Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The double doors to the third music room never looked so large and imposing as when Kasanoda was standing outside of them. His hand had been on the handle for about five minutes now, but he just couldn't find the courage to turn it. Every time he thought of what awaited him beyond these doors, and about the letter he found on his desk that had brought him here and all that it promised, his pulse raced and his throat went dry and he felt like he was going to swallow his tongue. He couldn't do this, he couldn't do this. . . .

"You can do this," he muttered to himself in a poor attempt to boost his confidence. "You owe it to Fujioka to do this." So he took a deep breath, smoothed his hair, and loosened his grip on the envelope he clutched in his other hand, trying to smooth it out against his leg. Then, steeling himself, he pressed down on the handle and pushed inward.

From within wafted the scent of roses and instant coffee; and as Kasanoda's eyes adjusted to the light streaming in through the tall windows, a warm chorus of "Welcome! Please, come in," reached his ears.

He stepped inside the third music room to see the seven members of the host club posing invitingly in the center of the room. Their welcoming smiles fell, however, when they saw who it really was at their door. "Oh? It's just Bossa Nova," Honey said disappointedly.

"Casanova?" said Haruhi. "What are you doing here?"

"Bossa Nova?" the twins asked.

"It's Kasanoda!" the boy in question corrected, eye twitching. Honestly, did they have to go through this every time?

"Oh, it's you." Tamaki sighed. "At ease, folks," he said as he waved his clubmates away, "it's just a john."

Speaking of which . . . "Where is everyone?" Kasanoda asked as he looked around the room, empty but for the eight of them. Not a flaming fangirl in sight. "Aren't you guys normally swarming with clients by now?"

"Guests," Tamaki corrected him with an intelligently raised index finger. "'Clients' makes it sound like we're renting out our bodies for lascivious purposes."

Haruhi and the twins resisted the strong urge to say that's exactly what they were doing.

"You mean like to aliens?" Honey said, once again missing the boat completely. "Tama-chan, what did you get me into?"

"Not exactly, Mitsukuni," Mori began.

"But . . ." Kasanoda was confused. "This is a host club, yeah? (And you did just call me a john.)"

"That's beside the point," Kyouya interjected. As he adjusted his already impeccably balanced glasses he said, "The thing is, you're the first one to arrive today, even though we should have been expecting our guests over ten minutes ago. For some reason, all of our regulars seem to have decided unanimously to skip today.

"You wouldn't happen to have heard of anything happening today that would attract all of our guests at once," Kyouya asked him pointedly, "would you, Kasanoda?"

Kasanoda felt a chill run down his spine and he gulped. That cold, cold voice . . . "I couldn't say. . . ."

"Maybe they're just studying for exams," Haruhi said. "They are approaching fast, you know."

"Impossible," said Tamaki. "Students at Ouran have better things to do than study for exams."

"Well, some of us actually need to do well on them. . . ." Haruhi muttered, once again feeling like she was speaking into a wind tunnel.

"Or perhaps they found something more interesting," the twins said with a shrug.

"More interesting than us?" said Tamaki. "Also impossible."

Shaking her head, Haruhi turned to Kasanoda. "In any case, what brings you to the host club today?"

The rest turned to look at him, waiting for his answer.

Kasanoda turned beet red. It had been hard enough to follow the letter's instructions and come here, as much as he had wanted to; now he had to be humiliated in front of the entire host club to boot? "I, uh, I-I came to see you, F-Fujioka," he stammered. "I g-got your note—"

"You g-g-got her n-n-note?" the twins mimed. "What are you, the little engine that could? Ah!"

They winced as Haruhi pinched both their ears, a displeased scowl on her face.

Which instantly softened as she said to Kasanoda, "That's awfully nice of you, Casanova, but I didn't send you a note."

He didn't know what to say. He could feel his heart sinking into his stomach where he stood. "But . . . it says I should come to the third music room, and it calls me Casanova. Who else could have written it?"

"Let me see that," said Tamaki, and Hikaru and Kaoru gathered around him to read over his shoulder as he took the note from Kasanoda and unfolded it.

The first thing they noticed about it was that it was written on an expensive paper with a grainy, somewhat translucent texture but a smooth finish, and a faint tinge of pink throughout. "Casanova-kun (heart)," it read,

Casanova-kun (heart),

I want desperately to see you again. Since our last meeting I can't
stop thinking about you. Your bashful smile, your gentle hands—
my heart beats doki-doki out of control when I think of them. Your
laugh when we played kick the can together is a sweet melody to
my ears. To share a love-love umbrella with you would make me
happier than three square meals! So don't be coy, OK? I'll be
waiting for you in the third music room after class.

Sincerely, you know who.

"'Sweet melody'?" the three boys echoed when it was over, to which Kasanoda blushed furiously.

"That doesn't sound like me at all," an aghast Haruhi mumbled.

"Doesn't sound like Bossa Nova either," said Hikaru, to which Kasanoda not only blushed but began to steam.

"Mm," said Kaoru, nodding, "it definitely sounds like something a girl would write, though."

"Doesn't it?" Tamaki breathed incredulously.

"Do you three listen to me at all?" said Haruhi. "How would you even know?"

"Look how round and bubbly the characters are," said Hikaru as she elbowed in for a look, "and the author made little hearts out of the maru. That's a total chick move."

"Right. . . ." Needless to say, she was not impressed. She scrutinized the penmanship a little closer. "You know, this looks a lot like Honey-sempai's handwriting."

Honey's mouth fell open. "Eh?"

Which earned him the shocked looks of the rest of the host club, with Kasanoda being the most shocked of all. "Why are you all looking at me like that?" Honey hugged his stuffed rabbit closer to him, as though to save himself from being tainted by their dirty, circumstantial thoughts. "I didn't write it!"

"Can you believe it? Honey-sempai of all people," the twins said conspiratorially to one another. "He doesn't look like the type to be into that. . . ."

"But it wasn't me, I said! Weren't you guys listening?"

"Curiouser and curiouser," came an ominous, raspy voice from one corner of the room, where the shadows were suddenly gathering like curling tendrils of Indian ink. "To receive an unsigned missive of someone's fiendish confession of love, scented mysteriously of vanilla and cloves . . . what a dreadful portent for a client of the host club to receive, Cosa Nostra-kun—"

"Guest! He's a guest!" said Tamaki. "A-and not even that! More like a passer-through—"

"It's Kasanoda!" Kasanoda wailed. "Why is that so hard to remember?"

"Right, right, my apologies. I was totally thinking of something else." Nekozawa stepped into the room, draped in a heavy black cloak as per usual. "As for the matter of the note, however, I wonder if the culprit could be, perhaps, the vengeful spirit of a spurned clie—guest," he corrected to Tamaki's glare, "of the past, out to seek revenge on her tormentors by sending cryptic epistles of undead, unbridled passion to her rivals. Are you in need of an exorcism, Suou? Oh, do say you are; my club has been dying to perform one. . . ."

Needless to say, Tamaki really didn't like the way Nekozawa was grinning maniacally at the prospect of an exorcism—nor did anyone else if their queasy looks were any indication. Knowing him, he'd be more likely to be the cause of them needing one. "I-I really don't think it's as bad as all of that," Tamaki said quickly, waving his hands in front of him. "It's probably all a big mix-up, is what it is. . . ."

"Who invited you anyway, daywalker?" Hikaru said suddenly, stepping between his president and that of the black magic club. "Whatever snake oil you're selling this time, we ain't buying."

To which Kaoru pitched in, "Do we need to get the flashlights again?"

"Now, now," Nekozawa said as he reached under his robe and inside who-knew-what to fish for something, "there's no need to be rash. I come bearing an explanation for my presence here, though even I do not yet understand it. You see, I too received a missive that was missing a signature."

And so saying, he withdrew an envelope that looked distressingly just like Kasanoda's.

"It reads simply," he recited, unfolding the pinkish piece of paper inside with a little help from Beelzenev, "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble/ Come to the host club on the double. So, as per orders, here I am." He extended the letter to the host club to examine for themselves. "I don't suppose any of you know what that's all about, either. However, it does look to be written by an individual of the fairer sex. The feminine curve of the ten-ten is a dead give-away, isn't it, Fujioka?"

Haruhi tried to suppress a twitch of her eye, and was mostly unsuccessful. "I wouldn't know."

That was when there came a rap of knuckles on the main door. "Finally, customers!" Tamaki said, all lit up, as he bounced to a conspicuous place and waved Nekozawa and Kasanoda out of the way. Clearing his throat and running a hand through his golden hair and practically sparkling, he opened his mouth to say, "Welcome to the—"

"Yo, Ohtori-kun, we need to talk."

One hand still raised invitingly in the air, Tamaki deflated, and the rest of the host club and Kasanoda and Nekozawa looked toward the doors to see Takeshi Kuze, captain of Ouran's champion yet somehow oft overlooked American football team, stride into the third music room with teammates Tougouin and Tarumi tagging along close behind.

"More guys. . . ." Tamaki mumbled. "How can this be . . . ?"

"What seems to be the problem?" Kyouya said as he stepped forward to face his old preschool rival.

In response, Kuze waved a crumpled up note and envelope in his face. "This is the problem," he said as Tarumi crossed his arms over his chest behind him. "Is this some sort of joke, Ohtori? Because I'm not laughing. I thought we had come to an agreement last time that we would put an end to our petty rivalry—"

"I didn't know it was started," Kyouya said, but the other ignored him.

"I thought it was clear from how gracefully I admitted defeat that I wanted to put our differences behind us like gentlemen, but it seems I underestimated you. You try to act so cool and objective and polite, but you just can't help yourself, can you? Pulling a sophomoric stunt like this isn't so beneath you after all. Well," Kuze said with a grin and a flip of his bangs that, next to Tamaki, had the host club seeing double, "if you can't let sleeping dogs lie then I guess I have no choice. Kyouya Ohtori!" He raised a fist, which just happened to be holding an orange, his sharp eyes gleaming with the youthful spark of sportsmanship. "The Ouran Orages challenge your host club to a rematch!"

"I refuse," Kyouya said flat out.

So cold, Kasanoda and Haruhi had to agree. Positively antarctic.

"Unacceptable!" Kuze said.

"Pardon me. Excuse me," said a voice from the hallway.

Wind blown out of his sails, Kuze looked down to see a grade school boy squeezing past Tougouin's large frame to get through the doorway. Ouran's linebacker moved out of the way as he and his teammates stared at this eleven-year-old kid who had interrupted Kuze's challenge.

Once he had penetrated their offensive line, the boy bowed and shouted: "I am ready for my next lesson, my king!"

Which assured that the object of everyone's attention next was none other than Tamaki.

"King?" he echoed to himself. It became quite obvious that he was overjoyed to be back in the spotlight, even if he did not exactly know why, after Kyouya had briefly, if unintentionally, stolen it. "Ho-ho! Why, of course, Shirou, my faithful disciple! Your king welcomes you back! But, er . . . may I ask what brought this about all of a sudden?"

And as if it were not obvious by now . . . "I got your note," Shirou said, offering up the offending piece of folded stationery as if Tamaki should have known that by now.

Before anyone could say, What note?, a trio of voices moving up the hall toward them drew their attention. "Like I said," a young man's voice was saying, "he probably called us here to discuss some kind of reparation for making those threats. I mean, it was entrapment pure and simple. That's just plain unethical—"

"But, President, isn't what we were doing a breach of ethics—"

"Shut up, Sakyou! That's different. We're journalists. It's our sacred duty to get to the bottom of corruption using every means at our disposal!"

The members of the host club and the American football team, and Kasanoda, Nekozawa and Shirou all exchanged glances as the voices came to a sudden halt outside the door and lowered to a nervous whispering that they couldn't make out. Needless to say, it wasn't any girls who were standing outside the third music room's open doors like they thought no one had heard them coming, but the unmistakable voices of the journalism club, Ukyou, Sakyou, and their unscrupulous leader, Komatsuzawa.

Just when the tension was building to a head, everyone waiting for the inevitable entrance worthy of Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai—

"Young master, we're here to rescue you!"

"Don't let them make you do anything undignifying!"

—In leaped two ruffians who had nothing to do with the journalism club whatsoever, all puffed up and ready for a fight. Kasanoda's eyes went wide as he recognized them, and he made the most fearsome face his fearsome face ever did make as he glared daggers at them. "Aahhh? Akutaro! Akujiro! So, you dare show your faces in the third music room?"

"Wuh . . . Kasanoda!" the duo said in unison, in equally chill-inducing voices and making equally horrible faces at their sworn enemy from across the room. "What are you doing here? Is this some kind of set up? Where are you keeping our boss's son?"

"Testuya ain't here, ya jerk-offs! What the hell are you talking about?"

"Don't act all innocent, Kasanoda! We know you've been trying to get into his pants since middle school!"

"Say that again?" Finally, someone had gotten his name right—twice—but Kasanoda was in no mood to congratulate them. His priority now was the yakuza sons stare-off showdown that the third music room had suddenly become.

Which was promptly interrupted by Komatsuzawa, who once again proved himself a wealth of temerity when he shoved Akujiro out of the way to make room for himself. "Hey! That's my dramatic entrance you're stealing!"

Sakyou and Ukyou, it should be noted, had much more restraint. And fear.

Kuze stared at the recently arrived president of the journalism club, who was remarkably enough holding his own against the two sons of the mob, then back at the note he had thought singular that was still clutched in his hand. "What the hell is going on here?" he muttered.

"That's what I want to know!" Tamaki wailed. "Why is our host club full of men? Eeee. . . ."

"Look to the notes," Nekozawa murmured in his ear, having draped himself over Tamaki's shoulders like a mink muffler (which was the source of the shiver that ran down the host king's back without a doubt). "Therein you shall find the answers you seek."

Fair enough, all parties decided, and they grudgingly put aside their differences in the meantime in favor of getting to the bottom of this debacle by offering up their respective notes—all of which, it should be noted, shared the same cherry blossom-pink hue.

Kuze's ran like an advertisement. It read:

Finding yourself in need of a Hail Mary on laundry
day? Try orange peel! Its super-acidic oil is nature's
solvent for removing those tough away game stains!
Gently lifts out grass and dirt to leave your jersey
looking and smelling fresh! Even gets out blood!

"This is true. . . ." Kyouya observed as he adjusted his glasses.

"As if I didn't know that already," Kuze said coolly, though the twitching eyelid kind of gave him away.

"Okay," said Haruhi and the twins, "but what does it mean?"

Komatsuzawa's typewritten one was a little more straightforward:

Come to third music room stop scoop of century stop
bring camera and change of pants stop.

The twins snickered at that, specifically at what they thought would necessitate both a camera and a change of underwear, but whatever it was seemed to go right over the journalism club's heads.

Akutaro and Akujiro's was rather straightforward as well, if a boldfaced lie. In rough handwriting that looked like it meant business, it read:

Greetings, jerk-offs. We've got your boss and are holding
him hostage in the third music room. You know what we
want. Bring it and maybe we can negotiate an exchange.
If you know what's best for him you'll be quick about it.

"So that's what you two were worried about," Honey said to the two young thugs. "You thought from the letter we were going to do this and that to him and you wanted to protect his virtue?" He smiled ear to ear. "How cute of you!"

Mori nodded.

Akutaro and Akujiro lit up like Christmas trees.

"Knowing the host club, though," Kasanoda grumbled to himself, the note recalling a not-too-pleasant memory of his past experiences with the group involving cat ears and a maid outfit, "that wouldn't be a real stretch."

"All I know is that I know nothing," Tamaki said in a dramatic voice.

"Well, that was kind of a given, milord," said Kaoru from where he and Hikaru were reading the previous note.

"No, that's what Shirou's message says. It's a quote from Socrates. . . . I think." Tamaki pointed at the slip of stationery as he added, "Then beneath that it says, Are you ready for your next lesson? Signed . . ."

"A crown," Shirou filled in when he trailed off.

"'Tis so, 'tis so!" the other said with an intelligent nod. "A crown fit for a king! Only, if I know anything it's that I didn't send this. Or any of them, for that matter."

"Neither did I," said Kyouya.

"Nor I," said Haruhi.

Honey's thoughtful hum and Mori's silence pretty much said the same thing.

Slowly all heads turned to the twins. They started. "Well, don't look at us," said Hikaru. "If we had something planned, guaranteed we wouldn't be this cryptic about it."

"Right. We would have taken a much more direct approach."

"Besides, warm, fuzzy reunion scenes just aren't our thing, you know? We're more dividers than uniters."

"Then I wonder . . ." Kyouya trailed off as he turned his back to them, his ever-handy pen tapping his chin in thought. "If none of us sent the notes, then who did? There is nothing in their contents to tie all six of them together, nor is the handwriting consistent across the board. The only similarities are in the circumstances, and the stationery—but even that is readily available at any high-end paper mercantile."

"It doesn't make sense," Tamaki said. "Who would want to bring everyone together like this?"

Haruhi was struck by a sudden thought that as far as she knew had nothing to do with the proceedings. It was only that she had known something was missing from this whole thing but couldn't put her finger on it until now. "Has anyone seen Renge?"

As if that were the magic word (and, who knows, maybe it just was), the doors to the third music room suddenly slammed shut on their own accord. The eighteen found themselves in just a matter of seconds locked inside the room, and if the grave sound of bolts sliding closed did not convince them of this, the frantic tugging at the door handles that inevitably followed to no avail did.

"Shit," said Tarumi, as Tougouin and Mori took turns trying to knock the doors down by ramming them. "We're trapped."

"We're doomed!" Komatsuzawa cried as he pulled at his hair. "Doomed, I tell you!"

Before he had a need of that change of pants he was supposed to have brought, however, the crowd parted for Honey, who was rolling up his sleeves as he faced down the unbudging set of doors. The chi was rising from him like steam as he prepared himself. "Flying . . . iron bunny . . ."

"No, wait, Honey-sempai! That's—"

"Marzipan frosting kick!"

A pathetic slap of shoe against door was the anticlimactic result. "Solid oak," the twins finished as everyone stared at Honey, who was still standing with one foot against the door.

For all of about three seconds, after which he wailed in agony, and everyone held their ears as Mori tried unsuccessfully to console him.

"Brute force won't do you any good," Haruhi said calmly as she stepped forward, "especially when the doors are hinged to swing inward. You know, sometimes the best solutions are the most delicate." And so saying, she produced two bobby pins, knelt by the door latches, and went to work on the lock.

The host club was amazed, not least of all Tamaki and the twins. "Whoa, Haruhi! you know how to pick locks?" said Hikaru while Kaoru stared admiringly.

"What poor, unfortunate circumstances forced you into a life of thievery?" Tamaki wanted to know, ever the concerned father figure.

Haruhi let out a deep sigh. "I learned it because I was curious, not out of necessity," she deadpanned; "and do you mind? You three are blocking my light."

Not that it would have mattered. The sickening snap a second later made everyone's hopes sink.

Haruhi stared. "Huh? It ate my bobby pins. . . ."

"The main doors are useless!" Tamaki gasped, backing away from them in terror. "Which means, we have to find another way out!"

"You know," said Nekozawa, who was still eerily calm about the whole matter, "there's always my way out."

"Already checked," Ukyou and Sakyou chimed despondently from the dark set of doors in the corner.

"No, I meant—"

"Also locked," Shirou said from the windows, the latches of which he was rattling in vain.

"Besides," said Tamaki, "I am not jumping out or through anything from this storey."

Nekozawa's shoulder's slumped. "What I meant was—"

"We knew what you meant," everyone told him at the same time.

"Oh man," said Akutaro, "we're screwed! Game over, man, game over! We're all gonna die in here—with Kasanoda!"

"You think this is how I wanna spend my last days?" Kasanoda shot back.

"Stow the bellyaching," said Kyouya. "No one is going to die. By my calculations, there is approximately seventy-two hours' worth of oxygen in here. I suggest we sit tight and wait for the janitorial staff to let us out."

"But, Sempai," Haruhi said, "today's a Friday."

Which prompted another hearty round of lamentations and yelling for help at the door (a lot of good that would do from inside a music room, but one could never be too thorough) and concerns about whether they were going to have to eat each other, or worse, what they were going to do when they had to use the little boy's room.

"Would everyone please relax?" Kyouya said evenly. "Like I said, right now the best thing to do would be to remain calm and conserve oxygen. I'm sure there's a very rational explanation for all this."

"Kyouya-sempai," the twins chimed, "you're taking this rather well."

"Yes," said Tamaki as he thoughtfully rubbed his chin, "almost too well if you ask me."

"Nobody asked you, milord."

Kyouya smiled to himself. "I wouldn't say my handling of the situation is anything out of the ordinary. The problem lies entirely in your mindset. I myself am an optimist. I believe we will eventually be saved by the cleaning staff by Monday morning at the latest, which should leave us with a good nine hours of oxygen to spare. I am simply looking at things rationally."

"Impressive," said Tarumi, to Kuze's glare. "You can rationalize spending sixty hours locked in a room with Komatsuzawa? That takes nerves of steel!"

The others couldn't help glancing at the president of the journalism club, as an anomalous rain cloud seemed to have suddenly and inexplicably found him.

After a second of careful consideration, Kyouya had to admit to himself that Tarumi had a very good point. He took out his cellphone and immediately started punching in a number.

That was about when Honey swooned.

He quickly caught himself, but Mori put a steadying hand on his shoulder nonetheless. "Mitsukuni, you okay?"

"I'm fine," Honey waved him off. "Just that suddenly I feel so . . ." He let out a big yawn, rubbing his eyes as he managed to finish, "Sleepy."

The collapse was so sudden even Mori and his cat-like reflexes weren't able to catch him in time. Honey landed on the floor with a loud thump; and though it surely would have woken anyone else, his gentle snoring told that he was sleeping peacefully.

It was when Mori bent to examine him that he smelled it—a faint, acrid odor that seemed to be coming from beneath the door. "Gas!" he said, and covered his mouth and nose in his hand.

"Gas?" everyone chorused in alarm.

"Everyone, back away from the doors!" Tougouin said, but as Tarumi noted, pointing at the ceiling, "No good! It's in the ventilation!"

Desperate to get fresh air into the room, Shirou tugged at the window latches more ardently, but, with a pathetic squeak of hands against glass, he was the next to go—because, as Tamaki was quick to point out, like canaries in a coal mine, Lolita boys were naturally the first to drop.

Nekozawa put his cloak to his nose, but even he was struggling to remain standing; and some of the others' first reaction to cough, as though to rid themselves of whatever they might have unwittingly inhaled, only made the situation worse. The twins didn't even have time to play up the situation before they passed out in each other's arms, Haruhi joining them a moment later in a rather undignified position; and, calling her name, Tamaki made it about as far as the sofa before he collapsed over the arm of it and landed upended with his face in the cushion.

In a matter of but moments, just about everyone was down for the count. Even the American football team's athletic builds ultimately proved to be no protection.

Mori was able to hold out longer than most of the others; but even he was quickly losing his grip on consciousness. The last thing he saw as he hit the floor, just before the world went black, was Kyouya turning to look at him, still standing, a black shape backlit by the windows.

Mori knew for sure he was losing it then, because he swore when he looked up to where Kyouya's face should have been, what stared back at him was the inscrutable face of a fly.

Chapter Text

The first thing Haruhi recognized when she regained consciousness was the sound of a pen scratching against paper. Ordinarily it was not a sound that would have been noticeable, but the room around her was surprisingly still. She shifted on what she was lying on, something rough to the touch and musty, like foliage. And outside wherever she was came what could only be described as bird calls. The disconcerting thing was, however, she could place none of them as belonging to crows or sparrows or any of the birds that typically made their home on the Ouran campus. They sounded without exception more at home in some exotic zoo exhibit.

She wiped the bleariness from her eyes and sat up straight on her bed of palm fronds.

Wait. Palm fronds? It had to be the new cosplay they had neglected to inform her about. Yeah, that was it. . . . Right? A worried, "Kyouya?"

He stopped his note-taking and looked down at her. "Oh, Haruhi. Good to see you're finally awake."

She didn't like the way he said that. And it wasn't just the way the light was glinting off his glasses. Come to think of it, nothing good ever happened in the movies that was preceded by the words, Good to see you're finally awake. "How long have you been up?"

"Oh, not too long," he said vaguely. "I must have metabolized the anesthetic gas faster than the others."

"Gas?" Haruhi racked her brain for what she last remembered before falling to sleep. It came back slowly at first, then all in a rush: the host club and a bunch of irregular, male guests trapped in the third music room with no good explanation as to why they were there except for some mysterious notes. And then . . . Haruhi drew a blank.

"What happened to us?" she said, rotating her sore shoulders and brushing a few stray palm leaves out of her hair. She looked around the spartan cement room where Shirou and the twins continued to sleep soundly under the filtered sunlight. "For that matter, where are we?"

"That's something we'd all like to know," said Kuze from behind her.

Kyouya looked up at the football captain, who was followed by his two teammates. "What did you find out?"

"Only that we're in what looks to be some kind of abandoned military training complex surrounded by jungle. There's fruit all around, so at least we shan't succumb to scurvy, but alas, to my chagrin I could find no oranges. I was, however, able to surmise by the salt in the air that we're on an island of some sort, but I couldn't say where. Just a gut feeling that tells me we're not in Japan anymore, Toto."

"Thank you, Captain Dorothy," Haruhi mumbled, nodding to Shirou who was presently rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "In that case, I'll let you break the news to the munchkin."

Shirou didn't seem to notice much about where he was, though. The first thing he laid eyes on was the twins, who were lying one spooned against the other at his feet. "Aw, gross! Are they always like that?"

"Hikaru, Kaoru, rise and shine," Kyouya said in his most matronly tone of voice, and prodded them with his pen, which only made Hikaru moan and bury his face further into Kaoru's shoulder. Shirou shuddered all the more. "Care to grace us with your conscious presences?"

"Just a few more minutes, Mom. . . ." Kaoru mumbled and tried to wave him off, which had the undesired effect on Hikaru's part of hitting him in the nose.

Tougouin was a little less polite with Akujiro, who was slouched against one wall. "Yo. Wake up," he said as he nudged him with the toe of his shoe.

Akujiro tipped over, bumped his shoulder on the concrete floor, and awoke with a start. "What the—" he said, then started rubbing his shoulder nonchalantly.

When his hand went to his neck to massage the crick out of it, his fingers hit something hard and cold and he stopped. He felt out the shape of it, quickly determining it was some kind of electronic device that encircled his neck like a collar. Then, in horror, he looked up at the rest of them and saw his worst fear was confirmed: he was not alone. "You guys . . . y-you . . . We're all. . . ." He couldn't seem to get the words out.

One by one the room's other inhabitants' hands went to their own throats, and felt the collars around them. "Aw, crap," Haruhi said. "I've seen this movie."

"Haruhi!" Tamaki wailed, bolting upright and, it seemed, picking up just where he left off before he lost consciousness.

Mori was there at his side in a heartbeat. "You all right?" came his deep, reassuring voice in Tamaki's ears.

The host king pushed himself up. "Never mind me. We have to save Haruhi! Daddy's coming, Haruhi! Those unscrupulous twins have her in the most compromising position yet. We must rescue her dignity, Mori-sempai! She—"

He paused and glanced around himself at his surroundings. A quick head count revealed there to be no twins in sight, and certainly no Haruhi. "Where'd she go?"

"Would you keep it down?" Komatsuzawa groaned from the other side of the room, holding his head as he tenderly readjusted his glasses. "I have the worst headache. . . ."

"Hang in there, President!" Sakyou said.

"I'm sure I have an aspirin around here someplace," Ukyou said.

"It would appear—"

Tamaki nearly jumped out of his skin at the utterly sinister tone of those words uttered from a dark corner of the room which the filtered light did not penetrate. "Jesus Christ, Nekozawa-sempai!" he said, grabbing at his chest. "Would you stop startling me like that? One of these days you're going to send me to an early grave."

Mori, too, was staring at the black magic club president as though unsure from where he had materialized. "Rest assured, Suou-kun, Beelzenev would never allow such a fine plaything as you to escape his clutches so willy-nilly," Nekozawa said, which naturally was only more cause for alarm. Sitting on a crate and leaning against the wall with the cat puppet dangling off one bent knee, he grinned up at them from under the dark bangs of his wig. "But, as I was saying, it would appear that our numbers have been evenly divided into two baseball teams."

"Baseball teams?" Tamaki echoed dumbly while Mori stared with equal desire for clarification.

Nekozawa nodded around the room, a drab, roughly-made structure that might have once served as a communications tower for some army some unknown time ago. "Tally those of us remaining yourself, Suou, and you will see that we number nine, and further that there are nine of us still missing."

Tamaki did as suggested, and sure enough he came up with the same number. There was himself and Mori and Nekozawa, the journalism club, Honey sleeping soundly in what might have been the only even remotely comfortable spot in the entire room, and Kasanoda and Akutaro propped up against one wall and presently drooling on one another.

Scratch that. With a groan on the former's part and a smacking of lips on the latter's they slowly came out of it. Each looked at the warm body next to him, nonchalantly stretched, did a double-take, and promptly jumped half-way across the room in the opposite direction. "Get offa me, you homo!" said Akutaro and for some reason started smoothing down his mullet while everyone else stared.

"Who are you calling a homo, jacka—Did you . . . Did you drool on me?" said Kasanoda, trying to somehow wipe the shoulder of his uniform jacket without actually touching it.

Akutaro wiped his face. "N-no! That's just wishful thinking—"

"Do you wanna die today, asshole?"

"Fiend, stay away from me! Brother . . . What have they done with my brother?"

"Forget your brother!" Tamaki joined in. "What about my Haruhi?"

Kasanoda rounded on him. "Haruhi's missing?"

Needless to say, all the screaming was driving Komatsuzawa out of what little mind he still had left.

Nekozawa meanwhile was leaning over Honey in concern. It seemed a little disconcerting to him that the other would still be sleeping after all this time. Perhaps whatever had knocked the rest of them out had been a mite too strong for his slight frame. Nekozawa put out a hand to shake Honey's shoulder—

Mori quickly and adamantly shook his head. "If you value your life," he said to Nekozawa, and trailed off.

Nekozawa waited.

"Don't."

"Yeah, trust me, Sempai," Tamaki added with a wince, "he'll be fine. Beelzenev's got nothing on . . . Well, let's just say hell hath . . . Just let him wake up naturally."

"Hey," said Kasanoda, working the kink out of his neck as he came up to them and pulling at his metal collar, "I don't suppose any of you guys know where the hell we are?"

That was when they heard it.

The earsplitting melody of their own doom.

"Hohohoho. . . . Who-hohohoho. . . ." came the high, disembodied laughter of feminine triumph that struck fear in the hearts of menfolk both old and young alike, while the whole building, nay, the whole island shook from the starting up of a rather high-powered motor.

While their building was thus shaking, all eyes turned to one wall of the room, in which a panel suddenly began to open up, revealing a television screen built into the wall. On it was an insignia Haruhi and the twins—judging by their apprehensive glares—had never seen before, though it did look just a tad familiar, as it was comprised of the letters "O" and "R," which a caption explained to be the same letters on their uniforms that stood for Ouran, all of which surmounted a caption which read simply "survival program".

As they watched, a rotating, silhouetted figure was slowly raised into the picture. Not that anyone in the host club needed to be told who it was. When the rotating stopped and Renge's smiling face appeared, none of them could say they were surprised.

Haruhi's shoulders slumped. "I should have known."

"What? Who is she?" said Kuze.

"Otaku," the twins answered in unison. "And that's all you need to know."

The young woman in question faced them now with hands on her hips. She did not need her trusty megaphone this time. Aside from the impossibly bright smile which even Disneyland's imagineers would have been unable to reproduce, her posture oozed all the authority of a drill sergeant. Which was more than could exactly be said for her outfit. Today it was short, camo shorts, army boots, and a tight, bright orange T-shirt that had the same "O" and "R" printed on it, outlined in glitter. Pigtails stuck out from a camouflaged army cap, there was a stick-on star on her cheek, and a headset completed the ensemble, which she spoke into cheerfully.

"Good morning, everyone!" Renge's voice boomed through the structure's PA system as she made a salute so utterly cute it would have sent Lin Minmei into insulin shock. "Did everyone get a good night's rest? I sure hope you did. You'll need your strength for the trials that await you . . . on the island!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Tamaki blinked. "Wait a gosh darn minute. Did you say island?" He pressed his hands to the screen as though she could hear him through it. "What have you done with us this time, Renge?"

"Hey, get away from the screen," Kasanoda growled, trying to pull him out of the way. "We can't see—"

"You're not the only one who's upset, you know!" said Ukyou.

"Do you have to yell?" yelled Komatsuzawa.

"Mitsukuni. . . ." said Mori.

"Where's my brother!" said Akutaro.

". . . Going to wake him up."

And then everyone else was clamoring for a piece of Renge, so that Tamaki had to shout above them, his cheek pressed to the screen like a kid to a candy store window.

"What's the meaning of this fiasco? Haruhi. . . . What have you done with Haruhi?"

"My, my, Suou-sempai," the young woman on the screen exclaimed, holding her reddening cheeks, "you do have a one-track mind! How noble of you, to be so worried about your true love in this your time of crisis! And they say chivalry is dead."

Kasanoda started at that, and Tamaki blinked, blushed and grinned like he hadn't heard that last bit. "You . . . you can hear me?"

"Of course, I can! You're looking at the latest in two-way, real-time telecommunications technology! Spared no expense." She looked over his shoulder. "Good morning, Honey-sempai. Did you sleep well?"

Everyone turned in fear to see the young man in question rising from his bed of foliage and rubbing his eyes. Tamaki prepared for an explosion, but it never came.

"Mm . . . Yep! Sure did! Thanks for asking, Renge-chan!" a bubbly Honey said instead. He looked up. "Takashi, is it Saturday already?"

The others blanched. "Saturday?"

Komatsuzawa checked his watch in disbelief. "You mean we slept a whole day away?"

"Do we get Asahi on that thing? Ohh, how 'bout Fuji Television?"

"You eighteen were out like little lambs. But never you fear! I wouldn't allow you all to come to harm on my watch. Not yet anyway," she added ominously, while Honey continued to mumble something about Saturday morning cartoons, "not before the real fun starts. I'll leave that up to you. No, all your dear friends are safe and sound in a secure location on the other end of this island. But you don't have to take my word for it. See for yourself."

And so saying, a smaller television screen just to the side of the big one that was projecting Renge's image flickered on, and in it appeared a room similar to the one Tamaki, et al, were standing in, and in that room were the missing nine from the music room.

