Spy Classroom - Volume SS2 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Lily’s Case

“If it’s Flower Garden you want, you’ll find her in the detention cell,” Peggy informed Klaus.

Peggy, a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a bulging, undersize suit, was the principal of their seventeenth spy academy. She appeared at a glance to be a kindly old woman, but she had once served with the Naval Intelligence Department. Glimmers of skepticism flickered behind her mild expression.

“The detention cell? Did she do something wrong?” Klaus asked as he flipped through the academy’s files. It was night, and the two of them were talking in the principal’s office.

“No, this happens a lot. It’s a bullying situation. Many of the other students have been harassing Flower Garden. Apparently, it all started when she got in her teammates’ way during a test. Her grades were never all that stellar, so she made for an easy target…”

“I see. That does sound like a common enough story.”

“Bullying is an unavoidable part of running a school. I’m not proud of it, but it is what it is.”

“I don’t follow, though.”

“Oh?”

“Why lock the victim up? Aren’t perpetrators the ones you’re supposed to punish?”

“Flower Garden got her revenge.” Peggy gave him a strained smile. “She poisoned all her bullies and sent them straight to the infirmary.”

“A bold strategy,” Klaus replied.

According to Peggy, the bullying had been going on for some time. Klaus didn’t ask for the details, but the gist of it was that twenty-five students had been involved, and Flower Garden had poisoned each and every one of their canteens. All the subjects of her revenge had been afflicted by extreme fevers that lasted three whole days.

Peggy shook her head. “I recognize that there were extenuating circumstances, but even so, she took things too far. Hence, the detention cell.” She parted the office’s curtains. “This is where we monitor the cell from, so you can actually see it from here.”

Klaus put down the document he was reading and headed over to the window. There was a small shed on the other side of the courtyard, and the situation inside it was visible through its large aperture.

Inside, a silver-haired girl was mixing chemicals together with an intense look of concentration, like she was glued down to her desk. After heating a beaker, she retrieved the precipitate from within and mixed it together with yet another chemical. Then, after comparing it to the example from her reference book, she dabbed a tentative drop on her tongue. She frowned. By the look of it, her concoction was a dud.

The girl got right to work grinding up flower petals so she could get started on her next experiment.

“She knew she was going to be in there awhile, so she asked to be able to study at her leisure.” Peggy nodded. “That girl’s a tenacious one. She works harder than anyone else at the academy.”

Peggy went on to tell Klaus that it had been eight years since Flower Garden enrolled at the academy and that she’d been working to improve herself that whole time. Due to the blunders she always made right when it really counted, though, her grades were atrocious.

As such, she’d been branded a washout.

The academy had accepted her due to the promise she showed, but she was far too immature for them to graduate her.

As Klaus continued staring at the detention cell, Peggy asked him a question. “…Are you going to be taking her with you?”

“I am, yes. For a time, at least.”

“Who even are you anyway? I got the oddest orders from my superior this morning. They told me that a man was coming and that I needed to tell him about my worst students. I have to ask—why?”

“That’s classified.”

“Ah, I see… I understand, of course. I suppose I don’t have any right to that information.” Peggy let out a chagrined sigh. “That girl survived hell, you know,” she began explaining. “Hers was the first village they ever used poison gas on, and she was the only person who survived. It had to have been her abnormal physiology that saved her; there’s no other explanation. Her family, her friends, her neighbors, everything she knew was gone. I’m told they found her just sitting there in a daze clutching her parents’ hands as the flies swarmed around them.”

“……………”

“It gets me to thinking. Even if she doesn’t end up becoming a spy, maybe it would be for the best if she found a safer path to take through life. That’s how I feel, not as a spy academy principal but as a human being. The whole reason I put the girls through such harsh training is because I don’t want them to die.” Peggy gave Klaus a long, pointed look. “Tell me, is the place you’re taking her heaven? Or is it hell?”

Her voice had a hint of reproach in it, and Klaus took a moment to evaluate her. He kind of liked how she cared about her pupils in ways that a spy needn’t have, so he answered her honestly. “I’m going to have her complete an Impossible Mission.”

“An Impossible Mission…?!”

“I’m not going to let her die, of course. It certainly won’t be heaven, but it won’t be hell, either.”

As Klaus gave her his brief response, he stepped away from the window. He was a busy man, and there were a double-digit number of academies he still needed to visit. Now that he’d reached his verdict, it was time to make his demand and hit the road.

He scrawled a message on a scrap of paper and placed it on the principal’s table.

“Pass this along to Flower Garden. Tell her that Lamplight has summoned her.”

Their conversation took place a single week before the Lamplight team was formed—and five months before they had their deadly showdown in Mitario against Purple Ant.

