Chapter 2
White Spider
Over at the CIM, preparations for Prince Darryn’s funeral were proceeding apace.
This was Fend’s chance to play itself up to forces both at home and abroad. It had taken them over ten days to capture the crown prince’s killer, and the country had been in utter turmoil that whole time. Even now, the people still harbored some doubts about the government, the police, and their intelligence agency. The Commonwealth needed to demonstrate that it was unified and strong.
Ever since the United States of Mouzaia overtook them economically, the Commonwealth’s international standing had plummeted. The royal family was their sole point of pride and the one thing they had over the United States. Queen Ribault was the leader of the entire Fend Commonwealth—the federation that had descended from the historied Fend Kingdom and its fourteen subordinate states—and the Commonwealth needed to reestablish the prestige the title carried.
This was going to be an event decked out with royals, world leaders, first ladies, and secretaries of state. Over two thousand state guests were going to attend the service in Shalinder Abbey, and the procession carrying Prince Darryn’s body from the palace to the abbey was going to spend more than two hours traveling through the city. The Commonwealth absolutely couldn’t afford to have any terrorism or riots take place during that time. They needed to crack down on malcontents and take preventative measures ahead of time.
The Fend government was doing everything in its power to prepare for the ceremony.
Meanwhile, Amelie, head of the Belias secret service unit, got a confidential set of orders.
Down in the CIM headquarters’ underground interrogation room, Amelie took another look at her counterpart. The more she looked at her, the harder it all was to believe.
The other party couldn’t have been older than a teenager. Based on her looks, she was more a girl than a woman. Her build was tall and slim. The prisoner’s uniform she was wearing had short sleeves, leaving the crack-shaped scars on her arms visible and exposed.
A faint smile played at her lips, causing her jagged teeth to flit in and out of view.
This was “Magician” Mirena. She was a member of the CIM’s Hide leadership. As the second daughter of the nation’s third princess, she’d been assigned the post as per custom.
However, that wasn’t the only name she had.
She also went by Green Butterfly.
Monika’s knife attack had left her unconscious and in critical condition, but she’d finally recovered enough to hold a proper conversation.
Allegedly, she had thrown her lot in with Serpent. That intel had traveled from Monika to Klaus, then from Klaus to Amelie. It was a difficult accusation to believe, but the circumstantial evidence supporting it was overwhelming.
The idea that there had been a traitor in Hide would have been enough to shake the CIM to its core, and only a handful of Belias members and Hide themselves were aware of it. Nathan had ordered Amelie to carry out her interrogation in absolute secrecy.
Amelie was in there alone.
“Shall we begin, Ms. Mirena? Although I suppose I should call you Green Butterfly, now, shouldn’t I?”
The two of them sat in the basement facing each other across a table.
“You’re going to tell me everything. Every last detail about why you betrayed your homeland.”
“…………………………………………”
The other spy didn’t say anything for a good long while. She merely let out shallow breaths and looked at Amelie as though sizing her up.
“Let me out of here at once. You have the nerve to defy a member of Hide?”
“You aren’t a part of Hide anymore.” Amelie paid the veiled threat no heed. “Let us assume, for a moment, that you aren’t a traitor. Even so, we failed to prevent Prince Darryn’s assassination, we allowed Flash Fire to go on her rampage, and we have a whole host of injured agents. All of that can be traced back to the faulty intelligence you fed us—that hogwash about a spy team called Avian plotting to kill His Royal Highness.”
“………”
“We are always just, and we do not err. The CIM has no need for personnel such as you.”
All told, Monika dealt injuries of varying severity to over fifty of their operatives. Nobody ended up dying, but someone still needed to take responsibility.
Monika had taken her to the cleaners.
A jarring laugh made its way to Amelie’s ears. “Ahhh, indeed. That will certainly do it. Goddamn do I hate the wretched masses.”
A mocking, sadistic smile spread across Green Butterfly’s face.
Amelie sucked in the faintest of gasps at the dramatic shift in ambience. “So this is you showing your true face?”
“Gee, it really is a shame. I mean, how incompetent can you people get? If Belias had just killed all of Avian like they were supposed to, this whole thing would’ve been over right then and there. You could’ve at least not given in to Lamplight the way you did. And how stupid do you all have to be to surround Monika with over a hundred agents and still have your arses handed to you?” Green Butterfly gave a devil-may-care shrug and let out another peal of scornful laughter. “You all were useless, and that’s why I lost.”
Amelie lashed out with her fist. She leaned all the way over the table and aimed her punch squarely at Green Butterfly’s face.
Green Butterfly was too injured to even think about avoiding it.
“This is an interrogation room, not some place you can go running your mouth as you please. Know your place, you silly little girl.”
The blow sent Green Butterfly stumbling backward. She fell on her hands and knees and clicked her tongue. “…Tch. Gee, why’d you have to go and do that?”
“I did some digging on you.”
As Green Butterfly writhed on the ground, Amelie rose to her feet and sank her boot into Green Butterfly’s gut. Each time she finished a sentence, she slammed her foot into the girl’s body again.
“Your real name is Luehrs. You were born the second daughter of our third princess. But here in Fend, we have a custom of appointing one member of the royal family to help lead our intelligence agency. Records on you were erased, and you were trained to be an elite spy. You had to hold your post for thirty years, and until then, you were afforded no freedom. Yours was a cruel fate. But even so, you served your nation dutifully.”
Once Amelie had finished covering every inch of Green Butterfly’s body in bruises, she stopped her assault for a moment.
“I hear you were on good terms with Prince Darryn.”
“…Yeah,” Green Butterfly groaned. “You could say that. He was rather like an uncle to me.”
Back in the day, that must have been incredibly useful for Hide. In Fend, having the royal family sign off on something opened up all sorts of doors. The royals had more clout than anyone, and having Green Butterfly act as a liaison between them and the CIM would have come as a massive help.
One day, though, all of that came crashing down.
“But you discovered His Royal Highness’s secret, didn’t you?”
“……………………”
“And it was bad enough for you to sell your homeland out to the Galgad Empire. Am I wrong?”
None of that was more than conjecture on Amelie’s part, but she framed it like a foregone conclusion, and her bluff paid off. The statements got a reaction out of Green Butterfly, albeit only a slight one.
“Well, hey.” Green Butterfly’s eyes widened. “Maybe you’ve got a head on your shoulders after all. Hee-hee. And here I was, thinking you were just another numbskull who wouldn’t dare doubt her precious royals.”
“………”
Not long ago, that had been true. Amelie had trusted the royal family, and she’d devoted her entire being toward serving Hide.
However, Klaus had given her a warning—Question everything you know.
She hadn’t just blindly taken his advice, but losing to Lamplight and finding out about Green Butterfly had shaken Amelie’s carefully constructed worldview and filled her with more regret than she could stomach.
Panting and gasping all the while, Green Butterfly used her trembling arms to slowly lift herself back to her feet.
Amelie’s eyes went wide.
She’d attacked Green Butterfly viciously enough that she shouldn’t have been able to move a single finger. Amelie had tortured over a hundred spies in her day, and not one of them had ever stood back up afterward.
“All I wanted was to share it!” Green Butterfly’s lips quivered in pain. “Bad? Oh, it was bad. What I learned was just wrong. But no one believed me. They would never believe me. Even though he…he supported the Nostalgia Project! It was evil, and it drove me to despair. It was evil, plain and simple!”
Her voice had started out faltering, but by the back half of her speech, it took on a renewed fervor.
