The student council office was nearly empty except for the few that remained after the meeting. These few were the President, Vice President, and a representative for the school's Sealift Division.

"Is Sealift going to be occupied anytime soon, Miss Ramsay?" The Vice President asked.

The representative looked uncomfortable talking to the senior leaders like this.

"Um, no, why? And please call me Elsie."

"Well Miss Ramsay, we you may need to transport the Tankery team sometime in the next week. We'll let you know the details later, but thanks for helping. You are dismissed."

Elsie rushed out of the room, unsure exactly why she was so uncomfortable. She took the shortest route back to her domain in the well deck. As she ran, Elsie wondered if the there would even be a landing craft free when it was needed. She hadn't actually said yes, but somehow a deal had been made.

"Why must you torture everyone?" The President asked.

"It's fun seeing people squirm. And it's fun making people do stuff for you."

"You're a sick bastard, you know that?"

"Yeah whatever. You're a softass."

"Hey, you can go- ah whatever. Where's the Tankery team headed next?"

"That depends on who they're fighting."

"Why not ask Ayame? She's like, the one in charge of that after all."

"This next battle isn't her decision."

The president was confused. "What? It's her team, isn't it?"

"Well, the goal here is of course to beat Ooarai to a pulp one day, but it's not like we're ready to take them on. The national tournament is on right now, so everyone's focused on the schools in it. What if we challenged one of them to a skirmish and beat them? Everyone would look at us then!"

My VP is such an attention whore, the president thought. And a creep. An annoying, unsatisfiable creep.

"Good lord, how do we mess up a spring in just a little practice?" Amy complained from beside the Ram. Every crew was performing maintenance, or at least pretending to. During practice, Amy had felt the tank handling weird and was now inspecting the running gear. She'd found a faulty volute spring on one side and was now working with the rest of the crew to replace it.

"There's another one on this side too." Delilah called from the opposite side. "It's messed up pretty bad. Like, the inside is rusted out and falling apart."

Behind the tank, Yelena and Mia were passing tools to Eiko, who being the smallest and most mechanically inclined, was contorted around the engine. "So I figured out why the tank felt so slow at the end of practice. The head bolts on the lower cylinders are so worn and rusted out that it's a wonder we didn't blow the heads clean off the short block. How the hell was this thing holding compression?"

Delilah was listening to all of this, amazed at how poor the condition of their tank was after they'd been using it for a couple weeks. No wonder the school was able to get it cheap. Whoever sold it knew how bad it was and was able to hide it for a short while until it was Dominion's problem. As she finished pulling the remains of the spring out of the inside of the bogie, she turned her head upward while looking around. She froze and her eyes widened.

"Amy, come here. Do you see what I do?"

Amy walked around the side of the tank. Delilah stood up and pointed.

"Underneath that bogie arm, on the inside."

"Whoa… Eiko, come look at this please."

Eiko struggled out of her position in the engine bay, worming around the engine block and other equipment. She got on her back and looked up at the underside of the bogie arm. There was a massive crack from the bend of the L-shaped arm, along the short point of the L, and all the way back to one of the mounting bolts on the side of the hull. From a standing or even squatted position beside the tank, the crack was hidden. It had probably gone unnoticed for months as the weight of the tank and the stress of operating took its toll.

"That's not fixable." Eiko said. "I'd normally say there's not much you can't weld or patch, but the rust is so bad under there and the crack is so large that it's only a matter of time before the whole arm splits in two and fails. Drilling a hole at the pointy end wouldn't help either, since the force is still wanting to spread the crack wider and the bolt would eventually pop through. We'll need to replace the whole bogie, no way around it."

Mia shrugged. "At least VVSS bogies are easy to replace. Just unbolt it and swap it out. The torsion bars on my old Panther were a bitch and a half to fix. It's like you wish you could just tip the tank on its side and shake out the shattered bits of metal."

"I beat you all." Yelena said. "Ever had to replace the Christie springs on a T-34? You have to take apart the entire side of the damn tank to get at them, and that's before you actually take the strut off. Oh, and the spring wants to kill you the entire time. It's like a garage door spring but less of a spool of death and more of a Phineas Gage reenactment."

"Okay yeah she wins." Delilah laughed. "Hey Ayame! Over here real quick!"

Ayame looked up from her phone. "What's up?"

Eiko explained their issue.

"Well unfortunately, we don't have any whole bogie units left in the garage. You'd need to run out to a Tankery store and pick one up. If you wouldn't mind dropping me off at the student council office on your way, that'd be great."

"No problem. Would you mind if the whole crew comes along? A bogie isn't exactly a light part."

"Sure. Take the three-quarter-ton. I'll meet you there in a minute, I need my bag."

