Yellow Jacket

Imujin glanced over the field of cadets, still standing rigid from the tension of the night. The bond hummed faintly like a held breath, a shared vibration threading through every one of them. The air felt sharp, brittle, like the wrong word might shatter it. No one dared move, as if even shifting their weight might crack the fragile stillness holding everything together. Eyes darted, shallow breaths fogging faintly in the cold. Even the wind had gone cautious.

"Well," he said at last, rubbing the bridge of his nose with a weary sigh that carried like a groan through steel. "Here's the problem. None of you are going to sleep tonight. Not well. Not deep. Not enough to wake up in time for the next class. You're burned out, you're running on adrenaline, and if I let you lie down now, you're not getting back up."

He let that hang for a long moment, scanning their faces. Some blinked slow, exhausted; some stared ahead in hollow-eyed defiance; some barely seemed to be breathing. He nodded slightly, as if confirming a grim suspicion. "So instead of wasting tomorrow, we'll do it now. While you're still awake enough to remember it. You're going to see what the Fist of the Legion actually looks like. Not drills. Not theory. Truth."

There was a ripple through the instructors like the wind cutting through tall grass, a sudden tilt in the air. Lisa frowned, arms folding across her chest, her jaw set. "Not here."

"Obviously not here," Imujin said, voice sharpening, cutting clean through the stagnant tension. "I like this place. It's mine. I'm not burning it to cinders just to make a point."

"Gym?" Jim offered with a crooked grin, though his tone carried a shred of seriousness. His fingers twitched like he was already itching to swing at something.

"No," Lisa said immediately, firm and cold. "We'd destroy it. It wouldn't survive five seconds. You know that."

"Sim," Gwen cut in, brisk and decisive. "We can just use the endless plain module. Nothing to break, nowhere to hide. Just open ground. They'll see everything. No distractions, no excuses."

Deck nodded, already pulling a thin console from his pocket, the glint of anticipation flickering in his eyes. "We'll wake up the subs. They can help run it and monitor for collapse. Keep the feeds clean, no static."

Imujin dragged his hands down his face and sighed, shoulders rising and falling like distant waves. "Fine. The pit it is. Endless plain sim. Everyone in."

Then he looked toward Velrock, who had been silent as stone, his stillness like a weight on the air. "You're sitting out."

Velrock nodded without hesitation, voice soft but firm, as if carved from bedrock. "Someone has to make sure they don't collapse or lose their minds. That's my job. I'll hold the line while you break it."

"Fair." Imujin turned to Lambert next. "You're sitting out too. You'd be distracted."

"Correct," Lambert said flatly, already reaching for a sterile kit as if she couldn't help herself, hands twitching with suppressed hunger for data.

"And Wirk," Imujin added, eyes narrowing. "You in?"

Wirk shook his head once, sharp. "Not tonight." His voice was rough, distant, like something had been scraped hollow and left raw. His gaze never lifted from the grass.

"Fair enough." Imujin rolled his shoulders, joints cracking like slow fire, like the prelude to an eruption. "Then it's the rest of us. Let's go."

He started to turn toward the exit path, but,

"Wait," Warren said.

They all looked at him. He stood still, expression grave and utterly at odds with the words that followed, the weight of his tone colliding with the ridiculousness of what came next.

"Before we go… I have to complete one of my tasks. And this feels like the perfect moment. You're all furious, and he," Warren pointed at Imujin, "looks like a target. So, if you all just help me hold him down so I can punch him in the face…"

The silence afterward was immediate and total. Even the wind seemed to stop. It was as if the world itself paused to see if he was serious.

Imujin froze, then turned his head slowly back toward him. "...That's not actually a terrible plan."

Gwen blinked once, lips twitching. "Honestly… yeah."

Lisa shrugged, deadpan, though her eyes glimmered with sharp amusement. "It's not like he could hurt you anyway."

Deck grinned, sharp and delighted, already cracking his knuckles. "You deserve it."

Imujin exhaled through his teeth, long and low, the faintest thread of a smile ghosting across his mouth. "...Fine. You don't have to hold me. I'll just let him."

Nobody listened to him. They all lunged at once. Imujin shouted, startled, "What are you doing? I promised I'd let him hit me!"

"Gramps," Gwen said, pinning his arm with ruthless precision, "do you think anyone here believes you? We are literally bonded to you. We can feel you winding up to run."

"Don't do it," Imujin wheezed as Lisa locked down his shoulders. "My beautiful face."

He was laughing by the end, even as they crushed him down. It helped them all.