Tamaki promptly glued himself to that monitor. "Haruhi!"

Haruhi and the twins started at her name being called. They and the others turned to the smaller television screen next to Renge's and, recognizing their schoolmates, quickly crowded around. "Wow, milord!" said the twins, who were quick to get in front of it. "Can you see us over here?"

"How is everyone doing over there?"

"Are Honey-sempai and Mori-sempai with you?"

"He-e-e-ere!" said Honey, nearly hitting Tamaki in the nose with his raised fist as he squeezed in front of the screen. "I slept the whole Friday away! Can you believe it? And I had the neatest dream—"

"Friday?" said Kaoru while Hikaru poked where he had determined the camera must be. "What day is it?"

"And there were giraffes and elephants and—"

"Yeah, yeah, and soda-pop fountains," grumbled Tamaki. "No one cares."

"It's Saturday," said Kyouya at their backs.

"Saturday?" Shirou squeaked.

"Honey-sempai, get away from the TV— You, twins! I can't see Haruhi—"

"Here I am, Sempai." She poked her head in between their shoulders and waved blandly.

"Haruhi! Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine—"

"Argh, dammit! I've been kidnapped!" said Shirou. "Again!"

"Jiro!"

The yakuza brothers managed to push everyone else out of the way on their respective sides.

"Taro! Thank heavens!"

"Don't worry! I won't let anything befall you, Brother! I swear it with my life!"

Tamaki managed with a few well placed tugs to yank the one on his side off the screen, and got a face full of Akujiro's licorice-rope lips. "Eh. . . . Move, you miscreant! If you had any sense of honor you wouldn't get in the way of a concerned father and his dau—"

"Haruhi says he's just fine," the twins chimed from behind Akujiro. And, oh yes, Tamaki could see just how fine she was, snuggled up in both their arms. "See? We're taking good care of him."

Tamaki's jaw dropped.

"Hey," she squirmed, "watch your hands. You know I'm ticklish there."

Tamaki's face went red as a beet. Kasanoda tried his best to see around his head.

Shirou shuddered like he'd just eaten a bad pickle. "Can this club get any queerer?"

"You have no idea," said Kyouya.

"Will someone get us out of here!" wailed Komatsuzawa. "Cell phone. . . . Someone's gotta have a cell phone!"

The American football club decided judiciously to wait this one out.

"Kyouya!" Tamaki gasped. "Where were you when all this happened?"

"What? No reception?"

"—But you'll understand when you're older the way women's minds work. It's all about marketability."

"Now I don't want to! That's perverted, I don't care what kind of face you put on it."

"Kyouya, you're supposed to be the responsible one! I— Mori-sempai, put me down! —If something happens to Haruhi on your watch, Hikaoru, so help me—"

"Hikaoru? Ha-ha! Wizard, milord! We like the sound of that!" And they grinned like Cheshire cats.

"T-that's not fair. I messed up. . . ."

A diabolical laugh from the main screen brought silence back to the two groups and they turned their attention once again to Renge.

"Oh, the tragedy of it all!" she said with a self-satisfied smile. "Whatever shall you all do? You want to be reunited with your friends and loved ones?"

"Yes!" said Tamaki, Kasanoda, and the yakuza brothers simultaneously, eyes shining.

"You wanna see civilization again?"

"Yes!" the American football team grumbled with arms crossed over their chests.

"You wanna get off this island?"

"God, yes!" Komatsuzawa wailed from his hands and knees over Sakyou's useless cell phone.

"I don't really care," Haruhi alone deadpanned. "As long as my grades don't go down on account of this. I just knew I should have gone straight home yesterday and studied."

"Aw, come on." The twins poked her in the ribs. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

Need they have even asked? "In a box under my bed."

"That's more like it!" said Renge. "Now let's begin the game rules, shall we?"

"Game?" Kuze finally spoke up. "What game?"

"Wait a second," said Tamaki, "this is all starting to sound very familiar. . . ."

"As well it should!" Renge stood back, a contemplative thumb to her chin as she spoke to no one in particular. "As I'm sure you all have noticed by now, what we have here is a classic recipe for a coming-of-age drama of adolescent survival. A group of handsome young men from upstanding families stranded by a stroke of bad luck on a deserted, tropical island without adults or any ties to the civilized world, abounding with teenage hormones and the inexplicable angst of youth. Friendships will be tried, rivalries reformed, and the careful manners forged by high society tested to their limits—"

Tamaki sat up quickly. "I got it! Like the Coral Island!"

"Well, actually, I was thinking more like Lord of the Flies, except with boys of appropriate age for young women to healthily fantasize about."

Everyone uncomfortably avoided looking at Shirou.

"Almost all of appropriate age, anyway. . . ."

"That's like Coral Island, right?" Tamaki went on obliviously. He rubbed his hands together. "This should be a fun challenge. We'll use teamwork to show who best epitomizes the Japanese work ethic."

Haruhi hated to break it to him, but, "Er, if I remember right, Lord of the Flies didn't exactly end so well."

"'Specially for the kid in specs. . . ." The twins looked simultaneously at Kyouya.

Who pushed up said glasses like he hadn't heard. "Mind explaining what this game is all about, Renge?"

Renge nodded. "Thank you, Kyouya-sempai. I knew I could count on you to get right to the meat of this operation. After all, you do have a right to know why you are here. You see, you eighteen are guests of the host club clientele. For our viewing pleasure, we have decided to bring you here and have you fight for our enjoyment a rousing game of paintball deathmatch capture the flag."

And with that the words "RIGHT WAY TO PLAY PAINTBALL DEATHMATCH CAPTURE THE FLAG—BY THE OURAN HIGH SCHOOL HOST CLUB FAN CLUB" appeared across the bottom of the screen.

"Score!" Kasanoda hissed to himself and pumped his fist.

Akutaro and the journalism club gave him dirty looks, but he was unrepentant.

"Your parents have all been sent letters in advance," Renge continued, "explaining the details of this 'teamwork-building excursion'," around which words she made air quotes, "so you won't be missed."

Before anyone could become too despondent, another panel opened in both structures' walls with a ka-chunk, this time revealing a cache of firearms mounted inside ranging from pistols to semi-automatics to sniper rifles, and one canister after another of colored balls.

"The rules are simple," Renge said to this. "You each get a survival kit and your choice of a weapon and paintball ammunition, with which you will eliminate your opponents on the other team by tagging them while your team attempts to steal the other base's flag."

Behind her, the green screen image of the fake Ouran crest became an aerial view of the island, on which both their structures and a third one were located. Renge gestured to each one like a weatherman on the TV news.

"The island is about five kilometers across with fortifications at the north and south ends. Tamaki-sempai's team is Blue Team, whose base you can see here in the north, and Kyouya-sempai's is Red Team located here, on the south end of the island. Your goal is to make it to the other team's base and steal their flag, after which you will bring it here," she pointed to the third dot that made an obtuse triangle with the other bases, "to Alpha Base, and whichever team does so first shall be declared the winner.

"However, in the case that there is no one left to capture the flag, the team with the last man standing shall be declared winner by default. Only by successfully capturing the opposing team's flag or eliminating the competition completely will the game be over, and only then will anyone be able to go home."

While everyone else was too stunned to do anything but stare, Renge raised an index finger.

"Oh! I almost forgot. Your entire experience will be filmed at every step of the way. High definition video cameras have been set up all over the jungle, and to handle the production we've hired the most amazing crew yet! Give them all a big hand for their hard work!" Renge applauded enthusiastically, although she was the only one doing so. "Not that you'll notice any of them. They're that good. Plus your dialog will all be recorded in the field by the necklaces you are all wearing—"

She grabbed her own between thumb and forefinger, which made many of the others automatically raise their hands to their throats.

"—Which also monitor the hits you sustain, letting us know when you're KIA and telling us your location so our awesome cameramen can get the best angles. What's more, they also act as walkie-talkies so you can coordinate with your team members from opposite ends of the island! How exciting! So don't try to rip them off or else—"

"They'll explode?" Akujiro wailed.

Which earned him a funny look from Renge. "No, but it would count toward a forfeit for your team and would really disappoint your fans, so try not to do that, okay? So let's all fight really hard and heroically out there," she said with a gusto, "all right, everyone? Any questions so far?"

When no one could formulate a response, let alone a coherent syllable, Renge answered for them.

"All right! You have the rest of the weekend to finish the game. Good luck, everybody . . . and happy hunting!"

And with a wink, Renge had gone and left them to their fate.

Chapter Text

"No, no, no, no, no!" said Tamaki as the live feed from the Red Base went black as well. He rushed over to it, bracing his hands on either side, as though he could make the picture come back by yelling at it. "Dammit, that can't be all there is!"

A low chuckle from the back corner made him and the rest of his team turn their heads.

"Well, how do you like that?" Nekozawa purred as he leaped off the crate to his feet. "What a fine predicament you've landed us in this time, Suou-kun—"

"Me?" Tamaki bristled.

"What are we supposed to do now?" said Ukyou.

"There's nothing else to do but kill each other off." Needless to say, the sheer width of Nekozawa's grin as he said that did not exactly put anyone at ease. "Figuratively speaking, anyway."

"This must be right up your alley, right, Neko-chan?" Honey said with a smile while Tamaki paced and tousled his own hair in distress.

At this time no one seemed to notice Akutaro clandestinely whip out a hand-held gaming console and start typing away.

Perhaps because there were bigger things to worry about, like the sudden tension in the air when Nekozawa returned Honey's smile with one which seemed to say Don't ever call me Neko-chan again. "Usually I leave it up to the powers that be to exact revenge for me, or write down my feelings in a notebook, but I do think there is something cathartic about simulated gunplay."

"I don't know about all that," said Kasanoda, "but I do know this is gonna kick ass. Right, Morinozuka-sempai?"

Mori said nothing, but his smile could not have made his sentiment any clearer.

"I rest my case," said Nekozawa. "I just find the irony of being forced to work with my arch-nemesis in order to survive and get off this rock to be an intriguing turn of events."

"But in order for us to do that," Honey said, "we'd better have some sort of strategy."

Mori simply exuded his concurrence.

Which made Tamaki snap out of his pacing, and beam and grab his chin, one arm folded across his chest as he turned away from them—and in the direction in which he knew there to be a video camera. "Yes, how right you are. A strategy. After all," he said, "I do have a reputation to keep up. As president of the host club, I have a sacred duty to my supporters to uphold my record of victory. Nay, I would not be a good leader if I allowed anything with my name on it to end in failure, which is why I could not live with myself if I did not give this effort and this fellowship of ours one hundred percent."

"One hundred and ten!" said Honey.

"Yes! I like your enthusiasm, Honey-sempai!" Tamaki was all but sparkling as he went on. "If we all had attitudes like yours there'd be no way we could lose! So let's go out there and give it our best, Blue Team. Win one for the old host club! Komatsuzawa!" His index finger snapped to the young man in question, who was looking more frazzled by the second. "You and your club will be on recon. Akutaro, Casanova—"

"It's Kasanoda."

"You two will be our welcoming party. You both come from gangster families so you should be able to handle it. Stun them with some of that cool slow-motion, double-wielding action you people do. Burn bright and die honorably. Nekozawa-sempai. . . ."

Tamaki had to look away from the creepy grin his upperclassman was giving him from under his dark wig.

"You just keep doing that voodoo that you do so well. Honey and Mori-sempai will back me up as I make my way toward the Red Base. And then once our enemy's flag is safely in my hands, whoever is left standing will fall back to my position as I deliver it to Alpha Base in a final epic shoot-out! So what do you say, team? Who's with me? Victory or death!"

"Screw that!" Komatsuzawa suddenly yelled from out of the blue.

The others glanced at him and his two blushing cohorts. The journalism club president slapped a helmet on his head, a rifle gripped tightly in his shaking hands. "I'm not sticking around you bunch of misfits out there. It'll be a slaughter!"

"That's the spirit!"

"Our slaughter, you buffoon!"

"But, Komatsuzawa-sempai," Tamaki tried, genuinely stunned that someone wouldn't want to be on his team, "we stand a better chance of winning if we stick together. Now, yes, some sacrifices are bound to be made for the good of the team—"

Which made the other laugh like a madman, much to Ukyou and Sakyou's utter embarrassment.

"For the good of the team? Are you all completely nuts? We might as well stroll up to Red Base banging pots and pans for all the stealth the host club has." He clutched his bag to his chest, shoving tubes of paintballs into it. "My club can do a better job staying alive on our own, thank you very much."

As he stomped toward the door, Sakyou and Ukyou exchanged glances. "Uh, sir. . . ."

"Well?" Komatsuzawa practically fumed. "Are you two coming or what?"

"Well, it's just that. . . ." Ukyou tried.

"Maybe Suou has a—" Sakyou followed up.

"Maybe he has a what?" said Komatsuzawa, daring the other to finish that thought, and one would have to admit that he could be somewhat persuasive when it looked like he wasn't going to get his way, sort of in the same manner as a toddler about to throw a tantrum in the supermarket.

They obviously didn't think his was the best idea, but with a shrug, Komatsuzawa's two underlings grabbed up their things and followed him outside.

Tamaki put his hands on his hips. "Well, that's a shame. —But six is still a good, strong number!"

But as he and the hosts watched the three go, Akutaro flipped his game console closed and hefted his kit and gun over his shoulder.

"Sorry, losers," he said, "but much as it pains me to say it, I'm with Komatsuzawa on this one. It's every man for himself out there, man, and I ain't working with Kasanoda."

"Fine with me!" Kasanoda barked. "I didn't want to team up with you anyway. Good luck getting that flag all by yourself, jerk-off."

Akutaro flashed him the bird, so Kasanoda kicked the dust up from the floor after him.

Meanwhile, Tamaki lowered his head with a contemplative hum. "This isn't good, team. Our fellowship is falling apart at the seams before we can even get it off the ground. How can we expect to beat Kyouya's team when our group dynamic is this fractured? His team is both athletic and crafty!"

"You've still got me and Takashi," Honey put in enthusiastically, while Mori nodded dutifully behind him.

"And me," Kasanoda added in a small voice, his cheeks red as he glanced away.

Tamaki brightened at that. "Two black belts and a can-kicking champion. I can't complain about that."

He trailed off, and slowly all four of them turned their eyes on the other remaining member of the team.

"Say no more," Nekozawa said. "I will be like the wind."

Beelzenev rubbed his little hands evilly.

"Sounds good. Whatever it means." Tamaki clapped a hand on his upperclassman's shoulder at that—but just briefly. Any longer and who knew what bad mojo might rub off.

"It'll be rough going," he said to the rest, "but even with five of us, I still have the utmost confidence that we can make it. You're good men, and I'd trust each and every one of you with my life. Except you, Nekozawa-sempai, which is why I'm just glad you're on my side."

"For now," the other acquiesced smoothly.

Tamaki's expression turned grave and he lowered his voice.

"Gentlemen," he said as he looked around at each of them, "there is one more matter that we must discuss, as it is a matter of the utmost importance. Unlike the rest of our team, we five share Haruhi's secret, and we five know how disastrous it would be for the host club, not to mention Haruhi himself," he said, conscious of the collars around their necks, "if his secret were to be discovered and captured for all posterity on videotape. I think you all know what I'm talking about."

Honey nodded gravely as Mori returned Tamaki's serious look, and Kasanoda slipped deep into thought.

"Now I know he's got some of the best darn friends a . . . a person in his situation could ask for on his team, but we can't count on the twins to always protect him, and that Shirou is one perceptive little spud, to say nothing of the American football team. That's why we five must swear an oath right here, right now, that even while we're fighting for our team's victory and doing all we can to capture Kyouya's flag, we will protect Haruhi's secret if it's the last thing we do. Even if we have to take it to our graves."

"You can count on me!" Kasanoda said gruffly before he could even finish.

He pumped his fist into the middle of the group, which Tamaki laid his hand on, flashing the red-headed boy a satisfied smile.

"Us too!" Honey bubbled as he and Mori added their hands to the mix. "We won't let Haru-chan down!"

"Yeah."

"I know you won't, Honey-sempai, Mori-sempai!" said Tamaki in—again, remembering he was on tape—the most teary-eyed voice he could muster up.

There was only one obstacle left then—only one person left who had the capability of blowing the whole Haruhi matter out in the open if he so chose.

The tension in those few seconds could have been cut with a knife. One hand in the center of their circle, Tamaki glanced over his shoulder and flashed Nekozawa an entreating look. "Well? Can we count on you, Sempai?"

The other hosts and Kasanoda held their breaths.

Nekozawa sighed. "As much as it would please Beelzenev to see my rival club's greatest secret exposed in front of their own audience, alas, I can empathize personally with Fujioka's feelings on this matter, and vicariously your own. So, even though it goes against everything my club stands for. . . ."

He shrugged, even though the decision seemed almost physically difficult to him. But as Beelzenev slung the gun he had been loading over his shoulder, Nekozawa added his own bare hand to theirs with a sinister, "May the powers of darkness bless our pentacle of hands in this covenant."

Which made everyone else snap their own hands back right quick.

"All righty then," Tamaki said shakily. "That was kind of awkward. But now that we're decided, let's get out there and take Kyouya's flag!"

"Hahh-choo!"

Haruhi's face suddenly seized up and she let out a sneeze that shook her whole body. She held her hand over her nose, saying a muffled, "Excuse me."

"Somebody must be talking about you, Haruhi," Kyouya said—and taking way too much pleasure in doing so, in her opinion. He pulled a hankie out of his pocket. "Here."

With a quick thanks, Haruhi accepted and clandestinely wiped her nose, but it wasn't as though anyone was paying attention anyway. They were all much too absorbed in other things. Such as. . . .

"Wow!" Shirou was saying over an open crate. "Mortars, rockets, grenade launchers. . . . They even have paintball trip mines! I didn't know these things even existed!"

"Yeah, that otaku girl is nothing if not well prepared," said Tarumi, next to a Tougouin who was busy trying to decide between a Splatmaster and a shotgun.

"I am so taking these," Shirou said of the trip mines, and proceeded to shove a few down into his pack. Needless to say, said pack was starting to look almost as big as he was.

Akujiro just gave them all a dirty look before returning his attention to his GameGuy.

That was when Kuze stepped away from the wall on which he had been leaning melodramatically. "Save the grenade launcher for Fujioka, guys," he said coolly.

Dropping the handkerchief, Haruhi didn't even look up. "Thanks but no thanks. I think a regular gun will be just fine. Something light and simple and quick-loading."

"Do you?" Kuze put a hand on his hip. "Because frankly, when I look around at the rest of our team, you're the one I see with the greatest potential for slowing us down. We might as well face the facts: You're not an athlete, you can't run that fast, you lack the agility and stamina it takes to survive out there in the jungle. . . . Hell, you probably don't even have basic experience with first-person shooters," he said, counting off her deficiencies on his fingers. "Sure, you're at the top of your class, but being able to figure out the length of the hypotenuse or translate Classical poetry isn't going to help us here. What we need here are street smarts, not book smarts. I think everyone here would agree, where you're concerned we need to even the odds a little."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence and all," Haruhi laid on the sarcasm, "but I don't think I'm the one you should be worrying about."

"I wouldn't be so quick to write off Haruhi if I were you," Kyouya said. "Not only is he frugal, he's an expert at slipping in and out of places completely unnoticed."

And though doubtless by the smile on Kyouya's face that all was meant in her defense, it sure didn't feel like it to Haruhi. She said, despondent, "Thanks a lot, Sempai. You two sure know how to stroke a person's ego."

"What's wrong, Ha-ru-hi?" sang two voices in unison from behind her. "Don't you like capture the flag?"

"It's alright," she said with a shrug, slowly turning. "I played it a lot in grade school, so I'm not really . . ."

She trailed off when she got a good look at the twins.

No one else knew quite what to say either. They had both abandoned their uniforms somewhere and stripped down to swim trunks, which they must have been wearing under their uniforms for some undisclosed reason. Somewhere—perhaps hidden among the supplies Renge had left them—they had found the stuff with which to paint their faces and limbs with smears of green and black and white. And with some leaves and twigs tangled in their hair and wearing their ties like bandannas, they really did look like little savages.

Haruhi's shoulders slumped. She had to be the one to ask, "What are you two doing now?"

"Isn't it obvious?" they said, arms linked. "We're Samneric."

"Is that a pharmaceutical or something?" said Tarumi.

"No! Sam," they said, pointing at one and then the other, "and Eric."

"It's a cosplay—"

"Renge inspired us."

"Whoo boy." Haruhi shook her head. "You two do know that paintballs hurt when they hit, right?"

The twins just beamed. "Sucks to your paintballs."

Haruhi didn't know why she even tried.

Meanwhile Kuze had just been struck by an idea. "We ought to have a leader. A captain who can lead us and develop a strategy for victory. Since we're stuck here until one side wins, like Miss Houshakuji says, the quicker we can win it the better."

"You sound awfully sure we're going to win," Kyouya noted.

Doubtless he was already taking odds, Haruhi mused. Or maybe he was just being cautious, but somehow she didn't think that was the case.

"Well, of course." Kuze struck a smug pose. "The Ouran Orages were undefeated last year, and I fully intend to keep it that way. I will not allow our good name to be sullied. As long as I'm on this team, I intend to win. And since I'm captain of the Orages, I nominate myself as Red Team captain. Any objections?"

Shirou raised a hand. "I object. I think Kyouya-sempai should be captain. He's already vice president of the host club, and he writes down everything in that notebook of his."

"That's right," "Hikaoru" jumped in. "He has the notebook! Let him speak!"

"And the specs! He can make us fire!"

"I appreciate your staying in character," Haruhi deadpanned, "but you're not helping."

"But it's because of the host club that we're in this mess to begin with." Kuze's eyes narrowed as he grinned triumphantly at his old rival. "Wouldn't you agree, Kyouya?"

"You raise a fair point," Kyouya agreed. "I have no problem with your being captain."

"Aw." Hikaru kicked a nut that had found its way into the structure and Kaoru pouted. "Way to stand up for yourself, Sempai."

"Furthermore," Kuze went on, looking all authoritative in his contemplative pose and dramatic pacing, "I think we ought to have a proper name. 'Red Team' just seems so. . . ."

"Girly?" said Hikaru.

"Totalitarian?" said Kaoru.

"Blase. I propose that, since I am captain of the Orages, it is only fitting our team reflect that namesake, a namesake to strike fear into the hearts of our opponents. I propose we hereby call ourselves 'Team Blitz,' because we shall roll through the underbrush like thunder and strike our enemy like lightning!"

"But," started the twins, "we think perhaps you chose the wrong team."

"Maybe 'Orange Team' is a bit safer? See, Haruhi's afraid of—"

"Would you two shut up!" And she promptly pushed one into the other.

Surprisingly enough, Kuze actually considered their suggestion. "Hm," he said, holding his chin. "On second thought, I must concede that doesn't sound half bad. I guess you two do serve a purpose other than to grate on one's nerves after all. 'Orange Team' does have a nice, refreshing ring to it that is perfect for our situation. It's an action color, one that captures the freshness of the timeless struggle that is the adolescent survival game."

Needless to say, his talk of refreshingness was bringing to mind someone else for that half of the host club.

It was at that moment that Tougouin rolled out a white board which had a map of the island affixed to it. Tarumi supplied the markers.

"All right, then," Kuze said to the group, using his newfound position of authority to full advantage. "As de facto leader of Orange Team, this is what I propose we do. With all this underbrush and forest cover, our visibility is going to be limited, so we can't expect this to be a passing game. Each yard is going to count, and not knowing what hidden dangers our environment poses, we won't be able to rest even when we've got the Blue Team's flag in our control. Now, Tougouin and Tarumi and I will take the offensive, cutting across this stretch here," Kuze began, and with a black marker in one hand and a red one in the other, he began drawing circles and X's on the map and lines and arrows connecting them. "The Blues are bound to set up some sort of defensive position on these outlooks here and here, so we're gonna need someone to come around like this in this little depression sort of here, which is where the Hitachiin brothers come in. . . ."

"Roger, Captain!" they said, giving Kuze a mock salute.

Which he more or less ignored.

"I think Shirou-kun and Ohtori have the best chance of guarding our team's flag, so I propose setting up a defense along this line here. Maybe we can corral them into this tight spot and set an ambush. As for Fujioka. . . . Well, you're just going to be a liability anyway, so just try not to get taken out of the game too early."

Haruhi decided it was best if she just pretended she hadn't heard that last bit. Or the part that followed as an aside to his teammates about how at least she was better than that bungler Suou, who would probably get killed more than just himself. Instead she tried to make heads or tails of the squiggles all over the map, and decided it was near impossible. "So, what's that supposed to be?" she asked, pointing at the map.

Kuze stared at her like she'd lost her mind—which just went to prove his point anyway. "It's a game plan."

She tilted her head. "I don't really get it."

"Of course, you wouldn't. You don't play American football." Kuze gave his teammates a look as if to say she was obviously out of her league.

"Well, no, it's not that. . . ." Haruhi sighed. How to explain it to these jocks? "It's like. . . . The X's are the other team's players, right? Well, how do you know where they're going to be?"

Kuze tried not to show his growing exasperation. "You don't. You have to guess based on what's most likely."

"Yeah, but how do you know what's likely?"

"Haven't you ever played chess?"

"Sure. But what if they do something unexpected? I mean, we are talking about Tamaki-sempai's team here."

"We've got a game plan," said the twins, raising their hands intelligently. "It's called, kill as many of them as possible."

"Second that," said Shirou with a cock of his assault rifle.

"Come on, people," Kyouya said with a patient smile, while Kuze barely resisted tearing his hair out at all the distractions. "I think the very least we can do is give Kuze-sempai's idea the old college try."

At which Kuze resumed his cool composure. "Thank you, Ohtori." He put the caps back on the markers with a snap. "Let's huddle, everyone."

Kuze put an arm around Tougouin's shoulders and the other around Tarumi's, but it took the rest of the team a little bit longer to gather into a tight circle.

Before Kuze could speak, Shirou looked around at them and said, "Wait a second. Doesn't it feel like we're missing someone?"

"Huh?" Kuze blinked, and Tougouin and Haruhi did a quick headcount of those gathered in the room, only to discover. . . .

"It would appear Mr Akujiro is no longer with us," Kyouya observed.

Which made Kuze swear and Tarumi chuckle. "Oh well. No big loss, right, Cap'n? He probably couldn't wait to get out there and bag him some Blues."

Meanwhile, the twins simply exchanged with one another a knowing grin.

"We'll just have to do this without him," Kuze muttered to himself.

Then he raised his voice, looking each man—or woman, or boy, for that matter, as the case may be—in the eye as he continued: "It's gonna be rough out there, team, but I have confidence that if we keep vigilant and stay in communication with one another, we can go home winners. Keep your heads down and your eyes forward, men, and always watch your step. Remember: the jungle out there is just the tip of the iceberg. Haninozuka and Morinozuka are out there also, and they'd like nothing more than to take us all out."

He stood back, withdrawing from his jacket pocket an orange, which he held before his face as though it were his trusty weapon. Poised solidly with one hand on his hip, his head held high, and flanked by his teammates and their guns, he truly looked the part of the formidable despot. Yes, even Tamaki would have been proud.

"Follow my lead," he said, his narrow eyes sparkling with a dangerous delight, "and the Blue Base shall fall before sundown. Then they shall taste the freshly-squeezed, citrusy wrath of the Orange Team!"

He thrust the orange out before him, pointing a finger down it toward the door.

"All right, team . . . move out!" he growled. "Suou, we come for you!"

Tougouin and Tarumi pumped their fists and whooped as though they were simply psyching themselves up for any other Saturday game, and grabbed their equipment and jogged out as though to the roar of the home crowd.

"Well," Shirou said as he went to follow after them, "this is it. See you guys on the other side. Don't do anything stupid out there, Fujioka."

And if Haruhi had had just a little less self-restraint, she would have been seriously tempted to take one of her own teammates out of the game right then and there.

"The nerve. . . . As if I'm not entirely capable of defending myself. Typical of a bunch of self-absorbed jocks and grade school brats," she muttered. "Oh yeah, and thanks a bunch for sticking up for me, Hika . . . ru?"

She looked over her shoulder only to find that she was talking to herself. Because where she was sure the twins had been only moments ago, there was now only air.

She turned around, but silence had descended upon the all but abandoned Red Base so quickly it was eerie.

"I guess no one else could restrain themselves any longer," Kyouya remarked at her back, and Haruhi could hear his amused smile in it. "So much for thinking things through."

Haruhi turned to face him.

"What are you going to do, Sempai?"

Kyouya adjusted his glasses, and for a moment his grin was hidden in the shadows.

"Perhaps the larger question is, what are you going to do, Haruhi? And I'm not talking about the benefits of taking a grenade launcher over a pistol," he said quickly when she opened her mouth. "I hope you do realize what a precarious position you might find yourself in as a result of all this, and if certain . . . facts were to come to light. . . . It wouldn't take much. An accidental tackle by someone not in the host club. A sudden downpour. . . ."

He trailed off, but he could see from her solemn look that they were on the same page.

"All I'm saying is that if that were to happen, I just don't know that I would be able to do a single thing to fix it. —Or Hikaru and Kaoru, for that matter," he added quickly as an afterthought, "or any of the host club."

At first, Haruhi had been a little irked by his line of discussion; but now as his meaning finally sank in, she forgot all about that and her eyes widened in understanding.

"Sempai . . ." she breathed, "are you saying . . . you're worried about me?"

Fortunately, blushing was not in Kyouya's genetic makeup. And even if Haruhi's way of cutting right to the marrow of his feelings did get a reaction from him, even just a little bit, he was standing with his back to the window, so no one would have seen it anyway.

Instead, all she saw was his smile—as bright and warm as the tropical sky. "Of course," he said cryptically. "I am your 'mother,' after all. It's perfectly within my rights to ask you to take care of yourself out there. Right?"

And then, just like that, he was back to his usual unreadable self. Haruhi let out a silent sigh, but she was still glad for the support. After all that had happened so far, at least there was one thing she could be thankful for. At very least, she was glad she and Kyouya had ended up on the same team.

She returned his smile. "Right."

Chapter Text

The jungle was full of birdsong as the morning stretched on, the air peaceful and heavy with the wet scent of greenery and exotic flowers.

To some it might have seemed a little piece of paradise, but Akutaro just wished he was anywhere else as he swatted another unreasonably large insect away from his face. He consoled himself with the knowledge that at least he wouldn't have to tolerate this farce alone much longer.

Akutaro stepped out of the thick underbrush and into a small clearing which looked like it might have at one time supported a small ammunitions bunker, perhaps during the war. He didn't give much thought at all to what the history of this island might have been before they were dropped here, however, as he cast a quick look around to make sure none of the Red Team was in sight. No one was going to ruin his plans now that he had come this far.

He glanced down at his GameGuy again when it chimed to see a new message pop up. He quickly typed out a response with his thumbs and sent it off.

Within seconds, instead of a reply, a dry branch snapped in half with a loud crack somewhere off to his left.

Akutaro nearly jumped out of his skin. He brought his paintball gun to bear with one hand, training it in the direction of the noise.

"Relax, Bro! Put the gun down. It's just me."

Akutaro let out a sigh of relief when he saw Akujiro step out of the bushes, his hands raised in the air in surrender and thick lips pulled back in a grimace. "Jeez, Jiro. Don't scare me like that."

Akujiro strode over to his side, and the two clasped hands and held them tightly between them. "Glad you were able to find me without any trouble, though," Akutaro said.

"Yeah," said Akujiro. "I just had a feeling when that Renge broad was showing us the map of the island that it would be the best place to meet."

"Guess it was too bad for her, huh, that she didn't think to take our GameGuys away from us."

"But she deserves whatever she gets for last time." The indignity of being cast as stock villains in her movie some months ago was still a bit of a sore spot for the brothers. What did she think Ouran was, her own personal, real-life love sim? On second thought, maybe they didn't want to know the answer to that. "Besides," said Akujiro, "she can't make us fight each other. Even if we have to be our own team, even if we have to steal one of the flags with no help from anyone else, I'm not going to betray my own flesh and blood."

No sooner had Akujiro said that, however, than a peal of hysteric, mocking laughter made the two jump and raise their weapons, looking frantically around the edge of the clearing for the source.

But even though the laughter seemed to be coming in stereo from every direction at once, there was no one there—until they looked up and saw the Hitachiin brothers perched in a nearby tree, straddling a couple of branches in their swim trunks and warpaint.

"Well, well. Look at what we have here," Kaoru said when they had begun to sober, wiping an eye.

"And we thought we had the market cornered on brotherly love," Hikaru said, holding his stomach.

"What a touching scene. It doesn't make what we have to do any easier." Kaoru aimed his gun at the yakuza brothers, followed by Hikaru a half second later, then said with a tilt of his head, "Actually, on second thought, it kinda does."

"You . . . you little pricks!" Akutaro shouted at them, clenching a fist. "You followed us!"

The twins tsked. "Followed him," they said, pointing their guns at Akujiro. "And it's not like it was that hard."

"Though we must say," said Hikaru, "using the IM function on the GameGuys to coordinate one another's location was a capital idea."

Akujiro snarled and raised his rifle.

At which the twins swiftly popped him in the side and breast pocket with a couple of paintballs each.

For a minute Akujiro just stood there in disbelief. Then his collar flashed as red as the splotches of paint on his jacket and sent out a long beep. "What the—I'm on your team, you team-killing fucktards!" he yelled when he realized what had just happened.

"Not anymore, you aren't!"

"That tears it." Akutaro pumped his gun. "Nobody treats my brother that way!"

He sent a volley of blue paintballs up into the canopy, which smacked against the tree trunk and knocked Hikaru and Kaoru off their branches. Seeing the smug grins wiped off their faces as they fell, Akutaro allowed himself a triumphant guffaw. But it was short-lived, as a moment later—

"Ha-ha, you missed us!"

—A hail of paintballs sprayed the surrounding area red. The two yakuza brothers ran for cover behind the crumbling remnants of the bunker foundation.

Akutaro poked his head up a moment later, but the twins had completely disappeared into the surrounding jungle. "Shit. Where did they go?"

"Give it up," one of the twins yelled back to them. "One of you's already out of the game. You're just putting off the inevitable hiding like this."

"Like you should talk!" Akujiro yelled back from behind the wall. "You two're brothers. You guys of all people should understand why we did what we did. We couldn't fight each other!"

"You're still deserters," said the other Hitachiin.

"And one of you's a dead deserter."

