Chương 687: Day Six Hundred And Eighty-Five

Dear Diary, Something that I worry about with my current schedule is that I'll run out of both skills and techniques I've learned and bullshit of dubiously useful value before my current crop of Cadets rotates out of Basic Physical Training and Basic Combat Training. Seriously, I had two Seasons of each at best, if you don't look too close and are really generous.

The second one wound up truncated by the war with New Amsterdam, and it turns out the first one wound up being abbreviated due to a late start because of the Dragon attack on the Aquarium. Shit, when it comes down to it, I'm really not even sure how long the current Cohort of Cadets, the one with the Terrible Trio, is gonna be in Basic. Like, I'm pretty sure I remember Basic Training back in the day being like thirteen weeks. I might be wrong, but for some reason that number's stuck in my head.

Advanced Infantry training, at the end of which a troop ought to be a baseline Professional Soldier, is another bit, and my admittedly shitty memory tells me that was sixteen weeks, but even if you add both of those together that's only twenty nine weeks. While that sounds like a lot, one Season here is three months, and each month is four weeks, so one season is twelve weeks. Two Seasons of Basic Training is twenty four weeks, which seems a little long, at least for 'Basic' Training.

I mean yes, I'm mainly here because as the Champion of two Gods and the Alliance, not to mention being a Primordial Terror with Endurance blowing out my Maw, I can run all of my Cadets into the ground in sequence, which is the baseline requirement for being able to teach Basic Physical Training with no actual Skills. I only started teaching because me taking over Basic Physical Training for Marshall duBois meant he could take over some of the Headmaster's paperwork.

Or maybe he didn't, what with the Marshall hating paperwork. I guess he could have shifted to teaching some other class he had the bare minimum qualifications to teach, letting that professor help the Headmaster out. Who am I kidding? Marshall duBois definitely teaches more than just Gym here at the Academy. Strategy and Logistics comes to mind. The odds he doesn't have at least one class he could but doesn't teach approaches unity really.

Unlike me, where if you made me a list of the basic Shapes from Basic Heroic Skills, I'm about ninety percent positive I could screw them up just well enough to completely confuse an entire Cohort of Cadets. Then again, this whole thing started with me asking if there was anything I could do, and the Headmaster himself asked me to teach, so I gotta keep reminding myself of something I've told my kids and my Worshippers by now. The best I can do is, by definition, the best I can do.

Tautological, but still valid and validating. So yesterday at the end of the school day I brought the kids home. They'd gotten paninis for lunch, and our girls had each been eating sort of in bursts lately. Growth spurts, I guess, where they nom everything in sight, then get real sleepy real fast on the regular. With that in mind I brought home stuff that they could portion out for themselves. Big serving bowls of salad, stew, and fried rice. After dinner, after showers, in the Bath, the expected happened.

One at a time, our little ones kinda wound down and zonked out. I moved to collect them, to carry them down to the bedroom, and Saffron reached out and stopped me.

"Wait, love." She disappeared and reappeared a few moments later with Siobhan, who settled into the water with a sigh.

"I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep like this, but..." She trailed off, then motioned idly to the kids, who'd formed a kind of floating island. Lachlan, who'd followed me home because Liam wanted to pal around with the girls and Homestead kids at school, and Lily, who'd stuck around for obvious Lachlan based reasons, looked at one another, chuckled, then gently nudged the island over to Siobhan. When it bumped up against her, she sighed, then became one with the island of cute where she so definitely belonged.

Screw it. I figured Lily and Lachlan could use one of the guess rooms if they wanted some privacy, so I pulled Saffron and Marie over to the island and became one with it as well. Dreamt of my ladies all floating in a big lady raft in the middle of my Maw. Woke up to Tallulah and Karen floating alongside us, Tallulah as dead to the world as the girls, Karen kinda catnapping on one edge of the pool waiting for me. What's up, Karen?

I thought at her, trying to stay as still and quiet as possible, because everyone floating in the pool asleep pegged my adorability meter. I hoped you could watch over me as I enter Jackville today. She sounded concerned. Sure. Something wrong? She shook her head lazily. Not exactly. But no one seems to have any way to officially approach Jack. So you're gonna...? She chuckled, the sound dampened to near nothing by the water and humidity in the air. Go asking around personally. Maybe see if he comes to see me.

Sounds stupid and risky. I'm all for it. That got an actual laugh out of her, which started everyone going through that whole domino chain of waking. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Did my by now normal Saturday routine, although I kinda missed the few days when I'd had Revels before. That kind of concentrated Worship session really put me in the right space mentally and physically to really push my Cadets.

At any rate, twelve of me spread through the Academy on Maid duty, two with Saffron, one in the Infirmary, one teaching the older kids some math. Like, long division and multiplication, plus some basic algebra and geometry. Nothing super complex, but the kids ate it up. Shit, the normal math teacher, who'd decided to spend the day tutoring some kids who needed extra help, kept poking her head inn 'just to see if everything was okay'. Staring at the equations I'd put up on the board. Old school chalk board, too.

Kinda neat and weird, but not bad. In the Practice Yard, I called the Cadets together after Lachlan had them do their warm up run.

"Good Morning, Cadets!"

