Spy Classroom - Volume 4 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Domination and Negotiation

“That’s right, Hearth died in this very room. How did you know?”

The moment Purple Ant’s reply reached her ears, Thea closed her eyes.

She saw no reason to answer his question. And even if she’d wanted to, she was too busy processing her feelings toward her savior.

Her chest throbbed. Hearth had died all alone in this basement. Purple Ant had tormented her, then ended her life. Thea doubted that he had shown her so much as a shred of mercy. He had probably taken his time torturing her before ultimately ending her life.

It hurt more than she could say.

Hearth had died only halfway to her goal, and there were so many things she’d left unfinished.

In the time before she perished, however, she succeeded in leaving a message. Even with her back against the wall, even when she was in desperate peril, she planted a seed in the Worker Ants’ hearts.

“A hero is coming. She’ll have dark hair, and she’ll rescue you from despair.”

Because Hearth had remembered. She remembered her meeting with Thea seven years prior, and she remembered how that young girl had shared her dream. And so she pinned all her hopes on Thea and entrusted her with the task of defeating Purple Ant.

Thank you, Ms. Hearth. Thank you for remembering me for all these years…

Thea’s tears flowed freely, and they refused to stop. How many times was it now that Hearth had lifted her heart up and saved her?

…No, that isn’t quite fair. Ms. Hearth isn’t the only one who helped me get back on my feet this time.

If it weren’t for her teammates, Thea never would have arrived at the truth.

When Grete left, she had told her to look back through the reports. Those reports had come in from their allies, and while Grete would have normally told her to read them earlier, the situation had been a bit too pressing for that.

The thing was, those reports weren’t just sitreps. They had messages attached to them, too.

Monika and Sara’s report had a little something extra written at the end of the letter.

“Postscript: I’m working my butt off out here, so I expect no less from you guys. I’m talking to you here, slut. Get your shit together. Right now, you get zero out of a hundred.”

It was classic Monika—harsh and to the point.

Then there had been a section in Sara’s handwriting.

“I made sure that Miss Glint didn’t see me writing this, but she’s really worried about you, Miss Dreamspeaker. And I am, too, of course.”

Thea laughed when she read that. Sara had been doing her level best to make sure Monika’s kindness came through properly.

Sybilla and Erna had included messages with their report, as well.

“P.S. To the pervy one in the Intel squad: C’mon, pull yourself together already. You made the chosen group, remember? I try not to bring it up much, but I’m still kinda sore over not getting picked.”

“I know just how hard you’ve been working, Big Sis. You’re too kind for your own good, but that’s what makes your ideas so wonderful. Sincerely, Erna (scratch that, I shouldn’t include my real name)”

As for Annette and Lily, they’d already conveyed their sentiments over the phone.

“I don’t want you to disappear, yo.”

“Now, go piggyback off the rumor and become a hero for real.”

And in Grete’s case, she had said it in person.

“Figure out the best course of action you can take. I believe in you…”

All of Thea’s teammates were cheering her on.

When she realized that, it had filled her heart with warmth.

I’m sorry, everyone. I’m sorry I made you all worry about me. Thinking back now, of course you saw what I was going through. I guess that’s what happens when you live under the same roof.

Had they gone so far as to plan this all out, she wondered? Had they met up beforehand and decided that if she hadn’t gotten back on her feet by the time the mission started heating up, they would write messages to her in their reports?

Lily was the one who’d masterminded it, no doubt. Sometimes, she thought less like a spy and more like a normal schoolgirl.

That said, their concern was truly touching.

Lastly, it was Klaus who had told her how to proceed once she’d finally rallied.

“Ruthlessness may have served the team well in the past, but the day will come when that empathy of yours is exactly what we need.”

It had taken her a while, but she finally understood what he meant.

She was fine just the way she was. Klaus understood her ideals, and he didn’t think there was a single thing wrong with them. She should have just trusted him all along. She should have believed him and worn her softhearted nature like a badge of honor.

She wished he could see her now.

She might have been soft, and it might not have taken much to crush her spirits, but she was about to put this despair to rest.

Adversity was nothing to be afraid of.

“Here I am, Purple Ant.” She opened her eyes. “The hero has arrived.”

“Well, aren’t we feeling cocksure?”

“Oh, I am,” Thea replied. “It’s time to settle this.”

She looked at Purple Ant head-on. Now she finally understood. This battle was hers to fight. She was the hero, and it was her job to strike down the king.

Purple Ant took off his hat with visible displeasure, then combed back his hair and redonned it. “The girl with dark hair. I see. So this ‘hero’ was you?” He gave her an annoyed frown. “You know, my heart leaped when I first got the call about you. But in the end, you’re just a naive little girl who doesn’t understand the situation she’s in.”

“Oh, I understand it perfectly well. I’ve been captured.”

“And now you’re going to die.” Purple Ant glanced over at the bartender, then snapped his fingers. “Perhaps a crueler method would be best. That would put a nice little bow on all this.”

The man had been polishing glasses through their whole conversation, but now his whole body quivered. He looked to be in his late twenties, and up until Purple Ant called to him, he had been rooted firmly in one place without so much as twitching. It was clear to see how honed his body was.

His expression had been calm and level, but the moment Purple Ant glared at him, he immediately began shaking.

“Allow me to introduce you two,” Purple Ant said. “My friend here used to be a renowned martial artist, and it took ten Worker Ants just to restrain him. Ever since my torture, he’s been polishing his techniques even further. Now he can dismember an adult man in thirty seconds flat.” He snapped his fingers again. “If you don’t have her in pieces within ten seconds, there’ll be punishment. Now kill her.”

The bartender stooped below the counter, then rose back up holding a large ax. Without even pausing to adjust his grip, he leaped over the counter and swung his ax down at Thea’s skull.

His expression was filled with a berserk fear, and his entire face was sweating.

“Stop.”

The bartender’s ax froze mid-swing. It was like someone had frozen time itself.

Purple Ant’s eyes went wide.

The order just now had come from Thea’s mouth, and it had overwritten Purple Ant’s domination.

Thea reached up and touched her throat. “You recognize this voice, don’t you, Mr. Bartender? You were here in the basement, and you saw Ms. Hearth, too.”

A groan escaped the man’s throat. “Guh…”

That voice was something Thea had inherited from Hearth. It was a perfect imitation of her tone, intonation, rhythm, and pitch. Thea had lost her own voice at a young age, and it was only by mimicking Hearth’s that she got it back.

