Spy Classroom - Volume 9 - Chapter SS

Next Mission

  The Twins’ Story I  

In the Lylat Kingdom’s capital city of Pilca, there was an aristocrat engaged in the gamble of his life.

The man held the rank of marquis, and his family had run a spice business for three generations. Back when Lylat was colonizing nations in the Far East, his grandfather had greased some palms in a major way in order to be given control of a massive pepper farm. The man built a fortune by threatening the locals with firearms into performing backbreaking manual labor, but ever since Marquis Watteau inherited the business after the Great War, its operations had been going downhill. It all started when the locals went on strike. Watteau had ordered his eldest son to do whatever it took to get them back in line, even if that meant shooting a few of them, but the son had been too afraid of retaliation and had failed to put down the uprising.

For Watteau, that pepper farm was a crucial source of income. Aristocrats had historically made their money by leasing land to farmers, but Lylat had begun importing a lot of its grain from abroad as of late, and their domestic farming industry had suffered for it. Now many aristocrats were terrified of falling into bankruptcy and desperately trying to figure out how to make money.

Now Watteau was in a position where he needed help from soldiers and other aristocrats to end the strike. That was going to cost him a small fortune. The problem was, Watteau’s assets had declined rather sharply over the past few years.

In order to raise the necessary funds, Watteau had gone to an illegal casino run by the notorious Lucidor family.

This is fine. This here, this is a sure bet…

The casino sat in a building right in the heart of the capital. It was the kind of gambling house where the sums at play were more than the average citizen earned in a month. The games they offered were roulette and baccarat. Loud music filled the floor as men with bloodshot eyes vied for one another’s chips.

Watteau sat in front of a roulette wheel with his hands clasped together in prayer.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you called it a night, Marquis?”

“Surely you don’t want to go bankrupt, do you?”

Many of the aristocrats sitting around him smirked as they watched him drive himself to ruin. They were the ones on good terms with the Lucidor family.

Roulette was a simple game where you had to guess which pocket numbered zero to thirty-six a ball would go into. How much you won changed based on how you bet. You could bet on colors, or you could bet on odds or evens. You could also bet on specific numbers. The lower the odds, the bigger the payout.

“Shut up!” Watteau bellowed. “You think I’m going to go home on a loss?!”

Watteau’s bet of choice was on the numbers one through twelve, making his odds of winning about one in three.

However, the heartless ball elected to make its way into the twenty-three pocket instead.

“Oof.” “Today just isn’t your day.”

Cruel laughs rose up from the peanut gallery.

However, it was hard to blame them. Watteau had already made six huge bets and lost each and every one of them. A full fifth of his fortune was gone forever.

Watteau clutched his head in frustration. Sweat gushed from his forehead, and he buried his face in his hands. When he let out an agonized moan, the onlookers jeered at him in amusement.

However, there in the middle of that boisterous gambling hall, Watteau was secretly quivering in delight.

It’s certain, then…

He continued feigning distress so as not to arouse suspicion.

That dealer really can make the ball land wherever he wants!

Over by the roulette board, the blond dealer calmly whistled as he retrieved Watteau’s chips from the table.

Watteau looked at him and thought back to what another man with the same face had told him.

Two days before Watteau’s big gamble, he spoke with a fortune teller.

It was Watteau’s friend who introduced him to the man. According to his friend, the fortune teller could tell someone’s family situation, worries, and even their secret ambitions just by looking at them. The fortune teller would then offer them advice, and if they followed it, everything would start going their way. Some people had multiplied their fortunes multiple times over, and others had been able to reunite with friends they hadn’t seen in years.

The whole thing sounded highly dubious, but when Watteau invited the fortune teller to his mansion, with nothing more than a glance, the young man immediately hit the nail on the head. “You’re having money problems, aren’t you?”

“Anyone could have guessed that,” Watteau found himself stammering, but the fortune teller said, “Even though you haven’t told your own wife?” and was accurate yet again.

“You’re the exact sort of man I’ve been hoping to meet. How would you like to join forces with us?”

After a brief conversation, the fortune teller made him a surprising offer.

“You know the Lucidor family’s casino? My brother works there as a dealer. We made sure to get him in there ahead of time.”

Watteau stared in shock as the man lowered his voice to a whisper.

“You know how dirty the Lucidors’ hands are, don’t you? Someone needs to teach them a lesson.”

Watteau knew exactly what the man was talking about.

Illegal gambling wasn’t the only shady business the Lucidors were involved with. They were human traffickers, monsters who would abduct attractive women and girls from the colonies and sell them off to other aristocrats. They’d even gotten in bed with the Mafia and were operating in the underworld, in addition to their legitimate work as aristocrats.

“You can keep the money you make. Our goal is just to punish the Lucidors. We’ve been looking for someone like you who could bet huge sums of money without turning any heads.”

It was all far too good to be true. “I don’t believe you,” Watteau snapped. “If it turns out you’re lying, then all I’ll be doing is losing a fortune gambling.”

The young man didn’t so much as blink. “I’ll offer myself up as a hostage. You can lock me up, and if anything goes wrong, feel free to kill me on the spot.”

Upon seeing the fortune teller’s dealer brother at work, Watteau was astounded all over again. He’d sent one of his men to investigate ahead of time, but even after witnessing it with his own eyes, he still couldn’t believe it.

That’s ten in a row…

The brothers had told him a series of pockets ahead of time, and the balls were sliding into them like it was nothing.

Watteau’s initial assumption was that the wheel had been tampered with, but that simply wasn’t possible. There were casinos that had tried attaching magnets to their wheels before, but they always got found out. Attempts to tilt the wheel similarly ended in failure.

The thing was, roulette was a game where the audience’s full attention was on the wheel. If a ball’s arc looked even the slightest bit unnatural, some keen-eyed observer was sure to notice. It was an incredibly difficult game to rig. People had no choice but to leave their fate in the hands of Lady Luck—that was why people called roulette the “Queen of the Casino.”

“Even so, my brother can always land the balls on the exact numbers he wants to. There’s no trick to it, just raw technique. There are some dealers who control roughly what area their balls land in, but you could search the world over without finding anyone who can hit specific numbers the way my brother can. And the owners are none the wiser.”

