ITE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND OF HER ALARM CLOCK. After hitting snooze, she looked over to see that it was nine o'clock in the morning. Peering out the window, she caught a glimpse of Zenpan gathering the troops outside. Ite remarked the bizarre nature of this event, occurring so early in the day. Usually, the troops were rallied at ten-thirty in the morning. Wanting to know what the fuss is about, she got into her uniform and stepped outside. As soon as Zenpan saw her, he quickly averted his gaze.

"Good morning, Zero," Ite called out to him before jogging over to his position. "What's going on? Have you seen Yukan yet today?" As soon as she mentioned his name, Zenpan's face began to lose its color as sweat began to appear upon his forehead. All discussions the military had been making before this ceased. Ite knew then that something was not right.

"Good morning, Ite," Zenpan began, his voice shaking in a display of nervousness. "Uh, I sent him to train at a different camp. He's not going to be back for roughly three months." This was a lie, of course, but he feared that telling her the truth would likely end in his demise. He didn't want to be the messenger of news that would get him shot.

"What?!" Ite yelled out, frustrated by what was happening. "Are you kidding me right now, Zero?!"

"Sorry," Zenpan began to rush his words trying to get out of the blast radius when Ite would inevitably erupt. "We gotta do army stuff now, so why don't you head for breakfast?" Ite grabbed onto his arm before he was able to make his escape.

"Zero," Ite coldly growled. "Stop lying to me right now." The general knew that there was no escape. Lying would only dig him deeper into this pit he now found himself in. Thus, he decided to come clean.

"Okay, he's missing," the general confessed, the fear of death in his eyes. "I have no idea where he is. We're trying to find Kadaina so he can start a statistical search."

"Sir," a soldier called out at a rather convenient time, "Kadaina has been found passed out by the horse pen. We are currently trying to sober him up as fast as possible."

"Good," Zenpan replied, still anticipating Ite's fury.

"I knew it!" she yelled out in response to hearing this. "I should have never left him alone last night." Rage began to boil up inside of her as she began to beat herself up for the mistake of leaving him unattended the night before. She had already chosen whom she believed to be the one to blame for Yukan's disappearance. She began to clench her fists so hard that her knuckles had turned white, entirely void of color.

Just as her anger had begun to peak, Kadaina was escorted toward the congregation that had been building up. He was barely able to support himself and seemed to be in a rather poor state. To those around him, he was very clearly hungover.

"Ugh..." the strategist began groggily, "my head is pounding. We need to go to Yukan's room to see if there were any signs of a struggle. They may have dozed him or something." Despite being incredibly hungover and only turning fifteen perhaps eight days ago, Kadaina still had recovered enough mentally by this time to put his brain to use, albeit for only short amounts of time and not with as much power as he usually put in.

"It was that bitch, Brunnhilde," Ite kept her anger bottled up, her voice shaking as he kept her feelings bottled up. "I know it was her."

"WHOA!" Kadaina reacted in an instant to the vulgarity of this statement. "Language, young lass! Uh, okay, um, Ite. Calm down."

The three of them went over to Yukan's room in the barracks. Lo and behold, there was no sign of the swordsman. The blade, however, was still perched on the leftmost side of his bed as usual.

"He was drugged after all," Kadaina began to analyze, thoroughly scrutinizing every small detail of the room. "They aren't after the blade. Just Yukan? His sword is still beside his bed in the holder. There is no broken glass and the window is still locked, so they entered through the door." He began to snap his fingers to jog his brain a bit more. "Uh, can someone get me a glass of water?"

"It's your fault for drinking!" Zenpan angrily yelled out, seeing that Kadaina didn't seem to be as focused on the task at hand due to the headache. "You're still underage!"

"Spare me the lecture, Zero," the mage snarkily retorted, gripping his head. "We have more important matters than my drunken adventures."

"This shouldn't have happened!" Ite yelled out, attacking herself once more. "I should have killed her when I had the chance, and now Yukan is in trouble."

"It was the fake nurse, Ms. Daitan," Zenpan tried to console her blindly. "It was nothing you did whatsoever."

"I shouldn't have gone back to my room," Ite continued, not even bothering to acknowledge what her general had just said to her. "I should have stayed up all night and watched over him. He was tired after fighting. He couldn't defend himself. He didn't even get the chance!"

"Slow down, Ite," Kadaina said, noticing something on her neck. "You have a mark on your neck from a needle injection. You were drugged after you went to bed as well. Whoever kidnapped Yukan needed to keep you out of the way for this to happen. You were too much of a threat to their plan."

"I could have prevented all of this!" Ite shouted out once more, still not budging to what her comrades were telling her. "If only I wasn't so stupid. I should have pushed harder to up the security around his room!"

"Everyone was drunk last night, ma'am," the general interjected to try to talk something into Ite, be it sense or consolidation. "I'm sorry that we let our guard down."

"There was nothing to be done," Kadaina added. "They outsmarted us this time. We got stuck playing victory's fools. We have to act fast now that our ace fighter is MIA." Ite was taken aback by this.

"We're not going after him?!" she exclaimed, baffled as Kadaina proposed leaving Yukan to rot as a possible prisoner of war

"We can't if we get wiped out first," the hungover mage responded, keeping his temper under check with an unforeseen strength. "The only way to survive the next battle is to lay a siege. We need to deploy one ASAP. I know you're upset Ite, but we can't risk this whole camp for Yukan's sake. I need to get everything organized and beat this killer headache. We can discuss this later after the plans for the siege are laid out."

Kadaina and Zenpan leave the room, abandoning Ite in the dwelling of her missing lover. As her rage hit another peak, she sent her fist into the wall, putting a large hole into the spot that her knuckles connected with the drywall as the pink insulation began to seep out like blood from an open wound.