Spy Classroom - Volume 2 - Chapter 2.1

Chapter 2

Placation

Four of them were going to be chosen.

Word about Klaus’s decision spread like wildfire among the girls.

After all, Grete wasn’t the only one who’d had her misgivings about the status quo.

Klaus was a classic one-man army.

It was standard procedure for a team’s boss to have sole purview over command and control, but the way Klaus was handling all their missions solo was a different story altogether. Furthermore, he was also taking care of all the team’s reporting, accounting, and other miscellaneous clerical work while still finding time to train the girls. And he was doing all that while having worked so many days straight that it was a challenge even counting them.

As far as team structures went, theirs was about as abnormal as it got.

However, there was a reason things were the way they were.

Klaus wanted to let them focus on honing their skills.

As powerless as that made them feel, they knew there was only one thing they could do about it.

They had to get stronger—strong enough for Klaus to rely on them.

After they realized that, the girls devoted everything they had to their training. They felt bad about how exhausted Klaus was getting, but not bad enough to keep them from plotting attacks that took specific advantage of that weakness. And when Klaus wasn’t there for them to attack, they would practice in other ways, doing everything from basic stuff like weight training to even waging mock espionage battles between themselves.

Now, at long last, they were finally getting to participate in a mission. Or at least, some of them were…

“He’s only picking four of us, so… What, the other four are just gonna be stuck holding down the fort?” Lily grumbled listlessly.

She was sitting at her desk, wearing a pair of goggles and surrounded by an assortment of sketchy-looking tools. She also had a towering mound of cigarettes, which she peeled open one by one so she could boil their contents and separate out the nicotine. Then she ground up a series of bugs and plants to extract their poison and carefully mixed her ingredients together.

Lily was clumsy when it came to a lot of things, but making poison was one of the few exceptions. As she spoke, she performed her work with utmost skill and precision.

“Eh, can’t say it doesn’t make sense.”

The response came from her white-haired companion, Sybilla.

Sybilla’s presence was, to sum it up in a word, commanding.

The light in her eyes was as sharp as any knife, and her build was as lithe as a beast’s. Like Lily, she was seventeen, and the two of them could often be found hanging out together.

At the moment, Sybilla was sitting on Lily’s bed and practicing her lock-picking technique. Dozens of padlocks were piled up around her, each and every one of them open.

“He’s worried about sendin’ us off on a mission, but at the same time, if he keeps trying to do ’em on his own, he’s gonna hit a wall soon. The way I see it, taking the four best of us is the only choice he coulda made.”

“You’re right. It’s not bad, as far as ideas go,” Lily murmured.

“And the logic’s sound, for sure…,” Sybilla replied.

“But there is one thing…”

“Yup, one pesky little thing…”

They made the same uneasy comment in unison.

““It’s gonna make things awkward as hell around here.””

Up until then, the eight Lamplight girls had gotten as far as they had by working together, one and all. Both in training and on missions, they’d divvied up their tasks evenly so they could all put their talents to use. They had been equals in every sense of the word.

But now, with this selection…

“Hey, we always knew this day was gonna come,” Lily remarked. “After two months together, I think we all have a decent idea of who’s leading the pack.”

“Now that you mention it, who do you think’s getting picked?”

“Well, for starters, our beautiful team leader Lily is obviously gonna be the first one on the—”

“No, but seriously.”

“…I think Monika’s basically a shoo-in.”

Monika was their arrogant, cerulean-haired teammate.

When it came to which of the girls was stronger, her name would show up at the top of any list. Her acting abilities were top-notch, as were her inventiveness, close-combat prowess, marksmanship, and just about any other skill you could name. She often boasted about how she’d intentionally pulled her punches at her academy, making her something of an exception among the ragtag group of washouts that made up the rest of Lamplight’s roster. Aside from Klaus, she was the heaviest hitter they had.

She was also on the Operations squad—the same squad as Lily and Sybilla.

“Wait, that means we’re doomed! We’ll never make the cut!”

“Shit, you’re right!” Lily let out an anguished scream, and Sybilla echoed the sentiment.

Within Lamplight, the girls were divided into three squads. There was the Intel squad, who was in charge of sorting through the information the team gathered, coming up with plans, and giving orders to the others; the Operations squad, who was in charge of putting Intel’s plans into action; and the Specialist squad, who was in charge of using their unique talents to back the other squads up.

Given that they were on the same squad as the team’s indisputable ace, the odds that either of them would get picked seemed depressingly slim.

“Hey, it’s getting late. We can talk more later,” Sybilla said.

“Oh yeah, we’ve got dinner to make.”

The two of them cut the chatter and left the room. They were on cooking duty that day, which meant they were in charge of preparing dinner for all eight girls.

When they got to the kitchen, they found a brown-haired girl there wearing an apron.

“Oh, hey, if it isn’t Sara. What’s up?”

“Ah, you two are on cooking duty?” Sara gave them an affable smile.

Her hair was so messy it seemed almost to have a life of its own, and her eyes had their usual timid look in them. She’d somewhat improved on this front, but when she first got to the manor, she’d constantly looked like she was on the verge of tears. Sara was a self-professed coward and the kind of girl you instinctively wanted to protect. Her youth, at a mere fifteen years of age, probably played into that as well.

The question was: Why was she holding a kitchen knife even though it wasn’t her turn to cook?

When they asked, she answered readily.

“Teach is busy holding a strategy meeting with Miss Grete, so he asked me to make them something to eat.”

Sara had a habit of addressing the other girls as Miss, an odd display of deference that came from the fact that, out of all of them, she had entered her spy academy the latest.

“Whoa,” Lily murmured in surprise. “Teach asked you to cook for him…?”

That certainly wasn’t an everyday occurrence.

