant stood apart. He did so with an unnerving composure that unsettled even the blood-soaked crowd. He seemed out of place, as though plucked from another world entirely. It was as if he had stepped straight from the polished marble floors of a high-rise office into this filthy slaughterhouse. A contradiction given form.

He was dressed immaculately. A suspender suit and tie, pressed and perfect despite the chaos around him. His clean black-rimmed hat sat at an angle so deliberate it was almost mocking, a statement of style in a place where survival was measured in seconds. The tie at his neck gleamed faintly, catching the dim pit-lights as though untouched by dust or blood. His eyes were sharper than his suit. Cool, calculating, predatory. The kind of eyes that measured profit and loss in blood rather than coin.

When he moved, it was like watching a blade glide through still water. Deliberate. Efficient. Unhurried. Nothing wasted. Each strike was measured with surgical precision, and every target that crossed his path fell in seconds.

On his fists gleamed the true heart of his menace. Electrified brass knuckles, arcs of pale lightning crawling across their surface like caged storms. Every swing landed with a sharp, sizzling snap that echoed above the din, sending tendrils of light scattering across the broken bodies of his opponents. When his knuckles found flesh, muscles convulsed violently, nerves short-circuited, and bodies collapsed twitching at his feet. When he caught bone, the arcs burned deep, carving blackened lines that cracked further under follow-up strikes. His enemies did not just fall. They were reduced to smoking husks of failure.

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The pit around him was still chaos, but he remained untouched. A calm island in the storm. His suit stayed crisp, unmarred by blood, and his movements carried the deliberate rhythm of a man on schedule. Where others fought like beasts, snarling and flailing, he conducted violence with the composure of a businessman attending a meeting. Every strike was an item ticked off his list. Every death, a task completed. There was no rage in him. No desperation to survive. Only discipline, cold and certain. The violence of someone who fought not because he wanted to but because it was required, like signing a ledger or closing a deal.

The crowd noticed him too. Their murmurs grew louder with every opponent he dispatched. While Warren's storm of violence had drawn the lion's share of awe and fear, this man in the hat earned a different kind of respect, a more chilling admiration. The contradiction he embodied fascinated them. Clean lines and refined attire in a pit of filth and gore. Lightning-wreathed fists tearing through flesh and bone with machine-like certainty. Brass knuckles that spat lightning as though he had bottled a thunderstorm and unleashed it at will.

Each time he struck, the voices in the gallery rose from murmurs to cheers, then to chants, as awe hardened into something darker. They could sense it. This man was not surviving by accident. He was bending the pit to his will. Shaping its chaos into order. Fighting with the poise of someone who had not only been here before but had thrived here. Or worse. Someone who belonged here all along.

He didn't just fight. He dominated. He moved with the certainty of a ledger balanced to the last coin. With the certainty of a blade cutting through silk. In the Ninth Layer, that made him as terrifying as any monster of legend. A presence carved not from myth but from methodical, unshakable precision.

The man tipped his hat to Warren like he was greeting his next date, a subtle gesture that carried the arrogance of someone who believed himself untouchable.

Warren did not hesitate. He launched himself forward with a storm of violence, his movements a blur of sharpened intent and controlled savagery. The suited fighter met him head-on, not flinching, not faltering. Their collision was sudden, thunderous, a violent exchange that made the crowd gasp. Each strike from Warren was fast enough to blur, heavy enough to crush bone, yet the man parried and countered with unnerving precision, as if he had rehearsed this dance before. Their clash wasn't just a brawl, it was a duel that shook the pit, a confrontation that layered spectacle on spectacle, magnifying every movement until it became larger than life. It was a duel carried by the roar of the crowd, the crack of knuckles against steel, and the clash of philosophies as much as fists. It was the kind of duel that would be remembered not as another pit skirmish, but as a legend in its own right, a story to be told and retold long after the blood had dried. between predators, a test of who would falter first in the storm of violence.

This man, Warren realized in the heat of the exchange, was no ordinary fighter. He moved with trained discipline, an ease that came from years of refinement. He didn't carry himself with the hesitation of someone still bound by human limits. His body responded as though it had long since abandoned fear, fatigue, or restraint. His counters came quick, clean, efficient, and each one drove a message home: this wasn't going to be a simple kill. This man was built for war.

Warren pressed harder. The speed and ferocity of his strikes had deceived countless opponents before. They weren't only fast, they carried monstrous weight, the same crushing force that had folded the hammer-wielding giant earlier in the pit, if not more. Every blow was designed to end, to break, to erase opposition. And yet this man in the suit blocked, shifted, or absorbed the strikes that would have shattered the bones of any other fighter. The surprise only sharpened Warren's hunger.

He was stacking his abilities one on top of another, layering pressure bursts with sudden spikes of force, weaving Power Strike into the rhythm of his truncheons, amplifying it all with the suffocating weight of his soul skill. Each strike was heavier than the last, each movement carrying the intent of finality. The air itself bent under the strain, the pit floor cracking where his feet dug in.

Since the day Imujin had told him to stop thinking with human limits, Warren had embraced the idea fully. Every movement, every swing, carried the conviction of someone who no longer thought as a man, but as something beyond man. He had become violence refined, and the crowd could see it in the way his yellow jacket blurred through the melee. And still, this stranger stood against him, parrying blows that were never meant to be stopped, defending himself from strikes that could break bodies into ruin.

The man's style was unnerving. Where Warren's attacks came like a relentless storm, his opponent flowed like water around the violence, snapping counters in the gaps with electrified precision. Sparks cracked from his knuckles with every block, the sound of sizzling arcs punctuating the air like miniature thunderclaps. He wasn't just defending himself, he was testing Warren, measuring him with every clash of fist against truncheon, every vibration that ran up his arms.

