Flechettes screamed through the air, carving streaks of fire through the haze. The corridor was already chaos, walls cracked open, smoke rolling through broken light. Elian held the line at the front, his Soul Skill spreading like a force of gravity through the space ahead of them, folding the air around each shot. The rounds bent, slowed, and fell, but there were too many, too fast. His breathing came in short bursts, sweat glinting across his jaw as he poured every ounce of focus into redirecting trajectories that should have gutted them. The air shimmered with distortion. Every breath came with the sound of ricochet and snapping light.

Vaeliyan stood back, his field whispering quietly through the air, building reach instead of destruction. He was setting up the coup de grâce, not wasting power on the early noise. The others handled the chaos. Fenn and Jurpat were hammering the Princedom lines with mechanical precision, bursts of flechettes tearing through cover and metal plating.

The Princedom line was taking heavy fire from the others, hammered by Fenn, Jurpat, Lessa, Varnai, Torman, Rokhan, and Roan as they tore through cover and armor. Even Bastard and Momo crashed through the front with brutal rhythm.

Vaeliyan’s attention stayed fixed on the air. His field spread, saturating the atmosphere molecule by molecule, unseen and unfelt. But he didn’t get enough time.

The Princedom line finally broke formation, their defense shattering under the coordinated attack. One soldier fell to his knees, gasping, fingers clawing at the neck of his armor where a flechette had lodge itself. Another stumbled backward into a flickering panel. The sound of the firefight staggered, and then a new sound cut through it: the sharp slam of a reinforced door opening at the far end of the corridor. A single figure stepped through.

He looked out of place in the storm, too clean, too composed. The man’s lab coat was flawless white, unwrinkled even under the emergency lights. His hair was neatly combed, his eyes calm and sharp, like a surgeon’s blade. He didn’t carry fear or hesitation. He carried purpose. In his hands, an experimental lance, roughly welded at the core, heat vents stitched together with copper wire, glass along its chamber still glowing from calibration. The scientist smiled as if seeing something exciting before it happened, and then raised the weapon. His hands were steady. He aimed straight at Vaeliyan and fired a single shot.

The sound wasn’t a sound at all. It was absence. Then time fractured.

To everyone else, it was a blink: Elian holding steady, the others firing, the chaos continuing. But inside that fraction of existence, the world stopped completely.

Vaeliyan’s Bound Path snapped open, and the battlefield unfolded into threads of silver possibility. He could see a thousand variations of motion: Elian turning, Varnai shifting, flechettes hanging midair. Every potential action, every death, every outcome existed at once, pinned to his perception. The world had no sound.

The flechette had not left the muzzle. It sat there; a single metallic glint suspended in the air. He scanned the lance instinctively, analyzing every curve and line, and came up blank. Nothing about its structure should have activated his skill.

One of his new mental layers picked up something his main mind didn’t. A thread of thought pinged an anomaly, something microscopic sitting at the flechette’s tip. Vaeliyan followed the signal, trying to figure out what he was looking at, until he saw it.

A seed.

Tiny. Dark. Coated in amber resin. At first inert, a small lump of matter glued to the point of the flechette. Then movement. The amber cracked. A pale shoot began to push through the fracture, straining upward as though defying the stillness of time itself. It bent space around it, curling and growing where nothing else could move. The sight twisted Vaeliyan’s stomach.

His chest tightened. What in the hells... he thought.

The sprout flexed once again, the amber shell splitting wide, and the Bound Path screamed for resolution. He didn’t have time for analysis or doubt. He made his choice.

The Path slammed shut.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathed as time shattered around him and motion returned in a single, crushing rush.

He didn’t try to dodge it; he used the field.

The air he had been saturating surged forward, dragging Elian and Varnai clear of the line of fire. The shock tore past them, hurling both to the ground, but Vaeliyan stood perfectly steady, untouched by the force. His coup de grâce collapsed before it could finish forming, but it was enough to save them.

The world slammed back into motion.

The flechette fired, striking the wall behind where they had stood.

