It was now more than three months into their training.

Yukari stood off to the side, spotting for Maho who was bench pressing a hundred and twenty pounds. Most of the girls in their group could match that amount, with a few exceptions on either side. Yukari was also waiting her turn, with another forty pounds sitting on the floor that she planned to add. She had put it on Maho once, which had not been appreciated in the least.

Yukari had herself always been fairly strong, but she was starting to realize that she had never really trained her body for it. Looking at Maho as an example, she could see how all of them had built up a fair amount of muscle. Four months ago they had all been squishy school girls, all of them marginally fit because of what they did for Tankery, but it was never really working out.

Almost as if reading her mind, Saori called Yukari's attention. "Hey, Yukarin! Look at me!" When Yukari looked at her, Saori flexed her arm muscles. She was immensely proud of the fact that hers were more visible than the rest of Anglerfish Team. Yukari had to admit that Saori looked quite fearsome with that look of confidence on her face and while dressed in her workout clothes. She didn't have to admit it out loud, though.

"Akiyama!" Yukari looked down to see Maho struggling. "Get the damn weight!"

Yukari grabbed the bar and lifted it off of Maho. "Sorry."

Maho jumped up, grabbing her towel and walking away. "Get your own spotter. I'm done."

"Hey now, we had an agreement."

Maho turned back to face her. "Yeah, and I'm done with it. Every single day, you find something new to get distracted by. I'm going to find a different spotter, and so can you." She left without giving Yukari a chance to respond.

Shaking her head, Yukari picked up the extra weights and started loading them onto the bar. A moment later, Erika walked up to her. Yukari waved. "I need a spotter. You got time?"

Erika grumbled about it, but stepped around behind the bench. "Nishizumi just asked me the same thing. She said you kept fucking up. Nearly left her to choke herself."

Yukari lay down on the bench. She let out a long sigh. "Well… I don't know that I would use language quite that strong. I messed up. Might go so far as to say I screwed up, but that's all."

"Uh huh… and you weren't gazing longingly at your friend's body?"

"What? No." She reached up and lifted the weight. "Did Maho really say that?"

"Not those words exactly, but I'm an expert at translating what she says into what she means. She holds back a lot, you know."

"Didn't really sound like she was holding back."

Erika smiled. It wasn't the comforting sort of smile. "Trust me, if she said everything she was thinking, we'd be cleaning you off the wall."

"I doubt it's that bad."

"Which one of us has spent years following her around?" Erika gave Yukari only two seconds before continuing. "Exactly. I know what I'm talking about."

Caesar had made an effort to get to know everyone around her place in the formation when they were training, as well as everyone in the beds around hers in the barracks. They were mostly talkative girls, and she got along well enough with all of them. Klara and an Anzio girl called Tortellini were the ones that responded the best to her conversation, but neither of them were in her room. The last girl she had to talk to in either place was also the only one who was in both.

All the girls around them were preparing for bed, and Caesar approached this last girl. The girl looked up at her. She didn't say anything and quickly went back to reading her book. Caesar stood there for a moment, discomfort creeping up on her. She decided to say something before it was too late.

She held out her hand. "Takako Suzuki. My friends call me Caesar."

The girl looked up again. "If that's required then let's not be friends, Private Suzuki."

"Er, yeah… right. My team calls me Caesar, then. I mean, we've got another Suzuki, so…"

"Well, I don't talk to her." She put down her book and shook Caesar's hand. "I'll call you Suzuki. Call me Beau."

"Ah! Are you from BC Freedom or Maginot?" She briefly felt smart for recognizing that it was French.

Beau shook her head. "I went to St. Gloriana. They called me Lime. I was a driver in a Crusader and briefly a gunner in a Matilda. I didn't get put on the field very often, though. And Beau is my real name."

"Oh." Now she felt extra stupid. "So you're actually from France?"

"Northern France, specifically."

"Nice." It was a dead-end conversation so far. "So, um… what are you reading?"

She held the book up so she could see. It was a copy of the Carmina Burana. "Just something to help me relax."

"I see." She didn't want to lose this conversation, but there was nothing more to add. Unless she could find something really quick. "Well, at least we get to do something we enjoy once we're done training, right?"

Beau closed her book. "When I transferred into St. Gloriana, I tried my best to avoid standing out. I didn't want to get involved in any of the tank battling we did. I was happy with my place. I'll do what I have to, but I don't intend to spend any more time here than I need to."

"Oh. I'm… sorry to hear that."

"Don't be sorry for me, Suzuki. You're the one who wants to be called Caesar." She stood up, leaving her book on her bed. "I don't mean anything by it, but if I were you I'd be wondering which one of my friends is Brutus."

Caesar watched the girl walk away. She shook her head and went back to her bed. "Caesar was killed by senators…" She sighed. "History amateurs."

Saturday night was movie night, and every once in a while it was a movie some of the girls enjoyed watching. Maho avoided it altogether, preferring to spend that time studying. On the other end of the spectrum was Mako, who had attended every movie and not watched a single one. They had a running tally on which movies everyone thought were the best they'd seen here. Erika was rating each and every movie as worse than the last.

Today it was Piranha 3D. It was like the person choosing these movies knew nothing about movies at all. Leopon Team had shown up together, all of them totally oblivious to what they were about to see. Tsuchiya and Suzuki clung to each other, the former couldn't handle the gore and the latter was deathly afraid of piranhas. Nakajima was trying to put on a bold face, but jumped at every point where anything happened, and Hoshino had already glazed over and was completely out of it.