Eventually, she stood there on her own two legs and gave Amelie an intense stare.
“I thought I could split that despair with Monika. Gee, I really did. She was supposed to be my perfect partner.”
“What’s the Nostalgia Project?” Amelie had never heard of it before.
Green Butterfly spat out a mouthful of blood and gave her a grin. “You really want to know? Once I tell you, you’ll never be able to unhear it!”
“………”
Amelie didn’t like how forthcoming Green Butterfly was being. There were parts of her attitude Amelie didn’t at all care for, but they’d successfully established a dialogue, and Green Butterfly had revealed the name of the hitherto unheard-of Nostalgia Project all but unprompted.
She had an ominous feeling, but at the same time, turning back wasn’t an option.
“I’m done being someone else’s pawn,” she replied. “I want to question everything, learn everything, and make my own decisions about how best to help my nation thrive. Now, tell me. What was the nature of His Royal Highness’s crime?”
“Gee, I like that new look in your eyes.”
Green Butterfly shot her a toothy grin and tottered back over to her chair.
Amelie returned to the table as well and sat down facing her.
“To explain the Nostalgia Project, there’s a man I need to tell you about first.”
“A man?”
“I met him two years ago. He’s an absolute lowlife, and he came to me when I was in the depths of despair.”
Green Butterfly went on, taking clear delight in watching Amelie’s reactions.
“White Spider—the man who, for all intents and purposes, built Serpent from the ground up.”
While Green Butterfly’s interrogation was going on, White Spider was working away at a typewriter in his hideout.
He’d just made a terrible discovery—their host had missed his deadline.
Resident cokehead novelist Diego Kruger had a contract with a publishing house. That publishing house wanted their manuscript, and they wanted it yesterday. If you don’t send it in, we’re coming over there ourselves, read the telegram.
That deadline had long since passed.
Having a third party show up at the apartment would be bad news for White Spider. However, Diego was deep in a narcotic stupor and unlikely to write so much as a page, and Black Mantis was out at the moment.
White Spider was left with no choice but to write it himself.
“This is a sick joke! Who the hell goes and starts moonlighting as a writer here at the eleventh hour?! I’ll have you know I’m a very serious terrorist. I murdered a prince, for crying out loud!” he complained to no one. “This is BULLSHIIIIIIIIIIT!!”
But all his ranting and raving only echoed off the walls in vain.
Then a phone call came in from the publisher.
“Mr. Kruger, how’s that manuscript coming along?! We’re coming over right this minute!”
“Hi there, this is Mr. Kruger’s assistant. Mr. Kruger is in the zone right now. If you interrupt him, I’ll kill you.”
White Spider briskly put down the receiver and let out a long sigh.
Welp, I guess I just gotta do this thing.
With that, he turned to the final resort of every writer who ever found themselves unable to advance their stories—plagiarizing his own life experiences without reservation or shame.
White Spider was once a soldier in the Galgad army.
He only joined up because it was impossible to find a decent job after the failed war, and he never put that much effort into his training. As a result of the peace treaty that they signed with the Allies after the Great War’s end, the size of the Galgad Empire’s military was strictly limited. On top of that, the army found itself under heavy criticism from the populace for having lost the war.
That was where he discovered he had a knack for long-range sniper marksmanship—but the era where a single sniper could change a war’s tide had long since come and gone. None of his talent earned him much praise, and eventually, he got into a feud with a superior officer and found the whole thing so annoying he put a request to retire from the service.
From there, he spent his twenties unemployed.
It was the most freedom he’d ever enjoyed in his life.
Each night, he liked to buy a bottle of cheap beer and go lie down in a public park. There, lying on the unmaintained grass, he would gaze at the sky.
Y’know, the way things stand right now, I bet we’re the weakest country in the world.
The night wind ran across his skin as he stared up at the steeples dotting the capital.
We got carried away and picked a fight with Fend and Lylat, got our asses handed to us, and ended up as the whole world’s villains. They even took most of our colonies, so we’re basically an empire in name alone at this point. And with reparations to pay that are dozens of times more than our national budget, we’re basically the biggest losers around.
Law and order in the Galgad capital weren’t much to speak of. As the wealthy made their riches off the recovery bubble and amused themselves with musicals and concerts, the underclasses spent their nights roaming the streets like wild dogs hunting for easy marks. In the parks, nights were defined by cash and booze, by drugs and sex.
Seeing the way the rich and the poor intermingled in the capital, it was almost like they were licking each other’s wounds from the lost war.
He loved weakness, and he loved staring aimlessly up at the sky with nothing to his name but a few coins.
If a fight broke out, he always sided with the underdog. If he saw a man hitting a woman, he’d kick that guy across the road without a moment’s hesitation. If he heard someone griping about their job, he would help them find a solution. Know who to fear. Know who not to—that was the creed he followed as he went around solving problems in his cowardly little way. Then he would pester the people he helped for some pocket change to support his homeless lifestyle.
He was the kind of layabout you could find just about anywhere in the world.
“What a coincidence. I love the weak, too.”
One night, a middle-aged man showed up clutching a bottle of beer. He had the energy of a world-weary old man, and he took sparing sips from his high-proof beverage. His coat was tattered and dirty. The man’s gut was worryingly flabby, and his hair had bits of white in it and looked like it hadn’t been combed in ages.
The middle-aged man plopped himself down on the ground beside the young man, and the two of them began hitting it off as they shared drinks.
The younger man clapped his hands together. “You and me, we’re cut from the same cloth.”
The older man seemed tickled pink by the assertion. He covered his mouth with his hand and let out a booming “Ho-ho!” He was clearly a happy drunk, and a loud one. He took another swig. “But I have to ask, son, what is it you like about the weak?”
“I just like what I like. Who cares about why?” Still lying on the ground, the younger man smirked. “That’s like asking why dudes love women with big ol’ booties.”
“Just give me the first thing that comes to mind.”
“Okay, then it’s ’cause I hate the way strong people act all high and mighty.”
“Spoken like a true bum.”
“You know I’m right, though. Think about how many people from other countries our military’s killed. And think about how many of our people the Allies tore through.”
“And you’re saying that makes you mad?”
“All I know is, if every country in the world was equally weak, we wouldn’t have to worry about wars. We could all just take a bottle of beer in one hand and our dicks in the other, and no one would have to die.”
“Amen to that.”
As they shared their casual back-and-forth, the older man paused for seemingly no reason and let out another booming “Ho-ho!”
The younger man plugged his ears with his fingers and grinned. Trading meaningless banter with complete strangers was one of his absolute favorite ways to kill time.
However, the next thing the older man said caught him by surprise. “The Weakest Problem Solver in the Capital.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what they call you, isn’t it? A stray dog who only accepts tiny payments for his services, who has no friends or property or home to call his own, and who has nothing to lose? I must say, you’re a pretty odd duck.”
The younger man blinked. Apparently, his new friend already knew everything about him. However, he wasn’t too bothered by that. After all, he was drunk.
The older man thumped him on the shoulder. “My boss has taken a fancy to you. Ho-ho. I’d love to arrange a meeting, if you’d let me.”
He raised his bottle aloft.
“There are people trying to violate the world you love so dearly. What do you say we save it together?”
Then he introduced himself.
The portly middle-aged drunk had a name—and that name was Indigo Grasshopper.
