Author's notes: I belatedly decided that it made more sense to split chapter 2 into two chapters, so this fic will now be a total of three chapters. But since I promised the conclusion in two weeks' time, the final chapter will go up tomorrow as scheduled. Enjoy!

On the way to Yamamoto's house, I asked Nagato if she could remove the spray paint from the door.

"Yes."

"...So, will you?"

"No."

"I thought you weren't angry about what they did to you."

"I am not." She paused, and added, "But I believe you do not truly wish the paint removed."

"Excuse me?"

"I think I understand what Miss Nagato is saying," Koizumi interrupted. "Miss Suzumiya gave you the spray paint cans to carry." (With the buckets of water emptied and stacked on top of each other, I had a lot more arm room, and Haruhi had no intention of letting it go to waste.) "Had you sincerely wanted to eliminate the SOS logo, you could have simply spray painted over it once her back was turned."

"I want the vandalism gone, not just the logo. And if I don't want it gone, why am I asking Nagato to get rid of it?"

Koizumi shrugged. "You make a fair point, but my intuition tells me, and apparently Nagato's intuition tells her the same, that you generally support Haruhi's plan. You're merely uneasy because these are lines you've never crossed before."

"Before you chalk this up to me having a fickle conscience, maybe you'd better think about how Nozawa is going to react once he sees that logo. He and his friends might do worse to Nagato and Miss Asahina than just shaving their heads."

"I'm not afraid of them, Kyon," Miss Asahina spoke up, clenching her fists, a fire burning in her eyes. "Miss Suzumiya is right. If they're coming after us, we have to fight back!"

Good grief. What did Nozawa do to her?

Or maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe Haruhi had become a bad influence on her, or maybe she was even more outraged at Nagato's predicament than she'd let on.

When we arrived at Yamamoto's house, Haruhi said, "Okay, Mikuru, distribute the toilet paper rolls. Then everyone start unrolling them until we've got at at least five meters out of each roll."

Can't we just toilet paper a house like normal delinquents?

It was a tedious task, and of course, Haruhi participated only in the role of overseer. Once a roll had been unrolled, she squirted the two or three meters which were closest to the main roll with her bottle of no-idea-what-it-is.

"Now roll them back up," Haruhi commanded. "Aaa! Do it by the cardboard part of the roll, Mikuru! Do you want to get that stuff on your hands?"

This part was much less tedious, but somewhat more odorous. No, I still can't hazard a guess as to what's in that spray bottle. But it was nice to see that Haruhi had put some thought into one of her plans for a change. The two or three meters of unsprayed toilet paper served as a buffer, so that we could pick up and throw the roll at the house without getting our hands contaminated.

Theoretically, anyway. I still forbid Miss Asahina from laying her divine hands upon the tainted toilet paper rolls. I myself was relieved of TPing duty when my first throw failed to overcome wind resistance, leading the toilet paper to fall short of the roof and pathetically roll across the front steps. I couldn't blame Haruhi for not allowing me a second chance, given what went into preparing those rolls, but I did feel a little unexpected disappointment at not getting to hurl a good one right over a bedroom window. Mikuru, apparently too angry to sit the whole thing out, took a hammer from the toolbox and put a few dents in the mailbox.

Once the TPing was done, Haruhi spraypainted the front door with our logo. And that was that. Koizumi escorted Nagato home as planned, and the rest of us split up to go to our own homes. Before we parted, though, Haruhi instructed us to meet at the side of the school the next morning with as many spiders as we could find.

The next day, Haruhi had us open up our boxes of spiders and consolidate them all. When this was done, there was a scene worthy of a horror film collected in one box, but the contributions to it had not been equal.

"It took a lot of creative searching, but I got 23," Haruhi announced. "Let's see how many the rest of you got!"

You didn't tell us this was going to be a contest.

"Hmm... Yuki, you know that some of these aren't spiders, right? Some of them aren't even arachnids... Oh well, they all seem to be getting along with each other, so we can use them. ...Wow, Koizumi, you've got a whole eight-legged menagerie in here! I can't even begin to count them all! And some of them are so big and hairy, too! Great job! ...What the hell, Kyon? Only seven? Did you even try?"

