Training by Kylie.

Kylie noticed the interest in Clara and Sophia for the commander, but if she thought anything about it, she didn’t let on. It was if she didn’t care or didn’t want to interfere. The only thing she said to us, was to always show respect for the man, to be nice to him, and above all not try to hurt him. It seemed she loved him very much and was very protective of him. Like he needed protection. The man was oblivious to the subtle hints Clara and Sophia were giving him. Wordless gestures, showing some skin, trying to compliment him. No effect at all. Zip. Nada. He still treated us like children during training with Kylie in shooting practices.

He wasn’t pleased at all with our meagre progress in shooting at standing targets, let alone at moving targets. Except for Lina, who proved to be sharp shooter. So he said to Lina, that if she would progress like that he might consider assigning one of the snipers to her.

We barely saw one of the snipers, Tom, the other one we haven’t even seen. Both of the men were training the villagers, and if they were around in the evening, they were only at the campsite when we were somewhere else to train.

As for my shooting practice, I barely could hit anything. I wasn’t alone in this, Mia had the same problem. We had bonded a bit. She didn’t talk about herself, only about what was happening in the squad. She noticed Sophia and Clara competing against each other for the attention of the commander. They would miss when they clearly had the skills to shoot a standing target, only for the commander to get closer and try to correct their stance. When one of them had a miss, and a correction, they looked at the other pleased with herself, while the other would look angry. Then the latter would try the same. Kylie noticed and sent the commander away, shaking her head slightly, looking sad. She didn’t interfere in their meagre attempts at all, but looked sad when they were competing against each other.

Mia and I were outcompeted in every skill. We learned the basics of survival. We could hunt, set traps, fish, make a fire, set up a small camp but the others were quicker in learning the finer aspects. We didn’t really feel like we would be able to contribute our full share to the squad. Plus, we were the minors, they were the adults. In a few days I would turn eighteen. So I told Kylie and the rest. To make sure she at least wouldn’t see me as a child, or perhaps trying to make her convey I didn’t want to be seen by the commander as a child. Not that it really mattered, we were all given the same training, and the commander looked at the entire squad as mere idiots, angry at our progress, or just angry with us being here.

At one point I had enough of it and directly asked Kylie why the commander was always so angry with us. She looked a bit sad at that, but in the end explained that Alex had a hard time to differentiate his feelings at the moment and the emotions you could read on his face. He wasn’t angry at us, but very angry at the villagers for abandoning us. Every time he saw us, it reminded him of the damage they had done to us. Villagers we had known all our lives, she said, turned into egoistic idiots, hoarding food, and more or less exiling us for no other reason that their own sense of surviving, even when they could have cared for us, if they had worked together.

That shocked me. In the nunnery I had mastered the training to never show your real emotions. To never show weakness or anger. Not that it didn’t prevent me from acting upon it, but I wouldn’t let my anger be shown on my face for all to see, so anyone could **** that. Showing anger at the wrong moment would reveal what you cared about, and that could be used as leverage to make you do something you didn’t want.

Alex, the commander was perfectly able to destroy the nunnery and the city around it, but would never have survived a single day amongst the girls. Except... as a leader. He would have glared at the nuns and without a doubt they would have been humbled into submission, like the rest of us. But as one of us, if he was a girl, which he most certainly wasn’t, he would have had no chance.

Alex didn’t bother at all with that. He simply showed what he was thinking or feeling at the moment. And for now, he had always been thinking about us, being abandoned by the villagers. But that didn’t take away the fact he was harsh in his words, in his rude manners against us. Then I thought about the conversation with Marie, that Alex hadn’t wanted to be seen as a savior, he rather preferred teaching the villages and be left alone, than live among the villagers and be praised. It’s like he didn’t want to be loved, although he clearly was by all in his section, including Tom.

The women adored him, cared for him, were very attached to him. He didn’t act in this brutish attitude towards them. He was gentle towards them. He loved them too, I concluded. But he didn’t want us to love him. The nuns had been the same at times. They didn’t want the children to grow too attached to them, so they were brutal in their ways, even sent me away a few times, and I never felt anything else for them than indifference or even hate, being dependent on them. And Alex clearly didn’t want us being dependent on him, in fact he was making sure of it, by training us the survival skills for hunting food and enemies.

I told the others. They were a bit surprised about the logic, but accepted it. They were wondering about the same odd incongruency between his brutal acting towards them and never to be able to hurt us. Sophia and Clara concluded that they would have to see through his brutal ways, as a way to evade their attachments to him. Both said the same to me they would try to seduce him anyway, after all, he was still a man, with urges like anyone else. I expressed my doubt about that, we all heard Kylie he wasn’t that much interested in sex, but they waved me off, like it was a ploy to keep them away from him. The man was able to keep three girlfriends, for fuck’s sake. One more wouldn’t hurt him.