Spy Classroom - Volume 5 - Chapter 3.2

The same night Avian was holding their strategy meeting, Lamplight was holding one of their own.

It had been a good long while since the eight of them had all gotten back together for a discussion like that. Lately, most of the team’s strategy meetings had consisted solely of Klaus, Thea, and Grete coming up with plans and relaying them to the others afterward. As the girls argued and debated, they were all struck by a strange sense of nostalgia.

It reminded them of their training, back when they’d all gotten together to discuss how they were going to take down Klaus. The days and months they’d spent doing that had been truly fulfilling—and if Avian defeated them tomorrow night, Lamplight was going to lose them forever.

Each time the girls imagined that happening, their voices took on a little more fervor.

Once they’d settled on their plan, Klaus called them over for a follow-up meeting.

The girls sat in a circle around him on the living room sofas. That was the way they’d done it back in Heat Haze Palace, and that was the way they intended to do it in Longchon, too.

“This next operation will likely mark the end of our mission in Longchon, but it’s taken on a very different form than the ops that came before it,” Klaus told them. “Technically, our mission is to investigate the intelligence leaks from our embassy, but I don’t think any of you much care about that part anymore. Professionally speaking, I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I’m going to choose to overlook that bit. Sometimes, the job takes us in unexpected directions.”

The girls nodded.

The only thing that mattered now was surpassing Avian. The mission was nothing more than a means to achieve that end. Their hearts were united in a single goal—completing the mission before Avian and proving that they deserved to continue working with Klaus.

Klaus nodded as well. “Besides, all we have to do is steal a single document. I could do that with my eyes closed.”

“Well, you don’t have to put it like that!” Lily cried.

“However, I’m sitting this one out. I’ll just be watching to see who wins between you and Avian.”

The girls agreed that that made sense. If Klaus took part, that would defeat the entire point. They needed to beat Avian all on their own.

“I don’t have a strong sense of what the academy environment is like, so to be honest, I have a difficult time understanding your trauma associated with it. In my opinion, you shouldn’t get hung up on their narrow-minded opinions. But if the wounds they inflicted on your hearts left you with as many sleepless nights as you claim, then I have just one thing to say to you,” Klaus declared. “Win. Take those inferiority complexes of yours and turn them on their heads.”

His words lit a fire under the girls, and they all replied with a resounding “Yes, sir!”

With that, the meeting was over.

Lily was the first to rise to her feet. “Teach,” she said. “You’d better watch close. I bet it’ll feel reeeal good.”

“What will?” Klaus asked.

Lily grinned. “Seeing your students crush a bunch of cocky elites into the dirt.”

It was one of her characteristically smug grins, and it fit the team to a T.

“Magnificent,” Klaus replied.

After the meeting’s conclusion, Klaus called one of the girls back. “Erna, how are your injuries? Don’t go pushing yourself, now.”

Erna was still covered in bandages. “It still hurts, but sitting this out would hurt more,” she answered.

“I see,” Klaus said softly. “…Well, once the battle is over, I have something I want to talk to you about.”

Erna tilted her head in curiosity. However, Klaus said nothing more. He just gave her a look tinged with a hint of sadness.

Then, twenty-four hours later, the battle between Lamplight and Avian began.

The stage for their battle was a region known as the Longchon Walled City, or as the government called it, the Longchon Illegal Housing Zone.

The Longchon Walled City had originally been constructed as a fortress to protect the country from foreign foes, but when the Fend Commonwealth colonized Longchon, they demolished the fortress and left nothing behind but a massive plot of land that was eventually populated by refugees from all across the Far East. After the Great War’s end, people came to Longchon in droves in search of stability as they fled civil wars and colonization, but with no work to be found there for people without proper passports, many of them ended up settling in the ruins of the Longchon Walled City.

That was how the apartment complex got started.

Over time, the area’s population grew and grew, and as it did, they started building housing on top of housing. Eventually, the fortress grew so large the government could no longer control it, and the complex ended up being home to thousands of people who had nowhere else to go. The unregulated construction was so dense that it took on a sort of mystique, with rumors sprouting up about how going in meant you could never leave and how residents who got lost simply starved to death. In the end, people took to calling it by its old name once again—the Longchon Walled City.

By that point, it was the single largest concrete city in the world. Some said its buildings went as tall as twelve stories high; others said fourteen. In truth, nobody knew the actual number. It also had its own economy, with everything from restaurants in gross violation of food sanitation laws, to back-alley doctors, to stores full of contraband foreign goods, to shops that sold illegal heavy weaponry and narcotics, to gambling dens and brothels. And the Steel Urn Group mafia controlled it all. Not even the police dared set foot in the city, so the Steel Urn Group was free to govern by their own set of laws and rule over the Longchon Walled City’s desperate populace with an iron fist.

The leaked classified document they were looking for was somewhere in that city.

The spies had decided on a starting time to begin their infiltration.

Once they set foot inside, the mafia lookouts would spot them and go into high alert. Considering how insular the Longchon Walled City was, sneaking in by disguising themselves as residents would be too time intensive. Instead, they’d decided that the better play would be to sync up their timing and charge in all at once to steal the document by force.

The two sides’ starting positions were as equal as could be. At ten PM sharp, Lamplight entered the city from the south, and Avian went in from the north. With that, the two spy teams’ battle quietly began.