Warren walked back to Dr. Wirk without a word. He held out a hand. Wirk hesitated, his lips pressed thin, then finally handed over the Yellow Jacket. Warren took it without thanks, slinging it over his shoulders as he turned away, the fabric heavy and familiar against his back. The bond buzzed faint and confused behind him, like a nest of hornets stirred by a distant storm. Everyone watched him walk. No one spoke. No one understood.

He stepped into the center of the meadow.

He stood still.

The world broke.

Rain detonated from nothing.

One heartbeat the meadow was dry and moonlit. The next it was drowned. Torrential sheets slammed down like collapsing walls, a thousand tons of water falling sideways, upwards, every direction at once. The sound came as a single deafening roar, a living thunderclap that erased thought. The instructors flinched. The cadets reeled back, boots skidding on slick grass. Eyes went wide, hands lifting reflexively as instinct screamed.

It barely touched them.

A soft drizzle clung to their skin, faint cold mist sliding across their hair and lashes. Beyond that thin veil, Warren stood inside the heart of an apocalypse.

The rain struck him like siege engines. Each impact hit with the violence of speeding haulers, hammering with such force the ground cratered under his feet. Wave-shaped walls of water rose against gravity to crash down on him, dragging the grass flat in expanding rings. His coat snapped and cracked, the fabric screaming in the windless void. Warren did not flinch. His body did not sway, did not rock, did not even shift beneath the blows. He stood like an unmoving island as an ocean tried to erase him from the face of the world.

The others stared. Shock drained their faces pale. They could barely stay upright through the thin drizzle, yet Warren bore the weight of a collapsing sky alone.

Lisa's lips parted, soundless. Deck muttered something sharp that drowned under the roar. Gwen's eyes were wide and glassy, her knuckles white on her sleeves. Ramis swallowed audibly. Sylen didn't breathe.

"Why," Jim said slowly, "is it raining."

"This isn't rain," Josephine whispered. "This is him."

The downpour tightened around Warren. It warped. It spiraled. It slammed into him harder and harder, endless walls of water punching into his chest, his shoulders, his spine, his legs. The soil around his boots turned to slurry then compressed to stone under the force. Cracks webbed out from his stance, crawling through the meadow like broken glass. His body remained utterly still, unmoving as the blows broke across him like surf against stone.

The drizzle around the rest of them felt cold, almost gentle. The water battering Warren could have stripped concrete from its foundations. It howled. It snarled. It clawed at him like a living thing trying to tear him apart.

Water rose past his ankles. Mud churned and boiled around his boots. His hood shadowed his face, droplets streaming off him in rippling curtains as the world drowned.

Gwen whispered, barely audible, "He's not human."

Isol didn't answer. His gaze stayed fixed on Warren, grim and quiet, like a man watching an old, familiar nightmare replay itself.

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The storm only grew stronger. The rain thickened until it came down in visible slabs, breaking into explosive plumes as they hit his shoulders and arms. Each impact rattled the ground. The meadow bowed. The trees at its edge bent inward as if pulled toward him, leaves plastered flat.

And he stayed. Unmoving. An island. The storm screaming itself to pieces against him.

Warren stood still for a single breath, the storm raging inside him now instead of around him. His hood shadowed his eyes. Steam curled from his arms. The air around his fists shrieked. Every droplet that struck his skin shattered into mist and spun away like smoke off a forge. His feet sank slightly into the mud from the sheer tension rolling off him, the air around him bending as if the world itself was holding its breath.

Lisa, Gwen, and Alorna held Imujin in place, arms locked around him like anchors. He let them. His face was calm, though his jaw was tight, eyes half-lidded like a man waiting for a storm to pass. The ground under their feet was slick and black from the deluge. Their knuckles were white with strain, shoulders trembling. They looked absurdly small holding him, three titans straining to cage a sun, their breaths coming sharp and uneven as they braced themselves.

Warren took a single step forward. The meadow seemed to flinch. The wind whistled low, like grass trying to flee.

He vanished.

There was no blur. No trail. No wind. Only the hollow rush of air collapsing into the space he'd left.

One instant he was standing still, fifty meters away. The next he was inside Imujin's guard.

Rain Dancer howled.

It detonated off him as he reappeared, water spiraling from his back and limbs in a rising cyclone. The pressure hit first, like the weight of a collapsing wave, then the roar of water stripping the world bare. It coiled around his right arm, wrapping his fist in whirling torrents, stripping the air from its path until vacuum hissed at its edges. The ground hissed and cratered under his feet from the backlash as his body materialized inside striking range.

And then, he set the trap.

A single lash of Rain Dancer whipped backward, striking across his own shoulders. The force slammed into him, harmless to flesh but enough to trigger the instinctive snap of Force Sovereign and the rush of predictive motion. Pain was not needed, only pressure. He baited his own senses into reacting as if under attack. The air fractured around him, time seeming to peel apart.

