Spy Classroom - Volume 8 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Bird of Fire

Twenty minutes before Sara rushed to Klaus’s aid…

Just after she entrusted Klaus’s rescue to her teammates and just before she used up the last of her strength, a spy came to see Sybilla. It was a man adorned with jangling ornaments whose hair went down to his waist. “Fascinating. I never imagined that Amelie would be the traitor.”

Over to the side, Meredith stared at the man in shock. “Mr. Nathan?!”

Based on his reaction, Sybilla inferred that the man was a member of the CIM’s senior leadership.

The man looked at Sybilla. “How elegant,” he complimented her. “She laid a trap for both sides to get them to destroy each other, did she? That’s well within Amelie’s powers…but then, you cleared up the misunderstanding and reached an amicable resolution.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Pandemonium, was it? I can see that Klaus is raising some fine pupils.” His bangles jingled as he combed back his hair. “Rest assured I’ll be offering whatever assistance I can. Serpent slew Prince Darryn, and I refuse to let them escape.”

With that, he borrowed Meredith’s radio and began giving orders to his agents across the city.

Determined to get Klaus back, Sara and Lily blitzed their way down Hurough’s main thoroughfare on a motorcycle.

“Miss Lily, do you actually know how to drive this thing?!”

“Don’t talk to me right now! I’m giving it my best guess!”

“Your best what?!”

After stealing the large motorbike they found in front of one of the nearby houses, they’d hot-wired it to force the engine to start. Lily was clutching the handlebars, and Sara was clinging tight to her back.

Right as they arrived at the building where Klaus was being held, they saw a suspicious car driving off. Upon spotting someone that looked like him in the back seat and realizing how panicked his Belias guards were, they decided to follow the car. However, they soon lost sight of the car itself in the night fog, and they drove through the city guided mostly by guesswork.

“I know where Amelie’s goin’, Lily!”

Eventually, Sybilla’s voice crackled through their radio.

“The CIM figured it out. She might be tryin’ to use the railway! Apparently, she got in touch with someone at a rail factory before this all started goin’ down!”

“The railway?! How’s a motorcycle supposed to catch up with a train?!”

“What’s your current position?”

Sara read out the street name on one of the nearby traffic signs.

A few moments later, they got their reply. Sybilla had been consulting with the CIM agents. “…You’re not gonna make it.”

Her voice was pained.

At the moment, the CIM was mobilizing. Upon realizing that they couldn’t get to the factory in time, they decided to gather up the spies near the station and get on the rails themselves. However, that plan was too slow if they wanted to save Klaus. White Spider could easily have already killed him by the time they caught up.

“Puppeteer” Amelie had arranged the board perfectly.

As horror washed over Sara, Lily spoke up. “Is there a route we can take to circle ahead of them?”

“Huh…?”

“Desperate times, desperate measures. What if we used the Seltin Bridge to board the train from above?!”

“What?!” Sara cried.

Lily slammed on the brakes to change their course.

“…Copy that! I’ll get you that route.”

In addition to Sybilla, they could hear the flabbergasted CIM spies behind her. “…Is that teammate of yours all right in the head?” “Ah-ha-ha, that’s certainly an option we didn’t consider!” Lily ignored them, and once she had her directions, she took off in a straight line.

Eventually, they arrived at the bridge.

The Seltin Bridge was a grand piece of architecture that spanned a river on the city’s outskirts. It had stood for over a century and been renovated several times in that span. The bridge had two levels: the roadway on its upper level, and the railway on the level beneath. All told, it was four hundred feet long.

When they arrived at the bridgehead, Lily brought their motorcycle to a stop. The train was nowhere to be seen yet. They’d successfully cut ahead of it. Now the only problem was how in the world they were supposed to get onto it as it barreled down the tracks.

“Aren’t we just going to get run over?!” Sara very rightly asked. When the train got there, it was going to be moving at over sixty miles an hour.

“We’re gonna go full pedal to the metal, then jump!” Lily shouted. “This is one of the emergency plans Grete thought up.”

“What?”

“She thought up hundreds of different scenarios, all to protect Klaus. That girl’s devoted to a fault.”

The road running on the top section of the bridge and the train tracks running on its bottom were overlapping, but after clearing the river, the road continued on straight whereas the tracks veered to the right. That meant the train would have to slow down just before the bridge’s end, and theoretically speaking, Grete believed it was possible to jump over.

Even confined to a hospital bed, she was still fighting, and she came up with a plan that had struck a group of CIM spies speechless.

“I’m not gonna let Grete’s passion go to waste. This time, it’s our turn to save the day.” Lily squeezed the throttle. “As Lamplight’s leader, I refuse to back down.”

“………”

Inspired by Lily’s dauntless courage, Sara began to work up her nerve as well. Klaus was going to die if they didn’t do anything, and if White Spider got away, then they would lose any chance they had of saving Monika.

Right then, they heard a noise so deep it seemed liable to shake the bridge itself. A powerful orange light tore through the fog. The steam locomotive was coming. A minute from now, it would be entering the lower section of the Seltin bridge they were standing on.

“The train’s here!”

“Then here we go!!”

As Lily revved the engine, a realization dawned on Sara.

Wait, we won’t be able to see the train until we’ve already made the jump?!

Once the train entered the lower section of the bridge, Sara and Lily would have no way to visually track it from the roadway directly above. Landing on the train the moment it came out of the bridge would be all but impossible. The problem seemed so obvious in retrospect, but that was the issue with not having enough time to prepare.

However, the train wasn’t going to wait around for them to figure it out. Within ten seconds, it was going to vanish from sight.

“Don’t you worry.” Lily gave her a soft smile. “You already know the solution. We’ve got Avian on our side, remember?”

The moment Sara heard that, she felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. She took off her cap and squeezed her eyes shut in prayer.

In her mind’s eye, she visualized the Avian members who were right there with them.