Thanks to its commander, Thea, and her trademark negotiation skills, Lamplight was able to rent out a one-room apartment ahead of time. She’d tempted one of the Longchon Walled City’s residents with her honeyed words and managed to buy them off. The room was barely long enough for a person to lie down in, but it was going to serve her just fine as their operational headquarters. Thea hung up the map she’d procured in advance (although its accuracy was dubious at best), then installed the large radio setup Annette had put together. That was where Thea was going to relay orders to her teammates from. Staying in constant contact via radio was the only way they were going to avoid getting lost.

Klaus, who’d accompanied them up to that point, gave the girls a small nod. “I’ll be off, then. I’ll be keeping an eye out to make sure nobody gets injured too badly.”

“Much appreciated.”

Merely having Klaus in the same room as Thea was liable to give her an unfair advantage. Given that their goal was to defeat Avian fair and square, Klaus had a duty to leave. However, he stopped in his tracks the moment he first set foot outside the door. “The problem is, in a place this big, there’s no real way of knowing who’s going to get knocked out or where.”

The Longchon Walled City was such a labyrinth that not even the people who lived there knew its entire layout. Watching everything that went on in the entire city was a feat beyond even the mighty Klaus.

“Oh?” Thea said, sounding rather surprised. “But, Teach, isn’t it obvious who the first dropout will be?”

“Hmm?”

“Someone in Avian is about to go down, and that’s just a fact. If you’re worried about anyone, they’re the ones you should check in on.”

“Well, someone’s confident.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? A certain someone told me in no unclear terms that she was going to be taking one member of Avian down, guaranteed.”

“Oh,” Klaus replied, sounding audibly impressed. That there was a bold statement indeed. Lamplight was in a veritable maze, and what’s more, they were going up against Avian. To think that one of their members had spoken with such confidence. Who could it have been?

When Klaus looked back, Thea gave him a smile.

“All I did was turn her loose.”

And what a brilliant smile it was.

“In any battle with you on the line, the power of love’s going to multiply her strength a hundredfold.”

It was twenty-five minutes in—barely any time at all—and the two teams were about to have their first skirmish.

Qulle found the Longchon Walled City to be a daunting den of vice.

Yeesh. I could get totally lost if I zoned out for even a second in here…

Together, the mass of unlicensed building additions created a city as sprawling as it was labyrinthine. Buildings had been built with no regard for their neighbors’ heights, so it was all too easy to walk across a building’s third floor only to inexplicably find yourself on the fourth of another, or to go up a flight of stairs from the third floor and discover that it went directly to floor five. The air in the seemingly endless concrete world was stagnant, and the smell of mold wafted from every nook and cranny. When Qulle went a little deeper into the city, she reached an area with no windows whatsoever. All she had to slowly guide her onward was what little light streamed in from the open rooms.

Plus, the buildings weren’t the only things designed to obstruct intruders. There were the residents, too.

…I guess they’ve already figured out we’re outsiders, huh.

She was being careful to avoid the residents whenever she could, but because of the way the city was set up, it was impossible to tell where people might be watching from. She could hear the inhabitants start muttering to each other about having spotted some unfamiliar faces. They were unlikely to harm Qulle and the others directly, but eventually, that information was going to make its way over to the mafia.

If we’d had more time, we could have disguised ourselves as residents or bribed enough people that it wouldn’t have mattered, but with how closed-off this place is, it took everything we had to gather what little intel we did.

That said, what was done was done. Besides, Avian and Lamplight were operating under the same conditions.

Qulle stopped in front of a closed-up dental clinic and strained her ears, gathering in sound from a vast range and accurately capturing the voices of the residents who were still awake. On the upper floors, the Steel Urn Group mafia was all flustered. They’d just learned that there were some unidentified strangers roaming around their complex, and they were scurrying to and fro to protect the classified document.

Good, things are going smoothly.

Once she had a decent idea of where the document was, she sprang back into motion. Her gait was far lighter than it had been before.

Honestly, I’m not too concerned about Lamplight. Most of them aren’t worth worrying about.

Looking at the recent data, Lamplight had given the lion’s share of their work to Klaus and Glint, and their strategy for their Impossible Mission had probably revolved around those two as well. In Qulle’s eyes, the others were largely inconsequential.

If everything goes like it should, Mr. Klaus will be our boss by tomorrow night. I can’t wait.

Qulle was on cloud nine—both from how proud she was as a spy, and from how besotted she was as a maiden who’d found a lovely new prospective suitor.

She thought back to the day when she got to go on a mission with him. The Greatest Spy in the World was far more dashing than she’d imagined. He came across as curt, sure, but once she got a chance to chat with him, she’d discovered that he had a considerate nature and a great sense of humor.

Once she learned that, a wonderful vision had come to mind.

I wonder if Mr. Klaus is seeing anyone right now, or if—

“I hear she went this way! The jade-haired chick’s over here!”

An angry shout shook her from her reverie. It wasn’t just one person shouting, either. Several people were. Loads of them, in fact.

“What?” Qulle gasped.

She hid herself in a storeroom, more on instinct than anything else. Something weird was going on.

She strained her ears again and sorted through the shouts one by one.

“Thief!” “That sneaky bitch. She took my wallet.” “She stole my IOU.” “That’s it, she’s dead meat.” “You screw with one person in the Walled City, you screw with all of us.” “If anyone finds her, make sure you catch her.” “I hear she’s got jade green hair and big-ass glasses.” “I hear her name’s Qulle.” “Don’t let the chick with the big glasses get away!”