In the United States of Mouzaia’s capital, Mitario, Lamplight had begun a mission they would later end up calling the Mitario Showdown. Nations from across the globe were participating in a summit called the Tolfa Economic Conference, and they’d sent loads of spies alongside their government officials. Every intelligence agency in the world had deployed their top agents to the conference, and it had quickly descended into a chaotic battleground.

That was where one of Serpent’s members—Purple Ant—came in.

His objective was to massacre every spy he came across with no distinctions made, no slowing down, and no quarter given. To do so, he brainwashed ordinary civilians into “Worker Ant” assassins and sent them to attack the spies lurking in Mitario. Top spies from every country under the sun lost their lives to him one after another, and even Hearth, once hailed as the Greatest Spy in the World, died at his hands after the unfortunate combination of being racked by disease and betrayed by one of her own.

By the time the girls arrived at the city, it had already become the stuff of nightmares, and it wasn’t long before they ended up facing off against the Worker Ants. Sybilla had disguised herself as a journalist, and she ended up in a lethal brawl in a lightless building against a strong, taciturn boxer named Barron. Monika had disguised herself as a jazz musician, and she ended up in a deadly game of darts against a college student named Miranda whose aim was second to none.

The girls both emerged victorious, but the true nightmare had only just begun. Purple Ant had given an order to the Worker Ants that if one of them lost, another twelve needed to go in and put the target down for good. Before the girls knew what was happening, they found themselves surrounded with their lives in grave danger.

As peril descended on them, there was another girl engaging in a reckless battle of her own.

“All right, here I go,” said the ash-pink-haired “Forgetter,” Annette, grinning with delight as she stood atop the building’s roof. “Time to leave Lily to die!”

It was just past eleven PM, but Mitario was a city that never slept. The countless skyscrapers and the glowing neon signs hanging from them made for a truly beautiful sight.

Annette threw herself off the roof toward those glittering lights, and a wire shot out from her skirt and slowed her fall.

She was a sitting duck dangling there, and there was an enemy sniper lying in wait above her. The Westport Building was the tallest skyscraper in the world, and the sniper had their rifle at the ready on its thirty-ninth floor. Even at night, escaping them would be nigh impossible. Even if their own shots didn’t land, all it would take was a single order from them, and their allies on the ground would start firing as well.

That was, unless another girl stayed on the roof and acted as a decoy.

“Looks like Annette managed to get away. I hope she can get word to the others.”

A silver-haired girl stood atop the roof and beamed to draw the sniper’s attention. That girl’s name was “Flower Garden” Lily. She was clad in a dark outfit, and the ribbon she was wearing around her neck fluttered in the air as she puffed up her ample chest with pride. She dodged the bullets flying her way and took shelter behind the roof’s water tank.

Lily was in dire straits; that much was undeniable. The sniper wasn’t the only one closing in on the building. There were also Worker Ant assassins—twelve of them, to be precise.

“Now then, looks like it’s time for the Republic’s spy Wunderkind who’s faced a thousand battles and never once been bested to get serious.” Despite being cornered with her back against the wall, she laughed all the same. “I mean, twelve opponents? What a joke. I could take out that many in a single punch. Come back when you’ve got a hundred times that, buddy.”

Herein lies a record.

After realizing that her teammates were probably in the exact same danger she was, Lily decided that the fastest way to get the information about Purple Ant’s assassins to the Intel squad was to help Annette escape while she stayed behind on her own. It was the only way she could see to break through the despair descending on Mitario.

By Lily’s estimate, it would take a bit under an hour for Annette to get in touch with the Intel squad and for reinforcements to arrive. That was how long she was going to have to face her foes on her own for. She’d long been mocked as an academy washout, and this was going to be the first time she fought a meaningful battle solo.

Herein lies a record of “Flower Garden” Lily’s life-and-death attempt to stall for time.

One of the Worker Ants closing in on Lily was a young man named Patrick. By day, he worked at a bank, and by night, he worked as an assassin.

Two years ago, he got grabbed by five hoodlums while walking down an alleyway and dragged into a nearby building, blindfolded, and repeatedly doused in cold water. After fifteen straight hours of torture without being allowed to eat or drink, he had an unequivocal truth burned into his mind: “Don’t defy the king.”

From then on, he went along with every order he was given.

Whenever he found strange inflows or outflows of money at the bank he worked at, he looked into the client’s personal information and shot them dead if he found them suspicious. It didn’t matter if they were a spy or an ordinary civilian. If he found them suspicious, he showed them no mercy.

Today, he’d received another order.

“One of the Worker Ants screwed up. Go in as a twelve-man kill squad.”

He got the king’s royal decree via an intermediary. The king never revealed himself in person, instead choosing to keep to the shadows. Patrick had never seen the king. All he knew was that if he tried to disobey him, his body would react so strongly that he would vomit. Because of that, he emotionlessly carried out the work.

When he arrived at the designated location, he discovered that the other members were already assembled. Their ages and genders were all over the place, with everyone from a young female student to a man who could well be described as elderly being represented.

