The cruise to Andreas Yoon's private island is taking just the right amount of time for Malcolm to get himself orientated with the part he is going to play in their grand master plan. He inhales sharply—the cold sea breeze a refreshing sensation that travels down his throat and fills up his lungs.

"So that's why you were looking for me, huh," he voices somberly. Charles has just told him about the guy that the president of Yoon Cargo Companies had sent to pick him up from the office earlier, as the both of them continue to look away in the distance, basking in the afternoon sun. The company president has left the two friends to themselves, letting them enjoy the scenery among each other.

"When the guy told us that you weren't there, somehow I got a feeling that I'd find you in the place you weren't supposed to be, and there you were, at The Roundtable," Charles admits, chuckling halfheartedly. "I'd say it's your fault, but really, things are bound to go this way anyway. We're just waiting for the perfect timing."

The perfect timing, Malcolm muses to himself, remembering what his wife has told him before. Finally it's about to start making sense to him too. "Were you always gonna tell me about the human experiments or did I just happen to fly too close to the investigation that I found things I wasn't meant to find?"

"Both," Charles confesses. "We need a third man."

Malcolm nods in recollection. "Yep, just like the last time," he recounts gravely.

"Just like the last time," Charles repeats, his voice fading along with the winds.

"Nihilism stands at the door," reads the lounging 49-year-old CEO along the opening sentence of The Will to Power by Nietzsche. He stares at the page as his eyes keep running over the text a couple more times before finally looking at the closed door to the cabin on the opposite side of him. He waits for Nihilism to appear. He imagines a man, or maybe she is a woman, or perhaps a five-year-old child, fighting sleep as he rubs it out of his eyes, a picture storybook in hand, waiting for Andreas to read it to him as part of his bedtime ritual, because that's what a child deserves, and that's all the goodness that he thought he had in him could offer, and he stares at the boy standing in the doorway and gazing back up at him. He waits for the child to introduce himself as Nihilism, because of course he is its perfect example; his mother died because of his birth, and four years later, his father suffered a tragedy that took his life, leaving him with nothing but a few years' worth of hazy memories that he can barely recall and the weight of a deceased man's surname leaving measly faint echoes that only one other man remembers. Nihilism is good company, because Andreas cannot delude himself into believing in hope. In the event that he loses the war he has been waging for the last five years against an invisible enemy, he will not have regret, because he never intends to win. He is just meant to carry out his final retaliation, and whichever is waiting for him at the finish line, if it's failure or victory, it will only matter that he has reached it.

Andreas doesn't really like to read, unlike his son, Isaiah. Sometimes he wonders who that boy has taken after, but more than anyone, it should be his real father, Vernon. The beeping of his burner phone hidden in his pocket catches his attention. "Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?" says the next sentence of the book as he glosses over it, before he puts it down on the side coffee table and picks up his phone. Shepherd is calling him. "Hello?" he answers.

"Scarecrow," the man on the other line acknowledges him. "Is Cowboy with you?"

"Yes," he responds. "We're with the agent. We've told him about his role."

"Something happened," Shepherd reveals, wariness evident in his voice. "Crow Hunt has been intercepted."

"What? How?"

"The new drugs have been duped. The real Z drugs are now being circulated back into the market."

"What?!"

"We need to talk to Rancher. I'm afraid The Crow may have something to do with this."

The figure at the opposite end of the cabin contorts into a shadowy form. There, he pictures a giant bird of prey, the dark silhouette of a shape that is barely a man and almost a beast, perpetually elusive, always within Andreas' reach but just a hair short of being captured. The Crow stands at the door. He glares at it. He breathes heavily into his phone's receiver and tells the caller, "Just follow the plan for now. I'll figure something out." Shepherd complies before ending the call. Andreas downs his glass of now lukewarm brandy, before getting up and exiting the lounge room. Surely those two friends have fully caught up with each other by now.

