Preparations for the siege of Inkopolis began on Monday at the Splat Academy. All the classes and levels combined into a singular mass to practice and learn the info specifically designed for the siege. It was awe inspiring to see so many squids in one place with the height of skill known only to the Splat Academy. A couple more squids had joined the academy in recent days, including Rose and Delfinia, and their numbers had risen to a solid seventy squids enrolled.
Advanced combat movement class put their current lesson, close quarter's combat movement, on hold for the whole group so that they could work on moving through a hostile territory (something Jace, Azure, Ivy and Pavyl's squads had already had experience in). Marie had Jace, Ivy, Celine, and Azure demonstrate the drill. The goal of the drill was to get through the room (which had been set up with multiple obstructions just for this purpose) without being hit once by all the other squids, who would set themselves up and fire on the group moving through.
Jace would've preferred switching out Azure or Ivy with Ora since they worked better as a team, but the drill would've been too dangerous for her to take part in. Too much Inkling ink flying around.
Ivy took point with the group, her blaster being the shortest range, Jace was support in the back while Celine and Azure were in the middle with their splattershots. They made their way through the whole course with only Azure taking a hit to her leg.
The other groups didn't do as well. They all worked well as teams, but just went way too fast and weren't careful enough to come out intact. They would have all been destroyed by Octolings because they weren't working carefully enough.
Marie then gave the groups a ton of a ton of examples and practices that they could do to get better. "This is going to be the kind of fighting that you'll use if our defenses fail." She said after giving the assignments, "We'll be fighting in the streets of Inkopolis with enemies all around, you need to learn to fight like this. Of course, this won't be as necessary if we can repel the attack, but it's better that you know right now in case it's too late."
She had them do the drills for the rest of the class.
For firing range, Agent 3 took everybody out to an adjacent platform and had them do drills all about concentrating fire, and fighting as an army instead of as small teams. They started off with firing as a group in certain ways to provide an area of effect that could ink a whole platform at once.
"Form up!" 3 called out after they had explained the drill in depth. All seventy squids got into a position relative to their weapon. Chargers went to the back while the less range a weapon had meant the closer to the front they were. Brushes and rollers were on the absolute front lines.
"Ready! Aim!" 3 held up his hand.
"FIRE!" 3 Screamed out the time honored commander's phrase. His hand dropped. All the weapons unleashed a volley of ink.
Jace smiled as he saw the effect their ink had. Everything fifty feet in front of the group was completely drenched in ink. Any Octarians dumb enough to charge their lines would've been a puddle of purple before they could do anything to defend themselves.
Then they practiced moving as units with coordination given by radio commands from 3. Most units were simply the teams of four that normally made up turf war teams. Except for Jace, he was the exception. He led a massive team of seven, not including himself. Ora, Celine, Rose, Evan, Delfinia, Philip, and Crista all looked to him as the leader.
During the drill, they acted like any other team, but Agent 3 told him that when they got to strategy with Callie, they'd need to act as something a little different.
While the other two agents had worked on fighting as a team, Callie was the agent who actually made the teams. While every team was charge of fighting as one unit, there had to be more organization than that.
"Okay, everybody, divide up into your units!" Callie called out to the large group of squids. Everybody immediately attached themselves to their teammates.
Callie moved around the teams, assigning them squad numbers, when she came to Jace, she gave him and his unit the number 6. Jace nodded. When she was done, Callie called out again.
"Divide up into squads one through six! One in the front, six in the back of the classroom!"
Jace walked to the back of the strategy classroom with the rest of his team. They were the only ones in squad six, the majority of everybody else being squads one and two. Squad four had some of widely regarded 'best' teams in the Splat Academy, five only had chargers, and three was filled with the teams that upgraded and modified weapons, but most of the students were in one and two.