Thea stood before the man and gently stroked his cheek. Gazing into his eyes as he stood motionless like that was trivial.

With that, she dredged up his deepest desires.

She smiled. “You’ve been waiting for a long time, haven’t you? Ever since this voice told you that a hero was coming, you’ve been holding out hope. He’s been controlling you through fear, but all the while, you’ve been desperately seeking that light.”

To him, Thea’s voice was like a panacea.

The idea Hearth planted deep in his heart had spent the past six months gestating, and it was ready to bloom.

“It’s okay now. You can let me save you. I’m the dark-haired hero, and I’m here to help.”

Thea wrapped her arms around the man and pulled him into a soft hug.

She embraced her foe. She comforted her foe. She loved her foe.

She swaddled him in her arms, rubbed his back, and held him in her bosom. Then she whispered the words he wanted to hear more than anything.

“You don’t have to kill anyone anymore.”

The man went limp, then clung tightly to her waist and began sobbing like a baby. Thea patted his head. “It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay now.”

Peering into his heart had told her everything she needed to know.

She knew he once had a woman he loved. How he had dreamed of marrying her, and how he’d built up his savings from the prize money he won in underground martial arts matches. How the day before he planned on proposing to her, he got attacked by hoodlums and tortured by Purple Ant. And how, unable to go against his fear, he strangled his girlfriend with his own two hands and became a slave who did nothing but kill.

Thea took his sins and his regrets and the hellish mess his life had become—and she forgave him for all of it.

She heard a big sigh coming from Purple Ant’s direction.

“Well, I’ll be. You overwrote my order. I must say, I’m shocked.” He frowned. “Have you really thought this through, though? He’s a serial killer, you know. I may be the one who gave the order, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s ended more than a dozen lives. Can you really be sure he’s even worth saving?”

“Without a moment’s doubt.”

“Then there’s something wrong with you.”

She didn’t care what he said. She was proud of the path she’d chosen.

No matter how many times she lost heart, no matter how many times she got hurt, she would always have the will she’d inherited from Hearth.

“Well, breaking my hold on one man won’t do you much good.” Purple Ant took the revolver he’d been loading and snapped its cylinder into place. “I guess I’ll just have to kill you myself. As a gentleman, it pains me to harm a woman, but we do what we must.”

“I’m not certain you know what that word gentleman means.”

“No, it’s true. I hate hitting women. It always gives me the most embarrassing boner.”

The moment Purple Ant leveled his revolver at her, the bartender quickly rose up and positioned himself so that he was shielding her. He wanted to protect her.

Thea was moved by his gallantry, but she had no intention of using him as a sacrifice. “I’m sorry, but fighting is hardly my forte. So instead, let me say this.” She looked over at the entrance. “Teach, help!”

Purple Ant smirked, and for some reason, his eyes lit up with scorn. It was like they were saying, I’m not falling for that again.

And yet, a response came.

“That’s what I’m here for,” the voice said reassuringly.

Purple Ant gawked in horror as he whirled around.

There, standing in the entrance, was Klaus. He didn’t appear to be wounded, but his clothes were drenched in the blood of others. It was hard to imagine just how intense the fights he’d been through were.

Klaus nodded. “You know, it’s odd. It feels like those words have been waiting to reach me for the longest time. And like it’s a shame that they haven’t been able to do so until now.”

He stared forlornly at the bloodstain on the ground.

Klaus’s appearance had given Purple Ant quite the scare. His gaze flitted back and forth between Klaus and Thea. “So you’re the Klaus I’ve heard so much about. How did you find this place?”

“I see no reason to tell you that.”

“What happened to the seventy-three Worker Ants I sent after you?”

“I beat them all. Why do you ask?”

““……………””

Purple Ant and Thea both lapsed into silence.

The man defied belief.

A single Worker Ant had been enough to give the girls a close fight, and being attacked by just over ten at once had put their lives in grave danger. And yet, Klaus had taken on seventy-three of them and emerged victorious without suffering so much as a scratch.

“I don’t blame you for being surprised.” Klaus crossed his arms in satisfaction. “Against the World’s Strongest, though, they didn’t stand a—”

Thea cut him off. “Teach…”

“Hmm?”

“…you’re on such a different level that the impressiveness of the feat doesn’t really register.”

“Really? That’s kind of a bummer.”

“You crossed that threshold where it’s so unbelievable, we end up having no choice but to assume your opponents were secretly weak or something.”

“Well, that doesn’t seem fair at all.” Klaus looked strangely hurt, but that was simply the truth of the matter. The feat was impressive, of course, but them’s the breaks. “Each and every one of them was a force to be reckoned with.”

After pleading his futile case one last time, Klaus turned and faced Purple Ant.

There were four people in the basement: Purple Ant, Thea, Thea’s new ally the bartender, and now Klaus. That was all. There were no windows or anywhere to escape out of.

The tables had been completely turned.

Now it was Purple Ant who found himself in a crisis. How was he supposed to fight back against Klaus’s superhuman combat skills?

“I see, I see. You’re even more of a headache to deal with than the rumors said.” Purple Ant shrugged. “But don’t think you’ve won just because you took out my rank and file. You forget you’re dealing with this city’s king.”

He was about to pull something.

The moment he sensed that, Klaus decided to make the first move. In the space of less than a second, he whipped out a revolver and shot it straight at Purple Ant.

But Purple Ant’s shout came faster.

“Protect me!”

The bartender had been covering Thea, but now his body sprang into action. He was moving not intentionally but on pure reflex. Doing so had been drilled into his brain.

Klaus’s bullet slammed right into the bartender’s clavicle.

“Kill them. And don’t believe their bullshit. Kill. Kill. Kill,” Purple Ant shouted at the top of his lungs. He was trying to overwrite Thea’s words right back.

Then he dashed toward the back of the bar, making sure to keep the bartender between him and Klaus all the while. He pressed his hand against what looked to be a solid wall and pushed right through it.

“He has a secret passageway!”

He’d prepared an escape route for if he found himself in the worst-case scenario. He was a resilient one, that Purple Ant.

The bartender thrashed about in a deranged frenzy, and Klaus pinned him still while Thea spoke to him again to calm him down. She hadn’t fully dispelled Purple Ant’s domination yet. The man struggled and screamed in agony.

