Spy Classroom - Volume 6 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Counterattack

Once Sybilla was finished showering, she helped herself to some of the dinner Erna had made. A sigh of satisfaction escaped her lips as soon as she had her first mouthful of the pea, onion, and bacon-laden milk soup. She then tore up some bread and dipped it in the soup, and that was delicious, too.

Lured over by the scrumptious smell, Lan and Erna joined her at the dining table. Lan seemed especially hungry, and she gobbled down just as much bread as Sybilla.

“And? What didst thou learn?” Lan asked cheerfully. “Did dealing with Belias in the flesh bring thee any closer to the truth?”

“Lemme turn that question around,” Sybilla replied. “What’ve you been doing all day?”

“Napping.”

“Damn, must be nice.”

“I had little choice in the matter. ’Tis of the utmost importance I not be found. Going for a stroll was hardly an option.”

Lan let out a big yawn. Sure enough, it appeared as though she’d just woken from a long sleep. Upon seeing her refreshed expression, Sybilla told her the truth. “Well, you’ve been accused of attempting to assassinate Crown Prince Darryn.”

“What?” Lan sounded absolutely flummoxed.

Sybilla went on. “Actually, forget attempting. He just got killed, and you’re their main suspect for that, too.”

“WHAAAAAAAAAT?” Lan gawked at her and leaned over the table. “I know not what thou meanst! Prithee, explain!”

After shouting for a bit, she grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. After flipping through a couple channels of static, she got to a news programme. Scrolling across it, there was a breaking news chyron informing the channel’s viewers that Crown Prince Darryn had been assassinated.

“Gack!!” Lan shrieked. She reeled backward. “This makes no sense! It makes no sense!” She began rolling around on the floor. The constant stream of unexpected information she’d just received had overloaded her brain.

Right as Sybilla decided to just ignore her, a pair of footsteps came thundering down the hall.

A girl rushed into the room, making no effort to hide the contempt on her face. It was Monika. “Shut UPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!”

“Gyah!”

Monika charged into the room, leaped into the air, and after performing a beautiful front flip, she slammed a high-speed ax kick into Lan’s abdomen. “I’m sorry, did you forget that staying hidden is your absolute, utmost priority right now?” She crossed her arms, no less furious than before.

Lan writhed on the ground and clutched at her stomach. “Th-that seems like hardly any way to treat an invalid!”

“Then quit screaming. You’re supposed to be laying as low as you possibly can.”

“I—I understand that. Verily, I do…”

“From here on out, one tiny slipup could get us all killed. Next time you break a rule, I’m going to punch you into next week.”

Monika’s voice was unshakably stern, and Lan furrowed her brow in displeasure. “Thy clemency leaves much to be desired…”

Sybilla couldn’t help but snatch glances at their exchange. “Hmm?” Erna asked, still holding her dinner spoon. Sybilla gave her nose an awkward scratch. “Nah, it’s nothin’. I’m just feelin’ a bit sentimental.”

There was something truly moving about seeing Lan smile like that. Back when they linked up with her, she’d been wearing a very different look on her face—the grief-stricken expression of someone who’d tasted all the despair the world had to offer. Even now, her body was still swathed in bandages.

Sybilla quietly closed her eyes.

Then she turned back the clock.

She thought back to how hopeless they’d felt when they first learned that Avian had fallen.

Lamplight left for Fend the moment they found out that Avian had been annihilated. There was no time for them to cry, only to act. They refused to accept that the news was true, instead believing that the report was mistaken, and that Vindo would greet them with a characteristically snide “You really think I would die like that, ladies?” as soon as they arrived in Fend.

In the girls’ eyes, Avian existed in a league of their own.

Even when they laid eyes on the photo they stole from a newspaper company, they assumed that it must have been doctored. It wasn’t until they met up with Lan that they finally came to terms with what had happened.

When they found her in the comms station up in the mountains, she was lying on the floor looking like the very portrait of death. She hadn’t been changing the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around her belly, and her eyes were devoid of light. It was obvious from the pallor of her skin that she hadn’t been eating properly, either. Later on, they discovered that she hadn’t set foot outside the station since her team got wiped out. When the Din messenger couldn’t get ahold of her, they wrote her off as MIA.

“It doesn’t…make sense…”

The only things she moved were her lips, and her voice was empty of its jovial thee- and thou-laden affectation. The girls had no idea what to say to her.

“What happened, Lan?” Klaus said as he knelt by her side. “You can take as long as you need, but I’d like to know. Sara, can you come hold her hand?”

Sara did as instructed, crouching down beside Lan and swaddling Lan’s wounded hand in hers.

