Yellow Jacket

The wedge felt like a punishment. They hadn't yet understood it was a test. Not just of strength or stamina, but of compliance, obedience, and self-erasure. Five miles. That was one lap. Not a metaphor. Not an exaggeration. It was a calculated stretch of misery, mapped in cruel precision.

The gymnasium was so large it had its own weather systems projected overhead. Thunderheads boiled above, lightning crackled through a false sky, and gusts of wind were piped in through invisible vents, calibrated to create disorientation and chill. Everything about the space felt artificial and perfect, a sterile cathedral of suffering. The terrain for Day One stayed fixed, clean, black, and gridded. It was the basic formation, designed not for surprise, but for introduction. A flat plane, featureless but precise. They didn't know yet that it could change. That the environment itself could shift, rise, tilt, even simulate battlefield conditions once deemed too extreme. They would learn that in the weeks ahead. For now, the Citadel wanted baselines. Blood pressure. Footfall angles. Collapse vectors. Pain tolerances.

The first lap was easy. Deliberately so. It let them believe this might be survivable. Feet slapped against smooth metal. Breaths came even. They could almost lie to themselves.

The second lap was a light jog. The wedge still obedient, still light enough to forget, for a moment.

The third pushed their breath. Heart rates spiked. Sweat began to show at the base of their necks, soaking the collars of uniforms.

The fourth started to grind. The wedge dragged harder. Ankles rolled differently. Friction kissed muscle.

By the fifth, most were soaked in sweat, breathing ragged. Muscles beginning to lock. The smell of strain began to rise: copper, salt, fabric fibers tearing under stress.

By the sixth, Fenn had dropped to a walk, every step dragging like it had teeth. Roan tripped twice, caught himself once, ate floor the second time. Xera's hands were shaking with fatigue; she kept wiping her palms on her thighs, smearing sweat. Wesley bit his own tongue trying to keep pace. Lessa was grinding her jaw, one side of her face twitching with each step.

The seventh was pain. Not exhaustion, that had passed. This was something new. Something angry. Calves flared. Knees screamed. Lungs didn't quite fill. Breathing was a decision now, not a reflex.

By the eighth, half of Class One were crawling. Hands, knees, elbows. No rhythm, no dignity. The wedge didn't adapt or think. It wasn't intelligent. It didn't need to be. It just got heavier. That was its only rule: more distance, more weight. Every step added friction. Every friction point added resistance. Every mile dragged became a personal gravity well. The pain wasn't precise, it was cumulative. Relentless. Indifferent. A punishment without a judge.

Vaeliyan kept his eyes forward. Vision blurring at the edges. Sweat burning the corners of his mouth. Jurpat beside him, breathing through his teeth, face pale but legs still moving. Elian was two rows ahead, perfectly upright, like endurance had been bred into his bloodline. Sylen paced near him, lower to the ground, economical, her movement compact and feral.

By the time they crossed the line to complete his first lap, Lisa Verdance had already run eight.

Not at a jog. Not pacing herself. Dead sprinting. The sound of her footsteps echoed like thunder, each impact deliberate, brutal, inhumanly steady. Her drag wedge followed like it belonged to her. Like it feared her.

She didn't look winded. Didn't even look interested. Her expression didn't break. Not once. Not when she passed them. Not when one of them vomited on the floor. Not when Roan stumbled and lay too long before crawling again.

He barely registered it through the pulse pounding in his ears, but the others did. Jurpat glanced sideways, jaw clenched so tight his neck was rigid. Sylen kept her pace steady, but her fingers twitched at her sides. Elian didn't react at all, which somehow made it worse.

They pushed through. One mile at a time. One scream-swallowed breath after another. The sound of wedges scraping became a background noise, like metal mourning its purpose.

By the time the squad reached lap five, twenty-five miles in, Lisa Verdance was no longer running.

She was standing.

Drag wedge beside her. Arms folded. Watching. Her eyes moved across each of them with surgical calm, like she was taking inventory.

She had already finished all twenty.

