SG Vol. 1 pt. 18 (Patreon)

While Lance gets to sleep nice and earlier than he is used to, his cadets find it difficult to truly wind down and relax despite the fact that they have been free of him for hours.

Just a single day of his training has been so different from what they are used to.

“I – seriously, I was terrified,” the boy now politely known as “Shitger” tells his fellow cadets. “Did you see his face? When we were running?”

“He was smiling and laughing,” Muscles answers. “I felt like a monster was chasing us.”

“Afraid?” Samurai asks.

“I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t. Are you?” Muscles asks Samurai.

Samurai shakes her head and says, “No, I was. I have never seen a man with such a twisted smile on his face chasing cadets  - anybody, no… anything before. Not even a man starved a hundred days will chase after a chicken like he chased us.”

“Yeah,” Shitger says, “he was scarier than your stupid analogies.”

“Metaphors,” Valkyrie corrects him, “and I don’t think he was too bad.”

Shitger looks in Valkyrie’s direction to groan like usual about how she has to always be correcting him and acting tough, but as soon as he sees her in only a tank top that does little to hide her cleavage, he looks away. The dog tags hanging on top of her exposed flesh only makes the sight more erotic to the cherry cadet as she combs her hair.

There is one girl in particular more traumatized than the rest.

“Hey… you alright?” Shitger asks the shivering girl after noticing her just sitting on her bunk, holding onto her ponytail with both of her hands.

“I – I… I… he tried grabbing my ponytail. Wh-while we were running. I… I saw evil in him when he was reaching for my hair. I knew… I knew that I’d be killed if he caught me,” the girl explains.

“H-hey now, don’t you think that’s exaggerating a bit? I mean, he wouldn’t really kill any of us, right?”

Silence fills the room as Shitger looks around.

“Ri-right?” he asks again. “Come on, he’d get court-martialed if he actually hurt us.”

“He punched me in the throat,” Muscles says.

“Rachel was sent to the infirmary,” Samurai adds on.

“H-he convinced me that Hell is a real place,” the shivering girl from before says.

“Come on,” Shitger says, “it was just the first day. He was trying to scare us and show us who’s boss. Now we know he lives up to the file they showed us, so we just have to do what he says and it should be fine! Right?”

“Don’t act too submissive, Shitger,” Valkyrie teases. “I don’t think he’d respect that.”

“Come on! You don’t have to call me that, too,” Shitger says with reddened cheeks.

His usual harem can’t help but look on at him with jealous pouts as he blushes from Valkyrie’s teasing.

“Whatever the case may be, I believe that we should all try our hardest to stay his cadets. You have to admit that not a single one of our previous instructors has been anything like him,” Valkyrie explains. “He reminds me of the stories my grandpa used to tell me as a child of his time in basic. Supposedly, all instructors used to be like this.”

“Yeah,” Muscles says, “I’ve seen videos of instructors back then. They were scary, but he’s something else. He’s insane.”

“He’s also one of the longest surviving VSU pilots in the world. That makes him worth listening to.”

“How – how do we know he didn’t just hang out in the back while everybody else went forward?” Shitger asks.

“Didn’t you read the file?” Samurai asks. “He’s our top ace. Only members of the Fighting Aces have higher confirmed kill counts than him. You cannot get that by ‘hanging out in the back’ like a dog afraid of the cat who stole its bed.”

“You really need to work on your analogies.”

“Metaphors,” Valkyrie corrects Shitger again. “It’s going to embarrass me if somebody so illiterate earns the right to pilot a unit.”

“Hey! I’m – I’m not illiterate! Just because I don’t know those fancy terms doesn’t mean I’m illiterate, plus they’re close enough! I think. Right?” Shitger asks Muscles.

Muscles shrugs with his hands up before lying down on his bunk. The size of his body is enough to make a regular bed look small for him, so he looks comically oversized on a standard bunk.

“Dude, how can you even sleep when your legs are hanging off like that?” Shitger asks. “What if a ghost under the bed grabs you?”