Branching Path bloomed.

The world didn't just split, it fanned open.

A hundred trajectories cascaded before him in a spinning lattice of potential futures, fractal chains of cause and effect. He could see them all. Every dodge. Every counter. Every way this strike could unfold. He only needed two.

One for the real him. One for the nanite apparition, his phantom self, that would last for just a single heartbeat, only long enough to throw one perfect punch.

He chose.

And then he unleashed it, the full force of the storm stored within Force Sovereign.

One Warren surged for Imujin's face, fist screaming through the rain like a comet, the shockwave of his motion warping the downpour aside. Another veered low in the same instant, driving straight toward his stomach. Both were real. Both carried the full force of the storm, and both trailed the screaming arc of the cyclone.

The punches landed at once.

The impact was not sound. It was pressure, a tidal wave given form. Water erupted in a perfect sphere from the point of contact, expanding outward like a collapsing star. Gwen, Lisa, and Alorna were ripped off their feet and hurled across the meadow, arms pinwheeling as they vanished into the sheets of rain. The shockwave flattened the grass to bare earth in a widening crater. The air turned to white static, sound vanishing in an instant.

Imujin disappeared.

He didn't fall. He didn't stagger. He was simply gone, hurled backward so fast the storm warped behind him. Even he hadn't expected Warren to cross the distance so suddenly, to hit with that kind of raw precision and speed. The backlash shredded the meadow's edge as he tore through it like a cannon shot, smashing through trees, soil erupting in geysers where his feet struck, then tumbling end over end in a rolling detonation of force. He skipped across the broken landscape three times, craters marking each brutal impact, before vanishing over the ridge like a launched artillery shell. The horizon flickered as the shockwave chased him.

For a long second, nothing moved.

Then the cadets roared.

The sound cracked across the meadow, wild and disbelieving, exhaustion burned out of their voices by sheer adrenaline. Chime actually jumped onto Fenn's shoulders screaming, while Jurpat doubled over laughing like he'd just witnessed a god get mugged. Even Elian's reserved mask cracked into a stunned grin. They clapped, they howled, they slapped each other's backs in chaotic waves, all of them electric with the impossible fact that Warren had just sent Imujin, the immovable Imujin, flying like a stone.

Warren stood in the silence that followed their cheers, fist still outstretched, rain pattering off his hood in gentle whispers now that the storm's heart had passed. Steam rose off him like a dying forge. His shadow seemed too long.

A mile away, deep inside the edge of his nature preserve, Imujin hit the ground hard enough to punch a crater the size of a house. Soil geysered skyward. Water vapor burst like thunder. He skipped once, twice, three times like a stone on a lake, carving gouges the size of buildings, then buried into a far hill in a rolling avalanche of earth. Trees toppled. Stone cracked. The entire horizon shook and groaned like it might fold.

Silence. Steam curled from the wound in the land. The air stank of scorched rain.

Then Imujin walked back out of the settling debris.

His coat was scorched and soaked, mud streaking his arms. He looked down at himself, then back across the broken meadow to where Warren stood waiting. His mouth quirked, like the edge of a grin trying to remember how to live on his face.

"That," he called, voice echoing like distant thunder, "was a really good hit." He rolled his shoulder once, scattering droplets. "Honestly… I wasn't expecting it to do that. Threw me for an actual loop."

He grinned, feral and bright. "Do it again sometime."

Chime slipped through the wall of cheers, still perched from where she'd been on Fenn's shoulders. She hopped down with a fluid little twist, boots splashing into the damp earth as she stalked toward Warren like someone on a mission. The cadets were still roaring, clapping, hollering, their voices cutting through the thinning rain in wild bursts, but she cut straight through them as if none of it existed. Warren, standing motionless in the center of the meadow with his fist still lowered, looked almost detached from the chaos. Rain dripped from his hood. His shadow stretched long behind him. There was no triumph in his face, just that sharp quiet he wore like armor when he didn't know how to feel.

"Hey," Chime said, planting herself right in front of him. "Since everyone's doing tasks for their Masters right now… do you mind helping me with mine?"

Warren blinked, slow and wary, like someone waking up from a long fall. "Sure. Anything. What do you need?"

"Your blood."

He stared. "…I'm sorry, what?"

"Blood." She said it like she was asking for a pencil. Folding her arms, eyes bright with the kind of manic determination that usually preceded property damage, she added, "See, Lambert's my Master, and I'm pretty sure if I give her your blood, she'll call it done. All of it. Just… poof. Completed. My soul gets to stop screaming at me for a while."

