The transport touched down with a hiss of hydraulics, and Kelvin was still grinning like an idiot when the boarding ramp extended. The recruits filed out behind him, and he could hear them already starting with the post-mission debrief that always happened when people survived something they probably shouldn't have.
"Did you see when he just flew into the swamp?" Marcus was saying to one of the other recruits. "Just straight up flew after that thing like it owed him money."
"The resonance cannon though," Reyna added. "That was insane. The golem just disintegrated."
Kelvin adjusted the compression case on his chest, feeling the familiar weight of KROME reduced to something he could carry around like jewelry. Ten tons of war machine, condensed down to six inches of spatial engineering that still made him nervous every time he thought about the math too hard.
