Spy Classroom - Volume 8 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue

Retirement and Legacy

“…and that concludes my mission report.”

Back in the headquarters of the Din Republic’s intelligence agency, the Foreign Intelligence Office, Klaus finished detailing the events of their long operation to the agency’s spymaster, C. Klaus had been sending in progress reports as well, but he felt it was important that C hear everything that happened from start to finish from Klaus’s own mouth.

He told C about how tracking down the truth behind Avian’s deaths had led them into conflict with the CIM, he told him about how they’d gotten sidetracked upon discovering Glint’s betrayal midway through the mission, and he told him about how they ultimately fought and defeated White Spider, the mastermind behind the whole thing.

“That’s why it took so long for us to get back. My team was hurt pretty bad.”

The mission had taken a harsh toll on them, and nary a single Lamplight member had emerged unscathed. In the end, they spent another full month in the Commonwealth just recuperating after beating White Spider.

During that time, Prince Darryn’s funeral took place without incident, as though all that brutal spy fighting had never even happened. The procession carrying the body to Shalinder Abbey had been visible from Lamplight’s hospital rooms.

“The good news is, we managed to retrieve Gerde’s legacy,” Klaus said with a nod. “All in all, it was a successful mission. It is a shame about Avian, of course.”

Once he was done, he took a sip of the god-awful coffee C had brewed for him. The flavor made him wonder if he wouldn’t have just been better off eating the beans raw.

From across the table, C gave him a round of applause. “Excellent work.” It was rare for him to give out genuine compliments like that. “You never disappoint. You tracked down the cause of Avian’s deaths, dealt with the cause, and even recovered Gerde’s legacy. Three whole missions, and you completed them all.”

“I suppose we did.”

“But there’s one part you left out, isn’t there?” C’s raptor-like eyes narrowed. “Is Glint dead?”

“………”

That was a point Klaus had specifically avoided touching on. However, that wasn’t going to fly with C. Klaus was going to have to tell him. He was going to have to say those words he never wanted to.

“She’s dead. We were too late.”

His mind turned, and he thought back to the shocking conclusion they’d arrived at after defeating White Spider.

A gunshot rang out.

Right after Klaus forced his injured leg back into action and White Spider sank into the poison foam, the Serpent member offered one last show of resistance.

The bullet failed to hit Klaus, Lily, or Sara.

The poison foam and poison gas had left White Spider completely unable to move. They could see his body crumple to the ground below the bubbles.

Paradise Lost was a truly terrifying weapon. Born from Annette’s twisted mind, it took poison gas and skin-searing poison foam and combined them into one. The former could be largely neutralized by holding one’s breath, but the latter was a menace. Together, they gave Lily the power to seize control of an entire area.

“Fuck, man…”

Eventually, the bubbles faded away and revealed White Spider’s collapsed body. He could still talk, but his limbs lay motionless. He’d used up the last of his strength.

“For a weakling, you really know how to make my life difficult.” On seeing him, Klaus couldn’t help but be impressed. “You took that tiny opening, and you used it to kill yourself.”

“Shut up, man. This shit ain’t me.”

That final bullet White Spider had fired had been meant for himself. He’d been too off-balance to aim for his head, but he’d succeeded in shooting himself through the abdomen.

Blood gushed across the floor.

It wouldn’t be long before his life ended. Klaus had wanted to capture him and pump him for info, but it looked like that option was off the table.

“Just tell me one thing.” Sara helped him stay upright as he moved over to White Spider. “What happened to Monika? Did you really kill her?”

“The first thing you ask about is how your subordinate died, huh?” White Spider jeered, only able to move his mouth. “Quit making me repeat myself. I offed her. That’s the honest truth.”

Sure enough, he wasn’t lying. Klaus’s honed spy intuition told him that White Spider meant every word. “What did you do with the body?”

