Spy Classroom - Volume 7 - Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Traitor

Over on the east side of Hurough, there was a set of wharfs collectively referred to as the Dock Road. The wharfs extended out from the Turko River as it ran through the heart of the city. A century prior, they’d been the largest port in the world, and huge amounts of imported goods had flowed in from countless different nations. The area was crammed full of gigantic brick warehouses and spherical tanks for holding crude oil.

Sunset had already come, but the darkness found no purchase on the Dock Road. Cargo was loaded and unloaded there around the clock, and the entire area was kept well illuminated. Over on the wharfs, in fact, it was just as bright as it had been in the middle of the day.

Monika stood perched atop a Dock Road warehouse, surveying the wharfs from a distance as she caught her breath. In her hand, she was holding a radio she’d stolen off Thea. However, she wasn’t getting any response.

I thought I could at least pass along a message, but it looks like that’s a no-go.

The only thing coming from the speakers was a fuzzy noise that sounded like rainfall. The signal was getting jammed.

Makes sense, what with how many CIM members they’re mobilizing. They’re putting a whole lot of manpower into this.

As the fact sank in, she turned her gaze over to the setting sun. It felt like she saw her own fast-approaching fate reflected in its descent below the horizon.

What other option could she have taken?

She’d asked herself that question time and time again, but she’d never found a good answer.

Serpent’s got their hooks into the CIM deep. Talking things out with them was never going to work. I don’t know why, but they’ve got it fixed in their heads that it was a Din spy who assassinated the crown prince.

The CIM was desperate to find the prince’s killer. After all, it was their reputation on the line. If they failed so thoroughly as to let the assassin escape, it would make a laughingstock of their entire nation.

That left Lamplight with two options: sacrifice a single Din spy or push back against the CIM with everything they had and prove that a Galgad spy was the one pulling the strings.

Obviously, the latter was the preferable of the two.

The problem is, everyone knows that Klaus works for Din, so him fighting back too publicly would cause a diplomatic incident. It could put the entire team’s safety in jeopardy.

The thing was, the CIM was under Serpent’s control. There was a good chance that their claims of innocence would simply be ignored, and if things turned into an unproductive war of attrition, then eventually someone on Lamplight might end up losing their life. Who would be the next victim to fall after Avian? Grete? Sybilla? Thea? Sara? Annette? Erna? Lily, perhaps? Or maybe even everyone? Every time Monika envisioned that tragedy, her whole body broke out in a cold sweat.

I don’t know if I actually believe it’d play out like that, she thought quietly to herself, but I want to protect them both. I want to protect Lily…and I also want to protect Lamplight.

No matter how many times she mulled it over, it never changed her decision. All she had to do was sacrifice herself, and everything would be settled. The killer’s death would put the Fend populace at ease. The CIM would get to protect their honor. The news would report the killer as a Galgad spy, so the Din Republic would get to avoid having an international incident with the Fend Commonwealth. And Lamplight would have suffered only minimal casualties before their next battle. It would be happy endings all around.

The one regret she had was that promise she made with Lily.

“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.”

Every time Monika thought back to that pledge Lily had made in front of the group, she felt her expression soften a little.

“Sorry, but I might not be able to keep that promise.” She let out a self-deprecating chuckle and quietly cast her gaze forward. “After all…I’m just a stupid, no-good traitor.”

Monika had failed to become a double agent. She’d taken Lamplight and Serpent and abandoned them both. She’d even rejected Klaus’s assistance, and now as she stood there, she was truly alone.

The bill was fast coming due.

One final battle awaited her—and she had no chance of winning against the full might of the CIM.

As the chaos raged, Amelie returned to the CIM headquarters.

The traps Klaus laid were ingenious, and Amelie had failed to spot them all during her escape from Lamplight’s base. She was pretty sure she’d pushed some sort of switch. That had sent a wireless signal over to Klaus, no doubt, so he probably knew that she’d fled. If he was so inclined, he could have all her Belias agents slaughtered.

Even knowing that, though, Amelie had no choice but to act.

You’re out of time, Bonfire. The unrest has spread too far. Even if it means sacrificing my team’s lives, I need to report in to my superiors.

Doing so pained her, but as a spy, it was the right call to make.

As soon as she arrived at the headquarters, she immediately headed for the room that housed their governing body, Hide, and relayed the truth to its five members behind their partition. She told them about how she’d been working with Lamplight to track down “Cloud Drift” Lan, but how they set her up and captured her. She told them about how, once Lamplight took her agents hostage, she had no choice but to obey them.

Hide listened to her report in silence.

Amelie could feel her skin prickling from how much raw tension was in the air.

“We’ll handle the matter of Belias’s failure later. There will be consequences, but now is not the time for that,” one pompous voice declared. The other four voiced their agreement.

A deep male voice boomed out. “Amelie, tell us exactly what you’ve witnessed.”

“…As you wish.”

“Was it ‘Cloud Drift’ Lan who shot Prince Darryn?”

