Yellow Jacket

Imujin looked at Vaeliyan with the steady, measuring stare he used whenever the subject involved anything dangerous enough to ruin someone if handled wrong. The man never rushed these conversations. He watched every shift of breath, every small adjustment of posture, like he was checking for cracks forming in a foundation before a weight was placed on it. "Did you pick which skills you wanted to evolve?" he asked, his tone even.

Vaeliyan gave a single nod. He did not hurry, did not fidget, did not second guess himself. "Yes. I am following what Dr. Wirk suggested for Power Nap. I am upgrading it in the standard way for Vaeliyan. That path is simple. Reliable. It works exactly as intended, and it fits the way this body handles stress and recovery. And I am also choosing one of the lesser known evolutions for when I am Warren. The two forms need different things, so I am shaping each version of the skill to serve one purpose specifically."

Imujin waited without speaking, letting the silence do the questioning for him.

Vaeliyan continued, "Warren’s path is the harder one. That evolution goes against what the skill naturally wants to become. Power Nap is meant to refresh the mind in an instant, not fracture a moment into millions. Dr. Wirk told me to crawl through my own thoughts slowly while the skill was active on Warren taking in everything I could, and I followed that instruction every single time it activated. It was boring, but it helped me map out how time past while the skill was active and I believe it will work. I will get that version one way or another. If it refuses to settle the way I want, I might need to buy the fragment outright. It is pretty useless for most people, but that also means it is probably rare. It is still worth taking the shot if it saves half a trillion credits in the long run."

Imujin’s brow tightened slightly, though not in disapproval. More like he was sorting through the implications. "Explain it."

"It is called Living Dream," Vaeliyan said. He let the name hang for a moment before continuing. "It stretches the dream state. The longer I am down, the more time passes inside the dream. That is the part I need. It lets me dive deeper into Mondenkind’s memory. I cannot get enough time down there. Every moment in her world feels like trying to read a book with half the pages glued shut. Living Dream gives us the time we need to travel through her memories. We never get enough time in there, and I want to learn to fly the way they did, especially now that my armor has wings."

Imujin shifted his weight and folded his arms, expression unreadable. "Good. That sounds useful. And dangerous in all the ways a good evolution tends to be."

Vaeliyan exhaled through his nose, steadying himself. "Yeah. Let me just... here we go."

He closed his eyes. He did not need the System’s attention. He only needed the intention he had carved into himself while deep in the Red. Nothing stirred around him. All he felt was the shape of the idea he had held for what felt like hours. Time behaved strangely in the Red, stretching and compressing in ways that made moments feel like entire cycles. He had known what he wanted Power Nap to become the instant he understood the limitations holding him back. He held that intention long enough that placing the evolution point now felt almost effortless, like dropping a stone into a river that had already been flowing in the right direction.

When he opened his eyes again, something subtle had aligned inside him.

Imujin asked, "Did you get what you wanted on this form?"

"Yeah," Vaeliyan said with a small nod, as if affirming it to himself as much as to Imujin. "It is exactly what I wanted for this form. I’m looking at the notification now."

Micro-Death (Active)

Evolved from Power Nap.

The mind collapses in a single controlled instant, extinguishing awareness before reigniting it with clarity sharpened to a cutting edge. All cognitive pressure, drift, and mental static fall away as the self resets from zero. Micro-Death delivers total mental clarity through brief, deliberate oblivion, returning the user to consciousness clean, calm, and unburdened.

Imujin breathed out through his nose, the faintest sign of satisfaction. "Good. Once you finish both of your evolutions, we will begin the next part. Make sure both sides of you are ready. There will not be any room for hesitation once we start."

In a moment, Warren stood where Vaeliyan had been. The shift between them was never dramatic. One breath simply belonged to one life, and the next belonged to the other. Imujin watched it with the same quiet recognition he always did.

"Finish your skill evolutions and then we will start on the classes," Imujin said. His tone carried weight, but it was steady, patient, anchored in an expectation that Warren would do exactly what needed doing.