Not walking. Not limping. No hitch in her stance. She had run one hundred miles in the time it took the best of them to complete twenty-five.

She stood on the edge of the track like a monument, her wedge gleaming and still. New. Perfect. Final. Not one line of fatigue marked her face.

And when they passed her, dragging themselves in agony, she smiled.

Not kindly.

By the end of class, most of them had failed.

Not gradually. Not all at once. One by one, wrists had started to shake. Fingers had slipped. Jaws clenched. Knees buckled. The slabs didn't need to crash, just tilt. Just once. Just enough.

And they did.

Fenn was first. Then Roan. Then Lessa, who tried to recover too fast and tilted both slabs harder in the process. Chime made it farther than anyone expected. Ramis held until his shoulders locked. Elian lasted nearly to the end, but his left hand betrayed him.

Vaeliyan lost grip with three minutes to go. He didn't scream, didn't curse. Just exhaled like he'd accepted it.

By the final bell, only Sylen still held the slabs perfectly level.

No shift. No twitch. No compromise.

She let them go only when Lisa nodded.

And when she turned to see the rest of Class One, panting, shaking, broken-eyed, she didn't gloat. She didn't scowl.

She just tilted her head and blinked like she'd never expected anything different.

She wasn't even mad at them.

Because it had never been about passing. Lisa had put an impossible task in front of them, not to watch them fail, but to see how they failed. And Sylen hadn't.

That earned something rare from Instructor Verdance: a flicker of something close to respect.

She gave Sylen a single nod. Not exaggerated. Not soft. Just a quiet acknowledgment.

The girl had held.

Against the slabs. Against the weight. Against herself.

Just quietly disappointed in how soft they still were.

Lisa clapped once.

"All right," she said. "You all know what that means. More than four failed. Three laps. After final bell. No shortcuts. No mercy."

No one argued. They couldn't.

And Sylen? She just walked off the line, quiet, breathing slow.

Unbothered. Unshaken.

And maybe just a little bit amused.

That was when they all figured it out, why Instructor Verdance had called it the Patty Maker. It wasn't a joke. It wasn't some sadistic nickname meant to scare them.

It was truth.

Because by the time their hands unclenched and their knees gave out, they felt like raw meat. Their bones didn't ache, they felt crushed, powdered to feed the muscle. Their arms hung limp. Their backs spasmed without reason. Muscles didn't burn anymore, they just twitched on their own.

And all any of them wanted to do was collapse. Not rest. Not recover.

Collapse.

Become a pile of meat. Because meat didn't feel. Meat didn't hold slabs. Meat didn't have pride.

Meat could finally stop.

Most of them couldn't move. The ones who could wished they couldn't.

They lay scattered like discarded tools, wrecked and twitching. Breathing wasn't reflex anymore, it was labor. Muscle no longer answered command. Pain wasn't sharp; it was a flood.

Lisa, ever the gracious host of hell, personally picked them up, one by one, and dumped them onto the transport pad in the order they'd failed.

Sylen went last. She didn't collapse. She sat. On Elian. Like a warrior queen resting atop a throne of corpses. She didn't say anything. Just adjusted her shoulders and closed her eyes for a moment.

Lisa smiled.

"Class is over. See you all tonight for punishment laps."

She waved.

No one groaned. They couldn't. They were too far past pain, too deep in the crater of survival.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Then, without transition, without countdown, without warning, they were in a classroom.

Clean. Neat. Chairs bolted to the floor. Desks. A whiteboard. A stylus resting neatly in its cradle. Fluorescent lights humming above them like nothing had ever gone wrong.

Sylen blinked, still seated on Elian. He didn't argue. That would've required him to have air in his lungs.

Next class was about to start.

They all slopped into their seats. Or onto them. Or near them.

Each chair was assigned. Each desk was labeled. But not a single one was normal.