Avian’s boss—“Flock” Vindo—stood atop one of the Seltin Bridge’s arches. He was a man with brown hair, and his sharp gaze was fixed on the motorbike down below. As he watched Sara and Lily begin their attempt to jump onto the train blind, he let out an exasperated sigh. “I swear, you Lamplight girls take recklessness to a whole other level.”

Vindo was an inspiration to the girls. He’d been promoted to being in charge of an entire spy team just a short while after he graduated from his academy. He was fiercely determined to surpass Klaus, and the girls had nothing but respect for his competitive drive.

“This’ll be the last bit of backup I ever give you,” he said, his voice forlorn.

Then he took off at a dash across the arch. Taking advantage of his jumping prowess and tremendous sense of balance, he charged down the bridge and hurled himself into the empty air.

“I’ll be your landmark. Don’t hesitate, just follow me,” he declared. “It’s time to take this Lamplight-Avian joint mission and bring it home.”

Lily had the motorcycle on full throttle. The front wheel came dangerously close to lifting off the ground, but she narrowly managed to keep the bike going straight across the bridge despite its sudden acceleration. They’d built up enough speed now that when they jumped to the train, they weren’t likely to get knocked off due to the speed difference.

However, that train had entered the lower section of the bridge and disappeared from view.

The end of the bridge was fast approaching.

Suddenly, Lily let out a shout. “I can see it!”

Sara looked up, and sure enough, she could see him. He was floating there in the night sky and marking their destination.

“I can see the path we need to take through the air!”

If Lily had hesitated for even a moment, it all would have ended in disaster. But if there was one thing she was good at, it was holding her nerve when the chips were down! She never so much as touched the brakes, and she veered at full speed over to the footpath beside the roadway and took advantage of the curb’s height to send the bike flying in the air. They cleared the guardrail and went careening through the night sky.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Right as Lily and Sara got hurled into the air, they spotted the train running right below them. Seeing its massive frame race through the darkness stirred up a primal sort of terror in them.

The good news was, they were moving at practically the same speed it was, and the jump had been timed perfectly.

The next problem, then, was the landing. If they screwed that part up, they wouldn’t live to regret it. However, the heat from the steam billowing out of the train’s smokestack knocked Sara off-balance. Her body began spinning forward. Right as she braced herself for the worst, Lily gave her arm a firm yank.

The two of them landed on the train’s roof, with Sara falling directly on top of Lily’s left shoulder.

“________?!”

Lily let out a squeal of pain. They’d stuck the landing, but Lily’s shoulder had taken a serious hit. She fell to one knee and clutched it with gritted teeth.

“Miss Lily?! You sacrificed yourself to—”

“GO!!” Lily shouted, urging Sara on as intently as she could. “Don’t stop moving! Don’t hesitate, just go!”

Sara sprang into motion, not even taking the time to nod in assent. She took the gun from Lily, dashed across the train’s roof, and put her hat back on.

Lily was down for the foreseeable future. Even if she was in any state to fight, she wouldn’t be of any use on the mission without a weapon or the use of her left shoulder.

The only one who could save Klaus now was Sara. She jumped down to the coupling and threw open the door.

Lamplight and Serpent had laid their schemes, and the battle was reaching its endgame.

When Sara rushed into the train car, she started by taking stock of the situation. The first thing she saw was the body lying on the floor.

Amelie…

Sara hadn’t personally spent time with the woman, but she was still a spy with deep ties to Lamplight. It wasn’t clear why she’d betrayed the CIM, but she must have had a good reason.

Sara also discovered that Klaus was still alive. He was kneeling on the ground by the carriage’s back door, the one that Sara had just come in through.

“Boss…”

“Magnificent.” Klaus nodded. “Thank you for coming to save me. It couldn’t have been easy.”

There was blood gushing from his right leg. The wound was fresh—he’d been shot. His hands were tied up, and his legs were both injured. He was clearly in grave peril, but Sara had gotten there in time.

That said, he wasn’t going to be any help in a fight. Sara didn’t have the means to free his arms. Those were special CIM-made restraints. It would be one thing if she had access to time and tools, but those were two luxuries she didn’t have at the moment.

Sara stepped forward to shield Klaus as she turned her gaze to the man across from him.

“It’s just you?”

The man’s voice was cold and composed. Sara had never met him before, but she knew exactly who he was. He was the mastermind behind Avian’s demise, Prince Darryn’s assassination, Monika’s entrapment, and all of the chaos engulfing the Fend Commonwealth and Din Republic. He was White Spider.

White Spider was bleeding from both arms, and there was a bruise on his face from some sort of blow. However, he was still standing tall, and he had the confidence on his face of a man who was more than ready to keep fighting.

He readied his gun and frowned in displeasure. “Nah, there’s no way you could’ve jumped onto a moving train without getting at least a little banged up. So, what, you had two people take the jump, and your buddy’s outta commission after breaking your fall? Can’t think of any other reason they’d be hanging back.”

After quickly analyzing the situation, he gave her a dismissive shrug.

“So what’d you come here all on your lonesome for?”

“To defeat you.”

She managed to get the words out loud and clear. She wasn’t trembling or catastrophizing like she normally did. She was long past that point.

A lot of people put in a lot of work to get me here.

Sara could never have taken on White Spider alone. Grete, Sybilla, and Lily had all sacrificed themselves to make this showdown a reality, and they were all united in a common goal: to capture White Spider, to find out where Monika was, and to make it back to Din with all of Lamplight intact.

It didn’t matter how powerful her opponent was. She needed to overcome him.

Sara held her gun in both hands and drew a bead on White Spider.

“All you’ve got for weapons is a single gun, huh?” When White Spider saw her get ready to do battle, his mouth curled into a smirk. “Shit, Amelie, you really are the gift that keeps on giving!”

The moment he tried to move, Sara pulled the trigger. The bullet soared straight at him…but then something blocked its path.

“_____?!”

She hadn’t seen him draw it, but there was a knife in White Spider’s left hand. He must have blocked the bullet with its blade.

As Sara gawked in astonishment, White Spider swiftly closed in on her and fired off a front kick. She took the blow straight to the stomach and got sent crashing against the passenger car’s rear wall.

