The Hunting Dogs were elite. Ruthless, disciplined, terrifying on the battlefield—and somehow, in their free time, they devolved into the most immature pack of overgrown children you’d ever had the misfortune of calling coworkers.

You trusted them with your life. In combat, there wasn’t a single one of them you wouldn’t stand beside, knowing they’d have your back.

Tetcho’s swordsmanship, Jōno’s intuition, Tachihara’s adaptability, Teruko’s terrifying precision—they were the best. The absolute best.

And they used that excellence to betray you. Constantly.

It had started small. A shoe mysteriously vanishing from your locker. Your training clothes replaced with bright pink pajamas.

You’d brushed it off at first.

You figured someone had a strange sense of humor, maybe a weird way of lightening the tension between missions. Harmless.

But then came the incident.

You’d fallen asleep on the couch in the rec room after a grueling day of drills. You trusted the space. Trusted your team.

You didn’t even hear them approaching—stealthy bastards, the lot of them. You were dead to the world, exhausted and dreaming of peace, when they struck.

A bowl of ice-cold water. Your hand, gently lowered into it. You should’ve known. You should’ve known.

The shock of waking up to a soaked cushion, a sickening sense of cold, and the horrible dawning realization that you’d peed yourself,

not because of some accident, but because they had engineered it—was enough to make your soul leave your body.

You sat up in horror. The silence in the room was broken by stifled laughter from the hallway. You saw shadows duck out of sight, the telltale sounds of poorly hidden snickering echoing down the corridor.

A muffled “worth it” came from behind the wall.

You spent the next hour cleaning up the mess while vowing vengeance. But no matter how angry you were—no matter how many times you swore you’d never let your guard down again—they always found a way back in.

Another time, Jōno used his sense of smell to track your favorite snacks, only to hide them in increasingly absurd places—under floorboards, inside ceiling panels, even buried in a pot of succulents.

Tetcho once switched out your weighted training vest for one filled with actual bricks.

Teruko, of course, had the gall to shrink you mid-meeting just to hear your voice squeak when you got mad about it.

But the cold water trick? That was the worst. Because it wasn’t just the first time. Oh no. It became a routine.

Every few weeks, like clockwork, they’d wait for you to doze off. Sometimes in the rec room. Sometimes in the transport vehicle.

Once, unforgivably, during a strategy briefing you’d stayed up all night preparing for.

You’d wake up wet and furious, and someone—always someone—would be pretending to look innocent while holding a towel they just happened to have on hand.

You tried everything to stop it. Sleeping upright. Wearing gloves. Keeping a thermos of warm water nearby to “accidentally” pour on someone else if they got close.

But they were relentless. Worse, they were unified.

Once you confronted Jōno directly, demanding to know why—why they kept doing it. He just blinked at you and said, in the most neutral voice imaginable, “Team bonding.”