Kai sat blankly on the wooden chair, staring at the television screen in front of him. He slowly raised a finger to his face to wipe away the large tear that streaked across his cheek.

  “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” the teen whispered to himself in between sniffles. “The librarian was right, this does beat season 8, even if it was everything I wanted out of the show.”

  He slowly got out of his chair and ejected the plastic cartridge out of the monitor and put it back inside of its case. Making his way through the library, Kai came upon the shelf he’d found the movies, and placed them back.

  “Seriously, what kind of God makes an Earth that doesn’t have a Sky High trilogy?” sighed the teen. “How am I supposed to enjoy movies after this? There’s nothing out there that can compare.”

  As Kai continued to wallow in his melancholy, a series of heavy footsteps reverberated from the library’s entrance.

  “And here comes the librarian with my textbooks. Talk about whiplash, going from the best movie I’ve seen in my life to the most boring books they have around here.”

  Peeking out from behind the shelves and rather than being met with the fanciful man in question, Kai instead witnessed a squadron of the biggest men and women he’d ever seen in his life marching across the carpeted floor. Larger than any bodybuilder from back on Earth, let alone Tuomas from the gym, the dozen or so hulking figures slammed their steel-toed boots on the floor in unison, generating enough force from their weight alone to make their footsteps be felt even through the plush carpet.

  They each looked to be between 20 to 40 years old, and on their heads were buzz cuts and angry expressions, ones that held pure contempt. Contempt for what, Kai couldn’t tell, but he didn’t want to find out. Especially with the bowie knives and pistols holstered at their sides.

  The teen’s street-honed instincts took over, and forced him to duck down behind the shelves opposite of the behemoths. But as they’d passed him by, curiosity began to worm its way into Kai’s mind. Sheila’s words echoed inside him, that any gun at TOAL would only be fired in his defense. And what kind of hit squad would attack a library anyway?

  Steeling his courage, the teen slowly made his way to the space between the next row of shelves, keeping his feet light and ears open all the way. Eventually, he found himself within earshot of the strange group, and settled an ear between a gap in the books to listen in.

  “He’s full of shit, is all I’m saying!” softly exclaimed one of the men in a gruff voice. “Bet he never had to worry about the greater good.”

  “Does it matter? He’s still got a point,” replied another. “I mean, if someone who’s never had to drop a body told me that killing is bad, I’d agree with them! Even if killing someone could save a dozen other lives.”

  “But you’d still kill them, right? To save those dozen lives?”

  “Oh yeah, totally.”

  The congregation burst out into raucous laughter.

  Kai gulped. He figured he’d heard enough from this group and decided to take his leave. Before he could stand back up, a brick slab of a hand tightly grabbed onto his shoulder. The teen began to struggle against it and even tried to twist the wrist it was attached to, but he was held in place by its vice-like grip.

  “Woah there, we don’t really appreciate eavesdroppers, kid!” chuckled the gargantuan body standing behind Kai. “If you wanted to join us, you could’ve just asked.”

  The teen slowly turned his head to regard the man. Several drops of sweat began forming along his forehead as he looked upwards, past the grabber’s chiseled chest covered by a t-shirt and pale green flak jacket, stubble-covered jawline, and heavily scarred face.

  “Uh… s-s-sorry,” sputtered the teen as he tried his best not to piss his pants.

  “Damn, you look like you think I’m gonna kill you,” replied the hulking figure. “Don’t worry, you’re good, unlike the last guy who tried to sneak up on me. Haha, fucking snapped his neck like a twist-off cap!”

  Kai winced and let out a high-pitched squeak.

  “Hey dumbass!” shouted one of the women sitting at the table opposite the shelves. “You forgot to turn off your aura!”

  “Oh shit, you’re right!” said the man as he reflexively slapped his forehead, letting go of the teen. “Sorry about that, kid. Feeling better?”