“Sara!!” Klaus cried.

She promptly tried to get back to her feet, but a wave of nausea crashed over her and sent her reeling. The attack had hit her right in the solar plexus. Her sense of balance was shot, and she tripped over her own feet and collapsed.

All it had taken was a single hit, and she was already on the verge of unconsciousness.

Everything…hurts…!! I think I’m going to be sick…!

She planted her hands firmly on the ground and did everything she could not to crumple to her knees.

White Spider had blocked her bullet like it was nothing. Guns were supposed to be the ultimate form of weaponry, but he hadn’t so much as flinched. As far as Sara knew, that was an advanced technique only shared by Guido, Klaus, and Monika.

This was a fight between spies who were on a whole different level than her. Sara had known that she was outmatched, and now she had cold, hard proof.

That gun was the only means of attacking she had. Amelie had confiscated all her other weapons. It was that, and her porcelain knife that was little better than a plaything.

But if I don’t protect the boss here…

She fired off a suppressing shot, not even bothering to take aim. The bullet flew off in the wrong direction. All she’d accomplished was wasting her ammo.

“Look, I get no joy out of punching down.” White Spider backed off and put some space between them. “Do us both a favor and jump off the train, wouldja? All I care about is killing the freak.”

In no world was that going to happen.

After struggling back to her feet, Sara planted herself back between him and Klaus. With ragged breaths, she desperately forced oxygen back into her body. “I won’t let you do that!”

“Oh, okay. Then you can die, too. Either way’s fine with me.”

White Spider took aim. There was a casualness to his movements, like he was simply removing an obstacle, but he wasn’t getting sloppy. It was a logical conclusion based on an accurate reading of Sara’s capabilities.

“………”

Sara had no ability to dodge or parry bullets. If things devolved into a shootout, her defeat would become a certainty.

She needed to find an angle, anything that might give her some tiny edge.

“We…” She put up the best brave front she could in an attempt to rattle White Spider. “We’ve got Avian with us.”

“Huh?”

“Beating you will be a cinch! Haven’t you heard? I think there were whispers going around the CIM about it,” she blathered. “Avian is alive. Mr. Queneau gave Miss Annette a chunk of metal in her hospital room, and that’s not the only thing they’ve done for us. I hear they saved Miss Sybilla just now. Miss Pharma helped her see through her opponent’s lies, and Mr. Vics brought the ceiling down.”

She gave him a triumphant grin.

“And they’re still supporting us even now. The only one here backed into a corner is you. The whole reason we were able to make the jump onto the train is because Mr. Vindo guided—”

She trailed off midsentence. She’d just looked up to gauge her opponent’s reaction, and when she saw the expression on White Spider’s face, her breath caught in her throat.

The man looked bored out of his mind.

That wasn’t the kind of expression you’d see on a spy in the middle of a mission. No, that was the expression of a person looking at someone they felt bad for. Someone they pitied.

White Spider awkwardly scratched his head. “Ugh,” he sighed as he lowered his gun. All the motivation had drained from his voice. “Man, way to spoil the moment.”

“Huh…”

“That was your big plan? Feels like I’m watching a baby crawl into the boxing ring as us dudes are trying to beat each other senseless. You didn’t just kill the mood, you fucking buried it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Calling what you just said a bluff is an insult to the art of bluffing,” White Spider snapped, making no effort to hide his annoyance.

Sara tried her best to riposte. “B-but they really are—”

“It was your animals, right? I’ve known you were an animal handler for ages.”

White Spider took his hand off his head and pulled on his fingers to pop his knuckles. “I figured out you had a hawk, a pigeon, a dog, and some mice back when I was surveilling Lamplight. Then Amelie filled me in on some interesting news. Apparently, they found some hawk feathers in Forgetter’s hospital room. You had your hawk do the delivery, right? That’s who ‘South Wind’ Queneau really was.”

“………”

“Now, the seeing-through-lies bit was what, the dog? You’re not the first spy I’ve heard of teaching their dog to do that. That accounts for ‘Feather’ Pharma. Destroying the building, that’d be the mice. There are plenty of stories about mice causing big accidents chewing through gas lines or electrical wires. That’s how you explain ‘Lander’ Vics.”

He looked at his fingers as though he was just killing time now.

“And as for how you jumped onto the train—”

Without any warning, he nimbly brandished his gun and fired. Sara was so taken by surprise, she couldn’t even react.

The bullet pierced her hat.

Gray feathers filled her view, and the chubby pigeon that had been hiding under her cap tumbled to the ground.

“Mr. Aiden?!”

“—you sent your pigeon on ahead and used him to set your aim. That was your ‘Flock’ Vindo.”

Luckily, the bullet had merely grazed the pigeon’s feathers. However, he was still in no condition to be moving around. Sara had been planning on using him as a diversion of last resort.

“Bottom line is this,” White Spider said, sounding almost bored. “You’ve been shooting your mouths off about Avian this and Avian that these last few days—”

He paused for a moment, then went on.

“—but it was all just fantasies. Avian is dead and gone.”

“________!”

Sara bit down hard on her lip. Everything White Spider had just said was true.

It was what Annette said—that “South Wind” Queneau had helped her—that gave Sara the idea for the plan. Annette had been making it all up. Either that, or she’d seen him in a delirious fever dream.

In truth, Sara had sent her pet hawk up to the hospital room out of concern for Annette. The window had been left open for ventilation purposes, and Sara had told her hawk to deliver Annette a piece of scrap metal without Miné noticing.

Then an idea had dawned on her—the off-the-wall plan of insisting that her pets were actually Avian. Her hope had been that it would confuse the CIM and give White Spider a scare, but apparently he’d seen right through her.

“We were there when Avian died, remember?” White Spider snapped at her. “I can’t believe you thought you could get away with telling lies that flimsy.”

In the end, Sara had failed to steal a win in the battle of deception, too. Her bullshitting skills just weren’t strong enough.