Akujiro and Akutaro looked frantically around. It was impossible to tell which direction their voices were coming from, like the surrounding forest had become an audial house of mirrors. "Don't tell me you wouldn't do the exact same thing if you were put on opposite teams and forced to hunt one another down!" said the latter.

"But, see, the thing is—"

"We weren't. So there."

Then suddenly the savage twins were standing there on either side, like some demonic mirror images of one another bracketing the yakuza brothers. Forced back to back with Akujiro, who simply covered his head, Akutaro hardly had time to swing his gun around let alone pull the trigger before the Hitachiins opened fire. The last thing he saw before he squeezed his eyes shut against the impact was the evil grin of the one facing him, burning itself into the back of his eyelids in double.

The long beep of his collar pronouncing him "dead" made Akutaro open his eyes, only to see his uniform jacket as bright and red as his brother's. The twins, however, were nowhere to be found, and the clearing was quiet again save for Akujiro's panting.

Akutaro threw down his gun and swore at the top of his lungs.

His howl of frustration was all but completely swallowed by the dense forest, only startling a couple of birds into taking flight in the immediate area, and by the time it reached the American football team it was but a faint echo.

Nevertheless, it made them pause in their thwacking of the underbrush and look cautiously about.

Komatsuzawa more or less ignored it, however, as he had more important things to worry about—like being miserable. He was hot, and hungry, his migraine wasn't going away any faster, and the humidity here was fogging up his glasses something awful—to say nothing, of course, of the fact that they might at any moment be ambushed by the other team. And in this visibility, it could happen completely without warning.

"Did you hear that?" Ukyou said, stopping abruptly in front of him.

The journalism club president smacked squarely into his underling's back with a grunt, adjusted his glasses, and pulled Ukyou aside. "Do you mind? It's hard enough walking in this hell hole without people rudely stopping in front of you. And hear what? I don't hear anything but that incessant buzzing."

"It sounded like someone in the last throes of death. I'm telling you guys: the game has begun. For real. There's no getting out of this alive."

Komatsuzawa snorted. "No getting out of thi— What's with the dramatics, Ukyou? It's a game. That's all!"

But even he didn't sound entirely convinced of that. Needless to say, his teammate's talk was making him just a little nervous.

"It's not just that," said Sakyou. "I heard it, too. It wasn't natural. I'm telling you, there's something weird about this island. I can just feel it. Like. . . ." He gripped his gun tighter in both hands. "A presence."

"Oh my God," said Ukyou. "Doesn't that remind you of something?"

"A presence? Oh, grow up! You're journalists, and as such you two are supposed to be skeptics. Next thing you'll be talking about the island being haunted by evil bogeymen—Eek!"

Komatsuzawa squealed like a little girl and nearly jumped into Sakyou's arms as something small and dark let out an equally high-pitched squeal of its own and barreled out of the underbrush just past their feet. "I don't believe in spooks, I don't believe in spooks. . . ." he repeated like a mantra to himself when it was gone, though Sakyou tried to reassure him, "It was just a little pig, President. Island's probably full of them."

All that noise manifested itself as no more than a muffled mumbling to the American football team, who waited silently with ears open behind Kuze's raised hand of caution.

He turned to his comrades with a nod and proceeded to give them further directions with a complex catechism of hand signals.

"Hold up, Captain," Tarumi interrupted him mid-sentence. "We play football, not baseball. Remember?"

Tougouin scratched his head. "I can't understand a word you're signing."

Kuze's shoulders slumped in a huge yet silent sigh.

"There's someone in the trees just up ahead," he whispered to his teammates, fixing them with his narrow, serious gaze. "If we play our cards right, this could be our first catch of the day."

"All right! Lock and load!" said Tarumi.

Kuze raised a finger for quiet.

Then he pulled out an orange.

"Now, we're going to need clear heads and steely nerves if we're going to pull this off. So I want everyone to take a whiff of the orange." Tougouin and Tarumi exchanged uneasy glances out of the corners of their eyes, but Kuze had an intensity about him that was hard to refuse as he thrust the fruit under their faces. "Breathe it in! Let the refreshing scent travel through your bloodstream and bolster your reserve. Can't you hear it susurrating to you, 'You are regional champions three years running, you can take on anything'?"

"I don't hear anythi—"

"Sniff harder!"

Tarumi shrugged. "Okay, but . . . What are we going to do about the Blues?"

The mumbling grew closer and Kuze held up a hand again . . . and took a long whiff of the orange with the other.

Beside him, Tougouin readied his firearm.

The jungle was quiet—almost too quiet—and Komatsuzawa didn't like it one bit. Inexplicably terrified of going any farther, he ducked behind a mossy rock, hissing for Sakyou and Ukyou to shut up already, nobody cared about who would win in a fight between Rambo and Predator. Then he silently gestured for them to follow him as he eased out from behind the rock, not knowing that just a stone's throw away, Kuze and his football team were fanning out and cautiously stalking him and his club mates in much the same way.

Until Sakyou stepped on a pile of dry palm fronds.

Perfect silence descended on the valley but for the echo of that loud crackling and popping—which for some reason only got louder when he tried to ease his foot off of the offending foliage. His club president was trying really hard not to let loose a fowl tirade, but it wouldn't have made their situation any worse. Their cover was already blown.

That was Kuze and his team's cue to leap out from their cover, paintball guns a'blazing.

Startled by the sudden barrage, the jungle lighting up bright red all around them amid the deafening snapping of paintballs, Komatsuzawa shouted and opened fire at random, spraying the surrounding jungle liberally with blue paint. He just caught a glimpse of Kuze's sharp eyes and Tougouin's huge frame among the foliage as he ran back toward the cover of the rocks, screaming all the way, where Ukyou and Sakyou already crouched, alternately returning fire and dodging the Red Team's paintballs.

"What the fuck was that!" said Komatsuzawa, assessing the paint damage to his jacket sleeves. He wiped some spatter from his glasses. "Did you see where they came from? It's like they just popped up out of the ground like some kind of mutant daikon babies!"

"I'm telling you guys, it's Predator all over again!" said Ukyou.

"Would you shut up about stupid Predator already!"

"Or the velociraptors in Jurassic Park!" Sakyou offered.

"Oh my God, you're right! . . . If the velociraptors could use guns, that is."

"Dude, they can open doors. Of course they can operate firearms."

Komatsuzawa tore at his hair. Could they pick a worse time to have a more pointless conversation?

"But, man," said Sakyou, "whoever they are, they're good. I can barely get a shot off."

"It's the American football team, you dolts!"

All of a sudden, the age-old terror of their kind's fiercest natural predator, the varsity jock, gripped them hard.

Ukyou paled. "Holy crap, we're dead!"

"Retreat!" Komatsuzawa yelled.

And they did.

Tougouin lowered his Splatmaster when he saw the journalism club hightailing it like crazy down the hill in the opposite direction. "It's Komatsuzawa and the journalism club. They're making a run for it."

"Well, we can't let them get away," Kuze shouted back, emptying a new canister of balls into his gun. "These losers could be the easiest kills on the island. After them, Orange Team!"

And the three abandoned their positions in hot pursuit.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest. . . .

"I wouldn't want to be a chimney sweep," Tamaki was singing, while Honey followed a bar later in a harmonic round-robin, "all black from head to foot/ From climbing in them chimneys/ and cleaning out that soot. . . ."

Needless to say, as they marched through the underbrush crooning, their weapons slung over their backs, stealth was the farthest from the hosts' minds. Even Mori, picking up the rear and nodding time, had a spritely spring in his step.

It was Tamaki who interrupted their diversion as they stepped into a little glade and disturbed its residents. All of a sudden, like their footsteps had set off a domino effect, dozens of butterflies in a rainbow of colors rose from the jungle floor to float in the shady air and surround the trio.

Naturally, Tamaki gaped.

"Amazing!" he said to the canopy and the insects, whose tiny feet were tickling Honey into a fit of giggles. "It's a veritable Garden of Eden, this is, our own island paradise in which the hand of man has never set foot! That makes sense if you think about it. . . ."

Mori, his shoulders covered with a fine layer of butterflies, smirked just a little.

"It's too good to be true, isn't it, Sempai? Like something out of a Disney cartoon! A butterfly garden is what this is—an enchanted butterfly garden!" Tamaki's eyes were shining as he said so, nodding with his conviction. "Next time we see him, we should totally suggest this to Kyouya for a themed club meeting!"

Honey stopped and turned to him then, putting a finger to his chin in adorable contemplation.

"Actually, Tama-chan, I think we're already in one."

"Extra-extracurricular," supplied Mori from beneath a headdress of beating wings.

Tamaki's shoulders slumped at that. Honey's bright and sunny mood may have continued on undaunted at that thought, but it seemed as though a cloud had suddenly appeared over the host king's head.

"Gosh darn it, I miss him. I miss Haruhi, too. Heck, I even miss those rascally twins."

He unslung his paintball rifle from his back, thrusting the butt into the ground as he sank to one knee, as though with the weight of this burden.

"Aw, but this is all too bittersweet," he said through clenched teeth. "Here we are a bunch of hired guns, sent out to kill our very friends, and we're playing with butterflies like so many giddy schoolgirls. Oh, the irony of it all! What a cruel twist of fate! Don't they know we're murderers!" And he sobbed into his sleeve.

Honey patted his shoulder.

"There, there, Tama-chan. We're not really going to kill anybody, you know."

Tamaki sobered instantly, even though there were tears in his serious eyes when he lifted his head. Yes, he was that good.

"You just watch and see. We'll get the Red Team's flag and then we'll all get to go home, all eighteen of us, everything like it was before. We'll still be the same hosts we were before. You'll still be the same Tama-chan. Kyouya will be the same Kyouya, Haru-chan the same Haru-chan, and then we'll all have a great laugh about all of this when it's over." Honey flashed him a grin as he tilted his head. "Right?"

Tamaki blinked, his breath catching in his throat mid-sniffle.

Mori just smiled benevolently down at them.

"By glory, you're right, Honey-sempai," Tamaki said then, pushing himself back to his feet and picking up his rifle again. "We don't have to let the direness of our situation get us down. We don't have to let our hearts be changed toward our comrades. If we let that happen, then our captors have already won."

He turned himself just slightly, his poise set with a heroic resolve that he could only hope was captured at the best angle by the surrounding hidden cameras.

"After all, we are, here now in the prime of our youth, trapped on a deserted tropical island with no rules but one: survival of the fittest. We may as well make the most of it. What do you say, Blue Team?" And Tamaki raised a fist into the air, swinging it about like a conductor as he marched on, singing at the top of his lungs, "I'd rather be the gypsy—let's go!—who's camped at the edge of town/ The one who has the dancing bea—Nana!"

The verse was cut off prematurely as Tamaki's feet suddenly came up from under him, and he fell back into the underbrush with a thud that made his comrades wince.

"Tama-chan, are you alright?"

"Agh!" came the pitiful response. "Monkeys! Always with the banana peels!"

Right about then, Komatsuzawa and his club mates might have been thinking that "Orage" was a pretty appropriate name for the football team after all, because they were certainly making enough noise for a whole storm. Their war cries made it sound as though they were right on his teammates' heels as they charged through the underbrush. And with this rough terrain, Komatsuzawa felt like either his legs or his lungs were going to give out at any minute.

He leaped down a short embankment and right into a very shallow stream that happened to be trickling through the jungle—then promptly tripped and fell face-first into the water. He hopped to his feet a second later, his uniform dripping wet and clinging uncomfortably to every part of him, and making it nearly impossible to run, let alone get back out of the stream. Naturally, he dropped a couple of F-bombs, because not only was he wet and miserable, but this meant the note his club had received the day before had been a very accurate forewarning after all.

Ukyou and Sakyou's eyes went wide when they finally caught up with him. It didn't really occur to them to stop, however, until they were half-way up the other side of the embankment.

"President, are you hurt? You're soaked!"

"How do you get that wet in, like, a foot of water?"

"You idiots!" he blasted them, splashing about like a spoiled little child. "What do you think this is? A train wreck? Don't just stand there gawking. Help me out!"

Ukyou turned back to do just that, grabbing his taller club president roughly under the armpits. Just as he was doing so, the football club emerged from the jungle and resumed fire. Fortunately for Komatsuzawa, however, Ukyou had inadvertently turned at that moment, shielding his upperclassman, so that Tougouin's shot hit him square in the kill zone in the back.

"No-o-o-o-o!" Komatsuzawa wailed, though one couldn't be sure if it was because one of his teammates had been hit or because said teammate staggered out of the way when he was hit. Landing on his ass in the foot-high water and exposed to the Red Team's paintballs, Komatsuzawa fired back like a madman until the sad, empty clicking of his gun told that the ammunition was depleted.

What happened next happened as though it were in slow motion.

Komatsuzawa looked up over Ukyou's shoulder to see the football team staring at horror at their captain, his left shoulder drenched in blue paint. Kuze took it in in dumbfounded shock, before it dawned on him and Komatsuzawa alike that the hits he had sustained were nonlethal. Then Kuze pressed his lips together in a tight line and glared daggers at the journalism club president.

Komatsuzawa started. His heart hammered in his chest and he felt like if he weren't soaked from the chest down already he would have wet himself, as he frantically groped for his fallen bag, screaming for Sakyou to cover him, his hands shaking so bad he couldn't reload his rifle properly.

It was like a bad dream when Kuze raised his rifle and aimed at Komatsuzawa's chest, and proceeded to stick him with a paintball with each determined step forward he took.

When he had had enough, and Komatsuzawa was sprawled in the water, groaning next to a pouty Ukyou, the attentions of the football team turned next to Sakyou—who was still standing on the riverbank in shock. Feeling they were really in no rush, and not seeing the blurry shape that zipped among the shadows above, Kuze and Tarumi took aim at him, until—

"Captain!" Tougouin yelled, and slammed into Kuze, tackling him to the ground.

They all heard the shot a split second later—the loud, resonating crack of a sniper rifle.

Tougouin pushed himself up off of Kuze and looked down at his own side, where, under his left arm, was a small, round spot of bright blue. It mightn't have looked like much, but the linebacker's collar announced clearly enough that that shot had nonetheless been more than adequate to take him out of the game.

"Tch! Of all the. . . . Snipers!" Tarumi said.

"What are you waiting for, Sakyou?" Komatsuzawa yelled over his shoulder, snapping his teammate out of his funk. "Take them now! Avenge your president, goddamn you!"

"Yeah, right. I'm going to live!" Sakyou yelled back, before running for cover.

"Get back here, you ungrateful coward!"

On the other side of the stream, Tougouin rolled onto his side. "Go," he told his teammates in a low growl, laying a heavy hand on Kuze's arm. "Hurry. Get out of here and find some cover before you're next." The gig was up for him and he knew it. He had accomplished his mission, taking the bullet for his leader, and now his part in this adventure was through.

Still. . . .

"I'm not going anywhere without you," Kuze said, shaking his shoulder. "The Orages never leave a man behind."

Another shot whizzed past them. Kuze ducked automatically, while Tarumi fired a few rounds into the woods where the shots had come from. It halted the enemy's fire momentarily, but, "I can't get a sight on the shooter at all! He's like a ghost!"

Tougouin shook his head. "This is where we part ways. It's been an honor to fight beside you one last time, but now it's over. I'm finished. But you and Tarumi must live to fight another day. Do not let my sacrifice be in vain. Go, Team Orange."

He pushed his Splatmaster into Kuze's hand, noting his hesitation. "What are you waiting for? Go!"

Kuze gritted his teeth. Though it pained him, he took the gun, nodded resolutely and leaped to his feet.

Then he disappeared with Tarumi back into the jungle, covering their backs as they went, as blue paintballs kicked up the dirt at their heels.

None of this had any impact on Kasanoda or his neck of the woods.

And so far, even though he hadn't run into any trouble yet, he was rather enjoying himself. After all, what was this game but a larger, more exotic version of kick-the-can with firearms? The adrenaline coursing through his veins at the thought of what battles awaited him brought on a natural high, while the peace of the jungle, the calls of the different birds overhead, brought out the naturalist in him in spades.

Which was not to say that Kasanoda had let his guard down. No, he treated the hunter-and-hunted nature of this game very seriously, keeping his eyes and ears wide open for the first sign of danger, allowing that primal side that was buried deep inside him to come out and play. . . .

And yet he still nearly jumped out of his skin when he went to hop over a log and caught a human shape crouching beneath it. He reached for his gun.

From the look of things, he scared the other person just as badly. The figure gasped and started, staring at him with wide eyes.

Kasanoda stared back as recognition dawned on him, and he forgot the gun in his hand. "Fujioka?"

Her big brown eyes blinked up at him. "Casanova?"

A smile broke out on his face then and he could feel his cheeks heat up.

"It's okay," he said quickly, putting out an empty palm. "I made a promise to protect you. So don't you worry, Fujioka. Your secret will be safe with me." And he saluted her gallantly.

Haruhi just stared after him as he hopped away again lickety-split into the jungle.

It wasn't until a good minute later that Kasanoda realized she could have tagged him right there. Never mind that he could have tagged her for an easy kill.

He shook his head. "As if I could do that to Fujioka," he said to himself through a lopsided grin. Besides, she had reminded him too much of a frightened little animal crouching behind that log, so vulnerable and maidenly in that one moment, for him to have been able to do her any harm.

No, if anything it made him feel incredibly good that he had spared her. His steps even felt lighter, as though his heart were really exerting some sort of anti-gravitational force on his feet with its soaring. And it wasn't necessarily that he hoped his chivalric actions might earn him some brownie points with Fujioka when this was over, either. His intentions were much purer than that. They may have been cast on opposing sides, he and Fujioka, but that did not mean they had to be enemies.

All those warm feelings rushing through his bloodstream boosted Kasanoda's confidence as the echoing of paintball fire reached him from out of the distance. He hurried in the direction of the sound, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. With Fujioka as his mascot, the fair lady to his errant knight, he felt ready to take on anything.

Unfortunately, no amount of enthusiasm could make Kasanoda turn around any faster as a pair of whooping, ululating, half-naked, paint-streaked first-years jumped out of the foliage from behind, barreling toward him.

Kasanoda did the first thing anyone's instincts would tell him if two whooping, half-naked persons were barreling down on him. He went stock-still and hoped they didn't see him.

Unfortunately for him, he happened to be standing in the open and right in the twins' path.

They didn't even stop as they raced by on either side, and hardly acknowledged Kasanoda's presence except to pop him several times with their paintballs. Then they disappeared again, their whooping uninterrupted.

Kasanoda stared after them as his collar flatlined. It took a moment for the realization to sink in that he was KIA.

He was KIA and he hadn't even gotten one shot off.

Forget lowered expectations, Kasanoda's spirits plummeted in a veritable nosedive back to Earth. His shoulders slumped. "Aw, goddamn it."

Chapter Text

The sun was at its zenith in the cloudless sky when the loudspeakers came to life around the jungle.

The jaunty strains of Johann Strauss's "Radetsky March" blasted from each pair of bullhorns mounted high in the trees at full power, drowning out every other sound but one.

"Good afternoon, everyone!"

That was Renge's equally cheerful voice, ringing inside everyone's eardrums. "The time is twelve o'clock sharp in the p.m., and you know what that means! Time for a morning recap while you all take a timeout to replenish your bodies after fighting so hard. You will find a boxed lunch in your survival pack, made fresh and from scratch for each and every one of you by yours truly!"

Needless to say, that last bit of information made a host or two cringe involuntarily.

"While you're enjoying your meal, allow me to list off the names of the dead so far. In order of elimination: From the Red Team, Akujiro, and from the Blue Team, Akutaro."

Somewhere in the bush, the two yakuza brothers sneered around a mouthful of undercooked rice, while elsewhere, the twins who had taken them down gave each other a high five.

"From class Two-B, Ukyou Chikage, and from Three-C, Komatsuzawa Akira. Blue Team."

The journalism club members took a momentary break from squelching in their wet shoes with every step as their names were announced, the latter growling to himself in frustration.

"Three-A," Renge continued, "Tougouin Makoto. Red Team."

Kuze and Tarumi glared up at the loudspeakers as they put down their packs, as though silently swearing vengeance for their fallen teammate.

In his own little plot of the jungle, Kyouya just placed a little pot of water over the portable camping stove he had set up, and smiled to himself; while elsewhere, patting down his last mound of dirt and dead leaves, Shirou looked up to catch his breath, and wipe the dampened hair from his eyes.

"And last but not least, Casanova Ritsu, One-D. Blue Team."

Lowering her printout, Renge peered out the windows of Alpha Base's tower as she spoke into the microphone. She had changed out of her tight tee and camo shorts into a powder blue track suit, and a wall of television monitors showed the reactions of the various players on the island to the news behind her as she spoke:

"That makes four down for the Blue Team and two for the Red Team, for a total of six players eliminated this morning. Not bad numbers at all, everyone! Blue Team, you guys better get cracking over there. Your men are dropping like flies. But with twelve players still in the running, who knows which way it could go. At this point it could still be anyone's game!

"But, oh? What's this I hear?"

She cupped her free hand over her ear—as though anyone who was listening could actually see her do it.

"It seems some of you out there have an agenda other than to win. How noble it is, all this talk we're hearing over here about you boys wanting to protect your comrade Haruhi's secret. You know, it only makes us tingle that much more with curiosity. Not only that, but what an element of danger has now been added to the game. I wonder what it is he's hiding. Will the big secret be revealed?"

As she heard that, Haruhi slapped her palm against her forehead in complete and utter mortification. "Great. Way to go, guys." Renge didn't have to specify for her to know that either Tamaki or Kasanoda or both had opened their big mouths, and now that it was out she even had a secret, Renge would never rest until she knew what it was. Just peachy.

She was going to kill Tamaki when they got back to civilization.

Which was not to say the host king was not already feeling responsibility for it. He could only stand there stunned, his mouth hanging open, as he heard that announcement be made to the entire island. Meanwhile, his teammates just ate their lunches obliviously.

"Well, that's all the news I have for you this hour," Renge concluded brightly. "Have a productive afternoon, everyone—and always remember to watch your back!"

When the last strains of the march had faded away, Tamaki shook himself out of it.

"Did you hear that?" he asked his teammates.

Mori shrugged and continued eating.

Honey paused with his plastic spork halfway to his mouth to note, "Yep. We've lost four of our nine teammates already. Poor guys."

"No, I'm not talking about that." Although they didn't seem at all bothered by that news either, when Tamaki thought about it. "I'm talking about Haruhi!"

The other two just stared at him blankly.

Tamaki let out a pitiful groan and held his head.

"Oh, this is all my fault! I knew Renge-chan could hear our conversation and yet I went on and on about Haruhi's secret. What if I've put him in more danger because of it? What if our enemies get it in their heads they're going to figure out what it is?" Gasp. "Like those dastardly jocks on the football team! They'd stop at nothing to get us back for our upset at the cultural festival. Can you imagine what would happen if our Haruhi fell into Kuze-sempai's meaty clutches?"

Ignoring the hackneyed horror flick playing out in Tamaki's head, his upperclassmen had to wonder if they were thinking of the same Kuze.

Honey sighed as he set aside his lunch. "Relax, Tama-chan. Maybe you should eat something, for your blood suga—"

"Curses, Honey-sempai, I can't eat at a time like this!"

"Well, at least calm down and think about it for a second. Haru-chan and Kuze are on the same team. Do you really think he would sabotage his own chances like that?"

"Of course! Don't you see? He'd do it just to spite the host club! Wouldn't we deserve it? Wasn't it because of us that we got them into this mess in the first place, because we even exist?"

"Tamaki," Mori said, "you're being paranoid."

"Am I?" At last, however, he stopped his pacing and sat down on the bent trunk of a palm. One could almost see the gears turning in his head, before he said again: "All right, then. It's decided."

"What is?" said Honey.

"I got Haruhi into this and I'm going to get him out of it. I was supposed to take care of him—like a daddy penguin, shielding its cub from all the harsh winter winds—so the way I see it, it's my fault if anything happens to him now. In light of that, there's only one thing I can do."

His upperclassmen waited for the punchline.

Tamaki's voice was full of deadly conviction as he told them: "I'm going to take Haruhi out of this game myself, before anyone else can."

"You're going to shoot Haru-cha—"

Honey was only asking out of clarification, but Tamaki leaped up at that, his eyes moist again as he shouted, "Yes, Sempai, that's exactly what I'm going to do! All right? I'm going to shoot Haruhi myself, for his own good, so that no one else has a chance to reveal his secret! Don't make this any harder for me than it already is!"

Sniffing back his tears and steeling his resolve, Tamaki picked up his pack and slung it over his shoulder, his rifle following it a second later.

Unable to meet their eyes, he said, "I guess this is where we part ways, Honey-sempai, Mori-sempai. I . . . I might not see you two again, even if I do manage to accomplish this mission. If by any chance you make it out of this alive, promise me. . . ."

His grip tightened on his pack's shoulder strap and he squeezed his eyes shut.

"Just promise you won't forget me!"

A heavy hand on his shoulder made Tamaki open his eyes, however. He turned to see Mori looking down at him, that warm, familiar smile on his face that bolstered Tamaki's confidence without any need of words.

"No need to talk like that," Honey said in a small voice. "You know we could never forget you, Tama-chan. Whatever happens, you have our word we'll make sure future generations of hosts will always remember their once and future king was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for a friend."

"Honey-sempai. . . ."

Mori squeezed his shoulder and gave it a shake, and his smile was rakishly lopsided as Tamaki looked back up at him. "See you on the other side."

Tamaki was speechless for a long moment. Then he quickly wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and clapped Honey on the shoulder. "Thanks, guys. For what I'm about to do, I don't deserve friends like you. Can I ever express my gratitude for everything you've given me?"

"You can start by staying alive," said Honey.

"Vaya con Dios," said Mori.

Tamaki replied with a double thumbs up and a quivering lip, before he reluctantly parted from them.

The early hours of the afternoon stretched on uneventfully, as though the carnage that preceded lunch had been swallowed up by the vastness of time itself, transporting the players scattered across the island's area, both living and disqualified, to a more primitive time as they passed by one another like ships in the night.

It made Kaoru yawn as he walked behind Hikaru along a narrow pig trail.

"Ho hum," he said in a lilting voice, stretching his arms in front of him.

Hikaru smiled to himself. "Don't fall asleep on me back there."

"Don't worry about me. I'm just wondering when we're going to get to see more action. Or the Blue flag, for that matter."

"Three kills in one morning wasn't enough for you? And everyone always said I had to do something about my violent tendencies."

Kaoru smiled to himself.

Then he remembered something. "Hold on a second," he said, and stopped in the middle of the trail to dig something out of his trunks pocket. He held up the folded, laminated paper he retrieved at arm's length, saying to it, "I do solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

"What are you doing?"

"Checking the GPS, of course." And so saying, Kaoru began unfolding it.

Hikaru stared down at it. "We have a GPS?"

"Something you would have known if you even bothered to check your pack before leaving it behind."

After staring in vain at the paper for several long moments, however, Hikaru had to say, "Are you sure this is a GPS? Where's the little YOU ARE HERE indicator? Can it even tell us where we are?"

Kaoru turned it over and upside down before concluding—as though his brother should have known better— "It doesn't have a voice function. This is a commoner GPS. I think they call it a 'map'."

"'Map'?" Hikaru turned it over on his tongue like a foreign confection. "I thought the only maps people used these days were for multiplayer levels online."

"Yeah, but in commoner speak, it stands for a piece of paper with a non-interactive layout of a given area—"

"I know that, Einstein. I just can't believe people still use them."

They weren't really that sheltered, Hikaru and Kaoru would have had to say in their own defense; but suffice it to say, it was probably a good thing the island was not very big.

"I think we might be in this area here," Kaoru said, pointing to an area near the southeastern coast of the island, "which would mean we must be heading toward. . . ."

His shoulders slumped.

"Our own base."

"That's okay. We must have just gotten turned around somehow while we were kicking ass."

"But I told you that rock looked familiar! Didn't I say it looked familiar? Seriously, how many rocks can there be on this island that look like our lord sulking in a corner?"

Just then, Hikaru spotted a faint red dot wavering over Kaoru's chest and passing on into the foliage. The two went still, holding their breaths, so silent they almost swore the beating of their hearts echoing in their eardrums would somehow give them away to the unseen source of the laser sight.

"Did you see that?" Hikaru whispered when several moments passed and nothing had happened.

Kaoru grinned. "Yeah."

He put a finger to his lips, and gestured for Hikaru to follow him as he slipped behind a clump of greenery.

He did not need to explain to his brother that on the rise up ahead of their position he had glimpsed for just a heartbeat something not right about the landscape—something as simple as the slender barrel of a sniper rifle protruding from the foliage, and from a mound of dead leaves that seemed to have a breath of its own.

Yet even as the Hitachiin brothers passed momentarily out of sight, their stalker, huddled beneath his camouflaged ghillie cape and helmet, remained confident that they had not spotted him, and that they would soon resurface on the pig trail, moving ever closer into range.

"The only problem I can foresee is that there are two of them," he muttered in a voice so low even the trees would have had problems hearing him. "Even if we can get a clean shot off on one, the other may take flight like a frightened deer before we can re-aim, and then what shall we do? But if we could just get them to come out of hiding together, my dear, then perhaps we could—"

"Perhaps you could what?"

Nekozawa started as the two voices came from behind him, seemingly right at his ear. He turned at the sound with a yelp, lost his balance, and fell on his backside, knocking the sniper rifle off its mount. Just as he had been hoping, the twins had revealed themselves together and out in the open; but what he had not taken into account was that they might do so with him in their sights rather than the other way around. For a split second he feared he was as good as dead.

Apparently the twins thought so too. "Face it, Sempai. You've reached the end of the line," said one.

"Better say your prayers."

Which made Nekozawa smirk. It came to him then. That there yet may be a way out of this. . . .

"So should you," he said, and reached into his jacket beneath his camouflaged cloak.

In a split second, he had armed the paint grenade and lobbed it at the twins, grabbed his precious Tiberius Arms T9 Elite rifle in Beelzenev's felt hands, and rolled backwards down the hill. Hikaru and Kaoru were too distracted by the grenade to fire, which gave Nekozawa time to recover from his inexperience with rolling backwards down anything. The whole trip to the bottom of the rise was rather painful and awkward, not resembling any of the grace of his family namesake, but it gave him time to escape while his pursuers were occupied taking cover from the grenade, and that was all that really mattered.

It went off with a pop, spraying the area blue, but Hikaru and Kaoru avoided the brunt of it. When they hurried to the edge of the rise where their upperclassman had been stationed just moments before, they could see no trace of him in the jungle below.

Evil laughter resounded a second later.

"Amateurs. You should not have hesitated." Nekozawa's voice sounded to the twins just a little more unhinged than usual, but they didn't chalk it up to much. "Now the hunter has once again become the hunted."

"Yeah, but I think in this situation—"

"Wouldn't that make you the prey, Sempai?"

Where he crouched in the bushes, Nekozawa paused. Damn it, when he thought about it, they did have a point.

Hikaru and Kaoru exchanged glances and smiled widely.

"Kill the pig!" they chanted anew at the same time. "Bash 'im in! Spill his blood!"

Nekozawa gritted his teeth. For all he prided himself on his ability to frighten his schoolmates with hardly an appropriately placed glance, he was loath to admit that the bane of his existence, among the few he could count on one hand whom even he in all his nefariousness feared, these two were not only among them, they also topped his lists of "most annoying people at Ouran" and "people I really ought to curse with a plague of boils".

They were currently charging through the underbrush like savages, trying to scare him out into the open as though he were a little animal, and chanting that infernal: "Kill the pig! Bash 'im in!" while firing indiscriminately into the bushes.

And, sad to say, it was working. To some extent. Because at that point, Nekozawa knew he might get hit if he did stay still, camouflage or no.

Hearing one twin coming up close on his left, Nekozawa whooshed right. The next moment it seemed, by the paint balls tearing up the foliage, as though they were ahead of him again and he had to double back. And all this slipping in and out of the filtered sunlight was beginning to give him a migraine. If their goal was to degrade him enough psychologically into some primal state of fear, they were doing a damn fine job of it. He had to give them that.

Then by some stroke of dumb bad luck, Nekozawa stumbled out of the bushes directly into their line of fire.

"Spill his blood!" the twins laughed like they did in his worst nightmares and took aim.

He hardly had a chance to react before they pulled the trigger.

The impact of the paintballs rang in Nekozawa's ears as they popped directly over his head, red paint spattering his nose and cheeks.

Hikaru and Kaoru were certain then that between the two of them they had managed a head shot, until they lowered their rifles and had to do a double take.

The black magic club president was more than a little surprised as well when a curtain of flaxen hair fell into his eyes. Feeling suddenly naked, his first reaction was to put his hand to his head, upon which he discovered not only his helmet to be missing, but his black wig as well.

He looked frantically around himself and spied to his horror his wig lying sprawled upon the ground, disheveled and matted with bright red paint.

"You shot my hair. . . ." Nekozawa couldn't believe it. He was alive, and yet he just couldn't wrap his brain around the reality of what had just happened. It was like an out-of-body experience, like this tragedy was happening to someone else and their hairpiece. "You shot my hair. . . ."

The twins laughed, but it was not without a note of anxiety.

In fact, it was out of a sudden and inexplicable anxiety, a feeling that they had just done something incredibly unwise. Something they would give almost anything to take back, despite its also being hilarious.

"Hey, relax, Sempai. We can get you another—"

"You foul little mitotic children of the corn shot my hair!"

That tore it. Second nature kicked in, and the sniper rifle in Nekozawa's hands was transformed in a matter of seconds and highly efficient hand movements into a magazine-fed semiautomatic assault rifle. And, as a new magazine slid into the gun with a satisfying click, the twins found it aimed straight at them.

"Now you will die."

The Hitachiin brothers could not be certain which was more frightening, their upperclassman's speed at turning the weapon around, or the murderous gleam in his blue eyes and wide grin as, with Beelzenev holding the gun steady, he opened fire.

They scattered and ran for cover, paintballs arcing through the air around them, while underneath the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, Nekozawa cackled like a hyena.

In the time since they had parted ways with Tamaki, Honey and Mori had shown no real interest in being rushed. Between the two of them, their sense of direction was impeccable, and they had had the lay of the land memorized at a cursory glance. They were not particularly worried because they had no reason to doubt they would not soon arrive at the Red Base.

That certainty did not waver even when Mori glimpsed the familiar purple and black striped tie of the Ouran uniform among the surrounding greenery, against the blinding background of a white shirt reflecting the afternoon sunlight.

