Now, the time has come for him to be prepared for battle, to be tested and melded into the fighter they need him to be. At six he has already killed another child who attacked him with his gang, making a tactical decision to end the threat forever (though he did not know he had killed him until much later). The teachers purposely isolate him, make the other students resent him, put every obstacle possible in his way. And he succeeds.
At battle school, he is at first ignored by his unit and commander, ordered to not participate in training exercises or take part in the combat arena. He trains by himself or with a girl, Petra, who has taken pity on him. He examines the way his troop works, and the enemies. He thinks of new strategies and ways to defeat the old ones, silently preparing. Then, one day, his anger at the stupidity of his commander finally reaches a hilt and he participates in one of the combat missions at the last second, winning the battle. The commander is furious, his pride tarnished – Ender earned an enemy for life.
Soon Ender’s natural abilities have made him the best Soldier at battle school, and he is given his own command, with a bunch of raw troops none older than his 9 years (he has advanced 3 years early, and some say none too soon). Within weeks he has them performing like a team, with 5 separate troops and 10 half-troops, more diversity and individual cells than ever seen before. The other commanders had no idea as to how to deal with all the new strategies Ender creates. Despite the fact that he was thrown into the battlefield 2 months early, his unit was soon #1 and never lost a battle. The teachers stacked the sides against him more and more each battle, and ender became more and more upset with the system. This came to a focal point when he was ordered to fight 2 units against his 1, the other units completely fortified. Ender still won, but he refused to play the game again. He was promoted.
After this he went back to Earth, disheartened with the government and not wanting anything to do with the war. After 3 months of lazing around a cabin and drifting on its lake, his sister was sent for to talk to him (she was the only person he truly loved). She feels like a tool and doesn’t want to take part in forcing her brother to do something he obviously doesn’t want to do. It is Demosthenes, a political writer created by Peter & her to offset Locke (Peter’s character), that ultimately forces her to talk her brother into continuing his work.
Ender is then sent to Commander Training, which he thinks is there to mold him into a commander - little does he know, the war is already on and he is already a commander. The commander. What he thinks are simulated battles with his friends as his troop leaders and computers as the actual battleships are real. He doesn’t know that the world is in his young hands, if he fails or quits, everyone will die. And yet he continues to win, despite his growing hatred for the people in the government that push him and his friends so hard. Eventually, in his “final test”, he believes that the odds have been stacked against him too high and takes the alternate way out, what he thinks is the cheap victory. He wins the war and destroys the buggers.
After this, Ender joins his sister on a journey to colonize Eros, a planet that was previously occupied by the buggers. While he is scouting out a place for a new colony to set up their town, he finds his dreamworld – literally. The buggers created a world exactly like the one he himself envisioned in one of the training “games”. He followed it to the mirror that he used to look in and see Peter, and found the cocoon of the final bugger queen placed behind it. He was so advanced mentally that he could communicate with the queen, and he realized that everything had been a misunderstanding. After this he and his sister start their journey out into space, Ender looking for a proper home for the bugger queen to start all over, Valentine along for the ride.