Qulle shuddered.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!”

Waterfalls of sweat began gushing from every pore on her body.

She hadn’t done anything wrong, yet somehow, she had earned the Longchon Walled City’s ire. What’s more, dozens of its residents had formed a posse and were trying to hunt her down.

But wait, why are they so riled up? And why are they zeroing in on me? Should I take them all out? No, no way. They’re civilians, and besides, there’s too many of them!

This was just supposed to be a mission about stealing a document from the mafia, so they’d assumed that the city’s residents weren’t going to get involved. The locals weren’t liable to help them, but they weren’t going to harm them, either. None of the spies would be stupid enough to make enemies out of the Longchon Walled City’s thousands of residents.

There was little in the way of law and order there. If the locals caught her, they could very well end up killing her.

Qulle squeezed herself as far back in the storeroom as she could go. A group of angry men noisily rushed past. She strained her ears, and once the sounds had died down, she quietly slipped out of the room.

Right as she did, someone stepped out of the room directly across from hers. “…Qulle, are you all right? Looks like things have taken an unexpected turn.”

“Vindo!”

It was Avian’s leader. At that moment, there wasn’t a single person she would have been happier to see. She rushed right on over to him. They needed to share their intel to figure out what the hell was going on. He walked toward her in turn, and Qulle felt the stress drain from her expression.

A moment later, though, it dawned on her—something was off. Vindo would never walk that noisily.

By that point, though, it was already too late.

“I’m code name Daughter Dearest—now, let’s fill this time with laughter and tears.”

The wrong voice came out of Vindo’s mouth.

Vindo—or rather, the person Qulle had thought was Vindo—tore off his face to reveal Grete’s face beneath it. The needle she brandished without a moment’s delay glinted in the dim Walled City hallway.

She plunged it into Qulle’s arm.

Qulle crumpled to the ground on the spot. It felt like her entire body was on fire.

“Lily concocted this poison herself. You won’t be getting up anytime soon.”

“Rrgh… Gah…!” Qulle’s vision went bleary. It hurt even just to breathe.

As Grete grabbed her by the collar and dragged her toward an empty room, Qulle finally realized that Grete was the one who’d set up the whole thing. She’d disguised herself as Qulle, brazenly stolen from everyone she could, and worked the locals into a rage.

No way… She was never able to weave lies that elaborate back at the academy!

The two of them had gone to the same academy, and tucked away in the back of Qulle’s memory, she remembered what Grete had been like. Back then, though, Grete had been a pathetic washout. She had a good head on her shoulders, but she was so frail she could barely function. She was a total novice, and even her talent with disguises was rendered all but useless by her androphobia. Qulle couldn’t begin to count the number of times she’d knocked Grete to the ground during their combat training. She could have sparred Grete a hundred times in a row and not lost a single bout.

So why? It’s not like I’m weak or anything!

She was flabbergasted.

The room Grete dragged her to was small and abandoned. The floor wasn’t level, making it ill-suited for anyone to live in. Due to the haphazard way it had been constructed, the Longchon Walled City was full of awkward little crevices like that one.

Once they were inside, Grete dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. The poison coursing through Qulle’s veins was so potent she couldn’t so much as properly lift a finger.

“…It’s been a long time, Qulle,” Grete said as she calmly looked down at her. “Back at the academy, I suffered plenty of defeats at your hand. You were the best around, and I’m ashamed to say I spent my nights burning with jealousy. I knew that it was sensible people like you who got loved by others, not hideous, gloomy people like me…”

Grete’s voice was gentle and calm, but there was a fire in her every word that burned with an unimaginable intensity.

“But now…even I have someone I refuse to relinquish!”

Grete’s tone and gaze sharpened, and Qulle bit her lip.

What could have happened to her while I wasn’t watching? What in the world made her like this?!

That was just the thing—Qulle hadn’t been watching.

She hadn’t seen the explosive way Grete’s skills had improved after she came to Lamplight and fell in love with Klaus. And she hadn’t seen the way Grete’s affection and her desire to help shoulder her beloved’s burden drove her to hone those same skills she’d let wither back at the academy.

In a battle with Klaus on the line, there was no way Grete wasn’t going to rise to the occasion!

“You can rest easy. This room is safe. That said, if I told the locals where you were, I can only imagine the ways they would punish you…”

Grete softly leaned in toward Qulle’s immobile body.

“Now, would you be so kind as to tell me about Avian? In detail, if you don’t mind.”

A cold pang of despair ran through Qulle at the barely veiled threat.

With that, Grete’s ingenuity claimed the first victim in the Lamplight-versus-Avian battle.

Over on the second floor in the northern side of the Longchon Walled City, Grete returned from her solo op and made her way over to Erna and Lily’s hiding spot. She looked downright invigorated as she gave her report. “I was just able to coerce some information out of Qulle. Now we should have a rough idea of the Avian members’ personal information and current locations. She also said that the document is likely still on the Walled City’s upper floors. And naturally, I also made sure that Qulle herself wouldn’t be going anywhere.”

“Slow down, girl, we only just got started!” Lily cried in shock.

Beside her, Erna’s eyes went wide as well.

I can barely believe that Big Sis Grete did all that…

Erna had been confused when Grete wandered off on her own just as the battle began, but now she’d returned having achieved fantastic results. According to her story, she’d taken out Qulle—the fourth-ranked academy student—in the blink of an eye.