Klaus made it a point not to delegate any of his housework to the girls. They may have all been living together, but he made a clear distinction between his subordinates’ personal lives and his. He must have really been up to his neck if he was willing to cross that line.

““………””

Lily and Sybilla exchanged a glance, then nodded in unison.

“This is our chance!” Lily cried. “I’ll go get the poison!”

“It’s kind of scary how fast you two decided that!” Sara yelped.

“I’ll go get my restraining wire.”

“And how are you so in sync?!”

As the two of them quickly began putting together a plan, Sara made a desperate bid to try to stop them. However, Lily and Sybilla rushed off to their rooms to grab their weapons undeterred.

They were thinking the exact same thing.

This might be their last chance to earn their way into those four slots.

“Question is: How’re the three of us gonna get him to take the poison?”

“Wait, when did I get roped into this…?”

Sara gave them a dumbfounded look. However, the resignation in her eyes showed that she knew resistance was futile.

The three of them stood in the kitchen with their ingredients laid out in front of them.

“Thinking back on our previous failures…” Lily fiddled with the vial of paralytic poison in her hands. “Whenever we poisoned his food or tea, he never even touched it. Maybe we could try coating the utensils in poison?”

By and large, Klaus could always see through any sort of act they pulled, and he had an amazing nose for traps. If they wanted to slip him some poison, they’d need to throw him off his game first.

“Teach really is a monster…,” Sara remarked dejectedly.

From there, they came up with a series of other suggestions. “We could poison the salt and pepper shakers and let him poison himself.” “We could cook something really spicy and poison his water.” “We could poison Lily’s portion and have her offer him a bite.” However, none of the ideas really spoke to them.

As they continued racking their brains, Sybilla suddenly cocked her head to the side. “Huh? Wait, I feel like we’re forgettin’ the obvious.”

Sara trailed off. “Really? What?” she asked expectantly.

Sybilla replied like it was the most natural thing in the world. “We wanna poison his food, right? Why not just make something really tasty?”

“………”

Sara blinked.

“……?”

Then she looked toward Lily for help.

It was clear that she didn’t understand how Sybilla’s brain worked just yet.

“Sara…”

Lily began laying out the situation. “I’ve been keeping this a secret, but truth is, I’m a big klutz. To give you an example, I’m the kind of person who would know all the answers to a written test but fill the bubbles in wrong and get zero points anyway.”

“Okay…”

Then Lily pointed at Sybilla and introduced her. “In contrast, our white-haired friend here is the kind of person who’d just get zero points the old-fashioned way.”

Sybilla gave Lily a swift kick in the rear. “What kinda shitty example is that?!”

“It’s a perfect example! It illustrates how dumb you are!”

“You’re getting zero points, too, y’know!”

“Maybe, but at least I’m not some blockhead whose solution to every problem is to bulldoze her way through it!” Lily shouted back with all her might.

Sybilla often cloaked it behind Lily’s dysfunctions, but she was no paragon of competence, either.

She had a tendency to approach situations head-on and solve them with brute force. At the end of the day, blunt was the only way she knew how to be.

When she discovered that Klaus could see through her acting, she started planting explosives on her teammates and sending them after him none the wiser. Then, when she found that frontal attacks didn’t work, either, she started coming after him nonstop without pausing to rest or sleep. Whenever she had a problem, it was in her nature to approach it with the simplest solution imaginable.

She pressed on with determination. “C’mon, just hear me out. We start by cooking something that’ll knock his socks off. I’m talkin’ the best damn dish the world’s ever seen. Once the target digs in, he’ll let down his guard. And then, boom. We give him the poisoned tea. It’s foolproof.”

Lily let out an impressed coo. “Ooh. If we could pull that off, that’d actually be pretty good.”

Hearing it all laid out like that, the idea sounded halfway respectable. However…

“Problem is, how? Making something that irresistible is way easier said than done.”

“I’ve got a plan,” Sybilla replied confidently. “A little while back, I spotted him makin’ lunch. When I did, I figured it might come in handy, so I wrote out the exact steps he followed.”

Sybilla produced a sheet of paper.

All the necessary ingredients, as well as how much of which spices to use and the time to complete each step in the process, were all listed out in painstaking detail.

“We already know how good the guy is in the kitchen, and this is something he cooked for himself. We follow these steps, there’s no way we don’t end up with something amazing.”

“Oh, I get it!”

The way Sybilla put it, it was starting to sound like a really good idea.

And besides, they didn’t have much in the way of a fallback plan. It couldn’t hurt to at least try it.

With that, their course was set.

“All right! Let’s whip up some food so tasty it makes him forget his own name!” Sybilla cheered.

Lily and Sara responded as one. ““Aye, aye!””

Thus began the trial and error.

As it turned out, replicating Klaus’s cooking was no easy task. Klaus did all his measuring by eye, so all they had to go off of for the quantities were Sybilla’s rough estimates.

Sara was the daughter of a chef, so they delegated the food prep to her, with Sybilla providing assistance from her memories. After they cooked up a series of samples, Lily chimed in with absolute confidence. “If you need a taste-tester, I’m your gal!” The other two decided to let her do what she did best, and Lily licked each plate clean, shouting “Next!” each time she did. The girl was like gluttony made flesh.

Eventually, a full two hours after dinner was normally served, they finally got their dish to a point they were happy with.

The cabbage rolls were finally complete.

Next, Lily went around to the other girls and told them that they had a perfect plan in the works. The others had their doubts, but Lily made a promise she had no way of keeping—“No, no, this’ll work. In fact, if it doesn’t, I’ll even put on a strip show… Starring, uh, Sybilla.”—and that was enough to get their rears in gear. The girls equipped their concealed weapons and gathered in the dining room. After Klaus was weakened by the poison, it was their job to finish him off.