The crew followed Eiko out of the open garage doors to a WC-51 truck parked outside in the sun. Amy climbed into the driver's and Eiko sat in the seat next to her while the rest of the crew piled into the cargo bed as they waited for Ayame. Amy started the engine and immediately picked up on the noise. Instead of the characteristic putter of the original inline-six, there was a distinctive rumble.

"Hey Eiko, what'd you guys do to this? An engine swap?"

"Yeah, a lot of the trucks and Jeeps had their original engines swapped out for AMC I6s. A bit bigger and more powerful but still cheap as hell and still an inline six. Not to mention they're damn near unkillable, unlike the original engines that are fifty years older."

"Sure as hell sounds like a V8 to me."

"Some of the heavier trucks got Toyota 2UZ engines for more power."

Amy revved the engine slightly. That certainly was not a 2UZ.

"It sounds like a cross-plane crank. Kind of like an American engine."

"Well…"

"What did you do?"

"We might have put an LS in it…"

"Eiko…"

"…with a supercharger…"

"Good lord, how'd you pay for that? And also, ohmygodhowmuchpowerdoesitmakeohmygodit'sanLSpleaseeeaasetellmeee!"

Amy was practically radiating with excitement at driving something with such a powerful engine.

"Used LSs are dirt cheap if you're okay with working on them, and the supercharger was the project of me and a couple other students working together. It gets about 470 at the wheels."

Ayame hopped up into the bed with the Ram's crew. Amy revved the engine hard, listening to the throaty roar of the engine and the sharp whine of the supercharger.

Eiko was embarrassed. "Great. Now everyone's looking at us."

Amy grinned. "Good." She floored the accelerator and dropped the clutch, releasing all of the engine's power at once. The rear wheels spun in place as the tires screeched against the pavement.

"Holy Christ Amy! Chill out!"

"Nah."

The WC-51 peeled out of the parking lot and onto the road.

"Ammyyyy!"

Within minutes, Amy pulled the truck to a gentle stop in front of the building that housed the student leadership offices. Yelena and Eiko were holding onto anything they could find with white knuckles. Delilah had a smile a mile wide, out of breath from the excited yelling she'd done the entire way as Amy slid the heavy truck around corners like a sportscar. Ayame was simply dumbfounded. "You said that we needed to see you drive a car if we thought you were nuts, but this is just a beefed-up truck and you're drifting like it's an AE86. I so do not want to be in an actual car with you behind the wheel."

Amy shrugged. "What's the point of going somewhere if it isn't fun?"

"Getting there in one piece?"

"Boring. Have fun with the office drones."

"And maybe have them introduce themselves to us sometime, since they brought us here!" Delilah called after Ayame, who was already walking in the door.

"They're just people." Eiko said, still catching her breath. "Just people with a really big job. And you're not missing too much. The President is nice enough, but she follows her Vice President like a pet. She's the weird one. Stubborn and manipulative."

Amy pulled the truck away from the curb and drove like a normal person to the Tankery shop.

"All the higher-ups are actually pretty great people. I guess you don't – take a right here, it's two blocks down – I guess you don't get into a good position if you're a total jerk. There are exceptions of course, like any group. But yeah, it's more important that they get their work done than be dramatic. By the way, the owners know all us Tankery girls. Whatever parts we need are at a discount since they sponsor us."

It was the same store the Ram crew had been in on their first day together. The front of the place was similar to any surplus store, with uniforms, clothes, and gear. Anything from a British Brodie helmet to a modern set of American OCP fatigues. However, the rear half of the store was more like an auto parts store but for tanks. Road wheels, track links, periscope prisms, and any other small-ish part of a tank were available. A large garage door behind the register desk lead to a back storeroom – really more of a small warehouse – of larger parts and extras of any item in the store.

Eiko rang the bell at the desk and a young-ish man appeared through the garage door.

"Oh, hey Eiko. What'd you break this time? Did Maiko's driver try to drift and throw a track again?"

"Well we found out that our Ram was sold underhanded. Whoever had it knew it was a junker and gave it to us."

"How bad?"

"We need a whole new set of volute springs and an entire bogie unit. One of them has a giant crack on the inside."

"Damn… anything else?"

"Yeah. New valve covers, head gaskets, and head bolts for a Continental R-975."

"Ayame finally blew her engine after messing with it too much I see."

"Nope, it's for the Ram too. I'm amazed that whoever bought it didn't check it very closely. I'm even more amazed we haven't blown open any cylinder heads yet with how deteriorated it is."

"Wow. Well pull your truck around back and I'll get you your parts."

Around the back of the shop, there was what looked like a garage that occupied the rear of the warehouse. The shop owner appeared with a pallet jack carrying the parts. Lifting the bogie into the truck bed wasn't as bad as it seemed it would be, and the rest of the parts fit in boxes.