"Mitsukuni."

That was all he needed to say to get the point across that they were no longer alone. Honey immediately wiped the happy-go-lucky smile off his face, dropping into a roll and a low crouch, and pulling his rifle that was almost as long as he was tall off his back. "Who are we looking at? Kyo-chan?"

Mori shook his head. He hadn't gotten a very long look, but he recognized that unsettlingly upside-down configuration of eyelashes anywhere. He had to sit with them in class every day during the off season. If he stared too long, they practically burned themselves into the back of his eyelids.

"No. Kyo-chan wouldn't be that obvious." Honey seemed to know what Mori was going to say before he could even say it. "Kuze."

Mori nodded once.

Speaking of which, the football captain could sense himself barreling toward a coronary as he ducked back out of sight and tried in vain to slow his breathing. He had tied his jacket around his waist because of the sweltering afternoon heat, but now keeping cool seemed like the least of his concerns.

"Hey, Captain, why're you—"

Kuze didn't wait for Tarumi to finish as he grabbed his arm and pulled him bodily down behind the foliage. "Shut up, you idiot!" he hissed. "Do you even realize who's about a twelve-yard distance away from us right now? Only Morinozuka and Haninozuka—"

"Holy shit!" said Tarumi, and proceeded to stick his head up to have a look-see.

"Don't—" Kuze pulled him down again. "Don't present them any more targets." He took a deep breath. "I think they might have seen me—"

"Shit, are you serious?"

Tarumi started to hyperventilate.

"Calm yourself, man!" Kuze put a hand on his shoulder rather forcefully. "Remember you're one of the Orages' most valuable players. You've run more consecutive yards in a game than anyone in the prefecture." But even as he said so, Kuze paused to take a whiff of his ever-handy orange.

Which Tarumi was beginning to eye rather jealously. "Can I have some of that?"

"You kidding? This is my last orange."

"Oh, come on! I just need a little fix—"

He made a grab for it, but a sudden barrage of paintballs made them both forget anything else but getting out of their defunct hiding place with their lives. The two ball players turned and fired back in their opponents' general direction, which temporarily ceased Honey and Mori's fire. But as they ran and weaved with all their might toward the end zone of a rather formidable-looking ditch, Kuze could not shake the feeling that he was being toyed with, like a cat lets its mouse think freedom is within reach before the killing pounce.

Not to mention he could have sworn he'd had this dream before.

Nonetheless, he did reach the safety of the ditch, several seconds behind Tarumi, who was doing a quick touchdown dance for simply making it there alive. Blue paint spattered the dirt at the lip of their foxhole; Kuze could feel the little balls brushing past his trouser legs and jacket as he leaped into the ditch.

He scrabbled back against the wall of dirt, breathing hard as he turned to Tarumi. "We still alive?"

The other took a look at his collar—Kuze could see there was no change in the status of Tarumi's—and nodded.

"Good. Now how the hell do we keep it that way?"

While he was pondering that seemingly unanswerable question, Tarumi turned and snapped off a few shots over the edge of the ditch.

That was when Kuze remembered there was more to their collars than just monitoring their life stats.

He depressed the walkie-talkie button, cringing as paint balls whizzed by just over his head. "Orange Team! Come in, Orange Team," he shouted over the din of it. "Whoever's still with us out there, this is your captain calling for immediate back-up to sector. . . ." He pulled out his map, flattening it against his knee. "Three-C. We're taking heavy fire from Haninozuka and Morinozuka. I repeat: We need immediate back-up."

Hikaru was crawling to join Kaoru behind the log he had found just as Kuze's words began to ring tinny from the tiny speakers in the sides of their collars. The twins stared at each other until he had finished, and then Kaoru shook his head violently and Hikaru shook himself out of his funk.

"This is Hikaru," he said, one finger on the reply button as though checking his pulse. "And that's a negative, Orange Captain. Hikaoru is indisposed at the moment. Repeat, you are on your own. Seriously, we are really pinned down over here—"

Another rapid trio of paintballs picked at the palm bark over their heads, cutting him off.

"Holy—"

"I don't get it!" Kaoru said while the line was still open, voice cracking. "All we did was shoot his wig, and he went total ape-shit, Kiriyama nutzoid on us!"

"Not only that, his gun is a freaking transformer! A transformer! How is that fair?"

"Hey, is that you Hitachiins?" Kuze sounded surprised that someone had actually answered his call. "Where the hell are you and Kyouya? Get your asses over here to Sector Three-C pronto—"

"Did you even hear what we just said? Kiriyama, with a transforming gun! Do I have to paint you a picture? If anyone could use an extra hand, it's us!"

Kuze started to lambast them for going AWOL or some such thing, so Hikaru cut the transmission.

"Damn it!" Kuze growled as the connection was cut. "Damn those insolent twins! Just who do they think they're talking to?"

He tugged violently at his collar. If it had been possible to throw the device down and grind it into the dirt with his heel, he would have done it.

"You don't suppose Ohtori or Fujioka would answer our call," said Tarumi.

"Fujioka wouldn't be any help to us anyway. He's probably cowering in a ditch somewhere."

"You mean like us?"

Kuze glared daggers at his teammate. It took all his force of will to remind himself that they were long-time comrades, and it was only their frayed nerves that made Tarumi say such a thing. In any case, it wasn't worth throttling one's teammate over. No, if they were going to have any hope of getting out of said ditch alive, then they couldn't do it without working as a team.

Kuze glanced down at his orange, looking to take another refreshing hit, but, he found to his utter disappointment, he had been squeezing it so hard in his anxiety it was mostly pulp and juice now. Feeling just as crushed as the fruit was, he gently set it aside and wiped the juice off on his trouser leg. Only his honor was left to him now, and he wasn't going to give that up without a fight.

"Okay, Eyeshield Twenty-One," he said to Tarumi, "you think you can do better, why don't you get out there and provide a distraction?"

Tarumi's eyes went wide. "Me?"

"Of course, you. If you have the ability, you should put it to good use."

"Are you quoting Gundam to me now?"

"Look, if you have any better ideas, fire away. But unless you'd rather sit in this hole waiting for Haninozuka to catch up to us—"

"All right, already. I get it, I get it." Tarumi sucked in a deep breath, and closed his eyes as though to visualize how he was going to pull this off in his mind. He turned to Kuze. "Got any 'nades?"

His captain retrieved a couple and put one in Tarumi's hand. With a nod to one another, they pulled the pins and lobbed their respective grenades over the top of the ditch.

"Go, go, go!" Kuze said, without waiting to see if their diversion had had the desired effect.

Tarumi needed no more prodding. He took off in a sprint, zig-zagging through the underbrush as if some rival school's entire defensive line were standing in his way.

It allowed Kuze precisely the window he needed. Their opponents turned their attention and their fire in Tarumi's direction, while leaving themselves wide open. Kuze took aim at the larger target. However—

"Takashi, three o'clock!" Honey shouted, and Mori ceased his fire to raise his gun to his right.

He hardly even had to look to block Kuze's shot. The red paintball burst on Mori's gun, a second before the kendo champ turned a sideways glance in his attacker's direction.

"Tch. . . ." Without waiting for the return fire, Kuze dove, double-wielding with Tougouin's pistol as he went down on one shoulder to the ground.

Nonetheless, impossible as it may have seemed when they were in that ditch, the two ball players did seem to have Honey and Mori on the defensive, albeit at the moment. With paintfire coming from both directions at once, it was apparent to the hosts that more extreme tactics needed to be implemented to put a favorable end to this battle. What had at first seemed like easy targets were finally showing their mettle, and it should have come as no surprise. As on the football field, the Orages were proving themselves to be a force to be reckoned with.

As Mori dodged Kuze's rather precise fire behind the trunk of a tree, his eyes caught Honey's. He nodded. It was time to implement Plan B.

Honey smiled to himself. Now it was getting fun.

Tarumi took off again for a better position, and Mori finally took the shotgun down off of reserve from his shoulder. The other's eyes went wide as he recognized the new sound pursuing him through the bush, and he neglected to watch where he was going. His toe caught in a root and he went down with a loud "Oof!"

Which was probably a lucky break, to tell the truth. The next shot whizzed by precisely where he would have been if he had not taken a nosedive when he did. Counting his blessings, Tarumi pushed himself to his feet before the next shot did do him in.

Seeing his teammate go down, Kuze popped out of his cover like a Whack-a-mole, taunting Honey and Mori with a rapid burst of random fire before ducking behind a rock. The distress on Tarumi's face made his captain reach for another grenade. "Tarumi!"

The young man in question searched him out with his eyes.

"Go long!"

Tarumi got his gist in a second. He caught the grenade his captain tossed him, holding it to him as tightly as though he were running the ball, and, stepping out from his hiding place, he tossed it directly at Mori.

Who saw his opportunity and fired at the same time.

Tarumi hit the tree in front of him hard, staring down at the splotch of blue covering the entire left side of his midsection. On the other hand, when the dust from the grenade had cleared, Mori was brushing himself off, revealing himself to be relatively unscathed. The grave reality of Tarumi's situation passed silently between he and Kuze as he met his captain's gaze, and Kuze felt something sink inside him. Another Orage had fallen.

"No-o-o-o-o!" Kuze yelled, and with rage directing his fire, he took aim at Honey.

His shots were dead on, yet somehow every single one managed to miss the diminutive third-year. Honey dodged each paintball like Neo in The Matrix, his evasive movements as fluid and perplexing as a breakdancer's.

When Kuze ran out of ammunition and was forced to reload, Honey saw his opportunity and charged.

The football captain looked up again just in time to see Honey kick off one tree, then another, and cartwheel through the air, firing into Kuze's little hole as he did so. Kuze put up his arm to protect himself, but it did him little good. More paintballs hit their target than missed.

Honey landed a second later with hardly a sound, one leg bent under him ready to pounce again, his smoking gun held out to his side. But he need have done nothing more.

Hearing his collar announce his KIA status, Kuze dropped his gun and fell over onto his backside. Suddenly all the fight had left him; he couldn't even find his anger anymore. His football team was squarely defeated.

"Who are you people?" he said as Mori came to join Honey before him.

Honey smiled.

Amazingly, to Kuze at least, there was nothing at all remotely smug in it.

"We're the host club, silly," Honey said and flashed him a victory sign.

"Good game."

Mori offered Kuze a hand up.

Which the football captain refused. He still had his pride, and that would not allow him to accept. His classmates-turned-rivals did not have to say it, as the destruction they had caused to the surrounding area spoke volumes.

And what it basically said was, Congratulations. You have just been owned.

Back in the twins' neck of the woods, it was a whole other brand of fear, as Nekozawa once again chortled evilly amidst the dying echo of paintfire.

"Yes-s-s. Goo-o-od. . . . I love the smell of terror in the morning. It invigorates me."

Hikaru and Kaoru could hear him breathing in deep, and almost swore his voice had a slight touch of that satanic reverb popularized by religious horror movies.

They poked their heads up to see Nekozawa striding out onto the crest of a hill, the afternoon sunlight surrounding his tousled blonde hair and ghillie cape with an otherworldly glow, like some sort of half-melted GI Joe action figure returned from the dead and radiating hellfire. Feet braced at shoulder's width apart, a cocky tilt to his head, he threw back his cape, dropped the gun before him and proceeded—with a little help from Beelzenev—to turn it into two pistols, which he slowly held out on either side like some twisted messiah of teenage vengeance, letting the spent magazines fall out of them to the ground.

He reloaded off the hip and then, lopsided grin planted firmly on his incongruously fair face, pointed each pistol at a twin.

They both dropped to the ground.

"Oh God, he's double-wielding—with a hand puppet." Hikaru was holding his own gun tight to his chest. "Worst. Nightmare. Ever."

"I can't believe this is actually happening." Kaoru glanced backwards over his shoulder and the log and managed to get a few rounds off—before several more were returned his way.

"I can't believe he's actually that good a shot," said Hikaru. "I mean, you know, shooting with a hand puppet and all. And where did he learn to move like that, magic camp?"

"Probably, yeah."

"Come out, little piggies, wherever you are," Nekozawa was now taunting in a sing-song voice. "Or we'll huff and we'll puff, and we'll blow your house down."

"Okay, he's officially lost it."

"We're not getting anywhere like this," Kaoru said, wide-eyed and frantic. "Either we take him out now, or we get the hell out of Dodge. There's no shame in cut-and-run. On the count of three, we bust out firing, okay?"

"Right," said Hikaru, breathing hard. He slammed a new cartridge into his gun. "He's gotta be almost out of ammo by now."

"One. . . ."

"Two. . . ."

"Three!" they shouted together, and as one, rose and turned, opening fire into the brush where they had last seen Nekozawa.

Their shots were rather accurate, their long years of schooling via video games showing their influence, and yet their opponent seemed to avoid every one, flying through the bushes like a demon.

"All right, we've got him on the run!" said Hikaru, taking a more forward position at the end of the log. "Now's our chance. You make a dash for the next spot of cover, Kaoru, and I'll be right behind—"

A burst of paintballs was returned from the jungle.

Hikaru trailed off as a strangled cry came from beside him.

He turned in horror to see his twin gripping his side. Kaoru's lips were pulled back in a hiss of pain, and bright blue splotches could be seen beneath his fingers, covering the dirt and camouflage paint he wore. He sank back onto his knees, then slumped against the log.

"Kaoru!"

Shots whizzed past Hikaru's ear, but, desperate as he was to get to his brother's side, he hardly bothered as he ducked down and hurried hunched toward where Kaoru lay.

He threw down his gun when he reached Kaoru. "No, no, no, this can't be happening. . . ."

But as he said so, Kaoru moved his hand to examine the damage, and Hikaru got a very good look at his wounds, blue paint dripping over his shuddering stomach from a handful of very precise shots. To add insult to injury, Kaoru's collar was emitting a rather frantic beeping. "No, goddamn it!" said Hikaru, gripping his brother's shoulder. "Kaoru!"

"Looks like he stuck me good," Kaoru said around a cough—which was not entirely an act, though the pathetic manner of it might have been. Still, he had the clarity to ham it up, turning his eyes slowly up to Hikaru. "Guess I should have been paying better attention, huh?"

"Don't talk like that, Kaoru! You're going to be okay. You have to be!" Hikaru lowered his gaze. "We have to stick together! We're the Hitachiin Brothers. The Hitachiin Brothers, Kaoru! We made a promise—"

Kaoru's paint-stained hand upon his calmed him, however, and made him meet his brother's eyes.

"A promise we'd always be together, Hikaru, through thick and thin?" Kaoru slowly shook his head. "I never wanted to break it. You have to believe me. But there's nothing I can do now—"

"No." Hikaru took that hand in both of his. "You gotta hang in there. I won't let you go. I won't leave you!"

"You don't have a choice."

Hikaru could only stare as Kaoru fell into another fit of coughing. "Damn . . . Haruhi was right. Paintballs . . . do hurt when they hit."

"Kaoru."

His name, uttered with so much tenderness and longing, made Kaoru glance up again to meet Hikaru's tearful eyes, the filtered light glinting moistly off his own. "You'll have to go on from here without me, Hikaru—"

"I can't."

Hikaru chewed his lip. "I don't know how to be without you. I may have been the one with all the glory, but you were the one with all the strength. You were content to let me shine. That's your way. . . . I would be nothing without you!"

"But you won't be alone. I'll always be with you, Hikaru, even if you can't see me. I'll always be there, inside—"

Kaoru's collar flatlined then, so he chose that moment to close his eyes and go limp against the log.

"Kaoru?" Hikaru yelled, his voice cracking. "Kaoru! Hang on, Kaoru! Dammit, don't you leave me!"

He shook his brother, his hand smearing the paint on Kaoru's stomach, but the latter was putting in his best effort to remain as lifeless as a doll.

Hikaru gritted his teeth and stifled a cry. Boiling with rage that was not entirely manufactured, he grabbed Kaoru's gun from where it had fallen with a clatter, and pushed himself to his feet. "I'll get him for this, Kaoru," he growled. "I swear. I'll make that black magic bastard pay for what he did to you."

Right on cue, Nekozawa chuckled.

Hikaru flattened himself against the trunk of a nearby tree as the third-year stepped out of his hiding place.

"How touching," he purred with sinister delight. "And how utterly, putridly saccharine, this hackneyed display of sibling affection of which you two are so fond. Too bad it will be your last. I see I finally landed a shot. I finally took out one of . . . the Hitachiin Brothers."

The particular relish he paid their name made Hikaru shiver—albeit partly because the other's villainous inflection could hardly have been better played. It took all his effort not to smile, which just made the lopsided grin that did make it to his lips seem all the more bitter.

"You're going down, Nekozawa-sempai. On my brother's name, I will destroy you!"

"Oh, we shall see who destroys whom," Nekozawa said; and the speed with which he brought his guns up was so lightning-fast that Hikaru was lucky his instincts kicked in when they did. He was just able to roll around the far side of the tree in time. A split second later, the place were he had been was flecked with blue spatter, a little of it catching him on the cheek.

He raced for better cover, paintballs kicking up the jungle floor at his heels, his heart racing in his chest, and entirely too aware that his upperclassman was flanking him with effortless precision. Something grazed Hikaru's thigh, but his collar did not issue more than a brief warning, and he kept on running.

When he was safe behind cover again, Hikaru thought for sure he had lost Nekozawa for the moment, but the jungle was too quiet for him to consider himself out of the woods yet, eerily quiet. If his enemy were still stalking him, it was truly with a feline stealth—unless the pounding of blood in his ears just kept any other noises from getting through.

"So, you want to play hard to get, do you?" Nekozawa purred. "I guess you're only half the man you used to be without your brother. But no matter. Go ahead. Take your time. I've got all the time in the world, and you must be almost out of ammo."

A cursory check of his firearm proved that to be true, but Hikaru bit back the retort that was on the tip of his tongue. If he said something now, the other was sure to figure out his position. It was a test of wills now.

To prove him right, he could hear Nekozawa's smile when he said, "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue? You must know you're only delaying the inevitable. I am going to find you."

Confident that his upperclassman's voice had been coming from somewhere off to the left in front of his own position, Hikaru began to slowly back up.

A figure shrouded in camouflage popped up close to him then, and Hikaru fired.

He appeared to wing Nekozawa, but didn't stick around to finish the job. He had to get back to Kaoru. The extra rounds—they were still back there with his brother. If he could just get there before Nekozawa could recover. . . .

"My, my," the third-year said to himself as Beelzenev examined the damage with a rub of his shoulder. But it was nothing to be bothered about. "Close, Hikaru Hitachiin," he muttered to himself, "but no cigar."

Beelzenev raised the pistol in his little felt hands, took careful aim, and fired.

Even before Hikaru felt the paintballs hit, he was struck by that urge to kick oneself, for he knew even as he ran that he had doomed himself. The impact knocked the breath momentarily out of him, and made him stumble the dozen or so meters that remained between him and his fallen brother. Disbelief flooded him one moment at the realization that he had been hit fatally, renewed opportunity the next.

Knowing he only had a few moments before his own collar pronounced him dead, Hikaru used what time he had remaining for a desperate crawl toward Kaoru's slouched form. "Kaoru," he grunted, one hand holding his side where he knew there were going to be bruises come morning, "forgive me, I've failed you again. First I couldn't protect you, and now I can't even avenge you right."

He collapsed onto his side just a few paces away, and reached out his free hand toward Kaoru's, scrabbling in the dirt in vain.

"At least," he managed between breaths, "we'll be together again soon."

Then his collar let out a steady beep, and he went still.

Peace descended once more upon the glade, birds calling out to one another again and insects resuming their indifferent chatter.

Nekozawa picked up his helmet from where it had fallen and patted it back onto his head, and—with a little help from Beelzenev—dusted off his stained black wig. Yet somehow even without his trademark look, he managed to look terrifying with his feral, satisfied grin gleaming from the shadow cast by the helmet, his golden unkempt mane sticking out this way and that from underneath it as though from electric shock.

His stride was cool and completely unaffected as he bent down and picked up the guns from each of the twins' sides, taking a couple extra cartridges of red ammo and slinging the weapons over his shoulder. If one were to look back over the school year, he could not deny that there were several injustices committed against Nekozawa that he would have been justified in considering this revenge for.

However, aside from taking from them what he needed, he wasted not even a smug glance at the eliminated twins, and simply slipped back into the jungle as quiet as a cat in search of his next target.

The Hitachiin brothers waited a good minute after he had disappeared to sit up and assess their situation.

"Ngh. . . ." Hikaru winced. "That was right in the kidneys. Those paintballs do hurt like a sonofa. . . ."

"Right?" said Kaoru. "I can't believe we're dead already. It's not even two in the afternoon."

"Yeah, but we had a good run of it. Three kills and a choice death scene ain't bad for one day."

Hikaru pushed himself to his feet with a grunt, gingerly stretching out his back. He grinned down at Kaoru. "Speaking of which, I hope the film crew caught all that. That was a fine bit of acting, if I do say so myself."

Kaoru chuckled as he too rose, dusting the dirt off his swim trunks. "Positively medal worthy, dear brother. But enough about me. You weren't half bad either."

Hikaru snorted. "Talent is in the eye of the beholder."

"Is it?" Kaoru looked at the ground around themselves. "Say, you do realize Nekozawa-sempai left us without any weapons."

"Feh. We don't need weapons where we're going."

Kaoru narrowed his eyes at him. "And where's that?"

But Hikaru was already off in a sprint and called back over his shoulder, "Last one to the beach is a rotten banana!"

Chapter Text

It was a well known fact that there were generally two types of people who were students at Ouran: the wealthy, and geniuses. And these sometimes overlapped.

Shirou was definitely belonging to the latter category. His family had money as well, but he couldn't rely on his parents' pocketbooks to help him out here, in this little patch of wilderness out, literally, in the middle of nowhere. No, as the only grade-schooler on the island—the only participant not in high school, for that matter—Shirou had to be creative if he was going to compete with, indeed stand any chance against, his older peers. They had the advantage of physical strength and experience, whereas he—

He could play the piano.

So the casual observer might have been somewhat perplexed to find Shirou resting in the mossy crook of a fallen tree, the ghillie cape he was using like a pillow half pulled over his eyes to keep out the sunlight as he dozed off. He had not ventured far from his home base, and yet seemed perfectly content to space out for an afternoon cat nap.

That did not mean he had not been working hard all morning, however, hard like a spider spinning its web.

Nor was he sleeping that heavily. The distant tinkling of empty aluminum soda cans was more than sufficient to wake him. His eyes snapped open and he rolled out of his makeshift bed, instantly awake, and grabbed the weapon he had left leaning against the side of the tree.

Elsewhere, Nekozawa stopped in his tracks as soon as he heard the jingling of cans, one leg hanging in the air in mid-step as though he were auditioning for a Broadway musical. Only then did he seem to feel the thin piece of string against his shin. He cursed his luck. And he had been so careful. . . .

Something came arcing toward him through the sky.

Nekozawa barely caught sight of it flying beneath the canopy out of his peripheral vision before it landed a few meters away from him in the brush, exploding in a shower of red paint.

He hit the forest floor, and returned fire with his sniper rifle. Nekozawa knew he was aiming blind, however, and this time he did not hesitate when he heard the whistle of another incoming projectile. He pushed himself hard to his feet and dashed to the side before the second paint mortar could claim him, slipping back toward the north, hoping to catch sight of whoever it was that was firing on him and put a quick end to them.

He hadn't run a dozen meters when he tripped this time over another wire. Paintballs zoomed out of the brush toward him. It was more luck than anything that allowed him to come out of the onslaught alive, though his cape was becoming less and less effectual the more red paint dotted it.

Dropping to one knee, Nekozawa turned and fired in the direction of his attacker, but he only knocked an unmanned rifle from the crook of a tree.

He blinked. Damn, but he was tilting at windmills; and to make matters worse, he now understood, in the middle of a trap.

From his safe point, Shirou watched the carnage through binoculars. Now he knew how spiders felt when they had something caught in their webs, how proud they must be and secure in the inevitability of their plan's success. It was only a matter of time before his victim's own haplessness—and Shirou's genius—did him in.

Such was thought too soon, though, when his upperclassman spotted him and fired in Shirou's direction—this time with two guns.

Two guns that spat red paintballs.

For a moment, as he ducked through the underbrush, Shirou was struck by a dreadful feeling of doubt. He had allowed his pride to make him smug, but had he really entrapped one of his own teammates?

No, he decided, tightening his resolve. That was impossible. But it was probably what his quarry wanted him to think so that Shirou would drop his guard. He didn't recognize the other as any of the members from the Red Team, and even so, Shirou had taken their camouflaged cloak for himself.

But that was not to say that he did not respect his opponent's tactics.

Nekozawa was feeling the same way, albeit grudgingly, as he wondered who was outsmarting him. He caught sight of a figure bouncing behind a thicket of huge green leaves, and sprayed the area liberally with paintball fire until the clicking of depleted ammunition brought him up short. Nekozawa wasted no breath cursing the twins who deserved whatever fate they got for not reloading at appropriate intervals. He just dropped their guns on the forest floor and began reassembling his T9, flinching as a hail of red came his way.

Once again armed and ready, Nekozawa grinned with the excitement of the hunt as he charged forward again, tearing through the thick, shadowed foliage in pursuit of his opponent. He followed the fire to its source, to the point he swore he could almost feel the Red shooter's heartbeat in the forest floor beneath his feet.

He waited for the other to reload. Then, leaping out of the last stand of bushes, Nekozawa found himself face to face with his quarry.

"Huh?" He pulled up short, blinking, the quandary stopping his trigger finger mid-pull. "A kid?"

Shirou glared back up at him, resenting that comment.

But what he could not have known was that in that split second, what Nekozawa saw was not so much Shirou as an innocent—which was perhaps his gravest misjudgment—just like his wee sister Kirimi. In the fifth-grader's black eyes he saw Kirimi's wide blue pools of wonder and adoration staring back up at her big brother from her pure visage; and in Shirou's tight, serious mouth were Kirimi's tiny, pouty lips just beginning to quiver in fright.

In fright of him.

Shame gripped Nekozawa then, and a fraternal kind of compassion—naturally, a feeling he did not have many occasions to be familiar with, and thus one he was easily a little overwhelmed by—clouded his vision. Even if only for a split second—an eighth note, if one will—that eighth note in which he hesitated to pull the trigger was plenty long enough for Shirou to do it for him.

He popped his upperclassman three times in the midsection. As dictated by their sheer proximity and the utter lack of resistance on Nekozawa's part, the whole thing was exceedingly anticlimactic. By the time Nekozawa recovered enough to realize what was happening to him, it was already too late. But the fact of the matter remained, he had been taken out by a kid.

He stared down in horror at himself, touching a tentative finger to the splotches of paint.

Shirou turned to get back to work resetting his traps—

"Oh, what a world!"

He turned back around to see Nekozawa staggering backwards and gasping, his hands twitching melodramatically as he stared at the paint on them.

"What are you talking abou—"

"Murdered, by a mere child! Whatever is the world coming to? Either I've gone mad or it has, the whole bloody thing! O Fate, thou art fickle. . . ."

Needless to say, all this "mere child" crap was really starting to irk Shirou, who would have liked few things more than to be treated as equally on par with his schoolmates. Then there was the matter of his victim's inability to take defeat properly, which was starting to get really annoying. "Hey, no talking. You're supposed to be dead."

Nekozawa fell to his knees, trembling in disbelief. "Everything grows black. . . . I can feel the darkness. Its presence grows exponentially with each rasping breath, a velvet curtain falling heavy upon these shoulders, crushing. . . ." He raised a shaking hand, as though to pluck some invisible fruit dangling just before his face. "And that horrible visage that stands before me . . . that cruel mistress of death, Lady Grinning Soul, reaching out her skeletal hand so that she might embrace me to her sunken, mummified bosom—"

"So die already! Do you want me to shoot you again?"

"No." Nekozawa sobered, meekly adjusting Beelzenev who had somehow gotten twisted around on his hand in the mayhem. "Just give me a minute to digest this and I'll be out of your hair."

Then he promptly wailed a lament for his defeat again and threw himself face-first into the moss, making some pitiful gasping noises while he was at it.

Shirou sighed and shook his head, not for the first time wondering where on God's green Earth they found these people. Wherever it was, the host club deserved every last one of them.

But as for him, he couldn't watch any more. It was just too embarrassing.

This time it was the sprightly "Voices of Spring" that livened the jungle like clockwork.

"Here we are again, everyone, entering hour fourteen-hundred," Renge gushed once again in that incongruously upbeat tone of voice, "and, my, what a productive hour it has been! You should all be congratulated on your gallant efforts, not least among whom, the surviving members of the Blue Team going into the latest round. You guys really pulled it together! With four team members lost seemingly in an instant for the Reds and with minimal casualties for the Blues, is this a sign the tides of war are turning?

"Last hour's kills are as follows: From Two-B, Tarumi Hayato, and from Three-A, Kuze Takeshi. Red Team. Sorry, guys, but it looks like Ouran's star football team just couldn't cut it off of their home turf. Time to hit the showers, boys!

"From One-A, Hitachiin Kaoru and Hitachiin Hikaru. Also Red Team. You two fought so beautifully and faithfully together right up 'til the end, so this one really broke our hearts to see—just as if a pair of young cherry trees had been cut down in full bloom right before our eyes." She sighed appreciatively. "So tragic, and yet somehow so lovely, with God as my witness, I shall never go hungry again! You each deserve gold stars!"

One could hear Renge sniffle into a handkerchief as she said this, but it hardly put a damper on her high spirits when she continued her speech—and the multiplayer round she was at the same time engaged in on the Alpha Base's BS3 prototype game console.

"And last on our list, from the Blue Team, Nekozawa Umehito, Three-B. He gave us quite a few thrills and chills there for a while, but now I think the Reds—or what's left of them—will rest easier knowing the beast of the shadows has been removed from play."

As another player bit the dust from Renge's rocket launcher, and the game announced her killing spree, she paused to readjust her headset.

"Well, this concludes the latest update from Alpha Base," she said as the schmaltzy melody moved into its send-off. "There are seven players remaining, and so far both flags are still at their bases. If you're one of those lucky enough to still be hanging in the fight, good luck and godspeed to you! As for the rest. . . ."

One could almost hear her shrug. "Better luck next time."

Komatsuzawa suddenly found himself too disgusted to go another step. "'Better luck next time'?" he said to Ukyou, his voice rising to an almost nasal level. "'Better luck next time'? Who the hell does she think she is? No, I'm serious. What kind of sicko would think it was fun to watch us kill each other off—"

"Well, you did say yourself," Ukyou began, "it's just a game—"

"No, Ukyou. Stratego is a game. Kick-the-Can is a game. Red Light Green Light, though quite possibly among the most humiliating ever invented, is also just a game. This is. . . ." He fought for words. "I don't even have the vocabulary to describe what this—"

"President."

"What?"

Ukyou hesitated. "Um, your trousers. . . ."

Komatsuzawa looked down at himself and started. His wool trouser legs were finally starting to dry, but now he found, much to his chagrin—among other emotions—that they had also shrunk about six inches. He sat down and tugged at the cuffs, but no amount of effort would get them to spring back to normal. "Gah! There's a reason these are dry clean only—"

"Perhaps I could offer you a way of getting even with those who are responsible for your troubles."

Komatsuzawa and Ukyou looked up at the figure who had suddenly appeared and spoken, but were not exactly grateful when they saw who it was.

"You?" The journalism club president was livid as he leaped to his feet. "Why should I want to listen to you? In case you don't remember, you're the one who friggin' killed me!"

Kuze, however, did not seem in the least intimidated as he faced the other down in shirtsleeves, his hands on his hips. Ukyou was eying Tarumi and Tougouin, who stood behind their captain bearing their paintball wounds, warily, just praying his president didn't say anything the two of them might come to regret.

Kuze chuckled. "I know," he said. "But surely you understand that was all part of the game. No hard feelings. Things have changed, though. Now it's war, and what you have to ask yourself is, which side are you on?"

Komatsuzawa opened his mouth to utter some retort, but the other's words made him pause.

"I think you'll find," Kuze said, extending him a magnanimous smile, "that you and I have similar objectives after all."

The Red Base was not far away now.

As they neared it, however, Honey and Mori could not help but note how thick the air had become on this southern end of the island. Perhaps the time of day had something to do with it, the canopy trapping the day's heat and concentrating it down closer to the jungle ground; but even that explanation could not quell the sense that there was something different about this particular spot. The trees were denser here somehow, as though they thrived on sound as well as light, swallowing both up entirely.

"I don't like it here," Honey whined, treating the cameras to a little bit of trembling lip.

That is to say, if even the film crew had managed to penetrate this region.

"It's dark, and scary. . . ."

"Buck up, Mitsukuni," Mori said. "We're almost there."

Honey sucked it up, but the bird calls that reached them in this part of the jungle seemed warped and malevolent. And it was just about as he was thinking that that the two stumbled across a terrifying sight. Honey stifled a yelp and clung to Mori.

Before them, in the center of their path, was a camouflaged helmet mounted on a stick, splotched grotesquely with bright red paint like the phosphorescent blood spatter of some alien creature. It stood there slightly askew like a trophy, like an offering to the savage gods of the wild, buzzing with the occasional fly, a warning if Honey and Mori ever saw one that ahead lay only danger and heartache.

They pressed on deeper into the dark grove regardless, with only an uneasy gulp from Honey.

Moving carefully, they were able to get quite a ways farther into the darkness until Mori caught something out of the corner of his eye flying toward them.

He didn't say a word as he pulled Honey bodily out of the way. A moment later, the mortar's impact tore up the spot where they had just been, painting it red.

There was a tenuous moment in which the two third-years' eyes connected with those of their attacker's, and they saw it was none other than little Shirou who had fired upon them so accurately, not looking so little anymore with the massive tube of a grenade launcher mounted on his fifth-grade shoulders.

He let one fly, rocking from the kickback.

"Incoming!" Honey said, and he and Mori took off in opposite directions.

Mori tucked and rolled, taking minimum splash damage as the projectile landed a stone's throw away from him.

Honey retreated to a safe distance and turned to fire on their enemy, when he felt his foot land on something suspicious. His eyes went wide and a silent gasp escaped him as he realized what it was, but there was no time to stop and handle the situation with the delicacy it demanded. He was already lifting his weight off of that foot in his sprint—

Shirou lowered the binoculars in triumph as he heard the loud, telltale snap and saw the spray of paint light up the jungle where Haninozuka had just been. The third-year had fallen right into his trap, with incredible ease on Shirou's part. Now if he could only be so lucky with Mori—

Another fountain of red lit up the same patch of jungle, momentarily dashing Shirou's hopes for victory. But then he felt even more confident than before. There was no way the infamous host club Lolita boy could survive multiple trip mines, let alone trip mines that were going off like firecrackers all around him in the underbrush.

