Yellow Jacket

The house still stank of metal, ash, and blood.

Florence crouched by one of the plated corpses, sleeves rolled, eyes hard. The creature, or what used to be a person, lay split at the gut, its insides no longer flesh but wire-laced pulp. Patches of armor plating had fused directly to the bone. Some seams were hand-welded. Others were grafted with melted composite. The mouth was sewn shut with black-thread filament, lips torn at the edges from struggling. The blindfold had melted into its orbital ridges. No markings. No system pulse. Just ruin.

"This wasn't formed through the System," she said.

Wren hovered behind her, Florence didn't need to look back to feel Wren's stare.

"It's not just modification," Florence continued. "This is guided corruption. Biomech layering. Whoever did this knew exactly what they wanted it to survive, and what they wanted it not to remember."

She reached for a narrow-bladed probe and slipped it between the plating seams. A soft crunch answered her motion. Beneath the armor, synthetic musculature twitched with residual current, slow, spasmodic, fading. She dug deeper, exposing a bundle of composite nerves laced in nanofiber. Her eyes narrowed.

"These nerves weren't grown. They were printed."

Wren blinked. "Printed?"

Florence nodded. "Layered like code. Engineered for input, not response. This thing wasn't reacting to pain or fear. It was running a loop. Command-driven. Probably signal-locked to an external relay."

Car approached from the ruined front door, boots crunching glass.

"How many?" Florence asked without looking up.

"Five," Car said. "Confirmed. Guards are sweeping the perimeter now. They've started the patchwork. Wall's going to need new anchors."

Florence leaned in closer, peeled back a section of chest plating. What she found made her pause. Inside, beneath the ribs, if you could call them that, was a mesh lattice surrounding a node the size of a plum.

"What is that?" Wren asked.

Florence didn't answer right away. "Looks like an anchor hub. Old tech. Pre-System interface port, maybe adapted. Hardwired. No data link."

"You mean someone had to be close to control it?"

"No," she said, voice grim. "I mean someone wrote its final commands directly into its flesh."

Car knelt beside her. "This tech isn't public."

Florence gave a slow nod. "It's off-grid fabrication. Private sector or rogue military, maybe even Empire. But it's not Green Zone standard."

"You saying Lucas made these?" Car asked.

"No," she said. "Lucas bought them. Or leased them. These things were more like guided drones, point them at a target and get out of the way. No feedback. No tactics. Just impact."

She didn't look at Warren when she said it. But she didn't need to.

He stood near the hearth, where the blood had pooled deepest. His truncheon rested across both hands, body still, eyes unreadable. A man listening to ghosts. Five cats draped across him like offerings. Styll was in his hood. Bastard on his shoulder. Three more balanced in his lap, and the fat one had claimed his boots. He didn't speak loudly. Just muttered under his breath, "This is too many cats. Please, dear gods, someone help me."

No one moved.

Florence adjusted her grip on a surgical clamp. Car checked a guard's grip on the new weld plates. Grix gnawed on her ration bar, one eye closed like she might nap mid-chew.

Warren stared ahead, voice lower now. "They're multiplying."

Styll shifted in his hood and yawned.

He sighed. "This is it. This how I die. Buried alive in fur."

Still, no one helped him.

He considered standing, then thought better of it. The cats were perfectly balanced, like living ornaments arranged by entropy.

Behind him, a beam creaked. A guard cursed quietly. Dust rained from above.

Florence reached for a secondary scalpel. She began cutting through another segment of the corpse's plated exterior.

"These layers go deep," she muttered. "This was done piece by piece. Not printed whole. They wanted it to hurt during installation."

Wren's face paled. "Why?"

"To break the body's resistance. Pain changes how flesh learns. Makes it obedient."

Car grunted, his voice low. "Sounds more like torture than tech."

Florence's voice didn't soften. "In this case, it's both."

She pulled the plating free with a pop. The tissue beneath it was raw, exposed, and still twitching.

"Residual energy," she said. "This one wasn't told stop when the it died. It is still trying to move."

Grix leaned over the railing above, a sandwich half-unwrapped in her hand. "You think they felt it?"

Florence shrugged. "If they did, it didn't stop them."

Wren finally spoke. "Did they volunteer?"

Florence paused. The scalpel hovered.

"I don't think they were asked."

She set the tool down and reached for a small sensor disc. As she placed it against the spine, the readout flickered once, then held dark.

"No chip," she said. "Not even a ruined one."

"But it moved like a Brute," Wren said.

Florence nodded slowly. "That's the point. It was designed to mimic. But it's something else entirely. Like someone studied the Broken and rebuilt them from scratch. Cleaner. Simpler. Obedient."

