Lucas thought about how many women he found attractive Artemisa included but his mind still drifted toward that unknown beauty he had seen twice today. That same beauty had appeared in his dreams more than once.

“I like women, but… why are you so sure it’s a man?” Lucas asked, leaving the question unfinished.

“You’re way too obvious. If it were a woman, you wouldn’t be overthinking it so much. There’s nothing wrong with liking men.”

“Of course there’s a problem and that problem is that I don’t know him!” Lucas snapped, losing his patience.

Artemisa grinned playfully:

“So it is a crush? On a stranger?” she teased with a knowing smile.

“You’re so annoying!” Lucas complained. “When we were in the auditorium, I saw a guy sitting up front and I thought he was cute, okay? That was it. Nothing more.”

“Which guy?” asked Artemisa. “And do I know him?”

“I don’t think he was from around here to begin with?” Lucas replied. “I don’t know, when I saw him I just thought he was really handsome. His body was very... ‘well-trained’.”

Artemisa’s smile faded due to how vague the description was.

“You only noticed his body? What did he look like?”

“Blond—but like, that platinum blond kind? And really pale skin, golden or yellowish eyes, and his face was just... handsome, I guess? He had a mole under one eye and…”

Just thinking about the guy made Lucas a bit nervous, and he swallowed more saliva.

“Wait, are you talking about the one who ran off with a woman because journalists were chasing them and they left the session as soon as it ended?” Artemisa asked.

“Yeah…”

“Lucas, that wasn’t just some random civilian. In fact, he might be the reason we’re locked in and stuck in this mess!” Artemisa snapped.

“I-I don’t know? I hadn’t thought about that.”

“You hadn’t thought about it?” Artemisa repeated, exasperated. “Lucas! You can’t be like this. You’re telling me that if you see that same guy at base and he turns out to be a spy, you’d just let him be one so long as you get to stare at him because he’s ‘hot’ and you liked his ass?”

“Don’t twist it like that! I never said I’d let him go if he was a spy.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t let him go?” Artemisa laughed, surprised.

Lucas couldn’t help but blush furiously.

“Stop hearing only what you want! I just thought he was attractive, okay? Maybe I’d ask how he trained to get a body like that... I mean, if you’d seen him! I think his waist was like this size.”

Lucas held his hands parallel in the air, showing the approximate size of the guy’s waist.

“So… do you want a one-night thing with him?” Artemisa asked.

“I told you I don’t even know him!” Lucas groaned again.

“If we end up in the same faction, I’m going to tease you every single day about your runaway crush,” Artemisa said, grinning.

“So, what did you choose?”

“ACE,” Artemisa replied. “I changed my mind last minute.”

Lucas covered his face, catching Artemisa’s attention. When she realized what that meant, she burst out laughing:

“You picked the same one! I’m going to remind you of this every day!” Artemisa teased, reading Lucas’s expressions with ease.

Lucas kept that handsome face in his mind as he drifted in thought, but when he looked at Artemisa and saw her in a better mood, he smiled:

“Still, I don’t think he’s dangerous. I mean, he signaled the director of our maybe-future faction and she replied, but I don’t know what she said.” Lucas tried to defend the stranger.

“I think that’s your heart trying to convince you you didn’t fall for a spy,” Artemisa laughed. “That would make a great gay comic: A soldier who fall in love with a ‘handsome blond’ spy.”

“There’s a lot of comics like that,” Lucas added.

At that moment, Lucas felt a piercing gaze. He raised an eyebrow, catching Artemisa’s inquisitive look.

“Luna reads them and posts them on her story,” he explained.

“And she talks to you about them?”

“Yeah, and I listen. They’ve got good plots and stuff, and the art’s good.”

“And you’re still unsure if you’re gay, man?”

“Could you not be so direct for once?” Lucas asked.

“You’re making such a big deal over someone you saw once?” said a third voice, not previously in the conversation.

Artemisa and Lucas looked around for the source of the voice that had just chimed in. To their surprise, it was the last person they would have expected to sneak out of the facility just for a few minutes of internet access.

The young man with dyed hair was wearing oversized headphones and a black portable computer. Apparently, he’d been listening to the whole conversation from a corner, a blind spot for both of them.

“Aqua? What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be inside?” Lucas asked, pointing a thumb at the door.

“I could ask you the same,” Aqua replied.

“When did you sneak out? We never saw you,” Artemisa asked.

“About half an hour ago,” Aqua said. “I was bored downstairs.”

“And how did you manage it? Did you climb out the window or something?” Lucas asked, confused.