"Well, you girls take care and good luck with your project tank. If you need anything else, I can send parts over."

"Thanks!"

Eiko barely was able to finish speaking before Amy started the truck, the engine drowning out little Eiko. This time, Amy knew she needed to drive like a human being with the weight in the back and it took her much longer to reach the office building where Ayame was waiting. She looked distant as she silently sat down beside Mia. "What's wrong Ayame?" She asked as the truck rolled back toward the school.

"We have a match."

"That's great!" Delilah said. "It'll be nice to fight in a real match with you guys finally."

Ayame sighed and laid back against the floor of the cargo bed, staring at the blue sky. "No."

"No?"

"Mia, do you think you could kill a Sherman with the 6-pounder?"

"Of course."

"What about a 75?"

"Easy."

"A 37?"

"Not too bad if you know where to hit. Hull machine gun port or the center of the mantlet for example. Maybe the transmission housing if you're lucky. Even better if you're flanking. Just gotta stay away from the applique patches if there are any."

"What about the rest of the team?"

"Depends. I don't know what their gunnery is like."

Delilah cut in. "The CTMS crew could, probably the M8 Greyhound too. The M8 Scott could just drop HE on it until it loses a track if you had to. Why?"

"I don't want to scare you all yet. The whole team is going to hear it at once."

"Understood." Delilah knew when to stop pressuring a commander. She was familiar with being overworked and stressed herself. The rest of the drive continued in silence.

With the truck parked next to the Ram, Ayame climbed on top of her M7 and took a breath. It's better they know now so they can start mentally preparing. "Dominion team! On me!" This is going to go one of two ways. Either everyone is depressed or they're excited to have a shot. "Commanders, roll call!"

The commander of each tank confirmed that her entire crew was present. Satisfied, Ayame began to talk.

"We've just been given an opportunity. An opportunity to prove ourselves. Our school is the 'other Americans' of Japan. We're not as big or as skilled or as rich or anything as other schools. But now we can have a chance to show what we can do against a superior enemy. We have a skirmish match this Saturday. Our opponent will be…"

Ayame faltered. She couldn't say it without voicing her worry.

"Who will we fight, commander?" A young girl asked.

"We're fighting… we're fighting Saunders University High School on Saturday."

The team was dead silent. Shock.

"It will be a hard fight. We will prepare for the rest of this week, I know we will do our best. That's what counts. I'll discuss this further with the commanders later. For now, practice is dismissed."

The team broke apart, still in shock.

"We're going against Saunders?"

"Aren't they the richest school ever?"

"All they have are Shermans! They're got a Firefly with one of the best snipers in the country!"

"There's no way this ends well."

The exchange students sat on the back of the WC-51, watching the team disperse. Delilah was watching Ayame in particular. She was sitting alone on the turret of her M7 with a thousand-yard stare. Her headset was loose in her hands. Mia asked, "Maybe I should know, but what's Saunders? I mean, obviously it's a school but why is it making everyone depressed?"

"They're the richest school in all of Japan. They have the best and most of everything, and that includes their Tankery program. Sure, they don't have a style associated with them like the Nishizumi style is part of Kuromorimine's program, but they have money." Eiko replied gloomily.

Delilah was more specific in her answer. Even in Scotland, Saunders was decently well-known, especially among teams with American vehicles.

"All of their teams are made up of M4 Shermans and their variants. Their commander is one with a big heart and a massive sense of sportsmanship. Kay is a model commander if you ask me. I even try to imitate her a bit. They lost to Ooarai's little banzai team in the first round of the tournament, but that's because their commander is Miho Nishizumi. She could fight her way out of an encirclement of King Tigers with a Luger and a teddy bear. But yeah, Saunders has everything. Some even say a hotline to hell, no idea what that's supposed to mean though."

"It's going to take a lot of fancy flying from everyone if we want to pull off a win then." Yelena said dejectedly. She followed Delilah's gaze to Ayame. "She looks like shit."

Eiko sighed and her head dropped into her hands. "After Saunders is done with us, so will our team."

AN: Happy Wednesday! I normally post on Sundays out of habit, but I told myself that I had to at least outline a new chapter before I posted anything this week. I've been being pretty lazy recently, so I hadn't written anything in almost two weeks. Additionally, yay to this being the tenth chapter! Originally, I thought this story would only be about twenty or so chapters, but about the time I wrote this one I realized that it will likely end up being much longer. I'll post chapter 11 on Sunday, and I promise I'm not going to break up the Saunders match into multiple chapters.

For those of you who are currently dealing with the crazy winter weather and for those of you that are like me that are currently preparing for the next few days, stay safe, stay warm, remember your layers, and fully clean your car off before you drive.