Chapter 31: The Pack
The squad was designated Fang-7. A bureaucratic label for seven broken pieces of reality.
Feng stood before them in a dusty training yard carved from the canyon wall. Vex watched from the shadows, a silent evaluator. Lin stood with her, arms crossed, a warrior assessing other warriors. Kaelan and Lian lingered at the edge, part of Feng's orbit but not under his command.
The seven Flawed looked back at him.
Ember: The fire-breather. His hair smoldered when nervous. His flaw was unstable combustion—emotion fueled literal fire. Fear made smoke. Rage made flames.
Marrow: The bone-shaper. An older woman with hands like polished ivory. She could reshape living bone—her own or others'. A healer's gift twisted into a weapon of grotesque sculpture.
Jinx: The luck-weaver. A twitchy, narrow-faced man who unconsciously twisted strands of his own hair into complex knots. He couldn't control luck, but he could nudge probability in small, chaotic ways. A cup might shatter, a weapon might jam, a step might find the only loose stone.
Silent: A boy who hadn't spoken a word since his flaw manifested. His shadow didn't just move independently; it absorbed sound. Where he stood, the world went mute.
Patches: A man whose skin was a quilt of different textures—scale, fur, chitin, smooth stone. He could manifest the properties of any patch on his body, but only one at a time. A stone fist, a scaled hide, fur for insulation.
Wisp: A woman barely more than a ghost. Her form flickered, becoming semi-transparent. She couldn't become fully invisible, but she could become easy to overlook, a blur at the corner of vision.
Rust: The last, a hulking man whose touch oxidized metal at an accelerated rate. A brush of his hand could turn a sword blade brittle and red.
"The Broken Blade saved you to use you," Feng began, his voice flat. "I am to make you useful. That means learning to fight, not as individuals, but as one thing. Your flaws are not weaknesses here. They are your only strength. But alone, they are just tricks. Together, you might survive."
He pointed to a stack of worn training dummies. "Ember. Burn the third one."
Ember focused, face screwing up in effort. A weak gout of flame sputtered from his lips, singing the dummy's shoulder.
"Pitiful," Vex's voice cut from the shadows. "A child's spark."
Feng walked to Ember. He didn't berate him. He leaned close. "Your fire is emotion. You're trying to control the flame. Control the emotion first. What do you feel right now?"
"I… I'm trying to focus," Ember stammered.
"That's not an emotion. That's a thought." Feng's voice was low, relentless. "You're afraid of failing. Afraid of us watching. That fear makes smoke. I don't want your fear. I want your anger. What are you angry about?"
Ember's eyes darted to the chains on the ground, the ones that had bound him. A spark of genuine, hot indignation flashed in his eyes.
"Good," Feng said. "Now, don't breathe fire. Breathe that."
Ember took a shuddering breath, his face contorting not with strain, but with fury. He exhaled.
A stream of concentrated, blue-tinged flame roared out, engulfing the dummy, reducing it to ash in seconds.
The other Flawed stared.
"Anger is a cleaner fuel," Feng said, stepping back. "Now, Marrow."
He had her practice not on dummies, but on Patches. "Give him a bone-spur shield on his left arm." Marrow, her hands trembling, reached out. Patches flinched as his left forearm's skin rippled and a sharp, bony plate erupted from it. It was crude, painful-looking.
"Jinx," Feng said. "While she's concentrating, nudge the probability that her next shaping is perfectly symmetrical."
Jinx twisted a hair-knot, muttering. On Patches's other arm, an identical, mirror-image bone plate grew, smooth and precise.
Marrow gasped, looking at her own hands in wonder. "It… it felt right."
Feng was using them to amplify each other. He wasn't teaching them to be less flawed, but to synergize their flaws.
He had Wisp practice flickering around Silent. The boy's sound-absorption field masked the soft noises of her passage, making her virtually undetectable.
He had Rust prepare a patch of ground, oxidizing buried scrap metal into brittle shards, which Ember's fire could then superheat into lethal, fragmenting shrapnel.
It was clumsy. It was slow. But it was a start. They were no longer just seven oddities. They were becoming a system—a flawed, fragile, but interconnected system.
At the end of the brutal session, Feng gathered them. They were exhausted, but a new light was in their eyes—not just hope, but the spark of agency.
"You are Fang-7," he said. "You answer to me. The Blade will give you missions. They will be dirty. They will be cruel. Our goal is not to serve their cruelty, but to survive it. And to grow strong enough that one day, our survival is on our own terms."
It was a whisper of rebellion, masked as pragmatism. They heard it.
Later, in the austere room he shared with Lin, Kaelan, and Lian, she confronted him.
"You're building them a heart," Lin said, sharpening her spear. "That's a liability. Shard will use it against you."
"I know," Feng said, staring at the rough stone wall. "But a tool with a heart can choose where to cut. A tool without a heart is just a rock in someone else's hand."
"You sound like a revolutionary."
"I'm a survivor. These people… they're like me. The world told them they were garbage. I'm just showing them they can be a different kind of weapon. One that might, eventually, turn in the hand that holds it."
Kaelan's sandy form shifted by the door, a silent sentinel. "The sands remember armies built on such bonds. They either conquer empires… or are buried by them."