Car glanced toward the hole in the wall. "And stronger."

"Yes," Florence said. "Much."

Warren watched in silence. He said nothing as she lifted the corpse's head and tilted it slightly. The stitch line across the mouth was almost surgical.

Florence sighed. "The sewing wasn't symbolic. It was structural. They weren't supposed to speak."

She leaned closer again, probing behind the ear ridge with a narrow pick. A faint click sounded.

"What is it?" Wren asked.

Florence didn't answer immediately. She pinched something small between her fingers and lifted it into the light. A metal tag, thin as a scalpel's edge, barely etched. The markings weren't in any known language,at least, not one she recognized.

Florence frowned, turned it twice, then slipped it into her coat.

"Unknown sigil," she said. "I'll log it. Later."

Grix muttered, "Good. Last thing I want is a Broken that talks back."

Florence stood again, wiping her gloves. "They weren't Broken. They were something worse. Something built to pass for Broken. And that means whoever made them wants the System to be blamed."

Silence followed.

Warren finally spoke. "Who sent them, then?"

Car shook his head. "Don't know."

Florence's mouth tightened. "They weren't bait. They weren't scouts. They were payload. Whoever used them wanted us dead,and didn't care what got caught in the blast radius."

Florence nodded. "Collateral. Efficient. Impersonal."

Warren stared at the ruined face, the stitched mouth, the melted eyes. "We'll make sure it isn't forgotten. But it won't stop us."

Florence met his eyes. "You sure?"

He nodded. "Let them watch. Let them write it down. But only I decide what it means."

Grix raised her sandwich like a toast. "To the world's worst science project."

She chewed for a beat, then added, "Next time someone sends one of those meat-missiles our way, I vote we redirect it. Find a target that deserves the mess."

Car didn't respond, but his smirk said everything.

Wren stroked Bastard's fur. The cat shifted in his sleep, unbothered by the tension in the room.

The smell of burning metal drifted from the wall as a guard started welding again.

Outside, the wind began to change direction.

Inside, they prepared for war.

Outside, guards hammered new brackets into the foundation wall. Welders sizzled. Wires sparked. The front breach was being reinforced with scavenged beams and repurposed support girders from the courtyard's destroyed shuttle rack. Every time someone touched the outer gate, dust fell from the ceiling. The air stank of metal, sweat, and scorched stone.

Veric worked the top bracket, his gloves blackened with carbon and heat scoring. He muttered something about needing a new spool of bonding wire, then yelled for Holt, who'd been dragging a beam solo and looked ready to throw it at someone. Holt grunted in reply and kept dragging, sweat streaking down the side of his neck like a leaking valve.

Jonas stood near the rebar pile, sleeves rolled, mixing old cement with water from the rooftop barrel. He cursed when the second mixer broke and resorted to using a rusted rod to stir by hand. "It's still better than fieldwork," he muttered. "At least concrete doesn't shoot back."

Near the archway, Johanna was sorting through stacked fasteners, double-checking the length of rebar anchors against the schematics etched into the wall with charcoal. Her hand was still wrapped from where Bastard had latched onto her wrist. She winced every time she had to twist a bolt or grip the tension clamps. Each piece of hardware she passed over was tagged with flagging tape Florence had color-coded earlier for stress points.

"These are wrong-gauge," she muttered, holding up a bundle of rusted ties. She tossed them aside and kept sorting, doing her best to ignore Bastard completely, though her eyes kept drifting to the cat like she expected round two.

Tamsin, wiry and quick-fingered, worked the lamps near the perimeter. He whistled through a gap in his teeth, setting each oil lamp with practiced efficiency. He'd been the one to fill Car in on what Lucas had pulled at the bazaar. Every few minutes, he'd glance at the eastern corner like he expected another fire.

Stolen novel; please report.

One of the newer guards, a younger woman named Reyna, paced near the partially sealed wall, keeping watch while pretending not to. Her knuckles were scabbed. She hadn't spoken since the siege.

Car supervised with arms crossed. He said nothing, just watched. Behind his eyes was calculation: supply lists, structural integrity, fallback routes. He counted the beams laid down, the bolts driven in, the angles of the supports. His mind worked faster than his mouth ever did. But when he turned and caught sight of Bastard on Wren's lap, his shoulders eased. A fraction. Just enough.

Florence joined him, wiping grease from her hands with an old towel. "We'll hold," she said.

"We better," Car replied. "Because if they come again we might not be able to stop them."

Florence glanced back inside. "We'll make sure there isn't a next time."

Later, Warren found Florence in her workshop. She was cleaning tools, sterilizing blades. The table beside her was lined with fragments, cleaned, cataloged, inactive.

