Spy Classroom - Volume 3 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue

Forgetter

White Spider biked his way down the highway.

Fortunately for him, he was able to pass through the army’s net before he got added to the wanted list. Klaus had prioritized disarming the bomb over trying to capture him, and White Spider managed to escape death by the skin of his teeth. That just went to show how powerful having more intel could be.

However, things had gone pretty far off plan.

Running into White Spider had come as a surprise to Klaus, but the reverse was just as true.

Dammit all…

White Spider clicked his tongue in irritation.

I mean, he memorized my face and figured out I’m with Serpent?

Hearing about Klaus secondhand was one thing, but meeting him in the flesh had been enough to make White Spider tremble.

The man was a bona fide monster.

The spy team Inferno was the stuff of legends, and Klaus had inherited every skill the team had.

In a one-on-one fight, even White Spider’s team Serpent only had about three people who could so much as go toe to toe with him. All of them working together would probably be enough to kill him, but White Spider could hardly justify assembling his teammates from across the globe to take out a single backwater nation spy. Actually, now that he thought about it, maybe it would be worth it…

There were a million things he needed to consider. However—

“But hey, I should count myself lucky I escaped from that monster in one piece.”

—for now, he was going to take a well-earned breather.

As he turned his thoughts away from Klaus, another topic of note came to mind.

I wonder how our favorite abusive mom is doing?

The whole reason he had even stopped by was because she had gotten herself into trouble. After calling for help herself, though, she had shooed him away just as readily. What a selfish woman.

Also, why were Bonfire’s underlings helping her escape?

White Spider couldn’t think of a single reason why they would want to do that.

Mysteries upon mysteries.

“I mean, it’s not like the kid and I are actually related or anything.”

Her words echoed in his ears.

“She was just some baby I found stuffed in the trash at a train station. I figured she’d be a useful prop for my spy work, so I adopted her. I never loved her. Never. I do feel a little bad about how her eye got crushed during the plastic surgery to let her pass as my daughter, though.”

“And that’s why you abused her?”

“Hmm? Nooo, no. I had a different reason for that.”

“What’s that?”

“Because she creeped me out, that’s why. I could never tell what was going on in that messed-up head of hers. I should’ve just left her in that trash can. I’m telling you, that kid was twisted to her core.”

Matilda spoke matter-of-factly.

“You wouldn’t get it unless you met her yourself and felt the way she makes your skin crawl. And when she started growing up, she got even more alien. Eventually, I got so scared of her I just started hitting her over and over. Lucky for me, I ended up beating all the memories out of her, so I was able to ditch her. But now I realize I didn’t go far enough. When you’re dealing with something defective, you have to make sure you dispose of it properly.”

White Spider shared the sentiment. Matilda needed to work out a plan to make sure she hadn’t leaked any important information.

However, he never expected her to come up with something so hopelessly cruel.

“I’ll give her my toolbox as a gift to remember me by, and before I do, I’ll set a bomb inside it. After I finish playing the part of the good mother through to the very end, my daughter will go up in flames.”

White Spider was at a loss for words.

The woman’s plan was to pretend to love her daughter so the girl would risk her life to help her, then turn around and kill her after all was said and done.

“Just checking here, but they haven’t figured out how you really feel, right?”

Matilda laughed proudly. “Don’t you wooorry. My acting’s been impeccable. I have my daughter eating right out of my hand.”

She spoke with conviction.

“She and her friends would never even dream of killing me.”

She was wholly confident she’d acted the part.

White Spider sighed as he finished thinking back to their conversation.

As far as being a messed-up sicko goes, she’d feel right at home in Serpent.

She might end up being useful down the road. He intended to wring her for all she was worth.

For starters, there was a good chance she was in possession of some valuable information.

Bonfire had looked worryingly sure of himself when he spoke.

“I still have seven trump cards up my sleeve.”

“When we rendezvous, I’ll need to make her tell me everything she knows about those kids.”

At the moment, they knew basically nothing about Bonfire’s mysterious band of washouts. Intel on them would be a godsend.

White Spider recited his mantra to himself under his breath.

Know who to fear. Know who not to.

He knew that his reunion with Bonfire was probably right around the corner.

Deepwater—the assassin feared across Din as Corpse—had been captured.