Lan slowly began getting the words out. “…It was five days ago. At two AM, they charged into our base and opened fire. There were over ten of them. Vics smashed down a wall to clear an escape route, but they had us surrounded…” She trailed off for a moment, then gulped in anguish. “Queneau was the first to die. They tossed a grenade, and he threw himself on it to save the rest of us. That was when Vindo gave up on getting everyone out alive. He ordered us to run while Pharma distracted them, and Qulle used the time that bought us to throw me in the river…”

“………”

“It washed me downstream, and I survived, but…I passed out from my wounds. After I came to, I found out the others were dead from a nearby radio…” She trailed off again. Her body was quivering. A moan spilled from her mouth, followed immediately thereafter by a throat-rending scream. “Ah… Ahhh… AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

As she raised her voice, she wrenched her hand from Sara’s grasp and barreled out of the comms room, but as soon as she entered the hallway, she tripped and tumbled forward headfirst. Vomit spilled from her mouth—mostly just pure gastric juice. As she lay with her face in her own puke, she began loudly wailing. “I’m sorry, Brother Vindo…! I’m sorry, Brother Queneau! I wasn’t able to do anything! You all saved me, and I could do nothing! Now it’s me! It’s just me! Sister Qulle is gone! Sister Pharma is gone! Brother Vics is gone! They’re all gone! I wasn’t able to save any of you! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorryyyyyyy!”

Her repentance went on and on, and she apologized to her teammates over and over again. Tears and snot trailed down her face as she called out their names. For a girl of just seventeen years of age, it was too harsh a loss to bear.

“Thea,” Klaus said. “Can you look after her? I’m leaving her in your hands.”

Thea had an ability that let her peer into other people’s hearts, and with a quick nod, she helped Lan to her feet and guided her to another room. The others could still hear Lan’s sobbing well after she’d faded from view.

“Losing your brothers and sisters in arms is never easy.” Klaus’s comment echoed lifelessly through the room. He turned his gaze over to the girls. “I imagine you all feel the exact same way.”

Silence.

Not a single one of the seven assembled girls said a word. They were all straining their ears listening to Lan, and each of them was reacting in a different way.

Sybilla’s eyes brimmed with tears, and she was clenching her fists in frustration. Grete was hanging her head with her eyes closed. Monika’s complexion was unchanged, but she was quietly rubbing her fingers together. Sara was trembling as big soppy tears poured from her eyes. Annette was staring at the ceiling with her mouth hanging open. Erna’s eyes were red and puffy, and she was clasping her hands together as though in prayer. And Lily was looking at Klaus as though she’d just made up her mind about something.

They had no choice but to accept that it was real.

Having infiltrated the Fend Commonwealth, the first thing Lamplight did was make contact with the local police so they could ID Avian’s bodies. The official story was that Avian was a group of travelers from the Din Republic who died under mysterious circumstances. The police had photographed all their corpses as well as written up full autopsies.

“Flock” Vindo was dead. He was covered in gashes and the blood of his foes.

“Lander” Vics was dead. He’d been shot protecting Pharma in his arms.

“Glide” Qulle was dead. The back of her neck had been hacked up by some sort of strange bladed instrument.

“Feather” Pharma was dead. She’d been shot in Vics’s arms.

“South Wind” Queneau was dead. Everything from his waist down had been completely blasted away.

The reports of their demise were undeniably true.

“Right now, we have one job,” Klaus said, alone in his practicality. “We need to find who it was that killed Avian. We’re not letting them get away with this.”

The seven girls nodded in unison.

“Who are we even up against…?” Lily said quietly.

“That’s the first thing we need to figure out,” Klaus replied. Then he called for Grete by name, and the red-haired girl stepped forward. “I need you to lay a trap as ingenious as a ray of light peeking through a rift in the clouds.”

“…The raid our enemy conducted on Avian was perfectly orchestrated. They must have conducted a detailed investigation afterward. That would have told them that an Avian member survived, and they’re probably pursuing her this very moment,” Grete replied without hesitation. “In other words, you’re suggesting that we use ‘Cloud Drift’ Lan as bait to draw the assailants out?”

“Magnificent.” Klaus gave her a satisfied nod. “I’ll leave the specifics of the plan up to you, but we need to set traps throughout the Fend Commonwealth. Thea’s going to be busy for a while tending to Lan, so I’m counting on you.”

Grete’s expression hardened, and she clenched her fist in front of her chest. “Understood. I’ll make sure we bring the perpetrators down.”

With that, the girls all made to leave the comms station. They all wanted to get to work avenging Avian as soon as they could. However, one voice rose up and stopped them.

“Could I have a minute first?”

The voice was Lily’s. For some reason, she was raising her hand in the air as high as it could go. “This is just a hunch, but I get the feeling that this battle’s gonna be really brutal. Avian was so much stronger than us, and they all…” She trailed off, gulping rather than finishing the thought. Then out of nowhere, she let out a strange cry of “Hoorah!”

The others all looked at her in dismay, and she ran out of the room only to return a moment later tugging Lan and Thea along behind her.

As she did—

“Hoo! Hoo! Hoorah!”

—she gave a far more enthusiastic cheer than the situation called for and started taking the others’ wrists and making them hold hands with the people next to them.

