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What can I say? Orphaned girls make good soldiers. Mass producible, expendable. No will to live, dependable. Highly trainable. That’s why the Japanese government invested in the Lycoris program in order to counter the rising tide of domestic terrorism.
It costs about five-hundred thousand yen to produce and equip a Lycoris—less than a tenth the price to train a soldier of lower pedigree. The result? A mass of highly skilled assassins ingrained to protect the Japanese people until their dying breath.
A brother program was initially proposed but never progressed past the developmental stages. Something about schoolboys was more suspicious than a pretty schoolgirl. Didn’t matter. The Japan Self-Defense Forces were quite eager to accept them into their ranks.
Initially, there were concerns about what to do with the Lycoris once they were past high school age, however, this program was never forced to contend with. The median lifespan of a Lycoris is about fifteen missions. Lycoris are typically sent on thirty missions each year. Only a few seasoned veterans have survived this long, and certainly none of the original one hundred Lycoris are still in service today.