But we still…

She desperately mustered energy in her legs.

We still have—

“You’ve got a look on your face that’s saying ‘We still have the Insight plan,’” White Spider said as though he could read her mind.

Sara froze.

Insight was well and truly the final card left in Sara’s hand. If White Spider had come with a counter, then it would crush her last hopes of victory once and for all.

“When that Monika chick told you to deploy some mystery spy… Yeesh, that gave me a good scare. We were talking about someone I had zero data on.” He scoffed. “But then you guys left me a hint.”

“What…?”

“You lot were awfully close with Avian. You’d have to be, to go and revive their corpses like that.”

Sara could feel her blood run cold.

White Spider’s mouth curled into an ominous sneer. “All I’d heard was that Lamplight and Avian happened to run into each other on a mission once. But if you people were actually thick as thieves, then all of a sudden we were looking at a whole different story.”

He stared at Sara to gauge her reaction.

“Code name Insight…is ‘Cloud Drift’ Lan, the one survivor from Avian.”

“………!!”

Her body trembled. Shock rattled her brain, and her heart felt like it was about to stop.

White Spider nodded mockingly. “But hey, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. End of the day, it doesn’t matter who Insight is. I covered my bases and made sure there was exactly one way to catch up with this train.”

“You did what?”

“It should be, what, about three minutes before the CIM train catches up with us?”

He was right. The CIM weren’t just sitting idly by. Upon realizing that Amelie had betrayed them, they raced to the station and commandeered a top-of-the-line steam locomotive. Insight was on board that train.

However, White Spider had accounted for that.

A foul grin spread across his face. “It’s gonna be a massacre.”

Over in the train car with the CIM’s best and brightest, Lan was focusing with all her might. She took deep breaths to steady herself. Her wounds were far from healed, but she had an important job to do. What she was about to do would be the key to saving Lamplight.

Beside her, the CIM agents were anxious. All of them were in the same boat as her. Flash Fire had carved terror into all of their hearts, and the man they were going to capture was one of her fellow Serpent co-conspirators. Their senses of fear and duty weighed heavy on them.

As tension crackled through the carriage, something changed.

It happened right when they were passing through the Seltin Bridge.

“Who’s the guy in the hood?”

The question came from one of the agents. He’d just spotted an uncannily tall man wearing a thick hood over his head in the next car over. The man was coming their way. His stride was bold, and the sound of metal scraping against metal was audible under his garb.

Eventually, the man entered the carriage that Lan and the agents were in. “White Spider never disappoints. Looks like everything’s proceeding as planned.”

Under his hood, they could see that the man was smiling. And extending from his long torso…there were three right arms.

“By intentionally leaving a way to save Bonfire, he gathered all the strong in one place.”

The sudden appearance of a trespasser was enough for the CIM agents to draw their guns. Each and every one of them was a first-rate spy in their own right. A single intruder was nothing to be afraid of.

However, they’d chosen the wrong man to go up against.

“Now, the Unrivaled purge can begin—Surmounters, avail me.”

The moment the agents opened fire on the man, he brandished his three right arms—or rather, the two of them that were glinting mechanically. Something akin to an explosion burst out of them, blasting all the incoming bullets off course.

Those prosthetics had just released a shock wave.

It wasn’t clear how the process worked, but whatever the man just did, it created a wall of air that had blown up the seats directly in front of him.

Lan knew exactly who that man was. Vindo’s dying message had described the people that killed four members of Avian. One of them was Green Butterfly, and the other was a man with many arms.

She rose to her feet and let out a roar. “YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!”

The many-armed man stopped his tracks and turned to face her. “Ah, so it was Cloud Drift? Heh, good to finally know Insight’s identity.”

The amusement in his voice made Lan’s blood boil. She recalled now that Monika had told them this man’s code name. “Thou’rt Black Mantis, are thou not?”

“I truly am the Unrivaled. How far my name has traveled. Ah, goodness me. Perhaps this means I will never know peace.” He sounded enraptured. “Once again, retirement inches away from me.”

Lan wasn’t the only one livid at how unserious he was being. The CIM agents opened fire again in an attempt to bring Black Mantis down. However, thoughtlessly poking the bear was the wrong move. This was the man who destroyed Avian.

“Wait! He’s too—”

Lan tried to call them off, but they didn’t listen.

“Get out of my way.”

Black Mantis’s prosthetics whirled into motion and began firing off more of those unidentified shock waves. Walls of air came crashing out, shooting the bullets out of the air and crushing the arm of the woman closest to him.

His weapon combined offense and defense into one, and there in the train car, there was nowhere to run.

Thus began Black Mantis’s slaughter.

Bodies were rent and burned and blasted. The blades on the sides of the prosthetics tore through a heavyset man’s torso like paper. The jets of flame gushing from the prosthetics roasted a group of spies brandishing guns. And with each shock wave he fired, bullets scattered and pulverized the arms and legs of anyone nearby.

No human should have been able to wield such power. Those two prosthetics had the destructive power of bona fide weapons of war.

Lan wasn’t able to get anywhere near him.

The shards of wood from the seats Black Mantis destroyed rained down on everyone in the back of the passenger car like shotgun pellets. Lan’s leg was grazed when she failed to evade successfully, and she was one of the lucky ones. The agent next to her got impaled in the chest and died instantly.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

Someone’s scream echoed out, then immediately went silent.

The sound of the train’s wheels was terribly loud. Black Mantis’s prosthetics had done a serious number on the carriage’s walls and roof. One of the corpses rolled out of the huge hole in the side of the car.

The massacre had been as swift as it had been one-sided. Lan hadn’t been fighting, and she was the sole survivor.

Black Mantis stood motionless among the piles of bodies littering the carriage. “Hmm……… My Surmounters really are out of peak condition.” He ran a disappointed hand across the prosthetics attached to his right arm. “What a shame. Were I fighting at full capacity, I would have been able to go kill Bonfire. But with their controls on the fritz, I ran the risk of destroying his restraints.”