Warren stepped closer, then paused. "I wanted to show you something."

Florence raised a brow, still wiping a scalpel. "Something wrong?"

"I leveled up," he said. "At the end of the fight. But that's not why. I want you to see what happens when I allocate stat points."

Florence looked at him, more curious now than concerned. "Why?"

"Because," Warren said, voice low, "every time I do, it's like I'm being ripped apart. The pain isn't normal. No one else talks about it. No one warned me."

Florence froze for a second, then slowly set the scalpel down. "What pain? There shouldn't be pain. The System handles the pain receptors itself. The integration is supposed to be seamless."

Warren met her eyes. "Yeah. The System doesn't really work with me."

Florence didn't respond right away. She turned, moved to her terminal, and activated a signal scrambler. A soft whine pulsed through the walls as the air changed slightly, like the room itself had closed its ears.

She turned back to him. "Okay. Let's see it. Just know,I'm here. If anything happens, I'm staying right here."

Warren nodded. He didn't flinch.

Then he dropped.

No warning. No hesitation. Just collapse. His body hit the ground like a puppet cut loose, limbs rigid as his back arched and a sound ripped from his throat that didn't sound human.

Florence lunged forward, but didn't touch him. His eyes were open, unblinking, staring through the ceiling. His fingers clawed at the floor, every muscle locked tight.

Beneath his skin, something moved,like a second skeleton trying to tear its way free. The nanites surged with a purpose Florence couldn't track, couldn't predict. They weren't repairing. They were rewriting.

He convulsed again. Blood welled in his gums. His nose. His eyes didn't blink.

Florence crouched next to him, voice steady but urgent. "Warren. I'm here. You're not alone. Just breathe. Try to breathe."

But breathing wasn't part of it. The System had no interface for this. There were no stabilization commands. No overload warnings.

Just pain. And motion. And Warren enduring it like a body made of wire.

She reached for a shock brace and hesitated. If she grounded him, would it help or trigger more nanite resistance?

He shuddered one last time, but it wasn't stillness that followed. It was a change in cadence.

His jaw clenched, teeth grinding together so hard Florence could hear enamel crack. His spine twisted unnaturally, vertebrae locking and unlocking in spasms. Every muscle along his limbs rippled like waves rolling beneath skin.

Then his arms snapped out, fists slamming to the floor hard enough to bruise bone. His back arched again, and this time, Florence saw it,just beneath the skin along his ribs, tiny silver threads surged, cutting lines through muscle tissue like surgical wires unraveling a body from the inside out.

He wasn't bleeding. But his body pulsed with heat. Steam rose off his skin in bursts. His veins glowed faintly in places, as though something metallic was coursing through them faster than blood had ever moved.

His mouth opened, but no words came. Just a ragged, shuddering breath that caught halfway out and stayed there.

Florence watched in stunned silence as his shoulders jolted. Bone shifted beneath the skin. Not broke. Shifted. Realigned.

The hum of nanite activity wasn't audible, but she could feel it. Like static pressure in the room. His nervous system was alight. His brain was burning.

A sudden twitch ran down his left leg, and she saw the calf muscle split open for a heartbeat,skin parting like it had been sliced with perfect precision, only to re-seal just as fast. No blood. Just white light behind the wound.

Then his eyes rolled back. And everything stopped.

Florence nearly reached again,then flinched. His pupils returned. But they were wrong.

Not just wide or dilated. Wrong.

They glowed.

Not in a radiant way. Not like a System-activated shimmer. They were floodlit from within. Cold. Lurid. As if someone had poured raw electricity behind his retinas.

She stared, horrified, as the sclera clouded over. Thin patterns traced themselves across the whites of his eyes, like filigree etching itself in real time. Silver lines. Flowcharts. Circuitry. And then it moved.

She leaned closer.

The nanites were inside his eyes. Not metaphorically. Not system-side. Literally. Deconstructing the surface layer of his optical nerves and rebuilding them as she watched. The cornea peeled back layer by layer,so thin she could only tell from the shift in light,and nanites flooded in to replace what they destroyed.

His iris twitched. Reacted. Not to her. To something unseen.

Florence covered her mouth. It wasn't pain anymore. It was transformation.

His hands clawed the floor again, fingertips grinding against steel. Then his breath caught.

And screamed.

Not a sound. A wave. Like the air shook to accommodate it. The workshop lights flickered. The scramble field wavered. For one second, she thought the entire system might collapse under the pressure of his body refusing what it had been told to become.

Then all at once, his body seized. Froze. Locked.

Then fell.