Even considering the way Qulle had stabbed them in the back and how personal the stakes were for Grete, she’d still accomplished more than anyone could have possibly asked of her.

“Still, we’ll need to double-check the intel she gave you to make sure it’s all true,” Erna said.

She had a point—there was a very real chance that Qulle had fed Grete misinformation. However…

“…No, I think we can count on its veracity. From what I saw, I find it hard to imagine she was lying,” Grete replied.

“Huh?”

“She was trembling like a baby.”

“What did you do to her?!”

“That said, you do have a point. Just in case, we should go get in touch with Thea and cross-check what we can.”

“You’re being kind of scary today, Big Sis Grete!”

The three of them had come all the way to the Longchon Walled City’s north side, and Thea was back down to the south. With how dense the city was, radios couldn’t connect directly from one side to the other. That said, Lamplight had chosen to use radios this time around. They normally avoided them outside of emergencies because of how easily they could be intercepted, but their alternative solution—Sara’s homing pigeon—was a little unwieldy. At the moment, Annette was installing radio repeaters throughout the complex. Their plan was that, over time, they would extend their range to cover the entire city.

The girls headed south through a bare concrete corridor. Fortunately for them, the residents were all busy searching for Qulle, so getting from point A to point B was a piece of cake.

“Hey, Erna,” Lily said as they walked. “Isn’t he heavy?”

“It’s actually not too bad, once you get used to it,” Erna replied. Erna was currently wearing Sara’s pet puppy on her head. His nose twitched ceaselessly, and he let out a little “yarf” as though to announce his presence. “Big Sis Sara lent him to me as a bodyguard.”

“Still, you’re injured. You should really be taking it easy.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Running with him on my head is a breeze.”

The puppy barked again. “Yarf!”

Rather than press the issue any further, Lily turned her attention back to running. When they got to the middle of the Walled City, their radio linked up with Thea’s. They slipped behind a staircase forcibly joining a third floor to a fourth and extended their radio’s antenna.

After Grete succinctly relayed the news, they got a satisfied-sounding reply back. “I read you, loud and clear. I’ll pass the information along to the others. You never disappoint, Grete. I knew it was the right call, letting you go in first.”

“…I couldn’t have done it without your words of encouragement.”

Apparently, deploying their strategist Grete onto the front lines had been Thea’s idea. After recognizing how motivated Grete was going to be, she’d chosen to believe in that. Looking at the results, it had definitely been the right call.

Erna turned her thoughts toward their next moves.

At the moment, we’re up eight to five. If we devote all our resources to searching for the document, we could win this without having to get into any more fights…

Thanks to Grete’s efforts, their prospects were looking good.

However, all that soon changed.

“Ah! Where did you come from—?”

A disquieting cry crackled through the radio. Then the signal went dark. The last thing they heard was the sound of the radio being destroyed.

Grete, Lily, and Erna looked at each other. All of them could tell exactly what had just happened—Thea had been attacked.

It was forty-five minutes in, and the situation was starting to deteriorate.

Lily quickly stowed away her radio. “We should go help her. It’s not far.”

The others nodded. “Yeah, I agree.” “As do I…”

At the moment, they had no way of knowing if it was Avian or the mafia that had attacked Thea. If it was Avian, then at least her life wasn’t in any danger, but the same couldn’t be said of the latter.

The three of them rushed southward. The corridors on the southern side of the city were highly populated, so it was impossible to get through them without bumping into at least a few residents. As the girls made their way onward, they braced themselves for their faces to get exposed to the locals.

“I have an idea,” Grete proposed. “After this, we should fabricate another twenty or so crimes for Qulle’s rap sheet. The more we rile the locals up, the easier it will be for us to move around.”

“Have you no mercy?!” Erna cried.

As an aside, Grete had been positively bursting with hostility ever since Sara told her about how she “saw Qulle and the boss sharing a chummy conversation.” As far as Grete was concerned, whatever happened to Qulle wasn’t her problem.

The only reason they found such a direct route to their headquarters was because of Grete’s intellect. The Longchon Walled City’s lifeless concrete walls could disorient even the most battle-hardened of spies.

Lily and Erna followed Grete out into a wide, open space. They must have made it down to the bottom floor, as the ground beneath them was nothing more than bare earth. This was the Longchon Walled City’s so-called main street. It was about seventy feet wide, which was pretty darn big by the city’s standards, and it was lined on both sides by restaurants with crudely written signs advertising congee, noodles, and fish meal dumplings. When they looked up, they could see the quarter moon peeking out from above the veritable web of clotheslines.

Grete stopped in her tracks. “Erna, could I ask you to be on your guard?”

“Huh?”

“They lured us here,” Grete said, biting her lip. “And it’s the perfect spot for an ambush…!”

On hearing that, Erna understood what Grete was getting at. From their enemies’ perspective, the best course of action would be to let Lamplight know that one of their members was in danger, then round up the rest of them when they came to help.

Sure enough, Grete’s prediction was right on the money.

“Behind us!”

No sooner did the words escape Erna’s mouth than a figure leaped at them. The girls dodged to the side, but Grete’s reaction was a fraction of a second too slow. Lily pulled her by the arm, but that wasn’t fast enough, either.

The figure was blisteringly fast. It called to mind a beast hunting an herbivore.

The dull side of a knife struck Grete clean in the back of the neck.

“Hmph. And here I was hoping to take all three of you down in one go.”

