Holi – Queen Bitch Guardian Station, training room.
Wiping the sweat from her eyes, Holi helped her brother up from the mat. They bowed and took their stances. "You'll get me this time Lolly" she laughed, giving her not-so-little brother the stinkeye. It had been a good life since the Queen Bitch had rescued her and Lolly from certain death.
A dispossessed Kurtherian named Harmartea had used her home as a lab to create super-soldiers. Her lack of ethics set her apart even from the Seven, who found her methods crude and distasteful. She had offered the rulers of this world a carrot and a stick. Bring her the poor and receive her bounty, or serve her needs themselves. The aristocracy knelt to their new goddess and began the work of contaminating the peasants and yeomen on their lands with the nanocytes she had created.
The nanocytes mutated; instead of an invincible army the peasantry was transformed into slavering, flesh-hungry mis-engineered monsters. When word made it to the Empire of a planet overrun with green-eyed zombies, Bethany Anne had come to investigate the possible Kurtherian outbreak.
Unfortunately Harmartea escaped as the children were being rescued, leaving the Empress pissed as hell. The moment she had assumed guardianship for the children in the name of the Empire, she blew Castellegia into shards as a message to any who would allow such atrocities in the future. She did not lift a finger to help the Castellegian aristocrats.
They died screaming.
If Holi had known what popcorn was back then she would have had a bowl ready and waiting for the show. Some might think that extreme but Holi had lived through the horror. She had suffered immensely because they had failed to protect her and so many others.
It had taken a long time to come to terms with all she had endured. She felt she would be at peace when she found Harmartea and kicked her ass across the galaxy and back but like any good Guardian Marine, she would settle for stopping any bastard who used lives like a commodity to be spent without a second thought.
OO-fucking-rah.
She watched Lolly, reading the micro twitches shouting his next move. The time in the pod doc had done him well, clearing his lungs of the disease that had afflicted him as an orphan child and tweaking his genetics for good health. Still, Holi had years of training and experience on him.
Lolly lashed out with a flying front kick. Holi down-blocked and used her momentum to give an open palm thrust to Lolly's chest before using ashi-barai to put him down on the mat yet again.
"I knew Karate Kid was a bad choice for movie night!" he groaned, rubbing the back of his head. "Sweeping the leg is a dick move sis, only the baddie does it!"
Holi chuckled, "Like the General always says, brother dear, the only fair fight...?"
"Is one you lose" He concluded with a rueful smile. "OK, let's go again."
"Luckily for you little bro, I'm needed elsewhere and I need to eat first. I'll leave you in the capable hands of this lovely gentleman here." She nodded at the approaching PT instructor. "Whoops, I think he heard your potty mouth. I see many press-ups in your future..."
With a wave in the direction of the instructor and a tippy-toe kiss on her brother's head she bowed to the floor and made her way to the showers.