Spy Classroom - Volume 6 - Chapter Ep1

Next Mission

As Klaus stared at Vindo’s final message, he felt an echo of the man’s presence. Vindo had probably been killed just after writing it. He, Vics, Qulle, and Pharma had all been struck down, and Avian had been destroyed.

Serpent was hiding in Fend, and they had been for some time.

A many-armed man. A scarred girl. The pieces were coming together. According to Vindo, he’d met “Firewalker” Gerde when she was staying in Fend. One of those two had probably killed her, too. Despite her advanced age, Klaus doubted there were many spies who could have put Gerde down.

I don’t like any of this…

Atop the plum hill, Klaus rubbed his chin and sank into thought.

“Lily, would you mind going on ahead and meeting up with the others?” he said when his subordinate came over. “I’m going to stay here for a bit. I need to figure out the best way for us to use you-know-who. The timing is going to be tricky.”

“Oh, I get it.” As soon as Klaus said the phrase you-know-who, Lily’s expression brightened. “You’re talking about the plan we discussed before we came over to Fend, right?”

“…Something to that effect, yes.”

“You got it. In that case, I’m out!”

Lily gave him a crisp salute, then collected the other girls and headed off, leaving Klaus alone on the quiet hill.

There was something he needed to confirm.

Right before they set out for Fend, Klaus had devised a scheme. He knew that the battle ahead would be a harsh one, and in order to make sure they all survived, he relayed his new plan to the girls: Lamplight was going to accept a new spy onto its roster.

More specifically, their new member would be operating differently than the eight girls did. They wouldn’t always be joining in on group operations, but the plan was that Lamplight could call them in and have them use the full breadth of their capabilities when the need arose. That spy had certain skills the girls could never hope to mimic.

The girls didn’t take much convincing. When Klaus introduced the new member to them, the girls offered up a round of applause.

At the moment, their newest member was already there in Fend.

Right now, they’re the one spy I trust more than anyone else.

Klaus turned and faced the darkness. “Code name Insight—are you ready?”

He got no reply.

The concealed spy simply waited for the right time to carry out their mission.

Lamplight and Serpent were about to come to a head in the Fend Commonwealth, and this time, each team had prepared a trump card.

Lamplight had a plan centered around code name Insight.

As for Serpent, their plan revolved around—

“What! A! Disaster!”

In the center of Hurough, there was a large clocktower that both housed Fend’s Houses of Parliament and served as a symbol of the nation itself. At the moment, though, there was someone very rudely standing atop it.

The girl gleefully shouted like she was howling at the moon. She was wearing a bold sleeveless dress, and her bewitchingly lustrous hair fluttered as it gleamed in the moonlight. Despite the roof’s sharp angle, she twirled atop it as though she was dancing. Every so often, she would look at the sky and shout, “What a disaster!” She seemed to be lamenting some sort of problematic situation, yet she was very visibly trembling with delight.

Running from her shoulder all the way down to her elbow, the girl had a large scar that resembled a bolt of lightning. What’s more, it had a matching twin on the other side.

She was Green Butterfly—a member of the Galgad Empire’s spy team Serpent. Although she was the team’s youngest member, she’d burrowed deep into the Fend Commonwealth and set countless schemes in motion there.

Atop the clocktower, she let out an exultant sigh. “I can’t believe Belias went down so fast. It’s kind of unreal. So that’s what the infamous Klaus is capable of, huh? We really can’t leave that guy unchecked. He’s just too darn strong.”

Green Butterfly had been watching the whole time. She’d sneaked into the party at Heron Hall to see Klaus’s skills for herself, and Belias had been none the wiser.

“You know, there’s this thing White Spider says.” The girl’s tone was playful. “He says that when you’re fighting that monster, it’s important to take the initiative and never let go of it. You gotta plunder everything you can before he has a chance to react, then just keep on making more and more quagmires for him to deal with.”

In her head, she turned over the advice she’d gotten from her teammate.

“If things go on like this, he’s gonna come kill me.” Green Butterfly laughed as she spun back around. “That’s why I’m burning through every plan I’ve got. And now it’s time for the most despicable strategy of all.”

With that, she smiled—at the girl beside her.

“I’ve got a new code name for you. Now your name is Scarlet Leviathan.”

“……………………” The girl beside her offered her nothing in the way of a smile.

“Your last name was super fateful, so I liked that one, too, but it’s time for a clean slate, y’know?”

Green Butterfly patted the girl on the back and began humming to herself as she looked out over Hurough’s metropolitan area. Then she spoke up and made her declaration with her eyes open wide and her voice so loud and melodic it was like she was singing a song. “Now tremble, foolish masses! Etch this deranged, beautiful nightmare right into your marrow!”

That was who Serpent’s plan revolved around—Scarlet Leviathan.

Just like Green Butterfly said, the world was about to be engulfed in a sinister terror.

Lily and Sybilla headed for the Belias headquarters. Lan’s injuries were still far from healed, so she’d already tapped out, and Sara was taking her back to Sybilla’s hideout to recuperate.