Honey was giving it his best effort, however, though so far luck seemed to be trying its darnedest to conspire against him. He leaped out of the way of one mine, only to set off another, then have another set off by the last one exploding. His instincts were quick, and he caught a branch and flipped over one exploding mine just in time, found cover behind a narrow tree trunk to escape the blast of another, but even his evasive abilities were being pushed to their limit. He had to wonder if this minefield would ever end.

Just when he wondered if he was about to be finished, the explosions stopped. Honey wasted no time. Shirou was busy exchanging fire with Mori, his back turned, the perfect opportunity for Honey to deliver the killing shot.

He crouched down to take off in a flying leap, but was not expecting it when the ground gave way beneath his feet.

Honey only had time to scream like a rabbit in an eagle's clutches as dead leaves parted and he was swept off his feet, and up into the trees in a net.

Shirou whipped himself around at the din, but there was nothing he need have worried about. He had the diminutive third-year, the bane of his existence, literally just where he wanted him. That would teach the host club to compare the two of them, he thought, allowing himself a quick grin. They would see now that nothing stood up against the real thing.

Mori for his part started when he heard that scream, and looked up just in time to see his friend go flying up into the canopy. "Mitsukuni. . . ."

Something was triggered in his mind, a switch flipped over somewhere inside that impenetrable fortress of solitude that was his brain, and it moved Mori up a couple notches from STUN to KILL.

Against the dark of the dense jungle, Shirou could see the change take place. There was a new glint in Mori's eyes the likes of which he had not seen before, like an assassin robot's red laser killing scope. He heard the pumping of a shotgun and wasted no time.

Giving into desperation, Shirou pulled at the ends of all the strings that led back to the log in front of him. A half dozen paintball rifles mounted in different parts of the jungle went off at once, filling the dense air with their popping.

Anyone else would have been overwhelmed by the fire coming from multiple directions, if not the sheer noise of it, but not Mori.

SEED-mode Mori ducked and rolled and took them all out one by one with a speed and precision more than befitting a kendo champion. Then he turned his attentions to the last source of live fire being directed his way: Shirou.

Shirou blanched, but Mori did not fire right away. He looked down at his gun uncertainly. It was not that he was out of ammunition; he had plenty. Rather it had struck him that, despite everything the kid had thrown at him, to take Shirou down with that shotgun would have just been overkill.

As though reading his mind from his perch high in the trees, Honey threw something down to him. "Takashi!"

With a nod, Mori dove and caught the falling Splatmaster, turned in mid-dive, and fired once.

He hit Shirou dead center just as he was tracking Mori to set up another shot.

All of this had happened in a matter of seconds. One later, and Honey finished a perfect dismount at his teammate's side, followed soon after by a net falling in the background. "Vaya con Dios," he said to Shirou.

Then looked over at Mori. "No, you're right, Takashi. That line does sound better when you say it."

"Your delivery just needs more gravitas."

"Oh, but it's hard to be serious all the time!"

That was when Shirou recovered from his shock.

"Not fair! You two tag-teamed me!"

Mori shrugged.

"If it's any consolation," said Honey, "you didn't make it easy. You put up quite a fight for a grade schooler. I wouldn't have expected half those tricks in a paintball match. That was the most fun we've had all day!"

Mori laid a hand on Shirou's head and mussed his hair, and that tore it for the little guy. He ran away into the bushes yelling that they were monsters, leaving a bewildered Honey and Mori to exchange glances and wonder if it was something they said.

Haruhi could not have said the same for herself. Fun was the farthest thing from her mind at the moment, and had been for the last few hours. Which was not to say she was having a miserable time, either. It was simply that, after the novelty of the tropical paradise around her had worn off, her thoughts had naturally wandered back to more practical things as she made her trek toward the northern end of the island, more important things.

Like how she had originally planned to use today to study for exams. After finishing the usual weekend load of homework, that is. True, exams were still a ways away, but in her opinion it was never too soon to get started committing the finer points to memory, especially in those subjects she struggled in.

Moreover, she needed the head start so that when exam week did get closer she would not feel too rushed when Tamaki started pestering her for classical grammar help—which he now did first, ever since discovering that she put up much less of a fight than the rest of their club members. As Kyouya put it, she was too easy, and had to stop giving away her talents for free.

Boy, was he right.

Haruhi wondered if he ever got tired of being right all the time. Because when Tamaki came around pleading and bargaining for help on his classical grammar because—as he put it—she was the only one who didn't lie to him about auxiliary verb conjugation just for giggles, she sure did.

Not only that, but Haruhi had told her father that she would run all the usual errands, including the grocery shopping, herself this weekend due to his unexpectedly busy schedule. And tomorrow was double coupon day at the convenience store down the street.

It was double coupon day, and she didn't even have the opportunity to be home to cut out coupons. Anyone who knew anything about bargain hunting—which, unfortunately, excluded everyone else on the island—knew that if you wanted to make the most of your savings, you had to commit to it as a weekend-long affair. Haruhi quickly did the calculations in her head. If they could be back home by three in the afternoon on Sunday, she would probably have just enough time to get the most essential coupons cut out and get down to the store, but that wasn't as ideal as eight or nine in the morning when she could get better pickings. Which would mean that they would have to finish this game by. . . .

Well, that was assuming she actually knew where in Japanese waters—or in the world, for that matter—they were, so that she could roughly calculate how long it would take to get back home. She just hoped to whatever gods were up there that there was a fast, private jet waiting for them at the end of this nonsense. Rich people could at least be good for that much, couldn't they?

And it was just as she was thinking that that Haruhi thought she spied a vaguely artificial formation above the tops of the trees up ahead. For perhaps the first time since they awoke on this island, she was elated.

"Okay. Focus, Suou, focus! Now, if I were Haruhi, where would I go?"

Tamaki tried his darnedest to put himself in her mentality for a moment so that he might better guesstimate his clubmate's whereabouts, but all he got for his efforts were a headache and a growling stomach—and not for the first time today, though this time it was so loud he thought the whole island could probably hear it.

He sighed, shoulders slumping, and put a hand to his belly. "God, I'm so hungry, I can't even think straight any more."

He had to admit it: He should have listened to Honey when he told Tamaki to eat, because Tamaki was regretting his decision to forgo food now. Perhaps skipping lunch had shaved a couple of minutes off of his quest, but it stopped being an advantage when it impaired his ability to tell whether he was even going in the right direction.

"Not that my lunch is any good now, after being out in this heat half the day," Tamaki told himself to justify his decision. "Come to think of it, since she made it, it probably wasn't any good to begin with."

But even convincing himself into a loss of appetite could not quell his stomach's hunger pangs.

"Fine, fine, fine," he said to said stomach as he pulled his pack down under his arm and reached into it. "There's gotta be an energy bar or something in here somewhere, just hold yer horses."

No sooner had Tamaki gone for his pack, however, than he picked up a faint but wonderful aroma on the air.

At first he thought it was a delusion caused by hunger, like an oasis glimpsed on the desert horizon, but as he moved a little ways down through the jungle, he could not deny the fact that he actually was smelling something cooking. Something delicious.

And that realization was such a godsend, a stupid grin lit up Tamaki's face and he could think of nothing else. "Foo-o-o-od," he whimpered dreamily.

Then he caught himself, wiped the drool from his chin, and looked quickly around the jungle.

It was totally still. The jungle fauna had quieted down for an afternoon siesta, only the cries of the insects filling the air with a soft drone that, intermingling with the distant rush of the surf, seemed to Tamaki like he sound of sunlight itself. There was no need to feel self-conscious; aside from the silently watching cameras, he was all alone.

Tamaki crept forward, following his nose, until he reached the lip of a small basin. The crumbling, overgrown remnants of a shallow, burnt-out bunker made up the depression, and in its center, almost entirely exposed to the surrounding trees, was a small camp stove and stool, both of which were abandoned.

Now, Tamaki knew his momma didn't raise no fools. He knew no one would just leave an open flame going in the middle of the jungle without the intent to come back to it soon.

But he was starving. And all the wonderful, fresh-cooked food was just sitting there going to waste while he sat on the edge of the glade and watched. He wouldn't be long, he told himself. Just long enough to grab a few bites and stop his stomach from growling. He would be in and out before the person who owned this camp stove returned from emptying his bladder or whatever he had gone off to do.

With that decided, Tamaki started off down the side of the depression. He started off a little too eagerly perhaps, though, as he caught his toe on an exposed brick and slid face first to the bottom of the hill.

Saying a silent "Crap" in his mind, and nose pressed to the dirt, Tamaki went still.

The jungle around him, however, was even quieter.

So, staying on the lookout for the first sign of trouble, he hopped back to his feet and settled himself down on the tiny folding stool in front of the stove.

There were beans bubbling on the burner, an opened can of deviled ham and some cracked wheat crackers laid out on a cloth napkin, a freshly picked mango, and a pot of hot instant coffee from which Tamaki poured himself a mug. Granted it wasn't foie gras and baguettes, but it was food, real food, and thus Tamaki couldn't remember—as he gobbled down ham and beans together on a cracker sandwich—in the recent past having a more delicious, more fulfilling meal.

Tamaki didn't realize he was not alone until he lowered the coffee mug from his lips and felt the cool muzzle of a pistol against the back of his neck.

"Hold it right there."

Tamaki smiled, however bitterly, as he recognized that voice.

"Kyouya. I should have known. This is just the kind of trap you would spring."

He could hear Kyouya's smile when he replied, "Yes, you should have known. You're even worse than Honey-sempai, always thinking with your stomach."

Tamaki's first instinct was to turn to face his old friend, an instinct he had to try hard to repress, but he must have moved enough because Kyouya stopped him with a more urgent, "Ah-ah. Put down the mug, Tamaki. Slowly. And keep your hands where I can see them. No reaching for your firearm or it's lights out before you can even pray the Lord your soul to keep."

Tamaki allowed a nervous chuckle to escape him as he did as he was told. "Fancy meeting you again like this, old friend."

"Yes. Though somehow I always thought you would be the one in control. But such is the irony of life, is it not? How would you say it? C'est la vie?"

"C'est la guerre. But why don't you shoot me now?" Tamaki could practically feel Kyouya's hesitation down the length of the pistol. "You have me completely at your mercy. Shouldn't you hurry up and take the kill?"

"M-m, perhaps I should. But I want to relish this moment."

The pistol retreated from Tamaki's skin, but he could still sense it trained on him as Kyouya slowly moved around to the side of him so that Tamaki could finally look up into his face, where a smile darkened his bespectacled countenance with a slight, malicious edge.

"I want you to realize the folly of your mistake before I kill you," Kyouya said, his voice, though congenial as always, touched by a subtle intensity that made Tamaki shiver. "I want to see it in your face, when you finally grasp how your overconfidence has failed your teammates."

"Where's Haruhi?"

"I'll ask the questions, Tamaki."

And his fingers tightening around the gun made that very clear.

"What were you doing here, besides stealing my food? I take it it wasn't me you were searching for, and it wasn't the Red Base either."

"I have to take him out of this game myself!" The words were suddenly out before Tamaki could think about what he was saying; but in his heart, there was a part of him that was convinced the part of Kyouya that was still his old friend would understand. "Don't you see? My motives were pure. I was going to shoot him myself, for his own good—for his own protection! It's the only way. Haruhi is your friend as well. He's a member of your club, too, Kyouya, our club, so don't tell me you can't understand where I'm coming from. You have a duty to protect him, same as I!"

Kyouya chuckled at that, and Tamaki shut his mouth. Even if he stood by every word he said, he had said too much again. He really sucked when it came to interrogation.

"And you really think I would just let you go to Haruhi after you've outlined your intentions so clearly? My, Tamaki, but you are naive. . . ."

"Think of what you have to lose if Haruhi's discovered—"

"Oh, but I don't think that will happen."

The other's confidence stopped Tamaki cold. He blinked at Kyouya, before narrowing his eyes in sudden suspicion. "What makes you so sure?"

"What makes you so sure he's in danger?"

"Haruhi has no killing instinct whatsoever. Sure he's good at surviving—being a commoner and all he has to be able to make the most of every situation—but it's precisely his kind nature that is his Achilles heel. He lacks that brutal indifference toward human life that might lend him a fighting chance in this jungle—ironically the character trait I admire most."

A montage of the young woman in question sprang to Tamaki's mind then—a false memory of Haruhi laughing in a field of flowers with puppies, the sun sparkling in her walnut-brown hair as it floated on a gentle breeze, and a scent of buttercups wafting toward him as she turned to him, the light catching in her summer dress as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and her surprise turned to joy as she recognized his face. . . .

His patient finger still resting on the trigger, Kyouya was content to let him enjoy his little fantasy until he was ready to rejoin the conversation at hand.

Tamaki's eyes snapped back up to him. He said, "Have you no heart, Kyouya? Because if we can't protect a goodness like Haruhi's, what is there left in this world worth fighting for?"

The northern end of the island rose sharper than it appeared to on the map, and the trees thinned somewhat as soft jungle floor gave way to rock, where a little waterfall trickled down from some hidden catch of rainwater.

Haruhi had to blink lest her eyes were deceiving her.

They weren't. The wall that rose up in front of her was definitely artificial, and it was definitely a blue light that pulsated faintly high up on it like a beacon.

She had finally reached the Blue Base.

"Well, that was remarkably easy," she muttered to herself. After all, it was all rather anticlimactic. "I really expected there to be a fight, but not even a turret or anything? I guess it shouldn't come as any surprise that Tamaki wouldn't be big on defense, but Honey and Mori-sempai? Come on, guys."

Oh well, her shrugged shoulders seemed to say. If that was the way they wanted to play, and there was nothing to stop her from waltzing in and taking the flag, then so be it. She couldn't very well argue with that. She might as well get it over with.

Unbeknownst to Haruhi as she searched for the entrance to the base, however, one of the Blues was lurking close by, although not on defense. At least, not on purpose. Unaware that a member of the opposing team was encroaching on his base, Sakyou was just trying to escape the whole mess by hiding among the maze of outcrops that encircled the fortress-like Blue Base.

It wasn't that he was afraid of taking his chances on the battlefield so much as that he just didn't like his chances. It was all a matter of practicality. So he figured maybe if he waited long enough, everyone else would either kill one another off or one of his team members would capture the Red flag, because so far not a soul besides himself had ventured back to this end of the island.

That was all about to change, but Sakyou didn't know that yet.

Chapter Text

While the fighting continued to wage farther inland, the Hitachiin brothers were having a wonderful time on the beach. All the tension of the hunt in the shadowy jungle they put far behind them as they ran by the shore, swam in the lagoon, and watched colorful fish darting past their feet in the crystal clear shallows.

By about the thirtieth time besting each other at playing chicken with the tide, however, all that began to grow a bit stale. Maybe those things had been fun when they were kids and could find some sort of amusement in doing the same old thing all day long, but they were teenagers now, and as such were much more likely to succumb to the much more relaxing, much more adult allure of lying on the sand, under the sun, and doing absolutely nothing. Since they couldn't participate in the main event of this little excursion of Renge's anymore, then they could at least get a mini vacation out of it on the side.

All of this was well and good for a couple hours, especially when they began to drift off to sleep. That was, until a sudden shadow blocking out his sun woke Kaoru with a start.

He hardly had a second to warn Hikaru, let alone open his eyes to see what was the matter, before a pair of arms grabbed him roughly, jerking him to his feet.

Hikaru started as he too was dragged upright out of his peaceful nap, and for those first few seconds was too disoriented to struggle against Tougouin, who held him fast. "Hey! What's the big idea?"

"What the hell—"

"Get your hands offa my brother!"

"Tie them up."

That voice, which had just recently called them for backup as members of the same team, made the two for a moment stop their struggling against the football players who held them.

They turned to see Akutaro and Akujiro grinning widely at them, stretching the ropes they held in their hands in anticipation. "With pleasure," said the yakuza brothers, and stepped forward to do the deed.

When they were done, Hikaru and Kaoru looked like they were about to be placed on the railroad tracks by some mustachioed villain. They squirmed like pupae in their cocoons, much to their captors' delight. "Oh, come on! This is unnecessary," said Hikaru.

"Did you have to tie it so tight?" gasped Kaoru.

"Payback's a bitch, ain't it?" Akutaro and Akujiro laughed, pulling the ends a little tighter; though one would have to wonder if the Hitachiin brothers could really be expected to remember how the tables had recently been turned. After all, that incident with Kasanoda and the paint can had been just another ordinary day for them in the host club. "What? You can't handle it when the shoe's on the other foot?"

Kaoru glared back, and Hikaru growled, but all four stopped their bickering when Kuze cleared his throat.

"If you're finished," he said coolly, "bring them along. We have much to discuss."

The way he commanded those two ruffians who under normal circumstances wouldn't give the American football team the time of day made the twins blink. They could only wonder what Kuze had up his sleeve as, prodded along by Tarumi's paintball gun in the back and feet dragging in the sand, they grudgingly followed his lead.

The Blue Base was larger up close than Haruhi had expected. However, she got to thinking, perhaps she had only seen a portion of her team's own base and that was why it seemed so. They had all been in such a hurry to leave and get the game started that they might not have seen how far the base extended.

Through the gate, she entered a courtyard that was worn by the elements and littered with dead leaves and sun-bleached palm fronds. Likewise, except for the distant trickle of water through the pipes, the whole place seemed shrouded in silence, and the cry of a bird overhead resounded off the stark walls with their peeling paint like a gunshot. There were windows in the split level building up ahead, ideal places for lookouts and snipers, but the structure definitely had about it the air of someplace abandoned.

It was the same feeling the school had after hours. But rather than be cause for fear, Haruhi thought, maybe it was simply a natural state for places that were unnecessarily large to be in.

Still, not wanting to be out in the open too long, she ducked inside a stairwell on the edge of the courtyard. She climbed the stairs quickly but with caution; her footfalls hardly made any noise, but this was not really from want of trying to be quiet.

Once again, she had to admit Kyouya had been right on the money—no pun intended—about her.

She came out on a landing that disappeared right into the rocky hillside. Vines crept up the sides of the walls wherever they could find a handhold, and ferns hung down overhead, obscuring the old, overlapping splotches of blue and red that remained from some long ago battle that had taken place here. Boulders fallen from the hillside provided plenty of possible hiding places for enemies as well.

It was to these that Haruhi turned when the sound of a pebble clattering down over the cement structure abruptly shattered the silence.

She flattened herself against the wall with hardly a gasp and fumbled with her paintball rifle.

No enemies jumped out to assault her, however. In fact, the sound seemed to have come from behind, over on the walkway beyond the wall she was leaning against. Gun fully loaded and ready at her side, she began inching toward the edge for a better look.

Unknown to Haruhi, on the other side of that wall, crouching low behind the railing of the walkway that looked down into the courtyard below, Sakyou was slowly making his way back toward the stairwell. He thought the sound had come from behind him, so he turned, keeping his gun trained on the base lest one of the Reds was already inside looking for him and his teammates.

Buck up, he told himself. If one of them is already inside, even if they already have the flag, they have to come out sooner or later to take it to Alpha Base. That would be the perfect time to ambush them, just when they're confident everything is going their way.

That was what he was thinking as he backed slowly toward the stairwell, his pounding heartbeat finally starting to calm with the logic of that argument. Until he reached the corner and backed into something that gave under his weight, something that was definitely not the wall.

Haruhi felt the impact against the pack on her back and yelped, dropping it to the ground.

Sakyou cried out in alarm at that and turned, more surprised than anything that he had run into another human being where there should have been none. No ordinary person—was all he could think as he turned wide-eyed to face the first-year—should be that stealthy! It was animal!

As for Haruhi, whose heart was hammering in her chest just as hard as Sakyou's from surprise and mortification—her first instinct was to apologize for running into an upperclassman. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. But it was as she was backing up a step and raising her hands in a defensive gesture that she tripped on something, and the gun went off in her instinctively tightening grip as she fell back toward the floor.

As luck would have it, the slip-up might have actually saved her, because when Sakyou raised his own weapon to fire, the couple of rounds he got off before Haruhi's paintballs overwhelmed him went sailing safely over her head.

Landing hard on her rear, it was another moment before the rapid snapping of paintballs made Haruhi remember where she was and open her eyes. A full second later she finally thought to take her finger off the trigger.

As the noise died down around them, Haruhi blinked.

Before her, Sakyou was staring in shock at his own chest, which was pretty well covered in red paint. Shock turned to disappointment a moment later as he realized he had joined the ranks of his team's dead. "Aw, dammit."

"Huh," Haruhi said to herself. "That was surprisingly easy."

She had thought at the outset of this game that it would be a morally difficult thing to do, to shoot one's classmates, albeit with nonlethal paintballs, and pretend that it was killing. After all, nothing good ever seemed to come from similar situations that were portrayed in novels and movies. Somehow, something always ended up going horribly, horribly wrong wherever there were a bunch of adolescents set free upon one another hopped up on adrenaline and the usual teenage tension and angst.

But somewhere between the hype and the utter lack of resistance she had experienced in her journey here must have built up a false sense of expectation, because she really didn't feel anything after shooting Sakyou, except perhaps a general relief that he hadn't been the one to fire first. And, if she were really honest with herself, a slight sense of primal satisfaction at having killed something with her own hands, albeit only figuratively.

Never mind, of course, that it had been mostly a complete stroke of luck on her part.

Trying to keep the smugness in her smile to a minimum, she said to Sakyou with a shrug, "Sorry, Sempai, but rules are rules."

"I know."

"I'm gonna go take your flag now."

Sakyou sighed. "Go ahead. Even if I cared anymore, it's not like I can do anything about it now, can I?"

He had a point there.

Haruhi's smile widened in gratitude. She didn't know the journalism club all that well except to know that she didn't really like their leader, whose character traits generally got on her nerves in any person who displayed them; but Sakyou didn't seem half bad. In fact, with his dry, somewhat droll manner and loyalty—however undeserved she personally believed it was—to his president, she actually found him rather admirable in an underdog sort of way.

"I'm glad you're so understanding about the whole thing. No hard feelings, right?"

She might have meant well by those words, but they weren't making Sakyou feel any better, whose impressions of Haruhi were not as generous. No amount of sympathy would lessen the shame of his total defeat by a person who was, to the best of his knowledge, one of the biggest girly-boys in the high school. The fact that Haruhi apologized for the kill just made it that much worse.

However, he didn't dare share any of that with Haruhi, just threw his arms up in an exasperated shrug and let her set off in search of his team's flag. He didn't see there being much else he could do.

Kyouya smiled to himself—with that smile Tamaki recognized as the one he gave when he knew something Tamaki didn't.

"What's so funny?"

Kyouya shook his head, but the smile only seemed to grow wider. "Nothing. I was just thinking about your predicament. You left your teammates with the hopes of rescuing a member of the opposing team—however by removing said member from gameplay—and as a result you may have damned both to certain destruction. Not to mention yourself, of course."

Tamaki opened his mouth to respond, but it was then that the speaker in his collar crackled to life.

". . . Blue Team. Come in, surviving members of Blue Team."

Tamaki's eyes went wide. It was Honey's youthful voice. He glanced up at Kyouya, but it was too late to cut the communication. His old friend had already heard, and was staring down his nose at Tamaki's collar with great interest.

"This is Mitsukuni and Takashi," Honey continued. "We have reached the first objective and penetrated the periphery of the Red Base. Preparing to infiltrate now. If anyone's still alive, prepare to fall back to Alpha Base to provide backup. Repeat, we have entered the Red Base. So far, no resistance encountered. There doesn't seem to be anyone here at all. Going after the flag now—"

Tamaki snapped out of it then and hit the button on the side of his collar, cutting Honey off before he could transmit any further information.

He glared up at Kyouya, but his old friend showed no intention of hastening the fatal shot any, nor did he seem bothered that he was not able to hear any more of Honey's transmission.

"An interesting development," Kyouya said as though to himself. "Though I can't say I'm particularly surprised. . . ."

"The gig is up, Kyouya. You can shoot me now, but you'll never make it back to your home base in time to stop them. Victory belongs to the Blue Team."

"We'll see about that. They haven't reached the flag yet."

The way Kyouya said that last part, however, it made Tamaki wonder what he was leaving out. "What do you mean, yet?"

"Well, as of speaking they haven't captured the flag, have they? They are not, as we speak, taking it to Alpha Base for the win—"

"No. I mean there's something else, something you're not telling me." Tamaki's eyes snapped up to the other's as it occurred to him— "You have something up your sleeve, don't you? They're walking into a trap! I've got to warn them—"

Kyouya's grip tightened on the gun as he saw Tamaki's hand going once again toward his throat. "You'll do no such thing. You've just about worn out your welcome, Tamaki."

He tilted the gun on its side, and the dangerous glint over the lenses of his glasses made Tamaki pause.

Tamaki gritted his teeth, his fist clenching at his side as he waited with growing impatience for the killing shot to come. Kyouya's hand was steady as a robot's as he aimed, his finger depressing the trigger ever slower—

"Hope I'm doing this right. . . . Uh, this is Haruhi. Kyouya-sempai, Shirou . . . are either of you still out there? Um, I'm in the Blue—"

Kyouya's resolve wavered just a hair and for just one second when he heard his own collar come to life with Haruhi's shaky voice. It was only a second, but Tamaki saw his window of opportunity in it—and a narrow window it was—and did not waste it.

He shot up from the camping stool like a viper striking from the bush and grabbed hold of Kyouya's wrist, forcing the pistol up and away from him as the other pulled the trigger.

In Tamaki's mind, he had planned to disarm his friend-cum-enemy with a few fluid movements and nicely timed distributions of weight. In reality, however, his struggle with Kyouya was rather awkward and disorganized. In the end, it was the host king's own clumsiness, rather, that made Kyouya lose his balance, and he ended up with Tamaki sitting heavily on his stomach. Wincing, the pistol fell out of his grip, clattering on the mossy bricks.

Regaining his senses, Tamaki grabbed it up, pushed himself to his feet, and aimed at Kyouya with Kyouya's own gun. He knew if he hesitated now he was lost, so he took aim dead center, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

An empty click was all he heard.

Followed shortly by Kyouya's chuckle.

Tamaki looked down at the gun as his friend pushed himself up into a sitting position, his chuckle growing into a sad laugh. The magazine that fell out into Tamaki's hand was empty. "You didn't reload?"

"Correction," Kyouya said, sobering. "I never loaded to begin with."

In a flash Tamaki threw the pistol aside and had his own gun out and pointing down at Kyouya, who did not seem to care less.

"Why?" Tamaki asked him in a small voice. His embarrassment over being held up by an empty gun was superseded by a larger concern: his friend's mysterious motives. "You never intended to shoot me?"

"Don't start getting sentimental on me now, Tamaki. Or self-important, for that matter. I would have shot you all too readily under other circumstances, but I decided at the beginning that I had to remove myself from game play, remain neutral."

"But why? You must have known you wouldn't be able to keep up this charade forever!"

Kyouya raised his head to look Tamaki in the eyes, his own set with determination behind his glasses.

"Unless," Tamaki said as it began to dawn on him, "you had planned to die all along."

"You might say it was out of guilt. Because I discovered something about this island that made me ethically unable to influence the outcome of the game one way or another. Even if it meant my life. Yes," Kyouya said to the other's widening eyes, "even I am not entirely without my own set of scruples. I decided the least I could do was hole you up for a short while, a mission which I would have to say has been more than accomplished. But then you always were a Don Quixote type, so honorable yet so incredibly gullible."

Tamaki said nothing, but his uncertain stare seemed to say he didn't completely believe his friend's excuses.

"I'm surprised you hadn't noticed it yourself," Kyouya told him. "Look at the labels on the cans if you don't believe me. Go ahead. Recognize anything about them?"

Keeping his gun trained on Kyouya lest this be simply another trick, Tamaki did as he was told. He picked up the can of deviled ham, expecting to see nothing out of the ordinary.

But when he looked at the label, his eyes went wide in recognition. The can of beans on the stove bore the same mark, and now, as he looked closer at his gun, so did the weapon he had taken into battle. A burning feeling of betrayal of the bitterest kind, the kind all the worse for being perpetrated by the closest of friends, boiled up from within him and made him grip the gun in both hands.

"You. . . ." His voice wavered, as though he still couldn't believe it. "You mean to tell me. . . . This whole time. . . ."

"All the more reason why you have to finish me off."

Tamaki started at that. What Kyouya asked was impossible, but the look in his eyes, like a man already dead—

"I can't. . . ." He lowered the gun a few inches, his hands suddenly possessed with a tremor he could not control. "I can't kill you. No matter what you might have done, whether it was intentional or just some terrible coincidence . . . you're still my friend!"

"I'm your enemy, Tamaki. You mustn't allow yourself to forget that, not for a moment. Do what you have to do, now, while you still have a chance."

Tamaki raised his head. A chance? What was he talking about?

"That's right," Kyouya said. "You still have a chance to save Haruhi. That is, if he survives the Blue Base."

"If he survives? What are you—"

"Or you can turn back now and join your teammates. The choice is yours. If you abandon them now, they almost certainly go to their doom. But if you take off after Haruhi. . . . Well, there's no guarantee you won't be too late to save him, but at least you might be able to say your good-byes properly."

Tamaki stared at him, for a moment forgetting the weapon in his hands; but he need not have said anything for Kyouya to read the question in his face.

"I've already given you more information than I planned." Kyouya smiled to himself. "Damn it, Tamaki. It seems even when we're on opposing teams I'm unable to resist that irritating charm of yours."

Tamaki pressed his lips together tighter to keep them from quivering.

"It doesn't have to end this way," he gritted out.

"Yes. It does. If you let me go now, there's no telling what I might do to upset the game. Just think about it. Can you really risk not taking the shot, especially now when you have me completely at your mercy? Each second you continue to stand here in indecision is another second that could have been used to save your teammates, wasted."

Tamaki shook his head, a bitter laugh escaping him. He had a point, but—

"I see what you're doing. Clever, Kyouya. . . . But then, I should have known better. Even if I shoot you now, you still win. Don't you? Because you knew all along that, even if you killed me yourself, nothing you did to me could hurt me more than making me choose which of our club members would live or die."

He lowered his eyes, his voice wavering as he said lowly, "And then on top of that, to make me murder my dearest friend—"

Kyouya's smile turned sad. "There's no other way."

"Maybe you're right, Kyouya. But still. . . ."

Tamaki sucked in a breath as he turned his head to stare into his friend's eyes one final time.

"I won't forgive you for this!"

"Good. You'd better not."

With an anguished howl of "Kyouya!", and as tears welled up in his eyes, Tamaki pulled the trigger.

Kyouya held back a grimace of pain as the paintballs hit him, a couple whizzing just over his shoulder as Tamaki temporarily lost control of his aim in his passion. He simply closed his eyes and trusted Tamaki wouldn't hit him in the face or anything, laid back against the bricks, and let his collar announce that he had expired.

Even after that, Tamaki kept firing until the clip was empty, his howl filling the clearing long after the popping of paintballs gave way to hollow clicks. As it dissolved into a sob, he finally lowered the gun to his side. Tears were streaming down his face, tickling his cheeks, but the host king ignored them. A part of him was too proud to wipe them away, while at the same time there was no doubt a part of him that had put so much effort into this dramatic scene he had almost begun to believe it was real. Or at very least that it could be. That is to say, simply the thought of executing his own friend was enough to produce the necessary tears, but it was hard to exorcise the thought once it implanted itself.

As Kyouya might have admonished him, he got way too wrapped up in his fantasies for his own good. And while the acting quality that went along with it may have been a boon to the club, that didn't always carry over into real life.

Kyouya. . . .

Tamaki choked back a real cry. He knew Kyouya wasn't dead. His chest was still rising and falling normally under the blue paint spatter. In fact, he was probably calculating the cost of replacing his uniform in his head at that very moment. But with a remnant of that sad, wry smile still planted on his lips . . . for the first time things did seem just a little too real for Tamaki's comfort.

He shook his head to clear it of that thought, his tears sparkling in the filtered light as they fell. Then he hung his head.

"Forgive me, Kyouya," he muttered. "I never wanted it to end like this." Even though it was all fake, he still hated himself a little for it. As well as Kyouya, for knowing ahead of time just how hard he would take this and making him go through with it anyway. "I may never forgive you, but I swear I won't forget you either, as long as I live. May you rest in peace, my dearest friend. . . ."

He glanced back over his shoulder and happened to spy the can of beans still bubbling away on the camping stove under its sinister label. It bolstered the resolve within him, and he sniffed away his sorrow as he turned once more to Kyouya's not quite motionless form.

"Just one last thing before I go. I just want you to know that I've made my decision. I think. . . ."

He chewed his lip for a second, his fist tightening at his side.

"I like to think you would have approved!"

And without further ado, because he couldn't stand to stay there a moment longer, Tamaki grabbed his things from where he had left them and took off in a northerly direction, back toward the Blue Base.

Not even an echo of that distant pop of paintfire reached Honey and Mori where they were, though the jungle around the Red Base had thinned slightly compared to where Shirou had set up his traps not far away. The land rose on either side here like it did on the northern end of the island, but unlike the Blue Base, this base's main structure was nestled inside a bowl-like dip in the land, and overhung by tall flowering trees trailing creepers while thick roots tore up the pavement between patches of thick, bright green grass.

Based on the map of the island, the ocean could not be far beyond, yet not even the sound of the surf penetrated this place, only the cries of birds and small animals in the canopy in the late afternoon.

There was a long stretch of open area between the edge of the forest and the shrouded Red Base, but the two had traversed that without incident. There were no snipers on the lookout, no sign that anyone had remained in the building to guard the flag from the other team.

That hadn't been wise; but then again, their own team members had been all too eager to get out into the fray as well without giving too much thought to defense.

Nonetheless, the two hosts maintained vigilance as they entered the outer walls of the Red Base, just in case any traps like Shirou's had been set up. They would not have put that past Kyouya's team at all, and were rather surprised when, after their call to the rest of their team over the collars' walkie-talkie system, several minutes went by without any incident whatsoever. Not even a reply. Isolation was never an unpleasant sensation for Honey and Mori, but now they found themselves wondering with just a bit of misgiving if they might have been the last of their team left.