White Spider shut up. “………………………”

Sensing the reason behind his sudden silence, Klaus’s eyes went wide. “Don’t tell me you—”

“I never found the body,” White Spider sighed in resignation. “That moron Black Mantis brought the whole damn building down. Then he went and burned the rubble. All over a stupid little insult—but still, there’s no way she could’ve survived that. Serves her right, if you ask me.”

He hadn’t actually witnessed the moment of her death.

Right as Klaus wondered if there were more hints he might extract from the man, White Spider spoke up. “Welp, looks like I’m outta time,” he said. “Heaven’s calling. Man, you really do boil my blood.”

The life was fading from his voice. Klaus still had a million things he wanted to ask him, but if there was one thing White Spider was good at, it was running away.

“Rainbow Firefly.”

A pair of words dribbled from White Spider’s mouth—words that Klaus had never heard before.

“…What’s that?”

“Hey, beats me. I don’t even know why I said it. I just felt like I should say it to you, one pupil of Guido’s to another.”

“Who is it? Another Serpent member?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know. Don’t worry about it, man. It’s just a prayer. Just a curse.” White Spider’s body grew weak, and the light drained from his eyes. “Fuuuuck…”

That expletive ended up being the last word he ever said. Through to the bitter end, he never stopped being a petty loser.

Klaus let out a long sigh.

He was dead tired. It had been a long while since the last time he’d braced himself to die.

I guess it’s all finished… Our mission here in Fend is done.

That Black Mantis man had long since fled, no doubt. His job had been to assist White Spider, not assassinate Klaus, and now that White Spider had failed, Black Mantis was probably in the wind.

Had they really failed to save Monika?

He didn’t want to admit it, but the cruel reality of the situation came crashing down on him all the same. It had been six days since she got attacked. The fact that they hadn’t seen any signs of life in all that time meant that—

“…The basement.”

Sara spoke the words softly.

“_____?” Klaus turned his gaze over to her.

“Did you ever hear the story, boss? About where Gerde trained Mr. Vindo?”

“I got the broad strokes. Granny G dragged him to her hideout and—”

“R-right, exactly. I heard the same thing. I happened to be there when Mr. Vindo was telling Miss Monika about it…”

Her voice trembled as tears welled up in her eyes.

“…and Gerde’s hideout has a basement.”

They got to work immediately.

Not even Serpent would have had any way of getting the details about Gerde’s hideout. If White Spider didn’t know that run-down wooden apartment building had a basement, it would have been easy for him to misread the situation.

They gathered up every available Lamplight member and rushed to the village of Immiran as fast as they could.

On their way there, they met up with Lan. She’d fractured every bone in all ten of her fingers, but she followed along anyway, and Sybilla, Lily, and Sara all prioritized the search over getting treatment for their own injuries. Thea had just been freed, and she guided Annette, Erna, and Grete there from the hospital as well. In the end, every single member of Lamplight joined the operation.

When they got to the spot they suspected Gerde’s hideout had been, they were greeted by a massive pile of weather-beaten debris. That was where Serpent had fought Monika and burned the building to the ground.

There was a chance that Monika had fled underground, and the debris had sealed off the basement behind her.

While they were searching, Sara spent the whole time apologizing. “I-I’m so sorry! If I’d just mentioned it earlier—”

“Don’t you dare apologize! Even if you had, we wouldn’t have been able to do shit with the CIM watching us anyway,” Sybilla shouted back as she used her battered arms to heave aside rubble. “And besides, the CIM told us they’d searched the area! Who the hell woulda figured they missed somethin’?”

“They said there wasn’t a body at the scene,” Lily continued with a bandage wrapped around her left shoulder. “When they told us that, we all just assumed it had been removed!”

“B-but,” Erna said as she diligently worked, “is she going to be okay? It’s already been six days—”

“It rained for days on end after she was attacked,” Thea said calmly, and Grete followed up on her comment as she helped carry away chunks of the wreckage. “That’s right… The building above was destroyed, so it’s entirely possible that rainwater flowed all the way down to the basement. As long as she had water, she might very well have survived!”

