Yellow Jacket

There was no fear in this, not in the way that Warren wanted. He was being a ghost, and these people were scared, and they had every right to be. Their fear was sharp and frantic, full of uncertainty and survival instinct, but it lacked the weight he craved. He had just killed a mech knight pilot and cut the mech in half with a single strike, splitting alloy and glass as if they were soft things that had forgotten how to resist him. The wreckage was still sinking slowly into the bog below, severed plates slipping beneath the dark water, bubbles breaking the surface where something massive disappeared forever. But there had been no pageantry in it, no anticipation, no drawn breath before the fall. It had been a single blow, clean and decisive, and the knight had been dead before the echo of the impact finished rolling through the mist-choked air.

His hunger found nothing to savor in that. It stirred inside him, restless and unsatisfied, irritated by how abruptly it had ended. There had been no moment to stretch it out, no chance to let the fear ripen. While he was here, while the battlefield was still open and watching him, while dozens of targeting systems were quietly recalculating around his position, he would enjoy the feast laid out in front of him.

He closed the axe mods on his truncheon with a sharp internal click and felt the weapon’s balance shift as its configuration reverted. He stowed the truncheons at his side, movements unhurried, deliberate. Around him, the ghost veil unraveled. Distortion collapsed inward, light snapping back into place as if reality itself were relieved to stop pretending he was not there. He stepped back into visibility and appeared in the mist among the remaining knights like something that had simply decided to exist again.

The reaction was immediate, but it was not clean. Targeting lights jittered and slid across his body without settling. Several mechs adjusted their stance mid-hover, thrusters flaring unevenly as pilots overcorrected. Voices spilled over open channels, clipped commands tangling with shouted questions as systems and people alike struggled to reconcile what they were seeing.

Before they could organize, before anyone could settle on a single answer to the problem standing among them, he triggered Void Echoes.

The world folded. Distance lost meaning. Air became suggestion rather than substance. Warren slipped through it and reappeared directly in front of one of the hovering mech knights, close enough that the machine’s shadow passed over him. He drove his Blacksteel gauntleted fist into the glass dome protecting the pilot. The impact sent a visible tremor across the curved surface, ripples racing outward from the point of contact. The dome held for a heartbeat, strained and whining under the pressure. Then a second ripple followed as the rain hammered the dome like a concentrated tsunami, force compounding force, deeper and heavier, and the glass shattered outward in a storm of fragments.

Shards spun away into the mist. Water rushed in. The pilot stared, frozen, eyes wide, mouth working soundlessly as his breath fogged uselessly in the open air. In front of him floated a man held aloft by thick pillars of water that churned and supported his weight without splashing. They wrapped around Warren’s boots and calves like patient hands, steady and unyielding. The armored frame that had enclosed the pilot moments ago was gone, peeled away by force rather than dismantled, leaving him exposed inside a machine that no longer knew how to protect him.

Warren slid closer, slow enough that the man could not pretend this was an accident or a system failure. He came close enough that the pilot could see the scratches scored into the Blacksteel, the fine abrasions left by past fights, and the calm set of Warren’s expression. There was no rush in his eyes, no strain. He leaned in slightly and said, “How’s it going? You’re about to die now, but I thought I’d make it a little fun.”

The man fumbled for a hand lance on instinct, terror finally breaking through the paralysis. His movements were clumsy, panicked. He tried to bring it up and fire. Warren slammed his palm into the man’s fist before the trigger could be pulled. Bone snapped with a dull, wet crack that carried even through the rain. The flechette veered away into the mist as the lance collapsed in on itself, metal buckling and folding as flesh and machinery were crushed together by the force. The man screamed, the sound raw and immediate, his arm jerking as his hand came apart under the pressure.

“Seriously,” Warren said, his tone almost conversational, as if this were an inconvenience rather than an execution. “You’re already dead. You don’t need to make this harder on yourself. I just wanted to see if I could get into the comms and say hello to your princess.”

