Yellow Jacket

Warren didn't so much see what happened as feel it: the plunge into the glowing vat of blue med gel, the searing sting of being torn apart and remade. His eyes were open, yet nothing in them belonged to the waking world. His mind was dragged inward, drawn into a void too deep to measure. Acid from the Nidian Strider had seeped into him, chewing through his insides, and the med gel answered in kind, knitting flesh with ruthless precision. Every cell burned as it was dissolved and reconstructed, a paradox of destruction and creation. If he could have screamed, the sound would have ripped his throat raw, endless and inhuman, echoing until his lungs tore themselves apart. But no voice came. Only silence, only the illusion of stillness, as the pain swallowed everything whole. He sank further into blackness, falling beneath the agony, slipping away from the world into a depth where even his own suffering could not follow.

Somewhere above that dark sea, voices bled faintly through the haze. He couldn't understand most of it, words smudged like echoes distorted underwater, but fragments clawed their way to him. Ruby's voice came sharp with panic, trembling with a mix of anger and fear: "We cannot… we can't have that happen again. This isn't supposed to be nearly as dangerous as what happened." Then another voice intruded, rougher, half-laughing, half-accusing: "Well, he shouldn't have stuck his face in it." The statement twisted, repeated in the murmur of others, some agreement, some scorn, others muttering too quietly to hear. It was back-and-forth noise, brittle and mocking, a chorus of voices just beyond his reach. They pressed in like static, rattling and hollow, distant and unreal. To him they were shadows of the living, reminders that somewhere beyond his descent the world still argued, still judged, still breathed. Their noise barely tethered him, a fragile line pulling at the edge of his fading self as he drifted further and further away.

As he sank deeper, his monster appeared. He saw it waiting, the gauze-wrapped corpse standing in the dark, and within its hollow frame the storm horror churned, lightning and rain sealed inside its ruined shell. It only watched as he passed. He moved through it, brushing the storm within, passing through himself without recognition, without thought. The knowing that it was him had already slipped away, stripped from him as he descended.

Below that layer the blackness grew heavier, and in that pressure something else formed. His sense of self peeled away until even the idea of being a he was gone. What remained was instinct alone. The dark pressed close, and a faint glow shimmered far ahead, blurred, impossible to focus on. It was squishy, a form without edges, writhing in the dark, calling out with a need that was not thought but existence itself.

And the presence came. It felt it even here, the same force that always answered. Food arrived, unseen but undeniable, and the squishy form consumed. It tore, it swallowed, it fed with desperate greed. Every bite was survival, every swallow a declaration that it existed. It fed and fed, consuming blindly, the glow ahead pulsing brighter with every mouthful. Need was all that remained.

As time passed, the squishy thing fed and fed. At first the hunger was simple, a hollow ache that filled when the presence brought food. The ache was deep and constant, like a pulsing emptiness that throbbed inside it. But with each feeding, the ache did not fade; it grew. Every mouthful stretched something unseen, every swallow left a bigger void waiting to be filled. The flicker of light and shadow came more often, sometimes a quick flash, sometimes a lingering glow. The presence shifted closer, its nearness thick in the dark, and every time it brought sustenance the squishy thing consumed without hesitation. It never paused. It never questioned. It only ate.

The food came in bursts, sometimes enough to coat its insides, sometimes so much it choked and writhed as it swallowed. It gummed and tore, blind and greedy, thrashing in the dark whenever the offering came. The sweetness of nourishment was overwhelming, saturating its flesh, but satisfaction never lasted. Almost at once the ache returned, gnawing deeper. It learned, though not in thought, not in words, that a wriggle, a call, a twitch in the dark brought more. Even when it sagged heavy and full, even when its insides pressed outward like they might split apart, it writhed and demanded again. The presence answered, again and again. Greed rose alongside hunger, a need without measure, without end.

It did not understand the danger. It could not. The body swelled, stretched, and trembled on the edge of tearing. Fluid shifted inside it, pressure rising until every movement was strain. Still, it wanted. Still, it called. Instinct told it to glut itself, to devour until no space remained. The sense of fullness never came. It knew nothing of limits, only the ache for more, always more.