Erika sat at the front, with her head in her hands and her inner movie critic enduring endless torture. Mako slept peacefully beside her, not a care in the world. Elsewhere, Erwin was ducked down in her seat and just hoping no one she knew would see her in the room. Pepperoni was eating, with no clear answer to the question of where she got lasagna.

When the movie finally ended and the screen shut off, about a dozen girls got up and left immediately, Erwin shuffling off in the crowd to avoid being seen. Yukari and Caesar, who had decided to attend a movie for the first time, sat next to each other in a cold sweat. This was anything but what they'd been expecting and hoping to see. Erika was right.

As it turned out, the responsibility of choosing the movies to be played had been given to one of the privates training at the camp. She stood at the head of the remaining audience with a paper in her hand and a smile on her face like she'd just won an argument with them all. She cleared her throat and made her announcement.

"Katyusha has decided that next Saturday you will watch The Room, starring Tommy Wiseau. I expect to see you all there." Katyusha turned and marched out of the room.

Erika leaned back in her chair. "Why me? What have I done to deserve this?"

Getting up from the perpetual face-palm she'd been in for the past hour and a half, Kay headed for the door, muttering under her breath. "Now I know why people drink."

Hoshino stood up next, turning to look around the room. "Well, jokes on her. I actually like The Room."

Tsuchiya finally pried Suzuki off of her and climbed over Nakajima to escape. "I need air!"

Suzuki was left curled up into a ball in her seat. "I'm never going swimming again. I'm never taking a bath or a shower ever again. I'm never drinking water again."

Nakajima looked at the back of the room, where Pepperoni had finished her lasagna and was just now eating the last slice of pizza. She froze when she saw Nakajima staring at her. She had to ask. "How can you possibly eat with that in front of you?"

Pepperoni shrugged. "Have you ever been in a meat shop? There are fruit more disgusting than that movie, and I've eaten them."

One by one, they filed out, leaving Yukari and Caesar alone.

Yukari stood up finally. "You know, I think we might not be old enough to actually be allowed to watch that movie."

"Oh, absolutely." Caesar stood up as well. "We're out of here in a little over two months, so we could totally die before we're old enough to watch that."

"Actually, my birthday's in June."

"Alright, granny, calm down."

Yukari suddenly backpedaled. "Hold on, we should wake up Mako." She walked around the rows of seats to the front where her friend was resting and gently shook her awake. "Hey. Movie's over."

Mako blinked her eyes open and stared blankly up at Yukari for a while before getting up and stretching. "Good movie. Eight point five out of ten. What's next week?"

Yukari frowned. "Something called The Room."

Mako looked interested. "Really? That's good. Nothing happens in that one."

"Well… let's get to bed. Something's changing in our schedule tomorrow morning."

"Bed, yes. I am… very tired."

"You know, when I heard the schedule was changing, I thought 'Oh, that's cool, maybe we won't have so many pushups before breakfast.'. I didn't think this was what they meant."

Saori pulled her helmet further down on her face, protecting her eyes as best she could from flying flecks of dirt and gravel. "Really?"

She had to shout over the sounds of the first tanks they'd seen since arriving in Australia, buried air cannons launching debris into the sky, mortars and machine guns firing blanks, and the occasional very real round and subsequent explosion from the main cannons of the M103's.

Saori crawled a few feet under the barbed wire, keeping her rifle of the ground, all the while happily chatting away with Yuzu. "I think of it this way; we're not doing pushups. We're not running. It's still exercise, but crawling is literally the easiest thing to do ever." She rolled onto her side to shield her rifle from a shower of dirt, looking back at Yuzu. "Plus, we can't hear Sergeant Dodger shouting at us."

As if to answer her directly, Sergeant Dodger's voice boomed out through the megaphone. It was still barely audible. "Oddball, stop staring at the hardware! Polyp, don't abandon your squad! Polyp's squad, get the fucking move on! Slug, stop mimicking everything I say! Koyama, you suck!"

"That's it." Yuzu stood up in the middle of the barbed wire, which was only plastic but still sharp and tangley. "Sergeant, ma'am! You suck!" She then emptied a full clip of empty clicks from her rifle straight at the sergeant.

"Private!" Dodger glared solar flares at her. "You just fucked up bigly." She leveled the rifle she was carrying at Yuzu and held the trigger down, expending all the blanks in the clip. Unlike the disappointing clicks Yuzu got, Dodger's were explosive gunshot sounds that carried no actual physical threat to someone several meters away.

Yuzu ducked anyway, getting caught in the wires. The sudden stinging of the prickly plastic barbs combined with the gunshot sounds caused her mind to jump to the conclusion that she was actually being shot, and she began to flail and panic even more, getting more tangled and continuing the process until she was no longer able to move.

Dodger stepped through the barbed wire without touching it once and stood over Yuzu's prone form. The humiliated private whimpered in fear. Yellow eyes stared down at Yuzu like she was a rabbit caught in the thicket, and Dodger was the bird of prey.

"Private, since I'm fairly certain you knew your gun was empty, I'm not going to report this. But the next time you want to take a shot at me, with your fists or your gun or whatever, you had better be willing to finish the fight."

Strangely, the only thing Yuzu could think of as she nodded stupidly, was that she was pretty sure the sergeant's eyes had always been blue.