Apparently, this wasn’t even his full power.

It made sense that the catastrophic destruction he’d caused wasn’t intentional. With how damaged the carriage now was, his own safety was in jeopardy.

Black Mantis did a practice swing with his prosthetics, lashing out with them like a whip and obliterating a nearby corpse.

“Still, killing you will be child’s play.”

He knew that Lan was still alive. He slowly advanced toward her position.

Lan couldn’t move.

That was the man who’d butchered her Avian teammates. She understood that, but there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t envision any path toward victory. No matter what she tried, those prosthetics would simply kill her. However, there was nowhere for her to run in the train car, either.

If twenty elite spies had failed to defeat that monster, how was she supposed to beat him?

Once he got within ten feet of her, Black Mantis came to a stop.

All Lan could do was cradle her legs and cower in misery.

“No survivors. I refuse to let anyone go to Bonfire’s aid.”

There was still some distance between them, but she was well within his prosthetics’ striking range.

He held his extra arms aloft.

“……………‘Out of peak condition’?”

The words spilled from Lan’s mouth.

Black Mantis froze.

For a moment, everything in the carriage was still. The only noise to be heard was the sound of the train’s wheels chugging along.

“And why is that, prithee tell me?” Lan looked up. “Why is thy weapon broken, here at this eleventh hour?”

The question had nothing to do with the fight to the death they were in. It was just a question—nothing more, nothing less. However, Black Mantis froze like he’d been stabbed in the gut. Lan had hit him right where it hurt.

That said, it was a perfectly legitimate question. By all rights, shouldn’t Black Mantis have been the one to kill Klaus? He himself had admitted that that was the original plan. Why had that changed?

“Did someone break it?”

Whoever it was, they must have been a truly outstanding spy. There was no reason for Black Mantis’s weapon to be malfunctioning aside from outside interference. Someone had gone and wrecked his prosthetics.

“’Twasn’t Dame Monika, no. As I hear, she was in no state to fight.”

The answer was right there in front of her. It was intuition that led her to it, but more than that, it was faith. “Ah, I see,” she murmured with joy as a tear rolled down her cheek.

“’Twas Brother Vindo and the rest who did the deed.”

Lan had no proof of that, but it was the truth. She knew it.

“And so what if they did?” Black Mantis growled. His voice was a touch deeper than usual, and he was unable to fully hide his irritation.

“That should be obvious, should it not?!” Lan cried, spurred on by the delight welling up within her. “It means that you lost to Avian! Belias’s surprise attack left them drained, and you had every advantage when you descended on them, yet they managed to damage thy tools of the trade! What is that, I ask you, if not a defeat?! Avian hath bested thee!”

Now Lan saw what had really happened. Vindo, Vics, Qulle, and Pharma hadn’t just gotten mowed down. They’d held their own against an absolute powerhouse, and in doing so, they’d accomplished something great: wrenching Black Mantis, one of Serpent’s members, off the front lines.

“Tell me I’m wrong! Were you at your strongest, you may well have succeeded in choking the life from Sir Klaus. Yet you were forced to change your plan. A shame, to be sure. And all because Avian destroyed thy appendages!”

“Are you done saying your piece?” Black Mantis raised his two prosthetic arms once more. “In the end, they still died. None of that changes the fact that you’re about to join them. I’m a busy man. I have no time to waste listening to the whining of a sore loser.”

“Which of us is the sore loser, I wonder?”

A cheeky smile flashed across Lan’s face. Courage surged through her body. There she was, thinking she couldn’t move, but now she felt as light as if she’d sprouted wings.

She still had no way of beating Black Mantis, of course, so she grabbed her bag.

“Rather than giving you the pleasure of killing me, I would sooner leap to my own demise.”

She took off at a dash toward the hole he’d busted in the side of the train.

Black Mantis made no move to stop her. He realized that there was no need to launch an attack, and a moment later, Lan’s body melted away into the darkness. The train was going at over sixty miles an hour. Even if she survived the fall, that wasn’t something you could walk away from.

After checking to make sure that she’d actually jumped, Black Mantis turned around. “…It matters not. I carried out my duty.”

Then he headed into the engine room and killed the engineers. Little by little, the train that been going to save Klaus slowed down, eventually coming to a stop in the mountains.

“Nobody’s getting to you, White Spider.”

After delivering his report to White Spider via radio, he hopped off the train and vanished into the darkness as well.

“All goners, he said.”

White Spider lowered his radio.

“Black Mantis got the job done. The CIM spies all ate shit, and Cloud Drift ended up jumping off the train.”

Sara shuddered upon hearing the news.

Black Mantis.

He too was a spy whose strength exceeded the bounds of logic or reason. So many people had just perished, and Lan had been involved in the attack. It would be no surprise if she was dead, too.

White Spider stowed the radio back in his pocket. “Looks like your bag of tricks is running empty. You got any more reinforcements lined up?”

“………”

There wasn’t a single person who could save her.

White Spider had laid out plan after plan in order to kill Klaus. He’d predicted every contingency and prepared for all of them, and he had no compunctions about taking lives or resorting to foul play.

Sara went pale and shuddered at the man’s sheer tenacity.

“That was kinda exciting, so y’know what, here’s another little tidbit for you.”

With that, he casually made his reveal.

“That Monika kid is dead.”

“No………………”

Her breath caught in her throat.

For White Spider’s part, though, he clearly didn’t consider it a particularly important revelation. He was wearing a careless grin and massaging his neck. If anything, it was Sara’s shock that surprised him. “Wait, hold up, you didn’t seriously think she survived, did you?” he said with a bemused laugh.

Sara shook his words out of her head. She knew that if she didn’t, she was going to accept them as fact, and her heart was going to shatter. “You’re lying…”

“I’m really not. Go ahead, ask the monster.” White Spider gestured with his gun. “He can tell, right? He knows in his gut if I’m lying or not.”

“Boss…”

Sara turned pleadingly to Klaus, who was still on his knees behind her. Klaus possessed an incredibly powerful intuition, and it gave him the terrifying ability to instinctively sniff out most lies the moment they left their speaker’s mouths.

