Spy Classroom - Volume 6 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue

Joint Mission

A few days before Lamplight set out for the Fend Commonwealth, Klaus had a meeting with C, the Din Republic’s spymaster, in the Foreign Intelligence Office headquarters. After C briefly explained that Avian had been eliminated, he asked Klaus to take over their mission.

After fighting back his grief, Klaus turned his thoughts to his new task. This wasn’t his first time losing comrades, and he knew that no matter how heartrending a tragedy it was, he needed to keep moving forward.

“What was Avian doing in Fend anyway?”

“They were on a mission related to Inferno’s downfall,” C replied. The man had silver-grey hair and eyes as sharp as a hawk’s. He tossed the file sitting on the table to Klaus. “There’s still a lot we can’t explain about Inferno’s destruction, and I tasked Avian with looking into one piece of it.”

Klaus nodded. There were a lot of mysteries that remained around the annihilation of the legendary spy team he’d loved like a family. What drove “Torchlight” Guido to betray them? Why was Veronika in Mitario, when she was supposed to be part of the bioweapon retrieval mission?

All they had in the way of clues were the six corpses that had been delivered to the Foreign Intelligence Office.

There was “Hearth” Veronika, the team’s boss who’d been killed by Purple Ant in the United States of Mouzaia.

There was “Firewalker” Gerde, the old lady sniper who’d died in an unknown location and been covered in deep cuts.

There was “Soot” Lukas, the prodigy gamer who’d died in an unknown location with the right half of his body burned to a crisp.

There was “Scapulimancer” Wille, the fortune teller who, like his twin brother, had died in an unknown location with the left half of his body burned to a crisp.

There was “Flamefanner” Heide, the erotica writer who’d died in an unknown location by poisoning and was found covered in flowers.

And there was “Torchlight” Guido, the combat specialist whose corpse was a fake and who was known in the Galgad Empire as Bluebottle or Blue Fly.

It was unclear what they’d been doing and where they’d been doing it just before their deaths. Guido had strategically sent Klaus off at the time, so Klaus had no firsthand knowledge of what Inferno had been up to.

“One of the most important tasks we need to complete is figuring out why exactly they died. Whatever that reason is, it likely has something to do with the covert maneuvers Serpent has been making across the world.”

“I agree.”

“The task I gave Avian…was to figure out exactly how ‘Firewalker’ Gerde died.”

Klaus’s eyes went wide at the unexpected piece of news. He scowled at the man across from him. “Why didn’t you send me instead?”

“Flock had made contact with Firewalker in Fend five months before her death, and I’d heard that Avian improved by leaps and bounds during their mission in Longchon. I figured they were the right people for the job.”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“Besides, I had important counterintelligence ops I needed you for. I stand by my original decision.”

But that decision led to Avian getting wiped out.

Klaus was furious, but he knew that this wasn’t the time to be pointing fingers. Right now, he needed to find a way to shed light on the mystery of how Avian got killed. “So who was it that butchered Avian?” he said, giving voice to the question that had been constantly swirling through his head.

“The one lead we have,” C replied, handing Klaus a single sheet of paper, “is this message Flock gave to our messenger right before he died.”

“Vindo sent a message? What did it say?”

Klaus swiftly scanned the document.

We found Firewalker’s legacy. I’ll relay the details in person.

Klaus stared at the page in shock.

Standard operating procedure was to give confidential reports verbally to avoid the risk of having the communications monitored or intercepted. Whatever information Avian found, it must have been incredibly sensitive.

Was that why they were killed?

It was too early to draw any firm conclusions, but it was hard to imagine the timing of their deaths to be a mere coincidence.

“I have a mission for Lamplight,” C told Klaus. “First, I need you to go to Fend and find out why Avian died. Second, I need you to eliminate whatever foe engineered it. Third, I need you to get your hands on this legacy of Gerde’s Avian found.”

Klaus knew what missions like that were called. Of the many types of missions spies undertook, the most difficult ones were the ones where they had to take over for another team that had been deemed incapable of continued operation and succeed where they had failed—Impossible Missions.

With that, Lamplight got to work.

Multiple groups of spies were cooking up schemes in Fend—and Gerde’s legacy sat at the center of their conflict.

With the battle finished, Lamplight had completed the first of their tasks.

Up in the mountains on the edge of Hurough, Klaus and the girls finished tying up the twenty-four Belias agents. The aide named Disintegrator Doll wasn’t there, but according to Annette, she had him in custody, and Lotus Doll was locked up somewhere else as well.