At the moment, the rest of the team was over at Belias’s headquarters digging through every scrap of information Belias had collected. Amelie had given in to Klaus’s threats and showed them exactly where it was. Lamplight had the power to kill her entire team whenever they wanted. They would much rather it didn’t come to that, of course, but the option was available to them.

At the moment, it was five in the morning. The sun had yet to rise.

Lily and Sybilla pushed their bone-tired bodies to the limit and ran through the Hurough streets.

“Now that I think about it,” Lily said, “were Serpent the ones who killed Prince Darryn, too?”

“Hmm? Oh yeah, I guess we never figured that out,” Sybilla replied with a nod. “There’s still a lotta questions there. Either way, though, they’re dead fuckin’ meat.”

“When morning comes, the whole world’s gonna descend into chaos.”

The two of them could feel it—there was a change taking place on a worldwide scale. For the next little while, the assassination was going to be the talk of the global town. That was what happened when a member of the Fend royal family got murdered.

However, they still didn’t know what the killer was hoping to achieve. These weren’t the Middle Ages anymore, and even in wartime, people didn’t just go around offing other countries’ royals. Doing that prevented the conflict from ever cooling off. If this really was Galgad’s handiwork, then as soon people found that out, the entire world would turn against the Empire once more.

“Even if you just wanna cause chaos, there’s gotta be a less risky way to—”

Midway through Lily’s sentence, the two of them spotted something.

Fire.

Part of the city was ablaze. It was early enough in the morning that people weren’t panicking in the streets, but those were unmistakably flames. And the building that was on fire was the Kashard Doll Workshop—Belias’s headquarters.

“No way…”

The two of them screamed and sped up. That was where their teammates were. Had they managed to evacuate in time?

When they finished barreling to the workshop, they found two people standing outside in a daze: Amelie and Lotus Doll. They were standing stock-still, like they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. There were wounds on their foreheads from being struck with something.

“You…people…,” Amelie rasped. “…inside… Your teammates… Why…?”

That was all Lily and Sybilla needed to hear for them to charge on in.

The fire had yet to engulf the entirety of the two-story workshop. It had started on the second floor, so the ground floor was intact. The two of them held their breath and rushed inside. The door right next to the entrance was wide open, so they could immediately see what was going on in the room.

Inside, Grete was lying face-down with blood gushing from her back.

As Sybilla stared in horror, Lily made a split-second decision. She grabbed Sybilla by the collar and tugged her farther into the workshop.

The thing was, Grete wasn’t the only victim. It wasn’t clear whether she was alive, and either way, she wasn’t in good shape, but Amelie had said teammates, plural. There were other people who were hurt, and for that matter, their enemy might still be somewhere in the building. Lily and Sybilla couldn’t afford to check in on someone who might already be dead, not when their other teammates needed them as soon as possible. They steeled their hearts and made what they knew was the rational decision.

When they headed down the hallway, they spotted another one of their teammates slumped against the wall.

Thea was sitting on the ground, cradling her broken, blood-drenched right arm.

“Lily, Sybilla…”

She was still conscious. She gasped in obvious pain as she choked out the words.

“Upstairs…”

Lily didn’t waste a second racing straight up. A few seconds later, Sybilla followed along after her. There were sounds coming from the second-floor workspace right next to the stairs, and the two of them dove through the flames to get there.

It felt like they were living through a nightmare. In all their lives, they’d never felt terror like this before.

They threw open the door and bore witness to the next horror.

Inside the burning workspace, Erna was lying unconscious on the ground.

Beside her stood Annette with blood trickling from her forehead. Annette was holding an iron rod, no doubt one of her inventions, and staring straight ahead with a dazed look in her eyes.

A moment later, her body went hurtling to the side.

With that, Annette smashed into the wall and gushed blood from her mouth.

Based on the amount of blood she’d just spat up, she’d probably suffered some organ damage.

Two girls were standing amid the flames. One of them had scars so large it looked like her arms had been split in two. She was the person from Vindo’s final message—Green Butterfly. But beside her, the person who’d just slammed Annette with her knife…

“I told you it was fateful,” Green Butterfly said delightedly. “That code name of yours was like a preview. Although I guess it’s Scarlet Leviathan now.”

There, beside Green Butterfly, stood Monika with a knife clutched in her hand.

Lily and Sybilla froze. It was taking every mental resource they had to process the scene in front of them. That was how utterly detached from reality it was. Why was Monika with Green Butterfly? Why did she hit Annette with her knife? Was she the one who’d attacked Grete, Thea, and Erna?

Monika said nothing.

Instead, she hurled a glass vial onto the ground in front of her. The vial was full of liquid, and when it spilled onto the ground, it immediately caught ablaze. The fire surged and rushed forward to surround Lily and Sybilla.

Across the curtain of smoke, Monika turned around.

“__________I’m sorry.”

They thought they heard a quiet whisper, but it was quickly drowned out by the sound of the building crumbling as the fire ate through it.

Green Butterfly had called it fateful.

The traitor’s name was “Glint” Monika, and that was what she was—a glinting blade coldly tearing through Lamplight’s bonds.