'Sheaf!' Hacker exclaimed; the shock evident on her face. Even X was surprised, though he didn't show it. Sheaf grinned widely in his characteristic way, pearly teeth flashing. He spread his arms dramatically and stood up. 'Did you guys miss me?'

X sighed. In his opinion, SHADE would do perfectly fine as a theatre production house as well. Everyone was a top-class drama queen here. Hacker responded even more dramatically. Out of excitement, she bounded towards him and hugged him. Sheaf laughed and hugged her back.

'So much enthusiasm even though you barely know me? I'm sure X must've sang paeans of my glory to you.' He remarked, glancing at X. Hacker shook her head.

'Nah, the guy is so silent and tight-lipped all the time, I barely even know him. I'm just the sort of person to get excited like this.' She replied on his behalf.

Sheaf laughed again. 'Yeah, I can see that.' He grabbed X's arm and pulled him into a hug as well. X really, really didn't appreciate such close contact, especially in front of an audience, but chose not to voice his complaints. 'Loosen up man. Goodness, you're always wound up so tight.' Sheaf lightly reprimanded him. X responded with a cutely childlike humph and a pout.

'So what happened? Did you do it? Did you find him? Was he safe? Was he on our side finally? Who was chasing him?' Hacker started her endless barrage of questions.

X sighed and muttered 'Here we go again.'

Sheaf took his time responding. He first sat down on a chair with a solemn expression on his face. From his time with Sheaf, X knew well enough by now that there was terrible news coming in. And he was right.

'I found him, all right. Just not in the state I was hoping for. I found him in one was the hidden secret houses we built specifically for this purpose. The door itself was hard to open, and when I went in I found out why. A broken chair was fixed on the door, probably to keep curious hands away. And the house was in an even worse mess. It literally looked like a hurricane struck it. There were shattered pieces of glass strewn across the floor. The curtains were torn up, furniture was broken, and tiles were smashed up. I found the guy himself in a bedroom. He had been shot in the chest. The dried-up pool of his blood formed indicated that he'd been lying like that for quite some time. All that mess must've been due to the struggle he put up.'

Hacker covered her mouth with her hand, horrorstruck. Even X, who was usually placid, looked tormented. People tended to assume that anyone in a dangerous field would get used to death and gruesome murder. But it just wasn't possible to not feel repulsed and shocked when our brain processes death and murder.

All three of them were silent for a moment. Nobody knew what to say. Until Hacker asked her final question on the topic. 'So, who was it? Was it ACE?'

Sheaf nodded slowly. 'The only other connection outside SHADE he had with anybody else was ACE. They must have realized that he was double-crossing them and spying on them and come after him.' He told with a slight shudder.

Hacker exhaled shakily and shook her head in revulsion. By mutual agreement, they spent two minutes in silence. Finally, X stirred out of the haze with a shake of his arms. Sheaf cleared his throat and exhaled shakily. 'Well, there's nothing we can do about him, except avenge him by taking down the people who killed him. Speaking of which, do you guys have any new leads on the case?'

Hacker's eyes gleamed and she bounced lightly on her heels as she spoke. 'Yeah, X here managed to get his bee into ACE's HQ with his genius thinking and even more awesome partner!'

Sheaf gasped and laughed. 'What?! That is truly phenomenal. I was quite worried that with our only inside source to ACE dead, it would push things back quite a bit, and maybe we would even miss our targets and fail in the mission. But that is seriously awesome news. Now, if we're careful enough, we can get almost any information we require without any of our physical presence.'

'Yeah, it's pretty rad. But we have bad news, or rather, urgent news as well.' Hacker broke in excitedly.

Sheaf's face first fell, then it became guarded as he carefully asked. 'Urgent news?'

Hacker motioned for X to sit down comfortably. All of them rolled over to face each other as Hacker launched into a detailed explanation of their past few days' adventures. Sheaf put on his incredibly concentrating face, with his slim eyebrows furrowed, petite nose twitching in attention in that unique way of his, and his lean fingers interlaced. Sheaf usually leaned forward while listening and placed his hands on his knees, giving the impression that he was a very reliable and present listener.

Sometimes X even suspected that Sheaf had purposefully developed this posture to make people talk to him more because after all the spy system is about intelligence and its gathering.

Sheaf remained quiet for the most part while Hacker launched into her enthusiastic summary. He only asked questions in between, which too were far and few. When they got to the deadline part, he got so anxious his knee started bouncing up and down. Finally, when Hacker's narration had concluded, Sheaf took a deep breath and asked;

'So we don't know the location of the VX right?'

X almost laughed. That question was so typical of Sheaf. Out of all the things he could have said, he chose to analyze the tasks remaining and tie up the loose ends. The ability to stay focused on the goal and not get distracted by unnecessary points was what made Sheaf so capable.

X pulled out his phone and opened the bee's remote-control app that he'd developed. He plugged it into a screen and stood before it. From the corner of his vision, he saw Hacker and Sheaf stand beside him.

'You know, I've always wondered about this. How exactly do you control the bee?' Sheaf asked curiously. X shot him a wary glance.

'Is this really the right time?' 

Sheaf smirked and raised his hands. 'Don't explain if you don't want to, Mister.'

X sighed and shook his head. 'No, no. Now that you've asked, if I don't explain it to you, you'll probably keep bringing it up at inappropriate times for the rest of my life.'

Hacker snorted. 'Yeah, he would totally do that.'

