Unexpectedly, someone sat themselves in front of me — the one who’d said that they wanted to be a game dev, earlier. I looked him up and down. He looked to be Southeastern Asian, and was quite a few inches shorter than me. Still though, he had a beaming smile and clearly far more extroverted than me.

Although, that wasn’t saying much.

“Hey, what’s your name? The officer called you J, right?”

“...I’m Jim.” 

“Kevin. Kevin Nguyen.”

I almost spat out my iced coffee. “You have quite the stereotypical name.”

“I know, I know. But hey, look around. We’re the only two Asians here. We gotta help each other out.”

“How do you mean?”

“Hmm… have you seen the 4-D animation, ‘One Thing’?” Kevin asked.

“Of course! I’ve seen just about every 4-D animation ever made! Have you seen ‘Random Unrelated Episodes That Are Somehow Tied Together’? The one with the main character who has silver, curly hair? It’s my favorite!” 

He’d found my weak point. Animation. Well, he had yet to find my other weakness, VR games, but that was just a matter of time.

“Of course! Anyway, my point is, like the main characters in ‘One Thing’, we gotta be bros, okay? I help you, you help me.”

“...Alright.”

“Cool cool cool!” Kevin quickly rattled off. “Anyway, we still have about ten minutes left. Wanna chat more about ‘One Thing’?”

“Sure!”

And so, even as our time in the mess hall ended, we walked through the training area, talking about our favorite shows and games.

Like I said, it’d just been a matter of time.

The officer paced before us as we stood at attention.

“I hope you enjoyed your warmup activities. Before we begin your training in earnest, we have to establish your baselines. We had your general physical information, and now we know your cardiovascular capabilities, as well as your basic understandings of special operations. But, we need to know more. Reaction speed. Sprinting speed. Flexibility. How high you can jump. Just about everything an athlete needs to be checked for.”

We formed into lines, and did our checkups.

All of my baseline stats were fairly average, except for my reaction speed, which had been honed, I guess, through gaming.

See, mom! It was all worth it!

The other test I excelled in was based around peripheral vision, and hand-to-eye coordination. Basically, I had a hologram in front of me where circles would pop up, and I had to slap them as fast as possible.

It was basically a high-tech whack-a-mole. 

After we were done with the baseline tests, we stood back at attention as the officer scrolled through our stats.

“Not horrible… alright. Hmm… could use some work. This one’s useless. How’d he pass the previous tests?”

Everyone winced and glanced around, hoping that they weren’t who’d been called “worthless”.

After going through all of our data, the officer nodded, then looked at us. 

“Not bad. I have confidence that at least a few of you will survive this training. You’re better than the last lot, at least.”

Everyone glanced at each other, then stared at me. Seeing their gazes, I sighed. As the team leader, it was up to me to ask, huh.

“Excuse me, sir.”

“What, J?”

“How many were there in the last lot, and how many survived training?”

The officer chuckled and cast his eyes over our group. “I see you’re worried for yourselves. That’s cute. Well, if it helps you, the last lot started off fifty-strong. Eight of them survived training and are now running operations for us across the galaxy.”

Less than ten percent had survived. Huh.

Suddenly, Kevin’s proposal of being allies didn’t seem so bad anymore.

“Alright. It’s time for your first lesson.” The officer pulled out some dangerous-looking items. “These are the basic tools of the trade. If you see here, this one was originally made about three hundred years ago to be used as…”

He droned on, but none of us were willing to look away or be distracted. After all, our lives were on the line here!