The young adjutant blinked and said with a perfectly straight face, "...Well, at a critical moment, help you finish yourself off?"
General Sylvester coughed loudly, like a man who'd spent ages striking a heroic pose only to have a wild ratman come along and kick him in the ass. The tragic resolve he'd just managed to summon vanished without a trace.
It took the general at least five seconds to catch his breath. Then he gave the young man a look as if he were a visual spectacle. The young lieutenant was only twenty-two, a Moon-dweller and a member of the Tiger Tally group—a capable, diligent, humble, and polite young elite. He didn't remember him being so mischievous.
By then, the adjutant had already briskly opened the hatch behind the command room and wheeled over the general's personal exosuit.
"Do I need you to finish me off? I'm a professional soldier too, and I got an A in marksmanship!" the general shouted.
In truth, he hadn't fired a gun at anyone himself in at least twenty years, but that wasn't the point. Marksmanship had just as little to do with finishing himself off, but that wasn't the point either.
What mattered was that once his self-important sense of tragic resolve had been swept away, the general realized that his courage had returned. He was now full of energy, strength coursing through him, as if he'd just graduated from school.
He eyed his adjutant suspiciously again, then couldn't help saying, "Kid, this is your real nature, isn't it? Finally letting it show!"
The young man looked at his superior—the chief adjutant, who was being held down by a medical robot while it bandaged his wounds—then grinned. "Actually, back at the Lunar Military Academy, more than one instructor said I was frivolous