Something was brewing.

As the others stared at her in bewilderment, Lily finished linking everyone, Klaus included, into a big circle. Lily stood at the circle’s center, and after doing a big spin—

“I wanna see some smiles!”

—she pressed a finger against each of her cheeks and beamed.

Before anyone had a chance to figure out what the hell she was on about, she joined the circle herself and linked hands with her neighbors.

Eventually, Klaus took it upon himself to play the straight man. “What exactly is this?”

“I dunno, call it a battle huddle.” Lily grinned. “We need to make an oath. I don’t want anyone else to die here. We’re all gonna make it back to Heat Haze Palace, and we’re all gonna make it back alive. I need everyone to promise me that.”

Strained smiles spread across a couple of the girls’ faces. It was such a Lily thing to do. No matter what the situation was, she never let her smile fade, and she never stopped trying to cheer up her teammates. Hers were less the actions of a spy and more those of a schoolgirl. It was like they were all part of some after-school club.

However, her words hinted at how harsh this undertaking was going to be. She knew, just as they all did, that they were throwing themselves headlong into peril. The elites had perished in that very land, and now it was up to Lamplight to inherit their task. It was an Impossible Mission in every sense of the word.

Klaus nodded. “What she’s saying certainly sounds childish.”

“Rude?!”

“But it’s also extremely important. Allow me to echo her words—it’s time we made a promise to all make it home alive.”

As he spoke, everyone in the circle squeezed down on each other’s hands.

Each and every one of them was determined to keep that promise.

From there, the girls spent the next two weeks carefully laying their traps. As their lure, they sent Lan out to cause commotion by shooting up buildings all across Fend and writing messages on their walls in her handwriting. The longer they kept it up, the more they were able to narrow down their target.

There was a group searching for Cloud Drift with dogged tenacity.

For Klaus’s part, he gathered intel by getting in touch with one of their double agents in the CIM. Spies were often kept pretty siloed and didn’t tend to have much information on their allies, but over time, the name of a group started popping up. Apparently, a spy team that reported directly to the top brass was in hot pursuit of a spy named Cloud Drift.

At that point, the girls set up their fourth decoy—the attack on the watch store.

Two spies walked down Fillade Street in the dead of night. Nobody else was around. There was Monika, who was hiding her face behind a mask, and there was Lan, whose head-to-toe bandages were fluttering in the night breeze.

“We shall start here this time, methinks.”

Lan picked the lock on the watch store’s back door and slipped inside with ease.

She’d been sobbing inconsolably during their reunion, but now, thanks to Thea’s therapy, she was able to smile again. Her injuries kept her from operating at her full capacity, but her skills were just as elite as they had been before.

Monika followed along after her. She glanced around to make sure that the store had ample mirrors in it.

“I’m going to cause a commotion here,” Monika explained, “then take photos of whoever shows up. If any of them match the people who attacked Avian, we’ll know we’ve got our target.”

“’Tis understood,” Lan replied.

That was the whole idea behind the incidents they were causing. By using Avian’s sole survivor Lan as bait, Monika was able to use her special creepshot talent to take everyone who came to the sites of their staged attacks and capture them on film.

Monika opened the store’s front door from within and unscrewed her camera’s lens cover as she stepped outside. “You go ahead and write something damning. I’ve got some fiddling I need to do outside,” she said on her way out.

“How do you mean?”

In her hands, Monika was carrying an assortment of tools. “I’m going to mess with the streetlight to make it flicker like it’s dying. That’ll help hide my camera’s flash.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Lan gave her reply. “Then there is but one passage that suits the occasion.”

She fished a can of spray paint out of her pocket and began writing in big letters, violently etching her message in red on the watch store’s wall.

WE ARE AVENGERS FROM THE LAND OF IMMORTALS 

BURN HOT AND RAISE A GLASS TO RESURRECTION

Monika cocked her head. “What does that even mean?”

“Nothing at all. Little mattered except that it be in my handwriting, no?”

“I mean, I guess so.”

“’Tis the same as what we painted on the Heat Haze Palace wall. There is naught but one image that doth suit the union of Lamplight and Avian.” Lan smiled nostalgically. “The bird of fire, the phoenix—this inscription is the verse of our two teams.”

“Ah,” Monika murmured.

Naturally, she knew all about the legends surrounding the phoenix. It was a mythological bird that burst into flames at the end of its life, and in doing so, was resurrected. It was a symbol of both death and rebirth.

“I shan’t sell my life cheaply,” Lan said. “Even if the fires of hell should consume me, I shall rise again as many times as it takes. No trial nor tribulation hath the power to daunt me. I shall inherit their will and their souls, and in this very land, we shall take flight once more as the bird undying.”

Monika stared at the verse as though transfixed by its radiance. Eventually, a quiet whisper escaped her lips. “……………………That’d sure be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Hmm?” Lan replied. She hadn’t quite caught that.

