Military Calendar June 7, 2518, 2000 Hours
Epsilon Eridani system, Reach Military Stronghold, Psychological Evaluation Room
Psychological evaluations took place once a week.
Deja would speak with the children one by one in the evaluation room, asking various questions in her silky-smooth voice—about memories, about fears, about dreams.
Most children treated this as a relief, an opportunity to confide in someone.
But Ethan knew that every single word would be recorded, analyzed, and archived.
Today was Tak-047’s evaluation day.
As Ethan passed by the door of the evaluation room, he caught sight of Tak curled up in a chair through the ajar door.
Deja’s holographic projection floated in front of him, guiding him to recall his childhood in a soft, gentle tone.
Tak’s voice drifted through the crack in the door, kept very low.
Ethan didn’t linger—eavesdropping on someone’s psychological evaluation was against regulations—but Tak’s performance over the past eight months had already told him enough.
Tak-047 was from New Havana.
The slums of that city were like a corner forgotten by the light of the entire colony, with alleyways so narrow only one person could squeeze through sideways, walls covered in gang graffiti and expletives, and the air forever thick with the smell of burnt plastic and cheap synthetic food.
Tak’s parents had both been addicts—synthetic stimulants, the cheapest kind.
They died when Tak was around four years old, one from an overdose and the other from unpaid gambling debts.
Tak didn’t even remember their faces.
All he could recall was the motion of his mother pushing him out the door on that final night, and that door that would never open again.
At five years old, Tak lived on the streets.
He learned to forage for food in garbage bins, and learned to run through the narrow alleyways—a cat-like sprint, his body almost parallel to the ground, his feet alternating at a piano-playing speed.
He learned to leap between rooftops—the slums of New Havana were densely built, the gaps between roofs rarely exceeding two meters, which to a nimble child was a high-speed highway.
He also learned to steal.
Not because he wanted to, but because he had to.
The local gangs controlled all the homeless children in the slums, and every child had to steal a required number of credits each day or face a beating.
Tak’s fingers were magic-like in their dexterity—he could weave through a crowd without touching a single soul while slipping three or four wallets into his own pockets.
Until he picked the pocket of an ONI agent.
The agent was in civilian clothes, looking like any ordinary tourist.
The instant Tak’s fingers touched the wallet, an iron-grip hand clamped down on his wrist.
Tak broke free by instinct, scampering up the nearest wall like a cat, ascending three stories in less than five seconds.
Perched on the roof, he pulled a face at the man below.
The agent stood below, looking up at him, smiling rather than angered.
He pulled out a communicator and spoke a short phrase: “Physical condition A+.” After a pause, he added, “Reaction speed S.”
That was why Tak had been selected for the SPARTAN-II program—not genetic markers, not potential evaluations, but a few words blurted out by an agent looking up at a child pulling faces on a roof.
At the training base, Tak masked his inner fear with arrogance and violence.
He was terrified of being abandoned—that dread of being pushed outside and watching the door shut forever was carved into his very bones.
So he kept everyone at arm’s length, using aggression to ensure he was never in a position of weakness.
Ethan was the first person to see through it all.
Riley-111’s childhood was a different kind of darkness.
Cygnus IV.
It was a colony famous for its tech industry, with clean, orderly cities, sleek and crisp architectural lines, and an atmosphere that always smelled of ozone and coffee.
Riley was born atop this peak of human civilization; his father was a high-ranking UNSC officer, his mother a quantum physicist, and their home had more bookshelves than wardrobes.
At five, Riley could already solve calculus.
Not to show off, but because numbers were as natural to his eyes as colors were to others.
At six, he published a brief paper on topology in his mother’s academic journal; though only two pages long, its logical rigor led the reviewers to believe it was a pen name used by a professor.
But the price of genius was solitude.
Other children viewed him as a freak—while they chased each other around the playground, Riley crouched in a corner deriving equations on the ground with a stick.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to play; he genuinely didn’t know how.