The open channel crackled, static flaring as priority systems seized control. Then a voice cut across it, sharp and controlled, stripped of panic by authority. “Listen, insect. I don’t know why you think you’re safe inside one of our mechs, but the moment you move again, you will die.”

It was a man’s voice. Warren had heard it before. He smiled slightly as he recognized it, the expression small but genuine. It belonged to the mech knight who had issued the initial ultimatum, the one who still thought this was a negotiation, the one who believed threats still mattered here.

The channel stayed open after the threat, rain hissing across open glass and torn metal, the sound bleeding through damaged housings and exposed seams. Static flickered at the edge of the feed, the storm pressing itself into every open frequency as if it wanted to listen.

“Insect,” the voice said. “Who are you?”

Warren did not look away from the pilot he was holding. The man was still alive, still trapped in the ruined cradle of his cockpit, breath coming too fast and too shallow. “Does it fucking matter?” Warren replied.

There was a pause, brief and controlled, the kind that spoke of someone choosing their words carefully rather than searching for them. “This is Knight Commander Cavil of Branthorn’s Seventh Cohort,” the voice said. “Who is it that I have the displeasure of speaking to?”

“Again,” Warren said, flat and unimpressed, “does it fucking matter?”

He turned his head slightly, angling the open comm toward the rest of the field so there would be no doubt this was meant for everyone listening. Around him, distant engines adjusted, hover frames shifting position as pilots tried to decide whether to advance or pull back. “Cavil,” he said, “you came to my home. You demanded capitulation. You planned to execute every member of a faction you decided had wronged you, even after surrender.”

His grip tightened, fingers digging into armor and flesh alike, enough to remind the pilot that the pause between heartbeats was a courtesy, not a limit.

“Instead,” Warren continued, voice level and precise, “you’re getting a fucking war. You’re getting exactly what you deserve, you piece of shit.”

He glanced at the pilot, still alive, still breathing too fast. The man was making noise now, panic spilling out of him without structure or sense, words and screams bleeding into the open channel as he tried to beg and shout at the same time.

“Please… I… Commander, I can’t… I can’t…”

The sound spiked and clipped as the pilot gasped raggedly, breath tearing in and out of him. Pain from his ruined hand overwhelmed whatever training he had left, every inhale hitching as shock and agony fought for control. The noise crawled across the comms, raw and uncontrolled, impossible to ignore.

“And also,” Warren said, already bored with it, “fuck this guy.”

Warren struck once. Not a punch, not a drawn-out motion. A sharp, casual slap delivered with enough force to end the conversation entirely.

The pilot’s head came free.

The body went slack immediately, warning tones spiking as blood and rain spilled together and washed across exposed plating. Warren released what was left and let the corpse fall away into the mist, its descent swallowed by the storm.

“Now,” he said, voice steady again, as if nothing of note had happened, “we can talk without his screaming in the background.”

The channel crackled as multiple feeds surged at once, overlapping signals competing for priority. Somewhere in the distance, a frame lurched as a pilot overcorrected.

“I want to talk to your princess,” Warren said. “If you can’t make that happen, I’m going to keep killing more of you. My people are going to keep killing more of you. And the storm is going to kill even more of you.”

Thunder rolled, close enough to rattle frames and shiver through the comms, a low pressure wave that lingered.

“So here’s how this works,” Warren continued. “You put your princess on the line. If you don’t, I kill your knights. Then I come for your princess. Then I kill her too, but I make it slow while you watch. You fucking got me?”

Cavil’s voice ground through the comms, cold and furious, clipped tight around barely restrained rage. “You will do no such thing, infidel. You dare threaten your rightful Empress and you and your entire…”

“Cavil,” Warren said, cutting him off. “Cavil. Shut the fuck up.”

Silence snapped tight, abrupt enough to be felt.

“You were threatening us first,” Warren went on. “You don’t have threats. You don’t have leverage. What are you going to do, nuke us?” He laughed once, sharp and humorless, the sound short and final. “We’ll kill all of you before you get the chance.”