"Good Morning, Champion!" they called back. I felt a glow of pride as I realized they could, one and all, shout at the top of their lungs after a five mile run.

"I've got a bit of a confession for you, along with some good news, some bad news, and some news news." I paused while they all focused, then admitted, "my second Season here was the war between Phileo and New Amsterdam. Marshall duBois had pretty much fucked off for the field, leaving us with a substitute teacher filling in for the rest of the Season. So I never really got any more 'official' training than you've got now." They all looked a little, I dunno.

Horrified mixed with disappointed, all of it muted by the adrenaline from their run and the nascent stoicism of trained soldiers.

"On the other hand, with no more training than you've got now, I kicked the living shit out of everything New Amsterdam threw at us." Good old Vickerson did not fail me.

"But you're a Goddess, and we're not!" she called out. Not whining, just noting a fact. Of course, I had my response planned out. I leaned forward and used Message to fill the area around the Cadets with my whisper.

"Yet." You could have heard a pin drop when I said that shit, let me tell you. I nodded.

"There's an old saying where I'm from.

'Inside every troop's backpack is a Marshall's baton'.

Now, that's been used to excuse some dumb shit over the years, and I think the guy who said it meant something other than what I mean, but when I heard it, it was from a trainer who wanted every Cadet he was training to know that out there, in the field, at the sharp end, where everything is blood and steel and pain and death and sweat and Glory, when everything goes to shit and the folks who are supposed to be in charge get waxed, the fucker who steps up, takes charge, and rips victory from defeat's lower intestine is just as likely to wind up General as the rich motherfucker with the fancy uniform and classroom training."

I waited while that sank in. Then grinned at them.

"Just to be clear, right now you guys are the ones with the fancy uniforms, and while this is all breezy and outdoors, it is in fact a classroom. Although one or two of you have in fact been out in the field, have seen the sharp end and the reaper and all that good shit. The rest of you might want to look to them for advice. Especially from here on out, because I'm gonna be making this shit up as I go along. Of course, you do have two big advantages here." I waited until Citron raised his hand.

"What are those, Ma'am?" I kept up my smile. Back in the day our DIs came in two varieties; always scowling and always smiling, and I figured I was scary enough without scowling.

"First, I have done some Intermediate and Advanced Combat Training with Marshall duBois, and even if I skipped out of one of those, too, I did it after kicking the shit out of the Alliance's two best hand to hand fighters before I did."

"Which two?" called Hildegarde.

"Marshall duBois and myself. I mean, I didn't 'kick the shit out of myself' then. Wait, no, I think maybe I did? Later? When my kid asked me to? But the day I left Marshall duBois bleeding on the pavers, I also left myself bleeding on the pavers." Hildegarde snorted.

"You mean you kicked the shit out of each other?" I shook my head, grinning right at her with an awful look to let her know I was gonna do some sparring with her one on one tomorrow.

"No. While some mutual shit kicking did happen, I left him bleeding on the pavers, then blew myself up entirely without his assistance." Her jaw dropped.

"Uh... why?" I managed to score a point by making Lachlan let loose a snort of laughter when I shrugged and said, "I wanted to look at the Imperator's panties, and that seemed to be the simplest way to get a look at the time." So fun watching the whole Yard try not to laugh. Then Vickerson asked, "what's the other thing, Ma'am."

"Good troop. Good Cadet. Good catch, remembering. The trainer who finished up the training Marshall duBois started in my second season, who did most of the work to get me to the point where I needed to be?" She nodded.

"Lachlan Lancaster." At that point, with them all looking at him, I let him basically take over the day's training. Weights, Endurance, some basketball at one end of the Yard, and some folks just tossing Squadballs back and forth, playing catch. He did all that because by that point, Karen had gotten herself moving, and while I didn't want to leave the class completely unsupervised, I mostly needed to watch Karen. Who wound up really doing fuck all.

Jackville wasn't really a 'City' exactly either, although it had none of Muscogee's 'fake' City about it. No, Jackville was... a bunch of Villages, small farms, docks, individual houses, just... a mess. There were no real 'streets', just paths from Village to dock, from fishing shack to lonely warehouse with some big fuckin' dudes sitting on chairs out front. The architecture was as eclectic as any I'd ever seen.

The aforementioned warehouse could have dropped into the Camden Yards waterfront without a splash, all thick gray stone. Most of the Villages were local architecture, that low to the ground, sort of dug in look to them, although not too many were as dug in as Grandmother's Village. Probably didn't want indoor swimming pools or anything. The majority of the independent buildings were set on what I heard Pesce refer to as 'pilings'. Even there, though, shit varied. Some were rickety shacks on thin little stilts.

Some were partially on low islands, but had parts of their floors set on solid logs. A few even had mangrove trees built into their structure, which seemed really weird, because I thought mangroves were supposed to be a little further south. Guess nobody told the trees. Of course, I advised Karen against wading, instead suggesting they either use one of the Questing Tentacle's boats, or better yet hire a local to ferry them around.

Another thing about growing up in the hood; you didn't fuck with somebody else's mark. Steal the money they got from them later, sure. But you screw with the mark, ain't nobody getting the cash, and that will not stand. At any rate, I figured losing some cash by overpaying a local huckster with a boat was a way better price to pay than losing appendages to random alligators.