The sky was still bright. The midday Martian sun beat down on the ground, creating the fleeting illusion of the Mitli California barracks—an afternoon Pegmont had known well since he was fifteen.
Dazzling light poured through a gash gouged into the bulkhead, casting a warm, luminous fan across the otherwise dim chamber.
Fine white motes of dust drifted gently through the beams.
Those rays now fell across Pegmont's back. Because of his constant battling with the Great Spikes, people often forgot that this fellow was actually a tall, powerful man. He had excellent lines across his shoulders and waist, looking every bit the textbook image of a formidable human warrior.
*Swish!* The dead iron battleblade in his right hand cut horizontally through the light and shadow, scattering dust before it rose again... The long blade already rested quietly at an angle across the six hooks on the back of his ragged combat suit.
Pegmont leaned down. His long hair fell forward, obscuring his vision, and his thick, wiry beard pricked his neck. With his left hand, he scooped up all six concentrated source energy blocks; with his right, he picked up the two strips of dried, tough meat.
After a moment's thought, he set the jerky back down and used both hands to carefully and neatly stack the six source energy blocks.
They were aligned as precisely as the sandwiches his obsessive-compulsive mother used to make him every day—two of them.
Pegmont tucked the sandwiches—no, the neatly stacked concentrated source energy blocks—carefully into the storage pouch at his left flank. He tested the motion once, making sure he could smoothly draw them out in a single pass, swing his arm to his back in the same motion, and slap them into the metal case.
"I suddenly miss you a little, my old Carol. Please, don't be polite or humble—keep using my name to scare those drunks and junkies in our old neighborhood. After all, your son is named Pegmont. I remember that's the name you gave me, raising me alone through so much hardship and grit.
"You even ran in your apron, wielding a Remington 870 to chase off those bastards trying to drag me into street fights. You bravely and fiercely tried to protect me—until you finally found out I was their ringleader...
"If not for running into that wretched shorty on my fifteenth birthday, I definitely would've ended up running Glen Street. Mom, I swear to you.
"...Damn it, right now I miss your sandwiches even more. Sorry, Mom. My dear old Carol."
If only he could have a neatly stacked sandwich right now, with not a trace of condiment spilling out, the morale of the Pegmont Legion would surely skyrocket... Thinking this, Pegmont finally bent down again and picked up the two strips of dried, tough Red Shoulder meat from the floor.
This was both his food and his poison on Mars. Over the past few months, Pegmont had stubbornly insisted he could survive on them, continuously hunting them down for that very purpose.
Yet, in the end, exactly how much he had actually managed to keep down and how much he had vomited back up was something even Pegmont himself didn't know.
[A tall, powerfully built man with messy long hair and a thick beard, fully armed and armored, stood with his back to the light, head bowed as he chewed on raw meat.]
In everyday life, you would rarely see a human eat with such a grim, unyielding demeanor—so stubborn, resolute, and steady.
Eyes closed, he tore off a bite. The hand holding the food remained poised by his lips as he slowly began to chew... until he swallowed.
This process took longer and went far slower than ordinary people might imagine, yet it was laden with a peculiar tension—a tension that should never have existed in a creature's instinctual act of eating.
Then came the next bite, followed by another round of resolute chewing...
His throat bobbed once, slowly at first and then briskly, completing the swallow.
It took Pegmont nearly forty minutes to finally finish this pre-battle meal. Having forced down both strips of dried, tough meat, foul-smelling streaks of reddish-blue fluid clung congealed to his beard.
"Just as well. I think it's time I shaved," Pegmont thought to himself, then spent another five minutes or so finally suppressing the nausea rising in his chest and throat.
Then, he turned around in the light and shadow.
Sunlight struck his face, filled his eyes, and washed over his arms and palms.
A palm hardened by years of gripping a blade was always rough and marked with old scars. Pegmont lifted his hand, drew the battleblade from behind his shoulder, and pressed the flat of the blade against the bulkhead with both hands.
*Scrape, scrape...* Slow, powerful strokes repeated again and again.
He seemed to be sharpening the blade, but that wasn't it; a dead iron battleblade had no need for extreme sharpness. The true result of this friction was that it created a smooth, dimly reflective mirror surface on the bulkhead.
