The strange events that had overtaken Viking Fisheries the night following their exhibition match with Waffle Academy could only be the result of the depredations of Continuation High. So said the Great Katyusha, who then described in considerable detail how she had figured this out due to her vast intellect and great cunning. Nonna listened to all of this with an indulgent smile, letting her boast herself out before finally allowing Nonna to get a word in.

"But why do you believe it was them?"

"A monster ate a police car." The diminutive girl's catlike fangs were appropriately apparent as she said this. "Remember the foam?"

Nonna was not about to forget it. The hanger where they stored their KV tanks had been filled to the brim with thick orange soapy bubbles that had taken three days to clear. Three days before they became aware that one of the KVs was missing. She prided herself on her stoicism but she had been hard-pressed to maintain it in the face of the sheer incongruity of the situation. It was far from the first time Keizoku had visited them but the bubble screen to cover their activity had been new and memorable. "It's a leap, isn't it?" She believed Katyusha but wanted to cool her down.

"No. It was Mika. It's always Mika. Wherever Mika goes, other people's stuff disappears. Our stuff. My stuff." Katyusha did her best to look sinister and Nonna cast a glance at Klara who didn't have as much practice at hiding her reaction to Katyusha's antics. The Russian girl pulled some of her hair over her lips to hide her smile.

"At least it was Viking and not us for a change."

"They'll be back." Katyusha declared coldly.

Viking had taken six days to notice their missing spares. They had been too busy dealing with the police and animal control to do anything Sensha-do related. The authorities had been stymied when their initial hypothesis, the school guard dog contracting rabies, had been stopped in its tracks. The two policemen and team of firefighters had given extremely colourful descriptions of their assailant which now haunted their sleeping and waking dreams. Those descriptions combined to provide an image of a creature that combined the features of a sabretooth tiger and grizzly bear with that of an oni.

It was entirely unlike the dog the girls of Viking had presented. Yuuma had no idea what had happened to him over the course of the night. No idea that the reason he was exhausted was because he had spent half the night racing through the forest, gnawing at trees in the belief the trunks were the legs of mammoths before a homing instinct had brought him back to the compound and his kennel. The police had demanded to see the dog and the girls had brought out an animal that while large was clearly too unwell to have done any of the things he was accused of. Any remaining belief that Yuuma was their perpetrator was vanquished by the revelation of his favourite food and the sight of the German Shepherd happily chomping on said carrot. The authorities began a massive search of the ship looking for the fearsome yet elusive beast.

It was then that Viking were able to use their compound again and discovered the missing spares for their Panzer IIIs. They might not even have noticed the missing small components if it hadn't been for the need to repair their tanks after the match. While they hadn't put the two events together, the Pravda agent who had remained after the match had and reported in.

"We can't have more students standing guard." Nonna warned. "They'll start missing classes. And we'll look afraid." She knew this was a winning argument.

"Katyusha isn't afraid!" She shouted and Klara brought more hair over her mouth. "We need to catch her. Red-handed. And parade her through the streets so everyone can see we've caught her! That we can humiliate her as she dares to humiliate us!"

Privately Nonna thought they had more chance of catching a Zashiki-warashi than Mika but saying so would only fuel Katyusha's desire to have the girl she viewed as her mortal enemy put in a cage and driven slowly around the school and town. "We do know she's planning something."

"She's always planning something."

"Something big."

"Then find out what it is!" Katyusha's fist rose into the air.

"We're doing what we can." Nonna explained with her legendary patience.

Fortunately a distraction arrived in the form of a reticent first year who came to report that despite their best efforts, they were still no closer to finding a substitute for a nuclear weapon. Naturally, Katyusha had moved on and had no idea what she was talking about and the first year fled, pursued by Katyusha's threats about what happened to those who wasted her time.

[][][][]

Orange Pekoe had also heard about the events at Viking. She knew immediately what they meant though she didn't want to believe her sister could be responsible for an animal apparently going crazy. Not just because she loved animals but because the destruction made them vandals as well as thieves. And apparently not very good thieves because all that was reportedly missing from Viking was a single crate of spares. So much chaos for so little.

Assam was talking about it. She was their intelligence operative after all so keeping aware of the other schools activities was her business. She concluded that it was indeed Keizoku behind it, though she couldn't for her life figure out why they had needed to create such a scene for so little gain. It wasn't like they could ask or infiltrate. Continuation was a small school; new faces always stuck out. She would have to figure out something she declared and took off, leaving Darjeeling and Orange Pekoe alone.

"Your tea's gone cold." Darjeeling pointed out. Which was English code for 'Something's bothering you.'

"We can make more tea." Pekoe replied.

"Alas, not all things are so easily fixed."

Pekoe sighed. It was clumsy, not like Darjeeling at all, which meant something. "I called them pirates, and then they did… All that. So I wasn't wrong."

"I find it unlikely Mika would intentionally have caused 'all that'. As Assam said, what would be the point? After all, there's misdirection and there's calamity."

