Yellow Jacket

Vaeliyan saw the numbers shifting at the edge of his visor, Barcus's kill count climbing like a breaking tide. Each flash of the counter tightened something in his chest. The gap between them was closing fast. Too fast. The sim tallied every death instantly, and the rising count pressed at him like a physical weight. If he waited any longer, Barcus would overtake him, and this entire trial would end as nothing more than a footnote.

Time to stop holding back.

He holstered Father's Promise mid-stride, the weapon locking to his thigh with a clean magnetic snap. His hand reached over his shoulder, fingers curling around the smooth black frame strapped to his back, the weapon that none of the others had seen him use yet, the one he had built for moments like this.

The Stinger came free with a low hum, black plating unfolding as it activated, tiny filaments of light crawling across its surface like veins. It felt weightless in his grip, a sleek extension of intent.

The modified lance flared to life the moment he gripped it, pressure vents whispering as its systems engaged, its surface shimmering with faint ripples from the power cycling through it. The air bent slightly around the barrel as he raised it. Vaeliyan leveled the weapon at the mass of oncoming enemies, took a single steadying breath, and squeezed the trigger.

The result was annihilation.

Flechette bursts ripped through row after row of combatants like they were made of nothing, like they were made of paper, made of air. Bodies erupted into static mid-stride, disintegrating before they could even cry out. The Stinger howled in his hands, silent and smooth as its force vanished into him, and everything in its path simply ceased to exist. Targets evaporated on contact, dissolving into flickering fragments before their bodies even started to fall. The ground where they'd stood was scoured clean, the sim desperately respawning replacements as fast as the Stinger erased them. It almost looked like the world was unravelling in front of him, a hole being torn through reality faster than it could heal. The visual field juddered from the rate of removal, enemies loading in only to be stripped from existence in the same instant.

Out of the corner of his vision, Barcus responded.

The orbiting daggers slowed, shifting positions mid-spin, their once-fluid rhythm now breaking into sharp precise lines. The pattern was unmistakable: he was shifting strategy. And then something new slid from the sheaths at his hips, thin, gleaming discs that caught the light as they spun up into the air. Bladed rings. They glinted as they joined the formation, replacing the heavier daggers one by one, arcs of silver carving through the haze of dissolving soldiers.

Barcus wasn't simply summoning more. Each time one of the discs rose, one of the daggers peeled out of orbit and snapped back to his waiting hand, vanishing into its sheath with mechanical precision. Only then did the new ring take its place. He was collecting and trading them out mid-fight, recycling his arsenal while never breaking rhythm. The old daggers reappeared at his hips like obedient pets, while the new discs screamed outward, cutting through the air so fast they left silver streaks behind them. The seamless flow of recovery and release looked less like combat and more like an act of sculpting, reshaping the battlefield with every breath.

Vaeliyan tracked them automatically, his visor attempting to follow their spirals and failing, the outlines splintering into noise. They sliced through enemies in perfect loops, carving lines of dismemberment through clustered ranks. Limbs spun away. Heads were severed in passing. Anything they touched simply opened and came apart, like the world itself had decided to fall into pieces around Barcus. The discs curved on impossible paths, deflecting off one another like ricocheting thoughts, and then returned to his orbit with flawless timing.

Barcus's capacity was real after all. He could only maintain so many blades at once. But the discs were lighter, sleeker, nothing wasted on hilts or grips, just pure edges, all cutting surface, no weight where it wasn't needed. Their streamlined design meant he could accelerate them faster, and he did. The air around him blurred with their velocity, his silhouette fading behind the spinning rings, his figure now only a suggestion wrapped in glinting motion.

They danced around him in wide arcs, faster than the daggers had ever moved, blurring like halos of metal as they shredded everything that came near. Even the fog-marked soldiers moved out of their way, giving the whirling discs a wide berth as they tore through anyone untouched by the purple corruption. The fog-born fought alongside him in eerie silence, and still he stood unmoving, issuing death like the eye of a storm. Through it all, Barcus remained perfectly still, calm and silent at the center of his storm, a statue surrounded by endless death, while Vaeliyan felt the weight of the falling numbers pressing against him like a silent clock.