Before they could react, the figure backed off and came to a stop. His entire body moved with a monstrous, springlike acceleration. He could go from zero to one hundred or one hundred to zero at the drop of a hat. By the time they realized they were under attack, he’d already retreated to safety.

The figure grinned. “Well, at least I took down the single biggest pain in our ass.”

Lily ground her teeth. “Vindo…!”

Erna shuddered as well. It was Vindo—the one person they’d been desperately hoping to avoid.

Grete crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut, and Erna gently caught her as she fell and set her down softly on the ground. “Big Sis Grete…,” she mumbled.

Vindo made sure to continue maintaining a distance of about fifteen feet as he readied a knife in each hand and glared at the girls. “I just lost contact with Qulle. Do I have you people to thank?”

“Oh, who knows?” Lily shot back.

Vindo covered his face with one hand. “That’s so like her. She’s weak, but she thinks she’s hot shit.” When he lowered his hand, the girls caught a glimpse of the wrath broiling in his expression. “Well, that’s fine. That’ll be the splash of cold water that some of the others need.”

Lily let out a provocative laugh. “What, that’s your excuse?”

“You’ll understand soon enough.” Vindo slowly twirled his knives. “If anyone’s underestimating their opponents, it’s you.”

Lily and Erna gasped in awe.

“Flock” Vindo was the single top performer out of the academies’ entire 3,098-student body, and now he was ready to show them what he could really do.

For that mission, Lamplight had split into four groups.

First up was Monika, who’d been tasked with proactively getting in Avian’s way. They knew she was the only one with the skills to straight-up overpower the elites, so her job was to root out Avian’s members and hunt them down.

Then there was Lily, Grete, and Erna, whose priority was to hunt down the document. Grete could disguise herself as any of the locals, Lily was nigh unbeatable in enclosed spaces, and Erna’s abilities truly shone in a place as accident-prone as the Walled City. As the three people who synergized best with the operating environment, theirs was the group the rest of the team operated around.

Next up were Sybilla and Sara, who were on flex duty. Their job was to take instructions over the radio and adapt to whatever roles the team needed from moment to moment. Sybilla’s athletic abilities let her get to wherever she needed to go, and Sara had an abundance of ways she could help out in all sorts of different situations. The two of them were the perfect people for the job.

Finally, Thea and Annette were in charge of comms. As Annette installed radio repeaters, Thea stayed in touch with the others to relay information and orders.

Now, all across the complex, the four groups were coming head-to-head with the enemy.

The first people to reach the room Lamplight was using as its operating headquarters were Sybilla and Sara. Just like Lily’s team, they got worried and rushed over when they abruptly lost contact with Thea.

Thea was sprawled on the ground in the middle of the room. She’d been bound from head to toe in rope and left lying on the floor. Her eyes were open, so she was definitely conscious, but the gag in her mouth was keeping her from saying anything. She’d obviously been attacked. Based on what they could see from the doorway, though, she didn’t have any external wounds, and there wasn’t anyone else in the room.

“Hold on, we’re comin’,” Sybilla reassured her.

“Wh-who did this to you?!” Sara asked.

The two of them hurriedly rushed into the room. The moment they set foot inside, Thea’s and Sybilla’s gazes met.

DON’T

A word rushed unbidden through Sybilla’s mind. She reflexively froze, then shot Thea a questioning look.

TO YOUR LEFT

Sybilla immediately raised her fists and moved to cover Sara.

A young man came charging out of the room’s refrigerator. “Ooh, you noticed me? Good going ♪,” he said in an annoyingly friendly tone.

That handsome, boyish face belonged to “Lander” Vics. He stretched one of his long legs out wide and fired off a roundhouse kick.

“So you’re the one who took out Thea?” Sybilla asked as she blocked it. “I can’t believe you found her so fast.”

“How could I not? ♪ Rushing straight to a lady’s side is what a gentleman does. ♪”

Vics was a man who liked to get physical. Sybilla could tell as much from the force behind his kick. When it came to close combat, though, she was no slouch, either. She had a special talent—a knack for theft that allowed her to steal anything within arm’s reach. All she needed to do was steal her opponent’s weapons. Once she seized all their weapons for herself, she could beat just about anyone.

Those were the thoughts driving her as she reached for Vics—

“…Oh? Tell me, what’d you just do there? ♪”

—but she came up empty.

Vics was unarmed. Sybilla couldn’t spot a single weapon anywhere in his clothes.

Maybe he prefers to fight barehanded, she hypothesized. If that was the case, she could just use her own knife to overpower him—

“I’m code name Lander—and it’s time to get smashing. ♪”

—but he gave his arm a big swing.

In his hand, he was holding the cudgel he’d just produced as if out of nowhere.

The attack caught her completely by surprise, and she hastily brought her knife up to block it.

“______!”

From the look of it, Vics hadn’t even committed that hard to the attack. However, it was enough to send Sybilla flying all the same. It felt like she’d just gotten blasted away by a windstorm. She hurtled backward, sending both her and Sara spinning. They didn’t stop until they crashed into the wall.

“I don’t enjoy using this on women, you know. ♪”

“…Where the hell’s all that power of yours comin’ from?”

Vics’s slender frame was hiding more strength than Sybilla would have thought possible. She’d practically blacked out just blocking that single hit. She looked his way, but the cudgel was already gone, and Vics’s hands were empty again. He was just standing there cheerfully grinning.

