If the hook for you was Keiji Kiriya dying on the beach, resetting, and using each loop with Rita Vrataski to outthink the Mimics, you’ll love how The Light Brigade shreds linear time on the battlefield. Dietz is a grunt who’s “made of light” and dropped into different points of a war out of order, forced—like Keiji counting loops in his Jacket—to piece together the pattern behind the carnage and exploit causality itself. It’s that same razor-edged mix of military action and puzzle-solving you felt when Keiji and Rita planned their strike on the Mimic “server.”

Remember those beach assaults where Keiji’s Jacket turns him into a slaughter machine—until he dies, learns, and charges back in? Armor drops you into Felix’s suit on a planet crawling with Bugs, and the combat is just as breathless and brutal. The armor’s brutal efficiency mirrors Keiji and Rita’s axe-and-Jacket synergy, while the psychological toll of endless drops echoes Keiji’s mounting cost across 160 resets. If you craved that nonstop, gut-punch tempo, this delivers.

Keiji survives by refining tactics loop after loop—getting a little farther through Mimic lines, drilling with Rita until each movement is perfect. Mark Watney does the same on Mars: iteration as lifeline. He hacks life support, does the math, and treats every setback like Keiji treats a death—data for the next try. If you loved how Keiji and Rita turn repetition into mastery, The Martian gives you that same survival-through-ingenuity high.

If Rita Vrataski—the red-suited legend with the battle axe who carves through Mimics and schools Keiji—was your favorite part, meet Honor Harrington. In On Basilisk Station, Honor outthinks and outshoots stronger foes, turning discipline and precision gunnery into decisive wins much like Rita turns grueling drills into Keiji’s edge. That cool command presence you saw when Rita leads their final push? Honor brings that to every engagement.

Keiji’s transformation under Rita’s merciless regimen—swinging that axe until the motion is pure muscle memory—parallels Johnny Rico’s forging under Sergeant Zim. Starship Troopers dives deep into powered armor doctrine, drill, and the ethos that turns recruits into soldiers, echoing the way Rita shapes Keiji from cannon fodder into a precision weapon before their strike on the Mimic nexus.