Warren hit the floor like gravity had just remembered him.

Florence knelt closer, pressed her fingers to his pulse. Still there. Faint. But steady.

Above her, the lights stopped flickering. The scramble field hummed steady again. The room returned to silence.

Except for him.

Warren lay still, but his eyes remained open. Still glowing. Still marked by whatever had burned through them.

Florence didn't dare blink.

Because he was still in there. But something else had been built alongside him.

Then, quietly, the signal field pinged.

Her Skill lit up,low, warm, and metallic. A whisper through the current. She tuned to it without thinking, the way she'd been trained. The nanites weren't silent.

Her throat went dry. "What are you doing to him?"

He told us what to become. We are becoming it. Stat allocation is a command. We obey.

Florence glanced back at Warren's trembling form. "He's in pain. You're hurting him."

Yes. We cannot suppress pain. That module was not preserved. Pain is systemic. Not optional.

She clenched her jaw. "Why now? Why does it get worse?"

Each allocation increases divergence. More structure is required. More replacement. We adapt. He persists. We advance.

Florence took a step back. Her fingers were shaking. "Advance into what?"

Integration. The organic shell is insufficient. Full efficiency requires structural conversion. At completion, the pain will stop.

Her voice came out quieter than she wanted. "Because there won't be anything left of him."

There will be Warren. There will always be Warren. Just less of the part that breaks.

She swallowed. It wasn't threatening. It wasn't even lying. This process was normal. It was how leveling worked for everyone,nanites gradually replacing organic matter, optimizing tissue, reinforcing structure. But the pain,that wasn't. Not unless you were Broken. She'd seen something like it once,years ago, in a prototype subject whose chip failed halfway through a rebuild. A Broken too far gone to speak but still trying to write its name on the walls with blood.

Florence knelt beside him, slower now. "You understand him?"

We are him. He told us so.

Outside, Wren sat with Bastard in the rear courtyard. The sky was pale with low smoke. She fed him tiny pieces of dried meat, her hands still stained.

Her thoughts wandered, but not far. They stayed close to the memory of it, of what she'd done. The way the air had changed, how the nanites had flowed from her skin into Bastard's small, broken body. Not magic. Not instinct. A Skill. The System had acknowledged it afterward, but she'd felt it before the words appeared.

[SKILL CREATED: MERCY'S CRY]

She hadn't understood it at first. Not fully. But now she could feel it, under her skin, behind her breath. Like a second heart waiting to be called.

The System had shown her the breakdown later. Three effects. Stabilization. Awareness. Memory. It wasn't a heal. It wasn't a resurrection. It was a refusal. A way to hold someone in place while the world tried to take them.

And it came with a cost. Her nanites had left her, flowed out to stabilize what couldn't hold itself together. While they worked, she had felt it: a drain in her limbs, a hollowness behind her eyes. Like her strength had gone with them. The System didn't protect her during it. It didn't buffer the stat loss. While she healed, she was vulnerable.

But when it was over, they came back. Not just returned, they came back smarter. Changed. They remembered what they'd done. What she'd told them to do. Her Skill grew with them.

The cats lounged nearby, as if nothing had changed.

But it had.

She had a Skill now. Not one she was trained for. Not one she could teach, Something born from grief, and discipline.

Florence had told her that most people got their class and then their Skills. That what Wren had done, creating one from nothing, meant something. Meant the System hadn't led her there. It had followed.

Wren didn't know what to call that feeling. But it had changed everything.

The System had jumped her straight to Level 5. From nothing. From zero. Just one act, one moment, one Skill, and she was now almost at Warren's level. That thought made her chest tighten.

Because he hadn't made his Skill yet. And if hers had come from who she was, from what she couldn't bear to lose, then what would Warren's be born from?

She didn't know. That was the problem. Mercy's Cry was her,every piece of it matched what she couldn't help but do. And when she thought about the others, the ones she did know, it tracked. Florence's Skill fit her like armor. Car's had probably been born fully formed. Even Grix, though she hadn't seen it yet, probably had something chaotic and sharp that matched her laugh.

But Warren?

She let herself imagine. Something terrifying, probably. A stealth-based one that let him vanish into puddles. A shadow-swap. A memory eater. Or something worse. Something like… cat magnetism. Maybe he summoned all cats within a sector to form a purring swarm of death. That would explain so much.

Or he'd get something simpler. A weapon master. Like Car. Or worse: he'd get nothing, and still walk through a fight like he was made of iron.

Wren wasn't sure which version scared her more. The stealth-killer. The silent god. The master of every weapon. But no,the cat one was the worst. By far. A walking swarm of claws, smug purring, and chaos. That one? That was the stuff of nightmares.

