A Falling Star

[Blaze Devall]

In many ways Blaze's time with the Legion was refreshing. All the disorder, all the uncertainty was suddenly gone. In its place he found order, security, and a new cause. At the same time he found himself oppressed in a whole new way. While he may be fighting for a future free from oppression, it was still a military he'd signed up for. Lights out, lights on, eating, working. There was a time for everything. And each thing must be done at the correct time exactly as instructed or run the risk of disciplinary action. This was doubly true given the state the Legion found itself in, enemies at every corner. Some may wonder how such a group had managed to survive at all under such conditions. Dedication was the answer. And dedicated he was. Blaze obediently followed every order, every command. At the beginning this mattered little.

Each instructor cared only about training every recruit under their command into a killing machine so fearless and so fierce that they might be mistaken for an actual machine. While he had never even completed high school this did not matter much. What Blaze was learning was an entirely different game. Ground combat, small squad tactics, weapons maintenance, flight simulators, correcting aim during high speed maneuvers, proper usage and timing for missile and mine launchers. These and other topics all blended together until they had succeeded into turning a high school dropout libertonian worker into an efficient killing machine. Or at least that's what he was told. With no taste of real combat he was simply left with his own illusions of grandeur and thoughts of fighting the good fight.

After eight months of training he and the rest of the trainees were cleared for flight status. Over that time he'd built relationships with many of his fellow recruits, relationships that were unfortunately doomed to end. Given the rather unwise nature of sending out a unit full of freshly trained recruits on their own the Legion had adopted the practice of attaching five fresh recruits with each patrol, making each wing a patrol group of ten. This meant that each group had an equal amount of fresh recruits to veteran legionnaires, allowing time to pass on information and experience to the newer recruits while also giving them the chance to become familiar with the sometimes treacherous fields that occupied much of the system. Even with shields up hitting something going at the speeds the Legion ships were capable of could easily result in disaster. The first four flights went without incident, the flight paths assigned by the Legion command intentionally away from the high risk areas typically patrolled by the Armed Forces and Navy. It was during this fifth flight however that Blaze would get his first taste of combat, his first true awakening of how far his training had brought him. And his first meeting with the Outcasts.