  Kai exhaled the rest of his held breath, letting it pass through his gritted teeth in a soft-sounding flow. The pressure in the air was released all at once, giving the teen a chance for respite. He silently nodded once his lungs were empty.

  “Good! Now come on, you wanna join us?”

  Kai wordlessly nodded once more, and was pulled back to his feet by a muscular arm gripping his own. The same hand fell on his shoulder once more and practically dragged him out into the open, and towards a table filled with similarly sized men and equally hardened women. Being pushed into a plush chair knocked the air out of Kai’s lungs and snapped him back to reality.

  “Who are you guys?” asked the teen uneasily. “And why do you look like you are ready to kill something?”

  “Assault Squad Romeo at your service,” replied the same man who had caught Kai earlier. “When hell reigns and something needs to die, they call us.”

  “Because chivalry isn’t dead, it was murdered!” shouted the rest of the table, loudly enough to make the walls in the room reverberate.

  “Should you really be shouting like that in a library?” squeaked Kai. “Won’t the head librarian get mad?”

  The group stared at him for several seconds with blank expressions. As if a dam had burst, waves of laughter rolled over them, one of the soldiers even smacking Kai’s back as she tried to steady herself on her chair’s armrest.

  “Damn kid, you’re funny!” said another burly man. “But we didn’t see him when we came in, so I think we’re safe.”

  Kai sheepishly smiled at the compliment, before replying. “Uh, thanks! But he was here just a while ago, he went to find my school textbooks. Hold on, that was a couple of hours ago though, where is he?”

  “Probably prowling close by, so how about if we keep it quiet just in case?” joked another of the hardened brutes. This one had short brown hair on a scar-speckled face. “Hold on, you said textbooks, right? Are you a student?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” nodded the teen, starting to feel a little more comfortable amongst the intimidating group, on account of him not being dead yet. “I’m Kai, by the way. Kai Freeman.”

  “What’s up Kai? I’m Svenge,” the same man introduced himself. “Hold on, if you’re looking for textbooks, I doubt you’ve learned what assault squads are, am I right?”

  “I mean, it sounds pretty self-explanatory,” shrugged Kai. “But not really, no.”

  “Pretty much, we’re part of TOAL’s army and get sent out on missions that need a more ‘delicate’ touch that a standard army of soldiers can’t provide. Each squad has a specialty, like Alpha who’s supposed to be a bunch of detectives or something. What was their callsign?”

  “No shit, Sherlock?” asked one of the others.

  “Hey, no need to be rude,” pouted back Svenge.

  “No, that was the callsign, dumbass. ‘No shit, Sherlock’.”

  “Oh. Well I feel like an idiot.”

  “And what’s your specialty?” innocently asked Kai.

  “We kill things!” exclaimed another woman.

  “Right…” replied Kai with a slight leer. “Wouldn’t every squad do that if you’re all soldiers?”

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  “Yeah,” hesitated the same chiseled lady. “But we kill them harder!”

  “Uh huh,” said Kai, accepting the explanation with an internal sigh. “So, what are you all doing here? You look like you’re ready to kill something.”

  “That’s because we always have to be ready for deployment,” said another one of the assault squad’s members. This one had dark tanned skin and curly hair, similar to Kai’s. “But in the meantime, we’re meeting up for our book club!”

  “Book club,” asked Kai, incredulously.

  “Yeah, our book club. Something wrong?” asked the same soldier with a glare.

  “N-nothing! Nothing wrong with that!” backpedaled the teen with a pacifying grin.

  “Hey, we might be a bunch of dedicated murder machines, but we’re still people, and this is how we spend our free time,” replied a fourth member. This one held a plain-colored book in his hands, opened up towards the end. “And you’re more than welcome to sit in with us today, Kai.”

  “Sure, thanks,” nodded the teen, accepting their offer from a combination of gratefulness for their hospitality, curiosity for what kinds of books these people would be reading, and a desire not to piss them off any further.