"Honey-sempai!" a tinny voice suddenly rang from their collars.

It was Tamaki, and he sounded like he was in a hurry, his breath coming heavy as he frantically spat out the words. "Mori-sempai! Are you guys still there?"

Mori hid it better than his classmate, but both he and Honey were elated.

"Hi, Tama-chan! What's up?"

"There's no time for that! You've gotta listen to me and proceed with the utmost caution! Look, this whole island is—"

The rest was cut off in a wash of static as they stepped through the next doorway. The two started and stopped, Mori's hand going to his collar. "Hello?" he tried as he attempted to get the signal back by retracing their steps.

But it was all in vain. He shook his head at Honey when not even the hiss of white noise could be picked up. Something was jamming the signal, his warning look seemed to say. Or else it had been simply cut off. Perhaps whatever Tamaki had been about to tell them was too close for comfort for the film crew or whoever would have been monitoring their conversations back at Alpha Base.

It was something else that was suddenly and inexplicably bothering Honey, however, a niggling, unsettling sensation in his head and his skin that he could not quite place, like an acute allergy, or as if there had been an abrupt change in air pressure or static electricity. It set him on edge from the hairs on the back of his neck to the roots of his teeth, but not with fear; that much he knew. No, the best way he could have described it would have been to say it was an apprehensive, disturbance-in-the-Force, "this town ain't big enough for the both of us" kind of feeling.

And as far as he knew, there was only one person who could cause it.

At least in the matter of the signal interference, the two didn't have to wait long to find out what was responsible.

The Blue flag had just come into view, bathed in a cool, azure light in the center of the room ahead, when Haruhi heard the structure's PA system crackle to life.

"Welcome, brave player!" Renge's disembodied voice reverberated throughout the building itself.

Haruhi looked around, and it wasn't long before her gaze alighted on one of the ubiquitous television monitors, which showed Renge—now dressed in a uniform that disturbingly resembled that of an SS officer—saluting her in a close-up. Can she see me—Haruhi couldn't help wondering—like back at the beginning of this game? And if so, what does that mean for me?

"You're to be congratulated. You've successfully infiltrated the enemy's fortress! The journey here hasn't been easy by any means, has it? First, there was the matter of the other team trying to gun you down, and worse, some of them you must have still considered to be your friends, people you shared fond memories with up until just yesterday!"

Yeah, Haruhi thought. Sakyou-sempai and I will never forget the thrill of being gassed and kidnapped together.

"It must have been very difficult. And scary! We here at Alpha Base certainly don't envy you your lot, that's for sure."

What, was she reading from a script? Haruhi had to wonder as she rolled her eyes. Because that didn't fit her own experiences on the island at all. She had met up with a total of two people the whole day—ever since she had left Kyouya and her home base—and the first had sworn to defend her and run off, while the other was a fortunate accident she really didn't feel that bad about.

Not only that, but Haruhi felt, what with Renge's overly dramatic tone of voice, like she was being talked down to. Which, come to think of it, was probably just the host club signboard girl sticking to character.

Not that Haruhi was angry with her classmate. Aside from her general irritation about being dragged away from more important things, that is. She just didn't see what all the drama was about.

"But," Renge said brightly, as though she were simply talking about the weather clearing up, "you've managed to survive intact this long to claim the prize that is rightly yours. And so behold! The rival team's banner and victory are within your grasp! Can you taste it?"

"Takashi, look!"

As Renge's broadcast continued over the intercom, Mori looked to where Honey was pointing to see the Red flag stretched before the back wall of the chamber, rippling slightly in a draft.

Meanwhile, Renge went on, just as she did at their base on the other end of the island:

"So it would be awful, wouldn't it, if, after all your trials and tribulations, the difficult choices you've been forced to make, you come this far only to find one more obstacle standing between you and your team's hard-earned win. That just wouldn't be fair, would it?"

Honey and Mori decided they already knew what her answer to that was going to be, however, even before the ground beneath their feet began to tremble, as though with the starting up of some giant machine concealed beneath the structure. A large diadem in the floor before where the Red flag hung revealed itself to be two doors, which sank down and slid back into the rest of the floor with a low grinding sound.

At much the same time, Renge spoke:

"But alas, life isn't fair. And it just wouldn't make for good entertainment if we allowed you to coast to victory without throwing in just one itty-bitty boss fight."

The rumbling stopped, and when the dust cleared Honey and Mori could see that a platform had been raised up into the diadem; and on it, all that was standing between them and the flag.

The newly lifted platform was still shrouded in shadow, the figure on it backlit by the soffit lights illuminating the flag. He was a junior high student judging by the white gakuran he wore, but his crouching stance, like a tiger ready to pounce, possessed a seriousness and physical command that belied his age. He held no weapon in his hand, but there was nonetheless something about his tousled dirty blond hair and the way the red atmospheric light shone off his glasses that was deadly.

"Allow me to introduce you," said Renge. "Meet our final challenger, the host club fan club paintball committee's secret weapon, Red Team Player Ten!"

Honey tensed beside Mori; the taller third-year could feel the change in the atmosphere around him even before he glanced down at his partner. The innocent veneer had fled Honey's wide eyes even if the ominous name still managed to sound cute coming from his lips: "Chika-chan."

Across the chamber, Haninozuka Yasuchika allowed himself a devilish, lopsided smile. "Hello, Brother."

Great, Haruhi thought. I knew there had to be a catch.

Because the same thing had just happened in the Blue Base as well—except that it was Blue Team's secret Player Ten who had been introduced to her.

And instead of a teenager crouched in a ready position, the figure who faced Haruhi was tall and lanky and armed to the gills, dressed in fatigues the pockets of which were filled to near bursting with untold ammunition, and wearing a bandanna across its forehead the long tails of which waved gently in a draft, all of which served to cut a war-hardened personage that would have fit in something along the lines of Metal Gear Solid exceedingly well.

That image was challenged only by the long, wavy auburn hair that flowed in a luxurious ponytail most women would kill for over the figure's shoulder, and framed an androgynous face made only slightly less androgynous by a manly, Sonny Crockett-esque couple day's untouched growth of stubble.

Haruhi blinked. "Dad?"

Chapter Text

"That's right, Haruhi," said the man standing between herself and the Blue flag. "Daddy's home."

Surprise gave way to slight irritation as Haruhi quickly shook herself out of her stare. "Dad, what are you doing here? You told me you had to put in extra hours this weekend—"

"Did I?" Fujioka "Ranka" Ryouji, known to friends simply as Haruhi's father, thrust his hip out rather dandily as he crossed one arm, still holding a paintball rifle, under the other elbow, and looked up out of the corner of his eyes. "I distinctly recall saying that something came up, and that I was unexpectedly going to be very busy, but I don't remember saying that it was work related. Bless your heart for inferring that, though, Haruhi. I was wondering why you were making it so easy on me, not asking any questions. . . ."

Because Haruhi hadn't really wanted to hear about anything at the drag bar her father considered a job that would necessitate him working extra hours, just like she didn't like sharing what went on in the host club with him. They had something of a don't-ask-don't-tell policy at home, even if she was the only one who stuck by it.

But that was completely irrelevant in this situation.

"So, let me get this straight. You knew ahead of time about all this, and you didn't tell me?"

Ranka blinked. "Now, now. No need for that tone of voice. I thought it would be fun. You know, it's been a long time since you and I've shared a real, honest-to-goodness father-, er, son bonding experience—"

Yeah, Haruhi would have had to agree, and there was a good reason for that.

"Fun?" she said, waving her gun about. "I was gassed and kidnapped! What kind of parent are you?"

"But you're okay now, right?"

"And because of that, because you knew what was going to happen and didn't warn me, we're going to miss out on double coupons this week!"

A deep sadness came over Ranka's features at that—well, at the revelation that his daughter had been gassed; he couldn't care less about double coupons—and he blinked, as though at a gathering tear.

"Oh, Haruhi," he moaned, but she could sense a dangerous edge to his words, hiding just behind this veneer of hurt, "you're not going to hold it against me, are you? You're not going to . . . shoot your dear old dad . . ."

Yet even as he was saying so, he had raised the gun in each of his hands and pointed them in her direction.

"Are you?"

The tension was thick in the flag room inside the Red Base as Honey and Yasuchika stared each other down. One sudden move, Mori knew as he stood frozen beside his classmate, and the delicate situation they were in would snap like a dry twig, after which all hell would break loose.

His finger moving with aching slowness toward the trigger of his paintball gun, he could only hope he would be ready for it when it did.

"So. . . . It comes down to this, does it?"

Honey's voice, though no deeper than it was during any of their normal host club activities, was possessing now of a deadly intensity.

Yasuchika scoffed. "Don't look so surprised to see me, Mitsukuni. You had to see this coming. Has experience taught you nothing, my dear brother, or are you really as single-minded as you act in your little club not to know better by now? That girl—" He nodded toward nothing in particular. "—came to me after our last battle and made me an offer I could not refuse. If I bided my time, she said, if I threw everything I had into my training, the day would come when I would yet get my revenge for all the humiliation you've caused me. Well, I've pushed myself to the very limits of my abilities and then some, I've studied all your signature moves, overcome the weaknesses that were holding me back, and now the time promised me has come. Today, at last, on this island, I'll have my chance—and this time, I will defeat you, Mitsukuni!"

Honey's ensuing smile could hardly look more devilish.

"You seem to have neglected one tiny detail," he said. "There's two of us, and only one of you."

Mori gave a curt nod at that.

But Yasuchika just matched his older brother's grin, undaunted. "Those odds are fine by me. I have no problem going through Takashi to get to you, especially now that that little brother of his isn't here to rein me in."

Honey kept his cool, but Mori could see the muscles clenching in his jaw. "Mitsukuni, allow me—"

"I'm fine," Honey told him under his breath. "I can deal with him. Let him talk. He's just wasting his breath. One way or another, we're walking out of here with that flag. Right? Just like Tama-chan said: Victory or death!"

"Victory or death," Mori repeated, catching Honey's meaning in the look that passed between them. They would only have one chance at this. Unarmed though he appeared at the moment, Yasuchika couldn't be allowed to make the first move.

"Hey!" he barked from across the room. "No whispering. You have something to say, Mitsukuni, you own up to it, and say it to my face like a man."

"There's not really anything to say." Honey shrugged. "Except this— Eat paint!"

Barely had he spoken when Mori whipped his shotgun level from his side and blasted off a couple of rounds at Yasuchika. At the same time, Honey had dropped and was spraying paintballs in rapid succession in his brother's general direction.

But neither of them really expected it to be that easy. Yasuchika must have been prepared for just such a maneuver. He had dropped into a crouch even as he saw Mori making his first move, and was leaping out of the way as the first paintballs flew toward him, dodging them all with ease and disappearing behind a pile of crates.

His head emerged a moment later over the top of one of them, and a return volley of red paintballs came Honey and Mori's way. They split up, the latter hurrying for the safety of the metal staircase, providing covering fire for the former as he backflipped and dove toward a crate of his own.

Renge's nerve-jarring laughter rang through the air as the echoes of this first parley of ammunition died away.

"Oh, the bittersweet agony of it all!" she crooned over the PA system. "How fickle and cruel are the winds of war, that pit brother against brother, and father against son!"

This latter part was news to Honey and Mori, but they did not have the luxury of time to wonder what she meant by such a cryptic remark, as Yasuchika was keeping both pretty evenly on their toes, chucking a paint grenade in their direction. In fact, he was making it difficult to concentrate on anything Renge said. The two high schoolers promptly abandoned their hiding places for others, firing at the ever-elusive middle school karate champion as they did so, with no time to stop and think, let alone listen to her hackneyed speeches.

"It makes fighting all the more difficult when family is involved, doesn't it?"

Honey would have had to disagree there, if it weren't for the fact that his little brother was the toughest opponent he had faced yet.

"What a terrible choice you must make, whether to do the unthinkable and forsake the family whose blood runs through your veins."

But their objective could not be clearer. They had to take Yasuchika down before he did them in himself. And there wasn't really any love lost in that decision.

"And yet, you have to ask yourself: How badly do you want to win? Bad enough to kill? You've made it this far now—too far to throw it all away, or waste your time wishing in vain there was another way. But I guess the answer to where your true loyalties lie shall reveal itself shortly. Best of luck to you, my secret players! And to you, to whom the lot falls to fight them. May the best men win."

Back in Alpha Base's control room, Renge stood back and smiled to herself.

She turned to the turntable on the desk beside her and lowered the needle onto the record at just the right point.

Then, still in her faux-SS uniform, she turned to face the wall of monitors that was being manned by the hired film crew with her hands clasped at the small of her back.

"Put Red Base and Blue Base on the main screen," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," came the immediate reply, and a second later the various feeds dissolved to show Haruhi in the Blue Base on one half of the screen, Honey and Mori in the Red Base on the other.

Renge smiled to herself with satisfaction as the first strains of "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" filled the room and the rest of the island's PA system, her right hand unconsciously moving along with the familiar melody as though it held a conductor's baton, leading not only the music but the action on the screens that played out like it was all choreographed to it. Maybe her authority here was going to her head, but she could get used to this kind of treatment. It felt a little bit like being a god.

All that was left to do now was sit back and watch the drama unfold. It all came down to this; the whole game rode on the outcome of these two battles. Whether it would end in the next few minutes, or continue on to a final showdown in this very building, she could only wait to find out.

Either way, her work, for now, was done.

Haruhi had ducked for cover as soon as she realized her father was serious about playing the game. Paintballs exploded left and right around her, but she made it safely behind a crate just as Renge's message came over the PA system. Neither of them paid particular attention to what she was saying. Knowing it was something trite and melodramatic was enough.

Besides, they were too preoccupied exchanging fire around the corners of their respective crates to listen carefully; and Ranka was doing his best maniacal-villain laugh as he fired a round that struck particularly close to Haruhi's bent knee, just as she had begun to reload.

She caught just a glimpse of his smug smile before she backed further out of sight, and figured it was probably useless to call a time-out. Combined with the buoyant strains of the waltz building around them, it was quite a surreal situation indeed in which she found herself.

"What's the matter, Haruhi?" Ranka's voice rang as she poured another canister of paintballs into her gun. "Didn't think I'd go easy on you this time, did you? You didn't actually think I'd just let you win your little game, like all those times when you were just a young boy. Those days are over."

"Let me win what games?" Haruhi muttered to herself. When she thought back to all those family game nights over the years, she distinctly remembered someone gloating about his victory like a spoiled little girl—who, it should be noted, was neither little nor, at least technically, a girl. Needless to say, it was never pretty when Ranka got competitive.

Besides, she couldn't remember the last time she had asked her father to go easy on her, or help her through something, and it wasn't like she was going to start now.

But that was beside Ranka's point. It was quite apparent by the cocky heaviness of his booted footsteps on the metal grating that surrounded the Blue flag, that the truth was the last thing on her father's mind. He was playing the game, yes, but as an actor.

Which really didn't come as any surprise.

"Don't think this is a walk in the park for me either," Ranka said, in a suitable impression of the evil authority figure from any dystopic-future flick. "You know, when they came to me about playing in the game, they asked me: Would you have any problem shooting your own child? Your own offspring? And I thought about it for a moment and decided, yeah, 'course I would. What parent wouldn't?

"But then I thought . . ." He trailed off, becoming pensive. "Why should that stop me? That Haruhi of mine has always got his nose buried in some book or another, or prancing around like a fairy in that host club of his. Getting shot at might actually do him some good. He needs to get out there with the elements, get back to nature, toughen up. It's time Haruhi learned to be a man."

He said this last part with such hackneyed relish that Haruhi couldn't help grimacing in embarrassment and shaking her head. Be a man, huh? Prancing around like a fairy, huh? Of course, she was picking up pretty quickly on the irony, yes, but wasn't that still the pot calling the kettle black?

She was even more mortified a moment later at her father's somewhat dainty chuckle. "I always wanted to say that."

So much for his acting. . . . Haruhi pinched her forefinger and thumb to the bridge of her nose as though to staunch the onset of a sudden headache. She couldn't take it any more.

"Oh God, I just remembered," she groaned, "the whole club is going to see you like this."

Ranka blinked.

"Why, Haruhi? Are you ashamed of me?"

No, not at all. It was just that, for once in her life, Haruhi was sad to say she would not have complained too much if a stray bolt of lightning came out of the blue and struck her numb right then and there. "Would you listen to yourself? And you wonder why I don't tell you about upcoming school events. You're like a walking cliche."

She was a little surprised when, rather than be indignant, Ranka actually responded enthusiastically.

"See?" he said. "This is good! You've got all this teenage frustration bottled up and you can finally get it out! I'm really glad we can be having this conversation, Haruhi. I just knew this would be a good exercise for our relationship."

"Dad, this really isn't the place—"

"Nonsense. What better time to talk about these sorts of issues than when you're in a fight for your life?"

Never mind that their lives were not actually at stake. . . . "Dad, they're videotaping all of this!" Whatever had possessed him to think she would actually want to air their dirty laundry in front of her classmates—and not just the host club either, but their entire fanbase—was beyond Haruhi. "Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called tact?"

"Oh, listen to you, Miss—Mister Party-pooper. And where's your sense of adventure, huh? Jeez, and after I got all dolled up for the occasion. . . ."

Haruhi chose that moment to make her move. While he was distracted by that thought, she burst from her hiding place. Anywhere else was fine; she just had to move.

Ranka saw her running for it and turned, but Haruhi fired first. It was a lucky shot, but still off the mark. The red paintball winged his upper arm, taking Ranka aback momentarily.

But he recovered with a vengeance, and came after Haruhi with the gun raised in his other hand, firing as she ducked through a doorway off the flag room and flattened herself against the other side of the wall.

"Nice try," he shouted after her, "appealing to my vanity. But I won't let my guard down like that again, and there are only so many places you can hide, Haru-kun. . . ."

"Eye on the prize," Haruhi told herself, ignoring him and his made-up nicknames as he went off monologuing once again. She knew what this exercise had been intended for all along, and that was to distract her from her goal. The Blue flag was still hanging out in the open in the other room, where she was, if anything, much less closer to it than she had been before; but Haruhi was well aware that if she went after it now, she would only be an easy target for her father.

Nor did she think he would hesitate to take a clear shot. If family game night had taught her anything, it was that her father was a relentless opportunist and proud of it—come to think of it, it was no wonder he and Kyouya got along so well—and he would pick her off at the first chance he could get. He would not take mercy on her, and consequently, she should not show him any herself.

But she had to get rid of him in order to get the flag down in safety. . . .

Wait a second, Haruhi thought. I'm making this seem far more difficult than it really is.

After all, it was just like Renge to throw something like her father at her to try and trip her up, mess with her concentration; but those tricks never worked on Haruhi before, and she wasn't about to let them work now. Where her studies were concerned, she took pride in her ability to shut out all outside distractions even to the point of stick-in-the-mud bullheadedness, precisely because it was thanks to that kind of mindset and work ethic that she had come as far as she had. As far as she could see, this game was no different. What kind of person would she be, she thought, if she let one guy with a toy gun tear all that hard work down? Even if he was her father. After all, it was her father, and her mother before him, who had impressed in her that great drive to win, to persevere against all odds, and beat tomfoolery at its own game.

They had taught her she could be anything she imagined, and right now she was picturing herself winner of this silly game. She hadn't even wanted to participate in the first place, but it was a matter of principle now. She had a fresh load of paintballs in her gun, and the Blue flag was burning its image into her inner eye, calling to her to come and get it. All she needed now was a plan. . . .

It was at that moment that she saw Ranka's shadow fall over the concrete floor at the doorway through which she had escaped. He was coming; her time was up—

"Haru-kun?"

Ranka cast one glance around the corner into the hallway, then leaped into it, gun at the ready for the first sign of his daughter that presented itself.

But, as far as he could see, the hallway was empty.

"You can't hide forever, son," he crooned in his sweetest voice, but even that could not hide the deadly intent in his every cautious step forward. His bedroom eyes swept the hallway, but the paintball rifle remained poised and ready for action. If only he could hear anything over that blasted "Blue Danube". . . .

Alas, it was too catchy to resist. For a brief moment, the adrenaline of the game and the merry melody swept Ranka up in a quick little three-step—all the way over to a couple of crates stacked against the wall. He swung the muzzle of the rifle into the shadow behind it without warning, but there was nothing there.

Still, undaunted, Ranka took a quick assessment of his surroundings; and when his eyes alit on the rickety metal staircase leading up to a catwalk above, he could not help breaking into a wicked grin. He scanned the area above. There was no place to hide up there, so if Haruhi were planning to escape to the next level he would see her; but the only movement on the second floor came from the slowly turning blades of the ventilation fan.

The space under the stairs, however, was just the kind of place she would be naturally attracted to; and there were boxes in the way, so he wouldn't be able to see her at first. It would be the perfect place to stage an ambush.

Ranka chuckled. Unfortunately, there was one major downside to her chosen hiding place, and that was that there was only one way in and out of that tight little corner, and in about three seconds he would have that very well covered. He didn't bother with subtlety anymore. She was boxed in, and she might as well know it.

"Clever, sonny-boy," he muttered under his breath, "if not very original. But if that's your choice, then . . ."

He braced himself, turned, and aimed both guns into the dark corner under the stairs.

"Game over."

Ranka didn't know how apt those words truly were until he felt the first impact right between the shoulder blades. It felt kind of like getting a hard massage, so it took a few seconds—one—for his eyes to adjust to the dark and see there was nothing in the corner under the stairs but a dead spider, and two, to realize that the thing that had hit him, and that continued to hit him as he jumped and spun around in shock, was just about the right size to be a paintball.

The fact of the matter was, when he turned around, there was Haruhi, stepping out from a nook he had overlooked and staring down the long, thin barrel of her paintball gun with a sparkle in her wide brown eyes that almost looked like . . . Yes, could it really be the elusive look of his daughter having fun?

Ranka could only stare in shock. He hardly registered the last paintball she fired for good measure as it hit him square on the right nipple. He opened his mouth but only a pathetic croak came out.

Haruhi blinked then, and lowered the gun.

"You're dead," she said then like it was the most natural thing in the world. "So, can I have the flag now?"

She looked at him as though half expecting something else to jump at her from out of Renge's proverbial sleeves. But what she did not know was that inside Ranka's head, for reasons he could not understand himself given the circumstances, he was trying exceedingly hard not to sweep her up in a bear hug right then and there.

"Haruhi. . . . You shot your old man in the back, just so you could get that stupid flag?"

Haruhi glanced around. "Er, well, I figured if I'm going to be stuck in this game—"

"I'm so proud of you, sport!"

That last part didn't come out quite as intelligibly as Ranka meant it, but Haruhi got his meaning well enough as he sniffled and wiped his cheek with the back of his arm, the paintball gun still tight in his grip. She could feel her face growing hot in mortification all over again. "Come on, Dad, do you really have to—"

"Oh, I'm just relieved is all. For a minute there, I thought I really was going to have to take you out."

Haruhi didn't know which was worse, her father at his most incoherent, or her father, coherent, calling her such endearing names as "sport" and "sonny-boy" that couldn't possibly sound less genuine when her schoolmates got to hear all of it later.

Boy, if Hikaru and Kaoru saw this, she'd never live it down. "This is really awkward. . . ." Haruhi muttered to herself.

But Ranka would hear none of it. "Well?" He waved to the doorway from which they had come with his gun when she hesitated to leave him, and Haruhi could not shake the feeling that something was a little backward here. "What are you waiting for? Go on! You've earned that flag. You take it, and you go and you win this incredibly gay contest!"

It was a horse of a different color over at the Red Base. Paintballs whizzed this way and that through the air, popping in time with the waltz and the gravity-defying acrobatic feats of the combatants.

One moment Yasuchika was kicking off a concrete pylon to cartwheel through the air, firing at his upperclassmen as he did so; while Mori wielded his shotgun like it was a samurai sword, slashing through the incoming paintballs so that they burst against the plastic chassis, their spatter falling ineffectively on his hair and uniform jacket like a light misty rain.

Honey fired back from within his lee, but Yasuchika, once again solidly on his feet, contorted his body this way and that and dodged each fatal shot with the ease of the Drunken Master himself, as though everything was stuck on slow motion but for him.

He spun as he descended, and was able to launch a couple of grenades in their direction before he disappeared behind a crate again.

It forced Honey and Mori to leap back for cover as well, shielding their faces from the worst of the splatter with their arms.

When it cleared, Mori was struck by a bolt of inspiration as he saw what it was the two of them had inadvertently hurried behind. Empty oil drums were stacked in a pyramid over their heads, the ends facing out so that each ping of Yasuchika's paintballs off of them rang loudly in the duo's ears. He had them pinned down fairly well at this position; and though there were plenty of openings in which Honey and Mori could fire off a return shot, they would need a bigger distraction than that if they wanted to get to a location that afforded a better angle.

"I've got an idea," Mori said.

The volleys of blue paintballs ceased, but Yasuchika knew better than to let his guard down. He adjusted his glasses and squinted, hoping to catch in the spaces between the barrels a peek of what his older brother might have up his sleeve, and that was when the oil drum pyramid at which he had been aiming began to move.

At first it was just one drum dislodging itself from the stack and rolling with a heavy thunk down to the concrete floor. Then the whole pile began to collapse.

And they were moving fast. And in Yasuchika's direction.

But none so fast nor so straight on course as that first one.

Yasuchika clenched his teeth in a snarl of frustration. He didn't need to actually catch them in the act to know that Honey and Mori had been behind this latest maneuver; only their combined strength could get that many barrels moving with such deadly precision. And as they rolled, the latter of said conspirators suddenly hopped up onto the nearest crate, and fired at Yasuchika as he sprinted from one to the other, forcing the younger Haninozuka to retreat right down into the oil drums' path of destruction.

Ducking out of the line of Mori's fire, Yasuchika shot at the one particularly intent drum that was barreling toward him, but his paintballs ping-ed harmlessly against the dented side of it, and it kept rolling on until Yasuchika had no choice but to leap out of the way.

The drum hit a pylon, its momentum throwing it back up into the air. And in that split second in which it hung suspended, who should come springing out of it in a hail of paintballs like some gun-toting Jack-in-the-box from hell but Chika's older brother. He dismounted nimbly on his free left hand, and, while he was thus precariously balanced upside-down, aimed a perfect blow with the top of his foot to the now empty drum in midair. Slight though Honey seemed, there was enough power in his kick to send the heavy drum hurling through the air after his little brother.

It was enough of a distraction to allow Honey to flip back toward safety, because for the next few seconds Yasuchika was too preoccupied trying not to get hit by a flying metal barrel to watch and see exactly where his brother disappeared to.

Needless to say, however, Yasuchika had had just about enough of both of them. Never had he felt so humiliated in battle as he did now. There was no honor in a tag-team job like this one, to say nothing of the low parlor tricks they had taken to employing. . . .

Yasuchika hadn't thought it was possible to feel more ashamed of his older brother and his friend, but, his elders though they might have been, he could find within him not an ounce of respect for their tactics. Where others might have seen inventiveness, Yasuchika saw only a shameful mockery of the martial art forms he revered so much.

That was the difference between the two brothers. To Honey, these tactics of his and Mori's were not dishonorable, because there was no established set of ethics for paintball deathmatch capture-the-flag. The name of the game was whatever it took to survive.

Or, in his case at present, to reload in safety. And Honey was down to his last tube of paintballs.

But that knowledge did not particularly worry him.

Mori came into his line of sight on Honey's right, but Yasuchika's fire kept him low. A look passed between them that both understood without the need for words.

"Takashi—" Honey began.

He didn't need to finish. Honey's gaze lifted from his friend's to the Red Flag hanging in the air over Mori's shoulder, and it was as though they were of one mind. Both knew they had only a few seconds' wiggle room, so Mori immediately bent his knees and clasped his fingers between them, palms upward.

Honey was already racing toward him, even before he got fully into position. He catapulted himself over a crate with one hand, landing lightly in Mori's palms, which then shot him up like a rocket, straight at the catwalk overhead. Honey grabbed the railing with his free hand and swung himself over, landing in a crouch on the metal grating with a solid clunk.

Yasuchika had glanced upward briefly to watch his progress through the air, but it was only for a moment as Mori, his mission completed, snapped off another few rounds in his direction. "Tch. . . ." The middle-schooler gritted his teeth as he was forced to turn his attention away from his older brother and concentrate on the larger threat, the senior Morinozuka.

Honey busied himself with the knots holding one corner of the Red flag in place. Below him, Mori and Yasuchika circled around each other like solitary dancers in time with the waltz, moving from cover to cover, Mori with the added burden of keeping Yasuchika firing at him rather than at Honey up above. It was a delicate dance, and one Honey couldn't risk letting carry on much longer. He tried simply untying the rope, but Mori needed his help below. So a quick flick of the shuriken carried around inside his uniform just in case something like this ever went down did the trick.

One half of the flag came free, and Yasuchika was within spitting distance just below his position. Honey grabbed on tight to his end of the flag, thought happy thoughts, and swung off the catwalk, straight toward where his little brother crouched firing at Mori. He felt the other end of the rope give, but it held just long enough to carry him safely to the ground.

Yasuchika had only a second to glance up and see the black and blue blur moving fast toward him, let alone a moment to fire, before the billowing flag fell over his field of vision.

Honey dismounted a few meters away with but a tiny sigh of relief.

But Mori knew they were not out of the woods yet. Dropping the flag over Yasuchika had been about as harmless as shaking a hornet's nest. The younger Haninozuka was pissed, and the longer he had to thrash about under the unnecessarily large Red Flag to free himself, the angrier he became.

"Mi . . . tsu . . . ku . . . ni-i-i. . . ." came the growl from within.

Mori could see it coming. While Honey brushed the dust off himself, looking quite satisfied that some good, old fashioned swashbuckling had taught his brother a lesson about being cocky with one's elders, Mori was racing to his side.

He reached it just in time to push Honey out of the line of fire.

Because at that very moment a spray of red paintballs arced out of the folds of the flag as though a materialization of Yasuchika's curse. They barely missed Honey, on account of Mori's quick thinking.

But his friend was not as lucky. The paintballs cut a perforated line across his torso from hip to shoulder, and even though Mori's expression remained unchanged, he knew at once that he was done for.

And that was all right with him now.

The shotgun fell from his hand, clattering on the concrete floor, its purpose fulfilled.

Yasuchika whipped the flag off his head with one hand, and a smirk spread across his lips when he saw the damage his otherwise random fire had wrought.

It was that victorious smirk that remained with Honey as he was pushed behind a stack of crates by Mori, and it was the first indication Honey had that something was wrong.

"Takashi?"

The music, once so carefree and joyful, took on an irreversibly bitter note to Honey's ears as he tugged Mori around to face him. His friend wouldn't look him in the eye, but the splotches of red making a grotesque pattern all across Mori's shirt and jacket told enough.

"Forget about me, Mitsukuni—"

"No! Takashi, you big dummy!" It hit Honey like a ton of bricks then. This wasn't just a game anymore; it stopped being fun the moment he lost his best teammate and dearest friend to the cold jaws of deathmatch elimination. "You were supposed to be there with me until the end! We were supposed to deliver the flag together! How could you do something so stupid?"

"You would have been hit. I did what I had to do—"

"I would have been fine—"

"You would have been disqualified."

Mori narrowed his eyes, and Honey found, as usual, that he could not resist the calm logic in his friend's voice, much as he wanted to deny the plain truth that was staring him in the face. It was useless now to argue what might have been. The damage had been done, and there was no undoing it.

"Takashi. . . ."

Honey's eyes welled up with tears at the thought of going it alone from here on out—of going on without his faithful Takashi—but he held them back. Now was not the time to mourn the loss of a comrade, what with paintballs continuing to splatter the corners of the wooden grates, as though to taunt Honey out of his hiding place.

"Come on already, Mitsukuni," his brother jeered. "No one likes a squatter."

Honey's jaw clenched of its own accord, as did his fingers around his gun. "Chika-chan. . . ." he growled. "I'm gonna kill 'im."

But Mori's hand on his arm grounded him in a heartbeat.

All he needed was one simple word: "Win."

It was not a last request. It was a command. There was no other option left for Honey now except victory, and it would be his. For Takashi's sake. For the honor of his sacrifice. And for the sake of all their comrades who had fallen in battle across the island that day. He would yet live to see the Red Flag planted on Alpha Base's doorstep.

Slowly, he rose, his chest heaving with his barely contained rage and wide blue eyes glaring daggers if ever they did at Yasuchika.

For a second—just one, brief heartbeat, but a second nonetheless—that look shook Yasuchika in a place deep down he had forgotten about; but he shrugged it off. Because this time when his brother rose, Morinozuka Takashi was nowhere to be found.

"So," he said around a sneer, "it's just you and me now, is it, Mitsukuni?"

Honey's riposte was cold as ice: "Just the way it should be, Chika-chan."

"For once, it looks like that's something the two of us can agree on."

Who could say for certain who made the first move.

The fact was, someone twitched, and the next moment the air was full once again of the hiss and pop of paintballs, punctuating each beat of the swelling waltz. Yasuchika jerked to his left, running alongside the back end of one row of crates as he did his best to hit his brother; and Honey followed, cutting to his right, keeping his aim tight. The wild American West of the silver screen had never seen a gun battle so fast and so accurate with so little at stake; and each tense moment more, the two Haninozuka brothers drew closer and closer to one another.

At last they ran out of cover, and Honey and Yasuchika came up face to face, a mere ten paces between them, each one pointing his gun straight at the other.

And, his mouth a tight line of determination, each one pulled the trigger at the same time.

Nothing issued from either gun but the empty hiss of air. As luck would have it, they had both completely spent their ammunition. Yasuchika cursed under his breath, his heart racing and his glasses fogging at the edges; while across the way, as though this were all just some entertaining game, a smile crept wider and wider onto Honey's face. One could practically see the gears turning with lightning speed inside his head. Each one knew: if they could not defeat each other by paintballs, they had other means at their disposal—weapons that did not need to be reloaded.

And timing was of the essence. Yasuchika knew all too well that it would take mere heartbeats for his older brother to clear the ten or so paces between them.

Tossing aside his useless gun, Yasuchika spied a broom leaning randomly against the wall, and took the opportunity that chance had afforded him.

As Honey's foot came flying at him, Yasuchika deflected it with the broom handle, then came back with a quick one-two—which Honey blocked—followed by an over-the-shoulder twirl and downward cut to the side.

