Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

The Last Hope

One hundred men and women strong.

Under the Artificial light of the Arcadia suns , ninety soldiers stood under the watchful eye of a spartan commander. Once those first SE soldiers had returned at 100% success rate, other colonies and planets had begun sponsoring a soldier for the risky surgery.

Adam had no doubt that, if it wasn't for Krill performing the surgery, then that success rate might not have been so impressive, but he had done a good job, and for the first time in so many years, Steel Eye had returned, but this time in greater force.

The original Steel Eye program had covered only 40 individuals, augmented in back alley field surgeries, Few had returned alive, and even fewer had retained their sanity. But it seemed, for some of them, Steel Eye would never go away. It was a part of him now, that he had accepted, A horrible part of his past that he could not let go, and could not let go of him.

Steel eye would forever be that horrid little gremlin that followed him everywhere, keeping just out of sight until he needed a good reminder of where he had come from, but that was fine by him, if SteelEye wanted to stay close, then he would hold it hand and walk clear-eyed into hell.

He wasn't the only one who had returned to Steel Eye.

Lindsay, and Jane had returned as well; all three of them having followed the same course: Steel eye, suffering, Iron eye, suffering, and now SE. He had pleaded and protested with both of them, but they were just as stubborn as he.

Out of all of them, he felt the saddest for Jane, who he had once hoped had put that past behind her, but at the end of the day she was a soldier, and had never truly been able to integrate herself back into society, even with help from the rehab center, even after the court case that made it a state of the art facility. He felt bad for allowing her to do this, but he would have felt even worse saying no.

He had no recourse to turn her away

She passed the psych eval and the physical.

It was time to move forward for all of them.

The Spartan commander stepped aside as the Saint of Anin took his place. Sunny wore her saint armor, pearly white sheen glittering in the light from above. The open face of her helmet curved gently upward into delicate horned points on her head. Her spar stood a good few feet taller than herself, its tip glimmering at a wicked point. When she walked, her armor rattled, the glittering pearl spikes jutting out from her heels glittering dangerously.

The affect was somewhat ruined by her companion, a little golden shadow doing his level best to emulate his mother.

Kay didn't exactly have his mother's gravitas, but what he lacked in pure raw power, he made up for in spunk.

Sunny walked up and down the line, inspecting the new SE soldiers, staring down their faces, prodding at them with her spear, and behind her followed Kay, attempting to clasp his hands behind his back brow furrowed in concentration as he stared thoughtfully at the soldiers.

"Good.... Good." He muttered as he passed each one of them.

Lindsay and Jane stood in the front middle of the formation, and this is where Sunny paused. Adam watched closely, from where he stood at the head of the field. This would be a good test for them. It had, likely, been a while since either of them had interacted with a Drev outside of a war context. Lindsay hadn't been off earth since the war almost a decade ago, and though Jane had found herself work as a cage fighter, she had only ever experienced Drev in an adversarial role.

Would this moment prove too much for them?

It had all been Adam's intention, of course. He needed to know his soldiers were in the right state of mind to handle themselves. That wasn't to say he didn't have some faith in them, otherwise he would never have let Kay follow Sunny onto that field, but at the same time, Sunny was the only person Adam could trust to take out a rogue SE soldier.