And so, it ate. Time blurred into a rhythm of call and response, a cycle of reaching and being answered. It did not matter if it was heavy with food or light with hunger; the act itself became unending. There was only the twitching, the flicker of light, the warmth of the presence, and the endless stream pressed into its maw. It wriggled, swallowed, pressed outward with its blind body, and the dark around it pulsed. The cycle was endless, until the rhythm itself became a kind of lullaby: call, answer, devour, ache, repeat. There were no thoughts, no words, no understanding. Only the growing, twisting fact that it could always call, and it would always be fed.

But then the pressure built higher than before. The squishy thing wiggled, and the skin around it resisted, stretched too far. It wiggled again, harder, and the skin split. The tear was not smooth. It ripped jaggedly, and pain shot through it, sharp and immediate. The act of splitting itself was pain: the skin straining, then giving way with a raw, searing crack that crawled across its body. The pressure released in violent spasms, but the release carried agony. It thrashed, trapped between relief and torment, every wriggle peeling more of the old skin back. The strips clung wet and tight, sticky against the new flesh underneath, making each movement a shudder of fire and rawness.

The tearing continued until the husk sagged loose. It was like dragging itself out of another body, leaving behind a damp, collapsed version of itself. Hunger came back in a rush, sharper and more demanding than before, biting into the edges of the pain. It called, desperate, but nothing came. The dark stayed empty, silent except for its own writhing. Still the hunger clawed, relentless, gnawing at the hollow spaces inside.

Then it felt the loosened skin beside it, limp, wet, clinging in folds. The new ache in its body guided it, not thought, not choice. Its maw pressed down, tearing at the discarded skin. The taste was strange, dense and bitter, not the food it craved, but it filled the hollow for a moment. The skin broke down between its jaws, swallowed into the void, easing the ache by the smallest fraction. There was no revulsion, only the certainty of hunger and the act of feeding. The pain dulled as it devoured what had once been itself, and in the dark, it learned something without words: even when nothing answered, there was always something to eat. Always.

Warren came back to himself in a rush, the dark splitting open into light. For a moment he wasn't sure who or what he was, only that something had ended. Fragments clung to him: the ache, the hunger, the endless rhythm of calling and being answered, the tearing of skin splitting around him. He remembered the taste of what he had swallowed when nothing else came, remembered the cycle of feeding until it blurred into instinct. He remembered being the squishy thing. And now he was not.

The memories lingered like smoke after fire, indistinct, impossible to ignore. He could not shake them. They weren't dreams. They were too real, too raw, still echoing inside his chest with a weight that no waking breath could clear away.

His eyes snapped wide, raw and stinging, and for a heartbeat he panicked, then realized with a jolt that he had eyelids. They blinked, sticky and fragile, each movement scraping across nerves that flared like open wounds. It felt unnatural to blink, alien, like trying on a gesture he had forgotten how to make. The light above stabbed into him, white and relentless, making his new lids flutter.

The first thing he felt beyond that was the cold press of metal beneath his back. A table. Sterile, flat, unyielding. The surface carried the faint vibration of machinery beneath it, as though the table itself pulsed with hidden life.

Straps bit into his wrists and ankles, bands straining when he tried to shift. Steel arms pinned his shoulders, mechanical grips clamped his jaw in place, and a lattice of tubes fed into his veins, down his throat, across his chest. He was locked down so thoroughly that even the faintest twitch sent the restraints groaning.

He tried to cough, to rasp, to breathe through the panic clawing at him, but the tubes down his throat made every attempt choke in silence. His body shuddered against the bindings, skin slick with residue that clung like sweat but stank of chemicals. Every nerve sang with the memory of pressure and tearing, though all he carried now were echoes. He remembered the ache, the hunger, the split, but he did not feel them anymore. They lingered only as fragments, nightmares he couldn't shake, intruding even into waking thought.

His chest hitched, lungs fighting around the tubes, every breath shallow and broken. His limbs were heavy, leaden, slow to obey, as though weighted with stone. The cold metal under his back gave him nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape the heat of the lights that burned down on him.

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His flesh itched and burned in uneven patches where med gel had sealed and unsealed, fast-heal working its brutal course like acid poured into his wounds. Med vets never rebuilt cleanly; they only stopped you from dying, left the rest to be patched and forced into shape afterward. His body was evidence of that, patched, raw, and unsettled. He was naked beneath the glare, every inch of him exposed, the stink of med gel still clinging to his skin. Each drop that slid along his ribs cooled too quickly, leaving gooseflesh in its wake.