“Hey, you can take a hit. I love that. That just gives us more time to enjoy ourselves. ♪”

“Hey Sara,” Sybilla said, ignoring Vics’s nonsense, “didja catch where he pulled his weapon from or where he stashed it just now?”

Sara gave her a scared little shake of the head. “I—I didn’t… I don’t see it anywhere…”

She didn’t know what had happened, either.

Vics had produced a cudgel out of thin air and caught them totally unawares. Now Sybilla had no idea what his reach was. She knew she needed to watch out for his monstrous strength, but not knowing how he was going to use it put her at a serious disadvantage.

Is that cudgel the only weapon he’s got? And if he’s got others, where’s he keepin’ ’em…?

If nothing else, she knew the name of the technique he was using to toy with them: liecraft. That was how spies fought—by using lies to multiply the strength of their abilities.

“This time, I’m coming at you for real, okay? I want to put up better results than Vindo. ♪”

Vics reached toward Sybilla as though flaunting how empty his hands were.

“Lander” Vics was the second-ranked spy out of the academy student body, and now he was standing in their way.

Meanwhile, Monika let out a big yawn from atop a Walled City rooftop as she stood beneath the waxing moon. She viewed the complex’s lights. As far as the eye could see, she observed dirty, moss-ridden concrete and tiny windows with clotheslines and radio antennas sticking out of them.

Monika was on the highest roof in the whole city. Her hair swayed in the damp sea wind. Up there, she was free from the musty stink that permeated the complex. Instead, she smelled the aroma of grilled fish. Someone down in the city was having themselves a late-night snack with their booze.

After standing there for a while, she felt hostility begin coiling almost palpably around her neck. She stooped down to dodge the attack, and something passed over her head. Then she used the city’s myriad clotheslines as stepping stones to descend to a different roof one floor down.

“Ah, thou hast dodged my string. Most impressive.” A petite girl appeared atop the roof Monika had just been on. There were a number of strings dangling from her fingers. “I am ‘Cloud Drift’ Lan. ’Tis a pleasure.”

“‘Thou’? ‘’Tis’?”

“Hmph, yet more unjust criticism. I thought it a right fine dialect.”

“Well, you’re clearly an idiot,” Monika said dismissively. She turned her gaze away from Lan. “There’s two more of you, yeah? The fatso and the weirdo in the mask. I can see you, you know.”

It was an angle that should have been impossible to cover from Monika’s position, but thanks to the mirrors she’d set up ahead of time, she could see her hidden foes just fine. Once she called them out, two more spies showed themselves as well.

“‘Fatso’? That’s so mean…,” pouted the plump “Feather” Pharma.

“…Aye,” said “South Wind” Queneau. He was once again wearing an all-white mask, rendering his expression unreadable.

Counting Lan, there were three of them, and they had Monika surrounded. Lan smiled as she readied her strings, illuminated by the moonlight shining down from the northern sky; Pharma had both her guns trained on Monika and was hemming her in from the south; and Queneau was standing tall and empty-handed atop a roof two floors down to the east.

“So three against one. That was Avian’s plan, right?”

Monika heaved a sigh from her rooftop position amid the other three. She, too, was privy to the information Grete had squeezed out of Qulle.

“…If thou knewest that, then why expose thyself so?” Lan asked, looking visibly puzzled. “Thou wast so conspicuous, ’twas like thou wast asking to be surrounded.”

“Yeah, it’s easier this way. All I had to do was stand around, and a trio of shitters came and threw themselves at my feet.”

The moment the provocation left Monika’s mouth, Lan sprang into action. She stowed her strings, drew her automatic, and fired off a shot all in the same motion. Her target was the antenna sticking out beside Monika, and the bullet sent the antenna flying straight at her.

As Monika dodged the shot, she let out a confused grunt. She could have sworn that Lan’s weapon of choice was those strings, yet she wasn’t using them in her attack.

“Victory lies not within my sights,” Lan said.

“Huh?”

“Brother Vindo declared it to be so, so thus it must be. Defeating thee is beyond us, even as three. Long since have we discarded any notions of triumph.”

Behind Monika, Pharma and Queneau went back into hiding. They made no efforts to all attack her at once.

Monika laughed mockingly. “You’re seriously not gonna come at me? Cowards.”

“Thine insults mean naught. Lying is basic custom for us. This dialect is but one example,” Lan said, returning Monika’s laugh with one of her own. “Why should I show thee my full strength? We falsify our might, falsify our teamwork, falsify our abilities, and wrap it all in liecraft upon liecraft. How willst thou fell three elites who’ve abandoned all pride and all chance of victory in the name of buying time?”

“………”

“Come, Dame Prodigy, dance with us. Dance with us as thy teammates crumble and fall.”

After gleefully making her proclamation, Lan drew another bead with her pistol.

“Cloud Drift” Lan had been ranked third on the graduation exam, “Feather” Pharma had been ranked fifth, and “South Wind” Queneau had been ranked sixth.

Together, the three elites began running circles around Monika.

It was seventy-five minutes in, and now Avian and Lamplight were both going for the throat.

Down on the main street in the middle of the Longchon Walled City’s ground floor, Vindo was leisurely holding a knife as he stood across from Erna and Lily. He wasn’t offering them the slightest of openings. If they tried to pull their guns on him, he would close the gap and slit their wrists in the blink of an eye.