“Please, say it’s not true. I’m begging you…,” she choked. “He’s lying, right? There’s no way Miss Monika is actually dead, right?”

The look on Klaus’s face was uncharacteristically grim. He stared at White Spider like his memories of the distant past were overlapping the present.

“The man isn’t lying.”

When the words hit Sara’s ears, all the light drained from her world. The sound of the train faded away, and everything she could see looked unrecognizably distorted, as though the world had lost its contours. Her senses grew dim. She couldn’t even tell if she was still standing upright or not.

She could hear the sound of wind inside her body. It was coming from the hole that had just opened in her heart. That, she could make out with terrible clarity.

Her mouth moved. “Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why do you do these horrible things?!” The man standing across from her barely seemed human to her anymore. If someone had told her he was an alien from space, she would have believed them. His values were just too diametrically opposed to hers. “How… How can you just take people’s lives like they mean nothing?”

“’Cause it’s the only choice we’ve got, us losers.” White Spider let out a scornful laugh. “Or, what, you wanna tell me it’s virtuous for the weak to fight fair so they can get their asses handed to them? Fuck that. If you don’t win, you lose everything. I can’t afford to get hung up on the details.”

“So that’s it?! As long as you’re fighting for a cause, it doesn’t matter how many people you hurt?!”

“No, it doesn’t. Necessary sacrifices, the lot of ’em.”

His eyes were tinged with madness.

“As the underdog, anything I do is justified.”

Sara refused to accept that. She refused to accept that Inferno, Avian, Prince Darryn, the CIM spies, and Monika and Lan’s sacrifices had all been “necessary.”

A heat burned through her, reviving her lost senses. She was feeling an urge she’d never felt before—the urge to kill. The very core of her being was telling her that that man needed to die.

“And hey, if you wanna tell me I’m wrong…”

Upon seeing Sara clench her fists, White Spider bent his left knee and shifted into a combat stance.

“…then come at me. Go on. Beat me and prove it.”

“HRAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

With a roar, Sara lunged at White Spider. She knew she didn’t stand a chance in a firefight. If she wanted to bring down someone who could swat away bullets, she was going to have to go for an all-or-nothing gambit and beat him with her bare hands.

Monika had given her close combat training for use in emergencies, and the hatred burning inside her was drawing her potential out to its fullest. She charged straight at her foe and tried to pound her right fist into his face.

“You’re finally fighting like you mean it…”

White Spider stowed his gun in his pocket. He tucked his knife back in his sleeve as well and engaged Sara empty-handed.

“…but that’s not how the world works. Putting your life on the line doesn’t mean you’ll win.”

He hit her with his counter.

Sara poured everything she had into her punch, but White Spider’s fist flew past hers and smashed her in the face. All the speed she’d put into her charge simply magnified the force of his blow, and she went careening backward. It felt as though her face had just shattered, and she started reeling.

Sara couldn’t overpower him. Rage wasn’t enough to make up the difference between them. She braced her legs with sheer willpower, determined to fight on, but that was when White Spider hit her with his follow-up.

“You get it, don’t you? You get how brutal it is when the weak have to stand up to the strong!”

The moment she staggered from the heavy right punch to her cheek, White Spider hit her with a body blow from the left. Her body rose into the air, and her limbs went limp.

“You get how helpless it makes you feel to get run the fuck over like this!!”

He didn’t let her fall to the ground. Now that she’d lost any ability to fight back, White Spider lifted his knee and slammed her with a front kick with his entire weight behind it. That first hit she’d taken was nothing compared to this.

“You get it.”

His finisher of choice was a bullet.

Despite having taken the shot in the middle of a fistfight, White Spider’s aim was true. If Sara hadn’t reflexively stuck out her right hand, the bullet would have torn straight through her heart. As it was, ripping through her hand shifted its trajectory enough that it grazed her neck instead.

The combination of the shot and the kick sent her careening backward, and she rolled over to where Klaus was and landed in a heap. She heard Klaus let out an agonized groan.

Sara used her porcelain knife to cut off a strip of her shirt. After quickly bandaging her hand to stop the bleeding, she rose back to her feet.

“I won’t…stop moving…,” she said, echoing Lily’s instructions as she positioned herself in front of Klaus once more.

“You’re still standing?” White Spider frowned at her in surprise. He must have assumed that that would be enough to keep her down. His cheek twitched a little. “You seriously haven’t given up yet?!”

Sara was insulted that he’d just written her off like that. “I don’t get it!!”

“What?”

“I’m saying, I don’t understand the grievances of the weak!” Blood trickled down her right hand, and she squeezed it tight as she spoke. “Because I’m! Not! Weak!!”

No matter how badly he beat her body, her will would never break. If you were weak, then it was all right to make people suffer? It was fine to kill as many people as you wanted, regardless of who they were? That was nonsense, plain and simple.

She held her head high and poured out her heart. “So yeah, maybe I’m an academy washout! Maybe I’m the weakest member on Lamplight! And maybe I haven’t grown at all as a spy—but still! I’ve been so blessed by every single person I’ve met.” Every word she said, she meant. “You could search the whole world over, and you’d never find someone as fortunate as me.”

Right when she was on the verge of flunking out of her spy academy, Klaus had found her, and Klaus had decided that she, meager as she was, was magnificent. Lily had cheered her on. Sybilla had laughed with her. Grete had guided her. Thea had supported her. Monika had taught her. And Erna and Annette had buoyed her spirit with their adoration. Then there were the Avian elites who gave her the tools to fight.

How could someone so blessed possibly be weak?

“That’s why, right here, I can say with full confidence that I’m strong!”

She and White Spider were polar opposites. She was appalled that someone with his level of skill and strength could ever call himself weak.

“Who’s coming to save you, then?” White Spider shouted in agitation. “If you’re so blessed, then prove it. You’re just a pathetic nobody, clinging to delusions!”