The younger man’s head was muddled from the booze, and he largely assumed that Indigo Grasshopper was joking. After all, he was dealing with a jolly old middle-aged drunkard who was saying crazy shit like “We’re a group called Serpent” and “We’re spies who travel across the world” with breath that reeked of alcohol. Every so often, Indigo Grasshopper would pause to howl “Ho-ho!” up into the night sky. There was no way the young man was going to take him seriously.
“Follow me,” Indigo Grasshopper said, and the two of them walked through the city. The younger man had no idea where they were going, but he was excited to find out.
As it turned out, their destination was the Galgad Ministry of Defense building.
Holy shit, the younger man thought.
All the lights inside were off. “I got a member of parliament to clear the building,” Indigo Grasshopper said as if it were no big deal. After using a passkey to go through the back entrance, Indigo Grasshopper headed to a locker room. It was clear from watching him that it wasn’t his first time there. He retrieved a suit jacket from one of the lockers and cast off his ratty coat.
At that point, the younger man started sobering up in a hurry.
“Allow me to introduce you.” All of a sudden, Indigo Grasshopper’s voice was far more collected. “This individual is Serpent’s boss.”
The person in question was waiting for them in one of the ministry’s offices.
The moment their gazes met, the blood drained from the younger man’s face, and he found himself holding his breath. He could tell that he was looking at something that ought not be seen. It was the first time in all his life he’d felt that way.
That still, oppressive pair of eyes never released him from their sight.
Indigo Grasshopper handled all the explanations. In a much more serious tone than before, he explained that there was a plan called the Nostalgia Project being carried out in secret, that Serpent was an intelligence unit trying to stop it, and that they operated independently from Galgad’s traditional intelligence structures.
None of it sounded remotely believable.
When the younger man faltered, Serpent’s boss opened their mouth.
“The Nostalgia Project’s goal,” they said, their voice gravelly, “is to eradicate the weak from the world.”
That was all, and from there, Indigo Grasshopper resumed his explanation. He showed the younger man proof as well; he had photos and voice recordings to back up everything he was saying.
Just hearing the details of the Project was enough to make the younger man’s blood run cold. Even with the most conservative estimates possible, the casualty count would still number in the millions. It would be a black mark on human history. Every fiber in his body was screaming that it needed to be stopped. When Indigo Grasshopper told him that people were trying to violate the world he loved so dearly, he hadn’t been exaggerating.
At the same time, though, he immediately understood just how difficult the Project would be to impede. Doing so would require putting pressure on influential parties across the world, but if they did that, it would mean going head-to-head with other intelligence organizations.
“O-okay, wait, hold on now! I’m picking up what you’re putting down! I believe you, I do!”
“Ah, what a comfort to hear,” Indigo Grasshopper replied. “Looks like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. And here I was, afraid you might dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist—”
“Yeah, yeah, thanks. But there’s one thing I don’t get.”
“Hmm?”
“What do you want me to do?”
Spittle flew from his mouth as he wailed.
Everything they were talking about was way above him. His knees were rattling, and he couldn’t make them stop.
“This doesn’t make sense. Serpent’s this spy org that’s gonna turn the world on its head, right? What’s a badass team like that want with a guy like—”
“We want you to recruit for us,” Indigo Grasshopper replied.
“Huh?”
“The boss can tell you’ve got a knack for it.”
Then, without a shred of embarrassment, he laid out the truth.
“And right now, Serpent only has two members. It’s just me and the boss.”
“The fuck……………?”
The young man froze with his mouth hanging open.
Upon seeing his shock, the two members of Serpent gave him a pair of self-deprecating shrugs.
At that point, the sheer hilarity of it all began hitting him. With little regard for the fact he had an audience, he clutched at his chest as side-splitting laughter started bubbling up from the deepest parts of his gut. “Ha-ha-ha-ha, ahhh-ha-ha-ha! You’re serious? You’re actually serious?! You guys?! The two of you are gonna take on the biggest intelligence agencies in the world?! How do you think that’s gonna go for you, huh?!”
Indigo Grasshopper gave him another shrug. “You’re not wrong.”
“You know what, boss? I like you. And you, too, Indigo Grasshopper. I can never say no to a good underdog story.” He wiped a tear out of the corner of his eye. “And hell, Serpent’s gotta be the weakest spy team in the world.”
Eventually, the shocked nations of the world would come to perceive Serpent as an intelligence unit shrouded in mystery—a mighty organization they knew nothing about, one completely divorced from the conventional Galgad Empire structures.
However, that was a far cry from what it actually was.
In truth, it was a tiny intelligence team that three people had built the way one would a start-up company. The average detective agency had a larger staff than they did. That was why it was so hard to track down.
It was just three people—three people against the world.
Serpent’s boss gave the young man the name White Spider, and Indigo Grasshopper taught him the basics of espionage.
According to them, they’d seen a talent in him—the ability to love people’s weaknesses.
He was the kind of guy who would sling an arm around a pauper’s shoulder and unashamedly laugh, “Look at us, just a pair of broke bums.” The kind of guy who would go to someone with a broken heart and sob, “I want a girlfriend, too!” The kind of guy who would find someone getting ground down by workplace drama, say, “I feel you, man,” and mean it from the bottom of his heart. He could identify people’s weaknesses without even talking to them, and it was in his nature to genuinely empathize with them.
“Don’t think of it as trying to recruit the best spies; think of it as looking for drinking buddies you feel like you would hit it off with,” Indigo Grasshopper told him. “That’s probably the best way to make use of your skills.”
“You make it sound so easy,” White Spider replied, then scratched his head and agreed to go along with the plan even though he only sort of meant it. “But look, man, if I go around collecting people I get along with, we’re gonna end up with a bunch of crackpots. You know, the kind of weirdos that don’t play well with others.”
“That’s absolutely fine.” Indigo Grasshopper gave him a big nod. “If anything, so much the better.”
In the end, White Spider spent the next several years rubbing shoulders with people from intelligence agencies all over the world in search of personnel.
Just as the other two had predicted, his efforts ended up paying huge dividends for the team.
From the United States of Mouzaia’s JJJ intelligence agency, he got the Qiongqi—later known as Black Mantis.
White Spider started out as a spy visiting the Galgad Empire.
The Empire’s Ravine intelligence agency had been keeping an eye on the Qiongqi for a while. The man cared more about renovating his prosthetics than his actual missions, and he embezzled money that came from his homeland to buy new parts. Every so often, he remembered to send fake reports back home, and when he did, he always demanded more money. “I’m about to make a breakthrough,” he would tell them.
The man was obsessed with his prosthetics, and White Spider found that positively endearing.
“Let me guess—you wanna be a hero, don’t you?” he said one day, stopping by the Qiongqi’s hideout. “But they never give you any decent missions, so you content yourself with conning your allies and languishing away. Gotta say, that’s pretty pathetic.”
The man shot him a murderous stare. “And who the hell are you?”
White Spider shrugged. “A guy even less cool than you.”
It only took White Spider a few short conversations to get the Qiongqi to drop his guard, and once he explained the Nostalgia Project, the man decided to join Serpent. He was a tall man who never removed his hood, and he casually brandished his three right arms.
“Ah, finally someone recognizes my potential. Perhaps this is fate.”
From the Bumal Kingdom’s Curse intelligence agency, he got Breeder—later known as Silver Cicada.
The next spy White Spider found was a woman about his age.