The twins had one chair and three desks between them. None of the desks were the right height. One was child-sized, one was armpit level, and the third had a surface that wasn't even flat. They didn't complain. They just hovered in confusion, then picked the most functional parts and tried to make it work. Jury-rigged learning

Lessa's chair was too narrow. Ramis' was tilted backward like a lazy recliner. Roan's kept jolting slightly to the left every few seconds like it had a nervous tic. Sylen's didn't have a backrest. Torman's had one too many. Wesley's seat spun in slow circles on its own. Chime's desk legs were uneven, sending a rhythmic thud every time he tried to breathe. Vexa's was bolted in place, but two feet too far from her desk.

Xera's station wasn't part of a microscope lab. It was a microscope lab. There was a microscope sitting on the floor. No chair. No desk. Just the scope, the slide tray, and her name tag.

Curious, and already too tired to argue, she bent over and looked into the lens.

Inside, under perfect magnification, was a miniature desk. A matching chair. A clean little nameplate with her full designation etched in gold. It looked... comfortable. Ergonomic. Designed with care.

She wished it was real. Wished it was bigger.

Instead, she slumped down to the floor, back against the wall, staring at the microscope like it had personally betrayed her.

She was almost ready to cry when she heard Vaeliyan scream about his seat.

Vaeliyan's chair was mounted to the ceiling.

Twenty-five feet up.

No ladder. No path. Just him. The ceiling. And gravity.

Cheating 101 had begun.

Except Deck wasn't there yet.

So Vaeliyan said, "Fuck it," dropped into Deck's chair at the front of the room, and faced the rest of the class.

The worst anyone could do was kill him.

And after what they'd just gone through, that might honestly be a mercy.

The door didn't exist.

Then it did.

It wasn't just a door, it was a red velvet-curtained archway carved into reality by force of sheer will and bullshit. Through it floated Deck, reclining like a lazy demigod on a full-sized, silk-sheeted cloud bed. One hand was behind his head, the other unashamedly knuckle-deep in his nose, legs crossed like he hadn't walked a step in years. The bed drifted sideways as if inertia didn't apply to people as unbothered as him.

"Oh, you're all here," he said with disinterest. "I was honestly expecting at least one of you to have been brutally murdered by Lisa. She usually breaks one or two of you lot in the first hour."

He sighed wistfully, dramatically, like someone remembering a perfect summer romance.

"Man, I wish she'd break me," he muttered under his breath. "Just once."

Then he spotted Vaeliyan.

Seated at the front of the room. In Deck's chair.

Deck lit up like a birthday cake.

"Gold star for you," he said, voice brightening. "You're the only one who didn't follow the so-called rules."

Vaeliyan didn't even stand. He just held up a scrap of paper like it was a royal decree. On it was a sketch of Deck's face, overly dramatic, smug, and bursting into laughter. It was awful. And perfect.

Deck floated over like a thundercloud full of joy.

"Double ultra gold star for you," he beamed. "You finished the assignment before we even started. Would you like a cloud bed?"

Vaeliyan blinked. Shrugged. Then nodded.

Deck didn't wait. A second cloud bed, soft and shimmering, blinked into existence behind Vaeliyan's chair. It looked like mist given structure, light and elegant, but somehow solid. Cloud beds, of course, were nanite constructs, tangible only when the user wanted them to be. Like actually sleeping on a dream.

"You can nap through today's lesson. You earned it."

Then he turned to the rest of the class with a grin that spelled trouble and delight in equal measure.

"As for the rest of you... welcome to Cheating 101. Today's lesson is titled: Who Gives a Flying Fuck. Do whatever you want to win. Lie. Steal. Bribe. Smile while doing it. The only rule that matters is this: it's only cheating if you get caught."

He clapped his hands once.

"Now, let's go over..."

Deck paused, still reclined like a bored storm god, then casually flicked the booger he'd been mining across the room.

It flew with perfect aim. A snot comet.

It landed, unerringly, right in the middle of Elian's forehead, glistening like a badge of cosmic insult.

Elian didn't flinch. Didn't even acknowledge it.

Because somehow, impossibly, he had made his workstation work. The chair was bolted incorrectly, the desk tilted like a condemned ramp, the surface two inches too low, but Elian had adapted. Recalibrated angles. Adjusted posture. Used a shard of metal from the chair base as a makeshift wedge. Now he sat with perfect composure, back rigid, hands folded like a model student sculpted by stubbornness and shame.

