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I kneel amongst killers. Seraphina to my left, Kalindora to my right. All is silent but for the children as they perform the Blood Benediction that has been carried down the generations from Silenius to us.

The voices of children drift through the air.

“My son, my daughter, now that you bleed, you shall know no fear.”

A dozen virgin girls with hair and eyes of milky white walk barefoot through the kneeling legions. Iron daggers are clutched in their hands.

“No defeat. Only victory.”

Blood drips from my hand as a girl drags the blade across it.

“Your cowardice seeps from you.”

Ajax’s eyes are fixed on the floor. His bleeding hand clutched in a fist. Clustered about him are his hungry young friends and the grizzled Gold and Gray officers of the double-strong Tenth Expeditionary Legion, the Terran-born Iron Leopards.

“Your rage burns bright.”

I feel every tremor of my muscles, every kilogram of my armor. But I do not feel the words.

“Rise, children of Gold, warriors of Earth, and take with you your ancestors’ might.”

A chill spreads through me as one hundred thousand legionnaires from the Grimmus lands of Africa and the Americas come to their feet. Not a man or woman amongst them has seen their home in over five years. They do not know when they will see Earth again. But they know their path home goes through the Free Legions.

Kalindora moans as Ajax activates his gravBoots and articulates himself into the air. “Here he goes again.”

In his storm armor, with its thunderhead shoulders, Ajax looks like Jupiter reborn with snowy teeth and inky skin. He bathes in the roars of his men as can only a man who thinks himself entitled to worship, yet earned it anyway.

Beside me, I see envy creep over Seraphina’s face.

I feel the human flaw in myself, but I resist its dark waters, and allow myself to bathe in my friend’s risen stature.

He is young wrath manifest.

“My brothers! My sisters! My Iron Leopards! The battle today is to decide the fate of our Society. Whether we cave to the tide of anarchy, the despoiling mob!” He points his arm. “Or whether we carve our own destiny and build a second Age of Order upon the bodies of the slave horde. We have shattered their fleet! But soon more ships will come from their infernal, restless factories to rescue the Slave King and his horde. When they come, what will they find?”

“Ash,” the legion booms.

The skin on Seraphina’s neck prickles with goosebumps.

“Sevro au Barca, Orion xe Aquarii, Cadus Harnassus, Thraxa au Telemanus, Alexandar au Arcos, Felix au Daan, Colloway xe Char, Darrow of Lykos!” Kalindora fingers the flame-etched hilt of her razor. “These are wanted lives! Bring them to me! Bring them to me! Bring them to me!”

The legions roar and Ajax’s dark face splits into a death’s-head smile.

A golem of a Gold man takes over. He sighs his simian shoulders back and stomps before the cadres of elite Gold knights, smiling like a bulldog chewing a hornet.

“We are Legio X Pardus! We are the vanguard! Ours is a place of honor! Ante mortem!” he bellows to the Golds.

“Gloria!” they roar.

He wheels on the Grays. “Ante mortem!”

“Gloria!”

He turns to the Obsidians. “Ante mortem!”