Squad E had gathered to hear an announcement from Lieutenant Wallace.
"Listen up, everyone. As I'm sure you're all aware, a key bridge was destroyed by retreating imperials. Our engineers are working on getting a replacement up, but for the moment we can't advance."
Nico nodded solemnly. Being a Valkyria didn't give her magical bridge repairing powers. Or if it did, she hadn't figured out how to activate them.
"But we don't plan to have sit idle in the meantime. The principality of Gallia is also struggling against the aggression of the Empire, and the Federation wishes to establish better relations You will be participating in joint training with the Gallian Militia. This isn't simply a mock battle: this is the first step towards an alliance."
"Why, hello there. My name is Salinas."
Nico was starting to question how important this really was.
They were standing in the middle of a dedicated training ground. Countless boots, treads, and tires had compacted the soil into a hard mass devoid of plants. As a result, it looked a lot like the grounds were Nico had been through ranger training.
"Well, my name's Nico, but aren't we supposed to be in the middle of a mock battle? Against each other?"
"Well, yeah. But sometimes there are more important things than fighting, like-"
Nico turned and ran, vaulting over a nearby pile of sandbags and taking shelter behind it.
"...Well, I suppose that's not the worst way I've ever been rejected" Salinas said.
"Salinas~" came a light, singsong-y voice from behind him.
"O-oh. Edy. Hello." Salinas said.
"You weren't trying to flirt with one of our opponents, were you?" Edy asked, her voice cutesy and dripping with barely-concealed fury.
"N-no. No, nothing like that. Don't be silly!"
"Then could you turn around and say that to my face~?" Edy asked.
Salinas reluctantly turned around, and saw Edy leveling her gun at his chest.
"No, wait! I can explain!"
Edy ignored him and pulled the trigger, unloading her entire magazine into Salinas' chest. Since they were using training rounds at the time, all this resulted in was his uniform being soaked with bright pink dye.
Salinas gave an annoyed huff. "Welp, now I'm out."
A flash of yellow briefly peaking over the sandbags reminded Edy that Nico was still there.
"Oh, um, hello! I am Edy Nelson, soon to be recognized as the greatest singer in all of Gallia!"
Nico peaked over the sandbags again and squeezed off three shots into Edy's chest.
Edy glared at her.
"We are still in the middle of a training battle. But, um, I would like to hear you sing someday."
"You really don't" said another Gallian soldier, a boy with messy blond hair. "She sounds like somebody beating a cat with another cat."
"Homer~" Edy said, before she turned and punched her ally in the face.
Nico watched wide-eyed as the enemy Engineer fell on his butt. "That seems excessive." she said.
"Oh, no, it's fine." Salinas said. "He gets punched like that all the time. He likes it."
"It's true," moaned a voice. "It feels… heavenly…"
"I think that's more reason to worry." Nico said.
Salinas, it seemed, was not the only one who wasn't take this mock battle seriously.
"Rita, excuse me," Rita looked up from a conversation she was having with a long-haired Gallian scout wearing a headband. He attempted to raise his rifle when he saw Nico, but she put two shots into his chest first. "I think the Gallians are going to try flanking us from that side of the hill. Could you please set up some sandbags so we'll be ready for them?
Rita looked annoyed as the man in the headband slunk away, but she went to do as Nico asked.
"Norid?"
Norid looked up from the patch of flowers he and a Gallian Scout had been admiring.
"I just saw a glint over that way. Could you check to see if there are any snipers there?"
"Sure thing." Said Norrid, sounding none too happy.
The scout he had been hanging out with – a girl about Nico's age in glasses and a beret – snapped out of her own reverie, levelled her gun at Nico. She pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.
"I fogot to put bullets in it… again…" the girl said.
Nico nodded sagely. "I do that sometimes, too." And then she shot the other girl.
Said other girl shrugged and went back to the flowers.
"Hey there, kid!" Called a friendly voice to Nico. "How's it going?"
"Oh, hello Jimmy." She said, nodding to him. "Things are… a little tough."
Jimmy frowned. "What's wrong?"
