SKY'S BURDEN

Areon Kael Vonn was on track to become a great nuclear scientist, his genetic augmentations optimized for research: mathematical abstraction, learning plasticity, metacognition, and deep focus. Four augmentations. The average human holds two. He was never meant to be a soldier. Never prepared to carry lives in his hands. Then his mother was diagnosed with autoimmune genomic degradation. Curable, if you have access to restricted military substrate. She went into stasis. His father's dropship was destroyed the same afternoon over a Sevari tribunal zone. No survivors. The only door that opens leads to the United Worlds Institute of War Studies. Pulled into the Institute, he receives the latest genetic augmentation for command and is given a clean, clinical starting line: the ability to sync with and control five AI combat units. Five synced AI combat units become a squad. Squads become platoons. Platoons become companies. Companies become battalions. Battalions become fleets. On paper, it's harmless. It isn't. Areon learns the horrors of war the hard way. Humans against Sevari, two civilizations close enough to share biology and far enough apart to never stop fighting, in a conflict that has burned for centuries across a universe neither side has fully explored. But the true enemy isn't any armada. It's war itself: the primal antagonist that inflicts irreversible damage on civilization, leaving stellar graveyards in its wake. Somewhere far above the front line, under the Sky, war is engineered. The Sky is indifferent to those who stand beneath it. And at the top, there is no one left to share its weight. Each step upward expands Areon's reach... and multiplies the consequences of every order, every delay, every mistake, bearing Sky's Burden.