Yellow Jacket

After putting Belle to sleep, Warren and the rest of the Complaints Department, along with their friends, allies, and Wren at his side, made their slow walk back down the tunnel. The air felt warmer than before, thicker, almost syrupy with the mineral breath rising from deeper in the Red. Every step stirred faint motes of dust that drifted lazily in the light. The concrete ribs of the old structure curved overhead like the bones of some ancient beast, and each footfall echoed in a soft, rhythmic pulse that marked their descent. When they reached the old service alcove, Warren stopped, waiting for Wren to secure Roundy’s charging pad against his back. Roundy buzzed once in protest at the indignity of being carried again, but he quieted quickly as Wren tightened the final strap. She tapped Warren’s shoulder, signaling she was done, and together they rejoined the others on the path toward camp.

The firelight from their campsite flickered weakly ahead, illuminating familiar faces gathered around the firepit, Car had insisted on making. Florence sat nearest the flames, sharpening her whips blades with slow, even strokes. Car and Batu were discussing whether the tunnel to the east could be cleared further without collapsing the support columns. Tasina knelt beside Mel, the thirteen year old bracing himself with determination as he fired a burst of flechettes down Car’s makeshift range. The shots scattered close to the mark, but not close enough.

Car stepped behind him, one hand on Mel’s shoulder as he said, "You need to breathe out on the pull, Mel. You can’t hit shit if you are full to bursting." His voice was calm, instructional, the tone of someone who genuinely wanted the boy to improve. Mel nodded sharply, jaw tight with effort, already readying the next shot.

The Neuman children that the Complaints Department had folded into their odd little force rested nearby, arranged in a loose semicircle like oversized hatchlings warming themselves by the fire. Some stared at the flames with their eerie stillness. Others practiced their newly awakened Soul Skills in twitchy, uncertain bursts that sent spark-like pulses through the air or rippled subtle distortions across the stone floor. They were strange, unsettling, and undeniably powerful… but they were also just children.

Keha watched over them with a presence that blended authority and unnerving gentleness. She still claimed she was human, but every tilt of her head and every stillness of her body said otherwise. The former Moth, the former prophetess Oracle, moved among the Neuman children as though she had always belonged to a brood. She corrected postures, demonstrated breathing rhythms, nudged shoulders back into alignment, and occasionally coaxed laughter out of them with strange stories that only Neuman memory would understand. Under her guidance, the children were learning how to harness the Soul Skills stirring inside their growing bodies.

Progress had been relentless in the weeks since their descent into the Red. Warren and the others had fought through Broken hordes, carved open new paths, collapsed unstable tunnels, and hunted horrors that had no right to exist. Every one of them had emerged sharper, faster, deadlier. Now they stood at level fifty: Warren, Wren, the Complaints Department, and even their closest friends who had joined them deeper in the tunnels. The children, though not fighters, had grown keener and more disciplined. Car and Florence had accelerated especially quickly, hovering now on the edge of level sixty. Both insisted they were merely "getting back into the rhythm of things," but the quiet pride in their faces told another story.

As Warren and Wren reached the ring of firelight, Warren rubbed his hands together, feeling the warmth seep slowly into his knuckles. The reason he had been walking as Warren instead of Vaeliyan these past weeks was simple. It had been too long since he had walked in his own skin. Too long since he had been anything other than the looming shadow of a legend. With the moment of truth approaching, when he would finally reveal to the world who he truly was—it mattered that Warren Smith was still a force worth respecting. He had to train both sides of himself or risk losing half of what made him dangerous.

Rain Dancer had grown alongside him. He had learned countless new ways the storm behaved underground. Here, the pressure shifted differently, the moisture clung to the walls in strange patterns, and even the faintest breeze tugged at the edges of his awareness. Sometimes a small, contained storm was far more lethal than the sprawling monsoons he unleashed above ground. Tighter pressure meant sharper force. Short bursts of movement translated into devastating strikes. He remembered fighting Tallo in confined space, avoiding the storm because he feared losing control. Now he understood the truth. Now he knew how to shape the storm with precision instead of fear.

And the storm inside him… it was enormous. He felt the edges of it pressing outward from somewhere deep in his chest, not painfully, but with a steady, powerful hum that reminded him of a caged tempest. It had grown with every fight, every sprint, every breath taken in the burning air of the Red. He suspected, though he could not prove it, that a single breath of the storm could sweep across Kyrrabad three times over and still have room to spare.