Lian, blending with the room's deep shadows, spoke softly. "My shadow likes them. It doesn't feel… threatened. It feels… similar."
That was the truest assessment. The flaws recognized each other.
A week later, the first real mission came. Not retrieval. Eradication.
A cell of Purist fanatics had been discovered two days' travel east. Purists believed Flawed were spiritual diseases to be cleansed with fire and sword. They had been hunting isolated Flawed in the Wastes. The Broken Blade tolerated no rivals in its territory, especially not ones that threatened its "resources."
Fang-7 was to be the scalpel.
"Intel suggests twelve Purists, led by a zealot named Sol," Shard briefed them in the war room, a holographic map of rocky badlands shimmering before them. "They are holed up in a canyon shrine. They have two captive Flawed with them, likely to be burned at dawn tomorrow. Your orders: eliminate all Purists. Recover the captives if possible. This is a test of Fang-7's combat efficacy. Vex will observe. She will not intervene unless total failure is imminent."
A test with live ammunition. And a witness to report any weakness.
They moved out at dusk. The mood was tense. This wasn't training. Feng could feel their fear—Ember's smokey scent, Jinx's frantic hair-knotting, Wisp's constant flickering.
As they crouched in the cold dark overlooking the narrow canyon, Feng gathered them for a final word.
"They see you as monsters," he whispered, his voice cutting through the wind. "They see you as mistakes. So don't try to fight like men. Fight like what they fear. Be monsters. But be my monsters. Together."
He laid out the plan. It relied on synergy, on using their flaws not as individual powers, but as parts of a single, terrifying organism.
They infiltrated under cover of Wisp's flickering and Silent's sound-absorption. Rust coated the metal hinges of the shrine's rickety gate with accelerated corrosion. A touch from Patches, using his stone-skin patch, and the brittle metal crumpled with a faint, muffled crunch.
Inside the torch-lit canyon, the Purists were gathered around a pyre, chanting. Two bedraggled Flawed—a girl with feathers for hair and a man with crystalline skin—were bound to a post.
Feng gave the signal.
Jinx focused, twisting his knots. The zealot Sol, raising a torch, stumbled as the ground beneath his foot gave way—the one loose stone in the entire canyon.
The torch fell into the prepared kindling.
"Now, Ember," Feng breathed.
Ember, fueled not by fear but by a focused, cold anger at the scene before him, didn't just breathe on the fallen torch. He exhaled a jet of pure, concentrated oxygen over the pyre.
The fire didn't just catch. It exploded in a silent, whooping detonation of light and heat, blinding and disorienting the Purists.
In the chaos, Marrow acted. She didn't attack. She reshaped the bone in the leg of the nearest Purist guard, causing it to buckle with a sickening crack. He fell, screaming.
Patches, now with fur-patch active for silence, and Wisp flickering, moved like ghosts among the stunned zealots. Patches delivered blunt, fur-muffled blows to vital points. Wisp used a small, oxidized dagger provided by Rust, appearing only as a faint blur as she cut hamstrings.
Silent stood at the canyon mouth, his shadow stretching, creating a dome of utter silence around the battlefield. The Purists' shouts for help, their cries of pain, were swallowed before they could echo.
It was not a fight. It was an unmaking.
The Purists, trained to fight honorable duels or burn helpless captives, had no doctrine for this. They were dismantled by a enemy they couldn't see, couldn't hear, and couldn't comprehend.
Feng watched, his own heart a cold drum. He saw the efficiency of it. The horror of it. This was what the Broken Blade wanted. A perfect, silent, terrifying weapon.
Only Sol, the zealot leader, remained standing, his eyes wide with fanatical rage. He held a blessed sword that glowed with purifying light. "Abominations! I see your taint! I will scourge—"
Rust stepped forward, directly into the sword's path. He didn't try to block. He let the glowing blade pierce his shoulder. As the metal entered his flesh, he grabbed the hilt with his bare hand.
His flaw activated. The blessed steel, resistant to normal decay, rusted at an impossible rate. The glow died. The metal turned flaky and brown, crumbling to dust in Sol's hand.
Sol stared at his empty grip, his faith shattered as completely as his weapon.
Ember stepped up and, without a word, put a final, precise jet of flame into the man's chest.
It was over.
The two captive Flawed were freed, staring at Fang-7 with a mixture of terror and awe.
Vex emerged from the shadows, her mercury hair coiled tight. She looked at the scene of efficient carnage, then at Feng. No smirk. Just a slow, acknowledging nod.
"The Broken Blade will be satisfied," she said. "Fang-7 is operational."
As they marched back through the night, the new Flawed walked taller. They had been monsters, and they had won. The bond between them, forged in shared atrocity and survival, was now ironclad.
Feng walked at their head, the weight of command settling on his shoulders. He had turned seven broken things into a pack.
And he knew, with a cold certainty, that Chapter Master Shard would now see him not just as a weapon, but as a weapon-smith.
The game had leveled up. He was no longer a piece on the board.
He was starting to learn how to move the pieces. And deep below, in the dark, the wounded world dreamed on, its feverish chaos whispering secrets only a fellow hungry thing could understand.