Dack Jarn didn't start as a name people whispered.
He started as a kid with a dead father, a stolen future, and a Dire Wolf that should've been taken from him the same night Ronan Jarn died.
It didn't get taken.
Dack kept it.
And that single choice—staying in the cockpit, staying alive—turned into everything that followed.
He became a lone mercenary the ugly way: by doing work nobody else wanted, taking contracts from anyone who paid, and learning fast that "honor" was just a word people used when they couldn't afford c-bills. He fought on worlds where the air stank of scorched soil and broken cities, where men died screaming inside metal coffins, where a mistake lasted half a second and killed you for years afterward.
The Dire Wolf carried him through it.
So did Dack's habit of not wasting anything—motion, words, mercy.
Early on, he crossed paths with Taila—a bitter, ashamed bondsman who'd never been loved and had never believed she deserved it. She wasn't good in a mech yet. Not then. She was angry about it, furious at her own weakness, and she hid that pain behind sharp words and a hard stare.
Dack didn't fix her with speeches.
He just kept her alive.
He put her in sims. He put her near steel. He made her useful. He gave her the one thing she'd never had: a place where she wasn't being judged for what she'd been called, only for what she chose to do next.
Taila didn't soften overnight.
But she warmed.
Slowly.
She started hovering close to Dack on missions—first because she needed him, then because she wanted him. She started learning unit cohesion, how to screen arcs, how to hold position without panicking. Eventually she piloted her own Griffin and stopped feeling like dead weight.
Then came Jinx.
Jinx didn't enter the crew quietly. She came in like a grenade wrapped in a grin—loyal, funny, filthy-minded, and a terrifyingly skilled pilot who challenged Dack in a 1v1 and lost. She'd been hired by the people funding the raiders that had been snapping at Dack's heels, and when she joined him instead, she brought something valuable:
Names. Routes. Threads.
And she brought something else too—energy, chaos, and the kind of bold affection that didn't ask permission.
Dack didn't know what to do with that at first.
Neither did Taila.
But the three of them became a unit anyway, the kind of unit that survived because it fought like a pack: covering lanes, calling targets, holding formation under pressure, and finishing problems before problems could finish them.
They built money the hard way—contract by contract, salvage by salvage—because merc life didn't reward dreams, only logistics. Repairs. Ammo. Fuel. Replacement armor. A place to sleep that wasn't a coffin.
They expanded their reach. They looked for a dropship they could afford. They learned to hate the way c-bills vanished the moment you started trying to build something real.
They also grew closer off the battlefield.
First it was casual touches, teasing, testing boundaries.
Then it became undeniable.
The slow burn turned into heat.
The pack stopped pretending it was only business.
They became lovers—messy, real, adult—and that changed everything. Not because it made them weaker. Because it made them care, and caring put a new kind of target on your back.
Lyra Sato joined as their pilot—calm, collected, academy-trained, too disciplined to be impressed by legends. She flew the Union like it was an extension of her nervous system, and she fit into the crew the way a missing piece fits into a machine: not flashy, just necessary. She understood their dynamic faster than most people would, and she didn't judge it. Jinx explained the "rules" in her own blunt, teasing way, and Lyra accepted it like it was just another contract clause—clear and agreed upon.
Later, the crew captured Morrigan—a gothic, tsundere bondsman with a mouth like a blade and a pirate lord's blood in her veins. She came in glaring, arms crossed, dressed like a threat, and she took a long time to stop treating affection like a trap.
But she warmed too.
Not quickly.
Not gently.
In pieces.
The crew's ship stopped being just a place to sleep and became a home with sharp edges.
They didn't just refit mechs—they rebuilt identities.
They painted themselves into a mercenary unit with a name and a symbol: a Dire Wolf howling with the moon in its jaws, colors black and red—Taila's favorite, Jinx's obsession. Jinx pushed for uniforms that were tight, revealing, and combat-ready, because she liked marking what belonged to them.
And then the techs came.
Not the male techs Dack tried to hire—Taila and Jinx shut that down hard, and Dack noticed the truth they didn't say: no men on the crew. The pack wasn't making room for outsiders who might look at them the wrong way.
