Listening from an adjacent hallway, hunched over a sophisticated audio receiver that looked like a cheap mp3 player, Agent Sato heard the explicit threat. The words "direct method" echoed in her earpiece, followed by the faint, terrifying clink of metal on metal from the medical cart. Her blood ran cold. Plan A—Kenji talking his way out of it with his unique brand of philosophical nonsense—had failed. It was time for Plan B.
Sato was a creature of contingencies. She had plans C, D, and E already queued up. A fire alarm was too crude, too repetitive. It would bring general security, but it wouldn't necessarily extract Kenji from Ayame's immediate, personal control. She needed something more specific, something that would create a localized crisis that only the head of the wing would need to address, a crisis that was simultaneously urgent and deeply, personally annoying. She needed a distraction with flavor.
Her eyes fell on a brushed-steel panel on the wall, discreetly labeled "Culinary Wing Environmental & Utility Controls." It was locked, of course. For a normal janitor, it was just another part of the wall. For Sato, it was a beautiful, irresistible puzzle box. Using a bypass chip from her kit, a wafer-thin piece of tech she palmed from a hidden pocket in her glove, she interfaced with the system's diagnostic port. The panel's small screen flickered to life, displaying schematics and pressure readings. She didn't need a fire. She needed a flood. A very specific, very messy flood.
With a few keystrokes on the tiny keypad of her device, she sliced through the academy's firewalls and accessed the plumbing subroutines. She located the pressure regulators for the advanced, high-pressure dishwasher and the emergency fire sprinkler systems specifically for Chef Ayame's wing. With a final, decisive command, she overrode the safety protocols and sent a single, malicious instruction: Initiate Emergency Sanitation Purge Cycle. System-wide. Maximum Pressure.
Back in the sterile abattoir of a kitchen, as Chef Ayame took another menacing step toward Kenji, her hand reaching for the hypodermic needle, the world erupted.
It started with a deep groan from the plumbing in the walls. Then, every nozzle in the room—the sleek, minimalist sink faucets, the six overhead sprinkler heads, the hidden jets of the industrial dishwasher built into the counter—hissed to life simultaneously. It wasn't a gentle spray. It was a high-pressure, full-force deluge, spraying lukewarm, slightly hard water in every conceivable direction.
Ayame froze, her hand hovering over the needle, her perfect composure finally shattering into a million pieces. She was momentarily, utterly stunned by the sudden, inexplicable, and deeply inconvenient deluge. Alarms began to chime throughout the wing, not with the high-pitched shriek of a fire, but with the insistent, almost mocking pinging of a catastrophic plumbing failure.
This was Kenji's chance. But he couldn't just run. A simple retreat was not in character for the master of chaos. His escape had to be a performance. It had to be a statement.
He looked at the perfect mille-feuille on the counter, its glossy chocolate now being spattered with water, its delicate pastry slowly starting to wilt. He looked at the furious, drenched Chef Ayame, who was staring at the ceiling as if she could vaporize the sprinklers with her sheer rage. An idea, born of pure, desperate inspiration, bloomed in his mind. He grabbed a clean, heavy whisk from the magnetic wall.
"Perfection is an illusion!" he roared over the sound of the spraying water, his voice booming with the authority of a mad prophet.
"And control is a cage built of glass! It is fragile!"
With a dramatic, theatrical flourish, he swung the whisk like a tennis racket and swiped the plate. The perfect dessert, the culmination of her entire philosophy, went airborne for a split second before skidding off the counter and shattering on the floor in a tragic, beautiful, watery mess of cream, pastry, and broken dreams.
"The soul of cuisine is not control!"
He yelled at the stunned chef, pointing the dripping whisk at her.
"It's life! And life," he declared, making a grand, sweeping gesture at the flooding kitchen, "is wet and messy and unpredictable!"
Using her shock as cover, he bolted for the door. He wrenched it open and sprinted out into the now-chaotic hallway, where other instructors were emerging from their offices with looks of bewilderment. He left Chef Ayame standing alone in her flooded, ruined laboratory, staring at the wreckage of her perfect dish, her perfect makeup finally starting to run.
He met Sato at their pre-arranged rendezvous point two floors down, in a dusty, forgotten storage closet filled with old textbooks. He was soaked to the bone, his hair plastered to his forehead, and his heart was hammering, but he was grinning like a fool.
"Did you see her face?" he panted, adrenaline coursing through him.
"It was like her whole world just short-circuited."
"I heard it all. 'Life is wet and messy'?" Sato asked, a rare, genuine smile touching her lips as she handed him a dry towel she'd brought.
"A bit on the nose, don't you think?"
"I was improvising!" he said, gratefully toweling his hair.
"It was either that or admit I was terrified she was going to jab me with a needle full of mind-control juice and turn me into a Stepford Chef." He paused, his grin fading as the reality of the situation sank back in. "She was going to force me, Sato. She wasn't bluffing. She has no limits."
"I know." Her expression turned grim.
"But the escape wasn't a total loss."
She held out her hand. Kenji looked down at his own. During his dramatic, whisk-fueled declaration, as he'd braced himself on Ayame's counter for his grand swing, he had palmed a small object she'd left sitting beside her terminal. An object Sato had noticed via a hidden micro-camera and had directed him to grab with a single, coded word through his earpiece:
"Magpie."
It was a slim, metallic keycard, heavier than it looked. It wasn't for a door. It had a complex data port on one end.
He turned it over. On the back, etched into the brushed metal, was the familiar serpent-and-wheat logo of Ouroboros. And beneath it, a tiny, almost unreadable serial number.
"This has to be for her computer," Kenji said, his voice a low whisper.
"The one with the biometric scanner. This must be the master override key. The key for the system administrator."
"It's our best lead," Sato agreed, taking the keycard and placing it carefully into a static-proof evidence bag.
"But this changes the game. She knows who you are now. Not a spy, maybe, but a deliberate agent of chaos. A threat she has to neutralize. The mission just shifted from investigation to survival."
Kenji looked at the evidence bag in her hand. They finally had a way into the conspiracy's digital brain. But to use it, they'd have to go back into the serpent's den, and this time, the serpent wouldn't be inviting him for a polite demonstration. She'd be waiting for him. And she would be very, very angry.