Breeder had had doubts about her intelligence agency from the get-go. She was disillusioned with its constant choices that served no purpose but to curry favor with the fat cats in charge of their government, and she didn’t believe in the administration enough to risk her life for it. She made sure to keep her feelings hidden from her colleagues, but she couldn’t escape White Spider’s eye.
He gave her his pitch in front of a politician’s estate. “Man, I feel you. Personally, I make sure to find some jackass politician’s car every morning so I can stick a wad of gum on it.”
Breeder didn’t hesitate a moment. She made her decision fast and immediately agreed to join Serpent.
“I owe you a deep debt. Never before have I had a compatriot who saw things as I did. Please, allow me to pledge my allegiance to you.”
Her hair was tied up in a colorful hairband, and she assassinated the politician she was supposed to be guarding before making a bold declaration.
“I am Silver Cicada! Now behold, as I sully my homeland and purge the world of the maggots infesting it!”
From the Lylat Kingdom’s Genesis Army intelligence agency, he got Deimos—later known as Purple Ant.
White Spider only came to know him by a lucky stroke of fortune. Over in the United States of Mouzaia, Deimos attacked him, then took an interest in him. That said, Deimos taking an interest in someone simply meant wanting to hear their dying words. Rather than kill White Spider on the spot, he decided to instead torment him first, then kill him later.
The man who’d tied White Spider up and was delightedly harassing him with a stun gun was thin and had a gentle face. White Spider sensed such violent urges in the man that it made his hair stand on end. However, he could tell that there was something keeping the man’s repugnant power in check.
Getting him to come around took a good long while.
“I’m afraid I’m not interested,” Deimos told him. “Though I will admit that I don’t much care for the way those Allied bastards are living it up while much of the Western-Central world is still reeling from the horrors of war.”
“Look, from what I’ve seen, you’ve made a couple slaves for yourself.” White Spider gave him a provocative grin. “But you wanna really go wild, don’t you? What, did Nike order you to hold back or something?”
The name he dropped was that of a world-famous spy—Nike, the strongest counterintelligence agent in the Lylat Kingdom.
There wasn’t a person in their line of work who hadn’t heard her name. She was a legend, and it hadn’t taken White Spider long to figure out that she was the one holding Purple Ant’s leash. Purple Ant was such a monster that no one but Nike could have possibly controlled him.
“C’mon, let your instincts run wild. You wanna tear everything down—and I get that.”
White Spider didn’t flinch; he just kept on throwing words at the terrifying being before him.
Eventually, Purple Ant signed on.
“Maybe you’re right. I guess ruling over Mitario as its king might be kind of nice.”
For two whole years, White Spider continued gathering members for Serpent.
Considering that he’d been unemployed up to that point, the results he put up were nothing short of miraculous. However, White Spider had no idea that his work had attracted some unwanted attention.
That attention led to a meeting—one that would prove to be a major turning point for the team.
It was the day that all of Serpent was going to gather under one roof for the first time.
White Spider had surreptitiously sent word to all the members, and he made his preparations to introduce them all to Indigo Grasshopper and the boss. He was the one who’d handled the communications, who’d arranged to smuggle everyone into the country, and who’d put plans in place to fool their respective intelligence agencies. He figured that rather than telling each of them their agenda separately, it would be more efficient to get them all together and do it in one go.
That was a fatal mistake.
There was no need to bring every member in the org together like that, and if he’d told Indigo Grasshopper about his plan ahead of time, Indigo Grasshopper would have stopped him on the spot. However, White Spider’s string of successful recruitments had both gone to his head and left him exhausted, both of which dulled his judgment and led him to his folly.
They gathered on neutral ground. It was a mountainous nation not far from the Empire.
White Spider’s schedule that day was packed. In the afternoon, he went to the airfield to greet Purple Ant.
“Excellent, Spider. Very good. A king deserves a kingly welcome.” When he got off the airplane, he did so with ten slaves in tow. “For your reward, I’ll punish you—by killing you thrice over.”
“How does that make any sense?!”
That evening, he got a call from Black Mantis saying he didn’t want to come.
“A soothsayer told me my fortunes were bleak. It might be time for me to retire.”
“Just get your ass over here already!!”
When night fell, he met up with Silver Cicada in an alleyway by the station and learned that she’d gotten herself into trouble.
“Mr. Spider, sir! Last night, I lost all my operating funds at a casino—”
“I’ll spot you!”
His teammates were giving him one headache after another.
Wait a minute, am I basically at the bottom of the Serpent pecking order?
He should have had seniority over all of them, yet you never would have guessed from the way they treated him. He didn’t like that realization one bit, but he continued doing his prep work all the same.
From what he’d heard, the boss and Indigo Grasshopper were hiding in a villa located on one of that nation’s outlying islands. He didn’t know the details, but for some reason, the boss needed to constantly change their whereabouts.
It was only when the four of them—White Spider, Black Mantis, Silver Cicada, and Purple Ant—reached the harbor that White Spider realized the depths of his blunder.
“Well, well, well. What a fun little group we’ve got here.”
There was a man lying in wait for them.
He was sitting in their boat wearing a navy-blue jacket and an easygoing smile. Swords were a weapon hardly befitting a spy, yet there was one resting on his shoulder all the same. Despite his stately beard, the jovial grin on his face made him come across as unserious.
“The Qiongqi, Breeder, and Deimos, huh? You’ve got a good eye on you. Pretty impressive, how you managed to assemble a bunch of spies that my boss was already keeping tabs on.” The sword-wielding man slowly rose to his feet. “What’re you plotting, mushroom-head?”
White Spider couldn’t move. He could barely even feel his own legs.
Indigo Grasshopper had given him the rundown on the basics of the espionage landscape, so he knew that there were two people whose combat skills were wholly unmatched. The raw violence they commanded was the pinnacle of what mankind could achieve, and no one could ever hope to beat them in a fair fight. If one of them came at you, your only options were fleeing or conning them. Fighting back was a surefire route to an early grave.
There was Nike, the Lylat Kingdom’s lady of the hammer who ruled over and protected its capital. And there was Torchlight, the Din Republic’s swordsman and Inferno’s second-in-command.
Now the latter of the two was giving him a probing look.
White Spider couldn’t sense a single bit of bloodlust or fervor from him. He’d clearly noticed the four of them, but he wasn’t letting any of his hostility show.
“It’s four against one, Mr. Spider,” Silver Cicada crowed. She clearly had no idea who the man was. “I say we slaughter the knave!”
She pulled out two fistfuls of syringes and rushed the swordsman down.
Once she went in, the rest of them had no choice but to follow up. White Spider drew his pistol, and Black Mantis brandished his prosthetics and rushed after Silver Cicada with a cry of “Surmounters, avail me!” As they did, Purple Ant gave an order to his ten subordinates. “Tear him apart.”
The swordsman—“Torchlight” Guido—slowly reached for his sword’s handle.
Then the world ruptured.
White Spider couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. As soon as Silver Cicada and Black Mantis got close to Guido, they went flying like they’d just been blasted away by an invisible explosion. Black Mantis’s prosthetics and Silver Cicada’s syringes shattered into pieces, and lacerations shot across the bodies of Purple Ant’s men and splattered their blood across the ground. Meanwhile, the bullet White Spider fired simply vanished into thin air—or at least, it appeared to. In truth, Guido had sliced it to bits.
By the time White Spider finally understood what had happened, Guido had already closed in on him. White Spider tried to hit him with the butt of his gun, but his efforts were in vain, and Guido hit him and Purple Ant with the flat of his sword in rapid succession. When a blow smashed White Spider in his left arm, the arm twisted backward like all its bones had vanished.