Lamplight made sure to give first aid to all the people whose legs they’d shot. Nobody was going to be dying there—not unless Lamplight resumed their offensive. Now Belias’s lives rested solely in Klaus’s hands.

“…Why take hostile action against us?” Amelie asked.

Klaus hauled Amelie over to the admin cabin. He left everyone aside from her tied up in a line over to the side of the construction site with a couple of armed girls watching over them to make sure they couldn’t run away or kill themselves.

“I don’t understand what the Din Republic’s motives are. You killed Prince Darryn, you captured us when we started looking into his death… What do you hope to achieve?” Amelie asked after having been separated from her subordinates. Her voice positively dripped with frustration.

“That’s a fair question. I suppose I should start by explaining myself.”

Klaus opened the door to one of the empty rooms. There was a girl wrapped up in bandages sitting inside with a cheerless look in her eyes.

“‘Cloud Drift’ Lan…!” Amelie growled.

The androgynous, dark-red-haired girl quietly bowed. “Verily. I am she.”

“Bonfire?!” Amelie’s eyes went wide. “You were working with her this whole—”

“Thine accusations were unfounded. Avian had naught to do with Prince Darryn’s assassination,” Lan said, answering in Klaus’s place. She clenched her fists in frustration for the briefest of moments, then bowed even deeper.

“I ask that thou believeth me. Avian is innocent. We inflicted not the slightest harm on the Commonwealth.”

“You have the nerve to lie to my face…?”

Amelie’s voice was brimming with rage, and her legs tensed up. She was radiating an icy bloodlust like it was taking everything she had to resist the instinctive urge to try to murder the girl standing before her.

“Amelie, I ask this of you as Belias’s boss,” Klaus said, reining her in. “Would you please hear her out? She has every reason in the world to want to kill you, yet she’s suppressing that desire and bowing her head to you. All we want is an honest dialogue.”

“You want to talk? After everything you did to me and my—”

“What I did was the only way you were ever going to listen to what Lan had to say.”

“………”

“If you refuse to even have a conversation with us, I’m going to have to turn to my last resort. I’d prefer not to elaborate on that.”

Amelie knew exactly what he was alluding to—torture. Klaus’s last resort would involve killing her agents in front of her, one after another, until her heart was shattered and her personality itself was gone. If he wanted to, he could start doing it at the drop of a hat.

She bit her lip in frustration, then ultimately nodded. “…Fine.”

Lan told her everything—about how Avian came to Fend looking for a spy who’d gone missing, about how Belias had attacked them out of nowhere, and about how Prince Darryn had never so much as entered their thoughts. The whole time she was cogently laying out her story, Amelie listened in stoic silence.

“So tell me.” Once Lan was done, Klaus shot Amelie a question. “What basis did Belias have for deciding that Avian was involved in the crown prince’s assassination?”

“…Our orders from our superiors.”

“You killed Avian without so much as seeing the proof?”

“Those were our orders.” Amelie’s voice was devoid of passion. “We have our own way of doing things here. Pawns on a chessboard don’t question the players’ intentions.”

“And those CIM superiors, that was Hide?”

“…That’s right. I’m surprised you knew. I don’t know any of the particulars.”

Klaus was familiar with the name, but little more. The Fend Commonwealth’s CIM intelligence agency was headed by Hide, a group composed of five spies whose identities were a mystery even to their direct subordinates.

Amelie regarded him doubtfully. “Are you suggesting that they lied to me?”

“I think that’s safe to assume, yes. Either there’s a double agent involved, or somebody tricked them, too. Whatever the case, there’s a rot festering in Fend’s innermost circles,” Klaus concluded. “I suspect that it was a Hide member who helped facilitate Prince Darryn’s assassination.”

“That’s impossible!!” Amelie screamed. “You people have no evidence for any of these claims! You’re just feeding us convenient lies to manipulate Belias into doing your bidding. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong!”

“I’ll remind you that you have just as little evidence as we do.”

“But—”

“Is the great Puppeteer really such a fool? Did you really feel nothing after hearing Sybilla’s and Lan’s pleas? Are you really so credulous as to blindly believe a superior you’ve never even seen over the truth staring you right in the face?”

“………………………………………”

Amelie said nothing. There was a conflict raging in her eyes, as if the very idea of doubting her superiors was unthinkable to her.