He hadn't kept a kendo champ as his closest friend all these years without picking up a thing or two, and Yasuchika had a lot of power in his swing besides. Any lesser opponent and it would have knocked the breath out of him; but Honey's hand was there to grab the end of the handle whose blow his side had softened. And Yasuchika was not in a position to pull away, but could only watch as his brother shattered the wooden shaft with the heel of his hand.

Yasuchika dropped what remained of the stick and jumped back, narrowly avoiding Honey's attempt to literally sweep him off his feet with his half of the broom. There was no crying over broken janitorial supplies for him, no sir. The Haninozuka brothers were, after all, first and foremost karate champions, even if one of them was no longer very serious about it. Guns and projectiles were all well and good, but they fought best with their own two, empty fists.

They exchanged their blows with a lightning speed and precision that anyone but themselves would have found difficult to keep up with. But those two did keep up, and each was frustrated by his brother's excellent defense. The blows and kicks they did land were rather ineffectual against an opponent who was ready for each one and more than capable of absorbing that energy—and flinging it right back at his attacker in spades.

Honey caught Yasuchika's kick at his head with his wrist, and the sharp look in his eyes, almost inhuman, for a moment made Yasuchika falter. He flipped back before his older brother could counterattack and got out of the way.

It was a brief respite, but long enough for each one to breathe and replenish a bit of his strength before they jumped back into the fray and at each other's throats. Yasuchika assessed the damage Honey had done to his stamina, quickly sized up how the other was holding together, and knew that his brother was doing the exact same thing—trying to determine before the next move just where each of them stood.

And Yasuchika was sorry to say he couldn't tell any which way for certain.

"Give up," he panted, blinking the burning sweat out of his eyes, and it seemed as much an admonition to himself to stay on his toes as it was a suggestion for his brother. "Just admit it . . . this time . . . I've got you beat."

"Never." Honey was breathing just as hard as he was, but his eyes were as bright as ever with his determination. Like he was just biding his time. . . . "You know the rules. It's not over until one of us gets tagged mortally."

A snort escaped Yasuchika at that.

"But you seem to have forgotten one thing, big brother. We're both out of ammo."

"Yes . . . but Takashi isn't."

Yasuchika's blood went cold inside his veins. Honey could sense him tense, and knew his little brother was desperately looking around for his classmate's shotgun. It didn't matter what color paintballs they used now. Even Yasuchika was finding it easier and more attractive to toss his sense of battlefield ethics out the window on this one. This was deathmatch capture-the-flag, and if the rules necessitated a kill by paintball, then that's what it was going to take to win this fight.

And each one was determined to be the winner, at any cost.

Honey used his brother's distraction to break free of their stalemate and go for the gun, but Yasuchika's reflexes were surprisingly quick, and he was right there at Honey's heels, grabbing at his older brother's coattails, anything to slow him down and buy himself more time.

Honey's fingertips grabbed at the strap of Mori's shotgun, but Yasuchika was there as well, and he yanked his older but smaller brother back in a tough judo hold that even Honey did not seem able to resist.

With the last of his effort, Yasuchika lifted Honey over his shoulder and threw him.

But he forgot for one moment just who his opponent was; and he neglected to foresee that he was not actually thwarting his brother by doing so, but aiding in his own demise.

Honey turned as he was tossed through the air, and as he did so the paintball gun turned as well, so that when Honey's feet hit a pylon, the gun slid neatly into place in his fingers. Snappier than a fly on the wall, he pushed off with his toes, and flipped head-over-heels over Yasuchika's head, to land nimbly behind his younger brother, armed and at an advantage.

He fired thrice, and Yasuchika fell to his knees, his midsection a wash of bright blue.

"No. . . ." Yasuchika said, his eyes wide behind his glasses as he stared down in utter disbelief at his fingertips, covered almost obscenely in blue paint. "I can't be . . . After everything I put into this. . . ."

"You lost," Honey said flatly. "Again."

"But how can I—"

Honey shook his head. "Oh, Chika-chan, you'll never learn. Not as long as you keep seeing this thing called you and me as a simple matter of victory or defeat."

"But what else can there be between us?" Yasuchika looked up at his brother from over the rims of his glasses, and under the sweat-dampened fringe of his fair hair, and there was nothing in those eyes but the same old anger, making him blind to what to Honey seemed so obvious.

"How 'bout love?" Honey tried.

For a moment, his tactic almost seemed to have worked; but then Yasuchika dismissed it with a sad sigh. How many times had he been over this, and it still hadn't sunk in?

"Love. . . . You have disgraced the Haninozuka name—no, made it a laughing-stock—and you speak to me of love and fraternity and reconciliation? As if I wanted to be a part of your stupid club and its juvenile, sissy games!"

"You already are."

And as soon as those words left Honey's mouth, a pale fell over his younger brother's features like it had rarely done before—despite all the embarrassments, the crushing defeats of the past. He was right. . . .

Damn it all, it hurt to admit it, but Honey was right. All this time, Yasuchika had thought he was in this for his own noble purposes, when he was really being used—another pawn in Renge Houshakuji's game, and another actor in her drama. And he had played all too eagerly into her hands. . . .

"The flag," Mori said then, shaking both brothers out of their respective thoughts.

"That's right!"

Instantly, Honey was back to his normal, bright and cheery self. "Thank you, Takashi," he said. "I nearly forgot what we came here for in the first place!"

Looking a little like an extra from a zombie movie, spattered as he was with bright red paint, Mori just gave his friend a barely perceptible, little nod.

Honey picked up the flag from where it had fallen, and bundled it up for transport to Alpha Base.

"This isn't over, Mitsukuni." The words practically tore themselves from Yasuchika. "Two against one—that ain't a level playing field no matter how you cut it. Next time you and I are going to meet somewhere there aren't so many distractions skewing the results, and then you'll see. On that day, I will uphold—no, I will avenge the Haninozuka name."

Honey smiled at that.

He could think of a thing or two to say in response, but none of them would have helped; so, he did what only a big brother in all his venerable patience would have been able to do, and kept his big mouth shut.

Chapter Text

In contrast, no one could have been less upset at being eliminated from the game than Kasanoda. His loss early on just meant he had more time to enjoy the local fauna. At present he was busy poking around inside one of the tide pools on the reef, watching little crabs scuttle about and making sea anemones fold their tentacles in with his fingertip.

It was about that time that he happened to look up and glimpse the tops of some heads moving above the rocks.

And while he was sorely tempted to just ignore them and return his attention to the sea anemones and crabs that had caught his fancy these last few hours—he just realized now that he didn't even know what time it was; he hadn't bothered to check his watch in quite a while—something, call it a sixth sense or whatever, told him that there was something rather suspicious in the way these heads moved, something too important to just ignore.

He recognized the two identical copper heads as belonging to the same Hitachiin brothers who had rushed him in the woods. Two more atrocious haircuts identified his archenemies, the brothers Akutaro and Akujiro. But the person leading them all, with the fair hair and sharp, almost foreign-looking eyes, and the puffed out chest. . . .

Not that it should have surprised him to see these people together. The twins had started this game on the same team as Kuze and his football teammates, but there was something about the way they were walking that seemed a bit off. Craning his neck, Kasanoda soon saw why. Hikaru and Kaoru were walking so stiffly and unhappily—and Kuze so proudly, apparently—because they were tied up as though by savages for a cannibal's stew with thick ropes.

This did strike Kasanoda as more than a little off; so he waited until their backs were turned and slowly—making sure to keep low behind the rocks at all times—followed after them, curious to see just what they were up to.

They rounded a corner of the cliff, and there Kasanoda saw them going into a natural cave that he had had no idea was even there until now. There was a small fire made of driftwood and dried palm leaves burning inside, and it lit the interior of the cave enough for him to make out three more figures moving within, one of whom was very dark indeed.

"Just about done," he could hear that person say as he flattened himself against a rocky ledge just outside the cave. He recognized that voice, which echoed just as darkly off the chamber walls, as belonging to Nekozawa, his own teammate; and, even though there was no love lost between them, the shock of realizing he had been betrayed made Kasanoda's cheeks hot.

"The collars' set-up is really quite simple," a camouflage-draped Nekozawa was saying as he loomed over Komatsuzawa, who was sitting on a large rock before the fire like it was a barber's chair, and had his head bent uncomfortably away from the other. Perhaps he actually believed that rubbish he published about the black magic club in his paper; although, in Komatsuzawa's defense, Kasanoda could honestly say that he wouldn't want Nekozawa Umehito that close to his face if he could help it either.

Under other circumstances, perhaps he would have felt some kinship with Tamaki over this. As it was, he was too busy concentrating on what Nekozawa was telling the others of the collars:

"They communicate with one another using a basic set of channels, the Red collars programmed to one channel, the Blue collars to another. No expense spared, huh? Kirimi's baby monitor was more complicated than this. Once you find the right mechanism, it's simply a matter of switching all of ours to one of the unused channels, and—" He let go of Komatsuzawa with a florid gesture, as though he had just healed the journalism club president with a laying on of hands. "Voila. Orange Team is up and running."

He turned to Ukyou as Komatsuzawa rose from his rock, Beelzenev beckoning with one little felt hand. "You're next."

Ukyou went white as a sheet.

"Good." Kuze pronounced this verdict with the finality of a king as he strode into the cave and—to Ukyou's relief—took the seat Komatsuzawa had vacated as though it were his throne. "Now that our communication problem is solved, we can start formulating an offensive strategy."

"You're not going to make us memorize those crazy diagrams again, are you?" Akujiro grumbled, earning a glare from the football captain.

"So what if I am? I'm the leader here, aren't I? I'm the one who brought you on board with this plan in the first place, and you're not going to pull off a first down let alone the revenge you want without my guidance."

"You should listen to him," Tarumi said. "The Orages have been undefeated ever since he made captain of the team."

"Oh, really?" Komatsuzawa smirked. "Is that how you two got your asses handed to you by the host club?"

"I'd like to see you go one-on-one with a Morinozuka-sempai armed with a shotgun! If I remember right, you were defeated by a creek a four-year-old could hop-scotch across!"

Komatsuzawa bit his lip, bristling like an angry cat.

But Kuze's patiently raised hand silenced them both, and Tougouin looked around at them all impassively as if daring anyone else to challenge his captain's authority.

"The fact of the matter is," Kuze said, "all of us here are 'dead.' We were all eliminated from the game, and it doesn't matter how freakish the particulars of that were, we can't change what's already over and done with. But we can do something about it. And if we are going to do something about it, then we better remember what it is that keeps us united. We may have started this game out on opposing sides, but we have the same objective in mind now, and the same enemy. We can't allow ourselves to forget for a moment that the host club and their fan club are behind this, because if we do and we're all fighting among ourselves—well, then we're worse off than we were at the start of this game.

"And I, for one, am not going to stand for it. I didn't ask to be kidnapped and made to spend my weekend fighting in some stupid game for some silly girls' enjoyment, and I'm going to make damn sure they remember that. So, if you all wanna quibble like a bunch of sissy-pants, you can get out and forget I ever asked you to join me. But if you want justice, then I suggest you listen to what I have to say. Now, here's what we're going to do. . . ."

As he began to explain the next course of action to the boys huddled around him, Hikaru and Kaoru tried to capture the attention of Nekozawa, who hung back a little from the group. Although he had been responsible for taking them out of the game, he was nonetheless the closest thing to a friendly face they could hope to find in this wretched hive of scum and villainy that Kuze's cave had become.

After hearing his name so many times, he looked over at them impatiently.

"Help us out here, Sempai," Kaoru stage whispered. "I mean, come on, your club is like our club's next-door neighbor—"

"The neighbor with the creepy house under which you suspect to be buried a couple of bodies," added Hikaru.

"And whose doorbell you can just barely bring yourself to ring before running away in mortal terror—"

"—but a neighbor nonetheless!"

"You might almost say our Bizarro Mister Rogers."

"The point is, think of all the good times we've shared at our lord's expense and try to find within your soul—maybe way back in the far corner; there's gotta be one in there somewhere—some sympathy for our plight and let us out of this, okay?"

"Yeah. At least loosen the ropes a little bit? I mean, what in the Devil's name would make you want to play second fiddle to a guy like Kuze—"

"You don't even have to make it obvious. Just get it started. We can worm our own way out from there."

Nekozawa just laughed at them then, however, and said loud enough for the rest of the cave to hear, cutting Kuze off, "Please. Your suffering moves me naught.

"Besides," he added with an otherworldly glint in his eyes that reminded them of a certain lordship, "as a representative of my club, I have a sacred duty here to represent it faithfully, and so far my behavior toward my fellow team members has not been particularly evil. That must be rectified. I have an order to keep within my own club, and a fan base to satisfy."

The twins would have laughed, if they weren't tied up and terribly uncomfortable.

"Fan base?" said Hikaru.

"So," said Kaoru, "in other words, you're hoping your mistreatment of us—"

"Will stave off a mutiny back home—"

"Because you had to be all buddy-buddy with our lord for all of, like, five minutes?"

"Precisely," Nekozawa said with a smile that they thought was much too wide considering the circumstances. "Which is why you two can sit nice and tight, because you're not going anywhere on my watch."

"Indeed, you are not. . . ." Kuze stared at them pensively, and the twins didn't care one bit for the hungry gleam in his eyes as he slowly smiled. "You two should feel honored. You're the most important part of our plan, Hikaoru. You guys're our ticket inside that fortress of Houshakuji's."

"Hostages, more like," Hikaru grumbled.

"Thanks to you, we now have something very precious to her with which to bargain. I'm sure she's well rehearsed on the rules of engagement."

"Are we talking about the same Renge here? The one whose idea of mortal combat is making sure she's first in line for the newest love sim?"

"She wouldn't want anything to happen to her beloved twin characters. She'll have no choice but to listen to our demands," Kuze continued like they hadn't spoken, "once she sees we have you two in our clutches. We'll see just how much she likes to play when her little pawns decide they've had enough of her games."

"We really don't think—" the twins started, but they didn't get much else out as they were tugged to their feet again by Akutaro and Akujiro.

Because at that moment Kuze rose from his seat, the fire uplighting him and his red-splotched shirt front like a blood-bathed hero from long ago, burning in his sharp eyes as though there were a fire, literally, in his soul.

"If we're decided, then there's no more time to waste," he said through a lopsided smile that was positively epic. "We're burning daylight here, men, and I think I speak for everyone when I say I'd prefer to sleep in my own bed tonight."

"Let's go!" Tarumi said, shooting up from his own rock, and there were echoes of concurrence all around. "And show that otaku girl who's really in charge!"

"Yeah, we'll teach her a thing or two!" said Akutaro.

"Try to stick us in an indie picture!" said Akujiro.

Komatsuzawa shot up and pumped his rifle, the firelight glowing dangerously off his glasses. "That crazy bitch owes me a new uniform."

His intensity earned him a few strange looks, before everyone soon decided the sentiment was close enough, if a bit over the top.

They doused the fire and, with Kuze leading the pack, strode back out into the afternoon light, paintball guns leaning on their shoulders and the Hitachiin brothers ushered along between them.

Kasanoda hurried for cover when he saw them coming, but they were too absorbed in their mission to spot him among the shadowy rocks and bushes the bordered the beach. He watched them march into the jungle, pumping their fists and whooping in their excitement, preparing to follow a safe distance behind.

He didn't get too far before he spotted something going by in the brush off to his right. He turned at the sound and saw it was the kid, Shirou, who had stopped like a rabbit in headlights when he saw a member of the opposite team pointing a paintball gun at him.

"Hey! Come here," Kasanoda stage whispered, waving the kid over.

Shirou just stared at him with a look that said, You've gotta be shitting me.

Kasanoda remembered where he was then and lowered the gun.

"It's okay. I'm 'dead'. What about you?"

"I'm not your lovely item!"

Kasanoda winced. That brought back yet another unpleasant memory he could have done without of his encounters with the host club. It was thanks to them that for almost a week his dad's men, who hadn't the first clue what the hell a "lovely item" was supposed to be, were convinced Kasanoda had short eyes for little boys. For a little while, he was afraid nothing short of cutting his stomach would convince them it had all been the host club's idea, and he still preferred women; but they eventually let him off the hook—that was, until Tetsuya, not knowing her true identity, had ruined it with that little slip about his hots for Fujioka.

But that was water under the bridge at the moment. "I know that—"

"Anyway, what do you want?"

"The football club is up to something. I saw them talking with the thug brothers. They even have the journalism club on their side now, not to mention Nekozawa."

"I thought Nekozawa-sempai was on your team."

Kasanoda heaved a sigh. "That's the thing. He was—"

"Then this can't be a very good sign."

The little squirt could say that again. How could Kasanoda be sure the black magic club president would keep his word and protect Fujioka's secret?

But he kept his mouth shut about that; he wasn't sure how much this kid really knew about the host club, and besides, he had to be careful not to let anything slip over the airwaves. Not while there was still a chance, their being dead or not, that that Renge girl was still recording everything they said.

"I think you and me oughtta join forces," Kasanoda said suddenly.

At which Shirou jumped like someone had just told him he had a giant spider hanging over his head. "What?"

It was kind of hard not to get offended at a reaction like that, but Kasanoda tried his darnedest—which was difficult to do when he was blushing as red as his hair.

"We're both 'dead', right? It's not like it's against the rules or anything. I just think someone oughtta follow them, see what they're up to, 'cause I get this feeling Kuze and his teammates aren't going to be playing by the same set of scruples anymore. Not with a posse like that."

"Why should I care? I never asked to be in this game either."

Kasanoda blinked. What did it take for the kid to get it?

"How 'bout because three jocks, two thugs, and a guy who prays to dark spirits against one girl isn't fair odds no matter how you cut it. Even if you don't agree with what she did to you, shipping you here, you can't just let her get overrun like that. I mean, jeez, as a man, you can't tell me—"

"Alright, fine!"

That was easy, Kasanoda thought, unaware that he had said the magic words—words that awakened a deep protectiveness and sense of honor inside the fifth-grader.

Unaware, too, that it wasn't exactly Renge Shirou was thinking of.

He rolled his eyes. "Let's just get this thing over with, okay? If we gotta protect her from those guys, then that's what we gotta do. Besides, I think Suou-sempai would probably have wanted us to if he were here. . . ."

Kasanoda smiled to himself. He couldn't help thinking, just a little sentimentally, how different the game might have been if he and Shirou had been on the same side at the start.

The sun was sinking low in the sky now, and Haruhi's shadow fell long on the sand, bending and twisting over the dunes on the beach beside her as she made her way down the coastline toward Alpha Base, where Renge would be waiting to receive the Blue Flag from her.

She did not recognize Tamaki right away, as he first appeared as a small and dark, backlit figure far ahead. But he saw her, and knew at once that she was just the person he had been hoping to meet.

Nor could she understand the true depth of his relief and pride to see that she had made it out of Blue Base intact and triumphant—nor the great reluctance that made each step of his forward a heavy one, now that it came down to him to stop her from delivering that flag. Yes, what a horrible lot had been left to him now: the very person he had fought to protect, even at the cost of his best friend's life, he now had to gun down or else admit defeat. It was a decision he would have given anything not to make, if only he weren't the only person he could trust with making it.

His figure grew gradually larger as they approached one another, until Haruhi was close enough to clearly see the paintball gun in his hand, and the melancholic smile on his lips—that familiar smile of the proverbial lonely prince.

They stopped about ten paces away from one another. The surf lapped the shore to their one side, the wind rustling the palms further inland on the other, and the white sand sparkled all around them in the waning light.

"You're still alive," Haruhi said.

Tamaki smiled sadly.

"As are you, I see. I'm glad you made it this far, Haruhi, I truly am. But, surely you see, that only makes it that much harder, what I have to do."

"You're going to shoot me, Sempai?"

It was an honest question, as neither had yet drawn their firearms, as though they were waiting for the other to do it, to show some sign of agression, before they took action.

"Do I have a choice?" Tamaki said, recalling with that mournful tone of voice his fallen friend turned mortal enemy. "Do any of us have that choice anymore? For a moment, I actually thought that I was going to help you. How foolish of me—to allow myself for one moment to even entertain the idea that things could remain unchanged between you and I, when we're on opposing sides!"

"We can still be friends afterwards—"

"Oh, Haruhi. . . ."

Tamaki shook his head.

"Bless you and your unswerving optimism. But can't you see? It's our destiny to fight each other, to kill each other. Whether we chose this fate for ourselves or had it thrust upon us, it doesn't matter anymore. The fact is, one of has to die, or else both will perish."

"Sempai, I really don't think. . . ."

"Shh. Please. Don't say any more. I beg you, don't make this harder than it already is."

Haruhi shut her mouth. She wasn't entirely sure what he was going on about. She was sure the main spirit behind deathmatch capture-the-flag was behind this act somewhere, but it seemed, as usual, that her upperclassman had gotten himself just a bit too tangled up in make-believe.

"I thought I could do it," he was saying, shaking his head, "but now . . . To actually see you here like this. . . ."

A wistful look came into his eyes as he looked up toward the pink-tinged sky, blinking back his wind-swept hair.

"You'll have to kill me, Haruhi. Shoot me now before I have no choice but to shoot you. Do it quick, while there's still—"

Pop, pop, pop.

Tamaki trailed off, and looked down at his chest where Haruhi's three paintballs had hit him full on. He sputtered.

"You . . . You shot me!" he finally managed to get out.

Haruhi narrowed her eyes at him. "You just told me to, Sempai."

"Yeah, but I didn't mean it! Well, okay," Tamaki revised at her exasperated look, "I meant it in that it's the honorable thing to do, offering to sacrifice my life in place of yours and all. I was only trying to do the right thing, 'cause . . . You know, 'cause I care for you like a father—but that doesn't mean you have to be so okay with it—"

The darkness suddenly radiating dangerously off of Haruhi effectively cut him off—like the event horizon of a black hole. "Good-bye, Sempai."

"No, wait!"

Tamaki fell to his knees in the sand, and sat back on his heels staring up at the heavens that had so forsaken him; and Haruhi had no choice but to stop, even though she was cursing this old song-and-dance number inside as she did so. Somehow, it just felt rude not to stop.

"I just want you to know I don't hold this against you," he went on in a sad and tender tone, clutching one hand to his soiled shirt front as a tear—glowing golden in the waning light—squeezed out from beneath his eyelashes to roll down his cheek. "As far as I'm concerned, Haruhi, it wasn't you who killed me, no, but this mad, mad world we were born into. If I could go back to the beginning, I would make sure none of this ever happened, you know I would. But as it is . . . I am honored, so deeply honored, that my demise comes at your hands. Those . . . gentle hands that should never have been given a gun—those sweet, innocent hands so unused to the cruelty of grown men's wars. Oh, that things might have turned out another way, and that we might have met on a different battlefield, as comrades. Funny, but even still I feel glad to be able to lay down my life for you. I was . . . so glad to have known you, if only for a short time. So go, Haruhi, and don't—"

Finally, Haruhi thought, and she trudged by him.

Tamaki started and shook away the tears he had been so diligently forming when he saw that she was actually leaving him.

"Ha-Haruhi? Where are you going?"

"You just told me to leave."

Tamaki's mouth fell open. That audacity of this commoner girl. . . . "I'm not finished yet!"

Haruhi sighed. She turned around, throwing her hands down at her sides. "Then why do you keep telling me to do things if you don't want me to do them?"

"Be-cause!" He threw up plumes of sand as he thrashed about in exasperation. "That's what you're supposed to do in a situation like this! Don't you ever read? Or watch movies, for chrissakes! You're supposed to profess how you can't leave me, you don't know what you'll do without me, and then I insist you have to go, because it's futile to stay when there's nothing else you can do, and besides you have to win. And then you say how you'll never forget me, and all the good times we shared— It's the tragic irony of our flawed relationship—"

"Flawed relationship?"

Tamaki held his breath. Had he said too much?

But Haruhi for her part just wanted to know where he picked this crazy stuff up.

On second thought, maybe she didn't. She rolled her eyes. "You know what? Just . . . screw it. I'm outta here."

And she turned again and walked off with the sun setting over her shoulder—and a fussing upperclassman behind her.

"But— I've only got a few more lines— I could just give you yours!"

"See you at the finish—"

"But it was a lovely catechism!"

"Good-bye, Sempai!"

"Ma'am, I think you need to see this."

"Yes? What is it?" Renge hurried over to the man from the film crew who had spoken, looking over his shoulder at the monitor in front of him.

She had not expected what she saw on it—however, she could not say that it came as a complete shock either. When she thought about it, it was perfectly understandable that the players who had been eliminated from the game earlier, and who, not being members of the host club, would naturally not be very pleased about playing it in the first place, would join forces and march toward her position at Alpha Base. After all, she had told them in the beginning that that was where the game would end.

The man turned to her. "What should we do?"

"Keep filming as usual," Renge told him simply.

"But they look pretty pissed off to me, ma'am."

"Not at all." She smiled. "All I see are a bunch of disqualified contestants come to see the game's big finale. In fact, I think I ought to go and welcome them myself."

"But—"

"Don't you worry about a thing," Renge told him, and the rest of the crew gathered inside the control room. "I will make sure to take the necessary precautions."

And with that, she turned and departed, leaving some very nervous moviemakers behind her.

Down on the beach outside, Kuze's revised Orange Team had to pause and look up. They hadn't been kidding when they called Alpha Base a fortress, but none had known until that moment just how appropriate that word was.

Inside the heavy, spiked gates was a massive complex of weathered battlements built right up against the rock, the monolithic stone streaked with water lines from the tropical humidity, with lots of places to hide and a large open square that probably doubled as a helipad right in the center.

Yet somehow, lit golden from the sinking sun and situated incongruously at one end of this square, like a tornado had literally just dropped it there, was a grand white mansion in the colonial style, with arabesque trim and a narrow, neatly manicured patch of garden right in front, and comfortable-looking porches on every level, each one with a great view of the ocean. The presence of this decidedly non-threatening building threw the boys a slight curve ball. Could it really be that after all their tribulations in the jungle, their ultimate goal had been this easy all along? Because aside from themselves, there didn't seem to be a living soul in sight.

Except, perhaps, for Renge Houshakuji, who was walking down the front steps to meet them, all alone and unarmed except for a wooden wicket—a not entirely appropriate choice of weapon considering this time she was dressed like she was going on safari, in khaki jodhpurs and a pith helmet.

"Good evening," she greeted them pleasantly with a tilt of her head. "Nice of you all to make it here yourselves. Saves me the trouble of rounding you all up."

"Spare us the pleasantries," Kuze said. "You know what we're here for. Your time has come, Renge Hou—"

"You mean you have a flag with you?"

Kuze, not expecting to be interrupted so early on in his ultimatum, glanced at his teammates.

He did not need to answer in any case; the truth was plain to see just at a cursory glance at their ragtag bunch. Renge shook her head and clucked her tongue in disappointment.

"Oh, dear." She hoisted the wicket on one shoulder. "You mean to tell me none of you brought the other team's flag with you? Well, I guess that stands to reason. I can see just by looking at you that you've all been eliminated already. What a shame. . . . And there's not a single champion back there among you? Eh? Not one of you is still in the race?"

"What's the point of this?" Tarumi whispered to his teammates. "Just to humiliate us? Isn't it obvious—"

But Tougouin stilled him with a hand on his shoulder. He was curious to see just where Renge was going with this himself. "We haven't come to win, Miss Houshakuji," said Kuze.

"Shame, too," said Renge. "Because the winner was going to spend the night in a most excellent bed."

She stretched out her free hand, gesturing to a mammoth four-poster situated quite randomly among the birds-of-paradise. Their ensuing skeptical looks were not completely lost on her.

"Believe me. After the day you've had, you would have liked to sleep in that bed."

"We didn't come to plant a flag," Kuze started again. "Nor did we come for a mere bed. We've come for something far more worthwhile: retribution."

"Retribution? Retribution?" Renge shook her head, like the word did not compute. "But that's silly. Whatever do you need that for?"

"For the humiliation you've put us through. For dragging us here against our will, making us fight one another for your own entertainment, nearly poisoning us with those boxed lunches and making us waste our precious time and money. . . . Need I go on?"

"You mean to tell me you haven't enjoyed yourselves one bit? Well, then, that is a problem. . . ."

"But we think you'll be a little more eager to listen to our troubles when you see what we have to bargain with. You see, Miss Houshakuji, we have in our possession something of great value to you. . . ."

Kuze made a quick gesture with his free hand, and that was when the Hitachiin brothers were thrust to the front of the pack, complaining at being manhandled.

"Don't give 'em an inch, Renge!" Hikaru said, to which Kaoru added, "We aren't worth it—"

Neither got another word out, however, as Akutaro and Akujiro promptly clamped their hands over the twins' mouths.

If they were going for shock and awe, however, Kuze and his new team was to be sorely disappointed, because Renge only chuckled at their attempt to threaten her.

"Oh, my," she said with a sigh, as though it were all too ridiculous to even laugh. "What did you actually think you would accomplish with these tactics? But all right. Fine. I'll listen to your demands . . . as soon as you get through all of them."

And at those words, the walls of the old battlements opened up and a whole phalanx of armed guards poured into the square from either side. Dressed in black, helmeted and vested in Kevlar, each one pointed his paintball gun right at Kuze and his companions. They came filing out onto the verandas of the house as well like so many ants, armed with sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Armored vehicles rolled slowly out from the fortress, gunners poised on their roofs for action. Only the roof of the battlement was without a soldier, and there the flag pole stood empty and silent against the pink sky.

The two members of the journalism club cringed. Even Akutaro and Akujiro were barely resisting the overwhelming urge to flee, and they at least had someone to hide behind.

But Nekozawa just smiled at the seemingly overwhelming odds, and Kuze refused to be intimidated.

That was, until he saw the symbol that graced the uniform of each soldier, and the door of each Humvee. It was unmistakable, and yet not in his wildest dreams had he foreseen he might see it here.

It was the insignia of his arch-rival, that single, self-righteous Chinese character that spelled out plain as day:

Ohtori.

Kuze gritted his teeth. His fists tightened at his sides.

Across the courtyard, Renge smiled. "Do you still wish to negotiate?"

Chapter Text

At last Alpha Base was in sight, and Haruhi could breathe a sigh of relief that this game was almost over.

That was, until she reached the gates of the base, and saw across the square to her one side the football team and the journalism club, with the twins held captive between them; and to the other, an army of secret police surrounding a curiously outfitted Renge, armed to the gills and preparing to fire at the ragtag bunch of her schoolmates. Beyond them all, the flag pole waited.

Just great, Haruhi thought. She'd walked into the middle of a standoff. And now, somehow, she was going to have to cross that disaster waiting to happen in order to raise the Blue Flag she had brought all the way here, if she wanted to put an end to this game she never even cared for from the start. Of course, Haruhi loved a challenge, but to say this was a challenge was a gross understatement. She may have been able to hold her own in a one-on-one fight, but as far as she could see, unless she found some way around that mess, her chances of winning this thing had suddenly gone from surprisingly good to zippidy-doo-da.

As her luck would have it, just then Tarumi spotted her out of the corner of his eye.

He did a double-take. "Holy shit! Fujioka's got the Blue Flag!"

Kuze could hardly believe his ears. He turned, as did everyone else, at his teammate's ejaculation, only to his surprise to see Haruhi with the Blue Team's flag hanging out of her bag.

Looking very out of place, but nevertheless with the Blue Team's flag.

Kuze experienced a feeling he had not felt in a long time then, therefore it took him a little longer than one might expect to realize it was shame. He had been wrong about Fujioka. The kid had come through in the end and surprised them all, not only by surviving longer than any of them, but by actually capturing the other team's flag for the win. Though he was loathe to admit it, it seemed Kyouya had been right.

He tried to stop it, but a stubborn smile dragged its way onto Kuze's lips nonetheless. "Way to go, kid."

It was short-lived, however, as Komatsuzawa suddenly shouted in disbelief from behind him. "Wh— Shoot him! Don't let him get to the base!"

"Oh, no you don't— Fujioka, run!" Kuze yelled over his shoulder as he turned and pushed the journalism club president's gun out of the way before he could fire. "Take the flag!"

He pointed in the direction of the distant flag pole, before he was preoccupied again with dodging a rather pointy elbow to the face.

Tarumi tackled Ukyou, who hadn't been trying to shoot anyway, and Tougouin blocked Nekozawa from snapping off the shot he had so carefully lined up, and that was when the twins saw their chance. Kaoru bit Akutaro's hand hard, right between the thumb and index finger. And while Akujiro was distracted by his brother's wailing in agony, Hikaru brought his heel down on his toes. The two yakuza brothers couldn't care less about their charges as they yowled in harmony, giving the twins the best opportunity they could hope for to waddle for cover before all hell broke loose.

Which it presently did. No sooner had Komatsuzawa popped a paintball into the air than the courtyard was awash in primary color, most of it the bright, highlighter yellow coming from the dozens of guards surrounding Renge as they all fired at once.

It was enough to break up the short-lived Orange Team's infighting—or at least for as long as it took them to get to cover, where they then resumed taking pot shots at each other, in between returning the guards' fire.

Haruhi couldn't believe it. Things had gone from bad to worse. She finally made it to Alpha Base with the flag, only for the place to erupt into one big free-for-all. And now she was supposed to somehow make it to the flag pole on the roof without getting hit.

Someone slid around the corner, saw her, and nearly ran right into a palm tree before he caught himself.

Haruhi blinked. "Casanova? You're back!"

For once, Kasanoda thought, he was glad to hear her call him that. He hardly even noticed as Shirou slammed into his kidneys.

"Whoa! You got the Blue Team's flag?" the fifth-grader said when he had recovered, making googly eyes at her. "Nice!"

"You guys aren't part of . . ." Haruhi pointed her thumb over her shoulder at the chaos in the courtyard.

"Are you kidding?"

"We came to try and prevent it, but I guess it's too late," Kasanoda said. "But, hey, if you're here for the flag, there's a way up around back." He dropped his gun to his side, rushing forward to pull Haruhi along with his free hand. Adrenaline rushed through his veins now that he had the chance he was waiting for, and he thought he could almost feel a spark where they touched. "C'mon!"

With Shirou covering their back, Kasanoda led her around the backs of the buildings, into an empty hallway around the outer walls where, sure enough, a staircase ran up to the levels above. Haruhi followed it with her eyes, breathing hard. It wasn't a sure-fire route; there were lots of corners and open doorways the she would have to dash across; but it was better than nothing—and it was a hell of a lot better than going in through the front door right now, that was for certain.

However. . . .