Warren rubbed the back of his neck as if trying to massage clarity into the situation. "I really wish you could help with this," he said. "It feels like it’s going to be harder than it has any right to be. I have an idea, but I’m not sure if it’s going to work. I think it will. I hope it will. But I really, really don’t want to spend a pile of credits buying the fragment if I mess it up. We have important things to do with those credits."

"I believe in you," Imujin replied. His voice softened slightly, not with pity, but with a grounded certainty that made it sound like a statement of fact rather than encouragement. "But there is nothing I can do to help with this part. The evolution is yours alone. All we can do is hope that your intention takes hold and that the skill listens."

Warren took a slow breath and nodded. No turning back. He selected the skill and slammed the evolution point into it.

Bound Path opened in his mind like a slow-moving curtain of water, thick enough to shape but fluid enough to distort around the edges. Inside it, time fractured the way it always did, stretching and bending in a way that let him see more clearly. He felt the moment when the skill began pulling itself apart, tearing down the first layer of what it had been so it could assemble something new.

The evolution trembled, drifting toward the standard route the System preferred. That familiar pathway tugged at him like gravity, clean and simple. It would have been easy to accept it, let the skill become what the world expected it to be. But Warren had never been built for easy paths.

He felt the slip begin, and that was when he tried the thing he had only guessed might work.

He remembered how a class defined itself, how the Stampede always surged toward the future vision of itself, reckless and hungry. He took that idea and forced it into himself, compressing his thoughts into a single rigid line. He squeezed his mind tight enough that it felt like something might crack, then shoved that solid mental shape into the skill as it writhed.

The shift slammed into him with so much force that Bound Path shattered for a heartbeat. His vision went white. His balance disappeared. The moment almost slipped from his hands entirely. He caught himself at the edge of the instant, clinging to the fractured half of the timeline with raw will. He felt blood surge in his head before it even broke through his nose.

The broken instant snapped back together. The stillness returned, sharp and cold.

Warren wrestled with the twisting shape of the half-formed skill. It fought him, slippery and unpredictable, trying to snap back to the clean lines of the normal evolution. The System kept pressing from behind, insisting on its preferred outcome.

Warren refused. Resolve had always been his highest stat. It had been his anchor since the beginning. Nothing had ever been able to tell him no for long, not even the System itself.

He imagined himself grabbing the skill like a greased eel, something slick and frantic, desperate to escape. He locked both metaphorical hands around it and slammed it down the pathway he had carved in his mind.

The moment snapped into alignment.

Warren shut Bound Path with a hard mental twist and dropped to his knees. Blood splattered against the ground in a small arc. He coughed, hacked, forced air back into his lungs as he wiped his mouth with the back of his shaking hand.

Wren sprinted toward him. Her eyes were wide, frantic, her breathing already sharp with fear.

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He lifted a hand and pressed it gently to her shoulder before she could reach for him. "It’s okay," he rasped. "I’m fine. I just did something I wasn’t sure would work." He smiled up at her, blood streaking down from his nose and across his teeth, a raw grin full of exhaustion and triumph. "But now that I know it does, I think I’m going to get every skill I ever want."

His chest ached, his head throbbed, and his vision still trembled around the edges, but when he finally looked at the notification, the smile curved it's way across the rest of his face.

Because he had done it. And the skill had become exactly what he needed.

Living Dream (Active)

Evolved from Power Nap.

Sleep no longer restores, it extends dreams. The moment the mind slips into unconsciousness, time dilates into a long, lucid dream-state where thought stretches far beyond the minutes passing outside. The user remains aware within the dream, able to wander, reflect, and process with the depth of meditation rather than rest.

Living Dream grants prolonged inner time in every brief sleep, letting the mind explore and unravel what waking hours cannot.

Imujin stepped beside Wren and Warren, his massive hands moving with surprising care as he helped the tiny man back onto his feet. Even hunched and bloodstained, Warren looked like he was holding himself together by sheer intent. The evolution had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit. His knees trembled. His breath shuddered. Imujin steadied him without a word, guiding him until he found enough strength to stand on his own.

