(Because I have to get this out of my head already)

They say that all you ever needed to know, you're taught at the Academy. You spend fifteen years locked away in those plain gray halls, the large, but crowded lecture halls, and the tiny dorms, learning how to be a productive member of society and an effective killer. You learn everything from English to Yarspin, from Math to Physics, from driving to cooking, friendship to love and most importantly, how to survive. You are placed into squads at the tender age of five and taught, day after day, year after year, how to survive, how to kill. You're taught in the classrooms, in the sim chambers, in live-fire exercises, even when you sleep you're still learning. They mold you into the perfect solider in a perfect unit. It's hard. It's so hard. You're pushed to the the very edge of breaking day in and day out. Your head is crammed full of knowledge while your body performs moves again and again until they are mere impulses. Muscle memory, as they liked to call it. The weak ones crack and are carted away to the Mental Tanks, they rarely come back. The slow ones die in live-fire sessions. The smart ones take their own lives. As for the rest of us, we just keep marching on, keep learning and evolving and just being. Having been brought to the Academy at such a young age, you have no outside reference for how life is supposed to be. You have nothing but the Academy and a faint memory of a life that fades more with each day. Since you've never been outside the walls, you can't wish for a normal life. This IS your normal life. If you wonder at all, it is about what lies beyond the walls of the Academy, but not about what other people are doing while you're here in this prison. As far as you know or are concerned, everyone does this. Everyone in the Academy is everyone in the world and those on the outside are merely Academy graduates, going about their civil duties as outlined in your worn handbook. Unbeknownst to you, there are children outside these cold gray walls. Children who never see the Academy and never hear of it, except in passing, overheard from an adult or skimmed past in a textbook. Children who live and play and learn in smaller buildings with warmer colors. Children who return home every night to their families. Children who are like you, yet so unlike you in every way. Children who are not born to be killers.

So you continue your training and you grow to be the perfect product of the Academy. You are brilliant, quick and quiet. You speak when spoken to and can recite the entire Book of Law, word for word. You do not offer opinions, you only state facts. Then you graduate and are given your dress cap and uniform. At the ceremony, with thousands of unrecognizable faces staring at you upon the platform, you receive a handshake, your new orders and the keys and deed to your very own Cube. Academy life is over and now begins your life of service, all in the name of protecting the planet from the Great Threat from outer space. The ceremony ends and you are hurried off to your Cube in order to settle in before you're shipped off for your first tour of duty, as per orders. It's small in your Cube, just enough room to live, with a bed, a chair, a fridge, a stove and a cramped bathroom. It won't matter though, for Cubes are just storage for inactive bodies waiting reassignment. The civil life you were promised defending the planet does not go as outlined in the handbooks. In fact, you never once step outside your Cube between entering it post-ceremony and exiting it the next morning to get into the trans-bus that is shuttling you back to the base for your first day on official duty. The promises are still promises, as you push them back and replace the thoughts of them with that of your current duty. Just as you were trained.

So they take you into the base, they reform your groups and they gear you up. The best fatigues, woven with a new synthetic fabric that keeps you warm when you're out in the cold and cool when you're out in the heat. You get all the best new technology they have to offer because, unlike those poor unfortunate souls of yester-war, you are not a recruit. You are a grade-A Academy trained infantryman. There isn't a single creature in this galaxy that is as good as you and your fellow men. This is what they told you in the Academy and this is how you feel when you're strapping on your kit. It's heavier than the ones you used in the Academy, but the weight just adds reassurance. Your confidence is heightened when you receive your new weapons as well. Knives made from the hardest metals known in the Tingle-Arm, a small blaster pistol to strap to your side as back up, and your prized rifle, the LNA-118. This beauty is the latest model of what you've always heard called a 'Luna Blaster' by your peers. It's slick, compact, and packs a mighty blow. You're absolutely thrilled to get your hands on it. You name her Betsy, after the elderly woman who taught your History lessons, the only true female you've ever actually interacted with. You continue to gear up, knowing that you've got a full ride to the ship to admire Betsy. It's just a short bus ride and a jaunt later you're being deployed onto the hot surface of a planet you can't identify.

Then you're thrust out into the battle, your unit charging forward, firing against an enemy wearing many plates of scaly armor, wielding seemingly unconventional weapons that are fighting back with everything they've got. There's yelling, blasterfire, screams of the dying and the angry, and Betsy's warm in your hands. You're in a blind, memory driven routine. Crouch, fire, roll, push forth, fire. Your unit is pushing them back, harder and harder, the battle wages on and on and for the first three days, you're lost in yourself, performing just as though this were another drill back at the Academy. Nothing gets to you, you just keep fighting, keep pushing them back.

The fifth day comes and there's a little chip in your mental armor. The seventh day rolls around and a single question arises in your mind.

How long can they continue like this?