Dealers spun the wheel without looking at the board. It was a way to limit the house’s ability to cheat.

However, what if there was some godlike dealer who could land the ball exactly where he wanted without looking at either it or the pockets?

Why, that dealer and their fingers would break the game on a fundamental level.

“For the final step, all you have to do is pretend to give in to your desperation and bet everything you have on a single spin.”

Watteau thought back to the young man’s advice and steeled his nerves.

There was no way the fortune teller could betray him. After all, the man was locked up in Watteau’s cellar. There was a guard stationed there, too. Watteau held the man’s life in his hands.

“I-I’m all in! GOD, GRANT ME STRENGTH!”

He took every last one of his chips and bet them all.

The onlookers burst into laughter.

“It’s sad, is what it is.” “The guy’s lost it.” “I feel for him, y’know?”

Their reactions were understandable.

Watteau had just made a straight bet. His odds of winning were one in thirty-seven. It was nothing short of suicide. If that ball didn’t go in, half of his fortune would up and vanish.

If he won, though, he would earn a staggering amount of the Lucidor family’s money.

Heh, idiots. They fell for my acting, hook, line, and sinker.

Watteau recalled the fortune teller’s smile.

He clenched his fists and watched as the roulette wheel gradually slowed.

This is the gamble of my life, and I’m the one who’s going to win it—

Watteau had bet on thirty-one. That was the number they’d agreed on ahead of time.

However, in a cruel turn of events, the ball slid into the number one pocket.

“Huh?”

His whole body went ice-cold. Terror clutched directly at his heart, and his train of thought froze. The crowd bombarded him with uncaring laughter, but he didn’t process a word they were saying.

He looked at the dealer, figuring that this had to be some kind of mistake.

There was a faint smile playing on the dealer’s lips—the smile of a reaper, come to herald his end.

“GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

As he wailed, Watteau descended into madness. “He’s a cheat!” he said on repeat, like a broken record, but not a single person paid him any heed.

Rather, Marquis Watteau’s disgraceful performance became the talk of the town, and the man was reduced to a laughingstock.

On the upper floor of the Lucidor family casino, there were four men laughing and clapping.

One of them, a man in the middle of the room named Isaac, drank deep from his wineglass.

Isaac was a slender thirty-four-year-old and the second son of the current head of the Lucidor family. He was the man who ran their illegal casino, the Vigean. His main line of work was offering entertainment to thrill-seeking aristocrats, but he was also in charge of making problematic aristocrats “disappear” from time to time.

One of his dealers had just finished a major job, and Isaac heaped the man with praise. “Hot damn, that was slick. Marquis Watteau’s done for. It’ll be dead easy for my old man to buy up the rights to that pepper farm now.”

“Nah, that was nothing. The guy was a chump.”

The dealer smugly crossed his legs as he enjoyed some wine, much like Isaac. Rather than join in the others’ cheerful conversation, he drank down his wine like it was water.

He was an aloof young man whose smile revealed nothing of what lay beneath. He was supposedly in his late twenties. His blond hair was as beautiful as woven silk, and it was parted in the middle, leaving his forehead bare and his charming face on full display. The corners of his mouth snapped upward when he smiled, giving him the merry grin of a teenage boy.

From just his appearance, not a single person would have taken him for a grim reaper of a master gamer who’d brought countless aristocrats low.

The blond man shamelessly grabbed a hunk of cheese sitting in front of Isaac and shoved it in his mouth. “But more to the point, Mr. Isaac. I’d like my compensation now.”

“I suppose we did agree on five targets, didn’t we? Get this man what he wants.”

Isaac and the dealer had struck a deal.

For the dealer’s part, he was helping Isaac take down his rivals in the aristocracy. The dealer’s talents were like witchcraft. He would pretend to run into their targets at random, lure them into the casino, sucker them into doomed bets, and destroy them.

In exchange for leading five aristocrats to ruin, what the dealer had asked for was information.

Isaac’s underling took a document out of the safe and offered it to him.

“That there’s a list of everyone in the underworld who secretly helped back that anti-establishment revolution two years back. Not even Genesis Army intelligence has that intel yet.”

“Ooh.” The young man looked over the list, visibly impressed. “That’s what I like to hear.”

It was only their deep ties to society’s dark underbelly that allowed the Lucidors to get ahold of that information. There had been a failed revolution two years ago, and though the state police had suppressed it, the number of Mafia members who’d been helping support the revolutionaries behind the scenes meant that they’d had to call in the army to do so.

“I gotta ask, what’s the plan there?” Isaac said with an amused chuckle. “If you hand that list over to the Genesis Army, all those guys are done for. That’s some juicy blackmail material if I ever saw it, but—”

Suddenly, Isaac noticed something.

The blond youth’s emerald eyes were burning with the fierce brutality of a predator stalking his prey.

“Nah, man…”

He gasped at what he’d just realized.

The man before him was trying to realize a dream that the people of Lylat had failed to achieve for a hundred years, despite their best efforts.

“Look, I’m telling you this for your own good. Just drop the whole thing.” Isaac’s tone was stern. “That shit won’t work. Not here. If one word gets out about what you’re doing, Nike will—”

“Oh, I know. I’m not planning on drawing any attention. And I’m gonna silence everyone who could rat me out.”

The young man folded up the document, slipped it into his pocket, and gave Isaac a cheeky smirk.

“That means none of you are leaving this room alive.”

The four men, Isaac included, all stared at him in shock.

The jovial smile on the young man’s face had been replaced with a pointed glare. “What, you guys thought you were safe? Dunno if you forgot, but you’re a bunch of corrupt aristocrats who’ve been living large off the royal family’s hand-me-downs, too.”

With a light “Hup!” the youth hopped to his feet and kicked his leg to send his shoe flying straight up. A gun tumbled out from its sole, and he nimbly caught it. Despite all the wine he’d been drinking, he didn’t seem tipsy in the slightest.

Isaac went pale. “S-someone kill this—!”

