Yellow Jacket

Florence had just finished installing another chip, working side by side with Dr. Morgan. What had started as a professional partnership had evolved into something much more fluid and instinctual. The two of them moved through the process with practiced ease, each gesture sharpened by repetition, each task automated through understanding. Over the past few months, they had built something ruthlessly efficient: a living pipeline of installation, scanning, stabilization, and integration. They weren't just chipping people, they were reshaping Mara. At this pace, they were pushing the limits of what even Verdance tech thought possible.

Already, 53% of the Yellow had been chipped. And among the tribesmen, 38%, a staggering number, given their initial resistance, had taken the chip voluntarily. It was the first real sign that Florence's plan might work. And none of it would've been possible without Isol's design. His Original Legion chip still carried the bones of military tech, but the brutal failsafes had been stripped away. The redundancy layers made failure nearly impossible. The safety protocols were self-adjusting, adaptive. The only fatality so far had been an elderly man with three failing organs and no real chance of surviving anything invasive. By every clinical measure, he was already dead the moment he walked in.

But it hadn't deterred a soul. The Yellow of Mara were a hardy breed, shaped by scarcity and defiance. And the tribesmen? They weren't made of iron. They were iron. Resistant, proud, but not stupid. They saw what the chip meant: a step forward, a foothold into something bigger than surviving week to week.

While Florence handled the future, Car and Batu held the present together. They trained the Legion of Mara with discipline sharp enough to bleed. After Warren, Isol, and Jurpat had departed, the burden of martial readiness had fallen squarely on their shoulders. Most people hated the drills. They hated the bruises, the bug bars, the relentless grind. But no one could deny what it was doing. The Legion was growing, not just in numbers, but in power. In form. In edge. Everyone knew the real shift would come when Isol returned with the new curriculum. They talked about it like prophecy: classes, structure, drills that went beyond brutality into design. Until then, Car and Batu would keep carving warriors out of whatever came to them.

Cassian and Grix were still a mess, still orbiting each other in that unstable loop that only people in love or denial could manage. They had broken up. Gotten back together. Broken up again. It had become so common that people stopped reacting. Usually, it came down to Grix and what she felt like, or what the Spitter whispered in her head. She told Cassian one day that she needed space. That things weren't going how she'd pictured. Apparently,The Spitter had given her a divine quest, serious, sacred, and sealed. She wasn't allowed to speak a word about it. Not until Warren came back. And even then, maybe not.

Cassian didn't press. He figured it was over. Grix pulled away, and he let her. Until one night, deep in the off-hours, she found him again. No warnings. Just her hand on his collar, yanking him close. She leaned in, her breath sharp and hot against his skin, and whispered with absolute certainty:

"You will always be mine, Manmeat."

Cassian didn't know whether to laugh or run. So he stayed exactly where he was. Grix didn't need answers. She never did.

The Sons of Muk-Tah, Nanuk, Zal-raan, Mabok, Cu-lan, and now Senn, had become one of the defining tests for the Legion of Mara. Though not all of them were blood relatives, they carried the name as a title, a bond forged through purpose. Senn had been added after the trio had left, and she quickly proved herself not just worthy of the rank, but perhaps its most terrifying holder. She was faster than Mabok, more precise than Cu-lan, and while Nanuk had taken to Isol's training like a duck to water, even he had to struggle to keep pace with her by the end.

She was a force. Sharp, brutal, and beautiful in motion, Florence had once compared her to a bone knife: clean, deadly, and designed for use. Nanuk led, yes. He had earned that spot. But Senn chased him every step, and by the time the others realized it, she was already standing beside him. Muk-Tah had seen her in the park one day, watched her break a grown man's jaw with a sweep and slam, and offered her the name that same evening.

The Legion respected it. And so did the tribes.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Speaking of Muk-Tah, he and Ernala, along with the other tribal chiefs, had been the ones truly running the city in Warren's absence. It wasn't official. It wasn't formal. But no one questioned it. If they were honest with themselves, they knew it wasn't temporary. Even if Warren came back, even if he marched through the gates tomorrow, he wasn't the one holding the structure upright. They were. And they would be, long after.