"It still happened though."

"True. But I know Mika. She won't like how much needless attention she's drawn." Darjeeling smiled. "Now if they had lifted an entire tank; that would be another story."

"Doesn't it bother you? What they do?"

"Keizoku has its traditions." She said evasively.

"But before it was a tradition; it was just theft."

Darjeeling sighed and then acquired a look Pekoe knew well. "Do you know of Sir Francis Drake?" She inquired and naturally she shook her head. "Depending who you ask, he was either a hero or a common pirate. He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, and along the way he plundered several Spanish ships including a treasure galleon that took his crew six days to unload. He made his queen rich and encouraged a generation of Englishmen to take to the sea." She beamed. "To be pirates. The Royal Navy was born from the actions of such pirates, their traditions passed down through generations that included those who hunted pirates. They became the most powerful navy in the world, ruling all the oceans but they began as pirates. Mocked by other nations who looked down on these plucky men with their little ships." She frowned. "Just as I looked down on Oarai and their colourful tanks before our first match." She took a moment to compose herself. "Without piracy there would be no Britain and a great many of their traditions would not exist. Our traditions."

Darjeeling had a strange way of saying much and saying even more with her meanings. Orange Pekoe hadn't known any of that, despite everything that had drawn her to St Gloriana and she found it hard to reconcile everything she knew of the school's traditions and habits with a history of pirates; especially the cutlasses and peglegs kind that sprung to mind. "So-"

"So we have no place to judge Mika and Keizoku. We have our ways and they have theirs. We may not like what they do but we've no place to condemn them. Not unless we wish to be condemned ourselves." Darjeeling paused, wondering if she sounded too much like a minister. Her curiosity meanwhile overrode her manners. "You never told me you had a sister."

"You never asked." Pekoe answered carefully.

"I suppose it makes sense. Aki, and Haru. Autumn and Spring."

She had gone by Orange Pekoe for so long that hearing her actual name was unnerving and she felt herself flush. As all of the club had their chosen names and always referred to each other as such, hearing her birth name was like being on a stage wearing just a towel. And having the towel fall off.

"She wanted you to go to school together." It was not a question.

"She wanted us to do Sensha-do together, like the Nishizumi sisters… Before the unpleasantness."

"You would load and she would shoot." Darjeeling smiled softly. "A team within a team."

"She wanted to go to Keizoku." Orange Pekoe continued, not that she needed to. "Like our mother. But I wanted to come here."

"She felt like you were abandoning her." Once again it was not a question and for a fleeting moment, Pekoe felt like she was experiencing a therapy session.

"I just wanted to go to the school that felt right for me."

[][][][]

Continuation High's roster of tanks was not impressive. Their best tanks had been acquired from other schools, mostly Pravda, and the lack of funding for the Sensha-do club meant they lacked the fuel and ammunition to regularly train with those superior models. As such they made do with their more numerous light tanks; the BT-5s and 7s, and T-26s. Their Panzer IIIs, Sturmis, T-34s and the KV-1s; they were held in reserve except for those times when supplies were plentiful.

That was how their practice of 'borrowing' from the other schools had begun. They had been forced by necessity to acquire supplies from other schools but eventually, it had simply become as much a tradition for them as charges had become for Chi-ha-tan.

Fuel was not hard to acquire. One day perhaps Saunders would do an inventory and realise that a few thousand barrels of diesel and petrol had vanished from their stores over the years. Saunders great wealth meant that the losses didn't harm them. For the same reason, Pravda had always been a favoured target, especially as they used the same tanks. Some Pravda students joked that every tenth shell they bought was really for Keizoku. A joke they were careful never to tell in front of their captain.

Mika loved Sensha-do. Mika loved her club. Mika loved her school. Mika loved her friends. Not in that order. Mika had cultivated an image of having no particular strong feelings about anything. That if she was asked a yes or no question, she would manage to not commit herself. It meant no one had any firm beliefs about her and that suited her fine. If no one knew anything for certain about you, you were impossible to predict.

Keizoku's lack of resources had always impeded their chances of winning the championship. Against the heavily armoured tanks and tank destroyers of Pravda and Kuromorimine, the majority of their vehicles could only take them out at point blank range and those schools knew not to let their guard down when facing Keizoku. Pravda had lost to Oarai whose tactics were not unlike their own because Oarai had not been known while Kuromorimine had suffered from a compromised captain and vice-captain. As she had seen in the St Gloriana-Pravda versus Chi-ha-tan-Oarai exhibition match, the other schools had already stopped underestimating Oarai. Their weakness in numbers and equipment would be a serious issue for them now they no longer enjoyed the advantage of not being taken seriously. The wind had turned suddenly against the major schools but now it was returning to its usual state.

Whether Oarai could defend their title or not was not her concern, only the morale of her own club. Even though they were the most respected of the so-called minor schools, the club knew they had no chance of being champions. The best they could hope for was to reach the semi-finals and while there was no shame in that, they had to take pride elsewhere and that pride came from their acquisition of resources from the other schools.