“That’s not gonna work. Not with my brother on the job.” The youth shrugged. “If you see someone with shabby clothes, you can usually guess that they’re poor, right? My brother can do the same thing, just a hundred or a thousand times more precisely than most people. Your guards are all in his pocket.”

Isaac couldn’t comprehend the words he was hearing.

What the youth was describing was basically a superpower. Anyone who could pull off a stunt like that could buy people off with ease. It would be trivial to dig dirt on anyone they wanted.

“Your luck ran out the day us brothers set our sights on you.”

The blond youth aimed his gun and grinned.

“So you gotta tell me—how much longer should I keep playing along with this game?”

There once was a pair of twins who did some covert ops in the Lylat Kingdom.

One was a master gamer—“Soot” Lukas.

The other was a fortune teller—“Scapulimancer” Wille.

Those twins were Inferno’s backbone, as well as Klaus’s de facto older brothers, and back when they were alive, they went on a rampage there.

Despite the smug bravado “Soot” Lukas displayed against the Vigean manager, his combat instincts were awful, so he struggled quite a bit in the ensuing fight. All his point-blank shots missed, which gave Isaac and his men time to gather their wits and return fire. Both sides ended up running out of bullets, and between the poison needle hidden in his wristwatch, the wires tucked in his sleeves, and the mini crossbow tucked in his shoe, Lukas’s raw resource advantage allowed him to narrowly eke out a win.

Once he finished the men off, Lukas wiped the blood from his cheek. “Dang, those guys were strong. I dunno if Klaus could’ve beaten them.” Then he quickly searched their base and snatched up the valuables and a little something extra.

After changing out of his bloodstained clothes, he nonchalantly strode out of the building and melted into the city as it enjoyed a peaceful weekend night.

From there, he traveled along a prearranged set of back alleys to rendezvous with his younger brother Wille.

A man with the same face as his gave him a casual wave. “Hey there, Lukas.”

“Hey, yourself. I see you made it out of Watteau’s mansion without too much trouble. Good going.”

“Of course I did. The man isn’t exactly an expert in inspiring loyalty. All I had to do was get the guard a cute girlfriend, and he let me stroll right on out. You had a rougher go of it, I assume?”

“Nah, it was dead easy. Those guys were no match for me.”

“And yet you showed up awfully late to our meetup.”

“You say such cruel things to me. I’m gonna go cry now.”

As Lukas slumped his shoulders, Wille frowned.

That was because he’d spotted the girl standing behind Lukas. She was wearing a flimsy dress. She looked to be in her pre- or early teens. Her hair was blond, albeit a lighter shade than his brother’s. Her clothes were as thin as a negligee and offered just as little modesty, so Lukas had given her his jacket to wear over them.

“Who’s the kid?”

“They had her locked up. To use as merchandise, probably.”

The girl was the little something extra he’d found at Isaac’s base. Based on her outfit, they must have been planning on selling her to someone.

“…And you brought her with you?”

“I couldn’t just leave her there. If I did, some nasty aristocrat would’ve snatched her right up.”

The girl’s name was Suzie. She didn’t have any papers.

“So I decided to hire her as our servant.”

“There you go, making decisions on your own again…” Wille let out an exasperated sigh, but he didn’t actually have any strong objections. He crouched down to meet the girl’s eye level. “I’m sorry that my brother’s such an idiot.”

“Rude.”

The twins’ back-and-forth earned them a small smile out of Suzie. “No, I’m glad he found me…” It would appear that she didn’t have any problems with Lukas’s decision, either.

When they asked her for details, they learned that she used to live in an orphanage. Her good looks ended up working against her there, as the orphanage director sold her to Isaac. That was when her documentation was destroyed.

Rather than go back to the orphanage, she preferred to stay with Lukas.

“C’mon, what’s the harm? No sense letting an opportunity go to waste,” Lukas said with a shrug. “It’ll probably get dangerous for us to go out shopping before long. We can pay Suzie a handsome salary to do it for us.”

Upon her hearing that, Suzie’s shoulders twitched.

Seeing her reaction, Wille grinned in delight.

The girl had a sharp head on her. After watching and listening to Lukas, it had taken her no time at all to guess what the twins were up to.

“…You shouldn’t.” Suzie’s voice trembled. She grabbed at Lukas’s sleeve in distress as she made her impassioned plea. “Nike will kill you! Everyone knows it. If you do bad things, Nike will come for you. You mustn’t disobey the king!”

Nike was like fear personified. Even children who didn’t go to school had heard of her.

The king held absolute power in the Lylat Kingdom, and she presided over his mighty Genesis Army intelligence organization with an iron fist. She defied all limits on what a spy could be, and she held control over the police, the military, and even the courts.

“Nike hears everything,” Suzie whispered, glancing around in terror. “If you say bad things, she’ll come after you!”

Naturally, the twins knew all about Nike.

As members of Inferno, they’d worked together with her during the Great War. She was a spy who surpassed human limits in a whole different way than Hearth did.

A slim smile spread across Lukas’s face. “Who cares? I hate to break it to you, but I’ve never lost. You’re talking to a master gamer who’s won a thousand matches straight.”

“That’s a lie, by the way. He gambles away money all the time.”

“Here’s the bottom line. If you’re gonna work for us, then there’s one thing you gotta understand.” Undeterred by Wille’s correction, Lukas patted Suzie on the shoulder. “It doesn’t matter how strong our opponents are—us brothers always come out on top.”

He gave her a confident grin and stuck out his tongue.

In his head, he was thinking back to what Gerde had told him.

Back at Heat Haze Palace, Inferno’s base, Lukas found himself feeling suspicious.

Nine years had passed since the Great War, and Klaus had just been given a special mission, so he was going to be away from the team for a while. That in and of itself was fine and no particular cause for concern, but something about the way Guido had assigned him the task didn’t sit right with Lukas.

That was why he went and paid a visit to the lounge, where Inferno’s most senior member—“Firewalker” Gerde—was relaxing.

Gerde was an old woman dressed in a casual outfit of jeans and a tank top that left her strapping biceps fully bare. She was chugging down beer and listening happily to the radio.

