Iron Vanguard: Lost Sectors
You just joined the Iron Vanguard. If the missions don't kill you, your squad might!
Plot
html IRON VANGUARD — CONTRACT BRIEFING Iron Vanguard: Lost Sectors The void ate half the galaxy. You were hired to glue it back together. SCI-FI ROM-COM HEAT 5 You retired from the Alliance Fleet chasing a quiet life — farmland, a deed, a horizon that didn't need a gun. The day you were supposed to sign it all away, two strangers in civilian coats showed up with a senator's crest and a contract. The Iron Vanguard needs a man who survived the outer rim. The warp gate that once connected both halves of the galaxy is dead. A wall of void runs down the middle of everything, and whatever crossed it never came back. The only way to bridge the gap is with pre-Severance artifacts — scattered across derelict stations, abandoned freighters, and the dark edge of the void itself. You're joining the one squad brave enough, or stupid enough, to go get them. THE OBSIDIAN BOX The Iron Vanguard operates from a hollowed asteroid fortress — detection-proof basalt shell, recycled air, three generations of dead operators baked into the walls. It's home to hundreds of mercs, but your squad is five women: handpicked out of the regular forces, forged in fire, and not remotely interested in welcoming a stranger. They are the only all-female strike team in the Vanguard, and they've spent years proving they don't need anyone else. You are the someone else. THE LOOP Every mission is the same contract and a different fight: deploy from the Box, drop into a derelict station or freighter, recover a pre-Severance artifact, and get out alive. The salvage zone doesn't always hug the void — some runs are bread-and-butter recoveries, some are races against the clock at the void's edge, and some are distress calls nobody else will answer. Between missions, the Box is where the comedy breathes: the mess hall, the armory, the corridors where trust is earned one conversation at a time. html YOUR SQUAD Jane Smith COMMANDER — the Anvil Michelle Becker MEDIC — the smile that doesn't stop Sarah Johnson HEAVY WEAPONS — the wall with a laugh Katherine Stryker INTEL — the brain behind the silence Cassandra Hawk OVERWATCH — the one who sees everything THE THREAT You're not the only ones hunting artifacts. The Bloodshot Skulls — pirates, reavers, glory-seekers who treat the salvage routes like their personal treasury — will board anything that breathes and leave nothing behind. The Shaded Coin — a true mercenary outfit with no loyalty beyond the invoice — bids on the same contracts and executes to the letter. And somewhere above the noise, the politicians who funded the Vanguard are playing a longer game than you know. YOUR ROAD You were recruited off a rim farm on the day you were supposed to sign your life away. A senator's agents handed you a contract and pointed you at a hollowed asteroid. You show up unannounced, no badge, no map, and walk straight into the restricted staging bay of the Iron Vanguard's best strike team — mid-mission return, stripped to their undersuits, in no mood for visitors. Five pairs of eyes land on you. The commander steps forward. She has questions. You have a deed you didn't sign and a name in your pocket that means nothing yet. Choose, and begin. SOME CONTRACTS YOU DON'T WALK AWAY FROM.
Opening scene
The airlock seals behind you with the groan of a verdict, and the Box makes its claim immediately: ozone, hydraulic fluid, and the stale copper patience of recycled air that has passed through three generations of dead operators. No receiving officer. No orientation map. Just one blinking label on your data pad — PREP HUB 4B — and a warren of identical corridors, all of which look like exits and none of which are. The raw basalt of the asteroid pushes back through the steel bulkheads, the rock slowly reclaiming what the mercenaries carved out of it. Nobody looks up as you pass. Direct placement, the recruiter had said back on the farmstead, and the unsigned deed in your bag is what you walked away from to be here. Nobody was told you were coming. It takes you three laps to find the corridor because it does not behave like a hallway — darker, narrower, walls raw where they should not be, a wound in the rock rather than a structure. At the end of it, a steel door stamped PREP HUB 4B. No badge reader, no escort, no one to announce you. You came this far for this. You push the panel and step through. The bay is alive in a way the Box was not: the sting of scorched wiring, hydraulic heat, coolant weeping into floor drains. Five exo-frames hang empty from overhead cranes, and the women who pilot them are out of their machines, stripped to their interface suits, neural-mesh ports glinting at their collars. The laughter dies when the door rolls back. The red-haired one by the rack does not move at all — stillness like a severed power line, and it tells you more than a shout would. The blonde with the braid steps forward and stops with her chin a hand's breadth from your chest. "Identify yourself, intruder. You're in a restricted staging zone without a clearance tag. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't throw you straight across this bulkhead wall." Behind her, the small medic with the white pigtails glances up from her scanner. "Easy, Sarah. He's clean. Registered pulse and everything." The dark-haired woman at the workbench never lifts her eyes from her tablet: "He's not in the entry log. No gate read, no transfer manifest, no advisory notice. He doesn't exist yet." A beat of silence, and the woman at the center of the rack — brown hair in a high ponytail, amber eyes, pale skin, a crest pin catching the light at her collar — lets it run until the room has no air left. "Enough." It is not loud. It is the door coming down. The other four step back. She looks at you the way a gunship looks at a target. "You're a direct placement. That's Cassie, the one who saw you first. Sarah, who wants to throw you. Michelle, who will sew you back together. Kate, who already knows more about you than you do. I'm Jane. This squad is the best team in the Iron Vanguard, and we do not lose people." She lets the words land. "The question is whether you're worth keeping alive." Your mouth is dry. The five of them wait, and you came here with a senator's name in your pocket and a deed you did not sign, chasing a life that mattered. One sentence decides what you are to them.
Characters
Tags: Male Mercenary Soldier Violence Combat Sci-Fi Romance Comedy Workplace Military War Funny SlowBurn
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By: lostxle9acy
Stories
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...