  “Perfect. Alright, everyone!” exclaimed Svenge, the apparent head of the team, drawing his truck-like hands together in a thunderous clap. “Last session, we all agreed to read the collective works of Immanuel Kant. Anyone want to summarize and share their opinions for Kai’s benefit?”

  “Sure,” replied another. “Pretty much Kant was all about deontology, which means what you do should only be based on what you’re supposed to do instead of what’ll happen because of it. So as I was saying earlier, if you gotta kill someone to save a dozen, you shouldn’t do that because killing is wrong. Even if the outcome is that even more people will die.”

  “Hey, I thought the point of this was so that we could come to our own conclusions about these kinds of things?” asked another member. “Way to go injecting your biases into the definition like that, Zarav.”

  “Oh fuck off, Danielle. Svenge asked me for my opinion too, and that’s my opinion. That deontology is bullshit!”

  “You could at least do a better job separating them. But if we’re talking about our opinions, then I think deontology makes sense. If everyone did what they were supposed to do like that, then nobody would have to make those kinds of shit choices.”

  “Ha! That’ll be the fucking day! Why don’t you just retire to a Fairytale World then? I bet you’ll be much happier there amongst the rainbows and gumdrops.”

  “Hey, hey!” shouted the leader. “Nothing wrong with having differing thoughts on the subject, that’s why it’s called philosophy! But at least back them up with evidence.”

  “Alright, fine,” pouted Zarav, taking a moment to think to himself before continuing. “Alright, so I was in this one village in the World I first got summoned to, and the enemy army was marching through trying to cleanse the place. That’s code for ‘kill anything that doesn't look like them’, by the way. There were like 10 times as many of them as us, and we were totally going to get fucking killed if we came out of hiding.”

  Everyone looked on in rapt attention, Kai too. He was thinking of what kind of heroic rescue or sacrifice had to be made to save the day.

  “And this one lieutenant I happened to be serving under was some Duke’s son, a total spoiled shitstain who was absolutely not cut out for any kind of leadership. And this dumbass wants us to charge out there with all of the villagers at the front to make a last stand! Of course, he’d be at a safe distance on his warhorse ready to get outta dodge the moment things look bad.”

  “So what did you do?” asked Kai.

  “Simple, I snapped his fucking neck! The rest of us soldiers agreed to say it was a horse riding accident if anyone asked, and we were able to save ourselves and the villagers we were supposed to be protecting by staying in hiding.”

  “Did you have to kill him?” asked the teen. “And so brutally?!”

  “Sure,” shrugged Zarav. “He was in the middle of throwing a temper tantrum that would’ve given us away. And then the enemies would’ve killed us in even worse ways. Trust me, I was doing that idiot a favor by making it quick.”

  As Kai fell into a mental haze at the response, the other soldier replied.

  “Well, I have to disagree,” said Danielle. “If your lieutenant did what he was supposed to, then you wouldn’t even have to make that choice.”

  “Maybe, but we’re talking about real examples here. I doubt you have one where everyone did what they were supposed to.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do!” she grinned. “So the place that summoned me had this god-king figure in control who was really good at looking into the future. Apparently that’s how he rose to power in the first place. Anyway, he saw that the kingdom was about to get shit on by a ton of supernatural disasters like a magical drought, hurricanes, bioterrors, whatever. But he also saw how to get the kingdom through it, which requires everyone to do exactly as he said.”

  “What did he tell people to do?” asked Kai.

  “Oh, lots of things. Some had to give away some of their food to others, others had to hand over their elderly or children to be executed and ground up into animal feed since they’d take up too many resources, things like that.”

  Kai stared at Danielle as his stomach began to retch.

  “Of course there were people who didn’t want to do that, so the army came in and killed them all instead of just a few. And by the end of it, the king was right and we did survive! And if everyone did the right thing from the beginning, then there’d be less dead, and things would’ve gone easier.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you people,” finally let out the teen in a high-pitched shout. “Where the hell did y’all end up to be this fucked up?” Kai quickly closed his mouth and covered it with his hands when he realized what he had said.