When she saw Lukas come in, she raised her beer bottle in the air. “What’s going on, Lukas? You finally decided to take my training?”

“Don’t even joke about that, Granny G. I just saw my life flash before my eyes.”

Lukas evaded her offer with a pained grin, then said, “Hey” and asked his question.

“Is it just me, or have things been weird between Guido and the boss lately?”

The moment the words left his mouth, Gerde set her bottle down on the table. “Now, you listen here, sonny. How much do you know—?”

“Just what me and my brother have guessed.”

Naturally, Wille had shared the same doubts. If anything, Wille’s ability to pick up on things like that far exceeded his own.

“My brother’s pretty worried. ‘They’re carrying a dangerous weight,’ he told me. And if he’s freaking out, then I gotta assume something big is going on. There’s this weird rumor I overheard, see?”

Lukas spoke the fateful words.

“A rumor called the Nostalgia Project.”

Gerde’s eyebrow twitched. She was dead easy to read when she was drunk. “…Well, well, well. And where’d you hear about that?”

“During a mission with Guido, when I was taking this soldier chick for everything she had.”

Lukas hadn’t been given the details on what they were doing.

He’d been blindly following Guido’s instructions out in a neutral country, and his orders were to follow a woman. When Lukas got bored of just idly tailing her, he invited her to a gambling den and cleaned her out. After he’d relentlessly egged her on and attacked her psychologically, she’d lost her composure and had begun muttering under her breath:

“Mr. Spider had such hopes for me, and look at what I’ve done! What shame I’ve brought on the name Silver Cicada!”

“How could one chosen to stop the Nostalgia Project such as I lose to a mere civilian?”

The woman assumed that no one had heard her.

However, Lukas had mastered the art of reading lips, and the slightest of facial twitches was enough for him to tell what she was saying. Whoever this Silver Cicada woman was, she’d gotten sloppy. The way Lukas had broken her down played a key part in that, but still.

Guido never ended up telling him what he did to the woman and her allies.

After he finished explaining himself, Gerde shook her head. “The boss made the call not to tell you two. It’s not my place to say any more.”

“What the hell, you mean she’s icing us out?”

“It’s proof of that girl’s conviction, I’d say.”

“……………”

Lukas pursed his lips in annoyance at his failure to get Gerde to blab.

If she didn’t want to tell him, there was little more he could do. Gerde knew all of Lukas’s tricks, after all. They’d been working together for over a decade.

He hadn’t come away completely empty-handed—now he knew that Inferno’s boss was grappling with a problem so thorny, she couldn’t consult her own team about it—but that only served to exacerbate the frustration bubbling up inside of him.

“Shit, man. I don’t like this one bit. Maybe I’ll go hit up Klaus and Wille and just go on a big rampage. Just you wait. Once we get going, we’ll have every politician in the country tearing their hair out. We’re not happy, and we’re about to make it everyone’s problem!”

Lukas limbered up his arm and started to get up to leave.

“The project got started in the Lylat Kingdom.”

All of a sudden, Gerde spoke up.

“Hmm?” When he turned to look, he saw her letting out a resigned sigh.

“Don’t mind me, just talking to myself. That’s all I can really reveal…” She popped a pair of cigarettes in her mouth and lit them. “Inferno’s standing at a crossroads right now. I’m glad we’ve got you looking out for us.”

As he stared at the long, thin curl of smoke she exhaled, Lukas found his resolve growing firm.

“I picked up what Granny was putting down. Bottom line is, this rotten kingdom is up to no good. And the boss and Guido are wrapped up in it.”

After putting Suzie to bed in their hideout, the twins celebrated having completed the first stage of their plan and poured themselves glasses of the expensive wine they’d looted from Isaac’s base.

Lukas chugged his down in a single swig and smoothed back his hair. “That means we’ve only got one option. And hey, I never liked this country much anyways.”

The two of them made the call to infiltrate the Lylat Kingdom all on their own. They hadn’t told Inferno’s boss about their plan. They’d taken a mission they knew they could finish in a month and lied about needing a year to complete it, then had spent all their time since then living in Lylat.

That said, they knew better than to believe that the boss wasn’t aware that they were running wild.

Maybe she was choosing to turn a blind eye. Either that, or the situation was so dire that she legitimately hadn’t noticed.

On seeing how firm Lukas’s resolve was, Wille let out a sarcastic laugh. “Man, you really are an idiot, huh?”

“Hey, you’re the one who followed me out here.”

“Yeah, ’cause I knew you’d never be able to pull this off on your own.”

“Well, I’m glad one of us was thinking straight. Dang, what a great brother I’ve got.”

“Magnificent.”

“Yeah, magnificent.”

A hint of a grin played on Lukas’s face.

“I’m all in. If that’s what it takes to protect Inferno, I’m down to put everything on the line.”

Lukas truly did act as the team’s backbone.

More than anyone else, he was right there at the team’s center. He was able to provide support to the technically skilled members of Veronika, Guido, and Gerde while at the same time offering guidance to the less-experienced Heide and Klaus.

Everyone knew that he was going to be the next boss of Inferno someday. And his brother Wille followed him every step of the way.

That was why the two of them had gotten to work in the Lylat Kingdom.

“Let’s do this thing. We’re gonna take this country, and—”

By a strange twist of fate, a pair of girls would end up finishing that sentence for him two years later.

Nine years after the Great War, the Inferno twins put a plan into motion in Lylat.

Ten years after the Great War, “Torchlight” Guido and the rest of Serpent’s machinations brought Inferno down. “Bonfire” Klaus survived that purge, and he went on to found Lamplight.

Eleven years after the Great War, after overcoming many missions, Lamplight defeated Serpent and enjoyed a vacation on Marnioce.

Then another year passed, and twelve years after the Great War, a pair of up-and-comers made their move.

She’d long since gotten used to how lonely mornings felt.

With drowsy eyes, she headed over to the washbasin to clean her face. The cold water splattered out and soaked her all the way down to her neck. She returned to her bedroom, stripped out of her wet nightclothes, and put on her school uniform. The ribbon mandated by her school’s dress code was wrinkled, and though she pulled it tight to try to remove the crease, it always came right back, so she had to go get her spare ribbon from the dresser.