"Warren," Imujin said, voice low but firm, "are you ready? Have you chosen which skills will become the foundation of the final path you will walk in this lifetime?"

Warren blinked at him, his expression a mix of fatigue and honest confusion. "What do you mean by that?" he asked. His voice cracked slightly, still raw from the strain.

Imujin folded his arms across his chest as if settling into a familiar, heavy truth. He considered his words carefully. There were not many moments in a soldier’s life where explaining this mattered. "This class upgrade will set you on a pathway. The class you choose now forms the base for every class you will take afterward. It has already fed enough on your choices, your actions, and your intentions to know what it wants to become. But you are standing at the last point where you can change its direction. After this, the path continues with or without your influence."

Warren frowned, brows knitting as he tried to piece the idea together. "What does that even mean, Imujin? Explain it like I’m not dying on my feet."

Imujin nodded once. "My class is called The Last Flame Exemplar. But it did not begin with a title like that. My original class at level fifty was Last Squire of the First Flame. Every class afterward built on it, shaped by the path I committed to at that exact moment. It grew with me, but it also dictated the direction my strength would take. It carved out a future that I could not escape once I embraced it." He tapped his chest. "And so it will be for you. In both of your forms. From level fifty to one hundred, the choices you make will decide the future you are capable of claiming."

Warren stared at him for a long moment before asking, "Why did no one bother to tell me this sooner? This feels like something I should have known before hitting the button." There was frustration in his voice, but also a tired kind of bewilderment.

Imujin let out a breath through his nose, the closest he came to sounding apologetic. "It was not an immediate concern. And there was only a fraction of a chance you would reach fifty in time. We expected you to fight most of the siege at forty, maybe finish at fifty if everything went perfectly. But the way you hurled yourself into the Red, the way you leveled… you outpaced every expectation. It was a good strategy. A reckless one, but good. I should have accounted for the possibility that you would force the timeline forward."

He rested a massive hand on Warren’s shoulder again, grounding him. "We thought there would be time to explain these things step by step. But now you stand here with the opportunity in front of you. Look over your skills again. Think about what you want and what you intend to become. Before you choose your path. Your final path. The one that leads to real power runs through this choice."

Imujin leaned down slightly, making sure Warren met his eyes. "This class will not define who you are. But it will define who you aim to be. It grows stronger from this point onward, and your skills will no longer shape it the way they once did. The influence reverses. The class will evolve your skills. Not the other way around."

Warren’s brow furrowed deeper as the weight of the truth settled over him. His fingers twitched at his sides, mind already racing despite the exhaustion.

"Choose wisely," Imujin said. "Not because I doubt you. I do not. You are many things, Warren, but foolish is not one of them. Pick well. And pick with intention. Your future listens to what you decide today."

Warren looked over his skills and let out a quiet, breathy laugh, the kind that carried more understanding than humor. Of course it had come to this. He had been choosing the same core abilities again and again since the very beginning. They had always been the backbone of his entire build, the unseen structure beneath every decision he made, every upgrade he earned, every reckless leap into danger, every moment where his life narrowed into a single point of intent. From the moment he had first received those skills, they had been exactly what he wanted. Nothing had changed. Nothing needed to.

If he had been a creature of pure instinct, he would have chosen instantly without a shred of hesitation. His gut already knew the truth. But Warren had never been defined by instinct alone. He was a creature of precision, of resolve, of intellect sharpened through necessity and trauma and survival. Even when he suspected the right answer, he refused to act without examining every angle. He owed himself that much. He owed the future that much.

So, he went through his skills slowly and methodically. No rushing. No letting exhaustion or excitement sway him. He studied each one in turn, mentally pulling them apart, weighing what they offered against who he had become and who he intended to grow into. Every effect, every synergy, every weakness, every place where a skill intersected with the others. He considered them not only as they were now, but as what they could become when tied to a class evolution that would define the next half of his life.