“I asked the most tired-looking guard I could find if I could use the bathroom. He said no, since there were bathrooms in the cafeteria. Then I told him I had a cold and low immunity, so I preferred the one on the second floor because it wasn’t crowded. He said I could only go through the first floor and only for five minutes.”

“That doesn’t explain how you got all the way up here,” Lucas interrupted.

“I told him I had irritable bowel syndrome and that if I went to the downstairs bathroom, the smell would be so bad no one would stand it. Then everyone would want to go to the second floor bathroom. I explained that if he let just me go, it’d take longer but he’d only have to deal with one person. If not, he’d have to deal with tons of complaints and traffic. In the end, people always pick the option with the least trouble.” Aqua explained.

“So, are they looking for you downstairs?” Artemisa asked.

“No, because I left during the guard shift change. That guard handed off his watch to someone else, and that guy had to go to floor -1 like half an hour ago. I think they already forgot about me,” Aqua replied.

“You planned all that just to sneak out?” Lucas looked impressed.

“I didn’t plan it. I just saw the opportunity and took it,” Aqua said.

Since Aqua had responded to him rather than ignoring him like usual. Lucas tried to make him laugh and break the ice a bit more:

“We went the movie-style route, almost crawled through the vents, but it’s nothing like the movies,” Lucas chuckled, but Aqua gave him a look like he was an idiot, and he immediately stopped laughing.

“We did like—woah, zap, ching,” Artemisa added.

She followed Lucas’s vibe, making silly sound effects and motions, leaving Aqua even more confused by the onomatopoeia.

“You’ve got guts. I wouldn’t have taken that much risk just for a whim,” Aqua said.

Apparently, Aqua only said that to avoid sounding too cold after all the “effort” his companions had put into their escape story. As if he didn’t really know how to respond.

“At least it was more fun,” Artemisa muttered.

Lucas decided to talk about what he saw after the interrogation—about the man talking with Vice Director Goryashko. The other two listened closely and exchanged glances, especially when Lucas mentioned the guy wasn’t wearing the proper uniform or ID.

“It’s illegal for an agent to not have their ID unless the mission requires it,” Aqua said.

“The vice director didn’t seem to mind, so he probably wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Lucas replied.

Aqua and Artemisa glanced at each other briefly upon hearing that answer. Neither of them could match Lucas’s unshakable optimism.

“Haven’t you ever thought you’re too positive sometimes?” Artemisa asked.

“Sometimes. But then I think, ‘if I’m not positive for myself, no one else will be,’ so I just keep going. Why do you ask?”

“Nothing...” Artemisa replied.

The three of them didn’t talk much after that—there just wasn’t much chemistry between them. And besides, romantic topics weren’t exactly Artemisa’s or Aqua’s favorites.

After 40 minutes, they decided they should return, and so they did. Strangely, the guards seemed to be focused on some other part of the building, since they had no trouble getting back to their beds in the middle of the night. Sleep was beginning to take hold of the three youths, as their eyes began to burn with fatigue.

They planned to take a short nap, so they laid down under their blankets to rest. But unexpectedly, an alarm that seemed to come from the very pits of hell began to sound, and at that very moment, the walls vibrated loudly, along with the floor beneath them. Everything felt like the onset of a catastrophe, as the room lit up with severe emergency red lights and a powerful flashlight beamed through the windows. They could make out a portion of a massive ship just outside the room. If the dining hall had regular windows, they would have shattered—but since they were reinforced, they remained intact.

“An invasion!” shouted Artemisa.

Everyone woke up or jumped to their feet in fear at what was happening. The room was filled with voices asking, “What’s going on?” “Are they invading the facility?”

None of the youths knew how they had managed to get up from their blankets, now standing with their beginner-level nuclear weapons and in attack position. Lucas had a thick broadsword resting easily on his shoulder, Artemisa had a small hand sickle and stood in front of Lucas, Pascal had his fists clenched and ready, and Luna had her ring activated. Meanwhile, Aqua was hanging from the chandelier in the dining room.

Everyone was ready to defend the facility from the threat, until the alarm stopped—though the noise from the ship remained deafening. The lighting returned to normal, revealing Vice Director Goryashko, flanked by a high-ranking agent on each side and a horde of support operatives.

A platinum-blonde man stood next to the vice director, confident, with a daring smile and powerful yellow eyes that looked like sharp gems. He wore the ACE black suit uniform like the director and the dark-skinned young woman beside him though his shirt was unbuttoned, he lacked a tie, and wore a black overcoat. He had a pistol on his belt that looked like a high-level anomalous weapon, while the dark-skinned woman carried an anomalous spear on her back.