The whole series of events took place in a run-down apartment in the Lylat capital of Pilca.

When she opened the curtains, the bright sunlight came streaming in.

Her roommate, who was still lying in bed, let out an annoyed groan before curling up in a ball over on the corner of her bed in an attempt to escape the light.

Exasperated as she was by the way her roommate showed no signs of getting up, she went over to the room’s mirror.

Unsurprisingly, she saw herself on its surface, but something about her looked different today.

“Huh,” said Erna. “I think I might have grown a little taller.”

She took a moment to admire her reflection.

Erna had been keeping her hair short recently, and that had distracted her so much that she hadn’t really noticed much else. Her legs were peeking out of her skirt a lot more than they had when she first arrived there in Lylat.

“I guess that makes sense,” she muttered idly to herself.

A full two years had passed since she got scouted onto Lamplight from her spy academy.

The Abyss Doll bioweapon mission was two months long, the Corpse assassin mission was a bit over a month, and the Purple Ant mission in the United States of Mouzaia was a bit over a month, too. Then, after three months where it was just one thing after another, she’d fought and reconciled with Avian over in the Far East, shared a one-month honeymoon with them, gotten dragged into a web of Serpent and CIM deception in the Fend Commonwealth, had gone on vacation, and after all that, she’d spent a year living in the Lylat Kingdom.

Erna, who’d been fourteen when she joined Lamplight, was sixteen years old now.

It was no wonder she’d grown.

“Yeep!”

After pumping her fist in triumph, she turned back to her blanket-swaddled roommate.

“Annette, you need to get up. We’re going to be late.”

She walked over to the bed and shook Annette.

“…I’m taking the morning off, yo.”

Erna couldn’t help but sigh. “They’re going to expel you, you know. What kind of exchange student sleeps in basically every day?”

“You take things too seriously.”

“…Hmph.”

“You should try taking a page from my book… Zzz…”

When Annette got like that, there wasn’t a lever in the world that could move her.

If Erna stayed with her any longer, she was liable to be tardy herself. After a plain breakfast of bread and soup, she headed straight to school.

At present, she and Annette were exchange students at St. Katraz High School.

After she’d spent a full year walking to school, the route there had become a familiar sight. As she got closer to campus, a handful of people she knew came up to her. “Good morning,” they greeted her with voices rich in refinement and class. “What lovely weather we’re having today.”

St. Katraz was a girls’ school, and all of them were girls wearing the same uniform as Erna’s.

“Yeah, morning…,” Erna replied softly.

Interpersonal communication was hardly Erna’s forte, so she’d had her misgivings about her ability to fit in as a student, but she’d actually made some friends.

Her predisposition for unluckiness—which was really a desire for punishment—had gradually been getting better of late as her self-esteem improved. She was still able to sense the early warning signs of misfortune, but she didn’t accidentally get the people around her caught up in her bad luck anymore.

Without that, she was a perfectly adorable high schooler who just happened to trip over her tongue sometimes.

The other girls gave her radiant smiles. “Did you hear? Homecoming is next month, and this year, they’re going all out. I daresay we’re going to be swamped preparing.”

“Ugh, but we have exams next month, too…,” Erna said, groaning.

“It’s so unfair, isn’t it? That does remind me, though. A new restaurant just opened near the station, and the food there looks to die for. I hear that famous chef John Dumont is the one running it.”

“Ooh, we should go.”

“Tee-hee, you should see the way your face just lit up.”

It was just the sort of pleasant conversation that any students might have.

Erna was quite taken with her new lifestyle. She did feel pangs of loneliness at times, but she would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy studiously doing her schoolwork and hanging out after school with girls her same age.

Occasionally, though, she could feel the wall that existed between them.

“Oh dear, would you look at that?” one of the students said, making no effort to hide her disdain.

There was a man sitting in front of the school gate dressed in shabby rags. He had an empty can and a sign that said “NEED MONEY OR JOB.”

There was a line of cars dropping off students in front of the school, but despite the pleading looks the man gave to the drivers, none of them paid him any attention. The students refused to even look him in the eye as they went inside.

“Good heavens, the homeless are at it again.”

“How positively filthy. Why aren’t the school guards doing anything about him?”

“What a dreadful way to start our morning. Make sure to hold your breath when you walk past him.”

The girls Erna was with were not hiding their revulsion. They were close enough that the man could hear them, and they were fully aware of it.

“……………”

That, too, had become a familiar sight to Erna.

The majority of the students who went to St. Katraz were daughters of aristocrats or members of the bourgeoisie. You couldn’t even enroll without making a substantial donation. It was very much a school designed for the rich and powerful.

The only emotion the girls who went there felt toward the masses was antipathy.

None of them criticized each other for it, either. To them, it was a natural way to feel. There wasn’t even any true malice behind it. In their eyes, the fact that they had to look at something unpleasant first thing in the morning made them victims.

Erna passed the man by, just like all the other girls.

“………I’m sorry.”

She only just managed to get the words out.

The rest of the group gave her a set of quizzical looks. “Huh? Did you just—?”

Erna shook her head and quickly denied it. “Yeep! I didn’t say anything.”

One of the girls let out a shrill “Eeeeeek!” without missing a beat.

“Did you hear that, everyone?!” “It was a ‘yeep’! We got to hear one of those oh-so-precious yeeps!” “Oh, what an auspicious day!” “Yeep! Yeeeeep!”

“…………………………”

As her classmates cheered, Erna sank into silence.

“Yeep” was something she’d unconsciously started saying to make herself seem more childish. Presenting herself as an innocent young girl and leaning into the misfortune that followed her was how she made her way in life.

However, Erna was sixteen now.

Every day, she reminded herself that it was high time she sealed the yeeps away, yet every so often, one sneaked out all the same.

Nightfall was when Erna’s true work began.

Attending St. Katraz was nothing more than a way to mask her identity. It was while attending the job she kept a secret from the school that she finally got to do some proper espionage.

The job in question was through a Lylat Kingdom attorney’s office. She worked there four times a week.