“…We have no reason to trust you,” she muttered quietly. “You harmed my people… And what’s more, if you had just told us the truth from the outset, we might have been able to save Prince Darryn.”

“I told you over and over that there was no way Avian was behind the attempt on his life. You just never listened.”

“But…”

“We’ve offered you substantial concessions, Amelie. You killed five of my countrymen, all of whom had promising futures. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t test our patience any more than necessary.”

“………”

Amelie sank into an uneasy silence.

Klaus shook his head. “…Forget it. I don’t have time for this. You’re going to tell me everything, or Belias all dies.”

“……………”

“If you’re a spy, you’ll do what’s best for your nation’s stability. You can either get eliminated blindly believing in a boss you could credibly suspect of having turned traitor, or you can choose to pay lip service to what I’m telling you and live to fight another day. What’s it going to be?”

Klaus’s threat had a definite menace to it. If Amelie refused to talk, he was prepared to kill every last member of Belias. The only way for him to protect his nation was to prevent anyone from finding out about the crime Lamplight was committing. The girls had good hearts, so seeing that would probably traumatize them, but the situation was forcing his hand.

Amelie buried her face in her hands. “…………………What is it you want to know?”

She was finally willing to cooperate.

Klaus offered her a chair. “Tell me about how Avian died. Something must not have added up.”

“But…how do you know that?”

“I just do.”

Amelie gawked at him.

After hesitating for a moment, Klaus decided to elaborate. “Someone of your caliber should never have been able to kill them.”

Klaus’s suspicion turned out to be true. Belias had failed to finish off Avian.

“It’s true that we attacked them,” Amelie said, sounding rather displeased, “but the fight turned messy, and we sustained serious losses. We found their bodies at dawn, but we don’t know who exactly killed them.”

The only person Belias was certain they’d killed themselves was “South Wind” Queneau, who’d protected his allies at the start of the battle. That wasn’t to say there was a chance that the others had survived, mind you. All their bodies were accounted for. But it was someone else who’d driven the nail into their coffins—and someone else who had killed them. Amelie’s theory was that some of her agents had died taking Avian down, but Klaus intuitively knew that that wasn’t it. Vindo had been on track to becoming one of the most talented operatives in the world. Not even sacrificing their lives would have been enough for the likes of Belias to take him down.

At that point, Klaus forced Amelie to tell him where she’d found the bodies. Unsurprisingly, the spot she told him about was different from what had been reported in the newspaper. Vindo and the others had fled upstream along the Turko River, no doubt to draw their pursuers away as Lan floated with the current, and had ended up on a hill lined with plum trees. The lifeless trees’ branches were barren of fruit, and there was a murder of crows nearby pecking away at a dead cat.

At four AM, Klaus took a few of his subordinates to the hill. “Search the area. They left us some sort of clue here; I’m sure of it.”

Vindo would never have gone down for free. He would have carved a coded message into one of the trees. Klaus didn’t have any evidence to support that theory, but he believed in Vindo all the same. The thing he was most curious about was the “legacy” Vindo had mentioned, but—

“Actually, now that I think about it,” Sara said as she shone her flashlight at the plum trees’ roots. “Do you know anything about this legacy, Miss Lan?”

“Nary a thing,” Lan promptly replied. “We often undertook different tasks, and the night Brother Vindo brought us together to share our findings was the very night Belias descended on us.”

“Oh…”

“My regrets know no bounds. Even now, I know not where I need direct my rage.”

Lan had decided to grit through her injuries and take part in the search as well. She had a grave look in her eyes as she, too, held a flashlight alongside Sara.

Meanwhile, the two usual suspects were squabbling as noisily as ever.

“Get your fuckin’ rear in gear! You barely even did anything on this op!”

“’Cause I was stuck in place! I had to stay hidden until the party wrapped up, remember?!”

The suspects, of course, being Sybilla and Lily. The two of them were diligently searching their area, but they spent the whole time loudly flinging insults at each other as well.

To be fair, Sybilla had a point. Lily’s involvement had been pretty minimal that time around. All she’d done was wait under a Heron Manor table and use her poison to put Lotus Doll to sleep when Sybilla shoved her down there. From that point on, she’d had little choice but to remain hidden so Belias couldn’t find her.

Sybilla gave Lily a swift kick in the rump, and the latter scurried onward. After lighting a fire under her teammate’s ass, Sybilla got back to work herself.