Once all eight of them were assembled, they called in Klaus and presented him with the dish they’d labored over.

“Magnificent.” When he praised them, his expression was softer than usual. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to cook for me, but thank you. This is fantastic.”

“Right?” Sybilla smiled proudly. “There’s plenty more, so help yourself to seconds. Lily, you wanna go brew some tea?”

Standing behind Sybilla where Klaus couldn’t see her, Lily grinned. Klaus’s guard was down, just like they’d planned. If they offered him poisoned tea now, he might really drink it.

The eight girls waited for their moment to strike.

“That would be great,” Klaus replied. “If I could be so bold, though…”

Suddenly, he stood up and headed to the kitchen next door.

Inside, he found the remaining cabbage rolls. He took the cream stew meant to top them and stirred in some additional seasoning. Then, after taking it and pouring it over the eight plates’ worth of cabbage rolls, he sprinkled spices, vinegar, and oil over each one in turn.

He laid the plates out in front of the girls.

“…they’ll be even better seasoned like this.”

““““““““……………””””””””

The girls had a bad feeling about this.

They gulped, picked up their spoons, hesitantly dug into the cabbage rolls—and had their minds completely blown.

Before they noticed, Klaus had already left the dining room.

The girls had been so focused on gobbling down the cabbage rolls and using bread to scoop up the last drops of stew that they’d completely forgotten to attack him. Fat and happy, they washed down their feast with some post-meal tea. Then, as they began to get a vague inkling that they were forgetting something, their bodies went numb, and they crumpled to the ground in agony.

It was a catastrophic failure.

Everyone other than Sybilla, Lily, and Sara staggered back to their rooms as if this was how they’d expected things to turn out from the start. “I’ll be looking forward to that strip show,” a couple of them told Sybilla on their way out, but she didn’t have the faintest idea what they meant.

Lily heaved a heavy sigh in the now-empty dining room. “Never thought we’d lose before we even got around to poisoning him…”

Sybilla and Sara nodded.

“Damn, and I was so sure we’d nailed those cabbage rolls.”

“I was surprised at how different his were. It was like my whole body was crying out in joy.”

They had to face the facts. Even when it came to cooking, Klaus was in a whole different league than them.

That skill was probably useful for spy work, too. He could use it to get hired as a nobleman’s personal chef or perhaps use his culinary mastery to win over a target’s heart.

That moniker he used, the Greatest Spy in the World, wasn’t just for show.

Like it or not, they got it.

They understood why he felt like he couldn’t count on them.

“Guess we’d better give up on getting picked for the mission, huh.”

“Yeah…”

Sybilla sighed, and Lily was in full agreement.

There were plenty of Lamplight members whose skills put theirs to shame. There was no way they were going to make the cut this time around.

Sara nodded sadly. She felt the same way the other two did.

Right as the solemnity of it all seemed poised to overtake them, though, Lily spoke up.

“…It’s okay, though. I’ve got an idea that’ll turn this all around.”

“Well, someone sure looks smug all of a sudden.”

“Okay, look. We might have lost, but we’ve still got a job to do. Think about it—what do you think’ll happen to the team if all the people who got left out start moping around all the time?”

“…The others’ll start walking on eggshells around us, and that’s when the mood around here will go to shit.”

“Exactly, and there’s only one way we can prevent that. As the losers, we gotta congratulate the winners and send ’em off with a big smile!”

“Ohhh,” Sybilla remarked understandingly. She clapped her hands together in agreement. “You’re right. Hell, thinkin’ about the long run, ours might just be the most important job of all.”

Lily grinned. “Yeah, totally!”

They would have obviously preferred to have gotten picked, but now that that was off the table, they needed to change gears. Protecting their relationship with the others was important to them.

“U-um…” Sara nervously raised her hand. “Do…do you mind if I help, too? Honestly, I don’t think I’m getting picked, either…”

Neither Lily nor Sybilla had any rebuttal to that.

Sara’s stint in her spy academy had been the shortest of any of theirs, so while it wasn’t exactly her fault, there were a lot of shortcomings in her skill set. Her Specialist squad teammates Erna and Annette had their own share of unfortunate quirks, to be sure, but there was no denying their talents.

Lily and Sybilla had the tact not to admit it, but they’d both come to the same conclusion.

“Of course.” Sybilla gave her a cheerful smile. “The more the merrier!”

Now that they had their task laid out for them, the mood in the room was a good deal lighter.

Sybilla stood up from the sofa and clapped herself on the cheeks. “All right! Time to get up off our asses!”

“You said it!” Lily cheered. “Let’s send ’em off with a bang!”

“Whaddaya say we start by congratulating Monika? There’s no way she doesn’t make it.”

“I agree!” Sara replied. “We should show Miss Monika how happy we are for her.”

“Yeah! We can, like, make her a giant parfait!”

With that, they excitedly got to work making the parfait together.

All three of them had a keen appreciation for how hard being a spy was, and they knew that if you got eight girls together, some of them would inevitably end up being better than others. There was no way they’d all end up at the exact same skill level. And they also knew the world of espionage wouldn’t be kind enough to turn a blind eye to those differences in proficiency.

They had learned that the hard way back at their academies.

However, they weren’t about to let that get them down.

Some of Lamplight’s members may have been more talented…but at the end of the day, they were all on the same team!

And as a testament to that fact, they piled the queen-size parfait high with fruit, chocolate, and whipped cream.

For the finishing touch, they sliced strawberries into heart shapes and laid them atop the parfait one by one.

Once their parfait packed full of love was finished, they silently tiptoed over to Monika’s room—

“““Congratulations, Monikaaaaa!”””