Maybe it was exaggeration. Maybe not. But the vastness of it vibrated through his bones as he stepped into the full glow of the fire, the storm humming beneath his skin like something alive, restless, and waiting for command.

The Neuman children had taken a surprising liking to Keha. Her presence calmed them. Her mannerisms made sense to them. But they also feared Roundy. They feared him deeply. Yet their fear was paired with respect. And through that strange reverence, they had begun to respect Warren and the other humans around them.

The oldest of the children was the girl whose name translated roughly to whispering wing of the songbird’s flight as Keha explained. Warren had shortened it simply to Wing.

Wing was the first to approach him out of her flight. She had watched him fight for days, observing every strike, every dodge, every eruption of force with the silent hunger of a predator learning its craft. Then she had approached him, whistling awkwardly in her approximation of the common tongue, asking whether following him would make her strong.

Warren had nodded. Told her she could grow strong if she worked with him. That had been all the promise she needed.

Wing also had a peculiar fascination with Mel. They were roughly the same age, by human estimates anyway. Neuman aging was difficult to read. But Wing watched him constantly, especially when he tried something new. And Mel tried at everything. Even when he was terrible with every weapon anyone handed him, he never stopped pushing. He never quit. And Wing, for reasons none of them understood, seemed to admire that. She followed his attempts with quiet, intense focus, her eye fluttering faintly whenever Mel picked up a new weapon.

It was strange. It was endearing. And it hinted at the beginnings of something none of them yet had words for.

Mel, for his part, seemed completely clueless about Wing’s interest. He swung between determination and frustration, never once noticing the way Wing’s eye followed his movements. But what thirteen year old boy ever understood when a girl liked him? He just kept trying, kept missing his shots, kept resetting his stance. And Wing kept watching him with that silent, focused awe, as if every failed attempt only made him more fascinating to her.

Roundy, for his part, only complicated matters further. He could speak Neuman fluently, his metallic frame producing their whistling songs with unsettling accuracy. But the language he preferred, the one he spoke in when no one asked anything specific of him, was something else entirely. It sounded beautiful, almost musical, each tone rising and falling like a crafted melody. But no one understood a single word of it. Not Warren. Not Wren. Not even Florence who was endlessly fascinated with the little abomination Warren had cobbled together.

The Neuman children listened to it the way most people listened to storms: wary, reverent, maybe a little frightened. And somehow, despite that fear, they respected Roundy more than anyone else in the entire camp.

They had sent a path and made sure it was clear every day. What started as a rough descent hacked through debris had evolved into a stable artery that tied the deep Red to the breath of the surface. The tunnel had become more than a route; it had become a lifeline. Florence’s drones scuttled through it in shifts, each machine carving away loose stone or reinforcing weak points with metallic precision. Their limbs clicked across the ground, scanners sweeping for pressure changes, structural warping, or fresh fractures that hinted at an oncoming collapse. Without her constant work, the tunnel would have died half a dozen times over, crushed beneath the shifting bones of the Red.

Every day, without fail, their runner used that path. Zal-Raan and Mabok swapped duties like gears in a machine, their rotation flawless. One came down, one went up. The next day they switched. The pattern continued endlessly. While one leveled with the main team, sweating and bleeding through the tunnels below, the other made the long climb to deliver updates from Mara. It had started as necessity, but it had become a rhythm all its own, a heartbeat pulsing between above and below.

Both men moved with a practiced ease earned through repetition. Zal-Raan ran like a blade through the dark, smooth and silent. Mabok was heavier, but stubbornly fast, pushing his legs until the stone seemed to bend out of his way. They delivered reports, warnings, and bits of Mara’s fragile daily life. On the worst days, they returned with a tension that clung to them so tightly Warren could feel it before they even stepped into the firelight.

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When neither Zal-Raan nor Mabok could make the climb, Bee took their place. The corpse-like girl trudged down the tunnel with the same steady, dragging gait every time, her posture loose and lifeless in a way that made even the Red hesitate around her. Warren still did not understand why she refused treatment, why she did not want to fix whatever Dr. Morgan had done to her. She always gave the same answer, half mumbled and half joked, saying she had grown to live with it, or die with it. She could never decide which. Her entire demeanor was gallows humor personified, but she had learned to fight in her own way.

The Broken never noticed her. They did not see her as prey or threat. They saw her as dead. Just like any scanner that passed over her. She did not register as living. She did not register as anything at all. That gave her an advantage no one else possessed. She could walk through the Red unimpeded. Nothing down here looked at her. Nothing tracked her. Nothing so much as twitched in her direction.