It is a relatively small-sized apartment complex. By the looks of it, the rent is probably worth much more than the living conditions the flats had to offer the tenants. And this would have been the best option they could pick, if they don't want to live in even dodgier neighborhoods. Howie enters the door to the apartment and is immediately greeted by the narrow staircase leading up to the rented rooms; to the left side of him is the watch room with the glass window within which he sees the middle-aged apartment manager sitting behind, lazily scrolling through his smartphone with the brightness all the way up. He taps at the glass to catch the man's attention, whose eyes gaze up at him in the slowest and most uninterested fashion. "Can I help you?" the manager asks.

"Does Nana live here?" Howie inquires. At the mention of the name, the manager immediately straightens up, but his bored face shifts into that of scrutiny.

"Is she expecting you?" the manager asks again. Howie sighs as he gets reminded of the mess he has been through not even hours ago, and here he is seemingly about to enter the exact same one.

"Can I just call her, ask her if she can vouch for me or something? It's really urgent," he insists.

The manager is about to protest, but he notices that the man eventually, in spite of himself, apprehensively follows as he is told. He picks up the landline phone and dials a number, waits for the call to connect, and when it does, he cheerily tells the recipient: "Someone's looking for you. Are you expecting anyone?"

Howie instantly gets the creeps from the man's swift change in attitude, and he feels like throwing up bile from the sight of it. Whoever this Nana person is should arm herself with pepper spray and tasers if she's going to be constantly within the proximity of this man. The manager's demeanor alters for the third time when he starts shooting dirty looks at Howie, before lending him the phone through the opening at the bottom of the glass window. "Here, she wants to speak to you," the manager says begrudgingly.

"Hello," greets Howie after putting the phone half an inch away from his face and ear. "Is this Nana?" he queries.

"Yes," answers the woman on the end of the line. "Who are you?"

"Shepherd sent me," he informs her.

"Oh," she blurts out. "Welp, this should be fun. Come upstairs, my apartment is on the 2nd floor, Unit 215. Just tell Casey's slimy that I told you to come up here."

"Great," Howie replies. He hears the familiar beeping tone from the disconnected call, and after handing the receiver back to Casey the manager, he relays to him, "Nana told me to come upstairs."

Casey just grumbles at him before returning back to his phone as Howie begins to ascend the flight of stairs to the 2nd floor of the apartment building.

Howie knocks at the door to Unit 215. He hears shuffling of feet from beyond the threshold before seeing the doorknob twist. A woman with dark hair that extends just below her shoulders, with a face of symmetrical proportions appears in front of him: the large dark brown eyes are fully aware and are perennially hidden behind the shield of watchful distrust; the small lips that is turned to a frown; and the inquisitive eyebrows curved into a questioning line. "Are you Nana?" he asks, waiting to see if there is someone else, someone who might look more like the one who has just said in passing during the phone call that they are expecting something fun. If she's going to keep staring at Howie like that, he might as well seek for them somewhere else.

"Yes," she answers, before bobbing her head towards the general direction of the interior of the flat. "Come on in," she adds, sizing up the man as she tries to figure out what Shepherd could have sent him to her apartment for.

"So..." Howie starts, trying to ease the awkwardness slowly building up between him and the tenant. As he scans his eyes across the living room, finding nothing too notable, just a few food trash on the coffee table, some cigarette butts on the ashtray beside a half-eaten bowl of instant ramen and a can of energy drink, the mismatch furniture and the yellow stained curtain that is drawn over the windows, a cast of incandescent light chasing the shadows to the nooks and cranny of the entire space of the common room, leaving a fair amount of spotlight on the clothes that had been tossed aside, the CDs on top of the shelf where the TV is placed, the coat rack by the side of the door with nothing hanging on it, and an oddly picked print-out of a stock image of a cow grazing on grass encased in a wooden frame stuck to the wall above the couch. Howie follows as the woman walks up from behind him and sits right back down from where she had been on the mint green sofa, wondering in his own head about what exactly he is there for.

