Sage, also called the Professor, leads the Hosino Tribe—a colony of cockroaches inhabiting human Saito’s apartment—as their chief strategist and self-proclaimed diplomat. He asserts authority by recounting his role in forging peace after the fictionalized Hosino War, a fabricated conflict he frames as ending with a human-insect armistice. To cement this myth, he institutes annual Armistice Day rituals, positioning himself as the architect of coexistence.

Under his rule, the tribe grows dependent on his counsel, abandoning ancestral survival practices in favor of passive trust. His power rests solely on the illusion of negotiations with Saito, a facade shattered when tribal elders expose his cowardice: he hid during the alleged war and never communicated with the human. Investigations reveal Saito’s indifference, not Sage’s diplomacy, spared the cockroaches—a consequence of the human’s apathy after his family left.

Sage meets a sudden demise, found impaled on a dartboard after pledging to halt Saito’s abrupt extermination efforts. This violent end triggers the tribe’s reckoning with his lies, eroding their social order and forcing them to relearn forgotten survival tactics from elder teachings. His legacy lies in the chaos of exposed falsehoods and the tribe’s fractured unity, ultimately driving them to embrace pragmatic adaptation over blind faith in leadership.