64. Reclaiming Hope (21)

Lufgt Huron was filled with complicated emotions.

This was strange, because he was ordinarily a man who showed almost no emotion at all, a trait that had first emerged during his days as a recruit.

When the training camp instructors deliberately made trouble for him over certain trivial matters, Huron voiced no objection. He accepted the instructors' insults, beatings, scoldings, and even their later praise, when anger turned to delight, all with the same indifference.

Most of the recruits who had trained alongside him teasingly called him "Stone Statue." Sadly, only a small number of those who had gradually become his brothers completed their training alongside Huron and became reserves of the Astral Claws.

Then, in the wars that swiftly followed, roughly two-thirds of them were lost again. In the end, aside from Huron himself, only three people who knew the name Stone Statue remained alive in the world. All of them now held officer positions within the Astral Claws.

Their old bonds had grown ever deeper through the tempering of time, iron, and fire, as had their understanding of one another. Yet even so, those three men often discovered with surprise that Lufgt Huron was clearly different from them.

That trait which had already made him stand out somewhat as a recruit had transformed into an unbreakable outward characteristic, like the edge of a longsword or the emblem at the center of a shield—the conspicuous feature everyone would notice first.

Simply put, outside the sacred mission entrusted to him, among the homeworld where he could live at ease, the flagship, and his brothers, Huron was instead a lifeless man.

Only when he threw himself heart and soul into war did he look like a living person.

The last time he had been so full of conflicting emotions was during