If he caved under interrogation and talked, then Lamplight would soon come to obstruct White Spider’s plan.

Klaus got to work disarming the bomb.

True to White Spider’s word, he had set it in the lobby of one of the city’s hotels.

From the look of it, the bomb wasn’t particularly powerful. If it had gone off that night, the most it would have done was killed one or two people who happened to be unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. However, it wasn’t mercy that had inspired White Spider to set it up that way.

To him, killing the minimum number of people necessary to achieve his ends was simply a matter of efficiency. Compared to Corpse, who had gotten drunk on his own power and gone around slaughtering people indiscriminately, it was clear to see which of the two was wiser.

Klaus had told White Spider not to let him down, but that was mostly just him acting tough.

Klaus snipped through the bomb’s wiring.

Beside him, Lily spoke softly. “I only saw him for a minute, but…he really did look like a mushroom, didn’t he?”

Klaus had already told her everything that happened.

“So he was a member of Serpent, huh? I never thought I’d meet someone who could get away from you, Teach.”

“He’s given us a lot to think about.” Klaus nodded. “For now, though, we should go meet up with the others.”

Klaus headed to the port to see Captain Welter Barth.

The army was using one of the warehouses as their command center, and Welter was barking orders to his men through the vast array of transceivers laid out before him. There were traces of exhaustion in his face, but he wore the expression of a man satisfied with his work.

Welter was the first to speak. “There’s nothing for you to do here. We already took down the enemy.”

“Oh?”

“She was a tough one; I’ll give her that. If you’d stuck your nose in, you might well have ended up dead.”

The other soldiers looked at Klaus with triumphant grins.

He shrugged, making sure to put on a good show of disappointment.

“Well, that’s a shame. Where’s the corpse?”

“We chased her into the sea and shot her dead.” Welter scoffed. “Your advice was useless, by the way. Trapping her in the water was so much more efficient. We’re still looking for the body, but we’ll dredge it up soon enough. You want to wait around for it?”

“I’ll pass. It might have washed out too far from shore to find. You did good work, Welter.”

Klaus gave him a round of applause.

That seemed to tickle Welter’s fancy. He puffed out his chest and crossed his arms as he crowed about his victory.

Klaus went in for a question before Welter’s mood had a chance to sour. “By the way, what did the spy you killed look like? Was it same person from the passport?”

“I don’t know. She had a mask on, so we didn’t get a good look at her face.” Welter hesitated for a moment before going on. “One of our guys caught a glimpse of her hair, though. Said it was blue.”

Klaus nodded. That was exactly the answer he’d been expecting.

He took Lily, and the two of them left the port and its hustling throngs of soldiers behind and headed for the city’s outskirts. There were no warehouses or hotels there, just a couple taverns intermittently scattered around.

Klaus stopped in front of a manhole.

The entertainment district was full of elaborate fountains, meaning its water infrastructure had to be diligently maintained. And that didn’t just go for the water supply pipes—it applied to its sewers, as well. The sewer system was laid out beneath the city like a web, and it connected all the way to the sea.

Welter had gone against Klaus’s counsel just the way Klaus wanted him to and chased the spy into the water.

Klaus lifted the manhole cover.

“Oh, hey, Klaus.” Beneath it, Monika was already halfway up the ladder. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

She was soaked from head to toe in saltwater, and she gave him a small wave.

“Monika, what are you doing down there?” Lily asked.

“Going for a stroll,” Monika replied casually.

Lily was quite sure she had never heard of someone going for a stroll in a sewer while totally drenched.

Klaus, however, simply praised her.

“Magnificent.”

It began to rain.

Thick black clouds had been hanging overhead for some time, but they had finally reached their limit. Cold raindrops started pouring down from them. The soldiers were probably going to give up the search for their nonexistent corpse soon and report to their superiors that the Imperial spy was dead.

Monika informed Klaus that she was going to continue her stroll, then started walking away. She wanted to retrieve her tools before the soldiers found them, no doubt.

“Oh, right,” she said, having remembered something right as she was about to leave.

“Hmm?”

Monika gave him a light shrug. “I wish you’d told me ahead of time that we had someone like her on our team. Coulda saved me a whole bunch of worrying. I ended up looking like a fool.”

And on that one-sided note, she left.