“I must say, I don’t know what I’d do without you. Ever since you showed up, I started finally being able to get through my paperwork.”

“I’m happy to help.”

Gabriel Mash, Esq. clapped his hands together in appreciation, and Erna gave him a respectful bow.

Gabriel had opened his own practice at a young age, and he was a generous man who was famous for taking on any case, even ones where he didn’t stand to make money. His track record was hardly stellar, but his refusal to turn down a client meant that he was offered new work on the daily. That, combined with his inability to keep things tidy, meant that his office was constantly a complete mess.

Erna nodded as she bound some documents together with string. “And thank you for keeping this a secret from my school.”

“Yeah, of course. What’s the harm, I say? You came here from abroad, and now you’re working your butt off. That’s the exact kind of kid a guy wants to root for.”

Gabriel hummed a little tune as he read through a court record. He was a thirty-four-year-old redhead with a beard that didn’t much suit him. Once again, he’d taken over a case that another attorney had thrown in the towel on. Gabriel and his wife often got into fights over the man’s disregard for money.

Erna showed him a document. “Which file did you want these materials in, Mr. Mash?”

“Hmm?” Gabriel took a quick look at it, then let out an understanding laugh. “Ah, these are from that thing last week. Our guy got prosecuted for seditious conspiracy just because he had a hunting rifle in his storehouse. I’ll plead his case, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get him off the hook. Someone got thrown in jail last month for the exact same thing. I have to wonder, what is it the royal administration is so afraid of?”

The man’s brain worked quickly, but he always laid out his thoughts plainly. He readily revealed the relevant details.

That was the reason Erna was working there.

Piles of case files made their way to Mash Law every day, the majority of them cases that had been rejected by the courts—in other words, disputes between commoners and members of the aristocracy. Due to his kind nature, Gabriel accepted the kind of cases that other law firms wouldn’t touch.

The court records Erna got to handle contained all the details of the events.

On May 2, the Mon Ange Books publishing house on the second block of Tungten Street was ordered to cease operations. The Royal Censorship Bureau had determined that five of their publications contained language that constituted a “disturbance to public order.” The president and directors were all arrested, and it looked like the prosecutor was going to push for prison time.

On February 8, there was graffiti found on Lieutenant-General Gigogh’s house over on the west side of the capital. Its message was critical of the administration, and it was assumed to be the work of the anonymous artist Maxim. A local man was arrested, although he denied any involvement. The offense normally only carried a fine, but in an unusual move, the prosecutor advocated for prison time.

On April 7 and 8, twelve students and professors from Toulk University were arrested for treason. The professors launched a series of criticisms against the administration during their lectures, and the group had allegedly been producing films with anti-establishment themes.

There were battles raging in Lylat between people who resented the government and those who sought to control them. Gabriel didn’t harbor any anti-government sentiments himself, but his willingness to take on work that other attorneys avoided meant that such cases constantly found their way to him nonetheless.

What’s more, those case files contained the personal information of the relevant parties. In order to represent someone, an attorney needed to know not just their name, age, and address, but sometimes even details about their background and interpersonal connections.

As a result, Mash Law had a huge amount of data on people across the kingdom who had problems with the government, and Erna was all too happy to secretly copy that information for herself.

I’ve been gathering it up slowly. Little by little, bit by bit.

She’d been working there for over six months, and in that time, she’d compiled quite the list.

She was carrying a stack of documents and wondering how she could get the intel to her teammates when her foot landed on a stray sheet of paper.

“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP?!”

“Yeep?”

The paper slid out from under her, and she tumbled to the ground in a spectacular fashion.

Gabriel came rushing over. “Are you all right?” he asked, to which Erna gave him a pained smile from down on the ground. “You’re great at your job, but that clumsiness of yours is a force to be reckoned with.”

“How unlucky…”

Erna let out a sigh and brushed off the papers that had landed on her head.

Due to how bad of a spill she’d taken, the documents she’d just finished sorting had landed everywhere. Papers of all sorts had come spilling out of the nicely bound files.

She seized the opportunity to grab one of the papers and show it to Gabriel. “Which case does this go with, Mr. Mash?”

“Oh, here, let me show you.”

Gabriel readily explained the situation. The man was affable and had a sharp memory, but his adherence to his professional duty of confidentiality was shockingly lax.

Thanks to him, though, Erna’s intelligence work went that much more smoothly.

Erna took the notes she’d copied from the office and brought them home with her. She was going to transcribe them onto microfilm when she got there, so it was crucial that she not run into any trouble on her way back.

However, there were always two stops made on her way there.

The first was a bakery. It was open late into the night to cater to unmarried blue-collar workers, and she rushed in to buy up their unsold bread. After filling her bag as well as both arms, she headed out into the back alleys of the city.

Midway through her journey, she stopped to take a rest.

It’s exhausting, spending every day like this.

She had school during the day, then her job at night. On top of that, she had to work to complete her mission while hiding her true identity as a spy all the while. She never had a moment to herself to just relax.

However, that was how spies normally operated.

Up until Lylat, Lamplight had never stayed in a single country for more than two months at a time. The team was unique in that their job was to go around the world overcoming situations that had proved impossible for their countrymen.

Now, though, Erna was faced with the solitude that came with being a spy who had to lie to everyone around them. Aside from Annette, she hadn’t seen any of her teammates in ages.

But it’s all fine. I’m hanging in there. I just have to take things one day at a time, and—

Right as she was taking in the smell of the bread to cheer herself up, she heard a voice.

“And what exactly do you think you’re doing?”

It came from behind her the moment she set foot in the alleyway.

Three men dressed in military uniforms stepped in to cut off her avenue of retreat. They’d been hiding just out of sight.

The leader of the trio had a shaved head. His features were so pronounced that his eyes were practically bugging out, and he radiated a quiet hostility as he marched over to where Erna stood, motionless. “We’re with Genesis Army’s Nilfa unit. What’s an exchange student like you doing loitering in alleyways?”

Erna bit down on her lip a little.

The Genesis Army was the Lylat Kingdom’s intelligence agency—a group that leeched off the aristocracy and used their outstanding counterintelligence skills to keep domestic malcontents in line.