Warren felt the weight of it. He wasn't up against another body to break, but against a wall of discipline and resolve that demanded more of him than raw ferocity. The suited man fought like an accountant of violence, every motion calculated, every strike accounted for. And yet Warren didn't slow. He couldn't. His soul skill demanded momentum, demanded he press harder, heavier, until something finally cracked.

The storm of Warren's assault had only one purpose. Not to pause until he carved his way through this obstacle and into the next opponent. His truncheons blurred in arcs of steel and violence, his strikes hammered like iron thunder, and his breath came steady, controlled, measured. He was a force of motion and fury, unwilling to stop until the path ahead was nothing but broken bodies and silence.

The crowd, caught between awe and disbelief, roared as the duel unfolded. They could feel it, that this wasn't just another fight in the pit. It was something greater. A clash that blurred the line between predator and prey, and in that blur, Warren moved with the certainty of a storm unleashed.

Warren saw the blow coming, but he didn't dodge it. He let the strike clip him in the ribs, let the momentum of the hit flow straight through his body like water passing around stone. The impact itself did nothing, his frame absorbed and diffused it as though it were smoke, but the lightning that coursed from the electrified knuckles was another matter entirely. It tore through him like fire racing along every vein, a jagged burn that made his muscles seize and his vision blur at the edges. His nerves screamed with agony, white-hot and unrelenting, but he clamped down hard on his tongue, iron taste flooding his mouth, forcing himself not to cry out. He couldn't afford to show weakness. Not here, not now. If he faltered, the pit would swallow him. He wasn't finished yet. Not even close.

In the same instant, Warren countered. A sharp burst of Pocket Sand erupted from his hand, scattering like a storm into the suited man's eyes. The spray struck with brutal accuracy, the fine grit embedding itself into soft tissue. The man staggered back, blinded, sparks still snapping off his fists as his arms cut through the air in wild, furious arcs. His electrified knuckles hissed with each empty swing, miniature thunderclaps punctuating the chaos. The crowd roared at the sudden shift in momentum, their hunger stoked by the sight of violence bending in Warren's favor. A ripple of sound rolled through the Ninth Layer, cheers, gasps, and howls merging into one voice of bloodlust.

And that's when Warren felt it. Not the chaos, not the storm of violence he was creating, but the sand. He had been liberal with his use of Pocket Sand throughout the fight, scattering it again and again into the pit, littering the field with tiny fragments of grit. Each time, he had pictured the effect in his mind, imagined not just the throw but the outcome, shaping intent into the strike just like Dr. Wirk had once told him to. Focus not only on what you unleash, Wirk had said, but on what you want it to become. Until now, Warren had never grasped the depth of those words.

In that moment, he understood. The sand wasn't gone. It wasn't inert. It was still there, still alive with his touch, still connected to him like a tether stretching across the pit. He could feel it clinging to skin, grinding into eyes, sticking to the wetness of gums, sinking into the lungs of the blinded man before him. The grains hadn't dispersed. They were waiting. They were listening.

Instead of hurling more, Warren did something new. He pulled. He called it back.

The effect was immediate. The effect was horrific.

Every grain of nanite-laced sand answered the summons. The particles that had worked into the whites of the man's eyes tore free with cruel precision, dragging wet trails of blood with them. The flecks that had lodged in his gums and teeth ripped outward, shredding soft tissue. Every mote he had inhaled clawed its way back up his throat and nostrils, carving jagged channels as it forced the most direct path possible. It was not a retreat. It was a slaughter in miniature, each grain cutting its own brutal way out.

The man's scream split the pit. It wasn't just pain, it was raw, unfiltered terror. Blood and tissue followed as the sand tore its way back, spilling from eyes, mouth, and nose. He convulsed, clawing at his own face, sparks still leaping uselessly from his knuckles, electricity arcing into the sand-stained air. The crowd recoiled as one, but not in unison. Some gagged at the wet hiss of tissue tearing free from eyes and gums. Others howled in delight, pounding the rails with fists, spraying drink as they shouted bets mid-scream. Coins and chits flew through the air, wagers shifting with every new spurt of blood. A man in the gallery laughed until he choked, slapping his neighbor on the back, while a woman shrieked in disgust and tried to shove her way out, only to be dragged back by friends drunk on violence. Ruby's voice cut above them, sharp and sweet, turning the chaos into rhythm. The gallery wasn't one voice anymore. It was a riot of hunger and horror, fractured reactions clashing together until they became something worse: worship.

Notification: Your skill Pocket Sand has evolved to Razor Sand.

Warren stood over him, teeth bared, chest rising steady and unbroken despite the lightning that still burned faintly in his veins. He had found something new, something terrifying. Pocket Sand was no longer a trick. It was a weapon with reach, a weapon with return. And in this moment, the Ninth Layer saw what it meant to cross him: Warren was not just a man with tools. He was a butcher with endless blades, each one made of dust and grit, ready to cut their way through flesh at his command.

(NEW) Razor Sand (Active): Evolved from Pocket Sand. A storm of nanite-laced grit sharpened to lethal edges. When unleashed, it shreds flesh, severs nerves, and tears through soft tissue with surgical cruelty. Causes immediate blindness, catastrophic internal damage, and escalating terror in those caught within it. The sand no longer disperses harmlessly, it lingers, embedding itself in eyes, lungs, and wounds, waiting to be recalled. At the user's command, the grains can rip themselves free along the most direct path, regardless of resistance, carving tunnels of destruction as they return.