The Last Gray Helmet

Ethan Kane was a broke mechanic from a border colony — a low-grade citizen, conscripted into the Gray Helmet Suicide Squad and sent to die as cannon fodder for the Swarm. Everyone assumed the bugs ate him years ago. They were wrong.

Every impossible battle that "nobody soldier" fought was quietly written into the Alliance's military textbooks — under a name no one knew: the Unnamed Marshal of the 9th Expeditionary Force. Ten years later, Ethan comes home to find his wife scavenging scrap to survive, his crippled father spat on, his daughter branded the child of a deserter — humiliated by the mayor, the syndicate, and the very son who sold them out. He came back for one thing: to make every last one of them understand who they buried.

And when the Swarm follows him home, the town will learn the deserter they mocked was the only guardian they ever had.