She was a sharp one, that Monika. By the sound of it, she had already picked up on some of what had happened.

Klaus and Lily headed to the hotel Monika had told them about. It was a dirt-cheap establishment sandwiched between a series of miscellaneous brothels and eateries.

Klaus knocked on the door, and Thea replied anxiously from inside.

“Monika, you’re back?”

The door soon opened. Thea was behind it with a look of delight on her face, but her eyes quickly went wide.

“T-T-Teach?!”

“YOUUUUU LITTLE…!” Lily charged into the room, weaving her way around Thea as the latter stood shell-shocked in the doorway. She charged as fast as she could toward the girl sitting on the bed. “Ernaaa!”

“Huh?” Erna’s eyes went wide, too, at Lily’s sudden onrush.

“You didn’t even call! You can’t do that! Think of how worried I was!”

For some reason, Erna was the sole target of her attack.

Lily hugged her tight, then began relentlessly rubbing her cheeks. Erna yelped and tried to resist, but Lily started tugging on her cheeks undeterred.

Thea looked down awkwardly. “I, um, Teach, we had a good reason we couldn’t call ahead; we just—”

“Thea.” Klaus cut her off. “If you’re doing something you believe in, make sure you see it through to the end.”

“Wh—?”

“You’re all fine, and that’s what matters. Your eyes are a little sharper than before.”

Thea’s face contorted, and her eyes welled up. She stumbled over her words for a moment. She only just barely managed to keep from breaking into tears.

After subtly wiping the corners of her eyes, she stuck her tongue out.

“Sorry, Teach. We were having so much fun that we forgot which day we were supposed to come back.”

“I see. Next time, make sure you report in.”

The truth was that he had one or two things he wanted to tell the girls off about.

There was no mistaking that they’d gotten themselves into a dangerous situation, and if they’d consulted with him, he could have led them down a different path and helped them resolve the situation without having to put themselves at so much risk.

However, the four of them had finally come together and overcome hardship as a team. Klaus couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

He decided to just turn a blind eye to what they’d done.

Over on the bed, Lily was still squeezing Erna’s cheeks.

“Take that! You were ‘having too much fun,’ huh, Erna?!”

“Stoooooop!”

Erna’s scream echoed through the room. It still wasn’t clear why she was the sole target of Lily’s assault.

Then Klaus realized something. “Where’s Annette?”

The ash-pink-haired girl was nowhere to be seen.

Thea frowned awkwardly. “She… She said she wanted to be alone, so I didn’t ask.”

Klaus nodded in understanding. He had a pretty good idea of where she was.

She was off watching the battle’s conclusion.

Klaus was well aware of why Monika had been worried.

Ruthlessness is something that Lamplight’s members are sorely lacking.

It was a legitimate concern. In fact, it was so legitimate that Klaus had considered the exact same thing. When he was first putting the roster together, he had noticed the one trait that none of them had.

Lenience could never exist on its own in the world of espionage.

We need someone who can become as ruthless as they need to be when the chips are down.

Klaus had made countless visits to the spy academies looking for someone who fit that description.

Running across her could have been an unbelievable stroke of good fortune.

“I promise you, you don’t want her on your team,” the principal at her academy warned Klaus when he first came around asking about her. “She’s so impossible to control that we’re planning on failing her.”

Her code name was Forgetter.

At first, it seemed like a simple enough reference to her amnesia, but apparently, that wasn’t it.

There was a turn of phrase—“to forget oneself.”

It was a saying known all across the world. There were a number of subtle variations—to lose oneself, to forget one’s place—but by and large, it was universally understood to mean flying into a rage or becoming utterly obsessed with something.

In short, it was when someone was so fixated on one thing that they lost sight of everything else—they forgot themselves in it.

It was really kind of an odd expression. After all, when someone “forgot themselves,” what they were actually forgetting was everything else.

To them, nothing mattered besides that single impetus welling up within them.

All that remained was their own desire. It was the ultimate act of pure egotism.

Klaus decided to recruit the girl.

The rain gradually picked up in intensity, rapping ever harder against Klaus’s umbrella.

Annette was standing on top of a cliff with a fantastic view.

As a matter of fact, it was pretty close to the hotel where Klaus and White Spider had fought. From there, you could see the entire port.