Grix had once said she thought Bee might have been beautiful before whatever happened with Dr. Morgan. And Warren had understood something then, something Bee had never put words to. She had been happy to not be looked at. Happy to not draw the eye of a warlord, or any man at all, in that moment.

Her silence and stillness had become her shield.

The weight of their most recent reports crushed the air out of the cavern.

Imujin and the Last Testament had returned to Mara.

That alone shifted everything. The Last Testament carried power, experience, and the kind of brutal certainty that cities prayed for in desperate times.

But the second piece of news overshadowed even that.

Scout mechs had been spotted moving through the bog multiple times over the past week. Their hulking silhouettes drifted through the mist like patient predators. They never pushed deep, but they studied everything. They examined the walls. They traced the perimeter. They charted the tower lines and kept quiet watch over the choke points most cities hid behind for defense. They were not searching for weaknesses. They were cataloging them.

And Mara had plenty.

Its defenses were thin. There were no heavy turrets. No mounted batteries. No cannon lines. No mechanized walls. Mara’s real strength was the people who stood behind its walls, and that was something the Princedom never understood.

Most invading forces expected a handful of Enforcers, enough to keep civilians in line. Warren had left illusions in place to mimic patrol routes, moving armor sets, lights, and signals to imply that Mara still had an active security corps. It might fool scouts. It might even fool the first wave of soldiers.

But illusions did not win sieges.

And a company of legionnaires, even well armed, even well drilled, would be nothing against what was coming.

The Princedom had no idea they would need a full siege to break Mara. In their eyes, it was a small settlement. A weak thing. A scrap of the Green left to rot in the Yellow. A place that should kneel at the first raised banner.

But they did not understand what Mara had become.

Every adult in that city was willing to fight. Every soul who had carved out a life behind those walls understood the cost of freedom. They fought for their families. They fought for their dead. They fought because there was no one else in the world who would fight for them.

Muk-Tah’s death weighed heavily. So did the loss of the others. Their absence clung to the city like smoke, sinking into every home and every memory. But their deaths had not shattered Mara. If anything, they had tempered it. The unity that had once been effortless was now strained, frayed, stretched thin under grief. But even frayed cords could hold. Mara had proved that.

They sought out their own rot and cut it away.

Raids swept the settlement night after night, searching for flesh eaters, collaborators, or any who might have harbored sympathy for the rebels responsible for the explosions. Doors were torn open. Homes were scoured. Every face was checked. Every name was questioned. Some who had seemed harmless were pulled from hiding places. Others were dragged out trembling, unable to decide whether they were more terrified of discovery or judgment.

Those few now sat inside the small prison complex the Green had abandoned. Four cells. Reinforced walls. The stale stench of recycled air and old fear. Mara did not have time for lengthy trials or complex procedures. They had truth. They had purpose. And they had the will to enact both.

Those traitors waited behind steel bars.

And they were going to be interrogated.

Legion troops were marching to reinforce Mara Actually marching from Parthilion, of all damned places. High Commander Ruka was sending troops exactly as the Primark had ordered, but she was taking her sweet time about it. According to the message Isol had sent down with Bee when he arrived alongside the rest of the Last Testament, Ruka claimed Parthilion was the closest city where she could stage forces without directly dropping soldiers onto Mara itself.

Warren thought it was bullshit. Ruka playing him for a fool, dragging her feet while pretending it was logistics.

But Theramoor had foreseen Warren's miss understanding and disagreed. She had said it was a sound tactical maneuver, one that would hide the Legion’s approach from the Princedom while they were stuck in a protracted siege with Mara. As long as Warren and the rest of them made the Princedom bleed, they would never suspect that the Legion was quietly moving a significant force to protect a fringe town.

It was cynical. It was manipulative. And it was exactly the sort of move High Commander Ruka would make.

Florence walked over to Warren and Wren and gently took Belle from the carrier, Without a word, she carried the baby into the small setup they had built specifically to let her sleep without interruption. It was the quietest part of the camp, set up around the portable crib they had brought from the Green, a fully sealed sleep unit with automatic sound‑dampening, temperature regulation, and shock absorption systems so Belle would not wake from a stray echo or the distant rumble of the Red. Florence laid Belle in her crib with practiced care. The baby stirred once, relaxed, and settled immediately.