Not even two seconds had passed, and the situation had completely unraveled.
Not a single one of the spies White Spider had gathered were still on their feet. They’d been fighting so boldly just moments before, but now they were lying unconscious on the ground to a man. Guido had completely annihilated them.
“That’s it, huh?” Guido said. He swung his sword to shake off the blood. Then he turned his disappointed gaze over to White Spider, who was cowering on his knees. “Now, as for you—”
“Ah…”
White Spider had been too befuddled to do anything, but now he understood the situation clearly. He was about to die. Guido was going to torture him, make him give up every bit of intel he had, then lop his head off once he was finished. There was no way White Spider could escape from a titan like him. He trembled from head to toe, and tears welled up in his eyes. His body felt like it was burning up and freezing over at the same time, and the urge to vomit was overwhelming.
He needed to pull Guido onto his side.
There was no other way for him to survive. However, he didn’t have enough time left to suss out Guido’s weaknesses.
At that point, the only thing driving him was a primal desire to live.
“Please, just spare my life.”
Guido scrunched up his face. “What?”
“I’ll do anythiiiiing! I’ll kill whoever you waaaant! If you want money, just name your price! I don’t wanna diiiiiiiiiiiiiiie! Waaaaaaaaaah!”
He screamed. He wailed. He sobbed. He cast aside every ounce of pride he had and poured everything he had into begging for his life. For all the allies he’d gathered and all the achievements he’d let go to his head, all he could do in the face of such might was to brownnose, lick the man’s boots, and debase himself in every way possible.
“This is buuuuuuuuuullshit, man! How am I ever supposed to beat youuuuuuu?! Damn you, Indigo Grasshopper, you tricked meeeeeeeeeee! I’ll get you for thiiiiiiiiiiiiis!”
To top it all off, he even started badmouthing the people who led him to that point. He spent the next little while shouting about how Serpent’s boss and Indigo Grasshopper needed to “eat shit and die,” then choked on his own spit and lapsed into a coughing fit.
Then he realized something.
“…I think I soiled myself.”
There was a foul odor coming from his lower body.
“…And I think it’s number two.”
Guido grimaced.
Snot and tears rolled down White Spider’s face as he went on. “Please, oh high and mighty Torchlight, I’m begging you.” Still down on his knees, he bowed low. “You have to at least hear me out.”
It was the most pathetic pleading anyone had ever done. Guido had seen hundreds of people beg for their lives over his long career as a spy, but that was the worst demonstration he’d witnessed by a country mile. The way the weakness-loving White Spider had abandoned any semblance of pride had been truly disgraceful.
At the end of the day, though—doing so had been the right call.
If he’d gone for some sort of half-assed bargaining, Guido would have sliced off his arms and begun the interrogation without a second thought. Being a spy demanded ruthlessness, and that was something Guido certainly had. However, he’d stayed his hand.
Only a man who truly loved weakness and was loved by it in turn could have been unsightly enough to make that happen.
Guido let out a small sigh. “Now I don’t even want to kill you.” With that, he stowed his sword in its sheath.
Guido gave White Spider a scathing glare. “I’ve never even seen someone beg that appallingly.” But White Spider was downright pleased. The way he saw it, the fact that he was still alive meant that whatever he’d done, he did it perfectly.
However, he did end up having to reveal every bit of Serpent intelligence he knew. White Spider had no interest in protecting classified information when his life hung in the balance.
When he got to the bits about the Nostalgia Project, Guido didn’t seem particularly surprised. He simply scowled a bit and said, “Yeah, I figured.” Apparently, Inferno already had some preliminary intel on it.
“If what you’re saying is true, then I gotta go talk things over with my boss,” Guido said. “Out of respect for that repugnant begging you did, I won’t kill you just yet.”
He sounded supremely confident, and he even left the other three alive, too. After tying up their hands and legs, he locked them in an abandoned house and freed the people Purple Ant had brought.
There was no one guarding them. Guido hadn’t brought any of his teammates along.
When White Spider realized that, he let out a grim laugh.
Not only had “Hearth” Veronika caught wind of everything he’d been doing, but she’d also determined that it would take a single agent to bring him down. Then “Torchlight” Guido had gone and completed the mission without breaking a sweat like the avatar of violence that he was.
How the hell did he get it in his head that he could go up against people like that?
Even after they were awake, Purple Ant and Black Mantis didn’t say a single word. The two of them were prideful, and they were taking their crushing defeat hard. Silver Cicada, on the other hand, was the picture of cheer. “This house reeks, doesn’t it?” she noted.
One way or another, this is curtains for Serpent.
Now that they were in Inferno’s crosshairs, they were doomed. Any moment now, Guido would return with his teammates in tow to capture Serpent’s boss and Indigo Grasshopper.
I hope the boss and Indigo Grasshopper manage to escape, but I don’t love their odds…
The detainment continued for nearly a week. The good news was, Guido had hired some locals to look after them.
The next time Guido showed up, he looked haunted. His face had the telltale pallor of sleep deprivation, and considering how haggard he was, he probably hadn’t been eating much, either. It had only been a week since they saw him, yet he looked like a completely different man.
White Spider braced himself for death all over again. The coldness in Guido’s eyes was that of a man about to carry out an execution.
However, nothing could have prepared him for what Guido was about to say.
“The boss and I are through.”
White Spider froze in shock, unable to process what he’d just heard.
Could Inferno’s boss Hearth really have had a falling-out with her second-in-command Torchlight? What could have happened between them?
“Why’s it gotta be like this? Damn it all…,” Guido groaned. Blood dribbled from his tightly clenched hands. White Spider didn’t even want to think about how much force a person must have to squeeze down with to make their nails break their own skin.
“I wanna talk to your boss, mushroom-head.”
Then Guido delivered another unexpected message.
“I’m joining Serpent.”
Not even White Spider had seen that betrayal coming.
From the Din Republic’s Foreign Intelligence Office, he got Torchlight—later known as Blue Fly.
For Serpent, getting Guido was a massive boon. On his suggestion, Purple Ant returned to Mouzaia’s capital and got to work reinforcing his army. Once its ranks hit the two hundred mark, he selected the finest among them and put together a team of unparalleled assassins. On top of that, Purple Ant had always had a soft spot for “Deepwater” Roland, but now he began really putting Deepwater to work.
One thing Purple Ant did was lend him to the Galgad Empire’s main intelligence agency in order to build up Serpent’s relationship with them. Indigo Grasshopper had always been hesitant to get too close with the rest of Galgad’s intelligence community out of the fear of leaks, but even he signed on. “If Guido says it’s the play, then we’d best follow his lead.”
There was one person who benefitted immensely from their newfound financial support from the Empire, and that person was Black Mantis. Through a series of alterations, he was able to build a pair of prosthetics that boasted power beyond anything the human body was capable of. Their mechanical limitations meant that they had limited uptime, but in short bursts, their combat potential was on par with Guido’s.
In just a short half year, Serpent had advanced by leaps and bounds.
Thanks to Guido’s coaching, Silver Cicada’s assassination techniques had improved dramatically. Getting lessons from one of the top spies in the world seemed to be bearing fruit, and she often cried, “He’s incredible, he really is!”
Guido gave White Spider some pointers on occasion, too.
“You know what your problem is? You’re petty and small-minded, and you always will be.”
“Surely there’s gotta be a nicer way you coulda put that!”