“No, I don’t believe it was. The night His Highness was slain, I saw Cloud Drift’s injuries with my own eyes. She was in no state to carry out an assassination. If nothing else, she wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.”

“The papers are saying it was a spy called Scarlet Leviathan. Is there any truth to that?”

“I’m afraid I can’t rightly say,” Amelie replied candidly. Aside from the killer, there probably wasn’t a single person who truly knew the answer to that question.

A gloomy male voice came from behind the partition. “Hmm, how odd… It certainly lacks elegance…,” he said, putting a peculiar stress on the final word. “The intelligence that a Din Republic spy was plotting to kill Prince Darryn came directly from Magician. Are you suggesting that we made an absolutely unthinkable error?”

The air in the room dropped a few degrees. There was discord brewing within Hide’s ranks. The gloomy man was calling Magician out.

The next voice Amelie heard was husky and female. It belonged to Magician, no doubt. “It wasn’t an error.”

“Really, now?”

“All this means is that the newspapers had it right—that the killer was a Galgad spy disguising themselves as a Din spy. It was a tiny misunderstanding, nothing more.”

After Magician gave her excuse, a long silence descended on the room. Then the deep-voiced man spoke again. “Amelie, we ask of you this,” he said menacingly. “What side does Scarlet Leviathan work for? The Din Republic or the Galgad Empire?”

Amelie hesitated for a moment. This time, though, she had an answer. All she had to do was state the facts. “I personally witnessed ‘Scarlet Leviathan’ Monika attack her Lamplight teammates.” Monika hadn’t so much as hesitated before turning her blade on her own allies. “I believe her to be a mole working for the Galgad Empire.”

She could hear breaths being released from behind the partition. There was another long silence, after which the five Hide members came to a consensus. “Relay the news to every active CIM unit. Our opponent is from the Galgad Empire.”

Then came the order.

“Scarlet Leviathan is to be killed at once. The CIM’s dignity rests on ensuring that she not be allowed to escape.”

Amelie curtsied. “I will see that it is done.”

That was about how Amelie had expected things to go. If the Anti-Imperialists and Neo-Imperialists could agree on one thing, it was that Monika needed to be eliminated. Hide’s verdict had been inevitable.

Though, I suspect this is all playing out exactly as she planned.

Amelie had seen the sadness lurking in Monika’s eyes. That was the one piece of information she hadn’t passed along to Klaus.

In any case, Amelie was under no obligation to protect her. There was no hesitation in her mind. Right now the entire populace of the Fend Commonwealth wanted Scarlet Leviathan dead.

Upon learning the full truth, Thea was aghast. The fact that she’d been betrayed must have come as a great shock, and her shoulders trembled as tears welled up in her eyes. “That can’t be,” she choked out, but not a single one of her teammates spoke up to refute Klaus’s claims. Back when he first told them, they’d reacted the exact same way. They didn’t want to accept the facts even as the fear welling up in their hearts threatened to overwhelm them.

“That traitor!!” Thea cried, clenching her fists in anguish. “We have to stop her! Letting Monika sacrifice herself like this isn’t the way we—”

The rumbling of footsteps cut her off.

A group of people in dark coats had just moved in to surround them. They’d used the panicked crowd to mask their approach. All in all, there were about twenty of them.

“You’re with the CIM?” Klaus calmly asked. If they tried to attack, he was more than ready to send them flying.

A man strode forth from the group. He had dark skin, blond hair, and that unique sort of composure about him exclusive to the strong. Klaus had spotted him in front of the Conmerid Times, too. An anachronistic saber hung from the waist of his jet-black coat. “Are you Bonfire?” the man asked. His eyes gleamed with contempt, like he was looking at something beneath him. “I’m ‘Armorer’ Meredith, the man in charge of the CIM’s Vanajin team. Think of us as coworkers to the Belias team you fought.”

“I see. And what brings you here?”

“I’d rethink my attitude if I were you. We have hostages.” Meredith shot a look over to where another group of men were holding a pair of dark-red- and brown-haired girls captive at gunpoint.

“Sara?! Lan?!” Sybilla cried.

The two girls bit their lips in chagrin when she called their names. “I-I’m sorry. They were on top of us before we knew what was happening…”

“Prithee, forgive me. There was naught we could do against their numbers.”

Klaus remained unshaken. “Amelie led you right to them, I take it.”

He was aware that she’d escaped, but he’d never gotten a chance to give Sara and Lan new orders. It had happened right in the middle of his fight against Monika.

Meredith let out a snort before going on. “The CIM is moving in to eliminate Scarlet Leviathan. Give us all the intel you have on her. The way I see it, she’s just as much a traitor to the Din Republic as she is to anyone.”

“………”

“If you try to protect her, we’ll have no choice but to view you as enemies of the Crown as well.”

Klaus’s thoughts turned. Considering his injured leg, would it be possible for him to kill all twenty Vanajin members to keep them quiet while simultaneously protecting the girls, including the hostages? It was possible, certainly, but it would carry substantial risks, and even if he succeeded, he didn’t see any way for it to go well in the long term.