And no matter how deeply he examined the list, his thoughts always circled back to two of them.

Bound Path. The first constant.

It was far too powerful, far too deeply interwoven into his perception of time and movement, to be anything but foundational. It did not simply slow the world around him. It allowed him to narrow his focus, sharpen his reactions, and reshape the moment so he could act with impossible precision. It created opportunities where none should exist, gave him angles no one else could see, and had saved his life more times than he could count. Bound Path had been shaping him since the instant he learned how to use it. Not loudly, not dramatically, but steadily and relentlessly.

Then there was Resonant Echoes. A brilliant skill by any measure. The absolute sensory recall it provided was unmatched. The ability to capture a moment perfectly and dissect every detail with total clarity gave him a kind of layered perception that few people could even imagine. The predictive modeling that emerged from that awareness had guided him through ambushes, shifting terrain, and moments where a single mistake would have ended everything. It was, without question, one of the most powerful skills in his kit.

But even with all of that, the skill his mind returned to, the one he could not ignore, was not one he had learned through effort.

It was one he had been given.

Multi-thread.

Already stronger than it had any right to be. Already more advanced than any normal version of the skill. The four layers of his mind had become not only familiar but necessary. They had changed the way he thought. The way he planned. The way he understood the world. He could not imagine returning to a single-line thought process. Multi-thread amplified every part of him that mattered: his intellect, his tactical sense, his combat intuition, his ability to read a battlefield, his talent for solving problems at impossible speed.

Resonant Echoes let him gather information. Multi-thread let him wield it. Sharpen it. Sort it. Predict with it. Build entire strategies inside a single breath.

Bound Path shaped the moment.

Multi-thread shaped his mind.

They were the two skills that felt like pieces of his identity rather than simple tools. They were reflections of who he was becoming, not who he had been.

If he was going to define himself by a single moment of choice, if he was truly going to set the cornerstone of every future class, then he refused to hold back.

Bound Path and Multi-thread were the answer.

The foundation of his next evolution.

The foundation of everything he would grow into.

They were what he would build his future on.

They were what he would become.

As for Vaeliyan, he looked inward and sifted through the memories of every battle, every instinct, every moment where his other half had needed raw power rather than subtlety. This choice was not made through panic or desperation. It came from clarity. For once, instinct and thought aligned without argument.

There were only two real choices.

He considered Instant Vector for a brief moment, amused by the idea of defining himself through pure movement. The skill was incredible, the kind of acceleration that tore the world open. But he discarded it almost immediately. There would always be other movement abilities. There would always be faster ways to cross a battlefield. Speed was not who Vaeliyan was.

Force was.

The first skill that called to him, the one that had always lived in the back of Vaeliyan’s mind, was Infinite Sovereign. The mastery of momentum, impact, and overwhelming presence. To strike as if the world itself had chosen to move with him.

And the second… there was no hesitation.

Engine of Destruction.

A true engine. A system of constant power. An undying machine of escalating force. A body that would not collapse under fire, but grow stronger because of it. A foundation that promised that every movement, every step, every breath would build more energy. A self-feeding storm.

He could see it clearly: the form that was Vaeliyan becoming an unstoppable creature of pure power. Every strike heavier. Every collision louder. Every moment of contact a declaration of dominance.

Rain Dancer made up for what Warren lacked in offensive capability. The fluidity, the adaptation, the battlefield control. And All Around You filled the silent space between moments with pressure and inevitability. But neither skill delivered instant annihilation and true staying power.

Infinite Sovereign and Engine of Destruction solved that.

Warren laughed softly at the thought of choosing an active skill. They would have worked well for others but not for him. The bone he had been given so long ago, the one that allowed passives to flow through both halves of him, meant that his future strength lived in the foundation, not in what he pressed or triggered.

It was always going to be passives. The kind that shaped the body and the battlefield at the same time.

Infinite Sovereign. Engine of Destruction.

Vaeliyan’s future was clear.