The noise that followed was a violent imitation of life. The wall exploded. A single trunk erupted outward, tearing through stone and wiring. Wood and bark forced their way into being, expanding at impossible speed. Branches burst from the ceiling; roots split through the floor. The corridor shuddered, groaned, and then screamed as steel bent to make space for it. The smell of sap hit first, sharp and wet, followed by the heat of friction as growth met resistance.

Jurpat crashed into a support pillar, shielding his face as a rain of splinters shredded the air. “What the fuck was that?!”

Elian coughed, dragging himself up, his focus still tangled between the gravity field and survival. “I can’t stop that,” he rasped. “That’s way too much mass and momentum, whatever that thing was, it’s not something I can stop.”

Vaeliyan stood motionless amid the wreckage staring at the splintered ruin ahead. A massive, full-grown tree had embedded itself in the corridor, the trunk buried deep into the wall, roots clutching at shattered metal. Sap poured like blood from its cracks, dripping in slow, heavy lines.

He exhaled hard through his teeth. “That’s new,” he muttered, tone flat and edged with disbelief. “Okay. So, this is a real fight.”

Vaeliyan’s jaw tightened. He let out a low laugh, short and humorless, and said, “At least it’s exciting.” His gaze drifted to the tree splitting the corridor, its leaves still trembling with impossible life. “But what the fuck was that bullshit?”

The firefight was chaos refined by rhythm. Flechettes carved streaks of light through the haze, thin and surgical. The stone walls cracked from the stress of each impact, fine trails of dust drifting from gouged edges. Vaeliyan’s half of the team held the line.

The battlefield was half-devoured by the tree that had erupted from the earlier shot. Its trunk split through the far wall, roots webbing across the floor and ceiling. Thick tendrils of wood twisted through shattered supports, reaching like veins into the facility’s structure. The roots tore through light fixtures and bulkheads, dripping sap that hit the stone in a rhythmic pattern. The smell was sharp and sweet, clinging to the air. Some of the roots had burst through the ground itself, coiling through the squad’s cover. Fenn crouched beside one laying down fire with Betty.

Elian’s Will warped gravity ahead of them, dragging enemy flechettes down and warping trajectories midflight. Varnai crouched low behind a root, using it as cover while she fired in short, brutal bursts, every shot cutting through gaps that the others opened. “Left flank’s thinning out. Push it hard,” she said, her tone as sharp as the crack of a flechette impact.

Fenn’s laughter crackled through the comms, short and electric. “On it.” Betty sang, flechettes screaming through the haze. One round punched straight through a Princedom trooper’s chest plate, leaving a hole so clean the man didn’t even fall before the kinetic shock caved him inward.

The door to the facility kept opening in rhythmic bursts, each cycle spilling more Princedom troops into the chaos. Dozens of them, armored, firing experimental lances with more of the jumping flechettes. Each wave came harder and faster, yet none of them could cross the line. The Complaints Department chewed through them like machinery, unrelenting, silent, efficient.

Between volleys, the structure around them groaned. Metal beams twisted under the strain of root growth, sections of the wall splitting apart. The floor bulged where roots pushed upward, breaking through like buried monsters reaching for light.

Then the scientist appeared through the haze, white coat bright against the glow of the emergency lights, the modified lance in his hands. He was rushing to load the chamber with one of those amber tipped flechettes. Vaeliyan saw it immediately, the shimmer of the embedded resin, and didn’t even get a chance to shout an order.

Fenn was faster.

Betty fired once. The flechette hit center skull, shattering bone and spraying the inside of the man’s head across the troops behind him. The scientist dropped like a puppet with cut strings, the lance clattering beside him. The flechette rolled free and clinked across the floor before coming to rest in a pool of blood.

Fenn’s voice came through calm and smug. “Told you we needed Betty.”

Vaeliyan didn’t even crack a smile. “Good shot. Now finish the rest.”

The Princedom troops kept coming, firing their experimental lances with frantic bursts. Flechettes tore through the space between them, but none found their marks. Bastard advanced through it all, lightning leaking from the seams in his scales, eyes like molten silver. When he roared, it wasn’t sound, it was pressure, a wall of force that made the Princedom formation collapse under instinctive fear.