If they wanted to save the Worker Ants once and for all, they were going to have to defeat Purple Ant.

Klaus put the bartender to sleep by slipping him a sedative.

“Come on,” Thea called over to Klaus. “We need to go after him.”

However, Klaus just stared quietly at the floor. He’d noticed something. He stooped down and reached his hand under the chair.

“These are the rounds the boss always used.”

There was a small bullet resting in his palm.

Sure enough, this was where she had been killed. In her last moments, her one final keepsake had rolled across the floor and been forgotten.

Klaus squeezed the bullet tight. “Let’s go, Thea. We have some avenging to do.”

“I’m right there with you, Teach. It’s time we settled this.”

Purple Ant had escaped down the hidden passageway, but he knew full well that it wouldn’t keep them off his trail for long. His aim had been to buy time so he could marshal his remaining Worker Ants for a final stand.

The battle for Mitario was entering its final stage.

Klaus and Thea dashed through the secret passageway and soon emerged aboveground.

They looked up and found a huge building towering overhead. It was the skyscraper they’d seen so much of over the past few weeks that they were starting to get sick of it—the Westport Building. Who would’ve thought that Purple Ant’s hideout would be smack-dab in the heart of the city?

Klaus used the nigh-imperceptible sound of Purple Ant’s footsteps to follow his trail. It would seem that he’d slipped into the Westport Building through the emergency exit in the back, then used the maintenance stairs to ascend the floors. The security guards were his stooges, too, but one word from Thea put a quick end to their attack.

“Stop.”

Upon seeing her, they froze in flabbergasted shock. They returned to their senses a few seconds later, but that was plenty of time for Klaus to knock them out with his lightning-fast fists.

Thea bit her lip.

Just how many people have been waiting for the hero to show up?

For the Worker Ants, the suggestion Hearth had planted in them had been their lone ray of hope in a world of despair.

They had been subjected to excruciating pain and forced to kill people again and again. Absurd as the notion of a dark-haired girl coming to save them was, the mere idea must have shone brighter to them than anything else.

I need to save them. They’re my enemies, and they’re trying to kill me, but I need to save them.

Thea rushed up the building’s external staircase.

The Worker Ants continued attacking them even there, but she and Klaus subdued all comers. The two of them reached the eighth floor at the same time.

That was the floor that housed the rooftop garden.

The forty-seven-story-tall Westport Building contained a variety of tourist attractions, and one of them was the garden on its eighth floor. It had been closed off throughout the Tolfa Economic Conference, and between that and the late hour, there was nobody around.

The rooftop garden was roughly the size of three tennis courts. It had a fountain on its east and west sides, each of which was surrounded by a bed of roses, and there was a bronze monument enshrined in the garden’s center. The monument depicted a goddess nurturing a dove that was about to take flight.

Purple Ant was waiting for them beneath the statue.

“This is where you want to make your stand?” Klaus asked.

“It is. And it was so thoughtful of you to come here all on your own, I must add.” Purple Ant tenderly stroked the statue. “This is the same goddess as the one over in the harbor. Have you gotten a chance to visit it yet? They say she’s a symbol of liberty; the statue celebrates how the immigrants who came here won their independence.”

“I suppose that makes her your polar opposite.”

“That it does. I despise her, you know. It makes me sick every time I have to look at her.” Purple Ant extended his hand toward Klaus and Thea. “That’s why I thought it would be apropos to kill you two right in front of her.”

The moment the words left his mouth, a group of people rushed out from behind the rose beds. Thea could make out three of them, and they were all pointing their guns at her and Klaus.

“Ah!”

She tried to back off, but Klaus was faster. He leaped backward in an instant and yanked on her clothes to get her out of their line of fire.

Bullets whizzed right in front of her face.

Their assailants’ timing and aim were impeccable.

The attackers gathered in front of Purple Ant. There were nine of them in total, each one clad in a tuxedo. Their ranks were comprised of men and women of all ages. One was a girl who’d barely left childhood, and another was a man on the verge of decrepitude. There was everything from housewives to young men in the prime of their youth. The only thing they all had in common was the dull look in their eyes.

“Say hello to my nine General Ants.” Purple Ant smiled proudly. “They are my trump card.”

He sat down on the statue’s pedestal as if it were his throne.

Klaus fired his revolver. Thea hadn’t even seen him draw it. Before the bullet could strike Purple Ant, though, his minions intercepted it. Two of them held up something that looked like shields and protected him.

Klaus let out an impressed murmur. “I can see they put your rank and file to shame.”

“Oh, that they do,” Purple Ant replied coolly. “I have more than four hundred Worker Ants, and these nine are the cream of the crop.”

Thea acted fast. “Stop right there,” she said.

However, the General Ants didn’t so much as twitch. She hadn’t gotten through to them at all.

They must not have ever met Ms. Hearth. And because of the way they’ve been isolated, they never heard the rumor, either.

Those nine really were Purple Ant’s ace in the hole. They were warriors through and through, and their sole charge was to defend the king.

Klaus gently nudged Thea back. “Stand down.”

If her voice didn’t work on them, all she was going to do was get in his way. It pained her to have to do so, but she fell back to the garden’s entrance.

Purple Ant snapped his fingers.

With that as their signal, the nine General Ants swooped at Klaus as one. They readied their various weapons—one had a knife, another a rapier—and moved to surround him.

“______”

Klaus parried one woman’s rapier thrust with his knife and moved to smash the butt of his gun against the back of her neck. However, he halted his attack at the last moment and leaped to the side instead. A bullet slammed into the ground where his feet had just been and bounced up off the concrete. A short distance away from the two of them, the old man was holding a rifle.

The moment Klaus escaped the old man’s line of fire, a pair of boys charged at him and swung their longswords.

They’re going to get him!

Right as that thought threatened to turn to a certainty in Thea’s mind, though, Klaus fell back in the nick of time once more.

Something fluttered down on the garden. It was the scraps of Klaus’s sleeve.

Purple Ant gave the battle’s proceedings a satisfied nod. “I heard about the incident, you know. About how you let my teammate White Spider get away from you back in Din.”

“………”

Klaus stared down at his tattered sleeve in silence.

Atop his pedestal, Purple Ant looked as composed as could be. “The reason was simple. You had no intel on young Spider, whereas he knew all about you. He knew everything from your upbringing to your strengths, your weaknesses, and how to beat you.”

“It would certainly seem that way.”