His gaze lifted, sweeping the field, taking in the scattered formation, the hesitation bleeding through disciplined movement. “You think you can stop us? You’re lying to yourself.”

He leaned back into the channel, voice dropping just enough to make it personal. “The only way this ends with you alive is if you let me talk to your princess, and you surrender, then you get the fuck out of your mechs, and you walk the fuck home.”

Warren smiled, small and mean, unseen by most of them but present in his voice. “You got me bitch?”

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In all his years as Knight Commander, Cavil had never been spoken to in such a manner by anyone of lower station. And this man clearly was. Yet he would not capitulate. He demanded to speak to the Empress and demanded their surrender in the same breath, as if rank and consequence simply did not apply to him. The audacity of it was almost laughable, the kind of presumption that would normally be corrected with a single order and a firing line.

Cavil did not laugh.

He turned to another screen inside Belphegor and pulled up the status feeds of his knights. The interior of the command mech hummed around him, a familiar cocoon of reinforced plating, stabilizers, and filtered sound. Lines of telemetry scrolled past in disciplined columns as he searched, each feed a constant stream of vitals, power draw, and positional data. He filtered, refined, narrowed until he found Dracus.

He opened its command protocols and struck the final entry, the one that should have ended the situation cleanly.

Nothing happened.

Cavil hit it again, jaw tightening, convinced there had been a delay or a misread input. Belphegor acknowledged the command. The system showed green confirmation. Dracus did nothing.

Still nothing.

He rerouted the command manually, bypassing standard delegation, and tried a third time. His fingers moved with practiced precision, the motions ingrained by years of command and repetition.

Silence.

For the first time, something cold stirred behind his ribs.

Cavil opened a direct line and barked, “Yellow Jacket. You’re from the Princedoms. Which one of them paid you to be here? Why are you doing this?”

The reply came with laughter.

Not distorted. Not strained. Open, amused laughter that spilled across the channel as if this were entertainment.

On the feed, the boy in the yellow jacket threw Desmond’s corpse out of the pilot seat like discarded cargo. The body struck the edge of the frame, twisted once, and tumbled away, spinning as rain and mist swallowed it whole. Dracus did not immediately enter meltdown. Warning indicators blinked, then steadied. Its core stayed stable for a heartbeat longer than it should have, long enough for Cavil to register the anomaly.

Then the mech itself began to fall, its massive form dropping without explosion, without the violent release that protocol demanded.

“Interesting,” the boy said, still amused. “So you think I’m from the Princedoms. What makes you say that?”

Cavil’s lips pressed thin. Only the bloodlines of the Princedoms, bound by oath, loyalty, and legacy, could ride a mech without triggering instant self-destruction. That truth had been written into the systems long before his command. The logic was sound. It always had been.

“You’re wrong,” the boy continued, voice light, almost conversational. “But it’s interesting.”

There was a pause, deliberate, stretched just long enough to be felt.

“Anyways,” he said, “I told you that if you didn’t get your fucking pig of a princess, I was going to start killing more of your knights. So I think I’ll just have to start doing that.”

Within the space of a blink, the yellow jacket vanished from the cockpit feed. One moment he was there, standing amid torn metal and rain. The next, the space was empty.

In his place, a black orb formed inside Dracus’s cabin. It hovered, perfectly still, swallowing light rather than reflecting it. For a fraction of a second, the feed struggled to focus, resolution warping around the anomaly.

Then everything inside the mech collapsed inward.

Armor crumpled. Internal supports folded. Mass vanished into the dark point as if the space itself had been erased.

Cavil snapped his attention across his displays, pulse climbing despite himself. What the fuck was happening? Where had he gone? No trajectory. No residual signature. Nothing that fit inside any doctrine he knew.

Another alert flared, sharp and immediate. Vital signs on a different knight’s frame flatlined without warning. This time it was Reno and his Devon.

The name sat in his mind for half a heartbeat longer than it should have.

“Fuck,” Cavil muttered.