For Mika, those 'acquisitions' were always in the back of her mind. Taking fuel and ammunition, spare parts and rations, they were essential to keep their tanks running. But pride wasn't found in acquiring the necessities. It was in making a heavy tank vanish from under the noses of another school with no one knowing how they had managed to get it out of the hanger unseen, and more importantly, off the ship. Every time they looked at that KV, they could remember that heist.

She was thinking about another such heist as she listened to Aki rant. She enjoyed when Aki let loose her emotions. Usually the most level-headed of their little team, every so often her frustrations would boil over and she would launch into a tirade with her hands balled into fists, wind-milling in front of her, as her little body shook from the force coursing through it.

Mika let her shout herself out before speaking. "She would have made an excellent addition to the team." She said. "And technically, we are pirates."

"That doesn't bother you?"

"We are what we are." She plucked a chord. "But that's not what bothers you."

"They look down on us."

"We look down on them. Everyone looks down on someone so that none of us are looking up, when we should be."

"… What?"

"Are you happy here, Aki?" Mika inquired and for a moment her light brown eyes took on a piercing quality.

"Yes." Aki didn't need to think about it.

"Is your sister happy at her school?"

Now Aki hesitated. "I don't know."

"Why?"

"… I haven't asked her."

"So…" Mika let it hang as Mikko joined them. The little red-haired girl had been waiting for Aki to calm down before coming to say what she had to.

"Pravda's on the warpath." She declared.

"Pravda is always at war. Everything is a war to them. Wars on truancy, bad grades, littering…" Mika smiled to herself. "And Katyusha is made for war."

"She's sent more spies and most of them can't be bothered to even try. Nina!"

Aki forgot all about her worries as she took in the sight of the Pravda girl. There was only a small difference in their heights but somehow the first year looked absolutely tiny, especially as she wore a ushanka that was far too large for her. It wasn't just the hat; she was wearing her Pravda school uniform.

"Hello, Nina." Mika said as if it was a perfectly normal situation.

"Katyusha sent you?" Aki asked, looking at the meek girl who was clearly in every possible way not made for subterfuge.

"She sent all of us." Nina answered glumly.

"Thirty of them." Mikko grinned. "So far."

"I'm not a spy! What did she expect me to do?"

"When the cherry blossoms fall, no one notices the roses." Mika declared and the three small girls stared at her.

"Maskirovka." Nina said with visibly dawning comprehension and then realised Aki and Mikko had no idea what this meant. "Deception. She sent us to distract you."

"While the real spies go unnoticed." Aki shook her head. "Except we know what she's doing… And she knows we know what she's doing... But she did it anyway because…" Aki couldn't see it.

"To play games." Mikko replied. "To confuse us." She grinned. "Like we confuse her in battle."

Nina nodded meekly.

"What does Katyusha want to know?" Mika asked.

"She knows you're planning something and she's really mad about last time." Nina suddenly broke into a smile. "The bubbles, that was amazing!"

"Tell Katyusha we're not planning anything against her."

"You aren't?"

"No."

"Are you lying?"

"No."

"But… How do I know?"

Mika beamed as only she could and Aki couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Tell Katyusha I said we're not planning anything against her and let her choose whether or not I'm lying. Let her choose what is and isn't… Truth."

When Nina had departed, more confused than she had ever been, Aki asked the obvious question. "Were you lying?"

"No. I've no interest in Pravda right now."

"Why?"

"Have you heard this saying?" Mika asked, earning a sharp glance from Aki. "Taking candy from a baby. Where's the fun in taking candy from a baby? And who would steal from a baby? We're not bullies. We can't pick on Pravda, on Katyusha; it's not kind. And where's the challenge?"

"Challenge?"

"Look at Nina and her comrades. They didn't even try to play the game. They didn't want to. They don't see the point in trying to stop us anymore." Mika shrugged. "So what's the point?"

"Because they have what we need to compete?" Mikko supplied. "Because we have the same tanks."

"We have the Type 95 from Chi-Ha-Tan." Aki reminded her.

"How is commandeering from Chi-Ha-Tan more of a challenge than Pravda?" Mikko waved a hand. "All we'd need to do is dress one of us up as them, point and shout 'Charge!', they would run straight off the deck and we would have the whole ship to ourselves."

"Mikko." Mika chided. "And no, not Chi-Ha-Tan."

"I'm not going to Kuromorimine." Mikko said immediately. "Erika scares me. And Miho's mum would probably hunt us down personally."

"They have no sense of humour." Mika confirmed. "But the winds of change aren't calling us to Kuromorimine."

"Where are they calling us?" Aki asked with a sinking feeling.

Naturally, Mika played a dramatic chord.

**** Author's Notes. If you're impatient for more OP and Aki interaction, it will come in the next chapter.