Meanwhile, Annette was using some hammer-like implement to smash through the burned wood. “I bet she kicked the bucket from the wounds that Black Mantis guy gave her, yo.”

“His weapon was defective!” Lan called over as she scoured every inch of the ground. “Brother Vindo and the others smashed it. I daresay he was at less than his full strength.”

Every person there was injured. The majority of the girls either ought to have been in the hospital or needed to head there posthaste.

However, not a single one of them stopped digging.

Eventually, Klaus found it. “Here.”

There was an opening in the ground buried beneath the rubble. It led to a ladder, and after hurrying down it, they arrived in a spacious room. The liquor bottles scattered across the floor made it pretty clear they’d found Gerde’s hideout.

They shined their flashlights around. The room was full of haphazardly strewn documents, their ink bleeding from the rainwater.

Eventually, their lights landed on the girl sitting in the corner.

“Is this a dream?”

Monika was still alive.

The sight stole the breath of everyone present.

The first person to rush over to Monika was Lily, who called out her emaciated teammate’s name and wrapped her in an embrace.

“Y’know, if this is what the afterlife is like…then maybe dying isn’t half-bad.”

Despite everything, her expression was as snarky as ever, and she fell onto Lily.

Once he was done reminiscing, Klaus let out another exhale and continued giving his false report. “Everyone’s better off with Glint dead anyhow. The majority of the CIM still views her as the culprit behind the crown prince’s assassination. The Republic can’t afford for her to still be alive.”

He said it all in a single breath so as to demonstrate just how stern of a spy he was.

“On a completely unrelated note,” he continued, mustering up the most cheerful voice he could as he changed the subject, “I was thinking of accepting a new member onto Lamplight.”

“………………………………………………………………”

C was silent for a long, long time.

Then he frowned at Klaus in suspicion. “If she was alive, you should’ve just come out and said it.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about, but she betrayed the Din Republic. Even if she had somehow survived, I have no idea what kind of punishments you would have in store for her.”

That was why Klaus hadn’t wanted to bring up the topic. He would hate for it to look like he was harboring a traitor. Glint was dead…as far as the paperwork was concerned.

“Code name Ashes—that’s the new member I want to add to the team.”

She was like a raging fire, melting that glinting ice and revolutionizing the world by burning everything to ash. The name “Glint” didn’t suit her. Not anymore.

When Klaus left the Foreign Intelligence Office headquarters, he found the girls all standing outside. The first thing he did after returning to Din was go straight to headquarters rather than stopping by Lamplight’s base, but at no point had he asked the girls to wait for him. Many of them had yet to fully recover, and surely they wanted to get some rest.

“We promised we’d all go back together,” was Lily’s argument.

They boarded the train and began making their way back to the port city they were based out of.

As an aside, there was a major fracas between Monika and Annette during their journey back to Din, but that was a story for another day. Annette’s grudge ran deep, but they eventually managed to settle things amicably.

The group went through the secret passage together, and when Heat Haze Palace came into view, Lily let out a bellow. “WE MADE IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!”

“““““““WHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”””””””

They threw their hands in the air and let loose the yells rising up in their chests. Their cheers of joy were fervent and nearly deranged, and they all exchanged teary hugs.

The mission had been grueling. Any of them could have easily died, and they’d all survived by hair’s breadths. But all of them had made it back in one piece, and that was cause for celebration.

At that point, Klaus noticed the one girl who wasn’t participating in the revelry.

“Our painting is gone.”

It was Lan. She had nowhere to go, and she’d followed them all the way there.

She was staring at the outer wall of the manor. The rain had washed away the phoenix mural that had once adorned it, and almost nothing of the mural was left.

“’Tis but I that remain…”

She ran her hand softly down the wall. Right as Klaus was about to call out to her, though, she shook her head. “No, worry not for me.”

Her voice was free of hesitation.

“Worry not for me, you all.”