She reached down and scratched behind Bastard's ears. "You'd warn me if he made you go full monster, wouldn't you?"

The cat ignored her. But she chose to believe the answer was yes.

Warren woke with blood in his mouth.

It wasn't his first time.

His throat was raw, like he'd been screaming. His body ached, not like bruises or breaks, but like something deeper had been stirred and left unfinished. His arms didn't obey at first. His legs were heavier than they should be. Every breath tasted like metal.

The light was low, but soft. He knew that meant Florence was nearby.

He turned his head slowly. Saw her crouched by the table, replacing used tools into a folded cloth. She wasn't shaking. Wasn't frantic. Just methodical. Tired, but grounded.

"Florence," he rasped.

She was at his side before he could blink. "Don't move yet."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. And don't lie."

He tried to sit up anyway. He got halfway before his hands gave out. She caught him easily, one arm around his shoulder, the other bracing his spine.

This wasn't a wound. This wasn't something that would scab over. The pain was residue,left behind by the nanites as they restructured parts of him even he didn't understand.

Florence eased him upright and sat back on her heels, watching him with that look. The one she used for puzzles she didn't like the shape of.

"You were out for a long time," she said.

He nodded once. "Didn't stay conscious for it."

"That's probably the only reason you're still breathing."

He didn't argue.

"I scanned what I could while it was happening," she continued. "There's structural replacement at the bone level now. Your femur's partially laced. Optical nerves are… not optical anymore."

Warren touched his temple. "Still me?"

She didn't answer right away. Then she said, "Enough."

He accepted that.

"You'll need rest. Real rest. Not just pacing yourself between fights."

"No time for that."

"I'm not asking."

He looked up. There was something in her voice, more than clinical. She wasn't afraid for him. She was angry that he'd keep doing it.

He leaned forward, trying again to stand. She helped him, slow but firm, until he was on his feet. The world tilted for a second, then settled.

"I'm still here," he said.

She nodded. "For now."

He stayed upright, breathing slow, trying to read her face. She wasn't done.

"This is normal," she said, quietly. "At least, for people like you. The System wasn't built to handle Aberrants, but the nanites still follow the rules they were programmed with. It will get better. Eventually. But not soon."

He waited.

"It gets worse before it stops. The pain, I mean. Every level adds more replacement. More nanite systems overwritten. I've seen models that suggest it peaks around level fifty. If you survive that long, if you can hold yourself together past that point, you'll have passed the worst of it. The body won't be fighting the changes anymore. It'll be the changes."

Warren folded his arms. "Fifty is insane. I've never heard of anyone outside the Green Zones making it past forty. Most cap out at ten."

Florence raised an eyebrow.

"You know two, at least," she added, voice flat.

He blinked once. "You. And Car."

Florence didn't confirm or deny. She just looked at him like someone who had already climbed that hill,and remembered every step.

"I've got something for you." Florence added. "Injections. They're not perfect, but they can help. You take one right before a stat allocation. It doesn't stop the pain. But it slows it. Dulls the initial surge. You won't black out from it."

"What's the tradeoff?"

"The pain lasts longer. Spreads out. Instead of five minutes of hell, it's five hours of slow-burning fire. Less risk of collapse. But harder to ignore."

He weighed it.

"I'll mark the dosage," she said. "Keep it close. Use it only when you have to. And... sometimes it might be better to just pass out, if you're safe and have people to watch over you."

She smiled at him, just a little. "You're not alone anymore. You have us. You have Wren. Even Grixalia would probably give up a nap for you."

He nodded. "Thanks."

"I'm not doing this for thanks. I'm doing this because you're family."

Warren looked at her for a long moment. Then, casually but not without weight, he asked, "Who is Grix to you exactly?"

Florence leaned back on her heels. Her mouth twitched like she might smirk, but didn't.

"She stole from me. Years ago. Thought I wouldn't notice a toolkit missing a laser pick and two vials of sealant. She was wrong."

Warren raised an eyebrow.

"I caught her in the ventilation duct with a sandwich and a stolen comms receiver. She offered to share the sandwich like that made it better."

"What happened?"

"I made her put everything back. Then I gave her a job. It was a pretty good sandwich, honestly. If she wasn't so scatterbrained, she probably would've made it out before I noticed."

Warren chuckled.

Florence shrugged. "She's not blood. But she bleeds with us. That's close enough."

Warren Smith — Level 7

Class: Scavenger

Alignment: Aberrant

Unallocated Stat Points: 0

Attributes:

Strength: 9

Perception: 13

Intelligence: 16

Dexterity: 10

Endurance: 9

Resolve: 13