“They’re not delusions.” Sara raised her right hand high. “Avian never stopped saving us, not even here at the very end.”

It was like she was trying to summon someone, and White Spider bit his lip in annoyance. In his defense, it was a natural reaction. There was no one who could rescue her from her predicament, and he knew it. No human being could possibly catch up with a running train.

However, Sara didn’t budge, and she valiantly raised her hand all the same.

“How many times are you gonna make me say it?” White Spider snapped. “Everyone on Avian but Cloud Drift is dead. All those sightings were just your animals—”

“And we were counting on you figuring that out.”

The moment the words left Sara’s mouth, White Spider froze.

The shock Sara had felt when he announced that Insight was Lan came from the realization that their plan had succeeded. And the only reason she’d been shaken up when she learned that Lan might be dead was because that fact was sad in and of itself.

“That’s what kept you from realizing who Insight really was.”

A small smile spread across Sara’s face.

It was time for Lamplight’s final trump card, code name Insight, to join the fray.

“Cloud Drift” Lan lay prone and gasping beneath the trees growing beside the tracks.

“E-every bone in my fingers doth ache…”

When she jumped off the train, she used her specialized Detainment string to grab hold of the trees next to the railroad and soften her landing. It was certainly better than hitting the ground full-on, but the damage to her body was still tremendous. Some of her fingers had practically gotten ripped off, and only time would tell how much long-term damage she’d taken.

“But I successfully kept thee hidden.”

She opened up the bag she’d been holding between her legs.

“I take it we’ve drawn close enough for you to make it, Insight?”

The spy had been hiding inside the bag. He fixed his sharp gaze on Lan.

Tears of remorse spilled from Lan’s eyes. “I beg of thee, make them pay.”

She clung to him. She hated Serpent so much, but all she’d been able to do was flee. He was the only one she could count on.

She didn’t know if her words had gotten through to him, but he continued staring straight at her.

“Thou’rt truly the symbol of Lamplight and Avian’s bond. I can imagine no bird of fire more fitting than thee.”

She couldn’t move her fingers, but she gently rubbed them against his brow.

“Speech is no strength of thine, so allow me to speak in thy place once more.”

Emotions surged up inside her, and she poured all of them into her words.

“Soar the heavens, Insight, O phoenix ours.”

And with that, code name Insight slowly spread his broad wings.

After grabbing hold of the bag, he flew up into the air, caught the wind, and shot off.

They’d gotten close enough for him to catch up to his target. He couldn’t sustain it for long, but his top speed was enough to overtake a train. And while the train had no choice but to follow the bends and curves of its track, he could pursue it in a single straight line.

He could feel a violent heat burning in his wings. He needed no words to know what his duty was. The time had come for him to carry out his mission and save Lamplight.

He’d been watching for so long, and that was what spurred him on. He’d been attending to the girl Sara and observing the team Lamplight for longer than anyone. He’d seen them grapple with their first mission. He’d seen the Lamplight girls’ smiles. He’d seen how kind the Avian elites were in spite of their haughtiness, and he’d seen the tears Sara had shed in her quest to defeat White Spider.

Insight had been by the girls’ side since the moment Lamplight was formed.

His wounded shoulder still ached from the time he’d taken that hit from the maid assassin’s grenade. However, he refused to let it slow him down.

His thoughts turned to the partner he’d shared so much of his life with. Ever since she joined Lamplight, she’d started smiling so much more. He owed the team a great debt for that, and now it was on him to muster all of his strength repaying it.

The entire passenger car shook from a fierce vertical impact. The whole train very nearly derailed and toppled onto its side. White Spider’s feet rose off the ground. It was all happening so fast that he couldn’t react.

Then the window shattered, and the carriage’s ceiling and part of its wall went up in flames as fire rushed in from outside.

What the…

White Spider’s thoughts raced as he hurriedly fought to regain his balance.

Did they set off a bomb? Did they somehow sneak one on?

That was probably Flower Garden up on top of the locomotive. Had she thrown it, perhaps?

Nah, that doesn’t work. They got stripped of their weapons, and they didn’t have time to go grab more.

Besides, if Lamplight had access to weapons, then there was a far more efficient strategy they could have pursued. All they had to do was attack the people in the engine room, stop the train, and make a break for it. That would have been a far more promising option than having Sara fight White Spider all on her own.

In other words, their backup must have finally arrived, and that was who threw the bomb. It was the only logical conclusion, yet that too was impossible.

No human being could possibly have gotten here!

It was a normal premise to be working under, and it was one that he was unable to get past. White Spider had carefully sealed off any and all ways to catch up with the train.

And that was precisely the blind spot that Lamplight’s plan revolved around.

Back before they set out for their mission in the Fend Commonwealth, Klaus had gathered the girls in the main hall and introduced them to a spy.

“I’m thinking of adding a new member to Lamplight.”

As always, his explanation left a lot to be desired.

“This here is code name Insight. Here in the world of espionage where betrayal is a constant, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more loyal than him. He’s the one spy I trust more than anyone else.”

““““““““Okay, hooooooooooooold on a minute.””””””””

The eight girls all waved their hands in alarm. After their one unified rebuttal, the conversation turned hectic.

“Look, I get he’s trustworthy, but still!” Sybilla said.

“Does he really count as a new recruit?” Thea mused.

“Lamplight’s official roster consists of the eight of us and the boss, so…I suppose that would technically make him a new member,” Grete replied.

“But is he really a spy?” Erna asked.

“I think he’s a better spy than Sara, yo!” Annette chirped.

“Yeah, seconded,” Monika agreed.

“Y-you know I have feelings, right?” Sara whined.

The girls’ shock continued on for a good long while, but Lily eventually said, “W-well, I guess I’m happy to have him,” and in the end, the girls greeted their new teammate with a round of applause.

At that point, Klaus resumed his explanation. They’d faced off against Serpent a number of times, and there was a decent chance that some of Lamplight’s info had gotten leaked. They were going to need a new plan if they wanted to keep pulling the wool over their foes’ eyes.