"Are you sure you should be helping me?" Haruhi said breathlessly to Kasanoda. "I mean, we're on different teams—"

"It doesn't matter to me anymore. Right now, I just want all this to be over and done with." And, Kasanoda had to admit—but never out loud—he secretly wanted her to win, teams or no teams.

Somehow, Haruhi seemed to have picked up on that already.

"Thanks," she said. "I . . . I owe you one."

He grinned at that, feeling his heart racing inside his chest. He could think of some ways she could pay him back when all this was over, but right now he cared about none of that. All he cared about was Haruhi getting safely to the flag pole. "It's nothing," he said, turning red. "I just wish I could back you up, but . . ." He indicated his collar with its red light, and shrugged. "I probably did more than I should've already."

Haruhi smiled at that, and that made everything worth it. "Wish me luck," she said, before hoisting the pack higher onto her shoulder and hurrying up the stairs.

Kasanoda shook his head as he watched her go. The words he was holding inside kind of slipped out, but they were from the bottom of his heart when he said under his breath, "I swear, Fujioka, someday I gotta make you mine."

Shirou caught just enough of that to shudder. "Ew!"

But Kasanoda wasn't paying attention. "Hey, Shirou. You got any more of those mines?"

"Yeah. Grabbed as many as I could fit in my pack. Why?"

"Follow me."

And Shirou raced after him, back toward the violence in the courtyard, keeping low to the lengthening shadows.

Outside, Hikaru and Kaoru were experiencing just a touch of deja vu as they flattened themselves against the lee of a boulder—an all the more difficult task to accomplish thanks to the ropes still pinning their arms to their sides.

They were just wincing as another bright yellow paintball erupted against the rock next to them, when who should appear, running with more dead seriousness than was probably necessary toward them, but—

"Milord!"

Tamaki slid like he was stealing bases, and came to a stop beside them.

"Just in time," Hikaru breathed, and Kaoru said, "Are you dead too?"

As if it weren't obvious by the paint splotches on his shirt front, but Tamaki smiled sadly anyway. "It was a necessary sacrifice," he said as he fished out a can opener and started to work on the ropes. "In the end, I just couldn't bring myself to shoot Haruhi—"

"Haruhi?" The twins paused in their worming out of their bonds to exchange glances. "Then it was . . ."

"Because of you . . ."

Tamaki looked between them. "What? You can't just stop there. What did I do?"

"Haruhi's here," Kaoru said, to Hikaru's eager nods. "She's got the Blue Flag and she's going to try and get it to the flag pole. But that's your team, so. . . ."

Tamaki shook his head. "I don't care about that! If it means I have another chance to do what I failed to before . . . But if it's against the rules—"

"I think the rules got chucked out the window long ago, Sempai."

That was just what Tamaki was waiting for. He pumped his rifle. "Then let's create a distraction for Haruhi, men!"

"Roger!" the twins said together, and with their freed hands took up the only weapons left to them: the rocks on the ground.

On either side of them was chaos. Kuze was leading his teammates in their assault on the soldiers in black, while Nekozawa flitted from shadow to shadow like a bat, alternating red and blue paint, and Komatsuzawa had his teeth clenched so tight as he fired madly about that his face was in danger of staying that way. Kasanoda and Shirou were wreaking much havoc with the fifth-grader's leftover mines, drenching whole squadrons of guards and the sides of Humvees with the ones they tossed into the fray.

Over on the other side, Renge stood like a goddess of the battlefield among the fallen Ohtori soldiers that littered the square, intermittently laughing at the carnage around her, and waving full speed ahead with her wicket as she ordered her men to "Fire!"

Whoever he had firing at him, however, Renge's men or his own teammates, each of the boys was quickly beginning to resemble a Jackson Pollock painting—and it was clear that it was going to take more than a couple of lucky shots to make them lay down their weapons any time soon.

Haruhi heard more than saw it all go down from where she was on the other side of the wall. Thankfully the guards stationed on the battlements seemed to all be preoccupied with the fighting down below, as none turned back to catch her as she made her way slowly closer to her goal.

Then she took a wrong step and her feet flew out from under her.

Thankfully Haruhi's sharp yelp went unnoticed amid the cacophony of gunfire, and she was able to catch herself. She looked down to see what had tripped her up, only to see—to no great surprise—a banana peel lying on the ground. A couple of colorful adjectives directed toward the island's monkey population, of the type typically reserved for the privacy of her own home, slipped out under Haruhi's breath.

Perhaps there was a lucky star Haruhi could thank, because she landed fairly unharmed and safe behind cover. However, the same could not be said for her gun and day pack, because when she fell, both had gone flying in the opposite direction, sliding out from the safety of the hallway into a wide open landing teeming with soldiers—the bag coming to rest, in fact, right behind the foot of one of the snipers, and with the Blue Flag pouring not very clandestinely at all out of the half-zipped zipper.

Haruhi cursed mentally as her chances of winning now shrunk to almost subatomic proportions before her eyes. Sure, no one had noticed yet so she was still safe, and yes, someone somewhere would have been able to find a perfectly doable solution to the problem of the pack's retrieval, but Haruhi wasn't seeing it. All she saw when she ran the figures through her head was herself getting surrounded and soundly removed from game play by armed guards.

Yet she couldn't not go for it. She had come too far to back out now, just because the going got a little tough. She really did want to win the game, she found to her surprise, and the unfairness of her current situation just made the feeling all the stronger. She could do it. It was just a matter of timing. And daring. The fact remained, if she darted out onto the landing at just the right second, and was really quick and quiet about grabbing the pack and getting out of the way, she might still make it up to that flag pole unharmed.

She had just about worked up the courage to make her move when the level of violence down below suddenly lightened dramatically.

A tense hush fell over Alpha Base, and soon enough Haruhi could see over the soldiers' heads what it was all about.

Honey was slowing in his jog as he neared the base and saw all eyes had turned to him, and the Red Flag still clutched clearly in his hand.

Then, as if someone had released a pause button, everyone was firing again, this time at Honey.

He did not stand there like a deer caught in headlights waiting to get mowed down. Nor would he go quietly into the night. Before a single paintball could touch him, Honey had cartwheeled and dashed out of the line of fire, zig-zagging this way and that through the various obstacles standing in his way in his effort to find a way up to the flag pole, without a care for what or who he had to go through to get there.

That was when Haruhi saw her chance. The guards were all focused on stopping Honey now. They didn't see her as she rushed out and grabbed her pack with the flag in it, entirely too aware that, right now, every second counted.

But for the moment, time was in Haruhi's favor. Below her, Honey scanned the courtyard desperately. He was boxed in and pinned down.

. . . Or was he?

A wicked smile lit up his childlike face that made those nearest to him involuntarily back up a step. He wasted no more time; and friend and foe alike could only stare in awe as he leaped and swung himself up like an orangutan by one of the long spikes decorating the battlement wall. To the strange, mixed symphony of popping paintballs and a long, appreciative "whoa" from his audience, Honey jumped nimbly from tenuous foothold to tenuous foothold, somersaulting through the air to land seemingly effortlessly and completely unchallenged at the very top of the tower, where the flag pole stood waiting.

Everyone else had given up trying to shoot him down at this point. The fight went out of them when they saw for themselves the beauty and power of his athletic grace and skill—at which time most of them also realized how futile it was to continue to try and land a hit on him.

There was nothing left for Honey to do at that point than to hoist up the flag. It fluttered majestically in the sea breeze as it rose higher into the sky, the last light of the sun shining faintly through its red fibers and backlighting Honey with a victorious golden halo.

Less than a minute later, he was fast asleep amid the birds-of-paradise, in the huge four-poster that Renge had promised as a prize. If he could comment, Honey would have had to agree it was the most excellent bed he had ever slept in.

As for Haruhi, it was a long walk back downstairs, sidestepping soldiers and film crew who were already making preparations for their departure from the island. Floodlights illuminated the courtyard as daylight continued to wane into a darker blue, and there were reluctant handshakes all around for a game well played, even if the scars to everyone's pride would take longer to heal.

It was Renge's exaggerated clapping that interrupted their make-nice.

"Very well done, everyone! Very good material. I daresay, your acting was much better than the last time we attempted something like this. Much more natural, which I'm sure had everything to do with the untamed environment you were thrust into and the tension of the hunt. It really has a way of bringing the raw emotion out. Yes, indeed. I think it's fair to say the end product will rake in a huge profit."

"Profit?" Kuze said bitterly, while Akutaro and Akujiro glared. How she could speak of them like crates of fruit for the market . . . "And what's this about last time? You honestly intend to turn our suffering into merchandise? Without our consent?"

She blinked, as if she honestly didn't understand why he was upset. "Of course. I thought we were past this."

Kuze snorted. "I never thought I'd have an occasion to say this to a girl, but you have fewer scruples than even the school paper, Miss Houshakuji."

Komatsuzawa—now all but drenched in yellow paint—looked very much like he resented that comment.

"So you're going to turn it into a movie after all," Haruhi said while Tougouin and Tarumi glanced uneasily at their leader, who was unwittingly taking long whiffs of the rock he had picked up automatically in lieu of an orange. "How are you going to edit all of . . ." She waved her hand around vaguely. "You know."

"I have some ideas," Renge said—a little too mysteriously for comfort.

"It all makes sense now," Ukyou was saying aloud to himself. "I've seen this movie before. In fact, I've seen all these movies before. We didn't know it at the time, but we were playing right into the script."

The twins looked at him like he must have hit his head. "Er, there wasn't a script."

"Not on paper, but it was there. Like Tyrannosaurus versus Velociraptor. You know. The grand finale bloodbath that ties up all the major plot points? All except for one. I almost forgot about it, but now that I remember, it keeps bugging me."

While the twins were debating who would have been which dinosaur, Ukyou looked up.

"What was all that earlier about Fujioka having a secret?"

Haruhi's heart skipped a beat in her chest at that, Hikaru and Kaoru went silent and exchanged glances, and Tamaki coughed on his own spit so loudly everyone had to turn and look at him in disbelief just to clarify the sound had actually come from him.

"It's nothing!" he tried to say, rather unsuccessfully. "Seriously. Just a little bit of harmless nonsense—"

"No, it isn't." Suddenly the hotshot investigative journalist, Komatsuzawa looked the happiest he had been all weekend. "You wouldn't be so quick to deny it if it wasn't true. I knew it! I knew the celebrated host club was hiding dirty laundry. When I find out what it is, I'm going to publish it in my paper for all your fangirls with their silly little fanzines and online auction items to read, and your club'll go down the crapper faster than you can say 'sex scandal'."

Needless to say, he didn't know how appropriate those words were, if not for the reasons he would have expected.

"All right! Out with it! Who knows what they're hiding?"

"You wouldn't dare," Tamaki said. All seriousness now, it took both twins to hold him back—and someone watching might have had the feeling from the looks on their faces it was because each one wanted to deck Komatsuzawa himself. "And to think there was ever a time I actually wanted to help you!"

Heart beating painfully fast, Haruhi couldn't utter a word in her own defense. If the fact she was a girl was revealed right here in front of this crowd, that was it for her. It was all over. The friends she had made, the respect she had garnered. Her place in Ouran. . . . She couldn't even think about that possibility. For all the good times and the bad they had shared, the thought of leaving the host club now, under those conditions, was truly terrifying.

She wanted to tell Tamaki how much it meant to her, whatever happened—that he was standing up for her now, and had all along, even at great personal risk. All the club members had risked so much on her.

Renge, on the other hand, waited on bated breath, not knowing how much the truth would hurt her when it came out; and Kuze laughed, albeit uncomfortably, in his obliviousness to Haruhi's inner turmoil.

"Come on." He glanced around at the group. "Someone must know what it is."

"I know Fujioka's secret. Would you like me to enlighten you?"

It was Nekozawa who volunteered, until then forgotten behind them in the shadows, and that was when Kasanoda decided there was no better time to show himself.

"No-o-o-o-o-o-o!"

He jumped out of the jungle, all but leaping at the black magic club president; but the football club saw where he was going with his attack, and he was intercepted by Tougouin and Tarumi before he could reach his target.

"What are you doing, Sempai?" Kasanoda yelled over their shoulders. "Where's your manly honor? You swore on fear of pain of death you would protect Fujioka's secret!"

"What secret?" said Shirou, and Kasanoda's remaining nerve shattered. The kid wasn't going to be of any help now that scandal was concerned.

"Ah," Nekozawa said to Kasanoda, "but now that I am 'dead', and the game is over, that obligation goes out the window, does it not?"

He chuckled sinisterly at that, and Kasanoda could only watch and pray that the end came quickly. Maybe nobody would believe Nekozawa after all.

"I'm surprised none of you could figure it out," said the black magic club president. "But very well. The gentleman you know as Fujioka Haruhi is really a—"

"—fraid of thunder and lightning!" the twins said in unison over him.

Which prompted Haruhi to stammer ashamedly in the ensuing silence, "Guys!"

They shrugged, as though her humiliation being advertised to the football club and journalism club—and soon to be the whole of the host club's clientele—meant nothing to them.

But in truth, after the moment had passed, Tamaki, Kasanoda, and yes, even Haruhi herself, were secretly relieved when the tension that had been building up among the rest of the crowd instantly melted. Even Nekozawa seemed to be thankful to have the burden of breaking his promise with Tamaki in front of everyone lifted from his shoulders by this revelation.

"Is that all?" said a supremely disappointed Komatsuzawa.

"Sorry, but aren't . . . most people . . . at some point?" Tarumi put in rather uncertainly.

"Not me," Kuze was quick to correct him. "I was born in a storm."

"They used to scare me quite a bit as a young girl," Renge acquiesced.

"I still don't like typhoons," Ukyou admitted with a shyly raised hand.

"Spiders," said Tamaki. "They've always creeped me out, what with their little legs and the way they sneak around. . . ."

"Spoiled food," said Kuze. "That's what really gets me."

"For me, it's the unyieldingly cruel regularity of the sun, that tyrant of the solar system, pounding down upon all who have the misfortune of being within the path of its rays."

"Yeah, but, er, we kind of all already knew that, Sempai."

". . . As does the staircase at the end of the northeast wing after hours. . . . And ghosts, for that matter. . . . And aliens. . . ."

"Clowns," supplied the twins.

"I have this reoccurring nightmare where I show up to practice naked," said Tougouin.

"But I guess if I'm really honest," Tamaki finished, "what I'm most afraid of is failure."

"Yeah, well, you're not the only one," Komatsuzawa huffed reluctantly, garnering some here-here's from Shirou and the American football team.

"Hey, Kyouya!" Tamaki called as the young man in question picked just that moment to emerge from the jungle to join them, with Mori and Yasuchika in tow. "What are you most afraid of? Wait, let me guess! Public toilets!"

"As if I would let something so mundane be my Kryptonite," Kyouya said with a smile.

But he did not offer another answer, and Kuze let out the breath he had been holding.

"So, you finally decide to grace us with your presence, Ohtori," he said to his old rival.

Which, like they were the magic words, shook Tamaki as though from a deep sleep. He did a double take, and then his whole being lit up even brighter than before. "Kyouya! You're alive! You're not dead!"

"Well, of course, I'm not dead. You do know that was only a game, right?"

"Oh, sure, sure!" And Tamaki did wave it off, though who could tell with how much sincerity. "I'm just happy to see you again, old buddy."

"Even if it was your old buddy who set us up for this ridiculous game in the first place?"

At that, the various discussions of fears and nightmares ceased, and everyone turned to Kuze, who had spoken, and his accused—whose smile, it must be said, did not waver, even as Tamaki glared back at the football captain from his side.

"Kyouya," he said to his old friend, "tell me it isn't true. You seemed just as taken aback by the whole thing as any of us. I mean, relatively speaking. You didn't have a hand in it like they're saying . . . did you?"

"Of course not," Kyouya said coolly.

"Well, I don't buy it," said Komatsuzawa, and Haruhi and the twins weren't going to argue with him.

It was enough to convince Tamaki, though. If Kyouya said he didn't have anything to do with it. . . .

"But your family's name," Kuze said, while Tarumi crossed his arms and nodded behind him. "It's all over this damn island."

Kyouya blinked impassively, as if just noticing—and not caring either way.

"So it is."

"And yet you expect me to believe you have no explanation for what that's doing here."

And he pointed at the huge character for Ohtori emblazoned on the fortress wall.

Kyouya, however, if anything only smiled that innocent, "I just got here" smile even wider; and all Haruhi could think was that she'd better make a note to herself never to go head-to-head with Kyouya in a match of poker.

"It beats me. Although, you do know Ohtori is a fairly common name."

To his chagrin, and that of his teammates, Kuze found himself without a retort. He could only shake his head at his old rival, a bitter grin on his own face as he said, "Oh, you are good. But mark my words, Kyouya, one of these days . . ."

He shook the rock menacingly in his white-knuckled grip.

"One of these days I'm gonna find something to throw at you, and on that day it's finally gonna stick. Now, Christ, how many kills does a guy have to rack up to get some friggin' citrus around here?"

Chapter Text

Before long, the helicopters arrived to take everyone back to the mainland. The Ohtori guards hoisted up the giant four-poster with Honey still asleep on it, and attempted to drag the monstrosity away for loading, one of them warning his buddies at every agonizing step of the way, "Careful! Careful! You don't want to accidentally wake him up. I mean, you really don't. Trust me, this is worse than transporting nitroglycerin."

"Don't worry," Hikaru half-heartedly called after them. "It'd take an act of God to stir him now."

"Or an act of our lord, more like," Kaoru chuckled.

Tamaki pretended he hadn't heard.

"So, it's really over?" he asked Renge. "We really get to leave, just like that?"

Mori did a quick headcount. Sitting with his teammates, Kuze was finally calm and content, an orange in his hand and a distant look in his eyes as he peeled off the rind and ate it piece by piece. The yakuza brothers were fidgeting, Kasanoda looked like he wanted to get a high-five or something out of Mori himself, and as for the journalism club. . . .

"Wait. Aren't we missing someone?"

"So-o-o-o-o-o? What did we miss? Did our team win?"

"Oh, no. . . ." Haruhi groaned at the arrival of that lyrical voice and tried really hard to make herself invisible.

Because that was when Ranka appeared, his arm around Sakyou's shoulders, and of course her father just couldn't help himself. He had to gay it up in front of everyone. "Look who I found wandering around the jungle."

Sakyou waved weakly at his club mates. Haruhi could only stare at the two of them dumbfoundedly.

"Hey, Fujioka," he said awkwardly to her, "I just want you to know there's no hard feelings. And that your mom is awesome."

"Um, he's not my mom."

Sakyou didn't seem to hear her, however, because at that moment Ranka caught sight of the helicopters and gripped the second-year tighter. "Are those the helicopters that are going to take us back to civilization? Oh, I'm so excited. This'll be just like Jurassic Park. I hope I get to be in the same one as Tomo-kun."

"Tomo-kun?" Ukyou tried his hardest not to laugh.

Which was no problem for Komatsuzawa. He cast his barely scathed underclassman I very disapproving look. "Sakyou, you and I will be sitting down for a little heart-to-heart about club loyalty when we get back to school."

Needless to say, unlike the ride home, that was not something Sakyou Tomochika was looking forward to.

At least he had Haruhi's father to distract him from his sense of foreboding as they boarded the helicopters with the football club, Shirou and Yasuchika, and the yakuza brothers.

"So. You managed to worm your way out of another one, Suou," Nekozawa said when they were gone. "Don't think the stars will align so favorably for you next time."

What am I, chopped liver? Haruhi felt like asking. Tamaki just managed to escape? It was her future at Ouran that had been on the line, but she had come to expect this sort of vanity of her rich classmates. . . .

Tamaki just waved his words off, if a little uneasily. "Come now, Sempai. You wouldn't have actually done it. Would you?"

Nekozawa leered mysteriously. "Maybe?"

Behind him, the twins must have gotten something caught in their throats, because they couldn't help their sudden coughs—which sounded uncannily like "Yeah, right" and "Pussy" respectively, but maybe that was just Nekozawa's imagination.

"Oh, by the way, Renge," Kyouya said as if he had just remembered, "I do believe you owe me one hundred-thousand yen."

Renge smiled politely as she dug into her jodhpurs pocket for the desired note. "I suppose you're right—though you must concede that Haruhi did reach Alpha Base before Honey-sempai. Under slightly different circumstances, the game could quite easily have gone the other way."

"I don't deny that. However, I still believe Honey-sempai would have won. Though I understand your faith in Haruhi is very well-intentioned, you're going to have to learn to put aside your personal emotions and look on the practical side of things if you want to bet with the big leagues."

"A point on which we shall just have to agree to disagree," Renge said as he tucked the ¥100,000 note away. "I will always be a sentimentalist at heart."

Haruhi was flabbergasted. "Wait . . . you two bet on the game?"

She couldn't decide which to be more offended at: the fact that they had had a bet running this whole time, or that Kyouya, her own teammate for crying out loud, had bet against her. And after those kind words at Red Base—to think that she had actually believed in his sincerity. . . .

Kyouya and Renge, on the other hand, did not seem to find anything wrong with their actions if the blank looks on their faces were any indication.

Tamaki turned to him. "Kyouya, I thought you said you had nothing to do with this. I mean, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still tried to believe you."

"I didn't have anything to do with it. Well, not directly. I might have let slip in casual conversation that my family's private police force had an island training ground for combat-survival situations equipped for capture-the-flag, and in Japanese waters no less. I might also have let slip the general location of said island, and suggested that the facilities on it could be rented for a minor fee. Aside from that, however, I don't see how I'm in any way, shape, or form responsible for what transpired this weekend."

"And the bet? That still implies some fore-knowledge."

"We made it after the game had already started, over the walkie-talkie system."

"Then the reason you decided to abstain from the game . . ."

"Was because I was familiar with the island's layout. I didn't want my unfair advantage to skew the outcome."

Kyouya adjusted his glasses, but even that action did not completely hide his wide, satisfied grin.

Nor did Haruhi say anything to the contrary, though it was quite obvious to her he had been more concerned about winning the bet than winning the game all along.

"I'm not buying it," said Mori.

The other hosts looked at him.

"I knew he was responsible yesterday."

"But . . . how?" said Haruhi.

Mori smiled to himself. "Because Kyouya is the real Lord of the Flies."

And as he said so, the third-year connected his fingertips to his thumb tips and put his hands around his eyes like goggles.

The other hosts just stared. Kasanoda and Nekozawa tilted their heads.

"Uh, you'll have to excuse Mori-sempai," Tamaki apologized to no one in particular, as though the cameras were still rolling. "He hasn't had his nappy-pie yet. Heh, heh. . . . Kyouya!" he hissed to his friend. "Translate?"

"I think what Mori-sempai is saying," Kyouya said with utter calm, "is that he saw me in a gas mask yesterday afternoon just before he passed out."

"Gas mask?"

While the revelation only confirmed what had been suspect in everyone else's mind, Tamaki held his chin in Holmesian contemplation. "But why would Kyouya think to bring a gas mask to a club meeting? Unless. . . . You didn't just drop hints—you knew when this was going to happen from the beginning!"

Whereat he pointed an accusing finger in Kyouya's direction.

"I think maybe he was one of the people who planned it," Haruhi corrected him.

"In fact, I was not," Kyouya corrected her. "I left the planning up to Miss Renge and the host club fan club paintball committee. However, if you want the honest truth so badly, I will admit to letting myself in on enough of the details to come prepared. And if that's a crime, then perhaps I'm a bit guilty in allowing what happened next to happen. . . ."

"Try totally," muttered Haruhi.

"There's no bit about it," echoed the twins.

"I don't care either way," said Kasanoda. "This was the most fun I've ever had on vacation."

Meanwhile, Tamaki was giving his friend's excuses quite a bit of thought. "Yes . . . I suppose I can see how these things happen. . . ."

"But I figured it couldn't hurt the host club," Kyouya went on, with only a slight adjustment of his glasses to indicate he had even heard them. "In fact, if we played our cards right, it could even prove a boon to the club financially. The proceeds from the DVD sales and related merchandise should come in quite handy as festival season draws near. I figured this sort of exercise would also serve as a good, healthy way of releasing some stress going into the exam season. So, in short, I fully trusted Renge to make the right decision."

He turned to his old friend. "That is why I felt compelled to remove myself from affecting the outcome of the game, Tamaki. With my previous knowledge of the island's infrastructure, the plot would not have unfolded naturally if I had allowed myself to take part in it. It would have come off . . . forced."

Now, those were terms Tamaki could understand. His eyes shone with moisture. "How right you are. And how noble of you, too, sacrificing yourself so willingly for the cause. . . ."

"Yeah, for a hundred-thousand yen!" Haruhi and the twins said, but no one else seemed to hear them.

Kyouya's smile was impervious. "I accept your apology."

And that was how Tamaki ended up taking responsibility for the whole grossly unethical affair. Haruhi swore she nearly had an aneurysm just trying to wrap her brain around how that had happened.

Inside, the high school third music room was dark, but far from empty. Or quiet for that matter. The curtains had been drawn, and a huge projection screen rolled in, on which the finished product of Renge's picture was playing before the audience of the host club's fans.

They oohed and ahhed at each daring move, sniffled at some "deaths" and cheered at others (had Akutaro and Akujiro ever lowered themselves to showing their faces in the third music room again, they would have been very disappointed with the reaction to their scenes), and screamed their utter joy at the tender moments between certain players—namely the twins and other members of the host club. ("It's so beautiful!" more than one sobbed when Mori was taken out of the game.)

But even Kuze would have found to his embarrassment, had his attention not been distracted so well by the gushing of his fiancee Kanan, that the seeds of a Kuze x Tougouin fandom were already beginning to sprout in some of the audience's minds.

The journalism club for their part had decided not to show—with the exception of Sakyou, who claimed to have been sent there for research purposes for his own club—but the host club had made sure that an advertisement for the film did run in their paper. Komatsuzawa naturally proclaimed very loudly his displeasure, making sure everyone knew the decision to include it had been out of his hands—in other words, he couldn't afford to turn down the money.

But Yasuchika had come to watch the premier, albeit gloomily; and Shirou was there as well, gleefully soaking up the attentions of the high school girls who crowded around him, along with Nekozawa and Kasanoda . . . and Kasanoda's guest.

"Way to go, Waka!" Tetsuya yelled along with Kasanoda's couple of die-hard fans as they reached the part where he helped Haruhi make her way through Alpha Base. He punched his boss playfully in the arm. "I just knew you wouldn't be written off so soon. Nice comeback!"

Kasanoda blushed and sank lower in his chair. "Thanks. . . ."

Tetsuya lowered his voice and leaned closer to say so only they could hear, "And check out this response from the crowd. . . . You're really the center of attention, aren't you, you stud?"

"I don't think it's for the reason you think," Kasanoda said warily, all too uncomfortably aware of the way the girls around them were ogling him and Tetsuya, rather than the Kasanoda on the screen. They had that edge-of-their-seats eagerness about them that should have been reserved for the picture, the kind that forewarned screams of "moe" and crack pairing fanfics on host club fansites. The less Tetsuya knew, he decided, the better.

At least the problem of what to do about the final battle scene at Alpha Base appeared to have been resolved. In keeping with the notion that those who had been eliminated from the game had died, the film crew had pulled off some pretty clever special effects and editing, so that in the end product it looked as though, as Haruhi and Honey neared the base, the fortress was being mobbed by the zombified members of the two teams. It was all rather realistic looking. However . . .

"I just don't see how it's possible," Haruhi found herself saying for the umpteenth time that afternoon, tilting her head at the screen as though that might make her see the sense in it. "I mean, you didn't even give a backstory for why they turned into zombies. You know, like the island's being radioactive, or there being some sort of parasitic thing inhabiting it that reanimates dead people. And they're still remarkably eloquent for zombies—"

"Haruhi," Tamaki interrupted her sweetly, "this is why Kirimi called you the nerd of the group."

That, however, only increased Haruhi's intensity.

"You don't have to be a nerd to get that zombies don't just pop up for no reason. You have to at least have, like, a curse on the island or something. Otherwise, it just isn't credible storytelling."

"Yeah, well, nobody else is paying attention to the story. It's all about our acting."

And at the word "acting," Tamaki flicked his wrist in a casual way that carried through his whole person, giving him at once an immediate air of buoyancy and emotiveness, a je ne sais quoi of adolescent angst that temporarily yanked the girls' attentions away from the screen—like sharks to the scent of fresh blood. Immediately he was surrounded by a chorus of "Oh my God, your pain was just so out there, I could, like, taste it, it was delicious," and "Did you really mean all those things you said to Haruhi, Sempai? You're so heroic and sexy!"

Tamaki turned to her. "See?"

It was more than Haruhi could bear to watch.

As usual, Kyouya was there when she needed him least, seeming to read the very thoughts she did not want him to.

"You should just be thankful our second foray into the motion picture business was such a success," he told her while he multitasked as per the usual—taking notes of viewers' reactions in his clipboard, tallying numbers of DVD sales, and somehow managing to adjust his glasses all at the same time. "It wasn't an inexpensive trip, you know, and film crews need to be paid."

"You make it sound like I actually wanted to go on that trip and be chased through the jungle by a bunch of teenage boys with guns," she grumbled.

Which Kyouya just pretended he hadn't heard.

"Still, sales are such that, if they continue this way, we should make a sizable profit. It helps that we have a network of fans in other schools as well as our own."

"Yeah, and speaking of which, what kind of weirdos think it's so cool to watch us killing each other off?"

"Another three dozen orders here!" Renge happily announced, waving an order form at Kyouya. "Tsubaki wants to send some off to her friends in Kitakyushu, big host club fans all."

At this point Kyouya smiled, as though to say "I rest my case," and Haruhi could honestly say she didn't like the vibe she was getting from it. "It is just make-believe, Haruhi. But if it helps put that weekend's experience into perspective, you can just think of it in terms of a reduction in the amount of money you still owe this club."

"You mean, to the tune of a hundred-thousand yen."

That got Kyouya to momentarily stop his scribbling. "Now, you're not still sore over that, are you?"

That was when Nekozawa decided to drape himself over Kyouya's shoulders, one arm dangling down to graze his underclassman's breast pocket. The reaction from the fans was immediate, and it was wild.

"Maybe when this is over," Nekozawa purred into Kyouya's ear, loud enough for them all to hear, "you would like to team up with our club once again to host another fund-raising, picture show event of our choosing."

Of course, his words were mostly lost in the sudden din of dozens of fangirls squealing in rapture like so many overheating kettles.

Though secretly glad it wasn't him this time, Tamaki stared in horror at his friend, who just tilted his head nonchalantly and smiled under Nekozawa's weight.

Then again, it wasn't like there was any worry the black magic club's blackness would corrupt Kyouya.

"What did you have in mind?"

"Oh, nothing much," Nekozawa went on. "Just a little costumed, musical get-together full of weird science and campy innuendo we think would be right up the alleys of your clientele."

"We're so in!" Hikaru volunteered, while Kaoru asked, "Do we get to do the Time Warp again?"

"All that and more, my little Rorschach blots." Nekozawa lowered his voice. "But you, Ohtori-kun, can come just the way you are. . . ."

Cue another outbreak of uncontrollable whistling and squealing.

And a horrified Shirou, who, much to his own inexplicable shame, could not seem to look away.

"I decline," Kyouya said politely without a waver in either his or the other's smiles.

Tamaki flashed Kyouya a double thumbs up at that—and quickly put them away again and crushed his enthusiasm when Nekozawa happened to look his way.

Cheers from the portion of the audience that was still paying attention to the picture thankfully interrupted them, and those who had turned away to catch the tension between Nekozawa and Kyouya wanted to know what they had missed. They had reached the part where Honey raised the Red Flag at Alpha Base, with the dramatic lighting effects shining around him and an epic score to go with it. The Honey fans could hardly be more delighted, even as he collapsed with a little sigh into the four-poster bed.

The source of their attention blushed like a Hummel figure and bowed all around, soaking up the praise. Mori simply smiled beside him. Despite Honey's demure words, he knew his friend loved being lavished by such attention.

Yasuchika, on the other hand, sat and stewed in his shame in a very tenuous silence.

"That's so Honey-sempai," a couple of first-year girls said, alternately holding their cheeks and their chests. "He's so serious one moment, and the next . . . adorable!"

"I just knew he could do it. He's such a natural athlete," said her friend. Then the two realized they were standing within earshot of Haruhi, their usual pick in club activities, and humbled themselves. "But, of course, I was still rooting for you the entire time, Haruhi. I'm sorry you didn't win."

Haruhi shrugged. "Thanks. But, you know, it really doesn't matter to me—"

"How did it feel to have Tamaki-sempai confess to you like that on screen?"

That question threw her for a loop. If Haruhi had been sipping her instant coffee at that moment, it would have quickly doused the backs of several viewers' heads. Had that been a real confession? Was she missing something that was obvious to everyone else?

"Uh . . . um. . . ."

"I think you have your answer there, ladies. Of course, as actors we have to be able to separate our personal feelings from those of our characters on the screen. However. . . ."

Haruhi nearly jumped as Tamaki's arm somehow found its way around her shoulders. She tried to protest, but he pulled her close to him, gazing into her eyes with a lusty darkness that would have given Hikaru and Kaoru a run for their money. The results were instantaneous.

"We can't help it if a little of our off-screen relationship slips through into the final product."

Haruhi could feel her cheeks turning pink, but she was quick with a comeback. "Our father and son-like relationship, you mean."

Tamaki's smile was unflappable. "Of course. What else could I be talking about?"

However, Haruhi thought she caught a slight wink in his look, begging her to play along. Strangely enough, the feeling that flooded her then was relief. For now, it seemed, they were still safe. Even with all the faked deaths and drama, nothing had been changed by their adventures on the island after all. And that was the way she wanted to keep it.

"Come on," Tamaki said to her in a lower voice, once the girls' attention had wandered back to the film. "You don't really think that weekend was all a bust, do you?"

Haruhi was surprised by how easily he had picked up on her mood, though she didn't know why she should be. He may have acted oblivious, and in truth been easily distracted, but she should have known better than to think her sour attitude would have gone unnoticed by Tamaki. She gave his question some serious thought . . . and in the end, looking back on their weekend on the island, and barring the unethical manner of how they had come to be there in the first place, could not find as much to complain about as she had thought she would.

Haruhi let her mind wander back to the twins' high jinks and new forays into cosplaying, her father's terrible acting, the overblown chivalry with which Tamaki and Kasanoda had attempted to rescue her, and how comically predictable it had all been every step of the way; and she found that in place of an answer, she was actually smiling to herself.

And that was good enough for Tamaki.