Aron stood behind a lectern, dressed in the same uniform he was wearing when he delivered his declaration of war against the world. “Rest, brave soldiers. Now, your watch has ended,” he said in a somber tone.In front of him was a crowd of people dressed in mourning colors. Due to the many cultures of the ARES recruits, it was a cacophony of clashing colors. Some wore white, some wore black, and some wore bright, garish colors. Some heads were covered, others were bare, and some were home to elaborately styled hair. Some feet were bare, some were covered, and some were wrapped in sackcloth. Some wore silk, others wore hemp, and one was even wearing nothing but body paint and a loincloth.Aron had never attempted to take cultural identities away from the people under him, but had instead supported them in their diversity and different heritages. All he asked was that they were human first, and cultures second.To his left was a guard detail of a hundred ARES troopers from the ceremonia

Inside a dimly lit, dusty basement room, a group of people with anger on their faces were seated on steel folding chairs. The only sound was the creaking of the unfinished basement ceiling and the occasional dust being knocked off of it and falling to the floor as someone in the house above stomped around like an upstairs neighbor. But no matter how loud the stomping echoed against the rust-red-spotted cement floor of the basement, the only disturbance was to the spiders that had spun their webs between the exposed wooden beams in the ceiling.Soon, the stomping above stopped and a door creaked open. Everyone seated in the basement swiveled their heads as one and looked at the stairs, where a shiny leather shoe appeared. Then a leg covered in tan slacks, followed by the hem of a navy blue blazer. When the man wearing the slacks and blazer turned the corner on the stairs, the blazer fell open and showed the blue and white horizontal stripes on the thin sweater beneath it, which had the

“Bring me to Aron,” Felix asked as he logged in to VR. With the growing number of people who had access and their varied tasks and locations, Nova had created a navigational VI aid.Once he arrived at Aron’s location, he couldn’t help but curse in surprise. He was in a large, grassy meadow with Sarah, Henry, Rina, and all of the high-level leader AIs. The meadow itself was about fifty meters across, and outside of it was nothing but devastation. Craters were scattered around the cracked, bare earth, and more were appearing every second as explosions continued booming out in the distance.“What the hell is going on?” Felix wondered, his jaw dropped so far Sarah considered spawning an egg to stick in it to see if it would fit.{Sir Aron is having a sparring session with mother,} Athena answered, pulling up a screen that showed the action in real time with slow motion replays for Felix.After watching the footage for a few seconds, he asked, “Why fight with swords and magic if it’s a spa

{Corporal Jose Cuervo, report to docking bay two. Corporal Jose Cuervo to docking bay two.}Corporal Jose “Tekillya” Cuervo had graduated from Athena’s basic ARES training course two months ago, VR time, and his performance assessment had qualified him to become a Reaper after the initial training was complete. He picked up his black-and-gray ARES duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and rushed to his assigned docking bay for transport. The VR training facility was as realistic as anything else in the simulation and recruits were required to eat, perform the biological necessities, sleep, and everything else, just as they were in reality.He had completed the majority of his Reaper training and been on “leave” for the time it took his special enhancements to be implanted in the Reaper-specific VR pod, a hybrid medical pod and ARES training pod. All that was left for him to do was one final training mission, during which he would become accustomed to the performance of his newly enh

Hellworld A-2485239/JS was a planet with ten times the diameter of Earth, putting it firmly in the category of “Super Earths”. It was unique in that it was 90% land and only 10% water on the surface, but instead of being dry and arid, as one might expect, it was entirely covered in lush, tropical foliage. From orbit, it looked like a brilliant emerald, and seemed like it would be a nice place to take a camping vacation every now and then.But that wasn’t the case at all.Code named “Jurassic Planet”, Hellworld A-2485239/JS was home to some of the most vicious species that Nova could design using all of the processing power at her disposal. The foliage was all either carnivorous, venomous, or poisonous, and the inhabitants were modeled after the most aggressive dinosaurs that could be proven to exist, then run through countless evolution simulations to crank up their lethality to a ridiculous degree. Essentially, everything on the planet would eat anything that couldn’t run fast enough