Deck pointed.

"That one," he said. "That's what losing with dignity looks like. Gold star too. But like... a boring one. Paper. Not holographic. Maybe crumpled. And wet. Definitely wet."

Elian didn't react.

"I think I'm going to hate this class," he said, voice dry as dust.

Deck grinned wider.

"Anyway," he said, stretching until his spine cracked like fireworks, "let's go over how to break into vaults your enemies are guarding, while framing your other enemies, and somehow also stealing their girlfriends at the same time."

He scanned the room.

"Who has parents? Good. You already know how to lie. Who has siblings? Perfect. Then you know what real treachery is."

He reached behind the cloud bed, pulled out a deck of cards, a roll of wire, a bag of peppermints, and a bomb, tossed them onto a desk at random.

"Now. Let's cheat our way through the next two hours and see who survives with their pride intact. Or not. Doesn't matter. Pride is optional in this class. Winning isn't."

He cracked his knuckles and smiled.

"Let's begin.

As soon as Deck finished speaking, Jurpat stood and casually walked to the front of the room. Without hesitation, he dropped into the now-vacant instructor's chair, leaning back like he owned the place.

Deck smiled at him. "And that's exactly how you do it."

Ramis looked up, worry creasing his face. The bomb on his desk had a timer, and it was counting down. Fast.

"Um… I'll trade you," he said, voice uncertain, and shoved the device toward Xera.

She had the peppermints and was too slow to react. The bomb landed on her floor next to her with a soft clunk.

Her eyes went wide. "Wait, what... "

The bomb was real.

They had asked. Deck had shrugged like they were bothering him with trivia and said it would only kill one, maybe three, if they were unlucky. His exact words were, "It's not even a big bomb. More of a conversation starter. Don't be dramatic."

In the chaos, it somehow ended up with Lessa. One moment it was being passed around like a hot potato between half-panicked hands, and the next it was nestled in her lap, ticking merrily. She looked down at it like it was a snake that had learned to sing opera and knew her name. Her hands trembled. Her breath hitched. She was too frozen to scream.

Then Vaeliyan, lounging in his own cloud bed, didn't even bother to get up. He slung an arm over the side, lazily waving at Lessa with all the urgency of someone requesting a refill on tea. His bed floated a few feet away from hers, soft and silent. He didn't move, didn't speak loudly, didn't flinch. Just waited.

"Just pass it to him," Deck muttered. "He seems competent."

Lessa, wide-eyed, passed the bomb over. Vaeliyan caught it mid-air with a casual flick of his wrist, then began dismantling it like he was cracking open a puzzle box at a café. Snap. Click. Hiss. The ticking stopped.

The entire class stopped breathing.

Deck blinked once.

"I knew I liked you," he said, pointing. "I'm going to ask Lisa to only make you do two laps. She owes me a favor."

Then, quieter, to himself: "And maybe I'll even get to ask her out."

The rest of class was chaos wrapped in instructions. Deck didn't teach. He gave scenarios, then smiled. What followed were hours of nightmare logic and panic-inducing tasks disguised as education. Vaults appeared. Codes were hidden. Pressure plates threatened dismemberment. Sweets turned out to be trap triggers. Some of the tasks required teamwork. Others required betrayal.

Nobody died, miraculously. But Elian's shoes were a casualty.

The floor didn't just appear to become lava. It became lava. Fully. Actually. The air rippled with heat shimmer. The stench of burning metal filled the room. Everything that wasn't nailed down bubbled, cracked, or burst into flame. The only safe places were their desks and chairs.

Somehow, impossibly, those held firm.

Wesley's desk, for reasons that spat in the face of physics, was a shopping cart with a flat metal sheet zip-tied to the top. His chair was a bright red tricycle, dented, rusted, and missing one pedal. It rolled with suicidal abandon, wobbling as the heat waves danced under it. How he didn't die, no one could say.