—then all rushed in at once.

We’re not mad we didn’t get picked. Good luck out there. We made this parfait just for you.

After telling her how they felt, the three of them each gave her words of encouragement.

“After all, you gotta be one of the four.” “Give ’em hell for us.” “We’re cheering for you, Miss Monika.”

Monika, for her part, took their blessings rather well.

They’d made the right choice.

As they left her room, proud of their accomplishment, they ran into Klaus in the hallway.

“Oh, there you are. I was trying to find you all.” His tone was plain and matter-of-fact. “Pack your bags. Lily, Sara, and Sybilla, you and Grete have a train to catch tomorrow.”

“““Huh…?”””

“The mission’s starting.”

The three of them gaped at him with their mouths hanging open.

By the sound of it, they’d all been chosen for the mission. Before they had time to be shocked, though, there was a question burning away at them.

“But, um…what about Monika…?” Lily asked.

“What about her? She’s going to be on standby,” Klaus replied unconcernedly.

They’d wanted to avoid having things get awkward over some of them getting left out. That was why they’d gone and whipped up that parfait—

“““………”””

—but in the end, they couldn’t have made things more awkward if they tried.

“So what was up with that parfait just now? You messing with me? Trying to pick a fight? Sara’s fine; we all know she probably got dragged into this. The problem is you punks. It’s aaalways you two. Put yourselves in my shoes for a second and think about how it must feel to get constantly jerked around by the team’s Two Stooges. I’ll tell you, it doesn’t feel great!” Monika yelled, holding Sybilla by the collar.

Once the chewing-out was finally over, Sybilla headed for Klaus’s room.

She barged straight in without knocking.

“HEY, YOU!”

“I see someone’s feeling chipper.” Klaus didn’t seem particularly bothered by the sudden intrusion. His expression was calm, and he kept on writing as though he was used to it.

Sybilla stomped over to Klaus and laid into him. “You picked the worst possible timing, asshole!”

“I don’t see how I can possibly be blamed for that.”

For once, he was actually right about that.

Sybilla cleared her throat to calm herself down. She knew she needed to stop flying off the handle.

“…Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Be my guest.”

“You really sure you chose the right four?”

“Would you rather I hadn’t picked you?”

“N-no, that’s not it; I’m totally psyched. I just wanted to know where your head’s at, that’s all.” Sybilla relaxed a bit and broke into a grin.

Much as she might find fault with some of the things he did, she had a lot of respect for his skills. Out of all the spies she’d ever met, he was by far the most talented. Getting acknowledged by someone like that would be enough to make anyone giddy.

That was why she wanted to know why.

She, Lily, and Sara weren’t exactly what you’d call outstanding. So why had he picked them?

“Well then, I suppose I’d best give it to you straight.”

“Yeah, hit me.”

“I’m deeply concerned.”

“The hell?!” Sybilla yelped.

Klaus looked up and gestured at her right arm with his pen. “How’s the fracture doing?”

“…That’s…”

“You aren’t fully healed yet, are you? You’re barely operating at half strength.”

She should have known he’d see through her.

The fracture was something she’d gotten during their last Impossible Mission.

During their fight against a certain monster of a man, she used her arm to block one of his kicks, but a full-power strike from a combat specialist wasn’t something you could just shrug off. That single blow had put her out of commission.

Her arm had healed a fair bit in the month since then, but she definitely wasn’t back in peak condition.

“Why’d you pick me, then?”

“There was a reason behind the choices I made, but I can’t reveal it just yet.”

“…Just so we’re clear, the reason you aren’t explaining your thought process isn’t ’cause you can’t, right?”

“………”

“I guessed it?!” she quipped, but she knew he was joking.

Spies were rarely told all the particulars of the missions they undertook. Not only could knowing too much make them a target, it also increased the danger of information getting leaked. Sybilla understood all that, but that didn’t make her any happier.

Klaus exhaled and crossed his arms. “One thing I can say, though, is that there was a very particular reason I specifically chose you.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You know how you’ve been anonymously donating all your wages to an orphanage?”

“How the hell do you know about that?”

Sybilla broke into a cold sweat.

After risking her life to complete the last Impossible Mission, Sybilla got a fat paycheck added to her bank account. Instead of spending it herself, though, she donated it all to a particular orphanage.

However, no one was supposed to know about that.

“When you move that much money around, the higher-ups are going to suspect you’re a double agent. Don’t worry, I made sure to explain the situation.”

They must have thought she was funneling funds to some sort of shady organization.

“The reason I picked you is related to that. I was thinking you’d be the perfect fit for the job, but…” Klaus paused for a moment.

His gaze flitted back and forth between Sybilla’s arm and her face. He exhaled.

“…there is your injury to consider. It’s unfortunate, but if you want to sit the mission out on account of your health, I won’t hold it against you.”

From the sound of it, Klaus had put a lot of thought into the decision after all. Sybilla could hear the conflict in his voice.

She hurriedly waved him off. “Hey, whoa, hold up. I never said I wanted to sit it out. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t worrying yourself sick for no reason, is all.”

Klaus looked at her silently. “………”

“When it’s just you, you’re the coolest customer around, but you get all cagey the minute your teammates get involved.”

“It would appear that way, yes.”

Sybilla had a decent grasp on Klaus’s personality.

In matters that concerned him, he was large and in charge, calling himself the Greatest Spy in the World and acting with an air of absolute confidence. However, he always hesitated before relying on his teammates for anything.

She couldn’t really blame him, though. It must have been traumatic, losing his family the way he had.

“I came here to tell you that you don’t gotta worry about a thing. When I heard you chose me for the mission, I was over the moon.” Sybilla thrust her fist forward. “I might not act like it, but the way I see it, I owe you a lot for recruiting me. However good of a spy you thought I’d turn out to be, I’m gonna make sure I get twice as good. I’ve seen the way Grete works her ass off, and I’m not about to lose, either.”