Momo charged beside him, a mountain in motion. She hit the line like a landslide, claws tearing through soldiers and walls alike. Stone splintered beneath her weight, sending debris flying. The Princedom’s formation shattered completely.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Elian’s Will locked the field in place, pinning fallen soldiers and dragging fleeing ones backward into Bastard’s storm. Varnai fired with controlled bursts, every round finding a throat, a visor, a weak point. Lessa, Torman, Roan, and Rokhan closed the perimeter, cutting off the stragglers and keeping anyone from retreating toward the door. The facility’s automated systems tried to seal it, but the damage from the tree made the frame warp and lock partially open. It jammed mid-cycle, the metal whining like something alive.

The Princedom forces fought, screamed, and died. None broke the line. None escaped. The floor was slick with sap and blood by the time silence fell.

Vaeliyan stood still, scanning the field, the hum of Bastard’s lightning fading behind him. The walls trembled as another root split open a section of ceiling. “Clear the field,” he said quietly. “Verify kills. No one leaves this area breathing.”

Lessa moved through the bodies, efficient and silent. Anything that so much as twitched caught a case of flechette to the face. “All enemy units down.”

Vaeliyan exhaled, steady. “Good. Everyone on me.”

The entrance ahead glowed from residual charge. The roots twitched as if the tree itself were still alive, its sap glowing faintly in the dark. Behind them lay a field of fused armor and glassed stone.

He looked once more toward the fallen scientist, the flechette glinting near his hand, then crouched to pick up the modified lance. The weapon was heavier than expected, its structure dense and unnatural. Several flechettes rested beside it, their tips capped with solid amber nodules. Vaeliyan turned them in his hand.

He stood, showing the weapon and the flechettes to his team. “We need to talk about what the hells this thing is.”

Vaeliyan looked at his team, holding up the flechette so the amber nodule caught the light. It shown with that strange dull orange that never seemed alive but never quite dead either. He turned it slightly in his hand, the faint smear of blood from the battlefield catching the light. “Guys, what do you see?” he asked.

Elian frowned, eyes narrowing behind his helm. “That’s the type that grew the tree,” he said. His tone carried a strange hesitation, something halfway between awe and fear.

“Yeah,” Vaeliyan said, voice low. He turned the flechette again, weighing it as though the small weapon could answer him. “It’s got a seed in the tip. But what do you think made it grow like that? Matter doesn’t just appear. It has to come from somewhere.” He glanced at the lance still in his other hand, tracing the edge of the trigger with his finger. “It looks like this thing can speed up time for the flechette it fires. I don’t know how in the hells they did it, but that’s what it looks like. Some kind of temporal bubble.”

Roan wiped grime off his helmet, studying the amber as if he could stare through it. “You’re saying they isolated time, and forced a hundred years into a few seconds?”

“Yeah,” Vaeliyan said. “That’s what it looks like. They figured out how to accelerate time in a confined space. They weaponized it. The lance fired, and grew a tree in seconds, because inside that bubble, it experienced decades of growth.”

Jurpat let out a low whistle. “Even if they could pull that off, it would take an impossible amount of energy. A tree that size? A hundred years of energy packed into a moment.”

“Exactly,” Vaeliyan said. “It would shrivel and die instantly unless it had something to feed on. Something that could sustain that growth. And the only thing I know that even comes close to that…” He paused, holding up the flechette again. “Is this. Four-eye toad amber.”

Torman muttered, “It’s fucking four-eye toad amber?”

“Yeah. They found a way to concentrate it,” Vaeliyan said. “They’re using it to feed the seed and keep it hydrated during that accelerated time. The tree lance just provides the trigger and the containment. The amber is what keeps the seed alive long enough to complete the cycle.” He looked around the battlefield. “The lance itself is only a single chamber. You can see the structure inside the barrel. This guy was waiting for it to cool down before firing again.”

Elian crossed his arms. “So, the amber’s the nutrient source, and the tree lance was the time scale.”

“Yeah. It’s like forcing nature through a loop it was never meant to survive,” Vaeliyan said. “And the worst part is, they’re using something that’s already fucking horrifying to do it. You know what it takes to harvest that amber. You’ve all seen what four-eyed toads do.”