...Yes. Yes, I did. After risking life, limb, and my standing as a law-abiding citizen to retrieve Nozawa's clothes, handling dirty toilet paper with my bare hands, and walking all over town in arctic weather, I still summoned the strength to spend my evening slaving away at finding spiders for you, my queen. But since you don't care about my suffering, I can only implore Your Majesty's forgiveness for her humble servant's inadequacy.

Haruhi cocked an eyebrow at my silent glowering. "What's with the attitude? Don't you realize how important what we're doing is? If we don't take appropriate action, everyone will think they can just pick on Yuki and Mikuru and their friends won't stick up for them! If that's what you want, then just keep going at this halfheartedly." She turned to Miss Asahina. "Huh? Where's your box, Mikuru?"

"Um..." She looked down, wringing her hands. "...I should have said something yesterday, but I'm afraid of spiders... I tried my best to get one, but then it ran up my arm and I started screaming and crying and... and I ended up squishing it..." Tears were pooling in her eyes.

"Poor Mikuru." Despite her use of the third person, Haruhi was obviously still talking to the cutest arachnophobe on the planet. "You really should have told me. Now do you see what happens when you don't give your brigade chief all the information that's important to a mission?"

I know she's adorable, but Miss Asahina is a high school student like us. Stop talking to her like she's a toddler and you're her mommy.

"We'll just let that be a lesson for next time. Anyway, thanks to me, Yuki, and Koizumi, we have more than enough. Kyon, Koizumi, you two sneak into J-3 and put these in Inokuchi's gym clothes." She handed the box off to me. "Us girls will take care of Haruta's punishment."

"What are you going to do to him?" I asked.

"We'll need to twist his arm a little. Haruta's in Yuki's class, so I want to make sure that he doesn't make fun of her."

"What's Miss Asahina's part in this?" I was starting to suspect some variation on her method for blackmailing the computer club.

"She's our mascot! She can't really help with the physical part of things, if that's what you're asking."

"Then leave her out of it. I don't want it to look like we're a gang."

Though I suppose a gang is just what we're being. We might as well put on bandanas with the SOS Brigade logo and warn people not to mess with us. If I didn't know that Haruhi was too flighty to stick with this way of handling problems with our peers for long, I'd be worried. If we get harassed again two weeks from now, Haruhi will probably just shrug and say to ignore it. If not, Koizumi could always have the student council president reign the SOS Brigade in.

...Or I could just try talking sense into Haruhi. That strategy seemed to be working with the current situation. She was frowning at my words, but she wasn't arguing against them yet.

At last she said, "Hmmph. If it's that important to you, I guess I can do without her. Mikuru, you can go to your class."

That reminded me. "If Haruta is in Nagato's class, doesn't that mean he's a first-year?"

"He is," Koizumi answered. "But the others are all upperclassmen. Perhaps when he befriended them, that's when they became interested in the SOS Brigade. Our organization is notorious throughout the school, but the first-years are much more familiar with the individual members."

"Get moving," Haruhi directed. "The longer you take to get this done, the more chance of you being caught. And don't even think about skipping today's meeting!"

Once we'd parted ways with the girls, I tried to pass off the box to Koizumi.

He held up his hands. "I'm afraid Miss Suzumiya entrusted those to you. I am not one to defy her orders."

"I could stand your laziness if you didn't make up stupid excuses for it. There were no orders. Haruhi just handed it to me because she thinks of me as the club mule."

"Untrue." He held the gate open for me. "I know she doesn't express it well, but Miss Suzumiya regards you as the SOS Brigade's most dependable member, the one whom, when all is on the line, will never let her down. Consider the movie project, for example. What is the one thing which, had it occurred, would have ruined the entire movie?"

"Nothing. You can't ruin something that's horrible to begin with."

"The camera breaking, of course. Even assuming it could have been replaced, the footage would have been lost. So Miss Suzumiya appointed as cameraman the one person she trusted not to drop the camera."

"Your ability to interpret everything Haruhi does as a sign of affection for me is incredible." As we walked the halls, I wondered what excuse we could come up with if we were caught. "Haruhi picked you and Miss Asahina as the stars because you're the most attractive and popular ones in the group. She picked Nagato as the villain because she already had that costume. That left me to be cameraman by process of elimination. Don't pretend you don't know that's what it was as well as I do."