Klaus quietly stepped away. He felt it would be best to give her some time to herself.

When Klaus sat down to rest in the chair in his room, he heard the sound of knocking.

“U-um, Boss…?”

Sara opened the door and peeked in with her head hung as per usual.

They hadn’t even been back for three hours yet. Klaus had heard cheerful voices coming from across the manor just a moment ago, so Sara must have intentionally slipped away from the group.

She walked over to him and gulped a little. “I know it isn’t the best time for this, but do you have a minute? I want to get this out there before I lose my nerve.”

“What’s going on?”

“I want to retire from being a spy.”

Klaus was taken totally off guard. However, her voice was confident. This wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment decision.

“This last mission showed me something. It made me realize just how deadly this line of work is.”

“…Well, that’s a shame.”

It stung to lose a valuable team member, but if that was what she wanted, he had no choice but to accept it.

As conflicted emotions stirred within him, Sara frantically waved her hands. “O-oh, no, that’s not what I mean—I’m not saying I want to quit right now!”

“You’re not?”

“I’m still going to work to support the team. But, um…I’m really just not as attached to this line of work as everyone else.” She smiled. “So someday, when I reach a good stopping point, I’d like to retire.”

Her face was brimming with forward-facing determination.

Klaus couldn’t bring himself to be upset. He turned toward her. “Do you have an idea of what you’re going to do afterward?”

“I—I do, yeah. I want to run a restaurant like my parents did. One in a quiet town, with a view of the sea, and with food that’s really tasty but not too expensive.”

“I can see you’ve put some thought into this.”

“Lately, I’ve been thinking about it every day. Miss Annette and Miss Erna could be my waitresses, and I could cook, and all the others could work there, too.” She hung her head in embarrassment. “A-and if that happened…then I’d really like it if you were there, too, Boss.”

Klaus was struck speechless. He hadn’t seen that one coming at all.

“I—I know it’s all just a fantasy, of course,” Sara stammered as a sort of excuse.

Klaus, on the other hand, had never ever considered fantasizing about a future like that. Could there be a life for him outside of espionage? It wasn’t impossible. As long as he didn’t die, it was certainly a way things could pan out.

“If that future came to pass…”

He gave her his honest opinion.

“…it might actually make for a happy ending.”

It went without saying that Klaus had no intention of retiring. He’d inherited Inferno’s duty, and it was his job to keep the Republic safe.

At the same time, though, he didn’t want to reject Sara’s vision.

“Then I’ll keep working hard so that everyone can retire without reservations.” Sara squeezed her fists in delight. “And until then, I’m not going to let anyone on Lamplight die—that’s my goal as a spy.”

Curiously, Klaus felt himself rooting for her.

Sara had never had a strong motivation for wanting to work as a spy. She’d been doing her best, but only because she had nowhere else to go and didn’t want to cause problems for the others.

Now, though, she’d found an ideal and stated it clearly—becoming Lamplight’s guardian.

She cared less about the results of their mission than about her teammates’ well-being. Her priority was protecting the team, making sure everyone made it through their operations alive until they could all retire.

That was a perfectly respectable way to approach the craft, too.

“Magnificent,” he said, praising her in his usual manner. “In that case, I recommend you focus on studying spy skills that you can use after you retire. I’m sure that understanding psychology and honing your forecasting skills will be invaluable in the world of business.”

“I look forward to continuing to learn from you, Boss.”

From there, one thing led to another, and Klaus ended up giving her a cooking lesson. The fridge was completely empty, so step one was going out to buy ingredients.

On their way to the entrance, they caught a glance of what was going on in the main hall. The girls appeared to be gathered around the table. They had a wireless transceiver, and they were all staring at it with a strange intensity.

The scene piqued Klaus’s interest. “What are you all up to?” he asked.

The group gathered around the transceiver consisted of Thea, Sybilla, Grete, Annette, Erna, and Lan.

“Shh!” Thea said, putting a finger to her lips. “We’re eavesdropping.”