Roan nodded grimly. “They don’t just secrete it. They make it. They use animals or worse people to make it.”

The group fell silent. Around them, the roots creaked, faintly shifting in the broken walls. The air smelled of sap and death.

“This thing’s genius,” Vaeliyan said finally, staring at the lance. “And it’s fucking monstrous. They’ve weaponized biology, time, and torture all at once. Whenever four-eyed toads are involved, unless someone’s eating them, it’s a fucking nightmare.”

Varnai spat into the dirt. “Then we burn it to the ground. Everything connected to this.”

“Yeah,” Vaeliyan agreed. “We burn it all to the fucking ground.”

A beat of static and Chime’s voice came over the comms. "Vaeliyan, we got a problem. Asset's in a vat. I'm pretty sure it's dead. Encased in amber. Could be it, could be something else, but this is where the coordinates led and it's a mess in here and it’s the only thing in the room that could be the asset. There are terminals everywhere in here that are linked to the vat."

"Chime, whatever you think, sedate the fucker, even if it looks dead. Don’t take a chance with this shit. Remember use the rhino tranqs, fifteen doses minimum. Ramis, pull any data you can get your hands on. take every drive, copy every file. If it's paper, bag it and bring it out."

Chime's voice tightened. "Copy. We’re extracting the asset now. Ramis is on the terminals. If there's more, we'll drag it out and torch what we can't take."

Ramis swore under his breath, fingers already moving. "I'm on it, Vael.”

“Sylen, help Chime with the extraction. When you break the amber, be ready to hit anything that moves with all the tranqs you have. If you see a finger twitch, hit it with every one you have." Vaeliyan barked through the comms.

Styll's sight flooded Vaeliyan's mind through the bond: a vat with a pale figure suspended in amber, tubes feeding into them. The body in the center was swollen, bloated, features macerated and impossible to read. Terminals lined the walls, monitors listing vital.

Vexa and Leron cursed, low and ugly. "It looks human enough to be a person. But it isn’t a broken. Whatever they did to this thing was seriously fucked up."

Wesley spoke up. "I went back and took a left at last junction, Vael. There's a whole room of bodies. They're... they're covered in amber, and they have feed tubes. The amber's running through lines into them. They're being fed amber. They look like they're alive but they're not. It's awful."

Chime's voice went low. "Dear gods. If there's any chance, we can get them out, do it. If not, end them and make sure they don't suffer."

"Xera, get over to Wesley, tell us where you are, and we'll head in," Chime ordered. "We're patching through the feed now. Ramis, how bad is the encryption?"

Ramis cursed again, faster. "Layered, deep, military and clever. I can get most of it in five minutes if I can keep going, I think I can get to the good stuff."

"Sylen and Vexa, you watch the door. Wesley, get ready to move on my mark. Leron, help Ramis with the racks."

Chime's team moved like a single organism, practiced and brutal. The thing inside did not look like a man. It was swollen; parts of its face had melted into a mask of wax. Fingers, when they could be seen, were bloated to useless stubs. When Chime finally winched the body up, the amber cracked with a sound like thick glass giving under weight.

For a moment nothing moved. Then something shifted inside the broken shell, a small, desperate motion that made Styll hiss and everyone flinch. Chime barked a command, injectors hissed, and a needle plunged into exposed flesh. Fifteen doses, saturated. The body spasmed, a hiccup of movement that was less alive than reflex. They shot more. The spasms slowed. The thing's throat made a dry rasp and then stillness.

Outside, shouts echoed. More Princedom forces converged on the facility. Flechette fire snapped, and Vaeliyan's channel filled with the sound of someone firing back until the line cut out.

The team worked faster, hands slick with amber and unidentifiable fluids. When Ramis finally retrieved the last file, he could get access to, he pocketed the drive and shouted. "I'm done, lets get back to the others"

Chime let out a long breath that tasted like ash. "Got it. We're moving. Prep the charges. We light the place up and leave nothing for these bitches."

Vaeliyan's voice came again, steady and cold. "Do it. Get the asset and the data back to the Boltfire. Move your asses!"