He slammed the comm open, control slipping just enough to show. “Come in, Yellow Jacket. Please answer. Hold. Hold. I will get the princess. Please hold.”

The comms opened up on Delpher, the channel snapping live with a sharp chirp that cut through the layered noise of the command deck. Static crawled briefly along the edge of the feed before stabilizing, the sound of distant machinery and rain bleeding faintly through secondary channels.

“All right, Cavil, you son of a bitch, I’m waiting,” Warren said. His voice carried cleanly across the link, unhurried and sharp, stripped of distortion as if the storm itself had decided to let him speak. “Get your fucking whore of a princess so I can talk to her.”

Cavil hissed under his breath, a quiet, involuntary sound he failed to suppress, and turned toward the palanquin feed. The image took a fraction of a second longer than usual to resolve, layers of encryption peeling back one after another until the gilded silhouette filled his display. Gold filigree, hanging silks, ceremonial shielding, all of it pristine and untouched by the chaos ripping through the battlefield.

“Princess,” he said. “My lady. Your Majesty.” He forced his voice into something approaching control, flattening the tremor that threatened to creep in despite his effort. “An unknown entity wearing a yellow jacket has infiltrated our formation and killed three mech knights in the span of seconds. He wishes to speak to you regarding our surrender.”

The words tasted wrong even as he said them, bitter and humiliating. They lodged in his throat like a foreign object, but he forced them out all the same.

He swallowed and continued, the pace picking up despite his attempt to remain measured. “He claims he will stop only if you speak to him and we capitulate to his demands. I am attempting to locate him, but he is moving constantly, faster than our tracking can reliably follow. Our systems cannot predict his position with any meaningful confidence.”

Cavil shifted his stance, bringing another display into view. “He is currently occupying one of the fallen knights,” he added, “but I cannot guarantee how long he will remain there or how long he is willing to wait. His behavior suggests he is acting at his own discretion, unconstrained by our responses.”

He straightened his shoulders, posture locking into something formal and rigid, as if discipline alone could stabilize the situation. “I am requesting your authority to surrender,” Cavil said. “We are losing forces at an unsustainable rate. Frames are being neutralized faster than we can respond, redeploy, or reinforce. If this continues, we will not have any effective troops remaining to hold the field or secure withdrawal.”

His gaze flicked briefly to another status pane. Red markers bloomed across the tactical overlay, flaring and vanishing as feeds went dark. He looked away before the pattern could fully register.

“This campaign was not planned with this enemy in mind,” Cavil said, more bluntly now, the edge creeping back into his voice. “Our doctrines, our contingencies, all assume opposition that can be delayed, contained, or overwhelmed through superior force. None of those assumptions are holding. Every engagement favors them, regardless of scale.”

He hesitated, jaw tightening, then pushed on anyway, unwilling to leave anything unsaid. “I recommend a strategic retreat, an immediate bolstering of forces, and a return under proper wartime conditions. We cannot treat this as a punitive action or a demonstration of authority any longer. It is a war, whether we acknowledge it or not.”

His voice dropped slightly, the next words dragged up with visible reluctance. “If necessary, orbital sterilization remains an option,” he said, the phrase heavy and unpleasant in his mouth. “But that decision requires time we may not have. I need you to speak to him now, my liege. Immediately. He is demanding your presence, and every second we delay costs us more lives, more frames, more ground.”

Cavil inclined his head toward the palanquin feed, the gesture stiff and formal, stripped of ceremony. “Please.”

Princess Selai would have spoken, would have cut in with command and authority as she always did, if not for the very real knife at her throat, its edge pressed close enough that even breathing too deeply felt like a mistake. The blade rested there with casual certainty, a reminder that for all the power displayed on the screens, control had already been taken from her.

Alorna entered the palanquin without entering it.

She did not force a hatch or slip through a door. She did not disrupt pressure, airflow, or heat. She became a part of what was already there.