Rain poured down on Annette as she peered through her binoculars. When Klaus approached her, she swiveled his way, binoculars and all. “Bro!” she exclaimed. “I’d better flee.” She turned around and made to dash off.

“Caught you.” Klaus grabbed her by the shoulder. “The game of tag is over now, Annette.”

For some reason, she laughed in delight. “Finally, yo!”

It was like watching a child at play.

Klaus shifted his umbrella over so it was covering her as well as he gazed down at the port.

The soldiers had given up looking for the corpse, and they withdrew from the area, confident that they had shot the enemy spy dead. Meanwhile, the dockworkers were starting to load in the containers from the docking area. They were working quickly so as to make up the lost time from the earlier commotion.

At the moment, they were using a crane to lift one of the containers into the air.

“Are you watching the container?” he asked.

“Yup. I’m watchin’ it like a hawk, yo.”

Annette kept her gaze fixed through her binoculars like a schoolgirl on a bird-watching trip. Amid the sound of rain falling, Klaus could hear her humming. It sounded like an original composition.

He raised his own binoculars and looked at the shipping container currently being lifted. It had an ID number printed on its side—3-696. When he compared that number against the port’s manifest, everything became clear.

“When I was putting Lamplight together, you were the person who gave me the most pause.”

Annette peeled her face away from her binoculars. “Hmm. Did you not want me?”

Klaus shook his head. That wasn’t it. “I was worried about you. I knew you might end up having to take on a difficult role all on your own.”

“Wait, I’ve been taking on a difficult role?”

“………”

Apparently, she hadn’t even realized it. Klaus wasn’t sure if that was something to be happy about.

“I can guess what happened,” he said. “There’s a woman in that container. What’s her name?”

“Matilda.”

Annette answered all his questions without hiding a thing.

She told him about how they met Matilda, the dinner at the restaurant, the way they bailed her out, how they found out she was a spy, the fight between Monika and Thea, and finally, how they helped her flee the country.

The way she talked about it, it was like she was recalling a series of fond memories.

“And?” Klaus asked. “Did you enjoy your vacation?”

“It was super fulfilling, yo.” Annette did a little hop. “I learned a lot. At first, I didn’t understand why the others were making such a big deal about moms. It didn’t make any sense to me. It didn’t make sense at the pool, it didn’t make sense at the restaurant… I didn’t get it, yo.”

“I see. And do you feel like you understand moms better now?”

“Yup! I’ve become one step wiser.” She smiled, flashing him her pearly whites. “Mom is someone who gets mad at me sometimes, praises me sometimes, teaches me all sorts of things, and supports me in what I want to do. So when I see her all sad, it makes me real angry. That’s what a mom is!”

Klaus was surprised.

Annette’s voice rang with understanding and conviction. It was a notable departure from the impression he had of her. The Annette he knew wouldn’t have come up with anything nearly so concrete. She had changed a bit over the last few days.

However, there was one thing he needed to make sure of.

“And this mom of yours,” he said, watching her inquisitively. “Is it Matilda?”

“Nope,” she replied. “It’s Thea. That woman isn’t fit to be my mom.”

It was a cold, dismissive way of putting it.

Annette’s eyes were deep and dark.

Klaus felt a faint tingle run through his fingertips. There was a malice in the air more intense than even the most elite of spies could give off. It was hard to even believe it was coming from the cherubic youth standing beside him.

“As I thought. You figured out what Matilda was really like, didn’t you?”

Matilda was the one who had butchered those five thieves. Thea and the others didn’t seem to realize it, but she was a dangerous foe who was willing to kill like it was nothing.

“When did you figure it out?”

“The day after we found out she was a spy. She smelled bloody when she showed up by the coast, and there were police running all over the place.”

“Makes sense.”

“I was furious at her, yo.” Annette puffed up her cheeks. It was adorable. “She shows up out of nowhere, and when we’re nice enough to get her tools back for her, she goes and kills people. It’s like, after all Sis did for her, this is how she decides to act?”

“But you didn’t turn her over to the army, did you?”

That would have been the easiest solution, and Monika had very nearly gone and done just that.

Annette shook her head. “An Imperial spy used the tools we got back for her to kill our citizens.”

“………”

“If those army punks found out, it would’ve been a huge scandal for Lamplight, right?”