Shitger’s ghost comment might only make Muscles roll his eyes, but it makes the ponytailed girl pull her legs up off the ground to tuck herself underneath her sheets. “Wh-what if he’s under our beds?” she asks.

“He’s not under our beds. Relax.”

“You – you didn’t have him right behind you trying to grab your hair while laughing! He looked like he was going to tear my heart out and eat it on the spot!”

“I mean… I’m not going to deny that he did look pretty hungry. He’d definitely be court-martialed if he was a cannibal, though.”

“I’m – I’m not so sure. What if that’s his secret? What if he’s going to make us kill and each other, and only the strongest gets to survive? Wh-what if—”

“Alright, I’m done trying to help you. Now you’re just crazy.”

“He made me like this!”

“Anyways, I’m telling you all that he’s actually a softie. You see those two girls with him at lunch? He even switched his food with the one he was sitting with, and the other was all over him,” Shitger says.

“Girls like muscles, but they like scars even more,” Muscles says.

“It’s true,” Samurai confirms. “Our instructor is more scarred than a scored Thanksgiving ham with pineapple-honey glaze.”

“How do you even come up with these metaphors?” Shitger asks, looking at Valkyrie for her approval.

“Good boy,” Valkyrie says with a wink that causes the boy’s heart to race and his harem to pout even more.

“A-anyways… those girls wouldn’t have been with him for lunch if he treated them like how he was treating us. Even if he did have a bunch of scars, there’s no way.”

“Do not underestimate the power of scars,” Samurai says. “A scarred man is a man proven in battle.”

“Yeah, or he’s a man who accidentally dropped a sharp knife,” Shitger says.

“Those were awfully large scars on his arms for a knife to make,” Valkyrie says. “I am also interested in knowing how he dropped a knife that somehow cut his face several times.”

“Maybe… ma-maybe those are scars from his victims clawing at him trying to get him to stop eating them,” the ponytailed girl says.

“I’d rather buy the him-being-a-badass thing than the him-being-a-cannibal thing,” Shitger says.

“Perhaps he is both?” Valkyrie suggests.

The ponytailed girl jumps up on her bunk and says, “S-see! Even – even she thinks so! If she thinks so then—"

“Don’t put weird thoughts in her head. You know her imagination is too hyper for her own good,” Shitger says and sighs. “Come on, what happened to being the big sis of the squad? Big sisters aren’t supposed to scare their little siblings.”

“Is that what you think?” Valkyrie asks. “We must have had very different relationships with our siblings, then. If anything, it is my duty to bully you all as much as our new instructor does. How does that sound? He bullies you during the day, and I bully you in the evening?”

Naturally, Valkyrie’s words cause Shitger’s mind to imagine a totally different kind of evening “bullying” than what she intended with her words. Even Muscles and some of the other girls are imagining being “bullied” by her as it grows dark outside.

“Anyways… seriously, what do you think of him?” Shitger asks Valkyrie. “Do you think putting up with his bullshit is actually going to be worth it?”

“I do,” Valkyrie answers without a moment of hesitation. “Between his experience and methods, I honestly believe that we are going to be far better for it if we survive his training. The fact that he is training us with such intensity means that he is serious about it. Remember what was on the board? ‘Kill. Survive.’ He doesn’t want us to leave and die. He wants us to survive.”

“Well… if you think he’s not that bad of a guy, I guess staying around and dealing with him won’t be too bad.”

“Would you have left even if I said he was not worth it?”

Shitger crosses his arms and says, “I – I’m not just going to leave and let him think he’s right about me!”

“Good boy. Now, we should all get some sleep. I am sure that he has an even more intense plan for us tomorrow.”

“Trying to sleep when my body hurts this much will be worse than trying to sleep with a thousand crippled infants performing handstands on my face,” Samurai says.

“Seriously, what the hell is up with your analogies?” Shitger asks.

“Metaphors,” Valkyrie corrects.