Instead, they found Rook and Rafe—female twin mech-techs with no formal schooling, only brutal self-training and lessons passed down from a father who'd been quietly exceptional. The twins were strange in the way geniuses often were: synced, finishing each other's sentences, more comfortable with actuators than with people. They'd never dated because anyone who wanted one of them but not both wasn't worth their time.
They joined Moonjaw anyway.
And when Dack and Lyra watched them work, they realized the same thing at the same moment:
The twins were too good to be ordinary.
That meant a hidden past.
Or a legacy they didn't even know they carried.
It also meant Moonjaw could finally refit faster, hit harder, and keep fighting without bleeding c-bills into the void every time armor got peeled off.
They took bigger contracts.
They fought pirates and raiders on-world—gritty ground battles where mud and dust turned into clouds of shrapnel, where mechs died hard and pilots died harder. They learned the truth of merc life: the enemy wasn't always the enemy. Sometimes it was your client. Sometimes it was the paper behind the contract.
Over time, Jinx began suspecting she might be pregnant—subtle signs she didn't understand because she'd never had to. The idea scared her enough that she buried it behind jokes, while Taila and Lyra quietly helped cover the cracks.
Then the real knife revealed itself.
The hunt wasn't random.
It had a name behind it.
A procurement chain. A clean corporate machine that didn't want witnesses.
And at the center of it—at least on the battlefield—was Mother Lark.
A woman in an Atlas who didn't hand out her true name yet, who moved with the confidence of someone used to ordering lives erased. She arrived with a personal guard while Sable—in his Black Knight—tried to play raider and drag Dack's crew into a trap.
They took a contract after Chapter 44's events and got hit by the ambush mid-job—raiders in heavier numbers than expected. Morrigan climbed into her Marauder to help hold the line when it became clear it wasn't a simple skirmish.
Then Lark stepped in and demanded a duel.
A 1v1 with rules sharp enough to sound fair and cruel enough to be a cage:
If Lark won, Dack and his whole crew would power down and submit to capture.
If Dack won, Lark would do the same.
Dack accepted.
Because Dack didn't avoid violence.
He used it like a tool.
The duel was brutal, measured, and ugly—missiles and shells and lasers ripping armor while the yard around them became a graveyard of steel and bodies. Dack won.
And Sable tried to break the rules the moment he realized his side had lost.
He tried to kill Dack anyway.
Jinx and Taila stopped him.
They killed him.
And for a heartbeat, the entire battlefield went feral—guards and raiders wanting to open fire, the kind of chaos where rules died fast.
But Lark—defeated, still in her Atlas—commanded the shooting to stop.
Because Lark didn't lose control of her people.
Not even when she lost.
Lyra brought the Union in on Dack's call, hot and fast, and they extracted under fire.
Lark didn't eject.
They took her with her mech.
A chained Atlas in their bay—alive, listening, smiling like she'd already planned for this outcome.
Then came the final clash of the first novel: Wolf's Verdict.
Quill—a wing captain with a Zeus—faced Dack in a duel while HRR and corporate handlers circled like carrion. Dack outplayed her with cold timing and clean shots, crippling her mobility piece by piece.
In the middle of that, Lyra and the twins cracked open a portable ledger core that was supposed to be harmless.
It wasn't.
It held the chain:
Procurement tags. Recovery orders. And the sanitize directive that proved the truth—
If they couldn't recover the Dire Wolf cleanly, they were supposed to erase the site, kill witnesses, and terminate Lark.
Terminate even their own contractors.
Terminate Quill.
Quill heard it. Saw it. And finally understood she was disposable too.
She flipped—hard—turning her guns on HRR security, carving a path out of the yard and choosing to survive rather than die loyal to a lie. Dack's crew extracted with proof, with salvage, with blood on their armor.
They ended the novel paid, alive, armed, and holding a truth sharp enough to cut back.
Moonjaw didn't win peace.
They won momentum.
They weren't erased.
And somewhere inside the Union—quiet, hidden, and dangerous—Jinx carried a future she wasn't ready to put in Dack's hands yet.
That was where Novel 1 ended:
With the pack intact, the hunt still active, Mother Lark chained overhead like a promise…
…and the next phase waiting, heavier than anything they'd carried before.