“A spy with their information leaked can’t possibly hope to win.”

As Purple Ant finished his speech, the General Ants resumed their attack.

Their coordination was impeccable. One of them thrust out their knife, and as they did, they were joined by a gunshot that soared right under their armpit. Klaus countered with a low kick, but another General Ant swooped in to block it, then brought their sword crashing down on his head.

It was like they were a single living organism.

Their eighteen eyes and eighteen hands moved about in perfect sync, allowing them to attack and defend at the same time.

It boggled the mind just thinking about how much time they must have spent training. It wasn’t the kind you could count in days. Theirs was the kind of state you could only arrive at by having a prodigy sacrifice everything else in their life and spend ten thousand, perhaps even twenty thousand hours to attain. If not for Purple Ant’s domination, it never would have been achieved.

Even so, Thea still couldn’t believe her eyes.

Teach is actually getting overwhelmed?

Klaus’s combat skills were second to none, and yet, all he was doing was defending himself.

Somewhere in her heart, Thea had harbored a baseless hope. It’s Teach, she had thought. Nine-on-one is no problem for him. Why, he could have taken on a hundred foes at once and emerged just as victorious.

That was why she was having such difficulty processing the sight she was seeing.

How could it be?

“Sure enough, there it is. It’s just like the intel said.” As Thea stared in bewilderment, Purple Ant began talking. His voice had a smug superiority to it. “You’re worried about your team, aren’t you? About how they might be dying at this very moment.”

“______!”

Thea’s eyes went wide.

She assumed he was just bluffing, but looking at Klaus’s movements, it did feel as though they lacked their usual shine. He was successfully weathering the General Ants’ flawless tag-team attacks, but that was as far as he was getting.

Sweat ran across Klaus’s face.

Could it be? Could an elite spy like him really be…shaken?

Thea frowned, unable to reconcile Klaus’s performance with his abilities.

“There’s this funny story I heard,” Purple Ant said provocatively. “Apparently, they used to call you a king, too.”

All the while, the General Ants continued their barrage.

“You lived in a war-ravaged slum as an orphan without parents or even a name,” Purple Ant went on. “The only way you staved off starvation was by stealing food from gangs. The thing was, you were such a tough little brat, it creeped everyone else out. So you lived alone in a dirty, dusty garbage dump. That’s why they called you the Dust King.”

“………”

“The day you got taken in by a spy was the first time you ever had allies to call your own. It’s touching; it really is. But it left you with a glaring weakness—you love your teammates like they’re your family.” Purple Ant gave him a pitying look. “It was traumatic, wasn’t it? Losing your team the way you did.”

That was when the balance shifted.

One of the General Ants managed to slip through Klaus’s guard and charge at his flank. The Ant’s fist slammed deep into his side. Klaus twisted his body to blunt the attack, but a look of anguish flitted across his face all the same.

That was the first blow Thea had ever seen him suffer.

Klaus quickly dashed backward and put some space between himself and his opponent.

The General Ants stopped attacking for a moment. They realized they had the upper hand, and they knew there was no need to rush things. They simply adjusted their formation with a mechanical emotionlessness. They never offered Klaus even the slightest of openings.

“You should never have let yourself build another team,” Purple Ant said. “You should have lived like a king. All you needed were slaves you could sacrifice at your whim. That way, you wouldn’t have become weak.”

Purple Ant had yet to so much as stir from his position atop the pedestal.

He merely watched with a sadistic gaze as Klaus grew more and more worn out.

“Teach…”

Thea recalled what he’d been like during their initial meeting. Back when she first arrived at Heat Haze Palace, his eyes had been so full of sorrow, they nearly looked frozen, and he’d devoted every minute of his free time to painting a piece he’d titled Family.

After losing his team, he had fought all by his lonesome.

But then he founded Lamplight. He had chosen to take them under his wing as their boss and as their instructor. From there, both teacher and students alike overcame hardships, trained tirelessly, and, in the end, completed their Impossible Mission.

The days they’d spent together had given the girls so many blessings.

The question was, what had they given Klaus?

“Why not just give up?” Purple Ant asked. “You couldn’t beat my General Ants on your best day. With your mind off somewhere else, you don’t stand a chance.”

The situation was tilted against Klaus in every way possible. Having his information leaked had allowed Purple Ant to prepare the perfect stage on which to fight him.

A surge of anxiety ran through Thea. Klaus dusted off his clothes under her nervous gaze. “You really enjoy the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” he said.

He sounded just as self-assured as always. Not even being boxed in by nine fierce foes was enough to cow him.

“I do feel bad about bringing this up after all that thoughtful monologuing, but you have it so wrong, I can’t take it anymore. The only emotion I’ve been feeling is dejection from how tedious this all is.”

Purple Ant raised an eyebrow. “Tedious? What are you talking about?”

Klaus let out a deep sigh. “To be blunt, I’m bored.”

“What?”

“You certainly made your Nine General Ants sound impressive, but it’s the exact same thing you were doing before. It’s like you’re fixated on this idea of finding strong people, using numbers to take them down, and making them your allies. Where’s the innovation?”

“………”

Purple Ant froze, like he was struck speechless.

The thing was, Klaus had a point.

Purple Ant’s ability was powerful, but it was the only trick he had. All he knew how to do was dominate people and sic them on his foes. The tactic’s simplicity was what made it strong, but at the end of the day, that was all it was. Nothing more, nothing less.

Could that be the key?

As Thea tried to infer what exactly Klaus was getting at, her teacher went on coldly. “For all the hundreds of minions you have, all they’re doing is carrying out a single man’s worth of ideas. I have to say, it makes for a pretty uninteresting kingdom.”

It all tied back to what Klaus himself had said. Or rather, to the lesson he’d passed along from Hearth.

“Differences between allies are the key to a strong organization,” she’d said.

Klaus turned around. “Wouldn’t you agree, Thea?”

“………”

The sudden question caught her by surprise.

After missing a beat, she realized what he was after.

“Oh, absolutely,” she replied with a smile. “Why, he couldn’t have made it easier to lead you around by the nose if he’d wanted to.”

Purple Ant pressed down on the skin around his eyes in irritation. “I don’t know what nonsense you’re on about”—he snapped his fingers—“but if that’s what you want your dying words to be, then so be it. Take the girl hostage.”

The General Ants sprang into action once more.