The mobile mansion moved on a constant cycle of intake and exhaust, vast and slow, designed to bleed heat and waste away without ever interrupting the comfort inside. Alorna pressed herself against the outer skin of the structure and let herself flatten, not metaphorically, not as a trick of perception. Her body thinned and spread, bone and muscle redistributing until she was indistinguishable from condensation clinging to the metal. She rode the surface as the palanquin moved, patient, unmoving, listening to the rhythm of the machine.

When the exhaust vent opened on its cycle, she flowed.

She slid inward as vapor, reforming just enough to catch the lip of the duct, then pulled herself along its interior in silence. The heat did not bother her. The vibration did not register. She counted steps, turns, airflow changes. She knew exactly where she was long before the first interior junction appeared.

The first guard stood beneath the vent, bored, weight on one hip, helmet tilted just enough to suggest complacency. Alorna dropped behind him without sound. Her hand closed around his mouth. The blade slid across his throat in one clean motion. She held him until the body stopped twitching, then lowered him gently to the floor.

She removed his credentials, pressed them flat against her palm, and moved on.

Alarms did not sound. No systems reacted. She walked as if she belonged there because, in that moment, she did. Cameras failed to register her because their parameters accepted her as background. Airflow bent around her. Light slid past her without catching.

Two more guards died the same way, quiet and precise. A fourth never realized she was there until she took his access band and stepped through the door he had been guarding.

She slipped through corridors lined with silk and gold, past servants who did not see her, past aides whose eyes slid away the moment she entered their peripheral vision. When locks barred her path, she used what she had taken. When doors opened, she passed through them like a draft.

Alorna left no noise behind her.

The inner chamber of the palanquin was still.

The princess sat upon her throne, posture immaculate, hands folded, attention fixed on the tactical display floating before her. Advisors murmured softly at a distance. Guards stood in ceremonial positions, alert but untested.

Alorna moved.

She crossed the room between breaths. One guard collapsed before his body understood it had been cut. Another reached for a weapon that never cleared its sheath. Blood touched the floor without sound.

She stopped behind the throne.

The princess lifted her glass without looking, wrist angled just so, the habitual gesture of someone accustomed to being attended. She waited, eyes still on the tactical display, already anticipating the taste.

The glass filled.

She did not see it happen. She did not hear a pour. The weight simply changed in her hand.

She brought it to her lips and paused.

The wine was darker than it should have been. Thicker. The heat coming off it was wrong, not the gentle warmth of mulled spice but something closer, heavier. When she breathed in, the scent reached her before the glass did.

Iron.

Coppery. Fresh.

Her fingers tightened slightly around the stem. She lowered the glass just enough to look at it, really look at it.

It was not wine.

The glass was full of blood, still warm, a faint skin already forming where it had been exposed to air. A thin trail ran from the rim, along the curve of the crystal, and dripped down onto the polished floor.

Her gaze followed it.

The trail led away from her hand, a narrow, dark line dragged across marble and silk rugs, unbroken, deliberate. It pointed straight back.

Her head turned.

Her handmaiden was pinned to the wall.

Held there, upright, arms splayed, feet barely touching the floor. A blade had gone cleanly through her throat and into the paneling behind her, anchoring her in place. Her eyes were open. Her expression was frozen somewhere between surprise and the start of speech.

Blood streaked the wall behind her and tracked down onto the floor beneath her feet, dark and glossy where it pooled and smeared. It had run down the front of her dress in heavy lines and continued on, collecting silently on the marble without a single splash.

A small square of paper was stuck to her forehead.

Stick figures.

One wearing a crown.

Another waving.

The words were simple, written with deliberate care: your princess is in another castle.

The princess’s breath caught. Her eyes widened, the sound she almost made dying in her throat before it could exist.

Then she felt it.

The knife pressed against her skin, just beneath her jaw, firm enough to promise what would happen if she moved. Close enough that the cold of the metal bled straight through.

Alorna leaned in behind her, close enough that the princess could feel her presence without seeing her.

She did not speak.

The note said everything.