Elian wasn't so lucky. His desk held fast, but the soles of his boots didn't. They peeled away like cheap stickers and vanished in the heat. When the lava finally receded and the nanites repaired the floor, he stood barefoot, smoke curling off his toes like incense. His dignity was a war crime.

Deck didn't offer an explanation. Just lobbed a fresh pair of shoes at Elian and said, "Try not to melt these ones."

Then he floated off on his cloud bed, whistling something cheerful, already ready to invent the next near-death experience.

Deck floated in on his cloud bed, slower this time, eyes half-lidded, mouth a thin, unreadable line. No smile. No jokes. Just quiet.

He didn't say anything at first. Just stared at the sixteen students still nursing aches and trauma from the last round of fun. He let the silence press.

Then he spoke.

"You all think cheating is about breaking rules. Doing something sneaky and hoping you don't get caught. It's not. That's what children do. That's what gets you killed."

He paused.

"You want to know the real cheat?"

He gestured around the room. "You're not in a classroom. You're not in reality. While you were being broken apart by Lisa, I rigged the transport pad to send you into a simulation chamber. Not a game. A full sensory override. Did no one wonder why you weren't dead when the floor turned to lava? Why you didn't choke on the poisonous gas that should've been released from melting concrete?"

He chuckled.

"Didn't catch the desk under the microscope? Perfect scale. Real shadows. Real wood grain. Too perfect."

A pause.

"And the door I floated in through? It wasn't there before. You think doors just appear in sealed rooms?"

Vaeliyan raised his hand without lifting his head from the cloud bed. "I didn't want to say anything because I was having a nap. But you had six fingers on one hand when you floated in. Then only four when you waved at me after I disarmed the bomb. Also, I'm pretty sure your ring has your own face on it."

Deck beamed. "I knew I liked you."

"Anyone else? Flaws in the sim?"

Wesley raised a hand. "The mint. Tasted like a mint at first, but then... I forgot I was even sucking on it. Next thing I knew, it was back on the desk. Like I never ate it."

Lessa chimed in. "I don't even remember picking up the bomb. Also... my hands trembled. They're prosthetics. They don't move unless I tell them to."

Deck pointed. "Yes. Good. That's a crack."

Elian rubbed his forehead. "The booger. It never went away. I wear a wipe-away cleaner bot, it should've cleared it, but it's still there."

The twins asked in unison, "Why didn't you wipe it off?"

Elian glared. "I wasn't going to touch it, now was I?"

Jurpat frowned. "Also... you weren't anything like this in the pit. And I swear Isol told me you were already dating Instructor Verdance."

Deck smiled wider than anyone liked. "Incorrect. We're married. And raising two beautiful baby tigers."

He floated higher. His voice didn't get louder, but the tone sharpened.

"If you cheat and someone knows, that's sloppy. If they suspect and still believe you? That's style. If they love you for the lie and beg for more? That's power."

He winked.

"Pick a fight with an upperclassman. Make them believe it was their idea. Make it loud, make it messy, and above all, make sure you win. Doesn't matter how, doesn't matter why. Just walk away clean, smiling, and looking like the victim. Let them think they lost control. Let everyone else think they had it coming. Just know... I'll be watching."

He flicked a small metal token into the air. It spun, hovered, and landed neatly in the palm of his hand.

"First person who pulls it off gets the bed next class."

Sylen raised a hand. "Wait, the bed's real?"

"Oh yes," Deck said, lounging deeper into his cloud. "You have any idea how hard it would be to program a fake nanite swarm without using a real nanite swarm? The idea has merit, but it's not worth the effort in the end."

He stretched, yawned dramatically, then rolled over. "Anyway, class dismissed. I have to go tell Lisa about my new favorite student. She's going to hate you."

Vaeliyan sat up fast. "Wait, what? I thought you said she owed you a favor and you'd try to get me to do fewer laps."

Deck grinned. "What can I say? I lied."

The simulation faded in an instant, leaving nothing behind but a cold transport pad and a single note resting on it:

Lisa hates cheaters, so I don't cheat her :P – Deck.