Guido had to pull the wool over Hearth’s eyes every time he got in touch with Serpent, but he still found the time to teach them a number of combat techniques and gave them instructions to practice on their own time.
“But hey, maybe that’s fine. Maybe the world could use a spy like that,” Guido said with a laugh from his Fend Commonwealth hideout. “After all, it’s that weakness of yours that drew all of Serpent’s members to you.”
“C’mon, you’re giving me too much credit. I was just running around doing my job, and—”
“Nah, you’re the one who built Serpent.”
White Spider had no idea what Guido was talking about. However, Guido sounded like he meant what he was saying. “Indigo Grasshopper agrees with me. He said that you’re the heart and soul of the team,” he continued, his voice dead serious.
White Spider let out a small grunt as his face went red with embarrassment. He still thought of himself as nothing more than a lowly peon, and that really was all he’d been trying to do.
“But what you don’t have is the conviction.”
“Huh?”
“Being a spy is all about warping the status quo. Fighting back against this world awash with pain and really changing things takes a certain mindset, and you don’t have the conviction for that.” Guido pressed the back of his blade against White Spider’s chest. “Remember this: The team we’re about to kill, Inferno, is the status quo.”
White Spider raised an eyebrow.
None of what Guido was saying really made sense to him. Rather than offer him any further explanation, though, Guido’s voice simply hardened. “Let’s go.”
That was Serpent’s first mission—eliminating Inferno.
Indigo Grasshopper was the one who made the call. If they didn’t take down Inferno, then Inferno was going to wipe them out.
Guido was the one who handled all the planning. Inferno’s members were scattered across the globe. His plan was to lay traps for each of them in turn, and Guido laid out all their locations and weaknesses.
Guido and White Spider’s target was “Firewalker” Gerde, the invincible elderly sniper. In order to take her down, the first thing White Spider did was find them a new teammate.
From the Fend Commonwealth’s CIM intelligence agency, he got Magician—later known as Green Butterfly.
With that, Green Butterfly became the team’s newest spy. She had ugly suspicions about her nation’s royal family, and White Spider got close to her to get her to flip on them. However, she was so arrogant that White Spider knew he needed to take her down a peg, so he conspired with Guido to do just that.
Just as he planned, Gerde wiped the floor with her.
As Green Butterfly lay bleeding from the shoulders on the dance hall floor, Gerde pressed a foot against her spine and a rifle against the back of her head. Green Butterfly let out a wail of pain.
“Hot damn, you got your clock cleaned good.”
When White Spider walked in and let out a derisive laugh, Green Butterfly glowered at him. “Oh, shut the hell up… What are you even doing here?”
He chuckled and gave her an unapologetic shrug. “This was a test. You’re too cocky. Word to the wise: When you’re a small fish, you gotta keep your head down.”
Green Butterfly gave him an absolutely murderous glare, but White Spider ignored her. There was someone he needed to be far more worried about. “Firewalker” Gerde was holding her rifle and staring his way with a look in her eyes that said she was just itching for a fight. Her tank top left her arms all but bare, exposing the muscles bulging from them like armor. In no world did she look like a woman in her seventies. Her face had the wrinkles typical of someone her age, but the aggression lurking in her eyes was that of a much younger woman.
The person she was looking at wasn’t White Spider—it was the man beside him, Guido.
“Oh, huh. So you’re here, then, are you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Sorry about this, Granny G.”
From the outside listening in, one could have mistaken their conversation for a pleasant chat. Peaceful as their words were, though, the air was so rife with tension White Spider could feel it in his skin. He couldn’t close his eyes. He knew that if he blinked, it might well be the last thing he ever did.
His job there was to observe. Indigo Grasshopper had ordered him to make sure that Guido didn’t rejoin Inferno’s side. Personally, White Spider found the whole notion absurd. Even if Guido and Gerde did start colluding, what the hell was he supposed to do against those two monsters?
The tension between the two master spies mounted—
“Welp, guess this here’s the end of the line.”
—but Gerde was the first to loosen up.
She tossed her rifle on the ground. “I know when I’m licked. I can’t beat you, not when you’re already this close.”
“You sure? I was rarin’ to go.”
“Ten years ago, I would’ve given you props for saying that. Then I would’ve laid you out on your punk ass.”
Gerde took the chair that had gotten knocked over in the middle of the dance hall, stood it back up, and sat herself down in it. Her posture was impeccable, and her back was as straight as an arrow.
Guido sensed what she was getting at and went to stand across from her.
“……………”
He looked down at her. His sword was still stowed in its sheath. He just stared at her, so motionless it was like he’d forgotten how to move his body.
“The boss came and cried to me in secret. It killed her that you couldn’t see things her way,” Gerde said. Her voice was gentle now, a far cry from the severity she’d been showing to date.
“She was really that torn up?” Guido gasped.
“Of course she was. And it’s all your fault. ’Cause of you, she went and shouldered the whole thing herself. She didn’t tell the youngsters a thing. Now she’s over in the States plotting God knows what.”
That was valuable intel.
From what Gerde had said, they could infer that Soot, Scapulimancer, Flamefanner, and Bonfire had no idea about the Nostalgia Project. Hearth had intentionally kept them in the dark.
She was trying to bear the Nostalgia Project’s burden all on her own.
“And you know what, sonny, I get how you feel. If I were a bit younger, I might be right there by your side trying to talk the boss down.”
“………”
Guido clutched his sword’s handle tight.
“Once age got the better of me, I started teaching my techniques to as many kids as I could. Heide and those idiot twins ran away from my training, but Little Klaus and plenty of other people inherited my skills.”
“……………”
“My knowledge and techniques will outlive me. That’s plenty. For me, that’s plenty…” Gerde sucked in a deep breath, then bellowed right at Guido. “So pull yourself together and quit your blubbering already!! You’re a grown-ass man, for crying out loud!!”
Guido drew his sword from its sheath.
White Spider was only able to see it for the briefest of moments. However, the way it gleamed was something he would never forget.
A beat later, blood exploded from Gerde’s body, and she perished with a faint smile on her lips.
That was the true cause of Inferno’s destruction—an internal schism.
Serpent had helped bring it about, to be sure, but it was something they never could have achieved on their own. If White Spider had simply kept making moves at random, then some intelligence agency or another would eventually have crushed them. Without Guido’s strong conviction, they never would have achieved the successes they did.
The Nostalgia Project was the ultimate sin, and the different approaches to that sin tore the greatest spy team in the world apart.
“Hearth” Veronika chose to shoulder all that sin herself and bring the Project to fruition.
“Torchlight” Guido chose to stop the sin and stand against her.
Both of them sacrificed themselves for the sake of what they believed in. The rest of the team’s deaths were simply collateral damage, nothing more.
An era was at its end.
The moment Guido struck Firewalker down, there was something inside White Spider that told him the mission was complete. Sure enough, successful reports came in one after another. Purple Ant took care of Hearth in the United States of Mouzaia; Indigo Grasshopper took care of Soot and Scapulimancer in the Lylat Kingdom; and Black Mantis took care of Flamefanner in the Galgad Empire.
They sent all the bodies back to the Din Republic.
They did so out of respect for their status as legendary spies, and also because Guido had insisted that they do so. He wanted them to at least get to rest in the same grave.
White Spider breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a big mission, and it felt good to wrap it up. He felt like he’d done his job, and that Serpent had grown into a respectable organization.