"Who are you supposed to be?" she asks him, putting away the ramen, seemingly from the sudden loss of appetite. "Why did Shepherd send you?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," he responds. "Do you work for him?"

Nana quickly glances up at him in contemptuous before picking up the bowl and standing up, walking towards the kitchen in the next room. She leaves Howie for a moment before popping right back in. "Why are you really here, man?" she prods. "I'm not in the mood for a chit-chat, so if you can just get on with it so we can go about our separate ways."

"Well, do you know any other underground doctors you can refer me to? That's probably why he sent me here," he surmises. Despite the woman's attitude, he can't help but be thankful that she is just as eager to escape their current predicament as he is. Somehow Howie is growing increasingly more alert as the seconds go on, and from the looks of it, he is undoubtedly inching closer and closer to the end of his time limit.

"I'm not a doctor," she informs him, feeding more into his festering worry. "You should have gone to the hospital if that's what you're looking for."

"What should you be, then?"

Nana hesitates for a second. "You're one of Shepherd's, right?" she quizzes him. He furrows his eyebrows in question, but eventually nods in agreement. "I'm one of his distributors," she claims.

"Ah," he voices knowingly. She has the drugs, Howie concludes. So that's why he's here.

"I don't usually do deals here, so I don't know why he directly sent you to me. That's shady as all hell, considering this is supposed to be a low-key thing."

"Oh, tell me about it," Howie comments presumptuously. He would have let himself indulge so much as to laugh at their shared sentiments, but his short-lived joy is spoiled immediately when he starts to feel all woozy and disoriented. His eyes blink fast as his head begins to throw itself in a whirl, with the world seemingly spinning around with him, despite his body remaining upright and unmoving.

Nana's unfriendly expression warps into a troubled glare. "What the ? Why are your eyes turning all black?"

The passing seconds of momentous disquietude become increasingly overwhelming as it drags on. ". I need those Z," Howie blurts out in a panic.

"What?"

"Give me those drugs," he demands. "Now."

He sees Nana hesitate for a second time. More upset than she has originally been, the woman hastily goes into the room opposite the kitchen, entering the door to the left side of the living room that Howie hadn't even noticed being there. He could hear her scouring through the area for a good minute before returning back with a small case bag similar to the one the man in the alleyway had. She places it on the tabletop and produces one of the vials of Z and an unopened packet of disposable syringe. ", why am I even doing what you're telling me to do?" she mumbles under her breath resentfully, her mind following the cues of a panic response she doesn't even know she is experiencing. It must be because of those freaky eyes of his, she thinks to herself. She hands both of the items to Howie, who deftly unpacks the syringe, sticks it into the vial cap and draws up the plunger. The liquid drug travels up its plastic barrel. When half of the 9mL is reached, he quickly administers the Z drug to himself through injecting it on the side of his left upper arm. He pushes the plunger down with his index finger and waits for the drug to take effect. After a few seconds, he could feel the tenseness in his muscles loosen significantly, his swirling vision suddenly clears, and the throbbing at his temples subside straight away. He looks at Nana, who is actively shooting him daggers with her eyes, and asks her, "Do you know proper first aid?"

"No!" she yells, staring up at him dubiously.

"Okay. Then just do it improperly," he presses on regardless. He pulls out his knife from his jacket pocket and sets it on the coffee table. "Do you have any type of gloves around? Preferably rubber gloves but plastic ones will do."

"No!" she screeches defiantly once more.

"Okay, then just use cloth," he pries. "I need a rag or something, oven mitts, whatever. Just place a shopping bag inside it so the blood doesn't come in contact with your skin."

"What the are you on about big bro? Can you chill with the directives as if I'm on your payroll?" 

"This is what Shepherd needs you to do for me," lies Howie. Arguably, he could use the fact that Isaiah Chwe hadn't specified what he has been sent there to do, whether he's just there to ask for the drugs or not, and so he could technically say that the director is helping him with more than just getting access to Z drugs. "I need you to take out the bullet on the back of my right shoulder. It's just below the shoulder blade."

"He