“There’s a condition we need to meet before we can put Insight to work,” Klaus stressed. “We need to convince our opponent that Insight is human.”

Then, during the mission, that moment came.

It was Monika who primed the trigger. When she was facing off against White Spider and Black Mantis, she made sure that her voice reached her enemies as well.

“Get code name Insight. We need them. They’re the only person who can beat Serpent.”

The others immediately understood the implication behind her words. They needed to get their stories straight and convince their enemies that Insight was a person. But there was one girl in particular that Monika was truly betting on.

White Spider hadn’t realized it yet. He’d yet to arrive at the notion that Insight might not be human. As soon as he realized that Avian was secretly just animals, he misjudged Sara’s talent. In truth, though, the secret objective behind the “resurrect Avian” plan was to convince him that she’d used up all of her animal-related tricks.

It was a con that only Sara could have pulled off.

Avian had taught them a new way for spies to fight, a way to combine technique and falsehood into one. Sara had spent her life treating her animals with as much care and devotion as if they were human beings. That lifestyle had given rise to a unique form of deception, and she’d used it to create a fighting style that was all her own.

Rearing × Anthropomorphizing = Scrolls of Frolicking Animals.

The train rapidly decelerated. The driver must have slammed on the brakes. The passenger car jolted again from the force of the inertia.

As White Spider was losing his balance, Sara got moving.

“Code name Insight…”

She summoned all of her strength and shouted out his name.

“…MR. BERNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARD!!”

White Spider had yet to successfully regain his footing when he saw it. Sara was dashing straight at him, and the moment she drew his attention, something came flying at him from his peripheral vision.

That something was a huge, dauntless hawk soaring through the flaming window. But as it flew through the flames, White Spider saw it as something else entirely, something straight out of legend.

A phoenix.

After appearing out of nowhere, the hawk hacked at him with its beak in an attempt to gouge out his throat.

“_______________________________!!”

Too late, the truth dawned on White Spider. The hawk was Lamplight’s secret plan. The hawk was Insight.

How the FUUUUUUCK was I supposed to figure that one out?!

The realization left him dumbfounded.

After smacking away the hawk snapping at his throat with an elbow strike, he turned back to face Sara. Sara was drawing a bead on White Spider using only her left hand and racing toward him to make sure she didn’t miss. Her tag team offensive with the hawk was flawless.

She was too close for White Spider to defend himself with his knife now.

So this is what she was after, White Spider groaned to himself. Insight had never been a spy who could turn the situation around all on his own. However, the moment White Spider got the notion into his head that the spy had to be human, it created a psychological blind spot. Lamplight’s whole plan had revolved around this single surprise attack.

Sara pulled the trigger. “You’re finished!”

“Like hell I am, dumbass!”

In that final do-or-die moment, White Spider hurled one of his weapons of last resort, his miniature bombs. It went off so fast it wounded White Spider, but Sara got caught in the blast as well. Her bullet went wide and missed its mark.

A look of horror crossed her face. “……!!”

If there was one thing White Spider had going for him, it was the tenacity with which he cheated death. Sara had bet everything on that attack, and he’d endured that, too. She couldn’t beat him. There was no overcoming the disparity in their skills.

“Looks like you’ve used up every last plan you got!” White Spider staggered as he raised his gun to shoot her dead. “And wouldja look at that! Now, it’s time to bring an end to this once and for—”

“I gotta say, Master Bernard, you never fail to deliver.”

That was when he heard the fearless voice coming from behind him.

Distracted from firing, he whirled around and found “Flower Garden” Lily standing right there. She’d been clinging to the top of the train the whole time. Her shirt’s left sleeve was torn, and she’d wrapped a strip of it around her shoulder as emergency first aid.

She must have been the one who took the explosives from the hawk and set them off.

“Master Bernard brought me a lovely little present, see.”

There was a sinister grin on her face and a rod-shaped weapon clutched in her right hand.

“Annette said she’d make a special weapon just for me, and now it’s finally finished!!”

What even is that thing?

The weapon Lily was holding was like nothing White Spider had ever seen. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even look like a weapon at all. It looked like a children’s toy. The object was composed of a five-foot-long metal pole with a series of odd handicrafts on its end.

It was a pinwheel.

It all started with the promise Lily and Annette made back in the United States of Mouzaia’s capital.

“When we get back to Din, you should build me the best weapon ever. Something strong enough to take down Teach.”

“You got it, yo. With my tinkering and your poison, I’ll be able to whip up something real nasty.”

After her failed attempt at murder, Annette had devised a whole new method of killing. She realized now that she could get other people to kill on her behalf without ever needing to get her own hands dirty. In a sense, her evil had evolved and sent her down a path to becoming even more wicked than before.

The weapon had been imbued with the murderous instinct necessary to survive in a world as cruel as theirs, and Lily gave it a befitting name.

“This is Last Code: Paradise Lost—a spreading world of decay.”

The pinwheel whirled, and massive amounts of foam frothed out from within, filling the inside of the passenger car with a speed and force that put all of Lily’s past weapons to shame.

The bubbles were made of poison and inflated with poison gas, and with them, she’d seized complete and absolute control over the space.

The poison foam began engulfing White Spider. He tried shooting the bubbles, but they just kept on coming, and each shot he fired seared his nostrils with the poison gas that got released. What’s more, the bubbles were covering Lily so completely that he couldn’t even draw a bead on her.

I’m not going down, not like this!!

He knew there was no fighting back against something like that. He took a big step back in an attempt to escape the foam, but a figure stepped in to block his path.

It was Klaus.

Forcing his wounded left leg into motion, he charged in front of White Spider.

You monster…

White Spider was helpless to do anything but bite down hard on his lip.

“Goodbye, White Spider.”

Klaus smashed his left foot into White Spider’s face.

“…You aren’t qualified to be my enemy.”

After taking hits in succession from Sara, Bernard, Lily, and now Klaus, White Spider keeled over backward, and his body sank into the pinwheel’s noxious foam.