With the Locust pretty much gone, rebuilding the COG on Vectes is going rather well for the remaining Gears. They’ve opened their home to the last of the Gorasni people and have the native Stranded and a few pirates to deal with, but other than that, things are pretty good.
That is until a Leviathan attacks the port and they discover it is far from the monsters they are used to taking on. This one is Lambent and far tougher to take down. As the Gears come across more signs of the Lambent’s reach to Vectes, they find themselves resorting to tactics Victor Hoffman and Bernie Mataki are all too familiar with from the battle of Anvil Gate during the Pendulum Wars. (more…)
With no other choice but to destroy the last city still standing, Delta Squad and the other remaining COG officers must take care of the survivors while they search for a new place to call home. Hoping that the last of the Locust has been buried beneath Jacinto, Chairman Prescott decides that their best course of action is to head towards their abandoned naval base at Vectes, an island they hope has not been affected by their Locust enemies. Under the leadership of Colonel Hoffman, Delta Squad leads the survivors to their new home. 
Undeniably one of the best games from the Playstation 2 catalogue, ICO: Castle in the Mist was a game I had rented but never finished and then fell through the cracks of my very growing game backlog. So when I saw that Viz was publishing Miyuki Miyabe’s novelization of the game under their Haikasoru imprint, I was elated. I would finally know how the story played out without the frustrations of actually solving the puzzles. 
Yuriko Morisaki’s life does a major 180 one day when she is removed from class and sent home for the rest of the day. None of the adults will tell her what’s going on, and when she finally finds out, it is the worst kind of news possible. Her brother viciously attacked students in his class, killing one of them, and is nowhere to be found.