Vaeliyan shifted his stance, the Stinger balanced lightly in his hands. He flicked the small switch near its grip with his thumb. No noise marked the change, no flash, no flare of light. The weapon didn't shift in shape or tone at all. But he felt the difference immediately as its firing pattern adjusted, switching from single high-caliber strikes into a rapid burst mode. The change was seamless, invisible to anyone watching, yet the air around him seemed to tense as if it could sense what was coming. It was like the battlefield itself recognized the shift, like even the sim's fabricated air held its breath, waiting for what came next.

Then he fired.

The air filled with clean lines of silent death as he swept the lance across the incoming ranks. Flechette clusters poured out in quick, precise bursts, not so much shots as streams of shearing force that carved through the battlefield in glowing arcs of destruction. Dozens of combatants dissolved in waves, erased before they could even take shape. The sim stuttered under the sudden acceleration of death, its seamless reality fluttering at the edges as it scrambled to replace the fallen fast enough to matter. The floor plates flickered beneath his boots as they were reconstructed, fragments of half-rendered enemies collapsing back into static before they even formed heads or limbs. The air shimmered faintly as fresh waves spawned into existence, only to be torn apart just as quickly. His kill count surged like a rising tide, climbing almost in lockstep with Barcus's now, each number snapping forward so fast it almost blurred.

Where Barcus carved spirals of collapse into the formation, Vaeliyan scoured entire corridors of space clean in methodical sweeps, the battlefield splitting between their paths of ruin. Bastard and Styll kept pace on his flanks, Bastard plowing through anything that slipped past Vaeliyan's fire while Styll ricocheted from dissolving form to dissolving form, slicing down stragglers that survived his volleys for even a second. Bastard's claws cracked the floor plating and sent shockwaves through the formations, while Styll's blurred leaps stitched streaks of silver static through anything still moving. They moved like they had trained for this, like they had always been meant to do this together, and for a heartbeat Vaeliyan almost forgot the sim wasn't real. It felt too seamless, too perfect, the rhythm of their destruction too clean to be accidental.

Yet as he worked, part of his mind stayed on Barcus.

The purple fog streamed steadily from the seams of the other cadet's helmet, pouring outward in slow drifts, curling around ankles and pooling in depressions in the floor. It crept in tendrils like curious fingers, winding through the chaos, sliding beneath the feet of the enemy. When it touched one of them, it plunged inside like a living spear. The reaction was immediate. They froze. Their eyes flooded purple from within, and then they moved, jerky at first, then fluid, turning on their allies with cold precision. Barcus's kill counter ticked upward each time one of them fell, whether by his discs or their own corrupted kin. Vaeliyan could see the subtle chain of cause, the ripples spreading through their formation like cracks spidering through glass, everything folding inward on Barcus as if the world wanted to kneel.

Vaeliyan tracked them automatically between bursts. The fog-born soldiers fought without sound, without panic, without self. They didn't flinch when struck. They didn't scream when cut down. They simply attacked until they dissolved into static, leaving thin trails of purple mist behind like ghosts of their stolen breath. Each time one fell, another breathed in the drifting fog, and the cycle began again. And every death counted for Barcus. It wasn't just control. It was infection. Conversion. A slow silent collapse of the enemy from the inside out, the front lines corroding like metal left in acid.

Vaeliyan narrowed his eyes behind the visor. That meant they counted as his.

It wasn't just the fog. The daggers, no, the discs now, still carved through enemies, weaving among the purple-marked converts without touching them. They spun faster than before, sleek rings of metal that traced lethal arcs between the corrupted puppets like trained beasts. They were controlled, guided, alive in their own way. He watched them bank and pivot without momentum, changing direction mid-flight with no visible impulse. Not just flying, but being moved. The way they bent space around them reminded him of his own weapon under the pull of All Around You, except these weren't tools of the field. They were part of Barcus.

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It wasn't three separate abilities. It was one. Or it had become one.

Barcus's Soul Skill.

It was some sort of puppetry. That was the base of it, manipulating inanimate objects, but it had grown. It had evolved. The fog allowed him to extend that control into living targets, twisting them into puppets as easily as his blades. The daggers weren't tools; they were part of him, just as much as the fog was. He could command both. The boundary between steel and flesh didn't matter to him anymore. It was all the same. All just material to be guided. He had erased the distinction between matter and will, between object and organism. Everything in reach existed only to serve his intent.