Just like the others, Sybilla had had a rough time at her academy. She wanted to become a spy, and she always put in the effort, but a couple strokes of misfortune had left her on the verge of running away from it all.

If she hadn’t gotten headhunted into Lamplight when she did, she would have ended up dropping out.

Klaus closed his eyes and crossed his arms again. “Magnificent.”

She couldn’t tell if she’d gotten her feelings across, but he gave her a solemn nod. “Out of all the people on the team, you have the gentlest heart. You could stand to think your actions through a bit more, but still.”

Sybilla glared at him. “You coulda stopped after that first bit.”

Klaus opened his eyes. “I suppose you’re right,” he murmured. “In that case, would you mind doing a small training exercise to help put my mind at ease? Nothing much, just a quick round of sparring.”

“With you? Like we just said, my arm—”

“I’ll only use a single finger.”

“!”

Klaus confidently raised his index finger.

Sybilla shrugged. She knew how strong he was, but not even he stood a chance with only one finger.

“Seriously? You really think you can take me like that?”

“If you’re so confident, let’s make it interesting. When you lose, you have to wear a maid uniform.”

“Huh? Where’s that comin’ from?”

“Getting second thoughts? You can even use weapons if you want,” he replied provocatively.

Something inside Sybilla snapped. “Bring it, tough guy! You beat me, I’ll wear whatever the hell you damn well want!”

“Magnificent.” Klaus rose from his chair and narrowed his gaze a smidge. “This will be nice, going all out for a change.”

Two seconds later, the match was over.

“So you’re the new maids!”

A woman in her midtwenties stood imposingly before Sybilla, Grete, and Lily. She gave them a cheery smile, the exact kind you’d expect from someone who specialized in manual labor. Her long blond hair was tied up in a ponytail, and every time she moved, it swayed from side to side like an actual horse’s tail.

As for her outfit, she was wearing a black dress topped by a white apron.

Her name was Olivia, and she was the head maid.

The girls handed her their résumés, and she looked through them.

“So you’re here for a seasonal gig while your seminary school’s on holiday? That’s weird; didn’t know any schools had a break round about now. Not that I’m doubting you, mind, especially not when you’ve got referrals from a politician.”

She looked at the girls quizzically and scratched her head.

“By the way, why’s Miss White Hair glaring at her uniform?”

“…It’s nothing, ma’am.”

Sybilla had yet to fully accept the reality she’d been thrust into.

The outfit she’d been furnished with was designed to distinguish between a mansion’s residents and its staff: a plain black dress to help its wearer fade into the background and a white apron that was easy to perform housework in. Its use had been traditional in upper-class houses since medieval times.

“……………”

However, the first things many people noticed about Sybilla were her short hair and sharp eyes. She was more tomboyish than cute, and she knew it, which was why she opted for pants and trousers over skirts and dresses whenever possible. If it were up to her, she would have taken the seminary school uniform she usually wore and ripped it up ages ago.

One of these days, I’m gonna sock that asshole good…

A maid uniform was the last thing she wanted to be wearing.

It all began one week prior.

On the day of their departure, four girls gathered in Heat Haze Palace’s main hall.

Grete, code name Daughter Dearest. Red hair. Eighteen years old. Intel squad.

Lily, code name Flower Garden. Silver hair. Seventeen years old. Operations squad.

Sybilla, code name Pandemonium. White hair. Seventeen years old. Operations squad.

Sara, code name Meadow. Brown hair. Fifteen years old. Specialist squad.

They were the ones who’d been called upon for that mission.

They sat down on the sofas surrounding Klaus.

“Our objective is to take down an assassin, currently referred to as Corpse.”

Klaus remained standing as he began outlining the mission.

“Thanks to the intel our countrymen gave their lives to obtain, we have a strong lead on who Corpse’s next target is. Our task is to covertly insert ourselves into their life and try to locate Corpse.”

Honestly, they would be lying if they said they were excited about the prospect of going toe-to-toe with an assassin. The possibility of things devolving into an outright fight to the death was a little too high for their liking.

At that point, Lily’s hand shot up.

“Teach, I’ve got a question. This is a domestic mission, right?”

“It is. Why?”

“I know it’s weird to be asking this, but you sometimes take on domestic missions, too, right? Why do they send you abroad one minute, then turn around and give you a bunch of domestic work the next?”

The other girls nodded.

Lily was right—nobody had ever properly explained that to them.

“…That’s a fair question. Let’s start with a little review.”

Klaus began writing on the blackboard as he spoke. His handwriting was god-awful.

“The Foreign Intelligence Office is split up into two divisions. There’s the first division, which operates mostly internally and focuses on rooting out spies within our borders. Then, there’s the second division, which focuses on gathering intelligence and performing acts of international espionage.”

In general, members of the first division were called secret police, and members of the second division were called spies.

“So Lamplight’s part of the second division?”

“No. We operate under both umbrellas.”

“Both of ’em?”

“We go where we’re needed, whether that’s in Din or abroad. Our task is to take missions that other teams failed at and see them to completion. That was how Inferno operated, and as its successor, that’s how Lamplight will operate as well.”

Grete covered her mouth with her hands.

“So we really will be focusing on Impossible Missions…”

Impossible Mission was the common term for missions that their fellow countrymen had tried to complete and failed. When that happened, the mission’s difficulty spiked, giving Impossible Missions a staggering 90 percent mortality rate coupled with a paltry 10 percent success rate.

Sara tilted her head to the side.

“Huh? But back at my academy, they always told us, ‘Stay away from Impossible Missions.’”

