86 EIGHTY-SIX

The Republic of San Magnolia claims to fight the autonomous Legion drones of the neighboring Empire of Giad with unmanned weapons called Juggernauts. The official description hides the truth: the Juggernauts are piloted by people known as the Eighty-sixers, who are treated as less than human and used as expendable tools of war.

Shinei Nouzen commands the Spearhead Squadron, a unit composed of Eighty-sixers sent into a conflict presented as increasingly hopeless. Shin continues fighting while pursuing motives of his own, even as death hangs over every mission. 86 EIGHTY-SIX begins from the divide between the Republic's public fiction of an unmanned war and the human soldiers forced to bear its true cost.