Vaeliyan's stomach tightened. If they ever fought for real, if this wasn't the sim, if they met outside this place, he couldn't breathe near him. He couldn't let himself breathe near him. If the fog touched him, if it got inside… it wouldn't just kill him. It would make him part of Barcus's will. And Vaeliyan couldn't imagine anything worse than being remade as someone else's weapon.

Barcus was terrifying.

Luckily for Vaeliyan, he didn't give two flying fucks about what anyone tried to put in his lungs. All Around You would have crushed it before it could even reach him, grinding it to nothing long before it had the chance to matter. Any attempt to take control of him through breath would die screaming in the pressure before it ever touched his blood, erased by the weight saturating the air around him. His presence didn't reject foreign influence, it obliterated it. The field accepted nothing he didn't wish it to.

The true shape of All Around You wasn't meant for, duels or clean single kills, but the wholesale erasure of battlefields. It was overwhelming force made into atmosphere. Against a single opponent the second form was preferable, but against many, the base form was perfect. Normally, this form took time to set up, time he was rarely given in real combat. But he had been given it when Bastard and Styll took on the earlier waves, and that made all the difference. Once the field reached the saturation point, the numbers stopped mattering. These base sim combatants were never designed to endure something like this. If they breathed, they lost. If they had lungs, bones, joints, anything crushable, they lost. The only thing that could break this was something far stronger, something too dense to fold or too alien to breathe, and this wave test wasn't going to throw that at him. Not yet. Until then, he would be locked on the same level as Barcus, but no number of these baseline enemies would drag him down.

It was time to stop pretending this was still a test. Time to stop pretending this was a contest of points or pride. This was about domination. About proving that nothing set against him could stand, and that the world itself could be made to kneel if he pushed hard enough.

He called back the spear, splitting it apart and sliding the halves home at his hips. The Stinger Lance locked to his back with a quiet snap as he straightened to his full height. The air shuddered. The field around him deepened, thickened, grew heavier, warping subtly as if gravity itself had grown bored of resisting him. Dust motes froze. The air seemed to thicken like syrup; every molecule dragged to a halt under invisible weight. Even the visual flicker of spawning enemies seemed to slow as if reality itself was second-guessing the choice to let them exist in his presence. He had been laying this snare since the first step into the sim, since Bastard first hit the field and shook the ground apart with his charge. Every kill had only thickened the atmosphere, every breath another stone added to the invisible mountain pressing down on this place. His companions had been cutting through the world, but Vaeliyan had been burying it. Now it was ready.

He let it go.

Pressure spiked.

The floor groaned. The distant simulated horizon cracked like a pane of glass flexing under strain. An enemy trying to spawn in directly ahead collapsed mid-breath, their chest folding inward like paper under a boot. Another dissolved before they even fully rendered, crushed into mist by an unseen hand. A third managed half a step before their helmet crumpled around their skull like wet cloth and they vanished into static. A fourth tried to scream and didn't even manage that, their throat crushed flat as their eyes burst inward. Vaeliyan walked forward, calm and slow, and with every footfall the space ahead of him tightened, compressed, crushed. His steps didn't echo. They thudded like falling stones.

Invisible death swept the field.

Helmets imploded. Lungs seized and stopped. Bones fractured under forces they couldn't see. Eyes popped, ribs bowed inward, joints snapped under invisible hands. Anyone who drew breath long enough for it to matter found it weaponized against them, their own air turned hostile and cruel. They staggered, choked, and dissolved into static as the sim desperately tried to replace them faster than they could be erased. It couldn't. The system fell behind, broken by the sheer pace of destruction. The floor shimmered from constant respawn failures as if reality itself was fraying at the seams.

All Around You had saturated the arena far beyond the reach of Barcus's small circle of puppetry. This was not control. It was not manipulation. This was pressure made sentient, and it obeyed him absolutely.

Enemies were dying before they could even finish spawning. The moment their feet touched the ground, the field ripped them apart. Some dissolved in midair, undone before they even reached the floor. Their weapons shattered to dust in their hands before their bodies had even fully formed. The sim tried to refill the ranks in clusters, accelerating its spawn cycles to catch up, and Vaeliyan simply erased them all the same. They arrived in formation and vanished like illusions, like smoke, leaving only stillness in their place.