This time, they changed up their attack pattern. Seven of them went after Klaus, and the remaining two went after Thea as she watched the fight from the entrance. The twin boys bore down on her, longswords in hand.

Naturally, Thea stood no chance against them, and Klaus was too tied down to save her in time.

However, Thea could hear a familiar pair of footsteps charging up the stairs.

“You know, I can’t imagine Teach is too pleased with me.” The swords were moments from reaching her throat. “Not after I recruited him onto our side.”

The footsteps reached their floor.

Her mighty bodyguard had finally arrived.

“I have a job for you,” she said with a sweetly smile. “Protect me.”

The General Ant twins froze in unison.

There was a man standing right in front of Thea, and he was grabbing the two Ants by their throats. He raised his emaciated arms into the air and hoisted the twins off their feet.

“Much appreciated.” Thea gave him another smile. “And splendidly done, at that.”

“You’re too kind,” Roland replied.

He threw his two foes with all his might and dashed them against the sculpture in the fountain.

“______”

Purple Ant gawked in disbelief.

On some level, though, he must have already realized it. After all, how else could Klaus have found his hideout?

As it turned out, there was one other suggestion Hearth had planted.

“I assume there’s no need for introductions,” Thea said. She gently stroked Roland’s chin.

“After all, he’s the man Ms. Hearth met right before she died—your dear pet dog.”

One hour earlier…

“You’re not the brightest, are you, kid? I can’t believe you fell for it that easily.”

Roland, now freed, squeezed down on Thea’s throat. As his fingers dug into her skin, she arrived at a hypothesis.

It was about what her teammates had put their lives on the line to investigate—the hero of Mitario.

Whoever started that rumor had to work in a field where they might run into Purple Ant’s Worker Ants, and they also had to know about the promise Thea made. There was only one person who that was true of—Hearth.

The reports said she had been killed by Serpent, so it stood to reason that Purple Ant could easily have been the one to do the deed there in Mitario. And right before Hearth died, she had planted a suggestion in his Worker Ants.

But was the story about the hero the only seed she had lain?

No… There’s someone else involved in all this who’s been acting strangely as well.

They had known since before the mission even began that he had ties to Purple Ant. And now that she thought about it, Klaus had expressed his confusion about the man’s odd behavior as well.

Someone fed him that bald-faced lie about being able to become Klaus’s rival.

Now everything finally made sense. All that time, Hearth had had everyone dancing in the palm of her hand.

She had known that Klaus would put together a new team after she died, she knew that he would find Thea, and because of the lies she told Roland, she knew that he would eventually challenge Klaus and get trounced. On top of that, she knew that Roland would sing like a bird and that Klaus and Thea would go after Purple Ant. She had accounted for all of it.

As far as destinies went, being the centerpiece of a legendary spy’s final plan wasn’t a half-bad one.

Thea strained her throat.

“Tell me, do you recognize my voice?”

Roland froze on the spot.

It hadn’t been an intentional choice on her part, but Thea had never spoken clearly around him. Up until then, she had been too scared to hold a proper conversation with him, and because of that, he didn’t know what her voice sounded like.

It was time to use that to her advantage.

She knew his weaknesses. He was sloppy, he was arrogant, and the moment he was certain he’d won, he left himself wide open. That was why, although unfastening his restraints had been a dangerous gamble, she hadn’t had a choice but to do so.

“Stop right there,” she said in Hearth’s voice.

Roland was clearly shaken by that. At long last, it gave her an opening.

Thea slipped out of his hand, grabbed his face, and closed in. She held his head close enough for a kiss and locked her gaze on his.

“I’m code name Dreamspeaker—and it’s time to lure them to their ruin.”

She stared him deep in the eyes.

She could see his desires—what his sinister assassin heart was burdened by and what he craved. She etched it into her mind. Thanks to the ability Hearth had helped her hone, all of Roland’s secrets were hers.

Roland shook off his stiffness and shoved her away. “Why, you little…”

Thea reached out and pressed her arms against the wall for balance to keep herself from toppling out the window. Then she rolled to the side and put some distance between them.

Her hair fluttered glossily behind her.

“I see, I see. You were there, weren’t you? You watched Hearth die.”

Thea had seen his heart, and she had seen the impression Hearth’s dying words had left on it.

The suggestion Hearth had planted in him was a powerful one indeed.

“So what if I did?” Roland snapped his fingers. “It doesn’t change the fact you’re about to die. That’s what I do. I kill.”

The raw bloodlust he was emanating was enough to send pins and needles across her skin. Thea had been cowed by that menacing aura on multiple occasions. She had been completely helpless during their initial encounter, and the same thing had happened in the prison cell. Each time, she had needed one of her teammates to step in and protect her.

Now, though, she was different. Now she had a white-hot fire burning in her chest.

“And when you kill me, what then?”

The moment he wanted to, Roland could kill her faster than she could blink. Nobody was coming to save her. Yet, even so, Thea’s smile was as elegant as could be. “Please, do tell. What good will killing me do you?”

“What are you—?”

“Oh, that’s right. Purple Ant will praise you, won’t he? That’s very important. That way, you won’t have to get punished.”

“……!”

Roland’s face flushed scarlet. She’d hit the nail on the head.

Thea playfully laid a finger on the corner of her mouth and smiled. “That’s a real nice relationship you two have going on. I worked real hard, so please don’t hit me. What are you going to do next, lick his feet? Oh, goodness, have you actually licked them? What a good little doggy you are.”

“Listen here, kid. You little bitch…” His fists were trembling, and he was red all the way down to his fingertips. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve. If you thought you were gonna die painlessly, well, think ag—”

“You know, I’ve been wondering this for a while, but why do you put on such a tough-guy act? I mean, you’re a nobody. Teach took you down like it was nothing, and between that and the way you suck up to Purple Ant, you’re really kind of pathetic.” Thea looked at him coldly. “I don’t think you understand who you really are, so allow me to tell you.” She pointed at him and fired off each of her next words like they were bullets. “You’re a haughty, weak narcissist who loves to leech off women. You suck up to your superiors, and you got broken in like a dog by some kinky S&M. You’re no match for anyone with any real skills, but you let the fact that you’re kind of decent at hunting fellow losers go to your head anyway. But at the end of the day, you’re just a bargain-bin murderer without even the tiniest amount of brains or panache.”