“Just obey us like good little boys and girls,” Meredith said confidently. “We don’t want to cause any diplomatic issues with the Republic if we don’t have to. Surely, this is better than having us make it public that Scarlet Leviathan came from the Din Republic, right? You want a war, that’s how you get a war.”

Klaus needed to make his decision.

He pulled out his gun, then tossed it on the ground. The girls sucked in frustrated breaths.

“It’s fucked, y’know,” Sybilla spat. “Your whole damn country is fucked.”

The expressions on the Vanajin members surrounding them went harsh, and they stared daggers at Sybilla. “I see your girl has a mouth on her,” Meredith spat back, unimpressed.

Klaus took advantage of that tiny opening to move his fingers.

Eventually, Vanajin dragged Klaus and the girls away to handcuff them, stick them in cars, and blindfold them to completely restrict their movement. While that was going on, the girl farthest from Klaus followed his hand signal. By taking full advantage of the moment Vanajin’s attention was gathered on Sybilla, she was able to nonchalantly sidle backward and disappear into the Hurough crowd.

As the sun finished its descent, it painted the sky orange with its afterglow.

Monika continued waiting atop the warehouse as more and more people gathered on the Dock Road, all radiating hostility. She could feel their gazes piercing her like needles.

Monika wasn’t surprised that the CIM already had her surrounded. She was making no attempt to flee or hide, and that must have been setting off alarm bells for them. For the moment, the CIM was spending the entirety of their efforts clearing the area of civilians. They weren’t going to go in for the kill until they had that finished. It wasn’t like Monika had anywhere to run, after all.

Monika got where they were coming from, but still. “Would it kill you to hurry it up a bit?” she grumbled.

Then she heard a lazy drawl from the next warehouse over. “Fouuund youuu.”

It was Green Butterfly.

“Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!” She let out a vulgar laugh and flashed her jagged pearly whites. “Gee, Mooonika, how’s it goin’? Check out aaall those CIM heavy hitters showing up. They’re here to kill you, you know.”

“You sure you want to be standing there? They’re gonna see you.”

“Oh, that’s fiiine. The CIM would never attack me,” Green Butterfly boasted. “No way, no how.”

Green Butterfly had the power to deploy the CIM as she pleased, and Monika had figured out the trick she used to do it. Monika had a question she needed to ask her, and it had nothing to do with any of that. “I just want to know one thing.”

“Oh yeah? Gee, what’s that?”

“What would’ve happened if those papers had reported that you were the killer instead of me?”

“Ha-ha, what? I would’ve just had the CIM bury the article, that’s what. Then we would’ve announced someone on Lamplight as the killer, and no one would’ve paid that nonsense a second thought.”

“Cool. Glad to hear it.” Monika’s expression softened a little, and she nodded. “I knew I made the right choice.”

“Look, I dunno what you’re so satisfied about… But it looks like your time’s up.”

The air of hostility permeating the area grew stronger. The CIM was finished with their prep work.

“So long, Scarlet Leviathan. I’ll make sure I bear witness to your death,” Green Butterfly whispered. She leaped off the warehouse, then vanished.

The moment she did, a group dressed in suits appeared as though to take her place. It was a CIM unit. All its members had their guns at the ready and were staring at Monika with murder in their eyes. There were fourteen in all.

The man standing at their center had a keen gleam in his eye. That was probably the team’s boss. He was wearing a dark mask over his mouth with an image of a carnivore on it. The raw bloodlust he was giving off told Monika that the man was the real deal.

The CIM members didn’t introduce themselves, nor did they say a single word that didn’t need to be said. They revealed nothing—not that they were Carval, a team made up of the CIM’s finest operatives; nor that they’d been operating abroad and had been ordered to return as soon as possible once Prince Darryn died; nor that they were a combat unit with unmatched skill that was supposed to be carrying out an assassination in the Galgad Empire.

Aside from Hearth, there was no target they’d ever failed to put down. That was the level those people operated on.

Behind them, there was a member of the CIM’s Hide leadership, “Cursemaster” Nathan, as well as seventy-five members of Vanajin, the CIM’s largest counterintelligence unit, and sixteen members of Belias, the counterintelligence unit that answered directly to Hide. All in all, the CIM had deployed over a hundred operatives, each and every one of them specialized in fighting spies.

“Our righteousness is absolute,” declared “Silhouette” Luke, Carval’s boss. His voice came out muffled through his mask. “We are always just, and we do not err.”

Monika shrugged. “If you say so.”

“You are an enemy of the Crown, and we offer you a dignified death.”

With that, they began their mission.

They’d brought far, far more forces there than they needed to kill a single girl. It was going to be a massacre.

After marching Klaus and the girl into a room, the CIM finally removed their blindfolds.

