I was on a bunk sweep the night that everything went wrong, the night when that idiot kid snuck out of base alongside with Playboy and Pokerface.

After seeing the disappointing display by my squad in the annual SND war game and hearing the idiotic request of Sasha, the team’s leader requested my approval for his squad to roll with one of the Regulars on liberation and black propaganda missions. I, of course, denied his proposition and gave him an earful after seeing how bad his performance was on his first war game.

I had given the little shit the utmost attention and extracurricular training since out of the bunch that volunteered, he had the purest, primal killer instinct. He killed wild games, birds and even humanoid monsters that from time to time appeared near our vicinities, with ease and efficiency, but seeing how he fought, being extremely reckless and suicidal, made me considered greatly for him not be included in the Regular Army. He’s like a dog that I couldn’t help but bring him with me wherever I go.

Of course, treating a kid his age without respect and constantly belittling him would make him turn rebellious at some point and that was what happened when a helicopter suddenly took off in the middle of the night.

“Hey, noona! We’ll be borrowing this alright?!” The jackass Nam Seung said as he closed the door of our Hind L prototype.

I always hated that Korean Brat, he had more clearance since he was a SOG agent, to procure and use any available resources. They took the regular army’s stuff whenever they could and returning them in missing or battened up conditions. Since this was a regular occurrence, I would rather do some paperwork to get their asses suspended and lowered their living conditions instead of chasing them since it’s too much of a hassle and a waste of resources. Thus I went about my ways to give a surprise check on the Juveniles’ barracks, knowing that many of them would try and smuggle contrabands from outside sources since many of the soldiers from outside would trade with my students the souvenirs that they had scavenged, collected.

“Ksenya, let’s go, tonight is open season!” I said, marching with Ksenya humming Katyusha as we hanged two crates onto our backs and made our rounds along the wide hallway of the barracks.

“Urah!” I yelled, kicking down the door of the first room, startling several of the students who were huddling up on a small pile of what I could assume were French and Japanese comic books.

“We are sorry comrades, but you’re not old enough for these.” Ksenya said, carefully and slowly pull the books away from the crying and sometimes pouting children as we made our rounds.

It was open season for us, as we had confiscated around 200 Japanese and French comic book portraying fairly indecent and partially risqué stories.

“Geez, how are they able to get so many of these perverted books? Are the scavenger units a bunch of porn hoarders or something?” I said taking a short break, skimming through some of the books.

The people from the 21st centuries seemed to be quite degenerated seeing how many different types of erotic and sensual literature and picture books there were, most notably the Koreans, French and Japanese, as the books were mostly in their languages.

“Well, these probably are educational materials comrade Yulia. They do portray the ideal romantic rendezvous between men and women after all.” Ksenya said, attentively and slowly turning the pages of a “romance” picture book.

“Yeah, but leaving these things laying around would make our cadets turn into horny rabbits and they’ll be humping each other all the time.” I snarkily said, packaging the porn books into the boxes and sealed them off properly.

“So what will become of these materials, I know that they are inappropriate but they are still works of our old world…” Ksenya said, lamenting the thought of them being destroyed like those of old political and philosophical texts.

“Well, you can probably keep them for your health and anatomy classes,” I said, handling them to Ksenya who seemed to be a bit too happy when I decided to not burn the comics and picture books.

Books about politics and philosophies of the old world though not prohibited by ICC were considered contrabands as personal possessions. ICC had considered the ideals of and written by the adults inappropriate, radical and overly hypocritical to be learned and enacted by the young cadets, recruits of ICC, thus they were either destroyed on-site when found in the possessions of cadets and/or preserved in the larger library in order to show the hypocrisy and stupidity of those we looked up to, those we called mothers, fathers and teachers.

‘History is determined by the victors, and here we stand transcended over those who abused us. History is filled with liars, broken promises of eternal prosperity and peace. The more things change, the more things stayed the same: ideology change, location shift but power will always find a place to rest its head. We fought and bled for the adults, the grown men and women who preached of us being their future, preached us of the freedom from tyranny and slavery; no wonder why we hated them so. History is determined by the victor, and there shall be no victors when we’re done.’

…

Ksenya and I did our final round of surprise bunk check in the living quarters of Sasha to find it strangely silent. Ksenya assumed that they were asleep at first, but upon me seeing how puffed up their beds were, I immediately came to the conclusion that the five of them had gone missing and remembering that Nam Seung’s transport had a full crew silhouetted behind him made me came to the conclusion that my kids had sneaked out of the camp to join those idiots on their suicide missions.

“Ksenya, I want transport ready in 10 minutes. I’m gonna kill that little shit.” I said, putting down the pack of boxes and ran toward our means of transportation.