“Shut up…”

“Or what, you’ll kill me? Let me ask you again—then what? Will you go back to the tedium of being Purple Ant’s dog? If you do, it’ll mean going back to traveling the world and killing whoever he tells you to while spending every day bored out of your mind. Then, one day, you’ll pick a fight with the wrong guy and end up dead. Ha-ha-ha, and don’t think you won’t. I mean, it’s not like you’re actually strong or anything.”

“Shut up… You don’t know shit about me…”

“Oh, quit the barking and baying. A pathetic mutt like you who doesn’t have the nerve to defy his owner or the patience to put up with his own boredom has no right filling my nose with his foul breath.”

Thea laughed mockingly as she turned a deaf ear to Roland’s attempts at defending himself.

Roland’s body shook. He was still as red as a tomato, and his eyes swam like he was having a breakdown.

However, Thea didn’t let up. She renounced his personality. She renounced his life. She renounced his very existence. She needed to break the domination Purple Ant had over him, and that was something that love alone couldn’t accomplish. The only way she could do it was by facing him head-on.

What she was doing was replacing physical abuse with verbal abuse. She was violating his mind just the way Purple Ant had. However, Purple Ant’s sole aim was to get his victims to submit to him. Thea’s was not.

“But that’s why your heart skipped a beat with excitement, wasn’t it?” she asked him. “When that legendary Ms. Hearth swore to you that Klaus could satisfy your heart, you felt like it was destiny at work, didn’t you? You were overjoyed at the prospect of finally having a proper rival, weren’t you?”

“………”

“You want to change who you are so badly, you can taste it.”

Back when they first met, Roland had complained incessantly about how bored he was. It was like he’d been cursing himself.

He was sick and tired of being controlled by Purple Ant.

Then she threw another piece of information in his face. “Why was it you helped out Olivia?”

Olivia was Roland’s apprentice, the one who’d disguised herself as a maid and gotten captured by Grete. Now she, too, was locked away in a prison and being pumped for all the intel she had, but originally, she had worked as a lady of the night.

The way Olivia saw it, running into Roland was what had saved her from a life of boredom and drudgery.

“Was it really just so you could use her as a pawn? Or was it because you sympathized with her plight? You saw so much of yourself in her, didn’t you? That’s why you wanted to save her.”

“………”

“You know, if you switch sides to the Republic now, you could win her back her freedom.”

She was facing him with all her cards on the table. It was time to take the information she’d gathered and put it together so she could win him over. Her heart sang with a firm sense of purpose. This, she now realized, was the role she’d been given.

Last time, her attempt to become a hero who saved even her enemies had ended in disaster. Her opponent had taken advantage of her empathy, and Thea had made the terrible blunder of helping her escape. The weight of that failure had been too much for her heart to bear.

But the thing was, she’d been going about it all wrong. There was a way for spies to save their foes, and it wasn’t by letting them get away. It was by getting them to turn traitor. All she had to do was turn her enemies into allies!

That was the way Dreamspeaker was going to operate—by denouncing her foes, then using her charm to lure them onto her side.

“Even if that’s true…,” Roland eventually said in a pained voice, “what exactly can you do?”

“I can liberate you. With my power to see into your heart, I can free you from Purple Ant’s control.”

She had seen it etched into his heart. He, too, believed that the dark-haired heroine was coming to save him. All he wanted was to be set free, and she was the person who could do just that.

“Or if you’d like me to put it another way…shall I do a bit of home-wrecking?”

She gave Roland a soft push, and he fell backward onto the ground like his spine was made of jelly. He looked up at her in blank astonishment.

Thea sat down on the bed and stripped off her shoes.

“Go on, kneel before your new owner.”

She stroked his chin with her bare, ever-so-fair feet. She could feel his breath hot and heavy on them.

“Now, do you want to experience the best kind of pleasure there is together with your beautiful mistress?”

It didn’t take long at all for Roland to succumb to that smile of hers.

Back on the Westport Building’s eighth-floor rooftop garden…

“Y’know, I’d always wanted to see how many Worker Ants I could take down in a single go.” Roland loudly cracked his neck. “Turns out, I’m pretty good at this stuff. I took out twelve of those punks, no problem. Not being allowed to kill ’em made it a whole lot trickier, but still, that number’s competitive with anything those foreign intelligence agencies put up.”

Purple Ant gave Roland a frigid glare, but Roland didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He’d probably been just as unflappable his whole life. He twirled Thea’s gun around in his hand.

The arrival of an intruder caused the General Ants to back off for a bit, and Roland took advantage of that opening to give Klaus an overfamiliar shout. “I saved those kids of yours, Bonfire. You can stop worrying about ’em.”

Klaus didn’t seem one bit pleased.

It was clear how deeply he detested Roland, but at the same time, the fact he owed the man some gratitude was undeniable.

As Thea looked back and forth between the two of them, another newcomer showed up behind her.

“Hey there. I see you finally figured out how to make yourself useful.”

It was Monika. Being reunited with her teammate sent a wave of relief through Thea. “Oh, thank goodness you’re alive.”

“Yeah, we’re all fine. Klaus went and saved Lily and Annette, and the Corpse guy bailed out Sybilla and Erna. Oh, and also—”

Midway through her matter-of-fact explanation, one of Monika’s veins bulged. She grabbed Thea by the collar.

“—you got anything you wanna say to me? About that giant load you dumped on my back, maybe? The only backup we got was Grete in a disguise. Bet you thought that’d be real funny, huh? I swear, I was this close to losing it when I found out it was her.”

“I mean, you did make it out alive…”

“Only ’cause I worked my ass off!”

“A-and besides, that deployment was Grete’s idea…”

“Says the commander who signed off on it.”

The bottom line was, they had successfully weathered Purple Ant’s three simultaneous crises without suffering a single casualty.

Monika and Sara were the duo Thea had been most worried about, but as it turned out, Grete’s valiant efforts had paid off. By disguising herself as Klaus and giving their opponents a good scare, she’d given Monika an opportunity to outplay them.

Thanks to her and Roland, everyone had made it out alive. The other girls were gathered out on the external stairs as well. Their target, Purple Ant, had nowhere to run.

“Anyway,” Monika went on, “all we managed to do is get away. We didn’t take down a single one of ’em. You should be thankful I’m such a genius.”

“Oh, trust me, I am.”

“And there’s nothing we can do here, either. At this point, whether or not we succeed”—Monika shot a look over at Klaus and Roland—“rests entirely on those two.”