Bingo.

On top of that, Matilda was Annette’s mother. That meant that a girl who worked for their own intelligence agency was not only the daughter of an enemy spy, but she’d even helped her retrieve her tools, and people had lost their lives as a direct result.

The victims may have all been criminals, but if someone with malicious motives got ahold of that information, they could use it to bring the Foreign Intelligence Office under fire. It was the exact kind of scandal the army was just dying to dig up.

“That put you in awkward spot,” Klaus said, summing it all up. “If the army managed to catch Matilda, they would get dirt on you. Your time limit was fast approaching, but I wasn’t there to get the situation under control. And most importantly, you were livid.”

Those factors had led her to one conclusion.

“That’s why you decided to assassinate her.”

“You got it! You’re good at this, Bro!” Annette gave him a round of applause.

That was the third battle—the war of deception between Matilda, the woman pretending to be a loving mother, and Annette, the girl pretending to be an innocent daughter.

By now, it was clear who the victor was.

“So by pretending to help her escape, you were able to trap her in that shipping container.”

Klaus took another look at the number on the container’s side.

The box Matilda was sealed in was unique and poorly suited for escaping in.

Had nobody noticed?

No, that wasn’t it. Thea would have made sure to double-check the container number.

“Ah, you swapped them by using a paint that dissolves in water to draw over the ID number and get her into a different container than planned. Then the rain washed away the paint and revealed the original number.”

“Wow! Right again!” Annette clapped once more.

That much was easy enough to deduce. Nobody with good intentions would put a fugitive into that particular metal box. Shipping containers were tightly sealed spaces with no air conditioning or toilet. A single day in one of those would be enough to drive the average person mad.

There was a ship in the port making the fifteen-hour journey to Lylat, and that was probably the one Annette’s target thought she was getting on.

The thing was, Annette had put her on a different ship entirely.

“That container’s being loaded onto a freighter headed across the ocean,” Klaus noted. “Just for the record, is there any danger of her escaping?”

“Nope! The tool I gave her to escape with was totally broken, yo.”

Shipping containers were made for the exclusive purpose of shipping goods in bulk quantities. The prospect of someone being trapped inside one had never come into the equation, and they were designed to never open from the inside, no matter how rough the journey got for the goods inside.

In short…

“So Matilda will spend up to ten days locked in there—long enough for her to starve to death.”

By the time the container reached its destination, it would become home to a malnourished corpse covered in its own excreta.

Annette flashed him a cherubic smile. “That’s what she gets for making me mad, yo.”

It was cold-blooded, but there was no denying how effective of an assassination method it was. The army and Annette’s teammates would end up none the wiser.

All that was only possible because Matilda had gotten careless, lured into a false sense of security by the fact that the rest of Lamplight had been honestly trying to help her escape. She hadn’t even put up a fight.

“Are you sure you went far enough, though?” Klaus commented. “Once Matilda figures out what’s going on, there’s a chance she calls for help and gets it. Her metal prison will be thick, but there’s still a chance that someone on the boat hears her anyway.”

“I’m a kind person, so I decided to show her mercy and leave her that tiny one percent chance of surviving.”

But right when Annette finished explaining, lo and behold—

—the shipping container exploded.

Fire gushed forth from it as it hung suspended by the crane, engulfing the container in the blink of an eye and transforming it into a blazing coffin.

“But now even that one percent got blown away!”

The light cast by the intense flames served as a black light, making it impossible to see Annette’s expression.

The container had been transporting flour, and its black smoke rose high into the night sky.

The dockworkers hurriedly lowered the container to the ground.

Annette nodded as she looked down at them from on high. “Matilda made the bomb herself. She planted it and set it off all on her own.”

Klaus was well aware of Annette’s talent. She had the ability to make perfect copies of things, down to their tiniest dings and scratches.

She must have switched something out.

It would have been something she and Matilda both had—a toolbox, maybe. While they were making their way across the port, Annette had noticed the bomb Matilda planted in her toolbox and reverse engineered it.

Matilda’s plan was to give Annette her toolbox and use it to blow her up.

However, Annette had turned that plan against her, and Matilda ended up self-destructing.

“Pathetic, blowing herself up like that.” Annette sounded almost bored. “If she hadn’t tried to kill me, she might have lived.”

