Baptism of Fire
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Effortlessly, Cadet Anjali Patel crawled up a mountain ridge on the Republican border world of Mura. The heavy equipment cases she was lugging barely slowed her down at all.
After all, she was a daughter of Rajipuri, born and raised in the highlands of Gurung. She’d scaled higher mountains and steeper paths by the age of ten.
Anjali was seventeen now, still not particularly tall, with brown skin and glossy black hair that she wore tied back into a braid. Anjali had joined the Imperial military almost two years ago to the day. Two years of hardship and gruelling training that had brought her to where she was today, a cadet in the Imperial Shakyri Expeditionary Corps, the Empire’s cadre of elite warriors, best of the best, sworn personally to the service of the Em