The two spies whose backs she was looking at were on a level far beyond anything the girls had reached.

There was “Bonfire” Klaus.

And there was “Deepwater” Roland.

Even though Thea was the one who’d helped bring it about, she still felt a bit awed by the sight. There was nothing more she or the others could contribute.

The two elite spies bantered as they stood side by side.

“…Roland, I appreciate you saving my subordinates. You have my gratitude.”

“What? C’mon, why can’t you just say thank you like a normal person? Remember, if it wasn’t for me turning traitor, you never would’ve found Purple Ant’s hideout.”

“Please, you betrayed one man. Try not to let it go to your head.”

Across from them, Purple Ant sat with his eyes twitching and his nine underlings surrounding him. Unable to conceal his displeasure, he dug his nails into one of the General Ant boys’ backs.

“Still,” Klaus said, “there’s one thing I should say. You aren’t—”

“Don’t,” Roland cut him off. “There’re some things a guy’s just gotta do. This here, this is me taking back my life.”

“Hmm?” Thea couldn’t understand what they were getting at.

Klaus said nothing more. He merely fixed his gaze on Purple Ant.

“…………………………………………………”

A stillness fell as both sides tried to feel the other out.

Before Thea realized it, she was holding her breath. The tension of it all was so intense it made her feel faint, but she managed to pull herself together.

Beside her, Monika was watching the proceedings like a hawk. She was planning on learning everything she could from the battle, and she refused to miss so much as a second of it. As far as straight-up fights to the death went, what they were about to witness was the apex of spy combat.

The first person to make a move was Purple Ant.

He rose to his feet and thrust his finger at Klaus and Roland.

“All units,” his voice boomed. “Kill the traitor first.”

The nine General Ants moved as one and charged at Roland, who readied his gun.

They were completely ignoring Klaus, and Klaus took the opportunity to fire off some shots. His bullets pierced two of the nine through their shoulders. However, they didn’t so much as flinch, and their coordination remained impeccable. All of them, including the two who’d just been injured, began their assault on Roland.

They rained a succession of rapier thrusts, longsword slashes, and gunshots upon their gaunt foe.

Roland opened fire with the gun he’d borrowed from Thea.

“What…?” Thea gasped.

She couldn’t believe what she was witnessing.

The long and short of it was, Roland was completely and utterly outmatched.

He managed to wound the first man who dove at him with his signature quickdraw technique, but when one of the women swooped in from the side with a series of rapier strikes, he was too slow to react. The woman stabbed him in the flank, and when he recoiled, a bullet caught him right in the gut.

Then the two sword-wielding twins swooped in to finish the job and hacked away at both his legs in unison.

“Ro…land…?”

She could tell just how serious his injuries were.

His entire body gushed blood as the General Ants kicked him aside and returned to their formation.

Thea hurriedly rushed to his side, but he was already too badly hurt to even move. The bullet hole in his abdomen looked especially grim. She administered first aid, but it was anyone’s guess as to whether or not that would be enough to keep him alive.

“A fitting end for a man who defied his king,” Purple Ant declared coldly. “There was no way a man of his paltry talents could ever stand up to my General Ants.”

Thea said nothing. There was something she’d just been forcibly reminded of.

Roland may have been talented, but there were people more powerful still who could trounce people like him like it was nothing. Klaus may have held his own against the General Ants, but that was only because he was an anomaly. Even Roland, skilled as he was in combat, was no match for them.

Klaus was the only person who could even hope to face them.

“I must admit,” Purple Ant said, “I made a few miscalculations this time around. I’ll give you props for that. However, this all falls well within my margins of error. My victory is still just as assured.”

Purple Ant pressed his stun gun up to one of the injured General Ants.

A scream rose up, as did the smell of burning flesh. He had cauterized the Ant’s wound.

After going around and applying his violent treatment to the rest of his injured peons, he began explaining himself with great delight. “Your mentor told us everything about you, young Klaus, and our very own Spider verified that intelligence with his own two eyes. Even if you were in peak condition, you wouldn’t hold a candle to my General Ants.”

Klaus said nothing. “………”

“A king gives no quarter to traitors. Now it’s time for the rest of you to die, too. You and the children hiding over on the stairs.”

Klaus’s silent gaze was fixed on Roland’s prone form. Thea continued doing her best to patch him up, but he just kept on losing more and more blood.

Eventually, Klaus looked back at Purple Ant. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?” He fixed his gaze straight on his foe. “I despise that corpse of a man. He may have just been following orders, but he still killed scores of innocent people. And what’s more, he knew this was going to happen when he chose to duke it out with you. I don’t feel sorry for him in the slightest.”

“Well, that certainly makes two of us,” Purple Ant replied.

“Even so, wasn’t he your teammate? Your compatriot?”

“Please. He was a slave.”

“Ah. You know, you really are a sickening man.”

Klaus began advancing forward, and the nine General Ants sprang into action as well.

The former’s goal was to reposition himself so that Thea and the others wouldn’t get caught up in the fight. One of the General Ants took a potshot at Thea in an attempt to distract Klaus, but Monika swatted the bullet out of the air.

That was enough to show their opponents that diversionary tactics weren’t going to get them anywhere.

It was time for the battle between Klaus and the General Ants to begin in earnest.

The Ants had suffered a fair number of blows, but their coordination was none the worse for it. Rapier and longsword tag-team attacks hammered down on Klaus, and bullets wove their way between the blades and whizzed at him as well. Whenever he tried to go in for a knife strike, one of the Ants in charge of defense would swoop in and block it with their shield.

Roland hadn’t lasted three seconds against that pressure, and it wasn’t because he was weak. The General Ants were just unreasonably strong.

Klaus had already lasted for more than a minute, but his breathing was starting to grow ragged. He had fought seventy-three Worker Ants on his way there, so it made sense that fatigue was starting to get to him.

The General Ants were pushing him back. It was only a bit at a time, but they were definitely gaining ground on him.

All Thea could do was cheer him on.

She shot him a wordless look of encouragement. Over in her peripheral vision, she could see the others. They, too, were watching the battle with their fists clenched and their gazes burning. They were praying for the same thing she was—for the instructor who’d guided them all to such heights to emerge victorious.

In defiance of those wishes, though, Klaus had to beat a large retreat.

Blood trickled down his cheek.

“Are you not listening?” Purple Ant asked. “I told you, we have a full dossier on you.”