“It isn’t well-known, but there’s actually more to that saying.” Klaus elaborated, “Stay away from Impossible Missions—Inferno handles those.”

The girls gasped.

Up until then, they hadn’t realized just how heavy the responsibility resting on their shoulders was. At the same time, though, it made sense.

Like it or not, there were always going to be missions that needed to be tackled, no matter how hard they might be.

Besides, that 90 percent mortality rate probably didn’t include the missions that Inferno took on.

Lily quietly summed up what they were all thinking. “It’s a little late to be saying this, but we took over for a pretty incredible team, didn’t we?”

Strictly speaking, the task they were up against wasn’t technically spy work. However, it still fell under their intelligence agency’s purview, and it was still part of the shadow war, which meant it was on Lamplight to see it through.

Klaus nodded. “Let’s get back to the subject at hand. Grete, Lily, and Sybilla, you three will be engaging the assassin’s target directly. He’s a senator, and your job will be to protect him from inside his mansion and try to flush out the enemy while keeping your identities hidden.”

The man they were guarding was named Uwe.

The three girls he listed off all nodded.

“Meanwhile, Sara and I will be providing off-site support.”

Sara nodded timidly.

“Now, let’s go—and let’s all make it back alive.”

With that, the spies rose to their feet.

Before they went in, Grete handled the preliminary investigation.

The Appel family had been involved in politics for generations, and its current head, Uwe Appel—active senator and vice-minister of the Ministry of Health and Welfare—was no exception. He was what you might call a radical leftist, and despite being a member of the elite himself, he was harsh on the wealthy and powerful and pushed policies to better the lives of the poor. At the moment, he was up to his eyeballs trying to secure a bigger budget for various welfare initiatives.

As far as they could tell, the man didn’t have a single skeleton in his closet. Despite being born to a member of parliament, he also served in the armed forces as a young man, and he was a patriot through and through. Between that and his political savvy, it made sense that other nations would want him out of the picture. All of Corpse’s targets had been politicians with similar interests as Uwe.

Uwe’s mansion sat a fair distance away from the capital. Its location was terrible. It was deep in the mountains, and to get there, you had to take an hour-long bus ride, then walk for another hour still.

Another notable characteristic of the mansion was the contrast between the building’s grandeur and how few people lived there. There were nearly thirty rooms in all, yet only five residents: Uwe himself, his wife, his mother, his personal secretary, and the head maid. As it turned out, Uwe didn’t need the additional maids for his own benefit but rather for the sake of the mansion’s frequent visitors. Apparently, their predecessors had all died in an accident.

Sybilla and the others thought back over the intel as they began changing in one of the mansion’s vacant rooms.

I get it, pretending to be maids is a good way to infiltrate a mansion, but still…

She might have been ready for it, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

As Sybilla stood sullenly, a smirk crept across Lily’s face.

“Pfft. You’re not gonna get hung up over wearing a skirt and an apron, are you? C’mon, pretty clothes never hurt a— OW!”

“Shove it. Next time you talk shit, you’re getting hit.”

“You’re already hitting me!”

While the two of them grappled with each other, Grete briskly finished getting dressed. “…I have to say, there’s something odd about this mansion.”

“Hmm?”

“The halls are so empty. Normally, a generational politician like Uwe would have their house decorated much more lavishly than this.”

Grete was right. Although the reception room had paintings hanging from its walls, anywhere that guests were unlikely to visit was totally unadorned. Some of the walls that hadn’t been repaired recently even had visible cracks on them.

“Damn, you really know your stuff,” Sybilla remarked.

“…To tell you the truth, I actually come from a politician’s family myself.”

That was news to Sybilla and Lily.

They’d known she was genteel, but they’d never imagined that she was the daughter of an actual politician.

“…I fear that our new employer might have a difficult personality.”

“All right, all right, I get it. This is no time to be freakin’ out over a little maid uniform.” Sybilla ditched her seminary school outfit and quickly changed into her new uniform.

If Grete was already raring to go, she couldn’t let herself hold the team back.

“Starting now, it’s go time. Let’s hit the ground runnin’.”

With fearless smiles spread across their faces, the girls began their mission.

At the end of their first day, Olivia stood in the hallway with her mouth hanging open.

“I can’t believe it…”

The best way to describe her expression would be abject shock.

For several long seconds, she stood frozen in place like a statue with her eyes wide and her arms stiff. Eventually, though, she nodded after realizing that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.

She gave the three new maids lined up before her a big smile.

“You girls are something else! It’s only been a day, and the mansion already looks like new!”

She clapped her hands in joy at the mansion’s radical transformation.

In the month between the accident that took the lives of the girls’ predecessors and the hiring of the girls themselves, Olivia had had to handle the huge building’s affairs all on her own, and the cooking and laundry had kept her so busy that she hadn’t had time to clean. Dust had built up in all the rooms, and a musty smell had taken hold of the carpets and curtains.

Now the difference was like night and day.

The dust had been swept up, the curtains had been washed, and the carpets had been properly cleaned.

The girls had carried out their maid duties with aplomb.

“Oh, no, really, it was nothing.”

Modest as Lily’s words were, the pride in her expression was unmistakable.

The girls had learned how to do basic housework at their spy academies. All this had taken was selecting the right cleaning agents to use and carefully removing the grime. Compared to the training they normally did, cleaning the inside of a mansion was like a walk in the park. Lily’s usual clumsiness hadn’t helped, but when the other two kept an eye on her, they found that they could make up for her shortcomings.

“I guess they just build kids different these days, huh. You all might even be able to hold your own against Mr. Appel.”

“Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen him all day.”