The building was one of the CIM’s many bases. Considering the time it had taken them to get there, Klaus assumed they couldn’t be far from Hurough. With no windows in the room, though, it was hard to be any more specific than that. They were in a cell. There wasn’t so much as a single chair, and the only way in or out was through a heavy metal door.

“Wait here and don’t cause any trouble,” one of the Vanajin members ordered them, then left the cell. Vanajin had probably been called in to participate in the anti-Monika strike force.

Vanajin had confiscated their guns, so breaking the door would be tricky. There were six of them in the cell: Klaus, Lily, Sybilla, Thea, Sara, and Lan. Considering how thorough the CIM was being, they had to imagine that Annette and Grete were being detained over at the hospital, too.

Klaus leaned against the wall and let out a long exhale. There was nothing they could do but surrender themselves to the passage of time. Klaus had given Vanajin some intel on Monika during the ride over, but only superficial details of little import. They wouldn’t be called again until the whole thing was over.

“C’mon, Boss!” Sybilla shouted, unable to contain herself. “What’re you just sittin’ there for?! You gotta have some trick up your sleeve. You gotta!”

Klaus closed his eyes. “All we can do now is wait,” he said plainly. There was, in fact, nothing he could do.

He heard the sound of teeth grinding. “What the fuck have you even been doing?!”

Klaus opened his eyes and found Sybilla standing before him, tears streaming down her face. Her hands were balled up tight into fists, and she was glaring at him like she was about to strike him at any moment. Her face was flush red. “You’ve been useless this whole goddamn time! You let Monika betray us, it took you forever to find her, and when you did, you let her get away! That shit ain’t you, man! The fuck’s wrong with you?!”

“Sybilla, come on…!” Lily said, grabbing her arm in an attempt to calm her down.

However, Sybilla shook her off and buried her face in her hands in anguish. “I know I’m just takin’ my anger out on you, but still… STILL!” Her shoulders heaved, and when she spoke next, her voice came out thin and sorrowful. “There was this part of me that believed… I figured you’d find some way to fix it, in spite of everything…”

She feebly hung her head.

Klaus quietly watched his dejected subordinate. The others cast sympathetic gazes Sybilla’s way. They probably all shared the exact same complaints she’d just voiced, and they were right to. Klaus had suffered a long string of embarrassing failures lately. He could hardly blame them for being disappointed in him.

“Teach had his hands full, too,” Lily said, trying to defend him. “And besides, he’s not the only one to blame here. If we’d just worked harder—”

“No, that’s not it,” Klaus replied. “There was a different reason she was able to give me the runaround, one that I only recently realized.”

The girls all gave him a quizzical look.

Now that he thought about it, things had felt off for a while, chief among them the fact that he’d failed to notice how Monika changed right before their attack on Belias. It wasn’t until he fought her in person that he understood what that feeling was. The answer was mind-bogglingly simple. “It’s because of how rapidly Monika’s improved.”

““Huh?””

“She grew faster than I anticipated and successfully concealed her plan. She beat me, plain and simple.”

He felt a hint of chagrin in that realization, but perhaps he ought to have been celebrating how far his student had come.

Lily stared at him in shock. “…What? No, no, no. I know it was just once, but still, there’s no way she actually beat you—”

“She’s still sixteen, right?”

She was coming up on seventeen, but either way, that was still pretty darn young. Ominously so. Klaus thought back to his own sixteen-year-old self and gave the girls his candid thoughts.

“I think she’s stronger now than I was at that age.”

“““““Huh?”””””

The girls’ eyes all went wide in unison. However, that was Klaus’s honest opinion. Klaus himself had grown a lot since he was sixteen, of course, but while he had no intention of relinquishing the title of the World’s Greatest, he realized now that he was going to have to work to keep it.

“Th-there’s no way…,” Lily stammered, still frozen in shock.

Her disbelief was understandable, but after fighting Monika, Klaus knew. He’d seen the raw talent her predicament had awakened in her.

Every so often, the world gave birth to a monster. And just as it had created the peerless spy that was Klaus, it had created another one in that very nation…

“She intends to die taking on the CIM. I would love nothing more than to stop her, but she’s made her wishes clear. It’s up to us to respect them. And besides, I doubt she’s planning on going down without a fight,” Klaus told the girls. “So I’m choosing to believe. I believe that that genius will find a way to survive and make her way back to Lamplight.”

After going through all that growth, Monika had decided to fight to the end. Klaus knew better than to stand in her way. All he could do was close his eyes and pray for her safe return.

Something very strange was happening on the Dock Road. So strange, in fact, that the CIM spies gathered there couldn’t process what they were seeing.

Nathan, the man feared as Cursemaster the world over, witnessed it from his position down on the bank of the River Turko. Nathan had lived through more than his share of battles. He’d joined forces with Inferno during the Great War to throw the Galgad Empire’s intelligence network into disarray, and of the five members of Hide, he was the only one who was still operating on the front lines.

