The initial setback with the Tiger didn't keep me down for long. I trained long and I trained hard, until one day, as I sat in the turret-basket of the huge machine, eyes closed as the pings and clangs of impacts echoed around me, I realised that the noise had stopped without me noticing.

Things can be fixed, Shiho.

Soon after the acclimatisation practice was completed, the remainder of my training continued at exponential speed. I learned to drive, to shoot, and to load - finally, I learned to command, to function as the head of the steel beast, in the place where I belonged - but not before I learned the duties of those I led inside out, and could perform them as well as they could. And I enjoyed it. In fact, those years, where I was exposed to all of sensha-do's joys and none of its weight, were probably the most fulfilling of my life.

Then, shortly after I had turned seven, it was decided that I had to go to school. Although, to be honest, I wasn't very happy with it.

"School? Why?" I asked. "I can add, and read, and write. I can learn sensha-do right here. Why do I need to go to school?"

"It's the law, Shiho." My father reminded me.

"She has a point. There's nothing she could get from school that we could not give her right here."

"Not you too," my father said exasperatedly.

"Won't school interfere with my practice?"

"There's a school team," my father offered.

My mother scoffed. "A school team! She's a lesson away from obtaining her integrated licence. What could they offer her?"

"There's always something to learn, Hizuki. Perhaps it is time she learned to command a crew of her peers. She can't practise with the older students forever."

So it was decided that I would attend the Schwarzwaldspite Grundschule, the elementary-level member of the Kuromorimine family of schools. Being a private school, it offered a somewhat higher quality of education than the free public institutions dotted all over the country, as well as boasting one of the most diverse elementary-level sensha-do teams - but to be fair, schools that possessed such teams were few and far between. It was, for lack of a better word, sad. The majority of tanks in such teams were cumbersome and substandard machines, being chosen for ease of handling by the small frames of elementary students rather than performance in the field - early Panzers, Stuarts and the first few marks of Matilda - tin cans with guns, really. The Grundschule was one of the only elementary schools to consistently field medium tanks, giving it something of a fighting chance against its middle-school opponents.

And so it was in this school that I had my first taste of the sport of war. Previously I had only sat in the training machines, learning the nuances of operation. I had studied the masters themselves - Villers-Bocage, Kursk, Prokhorovka, and spent countless hours drilling, loading, shooting at targets. But this would be the first time that I faced a living, breathing opponent that had the same senses, the same faculties, the same thirst for victory.

I know that many people say that it feels different in person. But as much as I want to, I don't think those battles were all that divergent from my training. Training under my mother had been harsh and intense, but she had prepared me well for what I faced on the field. Often in those days I saw a girl freeze up, joints locking, as the first shells glanced of the hull of her tank with that horrible, sonorous screech that I was so familiar with, and silently thanked my mother for numbing me to that same terror. I saw commanders, intelligent girls, stand and stare mutely as unexpected developments cascaded one after the other, losing their ability to act decisively when their army needed them most, and I had been reminded of my first clumsy forays into leading. I had the good fortune of being the recipient of a training regime that I could truly fall back on - whatever happened to me, there was the unyielding faith that I had been prepared adequately. And I was.

It was here that I finally understood why I - destined to command from birth - had to learn to load, to shoot, to drive, to sight and aim, and to operate the radio, at my mother's insistence. These seemingly redundant tasks that I had been drilled to perform to perfection now instilled in me an understanding of how a crew fit together - their problems, their difficulties and specialisations. From outside the Nishizumi school seems to brook no room for a subordinate to improvise and adapt, often being relegated to a mere limb of their leader, but this is because a Nishizumi knows her troops like the back of her hand, and her troops trust her with their every being - to send them where they are most needed, never to ask too much or too little - because she has been in every one of their positions before at some time of her life, and she knows their struggles and capabilities like her own. The essence of unbreakability is foundation, and it was upon this foundation that rested the immovability of the Nishizumi women - bit by bit we built up our skills and knowledge from the most mundane of tasks until the apex was achieved.

It was with these tools that I succeeded the previous commander at the age of eleven, and went on to participate in the national championships. Before the match my mother spoke to me.

"When a Nishizumi fights, she fights to win."

We fought to win, and the first time we did, by quite a large margin. There was no brilliant move that grasped victory, no stroke of genius at the final moment. The other competitors, some of them middle-school students, were strong, but they simply had not trained as much as we did. Their shots were less accurate, their formations looser, their manoeuvres less deliberate. It was not strategy or tactics that secured our superiority, but pure, raw, unrelenting strength backed by a will of steel. If our opponents trained for four hours, we trained for eight. If they shot twenty shells a day we shot forty. The unwavering advance and implacable defence was simply a byproduct of that. Discipline and hard work never fails you, and all of the Nishizumi school was built upon the solid foundation of that truth, and I liked it that way.

But it all came apart the next year, when I met a certain girl.