Purple Ant had become a force to be reckoned with. He didn’t just murder Hearth, but famous spies from across the globe, and his work plunged the world’s intelligence agencies into chaos. There was also Blue Fly, who boasted arguably the greatest combat skills in the world. On top of that, there was Black Mantis, who could cause even more damage than Blue Fly in localized areas; Green Butterfly, whose CIM leadership position allowed her to manipulate its agents as she pleased; Indigo Grasshopper, whose full talents were yet unplumbed; and Silver Cicada, who was growing and improving by the day.
Together, they had the power to take on the world.
Holy shit, we might actually be able to stop the Nostalgia Project.
It was hard to blame him for getting excited.
However, destroying Inferno had created a huge problem.
Neither Hearth nor Torchlight had told anyone about the situation they’d been faced with. After all, being a spy required both resolve and an ability to keep secrets.
That confluence of circumstances gave birth to a monster.
A monster who’d been left all alone, who’d been told nothing, and whose heart had just been lit with the flames of revenge.
White Spider had been told about him, of course. He was Inferno’s youngest member, the one who got stuck with all the grunt work. The global intelligence community had been taking notice of him as of late. Rumor had it that he’d inherited all of Inferno’s skills and was going to be a major player in the coming generation.
“He’s my pupil, so his skills are the real deal. He might have more raw talent than anyone else on the team,” Guido told White Spider just before the attack on Inferno. However, Guido’s appraisal wasn’t all glowing. “But he’s still a wet-behind-the-ears kid. His emotions are a big weakness of his. When push comes to shove, he always turns to his Inferno teammates. If you mess with his head, it’ll knock off half his talent right then and there.”
“I see, I see,” Silver Cicada said as she listened from White Spider’s side and jotted on her notepad. Once she’d figured out what trap she was going to lay for him, she immediately got to work making preparations.
All of a sudden, a thought crossed White Spider’s mind. “You sure about this? Listening to you talk, it sounds like Bonfire’s pretty taken with you.”
“Sure he is. I raised him like a son.”
“Couldn’t we just win him over? I’d be happy to take a crack at it.”
White Spider had no particular sympathy for Bonfire, he just figured that it was better not to let a potential asset go to waste. If the guy really had inherited techniques from all of Inferno, then that made him plenty monstrous as far as White Spider was concerned.
“Not a chance.” Guido shook his head. “I told you, my idiot pupil’s too dependent on Inferno. He won’t turn traitor. If we let a single Inferno member slip through our fingers, then they’ll eventually follow in the boss’s footsteps and become a threat to Serpent.”
White Spider could hear a hint of sadness in Guido’s voice. He must really have loved Bonfire in his own peculiar way. It did make sense—Guido was the one who originally found him. He’d raised Bonfire up, taken him on globe-trotting missions, and treated him to the local delicacies whenever they finished a job.
As White Spider was reflecting on how insensitive his question had been, Guido continued. “But y’know,” he murmured, “if by some impossible stroke of fate, he manages to overcome this, if he finally figures out how to fight on his own…”
The corners of his mouth curled ever-so-slightly upward.
“Then when that happens, that idiot pupil of mine…he really might become the Greatest Spy in the World.”
There was too much self-deprecation in Guido’s expression to call it hope, yet too much of a smile to call it concern. White Spider wondered if Guido knew how conflicted he looked. He very nearly asked, but he decided not to. Perhaps that half-assed nature of his was his weakness. White Spider was surprised that a man like Guido had such a flaw.
One way or the other, though, White Spider didn’t really take any of what Guido was saying seriously.
Thinking back now, that was probably the point where the wheels started coming off.
Silver Cicada got struck down.
When White Spider heard the news, he was shocked. She seriously lost? At that point, though, he wasn’t too concerned yet. Guido had offered to eliminate Bonfire himself. Inferno had officially been on a mission to retrieve the Abyss Doll bioweapon, and Guido was going to take advantage of that to set a trap.
With him on the job, White Spider was sure they had nothing to worry about.
Then Guido lost, too.
White Spider saw it happen himself, and he could barely believe his own eyes. Someone must have screwed up. Considering the way Guido took the bullet White Spider had meant for Klaus, maybe he’d been going easy on him in the fight, too.
Next time, though, White Spider was going to kill Bonfire for sure. After all, he knew every last thing about the man. Bonfire was far stronger than him, but that didn’t mean he was unbeatable. The fact that White Spider managed to escape their confrontation in the Din Republic entertainment district was evidence of that.
Purple Ant, Black Mantis, or Indigo Grasshopper—surely any one of them could take him down.
Then Purple Ant lost and got captured.
In the blink of an eye, Serpent had lost three members. Not just that, but White Spider had really relied on Purple Ant and Blue Fly. The two of them had been Serpent’s wings, and yet a single man had just hewn them both off.
All of Guido’s fears had come to pass—“Bonfire” Klaus had become the Greatest Spy in the World.
A tsunami of terror surged over White Spider and swallowed him whole.
He needed to kill Bonfire immediately.
That much was obvious, but what he couldn’t figure out was how. Not even Purple Ant had been able to take him down. If White rallied his team without a plan, they were liable to get beaten, too. His trusty Blue Fly was gone now.
On the night Purple Ant got captured, White Spider sat in his smuggler’s ship cabin and groaned. The radio conversation he’d had with Bonfire back in the city of Mitario still lingered in his ears.
“I see he wasn’t working alone. How about that rematch, then?”
It had taken everything White Spider had to hide how badly he was shaking. Fighting Bonfire wasn’t an option. White Spider could never hope to match a man like that.
“Dammit, Guido. You were right,” he muttered, his voice barely coherent. “I didn’t have enough conviction. Hell, I didn’t even understand what I was getting myself into, not really. I didn’t get what you meant when you said we were making enemies of the status quo itself…”
He punched the wall so hard his hand bled.
“Ugh… He really is such a pain in Serpent’s ass. I’m gonna kill him. I seriously am. I’m done with this brute-force nonsense. I gotta look at every angle, work through all the details, and come up with a plan that’ll put him down for good,” he said, echoing his words from back in Mitario. “If the weak are meat and the strong do eat…then that guy’s eating good.”
It had taken White Spider years to gather his team, and Bonfire was tearing through them like they were nothing. Even now, he was probably hard at work trying to track White Spider down. Only now did White Spider realize how merciful it had been of Guido to spare his life just for sobbing and begging. He doubted that Serpent’s boss or Indigo Grasshopper would have any idea how to deal with Bonfire, either.
Bonfire was the man who would eventually pick up “Hearth” Veronika’s torch and destroy Serpent. Then he would carry out the Nostalgia Project, killing countless millions of the weak and leaving a world where only the strong got to thrive.
Beating him with raw power was a nonstarter. Blue Fly and Purple Ant had proved as much.
“You know what, I gotta get dirtier. If I wanna overturn the status quo, I gotta become the cowardliest, sneakiest, nastiest son of a bitch the world has ever seen.”
That marked the day where White Spider started gradually warping his personality.
He needed to be Klaus’s opposite—to reach the deepest nadir of weakness.
“Look, it’s not my faaaault!!”
It was four months after Purple Ant’s capture, and White Spider was getting plastered in the city of Hurough.
Today was a momentous day, and in his excitement, he’d rented out an entire hotel suite. It was an extravagant expense, and one that was going to have serious repercussions for his cashflow, but he decided that that could be a problem for tomorrow.