He smirked a little. He hadn’t felt fear like that in a good long while. “Such elegance…”

Vanajin’s boss, “Armorer” Meredith, was on standby behind Carval. His job was to provide backup on the off chance Monika managed to give Carval the slip, and he’d come in assuming that was the same as having no job at all. He wondered why they needed so many forces there. Surely, it was overkill.

Now he admitted how wrong he’d been as he reached for the saber hanging from his waist.

Belias’s boss, “Puppeteer” Amelie, brandished her baton beside Meredith and got ready to give her agents their orders on a moment’s notice. Their protracted imprisonment had left them drained, but Amelie had trusted the worry growing in her gut and given a rousing speech to all her agents still capable of fighting, then brought them to the battle.

The thought had once crossed Amelie’s mind that the Lamplight girls could end up posing a threat to her nation, and now she was more certain of that than ever.

And Green Butterfly, who’d turned back to look, after putting some distance between herself and the fight, let out a shocked gasp. “No way………”

Carval was made up of the CIM’s cream of the crop, and all fourteen of them had just gotten annihilated. Despite being one of the top-two assassination teams in the entire Fend Commonwealth, all it had taken was a single girl to mop the floor with them. The fourteen spies lay collapsed atop the warehouse roof. Some of them had gotten their knees shot out and others had simply lost consciousness, but there wasn’t a single Carval member capable of standing on their own two feet anymore.

Monika had done it all on her own. As soon as Carval came after her, she dodged every bullet they fired her way, then closed in and brought the fight to them. And when she did, she ran them over. After switching from her knife to her gun, she began firing practically from all but point-blank and got to work obliterating the Carval members’ knees and shoulders. There were moments when she used her enemies as shields to repel bullets, and there were others when she stole her foes’ knives and hurled them with unparalleled accuracy.

Monika’s marksmanship was on point, too. Each time she downed an opponent, she used their body to hide where she was aiming from so the next one wouldn’t see her coming. Whenever one of her foes stopped moving for the slightest of moments, Monika’s speed meant they were sure to fall victim to her gun.

It took her less than two minutes to completely incapacitate Carval.

Monika weighed the automatic pistol she’d stolen from one of them in her hand.

I dunno why, but there’s this heat in me.

She let out a long exhale as she detachedly surveyed the situation.

What is this feeling? It’s like none of what I’m seeing is real.

She’d been fighting her battles back-to-back-to-back, and by all rights, her fatigue should have been peaking. Yet in spite of that, she felt absurdly light, like her brain was secreting something that maybe it shouldn’t be.

Are my opponents moving slow? No, I guess I’m just that fast.

Not even she knew how to describe the state she found herself in.

It’s like there’s this fire burning inside my body.

That was the closest thing she could come up with. It was hot, so hot she could hardly stand it. The fire burning inside her—inside her heart—had set her ablaze.

On that day, Monika earned herself a new code name. Nathan gave it to her after seeing what happened there on the Dock Road.

When intelligence agencies gave monikers to foreign spies, those names carried a different connotation than the ones used domestically. They were given exclusively to spies who held great significance for a particular mission, spies that agencies needed to be wary of, and in some cases, spies that absolutely needed to be eliminated.

For the Fend Commonwealth, that was exactly what Flash Fire was—a threat that needed to be killed at any cost.

“Why…?”

The words spilled from Meredith’s mouth as he looked at Monika. He gave no orders to his men. He simply stared at the scene that had played out before him. He could send in all seventy-four of his agents, but he knew he would be sending them in to die for nothing. The raw drive Monika was working with right now made him sure of that. “Why can’t they kill her? Carval is one of the CIM’s best teams…” All he could do was lament their fate. “They’ve taken out countless first-rate spies in their—”

Monika turned toward Meredith. As he looked up at her from the foot of the warehouse, he could see the contempt in her eyes.

“_____!!”

He gasped. He commanded the majority of the agents present, and she’d spotted him in an instant.

“Can you hear me, you CIM shit stains?” Monika’s voice echoed loud and true. “You get one warning. If you come at me, I can’t promise you’ll live to regret it. I don’t care if you’re puppets or slaves or what. Anyone who fights me dies.”

It was an odd thing for the person who shot Prince Darryn to say. As far as Meredith could tell, though, every single member of Carval was still breathing. As long as they got some emergency first aid, they would be able to make it out of there alive.

Monika had been pulling her punches—and that fact made Meredith shudder all over again.

“I never cared, you know.”

Each and every one of her words echoed loudly across the Dock Road.

“I was never interested in the fate of the world or the spy business or any of that. All I wanted was to get to be myself—and to spend my time with people I liked being with. That would’ve been enough for me!”

Her voice gradually grew more heated.

“But you brain-dead imbeciles let yourselves get tricked by a bunch of assholes, and you killed the wrong people, and now you’re trying to destroy everything I care about. It makes me sick. It makes me fucking sick!”

Meredith went silent, unable to comprehend Monika’s sudden accusations. The wrong people? What in the world was she talking about? She was a villain who’d wronged the Commonwealth. What right did she have to lecture them?