Klaus walked over to her looking downright exasperated. “You know it’s all right for you to take a break, right? You’ve already put in the most work of anyone.”

The five of them were the only ones up on the hill. They’d just finished an arduous battle, and the rest of the team had gone back to Belias’s headquarters to catch their breath. Right now they were probably drinking tea and poring over the new data they’d gathered.

Sybilla shook her head and turned her flashlight toward the next plum tree. “It’s fine. I wanna work.” However, her fatigue soon betrayed her. “Oops!” she cried as her foot got caught on a root.

Klaus reached out and caught her right before she fell. “Let’s go ahead and take five. Your body can’t keep going forever.”

“M-my bad…”

Sybilla’s cheeks reddened in embarrassment. She stepped away from Klaus and sat down at the base of one of the larger trees. Klaus didn’t want to leave her on her own, so he went and sat down next to her.

The night felt eerily quiet compared to the battle they’d just been through. A chilly Fend breeze swept across the ground.

Sybilla’s shoulder bumped into Klaus’s. She rested her body ever so slightly against his. “………You knew, right?”

Klaus wasn’t sure what she was referring to.

As he was in the middle of pondering that question, Sybilla explained herself. “That my brother and sister were already dead.”

“I did. Your academy instructor told me.”

So she was talking about what she’d told Amelie. From the sound of it, she hadn’t actually told any of her teammates what had happened.

After escaping her father’s gang, the Cannibals, Sybilla and her siblings had been saved by an orphanage, and Sybilla headed off to the spy academy with her siblings’ hopes resting on her shoulders—but then, four years later, her brother and sister were killed.

When that happened, Sybilla snapped.

Each night, she would sneak out of her academy only to later return to her dorm reeking of blood. Nobody but Sybilla herself knew what she was out doing during those times. What people did know was that she also started causing fights at school, and her grades plummeted. Considering that her exam scores hadn’t been all that stellar to begin with, it put her within a hair’s breadth of expulsion.

Klaus knew all that.

“For the record, don’t you dare pity me,” Sybilla said cheerfully. “I’m back on my feet, and my mission’s still the same. I’m gonna get strong, and I’m gonna do whatever I can to make a world where no kids have to cry.”

She let out the sad laugh of a person fighting back the pain hidden within their heart.

Then she looked straight ahead.

“And besides—”

“………?”

Her gaze was resting on Sara and Lily as the two of them frantically rushed around.

“I’ve got them now. A gaggle of little sisters who give me nothin’ but headaches.”

“Ah,” Klaus said with a nod. Sybilla was probably including Erna, who called her Big Sis Sybilla as she adorably snuggled up to her, and Annette, who called her Sis as she leaped at her, in those ranks as well. As a matter of fact, she might have even been counting a certain cerulean-haired sourpuss, lovelorn redhead, and black-haired degenerate with dubious views on sexuality as well.

Sybilla lightly knocked her shoulder against his again. “And plus, I think of you as kinda like a little brother, too.”

“…Me? This is the first I’m hearing of this.”

“You’re a hell of a handful, too. I can’t let you outta my sight for a minute.”

“I’m feeling a little insulted right now.”

“I’m gonna protect ya. As your big sister, I’ll do whatever it takes and go wherever I gotta.”

There was something very noble about how frank her declaration was. That was what Sybilla was—she was sincere. There was no pretense in the way she cared about people, nor was there any in the way she mourned for the fallen. That was a rare quality in a world awash in pain; it was a rare quality in the profession of statecraft, with all its lies and scheming; and it was a rare quality in a group of girls who harbored as many insincerities and flaws as Lamplight did.

For the team, Sybilla’s enthusiasm was like a ray of salvation. Her ability to work with others was outmatched, and her raw strength let her smash through any and all hardships.

“Magnificent.”

All Klaus could do was applaud her.

Sybilla grinned in embarrassment. “You say that so much it doesn’t even mean anything to me anymore,” she said, pouting in feigned anger.

Then, after a pause, she let out a surprised “Huh?” She’d spotted something. “Over there…”

She shone her flashlight at the plum tree right in front of her. There were scratches on its bark like claw marks from a wild animal. At first glance, it looked like the work of a cat or a fox, but further inspection revealed that the marks had been made by a knife. It was a cipher only intelligible to Din spies—Vindo’s dying message.

The two of them rose to their feet and headed over to the tree. The bark had regrown somewhat over the intervening month, but they were just barely able to make out the words.