“Don’t worry about it,” Monika replied evasively, then got to work on the streetlight.

Ten minutes later, Lan shot out the watch store’s show window, and the alarm bell began blaring.

In a house a little ways off from Fillade Street, another two spies were waiting on standby.

Grete put her radio up to her ear and listened to the encrypted message. After decoding the complex cipher entirely in her head, she relayed the information to the girl beside her.

“I have word from Monika. She says that the group gathered at the watch store is the same one that attacked Avian.”

“_____!”

Sybilla’s eyes went wide. She’d been in the middle of doing her warmup stretches.

Grete lowered her radio. “At long last, we have our confirmation.”

“Sure looks that way, yeah.”

Sybilla sucked in a deep breath. After a long investigation, they finally had a name. She was more than a little shocked. The group in question had no real reason to be attacking the Din Republic. For Avian’s killers were none other than—

“Belias—the group that attacked Avian was a counterintelligence unit working for the Fend Commonwealth’s CIM.”

Grete began leafing through the documents she was holding. “The team operates under the leadership of a spy called Puppeteer. They don’t interact much with Fend’s other teams, so there are many mysteries surrounding them. We have no idea why they went after Avian. I assume they were operating under secret orders from CIM leadership, but that doesn’t explain why—”

“Nah, keep it to yourself.” Sybilla waved her hand and cut Grete off. “I don’t wanna know any more than I have to. The less intel I have goin’ in, the easier it’ll be to play dumb.”

“But…”

“I gotta get goin’. It’s time to let Belias catch me.”

Sybilla loaded her trusty automatic and stowed it away in her jacket. Then she steeled her resolve and popped a caffeine pill to wake herself up.

“The people we’re dealing with shot Avian on sight,” Grete warned her.

“Yeah, and that’s why I’m the best one for the job. The boss is too strong, so he can’t exactly play the captive. Plus, I’ve got the most stamina to handle how long this is gonna take, too.”

“………”

“Don’t worry. I’m done lettin’ people take stuff from me.”

With that confident declaration, Sybilla turned and quietly headed for the front door.

“You know, I think of you as one of my truest friends,” Grete called after her. Sybilla stopped and turned back around, and Grete offered her a clenched fist. “During the Corpse mission, and during the whole bridal affair, you’ve always been right there by my side. Let’s you and I pull the wool over Belias’s eyes together.”

She tilted her head to the side and gave Sybilla a small smile.

“You got it,” Sybilla said, raising her hand in turn.

“…Good hunting.”

“Right back at ya.”

With a cheeky grin, Sybilla gave Grete a fist bump. Then she squeezed her fists tight again and dashed out into the foggy Hurough streets.

That brought things right back to the present.

After feigning ignorance and heading to the Fillade Street watch store, Sybilla got apprehended by Belias and taken to their interrogation room. Then Klaus rescued her just as they planned, and they and Belias began searching for Lan together.

During that time, Klaus stayed with Amelie’s unit and took them to various sites across the Fend Commonwealth.

All the while, the Lamplight girls continued laying their trap.

A series of knocks echoed out in the rhythm they’d decided on ahead of time. Sybilla could hear some familiar voices from beyond the door, and when she called them in, the door swung open.

It was Klaus and, behind him, the newly liberated Thea. Now there were six spies in the apartment—Sybilla, Lan, Monika, Erna, Thea, and Klaus. The others were all still hard at work.

Everything was going exactly as they’d planned it.

The girls all gathered around Klaus. “Good work, everyone,” he said. “We have confirmation. There’s no doubt in my mind that Belias is the group that attacked Avian.”

If Klaus was willing to state it that confidently, then the others had no reason to doubt it. Either he’d picked the information up himself on intuition, or Thea had gathered it by using her position as a hostage.

I guess we were all tryin’ to trick each other, Sybilla mused.

Lamplight had been hiding the fact that they’d already made contact with Lan, and Belias had been concealing the fact that they were the ones who’d killed Avian. Their joint search had been an alliance in name alone, and both sides had spent the entire time trying to con the other. Amelie’s words rang truer than ever—theirs was a world in which people could work together, but they could never be friends.

“However, we’ve run into a bit of a complication,” Klaus said. His expression darkened a smidge.

“Hmm?” Sybilla said with a tilt of the head.

“It’s odd,” Klaus replied. “For whatever reason, Amelie and her people honestly believe that Avian was trying to kill Prince Darryn.”

“These charges are utterly false!” Lan shouted. Unable to contain herself, she took a big step forward. “We had nary a reason to go anywhere near the prince! Our only aim here was to—”

“Oh, I don’t distrust you in the slightest.” Klaus gave her a gentle, pacifying look. “But a lot of things make sense now. The way Belias went in on Avian with guns blazing seemed excessive, but if they were trying to protect the royal family, then I understand their logic. They can’t afford to show mercy to people who threaten the Crown, and they didn’t have time to capture you all and get you to confess. Fend is a nation that makes brutal choices sometimes—like shooting first and asking questions later.”