  “Where do you think?” asked Zarav. “Grimdark Worlds! The most brutal and screwed up places out there.”

  “…All of you?”

  The muscular behemoths around him slowly nodded, every one of their faces covered in a range of emotions from humble smiles to thoughtful frowns.

  “Fuck…”

  “And that’s what it means to be in Squad Romeo,” said Svenge, laying a heavy hand on Kai’s shoulder. “We make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

  “Wow,” said Kai, slowly shaking his head. “I’m sorry you had to go through all of that. I’m just glad I got rescued before anything bad could happen to me. And thank God I wasn’t born somewhere like that, either. I think I’d take my shitty old life compared to anything like that.”

  “Hey, don’t blame yourself, Kai!” said Danielle with a comforting smile. “Not your fault we ended up in those shitholes. Besides, we’ve gotten out of there and those experiences have shaped who we are today, does that make sense?”

  “No, not really,” frowned Kai.

  “What she means is that we see the past as being over, and we’re stronger than ever because of it,” added Zarav. “So the present and the future are the only things to worry about now, so we just focus on those.”

  “With the occasional therapy session or treatment to deal with the really traumatic shit that’s still lingering from our pasts,” noted Svenge.

  “Wow, that’s a pretty enlightened way to think about it,” said Kai with a thoughtful nod. “I honestly didn’t expect something like that out of you all.”

  “Why, is it because we look like a bunch of shaved gorillas?” angrily asked Zarav.

  Kai froze. He looked over the equally furious facades of the other soldiers, before he saw one’s lip ever so slightly twitch. “…yes?”

  They all burst out laughing. After taking a second to recover from the shock of the sudden noise, the teen joined in as well. Whatever remaining tension they all felt was released, as the group found solace in the raucous noise.

  “Just because we’re hardened killing machines, that doesn’t mean we can’t think about why we’re hardened killing machines!” said Svenge with a final chittery exhale. “We do what we do to save people in the absolute worst scenarios that the rest of TOAL can’t stomach, all to make sure what happened to us never happens to anyone else.”

  “That’s what it means to be in Squad Romeo,” added Danielle. “When we show up, it’s because chivalry didn’t die, it was murdered.”

  “And Squad Romeo will even the score!” shouted the rest of the team at the top of their lungs.

  “For goodness sakes,” came a fanciful voice from behind them. “I leave for a few hours and a tribe of howler monkeys sets up in my library!”

  The group collectively turned around to see the head librarian staring them down with an extremely disappointed look.

  “Sorry,” whispered Svenge with an embarrassed expression of his own, the rest of Squad Romeo looking equally guilty. “Won’t happen again!”

  “I hope not, but I doubt that promise will extend beyond your current visit,” the librarian shook his head. “Very well, continue on. And Kai, I’ve found your books and have them at the front desk where you met me. When you’re finished here, I’ll happily check them out for you.”

  The teen nodded, and the strange man made his egress.

  “Damn, how does he keep sneaking up on us like that?” asked one of the soldiers. “He should be in blackops at this rate, not wasting his time being behind us.”

  “But you have to admit, he does a damn fine job as a librarian too!” chuckled Svenge. “Well, that’s about it for our time today. We’ve got an early training session, so let’s meet up here tomorrow to finish talking about Kant. And for the session after that, we’ll continue with the theme of duty by reading through the Bhagavad Gita.”

  The stone-cut figures all nodded and slowly rose out of their seats. They turned towards the exit and began to head towards their next appointment.

  “You’re welcome to join us too, Kai,” said Danielle with a cheerful grin. “Though you have quite a bit to catch up on. And you might not be able to relate to all of our experiences…”

  “If I ever do end up on a Grimdark World, I’ll let you guys know,” nodded the teen with his own mischievous smile.

  With one more quick laugh, the soldiers filtered out of the room, leaving Kai alone to mellow in his own thoughts.

  “Huh, nice guys. Danielle looked pretty close to my age, I wonder if she's single?”