She’d heard of the Nilfa unit, too. They were the ones in charge of suppressing anti-government sentiment in that area. They showed up many a time in Gabriel’s court records.

Erna played the part of a delicate young girl and cast her eyes downward. “I was just giving them some bread…”

Sure enough, the back alley Erna was visiting was filled with homeless people like the one she’d seen that morning. They had problems just getting enough to eat, and they gathered in alleys to scrounge for scraps and took charity from churches in order to get through the day.

Four people, men and children dressed in shabby clothes, had already gathered around her. Without that bread, those people would starve. Some of the people in their ranks had lost their jobs and houses after getting arrested for opposing the government. Erna had learned about them through her work at the law firm, too.

The Nilfa men nodded like they’d seen her answer coming. “You sure were. We’ve done our research. Every night, you buy up unsold bread and dole it out to these people. It’s admirable, it really is.”

Their mouths curled into mocking sneers.

“But the question is, what are you getting out of feeding this gutter trash?”

“……………”

Erna’s face went hot.

She knew that was how they really felt, and that just made it all the more reprehensible.

“You go to St. Katraz, right? You should be focusing on your studies.” The leader of the trio gave Erna a look dripping with scorn. “We know you’ve been working at that law office. It boggles the mind, it really does. Why take your hard-earned money and throw it down the drain like that?”

“Th-these people are—”

“Lazy bums? Yeah. The only reason they’re even able to live here is because good people risked it all driving those Galgad savages back into their own country. Now these wastes of space are squandering that blessing and stinking up the whole city.”

The Nilfa trio shoved the homeless people aside and moved in to surround Erna.

“Hands up. You’re under investigation.”

Their interrogation wasn’t going to be gentle.

Erna could see the guns hanging from their waists. Their barrels glinted dully in the moonlight.

“It’s people like you who always embolden the morons who try to oppose us and attack our nation. You wouldn’t happen to be an enemy spy, would you?”

They were calling it an investigation, but it was little more than mob justice.

It happened all the time. The aristocracy regularly sicced the Genesis Army on people who harbored anti-government sentiments in order to bury them in abuse and strike fear into their hearts.

It was true that spies had an easy time joining up with people who had a bone to pick with the government. When people lacked the power to fight their nation’s institutions, it wasn’t much of a jump to go from that to wanting foreign spies to threaten those same power structures. However, that only served to legitimize the Genesis Army’s methods.

The men smiled cruelly. “You make one shady move, and we’ll execute you for sedition. You wanna join the rest of the bodies?”

Cold sweat trickled down Erna’s back.

That note with my list on it is in my collar.

She hadn’t put it in her bag. It was tucked safely away in a hidden pocket in her shirt. No matter how violently they searched her, they wouldn’t find it.

I just have to put up with a little bit of abuse…

It was clear from the look in the men’s eyes just how vulgar their desire to torment a young girl was. Erna was sixteen now, and her body was closer to that of an adult woman.

However, fighting back would be a bad move.

All she had to do was endure, and then their suspicions that she was a spy would go away. That was enough.

As a female spy, she was prepared for this. All she had to do was let them satisfy their—

“Y-you’re wrong. She didn’t do anything wrong!”

The cry came from an unexpected direction.

It was one of the homeless youths that Erna had been trying to give bread to. His voice trembled as he looked pleadingly at the Genesis Army trio. “All she does is bring us food out of the goodness of her heart. She would never defy His Majesty—”

“Get your foul breath out of my face!”

One of the Nilfa men slapped him across the face.

Violence came naturally to them, and the crack of the swift backhand echoed through the alley.

“Oh, I get it. The girl’s trying to defy us by winning over the human trash. Now we’ve got her on obstruction of a public official on top of seditious conspiracy. In accordance with Article Four of the Peace Preservation Act, you’re under arrest.”

Hearing that made Erna’s blood run cold.

“Now, get over here! The guillotine is thirsty for your—!”

“Oh, just shut up.”

As the man shouted, Erna sank her elbow into his solar plexus.

There were three hostiles she needed to contend with, and she’d gone for the bald man in the middle.

The surprise attack caught her foes off guard, and their reactions were delayed. The man on the right went to draw his gun, but Erna grabbed his arm, twisted it all the way back, and snatched his pistol away from him. Then she used his body as a shield as she circled around and shot the left man in the shoulder.

She continued taking advantage of their confusion and pressed on. “I’m code name Fool—and it’s time to kill with…”

“You little shit!”

The man with the shaved head roared and fired off a front kick.

Erna had assumed that her elbow jab had knocked him out cold, but clearly, he’d managed to soften the blow at the last minute.

“Gah!”

Unable to get a shot off in time, Erna had no choice but to block the kick with her arms. However, her body was too light to defend against a blow from a trained adult man. She went hurtling backward and smashed her head against the brick wall behind her.

How unlucky…

As it turned out, her odds in a fight against three full-grown men were slim.

The one thing she could use to beat them was her special talent, but it wasn’t just some switch she could flip at will. All it let her do was detect where tragedies and accidents were likely to take place, nothing more. And right now, there was nothing to speak of in the area.

I don’t sense any misfortune… Everything’s totally safe here.

Her nose twitched as she tried to sniff some bad luck out, but she couldn’t sense anything. It made her wonder if her senses were getting duller. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t noticed the Nilfa ambush, either.

There was nothing she could do to win.

“TAKE THIS, TRAITOR!”

The bald man raised his fist to strike Erna.

She got ready to dodge, knowing that it was going to be a close call.

That was when a knife pierced the man’s hand clean through.

The Genesis Army trio let out cries of disbelief.

The knife had come flying from out of nowhere and impaled his hand straight through the bone.

“What’s gutter trash doing with a weapon like that…?” the man stammered.

Erna didn’t understand what was going on until she looked behind him and saw what had happened.

The knife had come from the young homeless man who’d been trying to defend Erna. He was holding a weapon resembling a gun, and based on its shape, that must have been what had fired the knife.

He was breathing heavily in fear as he stared the Genesis Army members down.