In his nine-plus months on Mars, this was the first time Pegmont had paid any attention to his own appearance.
After all...
"If you could make yourself look just a little presentable, I'd grant you the rank of captain, Peg," the diminutive General Bochen had often told him back then.
Yet Pegmont had refused every time. He hated discipline, because discipline usually meant dull uniformity.
"Shit!" Startled by the sight of his primitive, middle-aged reflection, Pegmont burst into laughter. "Fine, let's call it maintaining the combat image of the only human legion on Mars.
"Otherwise, if those Azure idiots happened to catch a glimpse, they'd think a Martian was doing the fighting."
Using the massive 1.6-meter dead iron battleblade, Pegmont shaved off his beard with masterful skill, leaving not a single stray stubble behind. The dusty hair he shaved off probably weighed a good five hundred grams.
In the blurred reflection, a youthful face barely twenty-eight years old—about half of it, anyway—reemerged.
Now it was his hair's turn. Pegmont hesitated for a moment as he raised his arm. Because of hair growth, that pink tuft originally above his forehead had now reached the corner of his mouth.
"No, Pink Peg chooses to refuse."
Sheathing the battleblade back across his shoulders, Pegmont looked down and tugged a loose thread from a frayed patch at the hem of his combat suit.
The combat suits of Azure's super combat powers had a double-layered structure. This loose thread belonged to the outer layer, woven from fine alloy threads laced with a trace of dead iron. While far less indestructible than pure dead iron, it retained immense tensile strength while remaining supple.
Ultimately, Pegmont pulled free a length of alloy thread about thirty centimeters long.
He smoothed most of his hair back, raking through it a few times with his fingers to make it look neater. Then, he gathered the rest into a bunch and tied it firmly behind the crown of his head with the alloy thread.
That pink tuft remained conspicuously visible.
"Old Fiels wasn't lying. He really gave me the best hair dye."
"Legion Commander" Pegmont had finally completed his pre-battle preparations. Standing there before the blurred human face in the mirror, he smiled with satisfaction.
It felt good to see a human again.
Even though he knew the person staring back was himself, after nine months of solitary life on Mars, Pegmont genuinely felt at this moment: humans truly were the most endearing, lovely creatures imaginable.
***
The time had not yet arrived. As stubborn as ever, Pegmont waited for nightfall.
He sat down in the cockpit of the T-type mothership, right in the sunlight streaming through the fissure. When he closed his eyes, the play of light formed halos—red and white—drifting and swaying across his retinas.
A sensation of warmth rested on his forehead, the tip of his nose, and his chin...
Just like that, in complete silence, Pegmont reviewed every single preparation in his mind, attempting to simulate every battlefield scenario as well as his only possible paths to victory.
He didn't know how long he sat there, until the red glow behind his eyelids gradually faded and the warmth on his face slowly ebbed away.
It was time to move.
Pegmont rose and walked out of the ship's cabin with a steady gait, calmer than he had ever been on any previous hunting run... He no longer had to worry about Great Spikes spotting him and rushing here to attack.
They were all gathered in another sector now, drawn up in full readiness, awaiting the final battle. For they knew that human would definitely come. Just like those humans at the South Pole once had, hurling themselves at the tractor field like madmen...
Humanity's sole source energy armed force on Mars—the Pegmont Legion versus ten thousand Great Spikes. The curtain on the war had risen.
*Thud!*
Leaving the ship's cabin, Pegmont made a final leap onto the roof of the T-type mothership. Straightening his back with his blade in tow, he turned to gaze into the distance.
The setting sun was sinking far away across this red planet. Gaps in the crimson clouds revealed flashes of pale light, distant and remote.
A colossal plain, sprawling with red and gray soil and stone cliffs, stretched out boundlessly—vast and formless, remote and unending.
Yet piercing the cloud layer, cutting across the endless desert and plains, the final beam of light from the distant sky, fringed with a glowing halo, still reached Pegmont's face.
Facing that last beam of light, Pegmont leaped from the top of the warship, his boots landing on the surface of this distant planet and sinking into the soft dirt under gravity.
A thick cloud of dust was kicked up by his advancing strides.
This was Mars.
With his pitiful grasp of astrology and mythology, Pegmont naturally had no idea that this planet actually possessed another name: the star of the God of War, Mars.
Chapter 877