Those simple games of tag were suffocatingly boring to him, while the things he found interesting were beyond the comprehension of any of his peers.
His parents’ expectations were like an invisible mountain.
Every day was packed full—math classes, physics classes, logic training, memory enhancement.
He had no time to play, no time to make friends, not even time to zone out.
Occasionally, in the dead of night, he would sneak up to the attic to gaze at the stars through the skylight, imagining himself turning into one of them and leaving this place far behind.
When he was seven, Dr. Halsey visited his home in person and played a game of chess with him.
On the eleventh move, Riley set an extraordinarily subtle trap—it looked like an obvious blunder, but was actually a fatal strike fifteen moves later.
Halsey sat in silence before the board for three whole minutes.
“You saw fifteen moves ahead?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Riley said.
His voice was calm, but his fingers were tightly interlaced beneath the table—he was afraid the doctor would find him strange, just like everyone else did.
Dr. Halsey didn’t think he was strange.
She simply looked at him for a long moment, then wrote something down in her notebook.
Riley’s psychological trauma wasn’t violence or poverty, but a deeper sense of emptiness—he felt useless for anything other than his mind.
The weight of his parents’ expectations left him suffocating, his peers’ rejection made him feel like an outcast, and he had no idea what the purpose of his existence was.
Was it to solve equations?
To publish papers?
Or simply to serve as a vessel for the label “genius”?
At the training base, Ethan was the first person to treat him like a normal human being.
No, better than normal—Ethan genuinely valued his analytical abilities without treating them merely as a tool to be exploited.
“Riley, your mind is the most powerful weapon among us,” Ethan had told him once during a break in training.
“Not everyone can see fifteen moves ahead.”
Cohen-099 came from the Paradise Falls colony.
It was a planet famous for mining, its surface pitted and scarred by mining equipment, its sky forever the color of rust.
Cohen’s father was a miner who worked sixteen hours a day underground and drank himself into a stupor as soon as he came home.
Once drunk, he would hit people—striking Cohen, striking Cohen’s mother.
When Cohen was five, his father came home drunk again.
Carrying a liquor bottle from the mines, he began cursing the moment he stepped through the door.
His mother huddled in a corner, clutching her head and waiting for the fists to fall.
But this time, young Cohen charged forward.
Opening his mouth, he bit hard into his father’s wrist.
Crying out in pain, his father threw his arm back, sending Cohen crashing into the wall, but the boy scrambled back up and lunged again—this time, biting off a chunk of his father’s ear.
Blood splattered across his face, warm and tasting of rust.
His father’s deafening howls filled the room.
Young Cohen stood there trembling, the bloody chunk of flesh still clamped in his jaws.
He didn’t know why he had done it—he only knew that he couldn’t let anyone hurt his mother.
His father threw him out of the house.
At seven, Cohen roamed the mining district, fighting wild dogs for food every day.
He learned to solve every problem with his fists—if anyone hit him, he hit back until they couldn’t get up.
Once, three miners picked on him, thinking a kid would be an easy target.
Cohen put all three in the hospital.
One got a broken nose, one had half a finger bitten off, and the third was struck on the back of the head with a rock, staying in a coma for three days.
When the ONI agent found him, he was fighting an adult wild dog.
The hound was twice his size, its teeth sharp enough to bite through leather.
Cohen was bare-handed, but he didn’t back down.
He clamped his left hand around the dog’s throat and pounded his right fist into its head again and again until it stopped moving.
The agent asked him, “Why did you fight it?” Cohen wiped the blood from his face and said, “It stole my food.”
Cohen’s psychological trauma was different from Tak’s.
Tak covered his fear with arrogance; Cohen used violence to protect the soft core deep inside him.
He never bullied the weak—at the training base, he only fought those who bullied others.
That was his line, and his only remaining gentleness.
Ethan observed Cohen for a long time before finally coming to this conclusion: although Cohen was always fighting, he never bullied the weak, fighting only those who picked on others.