Her machines followed her as a shifting formation of guardians in every size and shape. Towering sentinels moved with heavy, deliberate steps behind her, their plated limbs scraping sparks off the stone. Mid‑sized walker drones stalked at her flanks like mechanical hunting animals. Smaller crawlers scuttled around her boots, and a pair of hovering units drifted above her shoulders like watchful vultures. She did not command any of them. She did not gesture or issue signals. They simply chose to protect her, assembling into a protective sphere of metal and power wherever she went. She did not command them. She did not gesture. They simply chose to protect her. Over the weeks they had begun to grow, developing additional plating, extra limbs, more nuanced articulation, like evolving organisms rather than programmed constructs. Florence claimed she did not understand why they did it, but Warren suspected her Soul Skill had reached deeper into their cores than she realized.

Florence and Car had both finally come out of retirement, and seeing the rust fall off them was something else entirely. Warren’s aunt’s machines were only slightly less deadly than Roundy, and that was saying something. The little Murderbot had single handedly killed off a horde of Broken that had tried to push through the tunnel he had been guarding. When Warren and the others returned to check on him, they found Roundy perched on a chunk of collapsed concrete, whistling softly while he cleaned his knife.

The Broken had been dissected. Completely. Every fragment they carried had been removed and placed into a neat pile, sorted by size and type with obsessive precision. Beside it sat another carefully organized mound of Blacksteel pieces taken from inside their bodies. And the last pile, the largest by far, was nothing but meat, finely minced and shaped into the rough form of a snowman. Roundy had even carved tiny indentations for eyes.

It was grotesque. It was efficient. It was Roundy.

And then there was Car.

Car was something different entirely. Any weapon placed in the man’s hands became an extension of his body. His Soul Skill made him the best with any weapon he held. It did not matter if it was a lance, a knife, a hammer, or a sharpened stick. Car mastered it instantly. He did not simply use a weapon. He understood it, the way some people understood breathing or balance.

Fenn was a natural talent, a once in a century prodigy with a lance. But Car put him to shame when he was really trying. The difference was not in strength or speed. It was in the quiet, terrifying certainty of Car’s control.

The big man had put Broken down through screw holes in the walls, threading flechettes through gaps so narrow Warren was not even sure a breath could pass through them. Not a splinter of stone had come loose from the impact. Every shot landed exactly where Car wanted it. He could strike at impossible angles, bend a trajectory by will alone, and make a weapon behave like it had always belonged in his grip.

It was unnatural.

And that was exactly the point. A Soul Skill did things no normal ability could touch. Car’s had been waiting for him his entire life.

Master of Arms was not just a title Car should have held.

It was the shape of his soul.

Batu had changed as well. More than Warren expected. More than anyone expected. Once Varnai and the others explained the stages of Soul Skills to him and the rest of the group, something inside Batu clicked into place with a force that felt almost audible. The man had taken to the lessons like a duck to water, absorbing each explanation with a hungry clarity that would have shocked Velrock if he had been there to witness it.

Batu said he finally understood himself. Fully. Not in the shallow way most people claimed, but in a deeper, quieter sense that settled into his bones. He carried himself differently now, shoulders loose, breathing steady, eyes calmer than Warren had ever seen them. He had not leveled much, hitting level fifty like the rest of them, but Batu had already been the highest of those below fifty before they came down here. Numbers were not his breakthrough.

His Soul Skill was.

In the month they had been down in the Red, Batu’s Soul Skill had moved up four stages. Four. It was unheard of. Terrifying. Beautiful. He was almost at the end of the progression of his Soul Skill. Most people never reached the final stage in their lifetime. Batu was on the cusp after only weeks.

The man knew himself, and he knew his soul, the same way others knew how to breathe. He could feel the contours of his Soul Skill like the edges of a familiar room. He could sense its shifts, its boundaries, its strengths, its limits. He walked with the confidence of someone who had finally discovered the shape of his own existence.

And Warren found himself both proud and a little bit afraid of what Batu would become when that final stage arrived.

Warren looked around at his friends, his family, his squad, and the strange collection of lives that had somehow anchored themselves around him. Scavvers, Wildsborn, Tribesmen, Human children, Neuman children, High Imperators, and a former Oracle. Worlds that should have never collided had fused into a single, stubborn force. In Warren’s mind, this ragged circle of people was the true future of the world. Not the Green, not the Princedoms, not the meticulous structures built on old power. Them.

They were scattered in origin, mismatched in blood yet united completely in belief, but bound together by choice. By survival. By something far stronger than the systems that tried to define them.

This small, strange world was worth everything to him.

And he would save it, or he would die trying.