The Princedom forces kept coming, but they came as men with lances and fear, not as something built to fight Imperators. Vaeliyan felt the mismatch in his teeth, tasted it like weak metal. He had expected more resistance. He had expected the thing his future self promised him. Instead, he found easy kills and a hollow pulse where a true challenge should have been.

That thought made him grin. It made him greedy.

"Fuck it, let's have some fun," he said, voice sharp with irritation. He holstered his lance and drew his truncheons. The new mod clicked into place. The ends of both weapons split, axe-like blades locking with magnetic precision. Vaeliyan flexed his grip and smiled. “Time to earn it.”

He charged.

The Princedom line didn’t just fold; it disintegrated. Each swing of Vaeliyan’s axes split soldiers cleanly in half, armor and bone parting without resistance. He carved a path straight through their formation, every strike a single, perfect kill. Blood and fragments hit the walls in sheets. Nothing survived contact.

Jurpat’s armor always resembled a small, short-faced wolf, compact, heavy, and mechanical. When he activated his Soul Skill, it expanded into a monster of blades, a machine built for slaughter. Every motion was an execution. His claws tore through men and metal alike, shredding bodies into ribbons. There was no defense, no pause, just clean, relentless erasure.

Elian fought beside them, spears in both hands, each thrust piercing two or three troopers at once. Their armor buckled under the gravity pressure that followed, collapsing in on itself with a wet implosion. Every motion he made ended lives.

Bastard prowled the center line, lightning tearing from his mouth in torrents that charred men black. Momo struck like a collapsing wall, claws and mass pulverizing the remainder.

Varnai emerged from the haze, her armor’s thin tentacles unfurling in waves. They weren’t bladed, but they didn’t need to be. They lashed out, wrapping around soldiers with frightening speed, crushing armor and bone in coiling bursts. She whipped bodies into others, snapping spines, hurling corpses like projectiles. The tentacles moved with unsettling precision, dozens of them alive with purpose, crushing everything they touched. Torman fought beside her in brutal symmetry. His threads snapped outward, slicing through armor seams, binding limbs, crushing men into walls. At one moment he’d snatch a soldier into the air, hurling the body into a cluster of others, tearing them apart on impact. Between the two of them, the corridor became a meat grinder.

Lessa stood at their flank, her prosthetic arms retracted and replaced with cannon limbs. Each air-blast struck like artillery, shattering armor and scattering bodies across the floor. Fenn’s laughter carried through the noise as Betty barked, each flechette a burst of death that tore through multiple targets in a row. None of them were sweeping or holding angles. They were the storm itself.

The facility screamed. Fire crawled through ruptured conduits. The air grew wet and heavy with blood. Princedom soldiers died faster than they could fall. Vaeliyan’s axes rose and fell, each impact final, each movement deliberate. The Complaints Department wasn’t fighting a battle; they were ending one.

Sylen’s voice cut across the channel. “We’re en route back to the Boltfire. We’ll see you in like ten seconds. Most of us are going to get into the fighting, the rest are heading to secure the asset back on the Boltfire."

"Once you have it locked down, come back. We finish this together. Leave no survivors.” Vaeliyan said.

“Copy that Captain,” Chime replied. “I’m going to secure the asset. We’re coming back. You better leave something for us to kill.”

Vaeliyan’s laugh was low and feral. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Then the rear corridor split open with molten light, Ramis’s return signal. Chime’s team had rejoined, and Vaeliyan felt Styll before he saw her. The connection brushed against the edge of his mind. Dust and smoke filled the air as they advanced, the entire team now reunited and unstoppable.

Ramis’s Soul Skill flooded the hall with molten heat, burning everything in their path. The walls sagged, the air burned, and every Princedom soldier caught in range turned to slag before they hit the floor. Chime and the rest moved behind him, cutting down anything his fire missed. The combined force of the full Complaints Department hit like an extinction event.

The floor was slick with blood and sap. The smell of scorched amber filled the air, sweet and chemical. Vaeliyan kicked a broken lance aside and looked down the main corridor. “Once Chime’s team gets back,” he said, “we burn it all. Nothing leaves this place breathing.”

“Understood,” they all replied.