Lan bit her lip. “………”

“Belias is operating with as much conviction as we are.”

Sybilla had picked up on that. Amelie had come across as almost eerily unfeeling, but her eyes had burned with purpose.

“But if that’s true, then the reason they’re chasing Big Sis Lan…” Erna gulped. “…is because they want to execute her.”

That was almost certainly the case.

Once again, it made Sybilla appreciate just how close they’d come to killing her. If not for how valuable a potential source of information she’d been, Amelie would have likely shot her on the spot.

“There’s a mastermind pulling the strings here,” Klaus said. “Someone is lurking in Fend’s shadows. They destroyed Avian by feeding Belias false information, and once they were done pinning false charges on Avian, they went and assassinated Prince Darryn themselves.”

“But who could it be…?” Thea frowned. “Who has the power to manipulate an entire intelligence organization so thoroughly or the skills to assassinate a royal who was being guarded so—”

A loud bang cut her off.

It was the sound of Lan slamming the table. Tears were pooling in her eyes. “Do I understand thee correctly?” She pounded the table again, hard. “Brother Vindo and the others were killed over a simple misunderstanding?”

“That’s the long and short of it,” Klaus replied.

“………”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to explain to Belias. There’s no sense in us making enemies out of the Fend Commonwealth. We’ll arrange a meeting between Lan and Belias, talk things over rationally, and prove that the culprit behind Prince Darryn’s assassination is still out there. That’s all there is for us to do.”

The girls were at a loss for what to do about the truth that had just been dumped in their laps. Everything Klaus just said was an undeniable fact. There was no room for counterarguments. Belias had been hoodwinked, meaning that they were victims in all this. They’d annihilated Avian because they were convinced that doing so would keep their nation safe. There was no malice behind the act. They’d simply carried out their mission with hearts full of unshakable conviction.

Furthermore, it was just like Klaus said. Fighting the Fend Commonwealth would be a bad move. There wasn’t a single upside to be found in a minor rural nation like the Din Republic showing aggression against one of the world’s biggest superpowers. They would get obliterated, just like Amelie threatened.

“But…,” Sybilla interjected.

“…But what?”

“But if we do that, how the hell’s Avian supposed to rest in peace?!”

Klaus blinked slowly.

Lan’s eyes went wide, and Sybilla gave her shoulder a hug before closing in on Klaus. “I get that they had their reasons, but Belias agents were the ones who shot Avian dead. You want us to just pat ’em on the back and be like, ‘Hey, guys, heads up, you got tricked’?”

“………”

“You’re seriously gonna let them off the fucking hook?”

“………………………………”

It took Klaus a good long while to answer.

He cast his gaze down a bit as though in regret, squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them back up with considerable force.

“I’m not letting anybody off anything.”

A shudder ran through the room. The raw malice he was exuding was enough to make every one of the girls hold their breath.

He shook his head. “I phrased that poorly. Don’t get me wrong. I have no intention whatsoever of forgiving those cretins. I don’t care what Belias’s reasons were—their actions were completely and utterly unacceptable.” His phrasing was downright vitriolic. In all their days, the girls had never seen him brimming with such rage. “Belias is our enemy, and we’ll be carrying our revenge out immediately.”

“B-but…,” Thea said, hesitantly cutting in. “How exactly do you intend on doing that? They’re already convinced that Lan killed Prince Darryn. If we attack Belias, it could cause an all-out war with the Fend Commonwealth.”

“I’m well aware of that. We’ll be carrying out our revenge in a manner befitting our profession.”

“What do you mean?”

“Given the situation, this was going to be our only option anyway. As things stand, I have little confidence that Belias would be willing to hear us out in good faith.”

Eventually, Klaus explained everything, laying out the exact details of the revenge they were about to carry out.

“The others have already gotten to work. By the time the night’s over—”

After hearing the specifics of their little operation, the Lamplight girls began making their preparations.

Monika rushed out of the apartment in no time at all. After briskly finishing her prep, she left without saying so much as a word to the others.

……………………?

Something about her felt odd to Klaus. She hadn’t said a single word in the meeting they just had, either. Monika wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy, even at the best of times, but still.

As he pondered the matter, one of the other girls came over to him.

“That caught me a little off guard.”

It was Erna. She leaned against Klaus like a child wanting to be doted on.

“What did?”

“How mad you were back there.” Her expression softened a little in delight. “Did you like Avian, too?”

“…I did.” Klaus nodded. “It wasn’t as much as you all, but I spent a fair bit of time with them, too.”

“I see…”

“Like I said earlier, the pain of losing your allies isn’t the kind of thing you get used to.” He shook his head a little. The image in his mind was that of Vindo—a man whose heart burned with the fires of revenge. If the timing had worked out a tiny bit differently, Vindo might well have ended up joining Inferno. “If not for that, I might not have made such a violent call.”