X held his phone out so both of them could see it and pointed at the controls. To make it easier, he referenced it in hologram mode, so the various parts would be visible and evenly spaced out.

'So, the very basic controls are those of movement and flight. If you move this circle here, you can move the bee back and front. The button in the middle propels it on touch, and makes it fly if you continue to press it.' X instructed, demonstrating side by side.

'It almost seems like video game controls.' Hacker commented. X nodded.

'The various limbs have more specific controls in the right-hand top corner. The audio and microphone are actually two-way, so anyone on the bee's side would be able to hear what we say, but I don't really use it cause in stealth missions, silence is sometimes everything.'

They had been hovering the bee around the whole time X was explaining the details, when they suddenly came across security personnel, guarding a door that was clearly labeled 'Surveillance room' All of them straightened up and drew their breath. 'This is it. The room where we'll get a lot of our answers.' Sheaf mumbled. X and Hacker nodded tersely.

They waited for as long as they could, but there didn't seem to be anyone coming into the room. So, X scanned the surroundings until he spotted what he was looking for. A metal grill on the top of the wall tucked so far away it was almost hidden. X grinned savagely. It was showtime.

He directed the bee to the grill and zoomed through the spacing between the bars. Hacker raised her eyebrows. 'I'm assuming you've had to do this quite a lot in the past.'

'Don't even ask.'

X hunched over instinctively and bit his bottom lip in concentration. He sent out a quick radioactive scan to analyze the pathway and come up with a way to enter the surveillance room. The bee sent out pulses of waves, using its intelligent technology to figure out the various paths and their dead ends. Finally, after a gut-wrenching minute, it pulled out a detailed scan of the metal-air grilles system, accurate up to a hundred meters.

'Bingo.' X muttered with a slightly worrisomely wicked grin. He leaned forward even more and guided the bee carefully through the tunnels. Hacker and Sheaf were stunned by how his fingers effortlessly danced across the controls like it was an extension of his body like it was any other limb.

They bustled along the relatively dark metal tunnel, with X occasionally looking at the map screen opened at his side and constantly muttering to himself. They couldn't make out what he was saying, but it was obvious that his mind was furiously working, the gears in his head constantly turning.

Then suddenly the bee whistled through another set of grills and made it into the surveillance room. X straightened up and smiled ever so slightly. Hacker laughed and patted his back. 'You can be proud of yourself for once, you know?' She teased him. X returned the gesture by grinning as wide as her. Sheaf cleared his throat and pointed at the screen.

'We still have work to do guys,' He reminded them 'Look, all the cams are on full display here.' X's head snapped back to the screen in eager anticipation and hunched over it again.

The bee was carefully guided to the centre of the room, where it wouldn't even be visible to the guards. Then he took shots of the huge screen with its patchwork of surveillance feed every time the images flipped, showing varying angles of different places. In the room, two bored-looking security guards were supervising the cams. They didn't seem like they would be much trouble unless they glanced up and found something overly suspicious in the little bee hovering around the ceiling.

Once they took all the photos, the bee retreated to the grill and alighted safely. Then X pulled up the photos and ran them through an app he had created. It patched up all the photos together and created a plan of what each location could possibly mean.

'Fascinating.' Sheaf breathed, leaning forward. 'This app uses computer vision, doesn't it? This map could be very useful in keeping a watch on ACE.'

X nodded distractedly. All three of them scanned the various images and labels carefully. It was Hacker who spotted what was now painstakingly obviously the room where the VX was stored. And, besides it, was the weapons room, just like Agent Panda had described it.

'Okay, so the VX room is on the same floor as the hostages, which is quite a relief, 'cause it'll be easier for me to get to everything and everyone much faster.' Sheaf summarized. He pointed to the various rooms as he spoke. 'There is an intersection from this lift here. Three corridors lead to various rooms on either side of the wall. The hostages are this way, to the left and the VX is in the opposite direction, to the right.' He also pulled up the picture he'd taken from Agent Panda's files. They now knew that it was the guard schedule Panda had been talking about.

'So, since the execution occurs at six in the evening sharp, we need to reach them and get them out of there before then,' Hacker added, nodding her head slowly.

Sheaf nodded. 'Let's see the guard schedule. Then we'll have a better understanding of how to plan better.' He reached out and pulled the schedule to the front, and all three bent over it. 'There is a twenty-four bar seven schedule like he said. A day's cycle starts at 12 midnight and the two batches assigned to this room shift every two hours. So the schedule goes like 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and then 12 midnight again. The shift in question happens ten minutes before the appointed hour.' Sheaf listed out. 'Now we can decide on the plan in a better way.'

'I have one plan in mind,' X finally spoke, splaying his hands across the schedule, 'I'll go in any time before four in the evening because six is when the killing is scheduled. That would mean I can retrieve the weapon first, before retrieving the hostages.'

Hacker opened her mouth to protest but X understood her misgivings and beat her to it. 'I know that you want to go after the hostages first, but it's already gonna be a tough shave, trying to extract around ten people from a place where they're supposed to be executed. I can't get the weapon while having to care for them.'

She still didn't like it but nodded grumpily, seeing sense in his logic. 'And how are you going to get those people and twenty litres of a deadly weapon out of there?'

X was about to reply that he had no idea yet when his gaze went to the camera and his face went slack. Hacker and Sheaf spun around to see what caught his attention and their eyes widened.

now that you've known the characters relatively well, who's your favourite?

honestly, I've so attached to all my characters it's scary

And lastly, what do you think shocked our heroes so much? The appearance of your username when you voted for this chapter?