As he drank his favorite beer straight from the bottle, he gazed out at the Hurough cityscape down below. To him, all it looked like was the nation that had bombed his hometown to the ground.
“The thing about weaklings like me is, we gotta play dirty if we ever wanna win! It just is what it is. So sure, maybe I’m a bit underhanded, but it’s ’cause I’m weak. But then everyone goes and holds it against me while the strong fucks get to strut around in public while everyone loves ’em! It’s not faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaair!”
He hurled his beer bottle against the wall, then turned his gaze to the girl.
“You get where I’m coming from, don’t you, ‘Glide’ Qulle?”
There was a girl standing in the corner of the room. Her expression was mournful, and there were tears rolling down her cheeks.
She was a member of a Din Republic spy team called Avian. Her jade-green hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing glasses. Her eyes normally held more dignity than this, but at the moment, there were fat tears pooling in their corners.
Green Butterfly was working as a member of the CIM’s leadership, and she was the one who’d tipped White Spider off about a Din team trying to dig up information on Firewalker. That had caught White Spider’s interest. If a Din spy got killed or went missing, there was a good chance it would be Lamplight who inherited their mission. Working together with Green Butterfly, White Spider laid a trap for one of the Din team’s members.
“If I give you information about Lamplight,” Qulle said, her shoulders trembling in humiliation, “you’ll really let Avian live?”
“Yeah, absolutely. I can be a generous man when people turn traitor for me.”
As it turned out, that was White Spider’s lucky day. Avian actually knew Lamplight’s members. It was such a fortuitous coincidence he nearly let out a cry of joy. White Spider had come across plenty of Din spies, but not a single one of them had any solid intel on Lamplight.
“Of course, all of that is predicated on your information being true. It wasn’t up close, but I’ve seen those Lamplight kids before. If you try to feed me any bullshit, I’ll know.”
“………”
“Also, I am gonna have to keep Avian locked up for a bit.”
Avian going missing would summon Bonfire just as well as them dying, so it was all about the same to White Spider.
Qulle bit down hard on her lip, then handed him an envelope.
White Spider quickly flipped through its contents. Inside, there was a list of every Lamplight member’s appearance and verbal tics. White Spider had seen Lamplight twice. It had been through a scope, so he hadn’t picked up on many details, but Qulle’s report seemed to check out.
“Nice, you pass. Avian can live.”
“I really appreciate it. It’s just…” Qulle hesitated for a moment. “There’s one more piece of secret Lamplight intel, one that I didn’t write in there.”
“Huh?”
“If you’d lend me your ear for a second…”
She lowered her voice and slowly walked over to White Spider.
When she got close, she cupped her hand around her mouth and brought her face right up to his ear.
“………Go fuck yourself.”
She whipped a knife out of her sleeve and lashed out with it.
White Spider didn’t panic. After dodging the thrust aimed at his throat, he kicked Qulle into the air and grabbed the pistol he’d left lying nearby. “Yeah, I figured that was where this was headed.”
“Rgh!”
“You needed a better plan. I gotta say, there’s no one I hate more than people who can’t decide if they’re weak or strong. If you beg for your life, I’d be willing to hear you out.”
Qulle bit down hard on her lip. “We’re not going to lose to you!”
She hurled her knife at him and, in the same breath, turned and fled the suite.
White Spider didn’t bother chasing her. After all, he already knew where she was going.
He picked up the phone and called Green Butterfly using a special direct CIM line. “Change of plans. Qulle tried to screw us.”
There was something strangely exciting about saying it aloud.
“I want everyone on Avian dead.”
White Spider was glad all over again that he’d chosen to celebrate. Today was the day he took the fight straight to Bonfire, and that was something worth commemorating.
Attacking Bonfire head-on was a fool’s errand.
White Spider knew that, so he laid a trap to ensnare Lamplight.
By having Belias kill Avian, he could get Belias and Lamplight to fight. Then he could get someone on Lamplight to turn traitor and have them fight their boss Bonfire to the death.
Using the intel Qulle gave him, he surveilled Lamplight when they came to the Commonwealth and figured out that Monika was in love. Once he did, he took advantage of Prince Darryn’s assassination to get her to betray her team.
In a perfect world, he would have liked the CIM and Lamplight to get into an all-out war, but Monika put a stop to that.
Little by little, though, his wish was coming true. Now he was just one step away from being able to kill the Greatest Spy in the World.
By the time White Spider finished the novel, the sun had long since risen.
Without so much as skimming back over the manuscript, he popped it straight in an envelope. “This baby here’s gonna be a bestseller for sure. I never knew I had such a knack for writing. Looks like the world just found its newest literary genius.”
White Spider knew better than to include any details that could be traced back to Serpent, and he made sure to throw plenty of lies in with the truth. Then, for the big finale, he killed all the characters off in a massive explosion.
“All right, guess I’d better get to work now.”
White Spider headed out into the city.
He had plans to pick up some confidential intel from a CIM mole. Taking care not to get followed, he retrieved a note from beneath a park bench. It listed out the location for the meet—an abandoned clinic. After making sure it wasn’t a trap, White Spider headed in.
White Spider’s CIM informant was waiting for him inside. The man handed him a sheet of paper. “Read it quick, then destroy it.”
On the paper, he’d listed out the CIM’s guard formation for the royal funeral.
White Spider didn’t need to be told twice. He skimmed through the intel at record speed.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I expected. Most of the security is gonna be police and military. Those guys won’t be a problem. It’s the CIM agents working behind the scenes I gotta worry about.
The report also contained the location of the room where Klaus was being held. Getting there would be a challenge. There were loads of guards, and even if White Spider made it there, every minute the assassination took to carry out increased the odds he’d get spotted.
Now, how’re we gonna skin this cat…?
As his thoughts began turning, his gaze landed on the document’s final section.
At the moment, there’s a false rumor going through the CIM. It alleges…
The way it had been bolded gave White Spider a nasty premonition. He read the passage through to its end.
…that the Avian spies are still alive.
“Keeping things interesting, are we?”
Lamplight were the ones who’d planted the rumor, he was sure of it. They were the only ones who would ever devise a plan that absurd. He had no idea what they hoped to achieve, but they were clearly up to something.
However, White Spider had no problem with that. They were spies, and from here on out, everyone was going to be piling lie on top of lie on top of lie in an attempt to finesse each other and get the upper hand.
“Come on, I gave you the intel you asked for,” the informant snapped at him. “Now it’s your turn to talk. You said you knew, right? You said you’d tell me who really killed Prince Darryn—”
“Yeah, of course I do. You’re looking at him. And now I’m through with you.”
White Spider pulled out his concealed pistol and shot the man right through the head.
“Look, man, I really do try to be generous when people turn traitor for me. But at the end of the day, I’m kind of a piece of shit. Sometimes, I don’t exactly keep all my promises.”
He clasped his hands together in prayer for the corpse he’d just made, then left the clinic.
“And sometimes, sacrifices have to be made. We all gotta pitch in to protect the world from the ultimate sin—and you’re up next, Bonfire.”
That was who White Spider—the man who essentially built Serpent from the ground up—really was.
He’d been instrumental in manifesting the pipe dream Serpent’s boss and Indigo Grasshopper had laid out, and he’d grown into a spy who could rival all the intelligence agencies of the world. None of that would have been possible without his talents.
There was something that man knew in his bones—that if he didn’t stop Klaus, then Serpent was done for.
The final battle, the one that Serpent and Inferno’s survivors were staking everything on, was about to begin.
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