Erna and Lily exchanged a glance, then took the best course of action available to them: fleeing. There was no specific need for them to defeat Vindo. The only thing that mattered was stealing back the document before Avian did, so the smart thing to do was to run away. Luckily for them, their Walled City battlefield had escape routes in abundance.

The two fled back inside as fast as their legs would carry them.

“That’s not a bad call, you know.” Vindo’s voice echoed out calmly from behind. “Or at least, it wouldn’t be if you could actually outrun me.”

They could feel a wave of hostility approaching.

Erna and Lily fought tooth and nail to hinder Vindo’s path as they fled. They knocked over buckets full of drainage water and hurled every discarded PVC pipe they found back at him. However, Vindo deftly batted their obstructions away with his knives without so much as slowing down. They could feel him gaining on them.

“Erna, in here!” Lily shouted before tugging her teammate into one of the complex’s apartments. It was a cramped single room just barely big enough for two people to live in, and though it showed signs of being inhabited, its residents were fortunately nowhere to be seen. As the two of them rudely barged in, Lily offered an oddly conscientious “Sorry for the intrusion” to no one in particular.

The problem, unsurprisingly enough, was that the apartment was a dead end. They had nowhere left to run. Vindo charged into the room and launched a merciless knife thrust at them.

Lily clamped her hand over Erna’s mouth.

“I’m code name Flower Garden—and it’s time to bloom out of control.”

Poison gas came bursting out of her ample chest.

Erna recognized that attack. It was Lily’s go-to move—spraying a paralytic that she herself was immune to. The technique’s effectiveness hardly felt fair.

“………”

Vindo immediately gave up on his knife attack and dodged to the side. However, he was a step too slow. By the look of it, Lily’s poison hit him head-on. He held out for a brief moment, but it wasn’t long before his knives tumbled from his hands. He collapsed onto the ground.

“Heh. You picked the wrong girl to mess with,” Lily said proudly. “When Wunderkind Lily’s on the job, not even elites stand a—”

“Run!”

Erna yanked on Lily’s arm.

Not a moment later, a knife grazed Lily’s throat.

“Good call.”

As soon as Vindo finished collapsing, he’d sprang right back up and lashed out with yet another knife.

It was just like they’d been warned. Vindo’s liecraft—Instakill Counterattack—involved using his incredible springlike movements to take his opponents down the very instant they thought they’d won. Pretending to lose was his signature move.

As soon as he landed from his leap, he fell to one knee. “…Looks like I breathed some in after all.”

He could easily have been acting. As soon as they got close, he might well launch another counterattack. As long as Erna and Lily weren’t sure one way or the other, they had no choice but to flee. They rushed out of the room and dashed down the Longchon Walled City hallways once more.

After climbing a ladder that felt like it might break at any moment, they arrived in a corridor whose walls were covered in cracks and tears. By that point, they had no idea what cardinal direction they were moving in. They passed a couple of locals who gawked at them in bewilderment, but Erna and Lily paid them no heed.

As soon as they found an empty apartment, the two of them slipped into it. It, too, had clearly been lived in, and its floor was adorned with a plain rug. Erna quickly scanned the room’s layout. The sink was heaped full of kitchenware, and there was a large closet about seven feet from the entrance. Once again, whoever lived there was fortuitously absent.

Erna and Lily hid against the wall and focused all their attention on listening. However, they didn’t hear the sound of Vindo’s footsteps.

“…Wait, he’s not coming after us?” Erna asked.

“Maybe…,” Lily muttered. “Maybe the poison actually worked.”

“Huh…?”

“I mean, it’s worked on Teach before,” Lily continued, sounding vexed. “But with just the gas, he’ll be back up and moving in no time. We had the perfect opportunity, and we blew it.”

“——”

At that, Erna realized the blunder they’d made.

Vindo had gotten hit by the gas after all. Prodigy or not, there was no way he could have defended against an attack he didn’t see coming. That last counterattack of his must have taken every ounce of strength he had left. In truth, though, he’d barely been able to move.

He’d pretended to pretend to lose.

That was how skilled spies fought—by using lies and deception to get out of tough situations. By using liecraft, Vindo had led them around by the nose and gotten them caught up in his pace with the one technique Lamplight had never been able to learn.

“C’mon, let’s not beat ourselves up about it.” Lily patted Erna’s head. “At least now we know something. They might be elites, but they’re still human. They can be beaten just like us.”

“…Yeah, you’re right.”

“Let’s not run; let’s take him down. It shouldn’t be long before he comes after us.”

“………”

Upon hearing Lily’s words of encouragement, Erna steeled her resolve.

If they left Vindo to his own devices, there was a real danger that he would work his way through Lamplight one member at a time. They probably didn’t have a single person who could stand up to his surprise attacks. If they wanted to fight him with the advantage of having an ambush on their side, then this was the only chance they were going to get.

It was time for them to take down the greatest spy in the entire academy student body.

“I have a plan,” Erna said. “We can use the puppy I borrowed from Big Sis Sara. He’ll be able to warn us when Vindo gets close.”

“Ooh, so it’s finally his time to shine.”

“Then we go for Vindo’s eyes. I have this souped-up flashlight that Annette made.”

“Got it. Annette really can make anything, can’t she?”

Erna helped the puppy down from her head and gave him the knife Vindo had dropped to sniff. Meanwhile, Lily took the flashlight from Erna and flipped it on and off to make sure it worked. It emitted a blast of light so powerful it made the whole room look like it was midafternoon.