“On what?”

“We left Monika and Lily alone together.”

“I can see how that would be fascinating.”

Now that she mentioned it, Klaus remembered that there was a piece of unfinished business. Not even Monika herself had expected to survive that mission, and midway through it, she’d given Lily a message.

“I’m in love with you.”

The rest of the team had all heard her loud and clear over the radio, making Monika’s confession of love an extremely public one.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about how Lily responds, but still…

It was so very like the girls not to even hesitate before planting a wiretap.

Thea was beside herself with excitement. “Heh, heh, heh. Don’t you worry about a thing, Monika. As your partner in crime, and as the local love guru, I’ll make absolutely sure your love comes to fruition,” she muttered to herself.

She certainly meant well, but Klaus doubted her efforts were appreciated.

By the sound of things, Monika and Lily were out in the courtyard. Lily had gone out to check on the state of her garden, Thea had planted a wiretap on her, and Monika had just found Lily and was none the wiser to the bug’s presence.

“Hey, Lily… I wanted to talk.”

They could hear how nervous Monika was. It looked like they were actually going to get to hear the conversation, but—

“You can’t!” Sara cried as she leaped at the transceiver.

““““““Huh?””””””

Sara snatched up the transceiver and clutched it between her arms as she turned it off.

“Let’s just not! Th-this isn’t right! Think of Miss Monika!”

“What do you think you’re doing, Sara?!” Thea shouted. “It was just getting to the good part!”

The others cried out in agreement, but Sara held firm. “Nuh-uh! I’ll protect you, Miss Monikaaaaaaaaa!”

She fled across the main hall still holding the receiver in her arms. The other girls chased her down, and the whole thing devolved into a violent game of tug-of-war. Their bodies may not have fully healed, but at least they were in good spirits.

I suppose rubbernecking is a bit classless.

Klaus decided not to take part in the scuffle. If he had to say, though, he tended to agree with Sara.

Through the main hall’s window, he could see the girls’ heads out in the courtyard. Lily and Monika were staring at each other with serious looks on their faces.

I can’t imagine their conversation going anything but smoothly.

He had no idea what decision Lily would ultimately come to, but knowing her, he was certain she would find a thoughtful way to express it that took Monika’s feelings into account to the best of her ability. And no matter what she said, he was certain that Monika would earnestly accept it.

They’d fought their way through a brutal mission to reach that moment, and they deserved to be able to have it to themselves.

After all, the world at large had no intention of releasing Lamplight from its clutches.

They found Gerde’s legacy down in the basement with Monika. That was where Gerde had once trained Vindo. The room up on the third floor was a decoy. Gerde’s true hideout lay beneath the ground.

There were invaluable documents strewn all about. Classic Granny G, Klaus mused, not taking better care of her files. The rain had flowed into the basement and blurred the papers’ ink, but Lamplight still managed to decipher a few passages.

Within the next two to three years, there’ll be a financial crisis—one so bad they’ll call it the Great Depression.

Apparently, it was going to start in the United States of Mouzaia. Mouzaia had enjoyed an economic boom in the wake of the war, and they’d been overinvesting ever since. When that bubble popped, it was going to devastate every industry under the sun, and the ripples from that were going to be felt across all the nations that had grown dependent on the United States’ economy.

It was unclear what point that “two to three years” number was counting from.

The nations of the world will prioritize their own economies and begin hoarding resources. Countries with colonies and strong economic foundations will prosper, and the Axis powers that lost their colonies in the war will suffer.

Many nations regretted the Great War and sought international harmony, but this will force them to quickly shift their policies.

A number of powerful figures, Prince Darryn among them, have sensed the tides shifting and are putting a plan into action.

When they read the next line, they froze.

It all made sense. That was what brought Inferno down. This was what gave rise to Serpent.

The hell that had brought the world and the girls of Lamplight so much pain was rearing its ugly head again.

A second world war will break out—and the Nostalgia Project is how they plan to prepare for it.