“No, he said he’s staying at a hotel, and he’ll be back tomorrow. Look, I don’t want to scare you or anything but…brace yourselves. He can act a bit prickly. It’s a habit he picked up back in his army days, and you know what they say about old habits.”

Apparently, Grete’s assessment of Uwe’s personality had been right on the mark. They would need to be careful not to get on his bad side. Getting fired before they could find Corpse would be an embarrassing way to go out.

Filled with a sense of accomplishment over the work they’d done, the girls headed back to the servants’ quarters. There was no shortage of rooms, so they each got one to themselves.

Right as Lily and Sybilla started taking a load off in Lily’s room—

“I see you managed to infiltrate the mansion without a hitch.”

—they heard a voice from outside.

“You can come in,” they replied, and Klaus hopped in through the window.

The servants’ quarters were on the first floor, so it was trivial for a man with his skills to slip in.

Three people in the already-cramped servants’ room was a tight fit, but there wasn’t really any way around it. They were a bit concerned about being heard from outside the room, but at the moment, the hallway was empty.

“How are things coming along?” Klaus asked.

“Pretty good,” Sybilla replied. “This dumb getup looks awful on me, but if that’s our biggest problem, I’d say we’re on the right track.”

“Don’t worry. I think you look fine.”

“………”

Sybilla felt her face flush red, but when she realized he was only trying to placate her, she waved him off.

“You think that’s gonna fool me? Just do what you gotta do and get out of our hair.”

Klaus gave her a small nod.

“In that case, I have your marching orders. Uwe will be back tomorrow, so your job is to bug the mansion so we can get details on his interpersonal relationships and the status of his health.”

“Roger. We’ll get it done.”

“By the way, the method I recommend is—”

“Forget it, we’ll just ask Grete.”

“…I do have feelings, you know.”

They decided to humor him and ask, but sure enough, as soon as he said “See it through like a pious minister,” they went right back to ignoring him.

If they pointed out every ridiculous thing he said, they’d have been there all day.

“Hey, Teach, Teach.” Lily sat up from her bed and looked at Klaus. “This Uwe guy’s the one who’s getting targeted, right? In that case, shouldn’t we just tell him who we are straight up? That’d make it way easier to—”

For a moment, Sybilla found herself in agreement, but Klaus immediately shot Lily down.

“That’s not an option. Sly politician or not, he’s still a layman. He’d just accidentally leak information to the enemy.”

“Oh…,” Lily replied dejectedly.

“And be vigilant. For all we know, Corpse could already be lying in wait somewhere in the mansion.”

The girls flinched at Klaus’s warning.

It had almost slipped their minds, but the mission was already underway. The fact that they were at home instead of abroad didn’t change anything. They were still the shadow war’s lead actresses, and it was still their job to lurk in the darkness and deceive anyone who stood in their way.

“Now, I have more work to do, and you have your task. Go make like a cloud giving cover to the moon.”

Wanting to make up for his earlier failure, Klaus gave them another piece of virtually meaningless advice, then headed to leave. He had places to be.

“Hey, one other thing,” Sybilla called over to him.

“Yes?”

“Go give Grete a visit, too. She’s in the next room over.”

Lily piped up in agreement. “Yeah, good idea. It’d totally make her day.”

“………” Klaus gave them an expressionless look. “…I take that to mean you’re rooting for her romantic success?”

“Huh? Of course we are. We’re her friends, aren’t we?”

Sybilla and Lily had both realized how Grete felt. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a single member of Lamplight who hadn’t. When she wore her heart on her sleeve the way she did, it wasn’t exactly difficult to figure out.

“I see,” Klaus murmured. His tone gave them no indication of how he felt about that.

Then he hopped over the window frame. They couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore, but he’d been going in the direction of the room next door.

In the end, he never ended up telling them why he’d asked.

“Y’know, for a guy who never explains shit, he sure asks a lot of questions.”

“Well, I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

It wasn’t the first time that Klaus’s thought patterns had left them stumped. However, after all they’d been through together, they trusted that he had their best interests at heart.

For now, all they could do was carry out their mission.

On their second day at the mansion, they heard an old man’s voice echo through the courtyard right as the sun began its descent.

“Damn them! Damn those blathering fools, wasting all that money on pointless receptions!”

Uwe, the man their mission revolved around, was back.

He was fifty-eight years old, but they certainly wouldn’t have guessed that from the vigor of his bellows.

Olivia hurriedly called them over to the entrance to greet their employer.

Uwe didn’t have a chauffeur, so when his car pulled in beside the mansion, he himself was the one at the wheel. He made no effort to hide the displeasure on his face as he strode toward its entrance.

“Olivia, there’s no need for you to meet me every time I come and go! It’s a waste—a waste, I tell you!”

Between his broad shoulders, his long, straight back, and the self-possessed air he had about him, Uwe gave off a most imposing impression indeed. While he still had the gray hair and creased skin typical of men his age, even those seemed somehow menacing.

“…Hmm?”

For some reason, he stopped about thirty feet back from the entrance. He squinted in puzzlement.

Olivia smiled. “These are the new maids we hired off that recommendation from the other day.”

“Hmph. I figured you must have brought your little sisters with you to work or something. Buncha wet-behind-the-ears brats.”

“Why would they be my sisters? We all have different hair colors. And please, you’re scaring them.”

“…Well, fine. So you’re the new maids, are you?”

The girls introduced themselves and recited their fake résumés.

Uwe gestured with his chin. “Olivia, you know what to do.” Olivia sighed and vanished inside. When she returned, she was holding a rifle, a military model about three feet long. With a stern expression on his face, Uwe took the rifle from her and cocked it.

The girls didn’t know what to make of that.

As they stared at him, fire flared up in Uwe’s eyes. He pointed the rifle straight at them.