Machines crowded close to his face. He couldn't see them clearly, only the silhouettes of masked figures leaning in, their hands guiding sleek instruments that thrummed and whirred like predators circling. The sounds droned into him, low and mechanical, filling the air with menace.

Injections stabbed deep, chemical fire flooding veins, forcing tissue to swell, to grow. Needles hissed as they withdrew, leaving trails of burning fluid beneath his skin. Lasers carved across raw edges, the light sharp enough to sear his nerves, sculpting what returned with merciless precision. Each pass left a smell of scorched flesh, sharp and metallic, hanging in the air just above his face.

Bone and cartilage were gone, his nose nothing but absence, yet the reconstruction pushed him into new form piece by piece, as though rebuilding a mask over ruin. Flesh knit itself under the drive of guided science, eyelids restored but tender, fragile when they blinked against the light. Every flutter sent a pulse of ache through him, reminding him of how thin, how breakable, they still were.

Each adjustment came with a jolt of sting and pressure, a sensation like being rewritten while the straps and clamps made sure he could not move, could not fight, could not even turn away. Every second lasted too long, stretched out until the process felt like hours.

It felt less like healing and more like torture disguised as medicine, every act a violation dressed as repair. His body was being rebuilt, but in that moment, he could not tell if he was alive or simply being remade into a hollowed thing that only resembled him.

A shadow fell across him. Ruby stood over the table, her outline blurred by the sting in his eyes, but her presence undeniable. She was the only still figure in the sea of moving hands and instruments.

Her expression flickered between professional calculation and cold assessment, her lips pressed thin as though weighing the risk of losing someone who might yet prove valuable. One perfectly manicured ruby-tipped hand hovered above his chest, close enough to touch, close enough to press him back down should he move. Her eyes, sharp and reflective in the glare, studied him like a specimen rather than a man.

"You're awake," she said softly, though her voice carried a brittle edge that threatened to snap. "Gods above, darling… you're actually awake."

To Warren's disappointment, the procedure took hours. He had plans for the rest of the day, ideas of what he might do once the fight was over, but those had been burned away along with his face.

Instead of a clean victory, he found himself strapped down, naked, surrounded by machines and masked figures that rebuilt him piece by piece under the guidance of Ruby, an announcer who he knew was tied into command, yet clearly carried far more weight than she ever showed from the gallery.

The lights glared down mercilessly, the hum of machines never ceased, and the endless tug of skin, sting of needles, and hiss of lasers stretched each second into eternity. He was helpless as they rewrote his features, flesh scorched and regrown, nerves pulled taut until he could barely think.

By the time they were finished, he had a face again. But when he looked at the reflection they placed in front of him, it wasn't Warren staring back. It was Vaeliyan.

They had disengaged his body mod with a Legion override, forcing his real self to the surface during the ordeal. He hated how powerless it made him feel, stripped bare beneath the science that bound him together.

Once it was finished, Ruby set a replacement outfit on the table beside him, combat boots, black clothes, and a yellow raincoat. It looked nearly identical to what he had worn before, but it was new, untouched, a clean copy. The other one had been eaten through with holes, ruined beyond repair. There was no point in fixing it when replacements were endless. They simply provided another. With it, he could slide back into the disguise, present himself to the world once more as Warren. Yet she made him wait.

She looked him straight in the eyes and told him that if he tried too soon, his nose might fall off. He didn't think she was joking. The warning sat like a stone in his gut.

Jurpat didn't know what was happening. Warren hadn't told him anything before being hauled off. The boy was probably still down in the ninth layer, pacing, panicking, trapped in uncertainty.

Warren himself had no idea how long he had been gone or what state the pit was in now. Ruby had left the crowd with promises of a brief intermission, but the hours stretched long past that. Somewhere down there, the audience was waiting, or had grown restless, or perhaps had been distracted by another Ruby.

Isol's words returned to him, Ruby was everywhere. Warren had never known if that was truth or just Isol's way of naming the strangeness around her. She was always there somehow. Sometimes she stepped off a stage and was somehow already in a corridor.

It gave the illusion of many Rubies, yet no one could say for certain if there was more than one. There wasn't proof of another Ruby. There was simply Ruby, always present, always watching, and never absent for long. Warren had no idea how or why, and that ignorance gnawed at him.

The thought unsettled him more than he cared to admit. Were they all the same? Were they different? He had no answers, only the gnawing suspicion that he understood even less of the Legion than he believed.