Monika shook her head in exasperation.

“If none of that made sense to you, that’s fine. Doesn’t change what I need to do.”

She readied a pair of pistols she’d taken off of Carval members.

“I’m gonna raze this godforsaken country to the ground.”

With that, she took off.

Monika dashed across the warehouse roof, then leaped off at full speed and opened fire in midair. Her bullets flew unerringly, causing the spies around Meredith to scatter as she landed in front of him.

“Fascinating!!” The first person to react to her nimble moves was Meredith himself. Close-quarters combat was his specialty, and his dauntless nature and magnanimity of spirit were the exact things that gave him the charisma to lead seventy-four agents. “You talk a big game for a petty villain snapping at the Crown! I, Armorer, shall bring you to the gallows myself!”

Meredith drew his trusty saber and steeled his nerve. He was going to kill that girl, even if it cost him his life.

The moment before the two of them clashed, Monika took an evasive maneuver and rolled to the side. They passed each other by without either of their attacks landing. Amelie had been waiting in the wings just nearby, and that was the moment she’d chosen to step in. Monika had been forced to give up on attacking Meredith if she wanted to avoid the Belias bullets.

Amelie gave Monika a taunting look and brandished her baton at her. “This nation isn’t yours to do with as you wish, you know.”

“Rgh! Amelie…”

“It has been some time, hasn’t it?” Amelie smiled when she heard Monika click her tongue. “Programme 187.”

With impeccable coordination, a group of four Belias agents launched an attack on Monika. The four of them were all holding powerful submachine guns. It was an uncommon choice for spies, who generally preferred more covert tools, but when faced with the simultaneous fire of four SMGs, even Monika had no choice but to fall back.

Her whole body slid to the side.

In the blink of an eye, she was ten feet to the side of where she’d been just a moment before. After escaping the SMGs’ line of fire, she sank a few bullets into the shooters’ shoulders. That was Firewalker’s technique, the one she’d inherited from Vindo. It was the perfect way to pull off a high-speed hit-and-run.

The problem was, she hadn’t perfected it enough to be able to use it more than once in rapid succession. She turned and fled into the gap between two warehouses.

This isn’t some random skirmish breaking out in the middle of the city. It makes perfect sense they’d bring in machine guns.

This was no battle between spies anymore. This was war. Fighting them head-on would leave Monika at a keen disadvantage.

I need to get away so I can catch them by surprise and set the plan into motion!

Right when Monika made up her mind, a peculiar man descended on her from overhead as she raced between the warehouses.

The man’s hair was over three feet long, and it fluttered behind him as he landed in front of her. An odd jingling noise rang out. The sound came from the massive amount of jewelry he was wearing. His wrists were laden with bangles, and they clinked loudly against each other and his necklaces.

“Those moves were Firewalker’s moves. How elegant.”

It was “Cursemaster” Nathan, one of the members of the CIM’s Hide leadership. He used his gun to comb back his long hair.

“How delightful,” Nathan said gloomily. “Having a spy claiming to be from Galgad go on a rampage like yours will do a lovely job sobering up those unseemly Neo-Imperialists of ours. What a wonderfully elegant development…”

“What a coincidence,” Monika replied with a grin. “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

“What an interesting girl you are… Was that your objective all along, I wonder…?”

“And if it was?”

“You should have come in at full form.” Nathan’s bangles jingled as he lowered his voice. “This is what happens when you underestimate the CIM.”

All of a sudden, he unleashed a brutal flying kick. It took Monika both hands and every ounce of strength she had just to block it.

The blow itself was light, yet for some reason, it threw her completely off-balance. Unable to keep her footing, she keeled over backward. Monika had never seen that technique before.

She turned her back on Nathan and devoted her full efforts toward fleeing. That one exchange had been enough to tell her that fighting him was a bad idea.

Rather than wasting his energy giving chase, Nathan simply let her go. He knew there was no sense rushing things. Instead, he could just let her continue her rampage, then kill her when the time was right.

Monika knew that the math checked out. She could feel death approaching as exhaustion slowly but surely crept its way through her.

I don’t think my body’s gonna hold out…

By the time she beat Carval, she’d already burned through the majority of her stamina.

When Monika rounded the corner, she ran right back into “Armorer” Meredith. The man’s greatest strength was his tenacity, and he was prepared to hunt down his target to the ends of the earth. His body simply didn’t tire. In Monika’s current state, it was about the worst matchup imaginable for her. “What’s wrong, villain? Worn out already?!” he jeered as he bore down on her.

Monika bounced her rubber balls off the warehouse walls to attack Meredith from his blind spot. That was her specialty, and thanks to her surprise attack, she was able to distance herself from him and escape his sight.

Her supply of weapons was dwindling, but she’d successfully fled again.

For all her localized victories and escapes, though, it was clear that their sheer numbers would eventually be enough to overrun her. Monika knew that better than anyone. She knew that she had no shot of winning the battle. She knew that there was no hope for her.