Annette was right.

All Matilda had to do was abandon her plan to murder her daughter, and this tragedy could have been avoided.

She didn’t deserve a bit of sympathy. She didn’t, and yet…

“……………”

The sudden conflagration had sent the dockworkers into a tizzy, but fortunately, it didn’t look like any of them had gotten hurt. Sooner or later, they would discover the charred corpse inside the container. The container’s tight seal meant that its insides had quickly reached ultrahigh temperatures, and the body was going to be damaged so badly it would be difficult to identify.

Klaus wondered how Thea would feel if she found out what had happened there.

She would be aghast, no doubt, at how Annette had taken advantage of her goodwill to assassinate her mother.

That was why Annette had kept her plan from her teammates.

She had worn a righteous smile and manipulated those ignorant to her true nature in order to achieve her ends—the way the truly evil did.

“Bro…” Annette looked over at him. “…Are you going to call me sick and twisted?”

The question came abruptly, like it had escaped from the depths of her heart.

“What do you mean? Did someone say that about you?”

“I got… Hmm? Huh, I can’t remember.”

“…Weren’t you the one who brought it up?”

“I get the feeling that someone used to say that to me all the time, though,” she said cheerfully. “Whenever I did anything, they’d always say that I was twisted to my core.”

“………”

That was no great surprise.

When Welter’s military intuition picked up on the malice Annette was exuding as she lurked within the city, he had said more or less the same thing. “There’s a great evil at work here, Bonfire—someone so wicked their soul is twisted to its core.”

Someone from Annette’s past must have said that to her, too.

Matilda, perhaps. Either that or one of her academy teachers.

Klaus shook his head.

That’s not it. They’re all fools who can’t see what’s right before their eyes.

He rejected that rejection. The fact of the matter was that she had made the right call. Her methods may have been suspect, but they had gotten results.

After all, how would things have played out if Annette hadn’t acted when she did?

Matilda’s desperation might have driven her to attack the soldiers head-on, and people could have died.

The army might have gotten their hands on a pointless scandal to use against them.

Or Matilda, a woman whose acting skills alone made her a powerful enemy, might have gotten away.

Any of those things might have happened if a single ruthless girl hadn’t stepped in and manipulated Lamplight, the army, and even an Imperial spy.

Thanks to her, things ended the best possible way for their nation.

“Annette, that mercilessness of yours is a weapon that nobody else on the team has. How could something like that possibly be twisted?”

If anything was twisted, it was the world itself. And in that twisted world, Annette had made the right call.

“That was magnificent. You make me proud I chose you for the team.”

A team comprised solely of the virtuous could collapse under the slightest pressure. The world they lived in wasn’t a soft place made of nothing but pillows and marshmallows. Sometimes, you needed to be hard if you wanted to survive.

For a team to be as strong as it could be, it needed to be made up of all sorts. Those differences were what gave it its power.

Sometimes, fighting evil required the use of a greater evil.

Klaus had known that, someday, there would come a time when they needed someone who was pure, unadulterated evil on their side.

That was the role he had cast Annette in—Lamplight’s weapon of last resort.

“Love ya, Bro.”

Annette leaped at Klaus in joy and wrapped his neck in an embrace.

“Don’t jump on me.”

Despite his order, Annette didn’t so much as loosen her grip.

“I refuse, yo.”

She dangled off of his neck, sopping wet from head to toe. The water dripping off her seeped into Klaus’s clothes.

“Just for you, I’ll let you in on my last secret,” she said, still dangling. “You see, there was another reason I killed Matilda.”

“And what was that?”

“She insulted me. I killed her, and I’m still mad.”

She scaled Klaus’s chest and whispered in his ear.

“After four years apart, she had the nerve to say that I hadn’t changed a bit.”

That one sentence was what had inspired Annette to kill her mother.

There was no way Matilda could have seen it coming, but she had incited Annette’s wrath. No amount of playing the loving mother could have saved her.

Once Annette forgot herself, there was no stopping her runaway bloodlust.

That was why Matilda had failed to win over her daughter.

That was the turning point that had led to Annette doting on Thea and hating Matilda.

The great evil spoke in a voice as pure as an angel’s.

“I know I’m not getting taller. It sucks, yo.”