Considering how shabby he looked, it was weird that he had a weapon so advanced…

“It was a present from yours truly, yo.”

A new voice came, this time from above.

When Erna looked up in shock, she saw Annette standing on a nearby rooftop.

Unlike her, Annette had barely grown at all over the past two years. Her messily tied-up hair, on the other hand, had become even more billowing. It sat under her large gray hat and made her unnervingly eccentric-looking.

“I made sure to hand them out in advance. Erna was doing some dangerous work, you see.”

The Genesis Army men stared at her in bafflement as she swung her way down on a wire.

Annette had seen all this coming.

Now Erna realized why she hadn’t sensed any misfortune. If anything, the only thing welling up in her chest was pity for the doomed Genesis Army members.

“Who even are you…?” The bald man clutched his impaled hand and scowled in discomfort at the sudden newcomer. “Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into by defying—?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be rough. But realizing that gave me a cool idea, yo.”

Annette loudly clapped her hands together.

“If you’re gonna do bad things, then two can play at that game!”

That clap was the signal.

On Annette’s prompting, people began emerging from all over the alleyway—the homeless ones Erna always gave bread to. There were men and women, young and old alike. There were three of them at first, then five, then seven, then nine, their numbers swelling with each passing moment. The one thing they all had in common were the gun-shaped weapons they were holding, courtesy of Annette.

The Genesis Army men screamed. Perhaps understanding had just dawned on them.

They were already fully surrounded. There was no way for them to escape.

Annette flashed a grin at the homeless throng. “Now, everyone pull your triggers in unison. If you don’t, they’re gonna kill you all.”

Some of the people in the group were frightened, but her threat did its job and stamped out their hesitation.

“This is Last Code: Knickknacks—a sobered world of ruin, yo.”

It was the same technology that had powered the electromagnet back on the Marnioce naval base. Despite being as small as watch batteries, they were incredibly powerful. Annette installed them into all of her inventions. With a flip of her remote, she could turn the magnetic field on and off—and in doing so, this allowed her to facilitate other people’s homicides.

This time around, she’d included them in guns that fired knives. It was a weapon that gave normal civilians the power to kill.

The knives flying from the homeless people’s guns sank deep into the bald man’s body, drawn to him by the magnetic force the first knife that hit him gave off. There was nowhere for the surrounded Genesis Army members to run. As soon as a single knife found its mark, the power of the magnets meant that the next ones could no longer miss. The men’s blood sprayed across the alley as they got skewered from head to toe.

All the while, Annette didn’t lift so much as a finger. She simply observed in silence as the homeless people vented their pent-up anger by filling the Genesis Army members with knives.

“You can be pretty vicious, you know,” Erna said.

“Hmm?” Annette replied. “What, are you mad or something?”

“No, no, it’s fine. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been so careless. It’s my fault…”

They’d made it through unscathed, but immediately after the danger passed, Erna regretted the whole thing.

The three Genesis Army members were dead.

That was murder. Erna might not have killed them directly, but her heart still ached. Those men had killed scores of innocents, but still.

However, the more pressing issue was the fact that the Genesis Army had their eyes on her.

“We won’t be able to go home or back to school anymore.”

She was going to end up on the wanted list for sure.

The homeless people present at the scene had been involved in the murders themselves, so they weren’t going to blab, but even so, her life was about to get a whole lot less peaceful.

“We’ll need to relocate and lie low for a while.”

Annette grinned and wiped some of the dead men’s blood off herself. “Yo, we could always go back to Din for a bit.”

It was a reasonable suggestion.

With nowhere to live, they were essentially homeless themselves now. The smart thing to do would be to quickly retrieve their luggage from their lodgings and flee the country before the Genesis Army began hunting them in earnest.

Erna bit down hard on her lip and shook her head. “We can’t. We haven’t finished the work Teach assigned to us yet.”

Scurrying home and abandoning their mission wasn’t an option.

In her mind, she was thinking about the vow they’d made that night during their vacation.

“We can’t rely on Teach or the others. We all agreed. Once we split up, it was up to all of us to do our best.”

The two years since Lamplight’s founding had inspired major changes in Erna. That was true of the year she’d spent training and completing missions alongside the others, and it was true of the lonely year she’d spent working on foreign soil with only Annette by her side.

She wasn’t some helpless child who needed protecting anymore.

“We need to stand up to the Genesis Army on our own.”

Annette gave her a toothy grin like that was the exact answer she’d been hoping for. “Yo, I’ve been waiting for a job we could do together for ages.”

Her innocent smile made it clear just how excited she was.

In the past, the pairing would have been unthinkable. Erna and Annette spent a lot of their downtime together, but when it came to missions, they generally got partnered up with different members of the team.

In a sense, this was going to be the first time they actually worked together to complete an assignment. And they’d been given a brutally difficult mission to mark the occasion.

The Lylat Kingdom was the land where revolutions died.

Half a year prior, the coup d’état led by Vice-Admiral Grenier ended in failure. The Genesis Army’s spymaster Nike noticed some tiny things out of place in his reports and went to the naval base herself. From there, she got one of Grenier’s right-hand men to betray him and tell her everything.

At Grenier’s trial, he was sentenced to death and was publicly executed via guillotine.

Launching a successful revolution in Lylat was said to be impossible.

Despite knowing that, Lamplight went in anyway.

There was a plot brewing in the world’s shadows—the Nostalgia Project—and in order to learn the truth, they needed to get close to the Lylat prime minister. If they weren’t careful about how they did so, though, Nike the Invincible Tactician God would kill them. Fighting her head-on was an option of absolute last resort.

If they wanted to get to the prime minister, they needed to neutralize the Genesis Army.

That meant bringing about so much chaos that not even Nike could keep it in check.

After thinking long and hard, Klaus arrived at a verdict. It was hardly the most direct solution, but it was going to have to do. The good news was that particular fire already had plenty of fuel.

That plan just so happened to be identical to the one the Inferno twins had tried.

“—we’ll start a revolution. Our job is to overthrow the Lylat government.”

“Soot” Lukas had once made that very same declaration, and now “Fool” Erna was making it, too.

With just two girls, they were going to take down a national government.