Monika had gone into the fight prepared to die.

But I’m not done yet… Just a little more… A little more’s all I need…

She ran across the Dock Road as far as her body would take her, planting her devices at the base of every oil tank she passed and hurling mirrors into specific spots while keeping an eye on her surroundings. She badly needed to rest, but there were enemies on all sides. Whenever she took them out with her guns, the gunshots drew new foes to her location, and if she stopped to catch her breath for a moment, Meredith would catch up to her like the hunting dog he was.

“Shit,” she grumbled feebly.

“Big Sis Monika!!”

Right then, the last person Monika expected rushed over to her from behind cover.

“Erna?!” she cried.

What was Erna doing there on the battlefield? Had she slipped past the CIM’s siege?

Unfortunately, Erna’s timing couldn’t have been worse. There was a Vanajin member who’d been following Monika from atop a warehouse, and when he heard Erna’s shout, he turned toward her and fired. As far as he was concerned, she was there to provide Scarlet Leviathan with reinforcements.

The bullet sank directly into Erna’s side.

“_____!!”

Blood went flying.

Monika immediately shot the man and rushed over to Erna. Erna pressed down on her abdominal wound in pain as blood spilled through her fingers. She was still conscious, but it was obvious at a glance how badly she was wounded.

“Teach told me…,” she said through ragged breaths, “to back you up…”

Monika couldn’t make sense of it. How was this supposed help her?

As she stared at Erna in confusion, Erna’s trembling lips curled into a smile. “This should buy you…a little time. Getting unlucky in a way that doesn’t quite kill me…and playing the part of an innocent little girl…are my specialties.”

“Wait, you let yourself get shot…?!”

Erna was wearing an adorable dress, making her indistinguishable from an ordinary civilian. She certainly didn’t look the part of a Din Republic spy. However, there was no way Klaus would have ordered her to go and do that.

Erna looked Monika right in the eye. “I have faith that you’ll survive and make it back to us, Big Sis Monika.”

Then her body went limp. She was out like a light. The hand pressing on her abdomen flopped to the ground, and blood began pooling around her.

“…!”

Monika fired a shot in the air, then fled. Eventually, she heard the sound of Meredith bellowing angrily from behind her. “Halt! There’s a noncombatant we didn’t evacuate!” His voice was bloodcurdlingly intense. “She’s been shot! Get her to a hospital, stat! We’re not letting a subject of the Crown die on our watch!”

The CIM desperately wanted to avoid civilian casualties, and their formation loosened. That slight letup in their offensive gave Monika the opening she needed to catch her haggard breath.

“__________”

Erna had only bought her a tiny bit of time. However, that was more than enough for Monika’s will to fight to resurge. She steeled herself and headed for her destination: a wharf, lit up bright by the dock’s lights.

Right before she got there, though, she found one final obstacle standing in her way—her hated nemesis.

“Hey, Moooooooonika, guess who’s done foooooooor?!”

It was Green Butterfly. She let out a toothy laugh, like she’d been waiting for Monika to run herself ragged.

Monika clicked her tongue and stopped in her tracks. “Never thought I’d see your ugly mug out here.”

The CIM had finished getting Erna to safety, and Monika could sense them gathering. It wouldn’t be long before they had her completely surrounded. However, Green Butterfly made no efforts to flee. It was like that was precisely what she was hoping for.

“I figured out who you are, you know,” Monika said. “You mentioned that you’d betrayed an organization yourself once. That was the CIM, right? And you weren’t just any old agent. You had enough authority to deploy people en masse.”

Once Monika deduced that much, it wasn’t hard to find the answer.

“There’s a traitor hiding in the leadership body, Hide—and that traitor is you.”

“Bingo!” Green Butterfly clapped her hands together in glee. “I was trying to drop the hints slowly, but I should’ve known you’d figure me out quick.”

She had a hell of a lot of influence. She would even be able to play off the chummy conversation she was having with Monika, no doubt. She could just tell the others that she’d been hiding who she really was in an attempt to draw a confession out of the killer.

Monika sighed and shook her head. “It’s no wonder you’re so weak.”

“Excuse me?”

“You probably learned something as part of Hide. You said something about seeing how heartless the world was, right? Whatever it was you discovered, you couldn’t take it. And you know, I feel for you. But then you went and fled. You sold out your country, killed your own prince, took the masses you should’ve been protecting and mocked them for their ignorance, sank to Serpent’s level, and started spreading your petty nightmares. You’re a sad, weak little nobody.” A contemptuous smirk toyed at the corners of Monika’s mouth. “The two of us have nothing in common.”

Green Butterfly’s face went bright red. Much of what Monika had accused her of was conjecture, but it looked like she’d been right on all counts.

“And so what?” Green Butterfly said, scowling in irritation. “You’re still gonna die here. Bonfire abandoned you!!”

Green Butterfly had her there. The CIM had the area fully surrounded. In addition to the SMG-toting Belias members, Nathan was standing beside them with his gaze locked on Monika, and any gaps in their formation she could have used to escape were blocked off by Meredith and his Vanajin agents.