“ARE YOU THREE HERE TO KILL ME?!”

Whatever they’d expected, that roar wasn’t it.

The girls’ eyes went wide, and they recoiled so hard they fell on their backsides. He was seriously considering shooting them—and they had no idea why.

Who was this guy?

Uwe clicked his tongue in annoyance.

“…Hmph. No dice, I see.”

Lily’s gaze darted around in alarm. “Wh-what…?”

“I’ve had two politician friends die under suspicious circumstances recently, so I figured there might be a hit man lurking somewhere, but I haven’t been able to root them out just yet. If you’d tried to fight back, I’d have shot you on the spot.”

“Oh, so you were just protecting yourself…”

“The hell I was. I want to be the one to shoot the bastard dead.”

For an old man, Uwe sure had a lot of fight in him.

He made no move to lower the muzzle. What did he plan on doing if it accidentally went off?

“However, whether you’re fit to be my maids is a different story.” Uwe finally pointed the gun upward. “You, with the white hair. I’ve got a bit of an appetite. Go whip me up something to eat.”

He was testing her—and in an alarmingly authoritative voice at that.

Sybilla headed for the kitchen as instructed.

When she passed Olivia, Olivia gave her an apologetic look, but Sybilla smiled to tell her that she didn’t mind. From the look of things, Olivia was at a loss for what to do.

I mean, I get that he’s a little unhinged, but cooking’s easy.

She really didn’t think it was that big a deal.

Her cooking may have failed to knock Klaus’s socks off, but surely she could make something tasty enough to satisfy some old man.

Besides, she couldn’t have messed up pot-au-feu if she wanted to. They made the consommé in advance the previous night, so all she needed to do to make a delicious meal was simmer the meat and vegetables and serve them alongside bread. A child could have done it.

Once she finished cooking, she brought the completed dish to the dining room.

Uwe was waiting at the table with his rifle resting beside him.

“Dig in while it’s hot, sir,” Sybilla said as she set the pot-au-feu in front of him.

The savory smell of consommé wafted through the room.

Lily’s stomach rumbled.

Sybilla had clearly nailed it.

The girls watched Uwe in confident anticipation.

The moment he put the first mouthful of pot-au-feu in his mouth, he rose to his feet with such intensity that he knocked his chair over backward.

“Any maid who serves this filth is a WASTE OF SPACE!”

From that day forth, the girls found themselves in maid hell.

As it turned out, Uwe was even more tyrannical than they’d been warned.

To succinctly sum up his personality, he hated wastefulness with a burning passion. Perhaps they should have taken the undecorated state of his mansion as a warning.

“Silverrrrr! You spilled detergent on the floor again?!”

“Hey, White, quit cleaning all the useless places nobody even looks at! You’re wasting rags!”

“Red, I expect you to come promptly when I call for you! Time’s a-wasting!”

The three of them could barely go a few minutes without getting shouted at.

Whenever Uwe found something to complain about, he wasted no time in making his displeasure known. Either they were using too much detergent, or dirtying too many cleaning rags, or doing laundry too often, or using too much water—but in any case, he would always find something to reprimand them for. It was starting to get in the way of them actually doing their jobs.

And the mansion’s constant stream of visitors didn’t help, either.

Say what you liked about Uwe’s hatred of waste, but it certainly made him an effective politician.

Bureaucrats and other statesmen would often drop by to ask Uwe’s advice about budgets and expenditures. Uwe himself was in charge of issues related to welfare, but his visitors were from all sorts of departments, from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Ministry of Transportation to the Ministry of the Army and everything in between. After one look at their project outlines, Uwe would point out all sorts of unnecessary budget items and unreasonable estimates from contractors.

That was all well and good, but whenever such a visitor came, it was the maids’ job to greet them, see them off, serve them tea, and so on, and with guests coming so frequently, they often found themselves having to schedule their work down to the minute.

Lily was the first to start slipping up.

“You OAF! How many teacups must you break before you’re satisfied?!”

“Eeeeep! I’m so sorry!”

She had always been a bit of a klutz. Normally, Sybilla would have stepped in to help shore up Lily’s weaknesses, but as it turned out, she was having a rough time of it, too.

“Your cooking was as dreadful as ever today! How many times do I have to tell you to stop wasting ingredients before you get it through that skull of yours?”

“………”

Not once had she managed to cook a meal to Uwe’s liking.

She and the others went through a painstaking series of taste-tests, trying everything from appealing to his elderly palate by going easy on the spices to testing out a wide variety of different ingredients in case there were some in particular that he disliked, but nothing seemed to satisfy him.

In the end, he would always just growl “Eat it yourself,” then gnaw away unhappily at a loaf of bread. It was really starting to get on Sybilla’s nerves.

At times like those, Grete seemed like she would be the most reliable member of the team, but—

“You have some sort of problem with me?”

—she ended up earning Uwe’s ire as well.

“…Not at all; I’m just not feeling well.”

“Hmph. Don’t you lie to me. It’s plain as day how much you hate me.”

“I swear, that’s not—”

“Get out of my sight. Don’t waste my time working with that expression on your face.”

Her relationship with Uwe quickly deteriorated, and he ultimately treated her even more coldly than he did the other two.

And that wasn’t all; she was barely able to pass herself off as a real maid. As Uwe said, her displeasure was finding its way onto her face.

“What’s going on, Grete? This isn’t like you.”

When they asked her about it out of concern, she shook her head.

“…It’s nothing. I’m not about to throw in the towel over something as trifling as this.”

“Huh? Whaddaya mean?”

That was when they discovered a most unexpected weakness of hers.

“…Whenever I talk to a man other than our boss, my stomach starts hurting.”

“You what?”

In any case, though, all three of them were having problems with Uwe in their own way.