"Squad one, you are going to be the squad to face the enemy head on. You are our first line of defense, and hopefully, our last. You are going to be those that fight the enemy on our grounds, our terms, and you are going to have one of the largest impacts of all the squads. Your fighting will take place in your units of four, fighting diversely as a whole squad in order to defend the Academy. Squad two, your job is as a backup to squad one. You will switch out with units in squad one at any time, bolstering their ranks if they need the boost in units, and fighting hard. If squad one defends our Academy successfully, it will be because of your ability to jump and out of the fray to keep them fighting at full strength. You must be able to cover the squad one units with impunity, and you'll be the second wave when squad one tires. Squad three, you are our specialty team, you are here to maintain defenses and provide our units with weapons that could keep them alive. Squad four, you're the best of the best on the splat zones and off. You're going to be our squad that is kept for back up at all times. If there's any spot in the lines that we need you to go and take down anybody important or any war machine, you'll be who we go to. Squad five, you're our support group. Any Octarian that shows their face, blast it off from here. Squad six." Callie looked at Jace, "You're going to be a special group. Since your familiarity with Octarians, I've decided to line you up to go behind enemy lines before this confrontation and start up something to recruit Octarians who don't want to fight. Thanks to the present company," she pointed to Rose, Delfinia, Ora, Evan, Philip, and Crista, "We know that this is a possibility. You're going to go on special missions to start this. How you start this and how you go about doing this is up to you. During the siege, you'll act with squad four, just as an Octoling-Inkling unit, or U.I.U for short."
Callie readdressed the entire group, "That's it. Begin introducing yourselves to the rest of your squadmates. We want you working as a team by the end of this week."
While the rest of the squids began talking amongst themselves about how many Octarians they would kill over the siege, Callie made her way over to Jace's squad.
"Hey, can I have a word?" She asked. Jace nodded, "Yeah, sure. That's fine." And made his excuses to Evan and Rose, who he was talking to about the 'go behind enemy lines' purpose of their squad.
"So what's up, Callie?" Jace said, putting his hands in his pockets. His Gal sloshed around in its holster, and his Octobrush rattled in its sheath.
Callie smiled, "I wanted to talk about your mission. You've got the only mission to go and recruit people… other than us agents, we'll be recruiting squids in the next month so that way we could train them. Any later and they wouldn't be trained enough. But what I really wanted to ask, was what you thought when I said what your purpose was?"
Jace pursed his lips for a moment. He thought. "Well. The first thing I had thought of was that when we rescued Ora, we then saved those she thought would agree with her. What if we did the same thing, just with Rose and Delfinia's choices."
He looked up, Callie was nodding at his words. Spurred on, Jace continued. "From there I thought, 'well what if we get their choices, and their choices, until every Octarian in the army who wanted to come could leave the army and join with us.' But then I realized that there was a large flaw in the plan. On that scale, we couldn't screen every Octarian, we might get a few that would completely ruin everything and spy on us for the enemy. From there, I think that we should limit the amount of Octarians recovered by creating a series of safe houses and only letting those we know are dedicated come to fight with us. We'd limit our amount of Octarian resources, but we'd be able to lessen the enemy forces by allowing Octarians to hide while strengthening our own with Octarian knowledge and manpower."
He stopped, and Callie tilted her head and placed her hands on her hips. "That makes sense, but we'd need people to run the safe houses, and a way to screen the Octarians."
"Evan, Philip, and Crista. They're pacifists, they don't want to fight. They don't like it. But they have been mimicking what I've done here. They'd be perfect for the job so long as we can screen a small amount of Octarians to determine their loyalties in order to have them protect Evan, Philip, and Crista and keep their location secret."
"I'll run this idea up to the Cap'n. I think that he'll like it, but I'm not sure. There's a lot of spots this plan could go wrong."
Jace nodded. "You're right about that. There's a ton of What-Ifs in the plan. What if somebody escapes to alert the Octarian forces about the safe houses, what if somebody passes screening, what if they're discovered. The only thing we can do, is plan for that, otherwise we'd be murdering those who have no will to fight us and would rather be fighting with us. We'd be wasting innocent lives."
Those words seemed to set Callie back on her haunches and weigh on her thoughts. "I'll go talk to Cuttlefish about this."