When We All Died

Six

“But Captain, that's too dangerous for them! These children can hardly keep up now. Students keep passing out or getting injured and if we don't sto—”

The Lieutenant closed her eyes, sighing silently as their Captain on the other side kept yelling, screaming, and was on the verge of throwing up with how physically taxing it was to apparently sit still in his office and talk in fucking walkie talkie. “Okay. Okay. Yes, Captain. Bu- Yes, Captain. Roger that.”

The Sergeant stood on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall as her senior finally finished talking and hung up. He couldn't imagine how childish their Captain was for their Lieutenant to be driven to holding her head in her hands. “I’m guessing, he didn't accept it.”

“He asked me to fucking amplify their training. Fucking evil, I'm telling you.” With that, she sighed again, body slumping.

Now Nam Hyunshik, as described by the students, was just a cold dude with no emotions or extraordinary critical thinking. It was easy to pick up much of what the students said about him. All he wanted to say to them was that he never deemed it necessary to show any emotions or vulnerabilities to people weaker than him or people who were dependent on him. However, it would be false to say he'd never expressed any emotions; he had, and all of them had been in front of Lieutenant Shin Sarang.

When he first became a soldier, the Lieutenant had seen him sob like an absolute baby, seen him angry, seen him sad for his mother or even just desperate to get back home. What really drew him to her was that she never expressed her own problems or vulnerabilities and neither did he tell Hyunshik to man up or some bullshit. Maybe he was just an idiot or dumb but as someone older, more intimidating, more powerful and better than him, Shin Sarang was Hyunshik’s ideal type and had been for years. So he, as an act of consolation and empathy (and maybe a little bit of crush), walked closer to her and just as he lifted his hand over her shoulder, there was a voice.

“Your fingers better not be anywhere near me. Stay a good two feet away or be six feet underneath,” she said without even looking up.

Hyunshik retracted his hand almost immediately.

Suddenly, someone knocked on the door and kept knocking. It had to those kids.

“Come in.”

Immediately, more than twenty students slipped into the office and stood there, looking at each other until the Vice-president of the class and a couple of the class President’s friends stepped forward. Sarang knew where this was going. She'd known ever since she had been assigned this job. Yet as much as she hated dealing with this shit after a busy day, she couldn't blame the children at all.

“Hey! Get back to your roo—”

“Sergeant Nam, please. What is it?”

“We want you to send us back,” one of them, Kim Seokjin, immediately spoke up. The Vice-president elbowed him on the side, and spoke up herself.

“Lieutenant, we've been noticing certain aspects of our enlistment seem… less than ethical. Not to mention, our classmates keep getting injured during the training and we don't have a professional doctor on our school campus. We haven't been able to contact our parents since we came either. After adding up everything, we don't think we want to stay here.” Sarang saw the girl being secretly patted on the back by her classmates, they seemed quite hopeful about being able to go back. But unfortunately, she had no choice but to give an answer none of them would like.

“Well, you had the freedom to choose before we distributed the consent forms.” It felt as if someone kicked her on her chest when she saw their faces fall. This was exactly the reason why she opposed the decision of enlisting students almost as soon as the idea was proposed. She didn't want to imagine what would happen when they would land in the real world.