Then it's the sixteenth day and you're sleepless and fatigued, despite your stims and your training and that crack is now hole through which free thought flows. You've dug in and you keep it to yourself, because you feel defective. Your unit is working at gaining more ground and snuffing this last group out of the area, without a single thought other than that of combat, just as trained. Yet here you are, questioning it all, and there's this feeling in your gut, heavy like a stone. It's fear. Fear like you haven't felt since the early days, since you were first introduced to death. You're loosing, your unit is loosing. Casualties everywhere and you're thinking about them, these boys you've grown up with and trained with for fifteen years, suddenly reduced to nothing more than broken bodies.

They taught you in the Academy to be able to look at dead bodies in any state. Bodies freshly deceased, or in various states of decay, some even barely anything more than bones. They were victims of explosions, burns, blaster wounds, self-inflicted wounds, anything that would allow you to see a body in all states of death so you were prepared for anything. They drove this into you, numbing your sense to the sights and smells of death. What they didn't bother to teach you though was how to cope with it happening right next to you. Not in the front lines, or on a wing somewhere, but right next to you. They never bother to mention just how to cope with it when you're crouched on a foreign planet, the heat of two suns beating down on you and your malfunctioning suit that leaves you sweating and sticky. You're pinned down in your little hole, three men wide with you in the middle. Shots crack overhead, exploding mere inches from where you lie and you can hear them, howling in odd, gurgling two-toned voices as you wait for a chance to pop up and return fire. The fatigue and the noise for the past week has been getting to you, and the fear lump is heavy. Then suddenly the firing stops and you're firing back, you're dropping to the ground again and you're staring at your buddy who's frozen in a half-crouch to your left.

As you watch, there's this white line straight down his helmet face and it's falling away slowly and he's staring straight ahead with a puzzled look on his face which as the skin peels back away from his skull from the top down. Then his skull is splitting and falling away with the skin in four pieces, like a human banana peel, just curling downwards leaving the chunk of gray matter suspended in mid-air and you know he's still thinking and feeling and processing this. And in this split second before it explodes, splattering your visor with little fleshy chunks, you find yourself wondering if he could hear the ringing, if it was ringing even as he died. They always told you that when you're hit with a Nermin, or Head-Splitter as the boys in his unit referred to them as, you heard ringing like thousands of large bells in your ears. That was the last thing you heard before your head splits open, your brain explodes and you cease to be. No one can confirm this though, 'cause no one's ever survived a Head-Splitter round. Yet you wonder this all the same as your bunk mate finally collapses, 5 seconds after you first saw his the split in his helmet. Just another useless sack of meat now.

And that cracks it, you're screaming and screaming. You're frantically wiping off the best bits of your buddy from your visor, mind racing yet seeming to stop all-together. The firing continues, the fight goes on and yet you're frozen in this moment, staring at his remains and wondering if he can still hear the bells, even now. Someone jabs you in the arm with their elbow, yet all you can do is turn your head a fraction of the way to see the oncoming Yasrin troops, their menacing armor glinting in the sun, their primitive-looking weapons firing in rapid succession, small beams of light, Head-Splitters. Terror, you're frozen and the moment stretches on forever.

Your troop brought some Yasrin in a few nights ago, in a short lull in the fighting. Strip them of their weapons, their armor and their massive helmets and headdresses and they were hardly frightening. They were lean, though all muscle, with leathery skin that looked to be perpetually caked with a thin layer of dark dirt. Their heads, usually hidden behind helmets shaped like fearsome predator skulls, were oddly soft and misshapen, like disgruntled potatoes. There were even knobby little growths along the back of them, almost as though their heads had been in their helmets for far too long and had begun to sprout roots in the dark. The ones they had brought in squirmed about in their bindings, gurgling in their dual-voices. It was more sad than anything, watching them repeatedly try and smash their squishy skulls into the floor, trying to end their life and deny their captors information. You had laughed along with the rest of your unit as they were drug away, howling like mad, one of the creatures trailing a pool of bright fluorescent blood behind him from his split skull. The war would be over if they could strip them of their armor, you had thought, for just a swift blow to the face would do the job. Did they ever use the Head Splitters on their own kind, or did they just bludgeon them? Could they even hear anything as earthly as a church bell?

But then you're back and you're staring at a Yasrin who is just far off enough for you to make out the whites of his teeth, for their many eyes are beady and black, set deep within their leather skin. He's advancing, pointing his long, slender stick straight at you and as he advances, his dual-voice echoing in your head. Your fingers fumble with Betsy, your eyes locked on him and you try and force yourself to stop thinking about bells and shoot before you're dead. But you're not thinking about bells, you're hearing them. They ring, deep and brassy in your head, like the Academy bells back home, pealing out the morning's hour as you rose from sleep. Your vision splits in two and the feeling of an epiphany rises in you, yet the idea never fully forms in your head. And then it's too late. You can see the skin split and peel backwards on your nose and then nothing, and all you can hear are the bells, all the way down.