“……?”

“It’s an option I don’t like resorting to, but situations like these are where she truly shines.”

Erna looked at him in puzzlement, but Klaus said nothing more. There would come a time when he had to tell the others about a certain someone’s true nature, but that time had yet to arrive.

Amelie stopped by a large building that sat on the bank of Hurough’s Turko River. Allegedly, the building and the four towering spires that flanked it had once been an execution ground. Political prisoners had been marched to the gallows there one after another and slaughtered, and at night, rumor had it that you could still hear the cries of the dead coming from within. Ravens sat atop the building’s fences, casting malevolent stares at the city beyond.

That was where the Fend Commonwealth’s intelligence agency, the CIM, kept its headquarters.

After going in, Amelie was shown to a room on its uppermost floor. There was a large screen in the doorway, preventing visitors from getting a good look at the situation within.

A deep male voice came from beyond the screen. “…What the hell has Belias been doing?”

Other voices from within spoke up in assent. “Pathetic.” “How could you people allow the crown prince to die in such a way?”

If the rumors were to be believed, there were five people in there. The room was home to Hide—the CIM’s leaders and the people Belias reported to. The CIM had dozens of different teams, and Hide managed them all.

Amelie bowed low. “I have nothing to say in our defense. If my life would be enough to atone for this failure, then I lay it at your feet.” No response came from beyond the screen. It would seem that her apology was of little interest to them.

Amelie raised her head. She could feel her palms growing sweaty. “I have something I need to confirm.”

“…What?”

“Are we truly certain that Cloud Drift was the one who made that attempt on Prince Darryn’s life?”

“You would ask that, after all that’s happened?”

“I just need to be certain. Is Team Avian truly our enemy?”

When Amelie posed the question, she knew full well that her life might be hanging in the balance. However, there was something she couldn’t get off her mind—how insistent the young lady named Sybilla she’d spent the day with had been. Under normal circumstances, Amelie wouldn’t have given her the time of day, but in the wake of Prince Darryn’s death, Amelie’s heart was wavering ever so slightly. She could still remember the contempt Klaus had had in his eyes, too.

Again, there was no response from behind the screen.

Amelie continued explaining herself. “The people guarding Prince Darryn were the best of the best. There were eight soldiers and twenty spies keeping constant watch on anyone who approached him. Based on what we know about Cloud Drift, there’s no way she could have broken through their ranks.”

“…………”

“Are we sure that the information about Avian being involved in the failed assassination attempt is actually true?”

Klaus had demanded that Amelie produce her evidence on more than one occasion. Amelie had refused each and every time, but the truth of the matter was that she didn’t actually have anything of the sort. Belias was a special ops team that followed the orders of Hide, the highest authority in the CIM. They didn’t examine the grounds for each of Hide’s instructions.

Were Avian really terrorists?

The question refused to leave her mind.

Eventually, she got a reply. “Spies are pawns.” The voice was bitterly cold. “What kind of pawn questions its master? Is this an attempt to escape responsibility? How far Belias has fallen.”

“………”

“Hurry up and find Cloud Drift. And when you do, kill her.”

“…I fail to understand the logic behind that order. If Cloud Drift truly did play a part in the assassination, she couldn’t have done it alone. Would it not be better for us to torture her, rather than killing her on the spot?”

Amelie was risking her life questioning her superiors like that. However, there was no fervor behind the answer she got. “Don’t let us down more than you already have. Slaughter any who dare stand against the Crown.”

“………”

“Our righteousness is absolute. We are always just, and we do not err.”

Amelie had heard those words time and time again. Never once had she ever doubted them, and yet—

“You believed in that righteousness when you attacked Avian, did you not?”

“……………”

Amelie had been the one taking point during the raid on Avian. She and her people stormed their base, and when the youths sensed that something was off and tried to flee, her team had mercilessly bombarded them with hand grenades and shotgun blasts. When they tried to flee into the Turko River, her agents had hunted them down and cornered them.

The raid took them over an hour, but ultimately, they succeeded in annihilating Avian. Amelie confirmed the bodies of the five youngsters herself. The orders may have come from on high, but she and Belias were the ones who carried them out. Amelie had killed scores of people, including her own countrymen, because she believed doing so was right. It was far too late to turn back now.

“Of course.” Her tone was resolute. “I apologize for speaking out of turn. I hope you can find it in you to overlook my shameful behavior.”

She curtsied low.

“I’ll make sure that she dies. Avian took up arms against the Crown, and with Cloud Drift’s execution, they will be no more.”

There was no reply from beyond the screen. That meant Hide was satisfied, she imagined.

Amelie bowed again, then left Hide’s room. She was lucky to still have a job after a failure that absolute, and she knew it. Now that the CIM leadership had dispatched her once more, there wasn’t a second to waste. She needed to find and execute Cloud Drift for Prince Darryn’s murder as fast as humanly possible. That was Belias’s job, plain and simple.