Klaus wiped away the blood. “………”

Purple Ant snapped his fingers. “Even if you were fighting at full strength, my General Ants are the one foe you can’t beat. Now kill him.”

There it was. The kill order.

The General Ants swooped in as one. Klaus was under attack from every side. All of them, even the marksman and the ones on shield duty, were on offense now.

The nine of them were in perfect sync.

From Klaus’s right, the old man bore down on him at point blank with his rifle. From the front, the twins charged in with their longswords. From his left, two men raised their shields to use as bludgeons. From behind him, a woman made to run him through with her rapier. And the others filled in the little gaps with their guns and swords and knives. Klaus was surrounded.

“I see. Well, then I should ask…”

Klaus’s voice rang out.

It was those same words the girls had heard him say so many times before.

“…how much longer should I keep playing along with this game?”

He dodged through the General Ants’ onslaught by the slimmest of margins like he’d read them like a book. Then he shifted his leg, and the sound of gas spraying filled the air. Klaus had installed some sort of device in his shoe. He covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief.

The General Ants lost their balance. They were still acting in perfect harmony, and as a result, all nine of them sucked in their breath in unison—just in time to get a big lungful of gas.

“Poison gas…?” Purple Ant muttered in bewilderment. “But there wasn’t anything in your file about you using—”

Thea knew that gas.

It was the poison gas Lily always used. The timing Klaus released it with was even more perfect than hers, offering his foes no openings whatsoever as he used the paralytic to dull all their movements in one fell swoop.

The sight Thea saw next was one she would never forget.

It didn’t even take a full second. There was a big old zero to the left of that decimal place.

In that moment, the man who boasted of being the World’s Strongest showed what he was truly capable of.

He stepped forward and traveled several feet in what seemed like an instant.

As he did, six of the General Ants went flying.

The way Klaus’s assailants got launched into the air like scraps of paper before landing hard on the ground, it was like an invisible bomb had gone off or something.

At that point, Thea realized that she’d had it all wrong.

Klaus had never been up against the ropes, not even at the very beginning. Sure, he had been worried about his team. And sure, that might have hampered his performance. But any change that had brought about was little more than a rounding error. He had known all along how he was going to bring his foes low.

What he’d been doing was figuring out when the best time to release his poison gas was.

The weakness he’d shown had simply been an act.

“Let me point out where you made your mistake,” Klaus said. “You got all sorts of intel on me from my master’s betrayal, yes, but that information is six months out of date. In a time frame like that, even my skill set is going to grow.”

“B-but it doesn’t make sense…,” Purple Ant stammered, still failing to come to grasps with the situation. “Just last month—”

“Oh, you mean when I let White Spider get away? That much is true; I won’t deny it. The only cop-out excuse I have to give is that at the time, I was in terrible form. I’d been working for more than five hundred days straight at that point.”

That was hardly a cop-out.

Grete had noticed his poor condition as well. After leading them to success during the bioweapon retrieval mission in Galgad, he’d spent their subsequent two-week vacation wearing himself out by completing more missions still. Then, without taking a moment to rest, he’d headed off to assassinate Corpse. And to top it all off, he’d pounded no shortage of pavement in his search for the missing girls.

During his encounter with White Spider, he must have been exhausted.

“When White Spider ran into me, he misunderstood. He saw me at my weakest, and it made him think that that old intel was still accurate.”

Klaus went on.

“Unfortunately for you, I’ve become far stronger than I was half a year ago.”

Klaus took another step forward, and the remaining three General Ants went flying as well.

He was moving, and he was attacking. That was all there was to it, but due to Klaus’s speed, it really did look like his foes were getting blasted away by invisible explosions.

The secrets to Klaus’s talent were his extraordinary combat techniques and the raw power he had that allowed him to boast of being the World’s Strongest. Or at least, that’s what Thea had thought they were.

Now, though, a new thought crossed her mind.

Could it be? Is his real talent the way he learns?

Perhaps that was another gift of his—the ability to pick up new skills off intuition alone.

Thea shuddered.

We threw everything we had at him over and over. We tried putting him into all sorts of different situations, and we attacked him with the most ingenious plans we could think up. Could Teach have been using that to train himself, too?

The girls’ talents were far from outstanding, but each of them had one specific skill they could use better than anyone. They had used those skills to their fullest in their attacks, so their attempts couldn’t have been that mediocre.

Because of that, Klaus had been forced to live like he could get attacked at any moment, no matter where he was. He had been forced to anticipate traps of every sort. And he had seen the girls’ unique skills up close and personal.

It begged the question, just what exactly had a man with his superhuman talents been getting out of the time they’d spent together?

“Now then,” Klaus said as he shook the dust off his hands. “Are you ready to do this, Purple Ant?”

He gave his opponent a coolheaded stare.

There was nobody left to defend Purple Ant. He could spout off all the orders he wanted to, but there wasn’t a single person who would rise up to obey them.

Furthermore, it went without saying that he didn’t stand a chance against Klaus one-on-one. The battle was over, and the girls were blocking off his escape route. Without his minions, they had nothing to fear from him.

Purple Ant could see the writing on the wall. He inched backward, but he soon bumped up against the statue’s pedestal. Great beads of sweat began rolling down his face.

“You have to help me.” He sounded downright pathetic. “You want to save your enemies, don’t you? Please talk some sense into him.”

Thea could tell that she was the one he was talking to.

The expression on his face was pleading and desperate. It was hard to imagine this was the same person who’d been calling himself a king. Without his subjects, a king was just a man.

“Even I understand that there are people who are worth saving and people who aren’t,” Thea replied flatly.

That was something she was confident of. Purple Ant was beyond salvation. His personality was rotten to its core, and she knew better than to hope he would ever change.

“You’re like a walking natural disaster,” she went on. “Enemies are one thing, but you’re so repugnant, I hesitate to call you even that.”

Klaus started approaching Purple Ant. As he did, he pulled out a bullet from his pocket. It was the memento Hearth had left. Purple Ant went pale, and Klaus squeezed his hand around the bullet as he walked right up to him.

Thea did the verbal honors.

“The fact of the matter is, you aren’t qualified to be our enemy.”

Klaus took his fist with Hearth’s bullet in it and smashed it into Purple Ant’s face.

The man fell unconscious without even getting a chance to scream. With that, Mitario’s king was deposed.