The moment of mortality clung to him as he sat strapped to the table, skin prickling under the new grafts. He had seen something in that blackness, when his heart stuttered and the tubes kept him breathing.

It wasn't fear that lingered, but awareness, sharp and cold. He had been close, closer than ever since Mara. The fights there had been brutal, the streets unforgiving, but he had always clawed his way through.

The behemoth should have ended him, but Rain Dancer had turned the tide, his Soul Skill shielding him from what would have been certain death. In Mara, he had been able to lean on it. Down here in the pit, though, without access to his ability, he had chosen to fight in the worst way possible.

The Strider wasn't stronger than the behemoth, nor faster or crueler, it was only that he had played recklessly, denying himself the one advantage that had saved him before. He had wanted to complete the challenge at any cost. Survival hadn't even crossed his mind until it was nearly taken from him.

He could have chosen differently, he could have walked away, abandoned this fight, taken another path down here in the ninth layer. But he hadn't. He refused to give up, refused to use the one out he had been offered. His Soul Skill would have saved him, but using it meant failing the challenge. And he would rather have died fighting without it than use it and walk away alive.

Only now did he realize how suicidal that thinking truly was. It was a truth as sharp as the memory of acid in his lungs. He had nearly died for pride, for stubbornness, for the idea of completion above all else. And the knowledge settled cold in his gut: if he kept thinking that way, one day it wouldn't be a near miss. One day it would end him.

He remembered every decision with terrible clarity. Climbing the Strider's back. Pinning its tail. Driving his broken weapon into its organs until the cavity gave way beneath his hands. Reaching inside, tearing blindly, dragging out what shouldn't have been touched.

He remembered the heat of the acid, the slick of blood, the stench filling his lungs. He hadn't thought about what would come next, never did. He only thought about ending it.

But staring at his rebuilt reflection, the new flesh regrown across his face, he knew he couldn't keep living that way. If he kept fighting like that, sooner or later something would tear him apart beyond repair.

He told himself the truth plainly. He was strong for his level, stronger than he had any right to be, absurdly so. But he wasn't immortal. He wasn't untouchable.

Power meant nothing if he refused to think past the moment of the kill. He had to change. He had to start considering the aftermath, the weight of his choices, the dangers he invited by fighting as if death was an afterthought.

Because one day soon, if he didn't, he wouldn't walk away. He would die on some pit floor, body unrecognizable, and there wouldn't be enough med gel or Legion science in the world to stitch him back together.

Ruby sat across from him in a small, sterile room, one of the ninth layer's chambers where they could speak without being overheard. The walls were white, bare, and humming faintly with circulation fans. A single table sat between them, polished metal that reflected the overhead lights too clearly. Vaeliyan sat stiff-backed on his side, still sore, his face perfectly restored, no scars, no trace of the damage left behind. Ruby lounged opposite him, perfectly composed, perfectly manicured, ruby-tipped fingers resting on the table as though they were discussing something trivial.

"I'm glad you made it through," she began, her tone even, smooth. Then her eyes narrowed slightly, sharp beneath the easy veneer. "But what happened out there wasn't just bad luck. It wasn't only the Strider. You were reckless, deliberately reckless. And that's fine. The Legion prefers reckless victors to safe losers. But understand this, darling: you nearly spent your life for nothing. You're not even a Legionnaire yet."

Her voice cut the air as easily as the tools had carved his face hours before. She didn't raise it, didn't need to. The weight was in the words, cool and merciless. "What you did was suicidal. Brave, yes. Effective, even. But suicidal all the same. We celebrate that kind of madness, when it wins wars. Not when it burns itself out in a test."

Warren's fingers curled tight against the edge of the chair, but he didn't answer. Ruby leaned forward slightly, her smile thin, her voice almost warm though her eyes remained cold. "You have potential. Command sees it. I see it. And we can't afford to lose someone like you on something as pointless as a trial run. Save that suicidal brilliance for when it will matter. When it will work for us."

The silence stretched after her words, the weight of them settling between them like a debt spoken aloud. Warren didn't argue. He already knew she was right.

Then, sharp and jarring, an alarm blared through the chamber. The lights flickered once, and the steady hum of the fans shifted to a higher pitch. The siren wailed on, sharp and jarring, filling the chamber with its relentless cry.