Chapter 3: Back to School

Emily

It was time for battle school after so much waiting and being one of the only girls there, I wasn’t exactly going to fit in, It was going to be a struggle with a bunch of teenage boys fighting like crazy to be the best whilst I had to sit back and pick up the pieces behind them, I gave my family a goodbye, it was an emotional one as I was very close with my mother. I would survive, however. The trip was long, having to fly across the country in order to make it to the battle school seemed crazy to me but the facilities were so apparently expensive that it wasn’t worth building more than one, so we were stuck going to the centre of the country.

After many naps, and movie marathons I had made It the battle school and the first thing that struck me was how big it was. It was enormous maybe 5 times bigger than a conventional school. At a guess I assumed it was because of the amount of people have to live there and do their studies and so on but knowing all of the new people here I can see lots of people getting lost. All the students on various forms of transports entered the battle school in herds. I could only pick a few people I knew in the crowd, not many students from my school were able to be picked in the flurry of people entering the school, I was alone at this point, there was only one objective for me now, make it in and find where I’m supposed to be doing and where I’m going, I needed to get ahead while I could. I forced my way through the crowd and into the office where we signed in, I did so, the girls behind the counter were having what must be the worst day of the year. They gave me a room number and letter, I was room A17, and unluckily for me on the other side of the school, after a long walk to the room, I swiped the card they gave me for the door and it unlocked and opened, and to my nightmare I was in a room full of boys, 3 to be exact, the rooms they gave us housed 4 people and I was the only girl in the room. It was kind of funny however watching the boys go from rowdy idiots to instantly shy and nice, “Who are you?” one of them asked, I ignored him and picked my bed on the back right of the room. The final boy walked, and he was one I actually recognised, he was the boy I saved from that dimwit Myles, I was surprised he still made it in and wasn’t in prison, “Shouldn’t you be in prison?” I asked him, he stopped what he was doing so suddenly it almost scared me. “How do you know that?” he asked in pure suspicion, I then realised he didn’t recognise me, I don’t blame him, he was getting his ass handed to him at the time. “You were the boy who killed Myles, I Saved you if I remember correctly.” He looked at me with realisation “It was you! I don’t think I’ve ever met you before, who even are you?” I couldn’t help but grin “I was just a concerned student.” I then went back to setting up my things and making my corner home, I mean I It is kind of going to be for the next while.

JOHN

I Exited the plane to battle school and decided to make friends, I planned on being here for a while so I might as well start making as many allies as possible. But before long I had to make it to my room and get settled in, although getting through the line was an actual nightmare, it was shocking how much you could learn about someone in such a short amount of time. However, things had to keep moving. I made it too my room A17 after a hike and a half. I swiped my card to enter the room and shockingly the first thing I saw was a girl In the back right corner, she seemed oddly familiar but I couldn’t understand why, due to the process of elimination my area was the one in the back left, and as I started to get all my stuff packed away I heard “Shouldn’t you be in prison?” The words shocked me, “How do you know that?” she grinned “You were the boy who killed Myles, and I saved you if I remember correctly.” As that moment I realised it was her who saved me from Myles “It was you! I don’t think I’ve even met you before, who are you?” she stood at this point emotionless then she showed a small grin “I was just a concerned student.” She then turned around and completely ignored her surroundings, it really kind of baffled me. I didn’t spend much dwelling on it however I had limited time before our orientation to the school and I wanted to have everything prepared.

Days had passed and all the students were getting into the daily routines of the school, everything was still very new, but we were passed the point of getting lost all the time and not being able to know what to do. Main classes consisted the basics of math and English to keep our normal education skills up, the entertaining classes however were the battle planning classes, where we learnt all the basic theory of combat, how weapons worked, battle strategy and all those types of things, I was particularly gifted in these classes but when it came to maths and English I was quite a ways behind compared to the other students, as much as it bothered me I pushed through doing better and better at everything as each class went by, but at this rate I was always going to be stuck behind everyone, in week 3 we were set to start the practical forms of assessment, the main of which being the battle simulations, the way these work is that all of the new students would be split into groups of 20, and would be run by an older student who had made it through to the next stage of the system, under a normal round there would just be two teams of 20 fighting each other for a specific objective or to just eliminate the other team, then there were the smaller skirmishes, which split one team into two teams of 10 and had the two ‘best’ students one each one whilst the older ‘commander’ student looked on and gave advice to each team. Then there were the massive matches, where 3 teams of 20 fought another 3 teams of 20, it was almost like a small war, they would be the most hectic. The simulation worked a lot like reality, we were giving real replicas of military weapons with, hit scan lasers rather than bullets, and we entered a blank room with random assortments of objects scattered, we were then given a helmet which then projected the look of an area onto the room and gave us a full heads up display with useful bits of info in it, then there was the movement suits, which were indeed the only real thing to carry into the game, it allowed us to run on walls for a short period, boost of them, and gave us other little extras in terms of movement. Mastering the movement, would be the key to winning as an individual soldier.