"Lambert," Warren said, dragging her name out like it might bite him. "Would you actually do that?"

Lambert's voice cut across the meadow, sharp and breathless, with that hungry edge Warren hated: "Yes. Absolutely. Give it to me. Now. Give me. I need it. Please."

Chime beamed like a kid who'd just found a loophole. "See?"

Warren lifted a hand, palm out, like he could physically push away the crawling sensation that ran up his spine. "That is so deeply disturbing. You have no idea how creeped out I am right now, and I have killed a lot of people. She is, no. Okay. Actual nightmare fuel, ranked. If Roundy ever gets out, we're all dead. I'm ninety percent sure he's an aberrant, even if he's not technically alive. He'd kill us all if anything ever happened to his hedges. And then… Lambert. Because at least Roundy would be fast about it. Lambert would… savor it."

"I would not savor it," Lambert said primly, though her eyes glittered like scalpels catching light. "I would study it. I just need to know what that sweet red juice tastes like. For science. The texture alone could reveal everything about the chemical structure of…"

"Stop," Warren snapped, throwing both hands up. "You see? This is what I'm talking about. She wants to literally lick my insides. She wants to taste my blood. Who says 'sweet red juice' out loud?"

A couple of cadets nearby, who had quieted to eavesdrop, cringed visibly and stepped back.

Chime jabbed a finger into Warren's chest, unfazed. "Doesn't matter. You said you'd help. So, give me your gods damn blood, I'm gonna give it to her, and I'm gonna be done with my tests because I am tired, and you owe us, and I'm cashing out now."

"Wha," Warren started, then stopped, shoulders slumping like something inside him just gave up. He exhaled like someone deflating. "Fine. Fuck it. You got anything to draw it with?"

Chime produced a needle from somewhere that made Warren decide not to ask. "Yup."

She jabbed it into his arm before he could flinch.

He winced. "Oh, okay. Sure. No warning. I could've dodged that."

"Didn't," Chime said, cheerful as murder.

"Didn't," he echoed, and stood there while she drew it, muttering under his breath about nightmares and hedges and the creeping certainty that Lambert would one day dissect him with affection.

The walk to the pad was wordless. Chime darted ahead, practically skipping, cradling the vial of Warren's blood like it was treasure. Lambert followed her with a rapt, eerie sort of hunger that made several cadets instinctively step aside. Once the exchange was made, the group gathered, silent and taut.

Warren took one long breath, and without a word, he changed. One moment he was Warren, the next he was Vaeliyan, the shift so abrupt it made the air twitch. The bond rippled like it had been plucked. A flicker of gold cut across everyone's vision, sharp and fast as lightning, then was gone.

A few of the cadets stiffened. One of them cursed softly under their breath.

"Don't think about it," Vaeliyan said, voice steady. "The more you try to understand it, the more it'll give you a headache."

Only then did they step onto the pad, and then the meadow was gone.

The pits swallowed them.

They emerged into the vast preparation chamber, the air sharp with the cold sterility of machinery. The sub-instructors who had been milling about straightened fast, but Deck didn't let them linger.

"Velrock, Lambert, Wirk, you three are with the cadets," Deck said, jerking his chin toward a set of ascending lifts. "Skybox."

The named instructors obeyed without hesitation, falling in to escort the cadets. This would be their first time seeing the pit from above, and it showed. Even the boldest of them stared at the lift doors with wide-eyed tension, like they were about to be launched into orbit.

Deck himself strode toward a narrow stairwell spiraling down beneath the pit. "The rest of you," he said, glancing at the cluster of sub-instructors by the terminals, "with me."

The cadets caught the flash of steel in his grin before he disappeared below.

They didn't see what happened in the control room, but they felt it. The sub-instructors who returned to their stations had gone pale. Whatever Deck said down there carved the blood out of their faces. Later, they would learn the words: if anything gets out, you die. Imujin's words, not Deck's.

The cadets, meanwhile, reached the skybox.

The place felt like luxury condensed into architecture. Soft lighting, black marble floors, reclining seats reshaping themselves to the body. The panoramic window of 360° glass, letting them stand directly over the abyss and see the pit below without distortion, like standing on the edge of the world.

The pit spread below them like the inside of a scar, colossal and waiting.

Vaeliyan stepped forward until his reflection blurred into the glass. The pit stirred. A low vibration began, a heartbeat through stone. Light bled across the walls as the sim systems woke. The air shimmered, then tore open.

Reality fell away.

The pit filled with sky.

A sun flared from nothing, burning white over a vast expanse of green-gold plains that stretched forever in every direction. No walls. No end. No cover. Just endless horizon rolling out beneath a dome of burning blue.

The endless plane.