Vaeliyan wasn't fighting anymore. He was erasing. He was the void given shape, and the world was being peeled away around him. It was like walking through wet paper, through hollow shells, through ideas of soldiers that hadn't yet been allowed to become real. And he denied them reality.

He wasn't sure if there was going to be an end to the slaughter he could unleash now that he had stopped holding back. At this pace, he wasn't even competing with Barcus anymore. Barcus fought battles. Barcus carved victories.

Vaeliyan was killing the concept of resistance. He was dismantling the act of existence itself. He spawn-killed the world around him.

Vaeliyan started singing to himself, and the song was unsettling in how calm it sounded. It was about letting bodies hit the floor, and the wave of combatants that Barcus and his army were fighting was contrasted by the fact that there was nothing left standing on Vaeliyan's side. He didn't slow down. He didn't falter. He just kept going, a single shape moving through a void of erased enemies while the world rebuilt around his feet and dissolved again before it could matter.

At this point, Vaeliyan wasn't even fighting so much as observing, watching Barcus become buried under the sheer mass of enemies that never stopped spawning. It was impressive in its own way. Barcus's Soul Skill let him puppet what looked like hundreds of bladed rings and just as many purple-fogged puppet soldiers at once, each one moving like an extension of his own body. But even that had limits. Vaeliyan could see the edges of them now, the hesitation when his frontline cracked and he had to reassert control before they folded completely. It was a remarkable display, but still finite. That seemed to be his cap, at least at this level.

All Around You wasn't finite. It was made to destroy battlefields in its base form if given enough time to fully saturate an area, and Vaeliyan had been given more than enough time. Nothing was going to change that now. The pressure he had built was too dense to push through, and the space around him was so saturated that even trying to spawn inside it got things crushed before they could exist. He wasn't dueling anyone anymore. He was collapsing a battlefield around himself until nothing living could fit inside it. So he just waited for it to happen. There it was. Barcus's lines started to buckle. The combatants on his side began to resist more, but not fast enough.

Barcus's purple fog pushed into them, swelling their frames, making their movements heavier, their blows harder. The new combatants seemed to be able to shrug off damage long enough to kill more than they were losing, but the pattern was clear. As soon as Barcus had a replacement for every fallen soldier, the replacements were stronger, but fewer. He was bleeding power with every cycle. His army was self-perpetuating, but not limitless. It relied on a ratio of conversions to kills, and that ratio was slowly tipping out of his favor. At some point, his attrition would fail. Vaeliyan had no attrition. There were no survivors on his side, no soldiers to lose.

Vaeliyan called out without looking away from the carnage. "Ruby, is there a way to speed this up? Because if this is the level of combatants, you're going to make me fight, I can do this forever. As long as they breathe or have anything I can crush, they don't stand a chance. I don't really want to waste my time or yours. If there's a point in the fight we can skip to, I'd be fine with that too."

He gestured toward the empty field around him, still silent under the weight of his pressure. "Look. Nothing. Ruby, or whoever's running this, there really isn't a point unless you think something dangerous to my skill is coming. Otherwise, this is just… pointless."

Then he pointed at Barcus. "Now, him. The amount of bodies he's dropping is spectacular. Honestly. And his army protects him well. Every time they fall, he takes others. So, his army is virtually endless, as long as he can infect them. But even with that, this is starting to feel like a waste of time. So, are we skipping ahead or not?"

His tone was flat. Detached. He wasn't even angry, just curious if the people running this sim actually understood what they were testing. His side was silent. Still. Empty. Even the sim seemed hesitant to spawn anything near him anymore.

A new voice answered, one that wasn't Ruby. It was deeper. Calm. "Alright, son. Let's see if you can handle this."

The sim stuttered. The world froze. Then it shifted.

Barcus blinked out of place and reappeared standing among an entirely different force, soldiers far larger and heavier than the ones before, plated in thick segmented armor that clanked with each step. They carried weapons so massive they looked like they had been ripped off fortress walls, all jagged teeth and brutal edges meant to crack siege doors instead of bodies. Even from here, Vaeliyan could tell time had jumped. The waves of enemies he had been seeing were not these. These were something else entirely, something from deeper in the records, from long after first waves.

"Well, good luck," the voice said. "This is the point Barcus dies."