"I'm having trouble getting everybody to stay focused."
"Well," said Jimmy, "I think I might know what the problem is."
"What's that?" Nico asked.
"They're soldiers."
Nico looked confused.
"Being a soldier is a tough job. It's either boring or it's stressful. If you want to make it, you need to learn to enjoy yourself when you can. Even if it's just messing around during a mock battle."
"I… think I get what you're saying." Nico said. She smiled at Jimmy. "Thank you."
She was so focused on talking with him, however, that she didn't notice the grenade that had been thrown in between them until it went off and covered the two of them with dye.
The battle concluded, the two sides engaged in a simple ritual of shaking hands. Every member of Squad E shaking hands with every member of Squad 7. Including the officers on each side. It wasn't the most interesting task ever, though both sides had done things far more tedious.
"Good job out there!" said one of the Gallian officers, a young woman with brown hair tied up with a red kerchief.
Nico held her hand out to the officer, but when they got close a sudden jolt ran through her arm. Blue sparks flashed between their hands.
Nico yelped and jerked her hand away. The other woman did the same.
"Woah." said the other woman. "I've never seen static like that before."
They'd each shaken hands with at least a dozen people by that point. They should have discharged any static.
Is she like me?
But all she could actually bring herself to say was a muttered comment about static.
"So," said Connor, tapping his pencil against his cheek, "What happened to you on that day?"
The soldier had come without warning and had let themselves in. Everybody had been gathered in the kitchen to prepare lunch, and then-
"We heard the soldiers pull up. The Mother Superior told me to hide, so I went to the back of our linen closet." Nico said.
"And you didn't see any of them get killed?"
"No". That was the truth.
"So what did you do then? After you found them dead?"
"I… buried them. In the vegetable patch, where the soil was loose. The graves were shallow, and I had to wrap them in sheets since I didn't have any coffins."
There was a place not far from the convent with a sharp cliff over a deep spot in the river. The bodies were heavy, even with the armor removed. Dragging the bodies there was hard, but she couldn't bury them on the convent grounds. She wrapped these bodies in sheets as well, adding in rocks to weigh them down-
"I read that nobody else came until a week after the incident?"
"There was a lot of fighting going on in the area. The Imperial army overreached itself and got pushed back by the Federation."
"Did you do anything else during that week?"
She tried one night to soothe her heart with a bottle of wine. She woke up the next day with a splitting headache and a sudden dedication to the cause of temperance.
"I… had some difficulty coping."
"And what happened when you made contact with people again?"
"A search party from one of the nearby villages came. They were led by a man named Johann Ilbert."
"Was he somebody important?" Connor asked.
"He was somebody I'm familiar with. He owned a store in one of the nearby villages. He'd come by to trade with us sometimes. Sometimes I would do little jobs to help him out."
"So what did they do?"
"...They asked if I was okay. They offered me their condolences. Mr. Ilbert gave me some money." It had been for the two trucks, though she didn't volunteer that information. "One man offered to let me stay with him."
"Was it Mr. Ilbert?"
"No." Nico replied, unusually sharply. "I had already decided that I was going to join the army. They all told me that I shouldn't."
Mr. Ilbert didn't tell her what she wanted to hear the most.
"I see." Connor said. "And why aren't you being honest with me?"
Nico blinked at him.
"I did some research about tells for lying for some of my previous writing. And you have a lot of tells."
Nico sighed. "You're right."
Connor actually looked surprised. Had he even believed what he said, or was he just making a wild guess?
"There's things that happened then that… that I'm not ready to talk about. I'll tell you the truth someday, I promise."
"You sure know how to keep a guy in suspense." Connor said, sounding more amused than annoyed.
"Effective immediately, you will be returned to combat duty." Claude told her.
"Thank you, sir." Nico said.
It wasn't a surprise. Millenia had been sent back west, with talk she might be re-trained for clerical work. She might never regain full use of her leg, but she certainly wouldn't be running anytime soon.
Claude raised an eyebrow at this. "You probably won't be thankful when you hear what our next assignment is. Have you ever heard of the Siegval line?"