But how can I do it? Not ever her own Din allies were able to track her down.

Her thoughts turned as she strode through the CIM headquarter hallways.

Something didn’t add up.

Cloud Drift was alive; the writing on the watch store wall was proof of that. However, she wasn’t trying to meet up with her allies. If she was, she would have surely found them back at Heron Manor. The logical conclusion was that she’d betrayed her people and turned to base terrorism, but the problem there was how unequivocally Sybilla and Klaus had rejected the possibility.

Someone was lying. There was noise mixed in with her intel, and there was one possibility that came to mind.

Has Lamplight already found her and is choosing to shelter her?

The theory had been bouncing around in her head for a while. Perhaps Lamplight had come to them planning on concealing the truth.

Was I too hasty in releasing the hostage? No, antagonizing Bonfire any further would have been folly… This is no time to be aimlessly adding to our roster of enemies…

The man was a nutjob who called himself the World’s Strongest, but the raw skill she’d glimpsed in his behavior was well befitting of the title. She had no desire to invite his hostility.

Amelie’s thoughts kept turning.

Something smells fishy…

She had what some might call a hunch. Puppeteer was the boss of a counterintelligence team that had protected its nation for years, and her honed instincts were telling her that something was amiss.

That’s right. Now that I think about it, there was something strange about Avian’s corpses.

By the time Amelie made that connection, she was standing in front of her destination. The headquarters had a private room set aside for Belias’s use, and Amelie needed to catch some shut-eye. It had been days since she last got a decent night’s sleep.

When she opened the door, she saw Lotus Doll standing holding a teapot by the room’s several couches.

The woman in the habit looked at her gently. “I made you some tea, Master.”

Amelie offered her subordinate some words of thanks for her consideration and gladly took the tea. As she took her first sip, the tea leaves’ aroma slowly seeped into her nostrils.

“This smells delightful. You’ve improved your skills.” The rich fragrance helped set Amelie at ease. She smiled at Lotus Doll. “And your performance at Heron Hall tonight was impeccable. You picked an excellent opportunity to take over for that young lady and dance with Bonfire.”

“I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that. It was the young lady who suggested we trade places.”

“In any case, it gave you the perfect excuse to come into direct contact with Bonfire. Did you plant the homing device?”

“I did, Master.”

“Splendid work. The CIM developed those microscopic trackers in secret. Not even he could spot something so small. Let me know as soon as he makes a move.”

Amelie hadn’t really set Klaus and his people free. She had little faith that continuing to work with them would produce any actual results, so instead, she turned them loose to see if they did anything suspicious. Besides, sticking so close to Klaus made it harder for her to safely access the classified information she needed to do her job.

“Now that she’s killed His Royal Highness the crown prince, we absolutely can’t let Cloud Drift get away. We’re going to do whatever it takes to put her down. Our justice is absolute.”

“Of course, Master.” When Lotus Doll spoke next, her expression was tense. “I actually had two pertinent pieces of information I wanted to report.”

“Two pieces? Let’s hear them.”

Right as Amelie leaned in to listen, a realization struck her. Her other aide, the one who always worked in concert with Lotus Doll, was nowhere to be seen.

“Actually, before that,” Amelie said, raising her hand to cut off Lotus Doll. “Where’s Disintegrator Doll?”

“He stepped out to take care of some business,” Lotus Doll replied calmly. “He suggested that he had something that was weighing on his mind…”

The boy named Disintegrator Doll walked through the back streets of Hurough. The rain was still coming down hard. The fog meant that visibility was terrible, and as soon as he left the streetlights, he could barely see his own hand in front of his face. Every breath he took made his throat feel that much damper.

There was something he needed to make sure of.

Once news of Prince Darryn’s death spread, things in the Commonwealth were going to get pretty chaotic for a while, and Belias was going to have its hands full rooting out enemy spies. Disintegrator Doll needed to get his confirmation before information started flooding in and it became hard to get intel on smaller stories.

His destination was a road with poor visibility in one of the city’s suburbs. There was a bouquet lying by the side of the road.

He grimaced. “………Who put that there?”

Then, a beat later, he had a shocking realization. There was a young girl with an umbrella standing right beside the bouquet. She was an adorable child who looked to be no older than twelve or so, yet she was standing there in the fog after midnight.

She must have been the one who laid the bouquet there. Disintegrator Doll walked over to her. “Did someone die here?”

“Yeah. A blond girl passed away last night,” the ash-pink-haired girl replied cheerily. Her appearance was highly peculiar. She wore a large eye patch over her left eye, and her hair was messily tied into a pair of ponytails. “She was the victim of a hit-and-run.”

There was something strangely chipper about her reply.

“That’s a sad story,” Disintegrator Doll said with a frown. “But it’s odd, too. There wasn’t anything on the news today about a body being found.”

“I carried it over to my cot, yo.”

“You did?”

“Yup. I don’t have any other family.”

