Chapter 73

A flashback opens on a younger Billy Squire arguing with his daughter Biddy over her plan to attend a Red Circus protest. He distrusts the organization and fears what a government hostile to dissent will do to her; she answers that dying for her convictions frightens her less than a life where criticizing wrongdoing is forbidden. His plea about protecting their family goes unheeded. The protest's aftermath leaves him standing over her body. Marked by the SSS simply for being her father, he escapes the country with the Red Circus's help. In the present, Anya has absorbed all of it, having read the memories the children stirred up in him.

Tired of waiting, Vadim proposes activating Bruce and the second bus, the group's hidden trump card, protected until now by strict radio silence. That card is already lost. At the warehouse, SSS observers count the men inside and time their strike, and a gas-masked team including Yuri moves in with tear gas. Two agents die in the opening exchange, but the raid succeeds: Yuri personally beats down Bruce, taking a bullet in the shoulder and answering it with a knee strike born of disgust at a man hiding behind children. The hostages come out safe. Yuri, whose pain tolerance collapses whenever his motivation does, howls about suffering all this for Anya of all people.

Command of the main standoff passes from the frustrated police chief to the SSS captain, who announces to the bus that the second cell is dead and gives the hijackers until dawn to surrender. Vadim erupts; Billy quietly concedes failure. Though Vadim invokes their fallen friends, the dream of rebuilding the Red Circus, and Billy's own daughter, he privately concludes the man is too broken to rely on and settles on a final option: detonate the bus, hostages included, timed to catch the assault team in the blast.

Anya hears every word of the plan, along with the kill-ready thoughts of the SSS guard regiment massing outside. The captain, done negotiating, orders a storm under cover of night despite his own dawn deadline. Knowing what awaits the moment the raid begins, Anya stands up and fixes her eyes on Billy Squire, stunning her classmates.

A flashback reveals Biddy Squire died in the crackdown on a Red Circus protest, and that her death is what radicalized Billy.

Yuri's SSS squad raids the warehouse, kills the second cell, defeats Bruce, and rescues every hostage on the second bus; Yuri is shot in the shoulder.

The SSS captain takes command from the police chief and issues a surrender ultimatum, then secretly orders a night assault.

Vadim resolves to blow up the bus with everyone aboard as a last resort, and Anya overhears the plan telepathically.

Anya rises to confront Billy as the strike force closes in.

Mission 73 is a 16-page Volume 11 chapter, released December 26, 2022, in the Bus Hijacking Arc and adapted in Episode 45. Billy and Biddy Squire share the cover, and the chapter marks Bruce's death.

The SSS guard regiment's uniforms appear modeled on the Diensteinheit IX, a covert East German counter-terrorism unit active from the 1970s through the 1990s.