Avian had done it.

They’d escaped from Belias’s raid, killed several of their aides, gotten Lan out alive, and in the moments before their deaths, they even identified the mastermind and left that information behind. Those feats were far beyond the capabilities of the mediocre. Avian had been proud elites to the bitter end.

“I wish they didn’t have to die…”

A tear rolled down Sybilla’s cheek.

“Why does everything get taken from me…? Everything I care about…”

She sobbed as the loss struck her once again.

On the final night of the honeymoon, they threw an unforgettable farewell party. Avian was slated to leave for Fend the next day, and the spies made fools of themselves until the wee hours of the morning. The mural they drew on Heat Haze Palace’s wall that night was still there. Nobody remembered whose idea it was to draw it, but they all took turns adding a single red line until it was complete.

The painting was of a phoenix—the symbol of Avian and Lamplight.

Vics, the handsome man who’d spent the month teasing from the sidelines, grinned. “Feels like that month went by in a flash. ♪ I’m almost gonna miss you all. ♪”

“Awww, but now I’m gonna be all looonely. I hope we see you again,” moaned Pharma, the woman who’d been wrapping them all in hugs.

Qulle, the girl who’d been left at the mercy of her idiosyncratic teammates, nodded. “Don’t worry. Just like with Longchon, we might meet back up sooner than we expect.”

“…Aye. It would be nice to go on a joint mission together,” murmured Queneau, the taciturn man who cared more for his team than he let on.

Lan, the troublemaker who would end up being the team’s sole survivor, smiled. “Ah, what a joy that shall be. I would like nothing more.”

“Just make sure you don’t get in our way, ladies,” said Vindo, the young man who’d come to Heat Haze Palace the most often of all of them.

In a way, the phoenix painting was a prayer that all of them would survive. All of them wanted to meet again. However, that wish didn’t come true.

Instead, the girls’ hearts were rent by an unfathomably deep sorrow.

“This is horseshit…,” Sybilla moaned through her tears.

The death of Avian’s members had driven the Lamplight girls to great heights and left them with deep scars. Now the girls were imprinting Avian’s final wishes onto their souls.

Fuck. This.

This wasn’t the way any of them wanted it to go. They would have been fine remaining amateurs forever if it meant they got to keep looking up to Avian. Staying as washouts and seething with jealousy toward the elites would have been far preferable to having to suffer such a loss. Now they wanted nothing more than for Avian to mock them.

No matter how they tried to spin it, this conclusion was as far from a happy ending as they came.

To my dear washouts.

Upon reading Vindo’s carved testament, Sybilla let out a wordless sob. Because of her sincerity, the message struck her especially hard. Grief at her comrades’ deaths washed over her, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Sybilla, you have a kinder heart than anyone,” Klaus said as he came and stood by her side. “We’ll mourn them by seeing this mission through to its end.”

Vindo had left them a description of the people who killed him and the others.

Another group of attackers had shown up as Belias was conducting their raid and come to finish the rest of Avian off. They probably had some sort of connection to Belias, and in all likelihood, they were the same people who’d fed that false intel to Hide.

There had been two attackers—a many-armed man with dark eyes and a series of strange prosthetics on his right arm, and a girl with a sadistic smile and a pair of fissure-shaped scars on her shoulders.

Vindo had also caught the name the man used to address the girl: Green Butterfly.

There was one organization that code name immediately called to mind—a group of spies with names like Bluebottle (aka Blue Fly), White Spider, and Purple Ant who had plunged the world into chaos. Up until then, only Klaus and Thea had seen them as archenemies, and the rest of the girls hadn’t had any personal stake in the fight. However, Vindo’s message marked the moment when that group became enemies of Lamplight as a whole.

Serpent was lurking in the Fend Commonwealth.

After crying for a good long while, Sybilla looked at the sky. Klaus followed her lead. Up above, he could see the stars. Last night’s downpour must have washed away the pollutants in the air, as the thick fog that normally shrouded the city was gone, replaced with a sky as deep and as blue as the sea twinkling with an uncountable array of stars. Their light was so frail they seemed liable to blow away in the wind. However, he couldn’t tear his gaze from them. The starscape was heartrendingly beautiful, and he could feel a nameless urge welling up deep inside of him.

“Let’s do this, Boss,” Sybilla said. “Lamplight and Avian. This here’s gonna be our first and final joint mission.”