"Sometimes multiple interpretations are equally true."

Enough zen riddles. "Anyway, these are mostly yours."

"Is that what bothers you? There happens to be an abandoned shack not far from my home, absolutely overrun with spiders. That's all it was."

"I don't believe you, and I don't care either way."

We peeked into J-3. Koizumi took a piece of paper from his pocket, glanced at it, looked back into the room, and pointed to a gym bag in the back. I had to admit that I hadn't thought as far as identifying Inokuchi's specific bag.

I shoved the box at him again. "I brought them this far. You dump them in." I'm not afraid of spiders, per se, but carrying a box with dozens of them, their many legs pitter-pattering loudly against the cardboard, was enough to make me somewhat nervous.

"I do owe it to you to take on your burden at least once. But Inokuchi knows my face; he may not know yours." Koizumi tilted his head. "How about a trade? You're clearly upset about how Miss Suzumiya devalued your catch of spiders. I could have a talk with her. Tell her that you feel unappreciated. It won't mean as much coming from me as it would from you, but -"

"It won't mean anything coming from either of us. Haruhi's convinced I can take whatever insults she can dish out. And for once, she's right."

Still, it was true that Koizumi's face was more recognizable. I slipped into the room, keeping my head down as I pretended to be looking for my gym bag. Thankfully, most of the class hadn't arrived yet, and those who were there were focused on chatting with their classmates. I stuffed the box into Inokuchi's bag, gave the bottom a few whacks to get the occupants moving, and zipped the bag back up. Then I beat it out of there.

During lunch break, I started to wonder if we had gone too far. If those spiders all hid themselves in the dark enclosed folds of Inokuchi's gym clothes, he might not notice them until he started putting them on. I imagined him with spiders crawling all over him, screaming and flailing in an agony of terror beyond all imagining. I imagined him all speckled with ugly red and white spider bites.

Then I imagined what it must have been like when they attacked Nagato. I imagined her walking down the hall, all alone. I imagined Haruta, Inokuchi, Yamamoto, and Nozawa grabbing her tiny, meek frame and forcing her into an unoccupied classroom and down into a chair so that they could do what they wanted to her. I imagined the names they must have called her for merely having the misfortune of an association with Haruhi Suzumiya. I imagined them holding her in place, helpless for the sole reason of her firm resolve against using her abilities in her defense, while they applied the electric shears to her head.

No, I decided, we hadn't gone too far. Not even close.

"Boy, you're quiet today," Taniguchi said. "Hasn't Suzumiya been giving you anything to complain about?"

"Haruhi's enemies are even more of a pain than Haruhi herself right now," I answered. "A bunch of them were tormenting Nagato yesterday."

"Can you blame them?"

I gave him a black look.

"Hey, I'm not saying whatever they did is okay." He waved his hand, still shoveling food with the other. "But if you're going to pick on someone, she's the clear choice, right? Weirdos are more fun to mess with, and you don't get weirder than Suzumiya's crowd. And of the five of you, Nagato is the easiest pickings."

Taniguchi was a real piece of work. "We're showing them that none of us are easy pickings."

"Oh," Kunikada said. "Is that why those two are giving you the evil eye?"

I took a look over my shoulder and felt a cold sweat coming on. Loitering in the doorway were Haruta and Nozawa. Haruta was pointing at me and whispering something to Nozawa, who nodded, his arms folded. Nozawa's uniform was crinkled and damp, and looking at it made me wonder why he didn't just skip school for the day. I had a bad feeling it wasn't because he hated to miss a single lecture.

I turned back to Kunikada. "How long have they been there?"

"Mmm... About a minute, I guess? You don't think they'll come after you right now, do you?"

"The one on the right looks like a gang member or something," Taniguchi noted. "Kyon, if they do come over here, I'm not getting involved, okay?"

Taniguchi's "loyalty" was irrelevant. They weren't coming for me right now. They'd wait until after school, so there'd be no one to interfere, like they did with Nagato. And I probably wouldn't be the only one they'd come for.