Monika and Green Butterfly made their moves in unison.

Green Butterfly took her gun and fired, aiming straight for Monika’s throat. As Monika dodged the shot, she fired off one of her own at Green Butterfly’s shoulder. The bullet sank straight into her foe’s right arm.

“Just die already!” Green Butterfly moaned. Monika kicked her aside and charged at the CIM throng.

Doing so was tantamount to suicide, and unsurprisingly, the CIM opened fire, fully intent on riddling Monika with bullets. In her head, though, she was carefully running the numbers.

Sure, Klaus didn’t save me. But you know what? That’s fine.

She began performing the final steps of her calculations. Thanks to that tiny bit of time Erna bought her, she’d been able to complete her plan.

He crushed me, just like he always does. And that’s enough.

There was one thing Green Butterfly had completely overlooked. What she should have asked herself was, why had Monika gone and risked her life to have that fight with Klaus? By all accounts, doing so had been wildly unnecessary. If Monika had been expecting to have to battle the CIM anyway, it would have made more sense to preserve her stamina. Her actions made no sense.

Green Butterfly had failed to see the reason behind what Monika did. However, it was hardly her fault. For most people, Monika’s motive was something completely unthinkable. For any of the Lamplight girls, though, it would have been dead obvious.

The one class that always led us to greater heights…was our battles against Teach.

The thing was, it had been necessary. When Monika had told Klaus to come on and school her back at the church, she’d meant it literally. Monika’s goal had been for the Greatest Spy in the World to show her how to survive being at the center of a storm of bullets.

Monika recognized that dodging all the CIM’s shots was beyond her, so she used her arms to protect her vitals and avoid any lethal hits. As she endured the sensation of lead tearing into her flesh, she lured the CIM her way. The technique Klaus gave her had bought her a few precious seconds.

“Angle… Distance… Focal point… Rebounds… Speed… Timing…”

Monika had gained a new power, and that was precisely what she unleashed. After getting her ass handed to her over and over by Klaus and Vindo, she knew she needed to get stronger. She’d spent days and nights trying to come up with a new way to protect Lily and to protect Lamplight, and it had led her to a new power, one far beyond creepshot.

She thrust her right hand at the CIM crowd and cried out loud and true.

“I’m code name Glint—and it’s time to burn bright!”

Erna had given her the hint. Erna and the accidents she’d engineered during their fight against Avian in Longchon—the burning lenses.

All at once, the entire Dock Road exploded into flames.

There were powerful lights illuminating every nook and cranny of the port, and Monika had used the mirrors and lenses she’d strewn in her wake to focus them, causing the fibers she’d planted to ignite. The fire had triggered the bombs she’d set at the base of the oil tanks, causing the tanks to burst and the oil to combust. Monika had calculated it out perfectly, and the first wave of flames quickly spread to the port’s many warehouses and ships, lighting the entire Dock Road ablaze.

The raging flames quickly engulfed the CIM, leaving them no choice but to flee. One after another, they dove into the Turko River to escape the fire.

The port had been transformed into hell on earth in the blink of an eye, and now Green Butterfly was the only one left out on the wharf. Her hair was singed, and her eyes were wide with horror. “Have you completely lost your mind?! This is… This is just wanton destruction!” she howled. “It won’t just be spies. You’re turning the whole world against you, everyone in every nation—”

“That was always the plan.”

Monika and Green Butterfly were the only ones the conflagration hadn’t spread to. Surrounded by the flames, the two of them faced each other.

In Monika’s hand was a knife. “You can prey on people’s weaknesses and get them to turn traitor all you like, but no matter how many allies you make, I’ll bring enough terror to drown you people out. I’ll be a king killer or whatever else I have to be.”

There was no mercy in her heart.

“Stay the hell out of my way.”

Monika took a big step forward and smashed her knife down as hard as she could on Green Butterfly’s collarbone. Green Butterfly screamed, then fell prone.

Now that that’s settled…

After dealing with Green Butterfly, Monika took a moment to catch her breath. Her situation wasn’t much better than it had been before. The fire was fast approaching from her rear, and the river was full of dozens of CIM hostiles.

The fight was still going, and it wouldn’t be over until Monika breathed her last.

The world hadn’t been kind to Monika.

Every time she thought she finally had something of her own, some power too great for her to oppose always came in to destroy it. Every time she uprooted her life, the universe found new setbacks to throw at her. Her society took the feelings she held most precious and wrote them off as a mental illness. And when she hid those feelings deep within her and quietly nurtured them, a vicious spy exposed them, took advantage of them, and led Monika to ruin.

That was why she fought. That was why she held her head high, knowing that her very existence was one of rebellion.

Lighting Fires × Villain Role = Playing the Heel.

So what if she never got to share with anyone? All of humanity could hate her, and she would be just fine.

What a perfect liecraft for me, the contrarian thought as her lips curled into a grin.