The Green, at this point, had mostly folded into the new civic structure. Some came willingly. Some came bitterly. Most simply adapted. But there were always stragglers. Always outliers. A few ex-officials still thought they could bribe the tribes. Coerce them. Treat the new order like it was just a temporary tribal fever dream.

They had forgotten.

They had forgotten what it meant to live through Warren's rise. They had forgotten the mad charge of a boy dragging destiny behind him like a hammer. They had forgotten the night he stole the city from right under their teeth. The tribal chieftains hadn't. They had seen the moment the tide shifted, and who caused it. And more importantly, they knew Warren was not the kind of man you could simply replace. Not that the ex-Green leadership really wanted to. Most of them just wanted more room to feed. They had grown fat on Yellow suffering. Now they were being asked to work. To live. To earn.

One in particular had become a problem.

Frank Lurman. Second Assistant to the former Lord Mayor. A title he wore like a crown. Called it a high honor. Said the new Council of Mara should be begging for his involvement. They hadn't. But that didn't stop him. It emboldened him.

He had begun running ads across the city, holo-posters, flyers, back-channel broadcasts. Messaging that the Tidelord was a fraud. That Warren didn't exist. That the real leadership had collapsed into tribalism. He called Muk-Tah a glorified bandit. Ernala a glorified nursemaid.

There were whispers of dragging him into the street and roasting him. But Ernala, calm and sharp as ever, said to let it play out. Let him draw all the dissenters. All the discontents. Let them gather around his little banner. Once they were in one place, it would be easy to deal with them, cleanly, efficiently, without scattering the infection across the city.

It worked. Mostly.

The problem now was simple: they had no formal laws. No structure yet for trials, for sentencing. So Frank Lurman, self-proclaimed civic dignitary of the old regime, now pulled a plow through the southern fields. Yoke around his neck. Mud in his boots. Sweat pouring from his jowls.

They hadn't roasted the pig.

They'd broken him.

And every time someone walked past and saw him grunting against the weight of the cart, they nodded, not in cruelty, but understanding.

Mara was changing. And it didn't need permission.

The former Yellow had been transformed. What once was a maze of crumbling dwellings and collapsing steel bones had been shaped into something almost civilized, structured, functional, alive. The credit, mostly, went to Car and the guards from the Bazaar. Alongside the yellow scavvers who joined the expedition, they had cleared the rot. Buildings were salvaged when possible, repurposed when stable, and demolished when hopeless. The skyline still bore the scars of the old world, but the foundation was new. Clean. Intentional.

The Broken had mostly been eradicated. Their nests rooted out, their bodies burned, their frames stripped of as much blacksteel as they could get, and their fragments harvested. Those fragments were not used, they were stockpiled. Stored carefully for the Legion. Isol had been clear before he left: they would need as many fragments as they could get.

Florence had made it plain: once the chipping was complete, the factories would shift focus to full fragment processing. But to meet Isol's projected needs, the Psyro Glass factory would have to run at maximum capacity, nonstop. And even then, they would need to trade aggressively for materials. They were working on it. Every day brought them closer.

One of the largest fragment hauls came from Grix and Car's team. They had tracked back to the mountain of Broken, Grix and Warren had once slain, during the chaos of Lucas kidnapping Wren. What they found there was enough to make a sizable dent in the total required count. They harvested the remains piece by piece, logging every shard of blacksteel or fragment they found. And it might be the reason Isol's plan had a chance of working.

Now, Car and Florence were planning something new.

A lance factory.

It was time. Car had been making custom lances for practically his whole life, he lived and breathed lances. They weren't just weapons to him; they were an extension of identity, of purpose. With his deep, battlefield-rooted understanding of lance function and Florence's grasp of tech and systems, the two of them were drawing up schematics that could elevate Mara's arsenal far beyond what the Green ever produced. It wouldn't just be a local armory. It would be a forge, one that could produce some of the finest lances Hemera had ever seen.

It wouldn't just be for Mara's defense.

It would be for its identity.

The Yellow had been transformed, but it was only the beginning. The next time anyone called Mara a slum, they'd have to do it while standing in the shadow of a factory that could kill gods.