In Cohen’s heart, the five-year-old boy who had charged forward to protect his mother had never truly vanished.
The late-night promise took place on a moonless night.
Access to the training base’s roof was forbidden, but Tak knew a ventilation shaft that led there.
The four boys—Ethan, Tak, Riley, and Cohen—climbed up through the duct, sitting on the cold metal roof and looking up at Reach’s starry sky.
Reach had more stars, brighter ones, than Harvest.
Perhaps owing to a different atmospheric composition, the night sky here bore a unique blue-purple undertone, as if light ink had been splashed across a black canvas.
The Milky Way swept straight overhead, packed with stars like crushed diamonds scattered across the ground.
“I’ve never seen stars this clear before,” Tak said, the daytime arrogance gone from his voice, leaving only a near-fragile softness.
“The sky over the slums was always hazy grey. You’d see fewer stars than neon lights.” Resting his chin on his knees, he hugged his legs and curled into a ball.
“My mom said stars are dead people watching over us,” Riley said softly.
His light blue eyes reflected the starlight, looking like two tiny stars themselves.
Cohen was silent for a long time.
Lying flat on his back on the roof, gazing at the sky, his voice was barely audible: “My mom… I can’t remember clearly what she looked like.” He blinked hard, forcing back tears.
Ethan looked at the three of them.
Tak was shivering—not from the cold, but because he was unaccustomed to showing vulnerability in front of others.
Riley’s hands were wringing the hem of his shirt—he was bad at handling emotional moments.
Cohen clenched his fists—his way was always to turn pain into anger.
But right now, these three boys from completely different worlds were sharing their wounds beneath the same starry sky.
This was something SPARTAN training couldn’t teach—trust.
“From now on, we’re family,” Ethan said.
His voice was calm and firm, like a nail driven into wood.
“We protect each other. No matter what happens, the four of us stay together.” He reached out his right hand, placing it on the roof in front of them.
Tak glanced at him, then placed his hand on top.
Riley hesitated briefly before extending his hand as well.
Cohen went last—sitting up, he pressed his scar-covered palm heavily onto the other three hands.
Four hands stacked together, turned silver by the starlight.
No one spoke, but everyone swore the same oath in their hearts.
The fireteam officially took shape—Ethan in command, Tak on reconnaissance and agile assault, Riley handling tactical analysis, and Cohen covering melee and heavy firepower.
Four people, four skillsets, four directions, but only one goal.
Survive.
Together.
Psychological evaluations were not the only way to understand one’s companions.
Details in training were far better at revealing a person’s true nature—a truth Ethan knew well.
He noticed that Tak always chose the highest route during obstacle training—not because it was a shortcut, but because he liked high places.
It was a habit born in the slums: from up high, you could see everything, while others could barely see you.
Tak had an almost morbid fascination with heights, yet paired with an astonishing sense of control—he could traverse a twenty-foot-high rope net as if on flat ground, his center of gravity kept so low he seemed flattened against the net, moving at twice anyone else’s speed.
Riley was completely different.
His performance on the obstacle course was always unremarkable—neither fast nor slow, neither good nor bad.
But Ethan noticed that before every run, Riley spent several minutes observing the whole course, mapping out the optimal path in his mind.
He wasn’t running the obstacle course—he was solving a problem.
To him, the course was like a math problem with an optimal solution, and all he needed to do was find it.
Cohen’s training style was the simplest and most brutal—he used no finesse, no strategy, only brute strength.
While others balanced cautiously on the rope net, Cohen ripped the whole net down.
While others tread lightly across the pontoon bridge, Cohen stomped forward, the bridge groaning in protest without breaking—because although his tread was heavy, every step was solid as bedrock.
Ethan watched the three of them, sketching their outlines in his mind.
They were like different pieces of a puzzle—incomplete on their own, but forming a complete picture when put together.
What he didn’t know was that he himself was an indispensable piece of this picture—he was the one holding all the fragments together.