Now they had one of Sara’s pets and one of Annette’s inventions. Erna was ready to finish the job, and she was going to use the tools her Specialist squad teammates had given her to do it.

Lily nodded in admiration. “Got it. So after that, how’re we gonna finish him off?”

“We’ll throw whatever we find in the room at him!”

“That’s your plan?!”

At that point, the puppy’s nose twitched. That was their signal that Vindo was there.

Lily blasted the flashlight at the room’s entrance, and Erna took a frying pan, a stainless steel bowl, and a cutting board from the sink and hurled them.

As Vindo charged in from the hallway, he swatted away the kitchenware and closed in on Lily. He was moving so fast all their efforts to blind him were for naught.

However, that was precisely the opening Erna had been waiting for.

“I’m code name Fool—and it’s time to kill with everything.”

She yanked the rug with all the force her legs could muster. And when she did, the closet toppled over.

For Erna, spotting a piece of furniture that was primed to tip over was child’s play, and that was precisely what the large closet behind Vindo did.

“________”

Even the great Vindo was caught flabbergasted. His eyes went wide, and Lily took full advantage of the opening.

“This time, you’re mine!”

Without a moment’s delay, she fired off her next blast of poison gas. Once again, it hit Vindo head-on.

Erna clamped her hands over her mouth, already certain of Lily’s success.

There’s no way he could avoid breathing in the gas…

When people fell victim to unexpected disasters like that, their natural reaction was to gasp. That would give Vindo a big lungful of poison. Plus, even if Lily’s poison wasn’t enough to take him down on its own, he also had Erna’s disaster to contend with. Out of everyone in Lamplight, Erna was the one who’d spent the most effort forging her bonds with her teammates.

That was the one thing Lamplight had that Avian lacked—the time they’d spent together with Klaus.

Together, we’ve spent ages training against Teach…! Erna encouraged herself.

The poison gas and the falling furniture attacks bore down on Vindo in unison. Erna’s head was telling her that they’d won, and her heart was soaring at the sight. She couldn’t help but react that way—despite knowing exactly what Vindo’s liecraft was.

“I hope you enjoyed that daydream of yours.”

All of a sudden, Vindo vanished. The next time the girls spotted him, he was standing beside Lily like he’d been there the whole time. They gasped in shock.

“You already showed me that attack once. All I have to do to beat it is not breathe.”

Vindo slammed his knives into Lily’s shoulder and neck. “………” She choked as the air rushed from her lungs and she crumpled to the floor. The still-lit flashlight fell from her hand and rolled over by Erna’s feet.

“It was simple,” Vindo said, sounding almost bored. “I knew that if I let the poison hit me, you two would try to fight back. It saved me a load of time.”

He’d pretended to pretend to pretend to lose.

The whole thing had been part of his plan. He’d intentionally fell for their attack, analyzed their techniques, and used that knowledge to win the follow-up fight.

“Big Sis Lily…”

Lily had been bested just like Grete before her, but that wasn’t the only thing that had shocked Erna. There was also the matter of Vindo’s movement.

“Just for the record, if you people think you’re the only ones who’ve gotten special training, you’re dead wrong.”

Hearing Vindo’s words caused the blood to drain from Erna’s face.

It wasn’t because she’d never seen that footwork before. It was because she had. Vindo’s movement had been so blisteringly fast it bordered on teleportation, and Erna recognized it in an instant. It was the same footwork as Klaus’s—the movement he’d used during the climax of his battle against Purple Ant back in Mitario.

The question was, where had Vindo learned it from?

Erna was horrified. Her teammates were dropping like flies, and now she was all on her own. Klaus wasn’t coming to rescue her, and she had no idea where the rest of her team was. Their comms were down, so she had no way of calling for help. And with how labyrinthine the Longchon Walled City was, there was no way anyone was just randomly going to come save her.

A pair of words spilled from her lips. “How unlucky…”

“…What the hell are you talking about?” When they did, Vindo shot her a confused question. “‘Unlucky’? Please. All of this happened because you screwed up.”

“What…?”

“What, you think you have a penchant for misfortune or something?”

“…………………………”

Erna didn’t understand what he was implying, so all she could do was go silent.

“You seriously don’t get it?” Vindo let out an exasperated sigh. “Well, you don’t. You’re just an idiot. You can trace the whole situation you’re in back to your own blunder.”

“……”

“When you Lamplight people botched your mission, it gave us an opening to steal your boss. But the question is, where’d you botch it? And the answer is, it was that fire in the cotton mill office. That was where you got burned, and your mission went south.”

“…………”

“And you know what started the fire? It was the goldfish bowl that you moved.”

“____________”

“It’s called a burning lens. The curved glass took the setting sunlight and gathered its heat on a single spot. That was what set the carpet on fire. It smoldered as it ate through the oxygen in the room, but when you opened up the door, the backdraft effect lit it right back up. That was what caused the explosion you got blasted by.”

“________________”

“Honestly, I should be thanking you. You blowing yourself up made my job a million times easier. It’s pathetic, the way you live your life dragging your teammates down with your stupid mistakes. Lamplight has a weak point, and it’s you,” Vindo declared.

“I’ll say it again: You’re not unfortunate—you’re a fool who brings misfortune down on your team.”

It was ninety-two minutes in, and Vindo’s biting words had just smashed Erna’s heart to pieces.