It doesn’t look like Hina and friends are really doing anything but going with the flow.

— Captain Alan catches Jail, so they spar for a bit. Eventually, the latter realizes that he’s fighting the man who will become his foster father, so he decides to spill the beans, i.e. why he and his friends are here. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Alan is so quick on the uptake. He instantly realizes that Jail is a time traveler thanks to Nana. Smart guy or convenient storytelling? Shrug.

— Alan then takes all of the time travelers outside of the school walls. This way, they can see for themselves what state the world is in. Apparently, the disheveled masses will swarm you and beg for food. Sure, I guess something like this is possible. But why then are the brightest minds devoting all of their time to the Aces project? Are you telling me it’s easier to create a super soldier via genetic manipulation than than it is to figure out a way to manufacture some sort of cheap but life-sustaining gruel? I dunno if I buy that.

— Jail and friends are now unsure about what they should do. If they change the past, then Alcia might not come to exist. And if Alcia doesn’t exist, they won’t exist! Oh no! Well, this is why time traveling stories usually involve split timelines. Plus, it seems silly to preserve your own life when the alternative means that billions will die in some sort of cataclysmic war. Moreover, even if we grant that this sort of time-traveling is even possible, it’s not as though these characters will suffer an agonizing death. It sounds to me like they’ll just fade out of existence. Then again, I’ll never have to make this choice in my life, so of course, it sounds easy.

— What follows is a training montage accompanied by action lines. After all, why animate when you can be efficient?

— I also don’t really understand making the poor girls jog in mini-skirts, but hey, I’m not a military man.

— Schmelman starts handing out melee weapons. Why? ‘Cause in this future war, we don’t need no stinkin’ guns!

— Alas, Hina gets a fat stack of textbooks. Knowledge will be her weapon, yo — knowledge on how to heal people. You could say that she’s the deadliest of them all. She gets to decide who lives and who dies. And sadly, you know she’s going to save the pervert who keeps molesting women.

— Apparently, all of the countries have agreed to fight in order to “lessen the overgrown population.” Again, I feel like these bright minds should be able to come up with a way to feed themselves that doesn’t involve fighting, but who knows? I guess bugs no longer exist. Look, I’m not saying I would like to eat bugs. Of course not. But if I had to choose between war and eating bugs, I know what I would pick in a fucking heartbeat.

— In any case, Firenda continues to push the idea that they need to start experimenting on human subjects. Schmelman refuses once more. You know he’s serious when he opens his eyes. Even so, maybe Firenda’s the true villain? Maybe she’s the one who leads everyone down this dark path because she’s just so hungry to turn these kids into lab rats?

— We eventually get a beach episode, ’cause why not? Why wouldn’t military cadets play capture the flag in bathing suits?

— Since Class A is so dead set on becoming an army that never kills, Licht hatches a brilliant plan: they just keep running until the opposing team tires themselves out! Doan tries to to throw a wrench in his plan, but he’s too stupid or blind to see an obvious trap. It’s probably both. I don’t think you can just run circles around the enemy in an actual war, but it doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is that Licht’s classmates are impressed with him once again, so they nominate him to be their commander.

— Unfortunately, the adults receive some bad news. One of their own has died during a mission. More importantly, it sounds like the war is gonna happen sooner rather than later. Firenda manages to use this tragedy to convince Schmelman that they must now conduct experiments on humans! She also adds that the lab rats only became aggressive due to Schmelman’s genes. Now, I’m no scientist, and I would never claim to be one. I’m just a shitty software engineer, which means I spend most of my day debugging my own mistakes. But I like to think that scientists have a rigorous process where their work must be reviewed by their own peers. So if you’re going to make a claim like, “Oh, these rats are only going nuts due to a defective gene,” you need to, y’know, provide evidence. Your experimental data must be reproducible by others. That’s just common sense, and again, I’m not even a scientist. But Schmelman is convinced, because the next thing we see is him embracing Licht. Welp, so much for altering the past.

— Plus, if Jail doesn’t think it’s a good idea to do anything to affect the future, then why even stay here? Apparently, he just wants to keep dueling Captain Alan.