“I see… So you’re a street urchin.”

It made sense. Several of Hurough’s suburbs were homes to communities of orphans. There were places where social services didn’t reach, and the children there lived on the streets by working as errand boys for the mafia or relying on handouts from churches. The ash-pink-haired girl was one of those urchins.

Disintegrator Doll gave her a bow. “I work with child welfare services. Would you mind showing me the body? I might be able to help arrange a burial.”

“You got it,” the girl replied cheerfully. “It’s this way.”

She led him down a back alley.

During Hurough’s population boom, the city had lined its alleys with wooden shacks. There weren’t nearly as many of them nowadays, but homeless people and orphans still squatted in them sometimes. Just as Disintegrator Doll had suspected, the place the girl took him was dark and hidden away from prying eyes. He stealthily drew his hammer, taking care not to let the girl notice what he was doing.

“I was pretty surprised, yo.”

“Hmm?”

The ash-pink-haired girl gleefully turned around.

“I never thought a guy like you would go and mow down a little girl like that.”

“………………”

Disintegrator Doll’s expression didn’t so much as twitch. He was used to having to feign tranquility.

“What are you talking about?”

“Last night, when you had that white-haired girl in your back seat. You ran right into that blond girl, but you drove off like it was nothing.”

“………………”

“You even got out and checked to see what had happened. It was pretty cruel. You looked down at her like you couldn’t care less, then left without even trying to give her first aid.”

“………………………………”

Disintegrator Doll nodded. I knew it.

There had been a witness.

He knew he’d sensed someone watching him from within that night fog.

The night prior, Disintegrator Doll had run over a blond girl when Sybilla was riding in the back seat. Then he drove off after lying about her having been a branch from a roadside tree. Letting the foreign spy sitting in his back seat get her hands on blackmail material hadn’t been an option.

“It was for the good of the nation,” Disintegrator Doll replied. “I was in the middle of a mission to protect the crown prince. I wasn’t going to stop just because I ran over some destitute child.” He spun the hammer in his hand. “This error cannot be seen. Thank you for bringing me somewhere so deserted. Now I can eliminate the witness in—”

Disintegrator Doll numbed his emotions and allowed pure logic to take over. As he raised his hammer into the air, though, he was struck by a belated realization.

Wait, if she knew I ran that girl over, then why did she agree to go along with me?

Normally, the question would have come to his mind immediately. For some reason, though, it had taken him longer this time. He’d been negligent. After all, it was just so unthinkable that a girl with a smile that angelically innocent could be harboring evil within her.

Suddenly, he noticed that his right hand wasn’t moving. It was all bound up with string. As a matter of fact, the wirelike string that had just shot out from behind the building was pinning his entire right arm in place.

“Turns out her string’s pretty handy, yo.”

The girl happily tossed her umbrella aside.

The ash-pink-haired girl—“Forgetter” Annette—normally kept her madness hidden away, but once she even assassinated the Galgad spy Matilda, who had raised her like a mother. By behaving like an innocent young girl, Annette was able to keep people from noticing the deadly weapons she employed. She’d taken Lan’s Covert Ops liecraft and adapted it into a technique that could completely and utterly conceal the danger she posed.

Tinkering × Hidden Evil = Innocent Slaughterer.

“I’m code name Forgetter—and it’s time to put it all together, yo.”

With that, Disintegrator Doll’s right hand fell off.

A massive blade flashed before his eyes. By the time he could react, the amputation was already complete. Everything from his wrist down had been lopped clean off with the hammer still clutched in its grasp.

Agony shot through him, and he crumpled to the ground. He desperately grabbed at his wrist with his left hand to try to stem the bleeding, but to no avail. Pain like nothing he’d felt before in his life burned its way through his brain.

“Ah, ahhhhh! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!” he screamed.

Terror began gnawing away at him from within. He knew that if he retrieved his hand quickly enough, there was a chance that Fend’s cutting-edge medical treatments could sew it back on, but—

“You know, I think you and I are a lot alike,” the ash-pink-haired girl said with a delighted laugh. “Back at Avian’s base, you asked Sybilla how it felt to lose her countrymen, remember? I thought that was pretty funny, yo. I mean, you’re the ones who killed them!”

They’d been observed, even back then? Disintegrator Doll hadn’t noticed a thing.

The girl put her foot on his fallen hand. “So I’ve got a question—how do you feel right now?”

There before him stood a great evil.

The order Klaus gave the girls was a simple one.

Abduct every single Belias member in a single night.

Don’t give them a chance to call for help. Wipe them off the face of the earth without letting a speck of dust remain.

For this to work, they would have to commit a perfect crime.

What Lamplight needed to do was kidnap Belias without leaving behind a single scrap of evidence that they’d harmed them. That way, no conflict would arise between the Fend Commonwealth and the Din Republic.

Sorrow for the loss of Avian weighed heavy on Lamplight’s hearts as they got to work.

You have one job: Destroy them.