Carrot Top

Two months after Sunan, Sousuke and Kaname are in a holding pattern. He'll fire his rifle off the school roof. She'll yell at him to stop. Lather, rinse, repeat. That all changes one day when Sousuke's commanding officer Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa shows up at his apartment, trying to hide a key to a terrorist superweapon of unprecedented power. Tessa is brilliant, pretty, and the same age as Sousuke, and her presence might put a serious crimp on his relationship with Kaname... assuming the city survives the night!

Sagara Sousuke isn't your typical high school student. He reads military enthusiast magazines; he responds to questions with "affirmative;" he brings grenades to school in his bag. Though everyone at school takes him for a hopeless military geek, Chidori Kaname thinks there might be something more to him. When their plane is hijacked in the middle of a field trip, Kaname's instincts will prove correct: Sousuke is an elite, mech-piloting mercenary... and he's here to protect her!

It would appear that, after two years of relative slacking, the Hero of Chaos is once again facing an ever-growing workload. Boxxy had been quite fortunate to obtain an exceptionally potent pawn with very little effort, but that was still effort it did not intend to expend. Sensing it might get dragged into things it really doesn't want to bother with, the creature makes haste to depart Velos and its orcs so that it may continue its private preparations for the upcoming Dragon Festival.

The world waits for no one. While Boxxy is off chasing shinies and delving dungeons abroad, Azurvale's shadows churn, fester, and ferment into a potent cocktail of trouble. Secret organizations maneuver behind the scenes, patiently advancing their nefarious plots. Government agencies lay in wait, ready to pounce at the first sign of trouble. Powerful adventurers gear up and train for the next challenge, uncertain as to what form it might take.

The war is in full swing. Following the unprecedented outcome of the siege at Fort Yimin, both the Republic and the Empire are forced to drastically reevaluate their plans for the conflict. With matters on the western front more or less settled for the moment, the warring nations turn their attention toward the eastern theatre. Winter looms on the horizon, threatening to deadlock the region and put a temporary halt to hostilities.

Even before the doomed mission to Hadley’s Hope on LV-426, Jenette Vasquez had to fight to survive. Born to an immigrant family with a long military tradition, she looked up to the stars, but life pulled her back down to Earth—first into a street gang, then prison. The Colonial Marines proved to be Vasquez’s way out—a way that forced her to give up her twin children. Raised by Jenette’s sister, those children, Leticia and Ramon, had to discover their own ways to survive.

This highly regarded war memoir was a best seller in both Japan and the United States during the 1960s and has long been treasured by historians for its insights into the Japanese side of the surface war in the Pacific. The author was a survivor of more than one hundred sorties against the Allies and was known throughout Japan as the Unsinkable Captain.