“I’ll take command once we’re on-site. Those were my instructions,” Patrick told the group succinctly as he distributed radios and directed the others to spread out. Their target had fled behind the Westport Building to the business district with its rows of skyscrapers. “Two hours ago, one of our Worker Ants in the police force let the target give them the slip. Their mistake was that after they framed her for murder, they left the actual arrest to some other officers. She should still be nearby. Find her.”

Using the radios to keep in contact, he had them encircle the area.

It didn’t take them long to track down their target. One of their allies worked as a security guard at the Westport Building, and they got a report from him that he’d spotted their target with his telescope. She’d been on the roof of one of the office buildings.

Patrick swiftly headed to the location. The nine-story building had just been built, and although it was owned by a trading company, everyone was out of the office at the moment, and the building lay empty. It was the perfect site in which to get a bit violent.

He put together a strategy. His plan was to have five of them, including their sniper, surround the building while the remaining seven went inside and started ascending its floors.

The story was, although their sniper constantly kept his rifle at the ready, the enemy had been able to sense his hostility. He fired immediately but failed to land a hit, and the shocked silver-haired girl fled inside the building. Meanwhile, the sniper had been so distracted by her that he lost sight of the ash-pink-haired girl who’d been with her.

So the pink-haired girl got away… We need to finish this before she can call for backup.

Patrick was unshaken.

The first thing he did was head for the first-floor offices and track down the control panel that operated the entire building. With it, he could manipulate everything, from the air-conditioning to the lighting. He turned on every light in the building. Then he readied his gun and began the search.

The seven of them scoured every corner of the floor for anywhere a spy might possibly be hiding. They started on the first floor before going to the second, then headed from the second to the third. Luckily for them, the building wasn’t that big, and each floor had only five or six offices in it. The air was tense as they progressed from one floor illuminated by white florescent lights to the next.

While Patrick was giving out orders, the old man came over to him. He had the gentle face of a man who wouldn’t kill a fly. “You command so efficiently… Have you been doing this long?” he asked quietly.

Patrick was impressed. “Well, that’s something. You’re composed enough to be making small talk?”

“My brainwashing seems to have loosened,” the man whispered. “Up until just a few days ago, I couldn’t even hold a conversation while under orders. My mouth would freeze up… I still wouldn’t dream of disobeying his orders, of course… The trembling, it doesn’t stop…”

Sure enough, his hands were shaking. The king had no desire for his Worker Ants to fraternize among themselves. It was a measure to prevent information leaks or conspiracies from forming—or at least, that was what they assumed, but at any rate, it was one of the many rights denied to Worker Ants. Whenever they went against that decree, even just a little, their bodies would protest.

The man fought back his trembles. “But you can chat, too, can’t you?” he asked.

“Yeah. Truth is, his control over me gets weaker the more of us there are together.”

“Oh, really?”

“That’s when I get assigned more complicated jobs. The restrictions run the risk of getting in the way.”

“Ah, that’s good to know. Do you think you’ll ever break free completely, then?”

“Not a chance.” The idea was far too optimistic, and Patrick shut it down cold. The king had no such mercy. The only thing that awaited him and the other Worker Ants was despair that knew no end. “I’ve already killed thirty-five people.”

“………! That many?”

“How do I put it? It’s like my heart is slowly dying. At the point I’m at, it feels like there’s no going back. What about you? Do you really believe we can return to what we were? We’re murderers, you know. I know this guy Deepwater who’s been at it longer than I have, and even when his fetters got loosened, he just kept on killing people and looking bored out of his mind. He’s barely more than a hollow puppet.”

“That’s horrible…”

“The hardest part for me was about half a year back, when I had to kill a kid. He was strong as hell, but that didn’t change the fact that I was snuffing out a child.”

Patrick only found out later, but that boy was none other than the renowned spy known as Ouka. Ouka was a boy with the heart of a hero who killed evil spies regardless of their nationality. He’d taken out a number of notorious operatives over the past few years.

Patrick was the one who’d gunned him down.

Ouka was just a boy, barely more than a child, and Patrick had shot him right in the heart. The boy had been on death’s door after getting swarmed by Worker Ants, and Patrick ended him. As soon as it happened, Patrick felt as though he’d lost something important as a person. He’d gone past the point of no return. Even if he escaped the king’s domination, he knew he would never be able to go back to the life he used to live. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even care about getting free anymore. All he had to look forward to was darkness of the pitchest-black sort.

All of a sudden, the old man whispered something. “………She said a hero was coming.”

“Hmm?” Patrick replied.

“My brainwashing loosened back when a crimson-haired woman told me that. I can’t get her words out of my head. She told me that a beautiful, dark-haired hero would be coming someday…”

“………”

Patrick had heard the rumors about the hero of Mitario. Someone had planted a strange idea in the Worker Ants’ heads, one that not even the king’s power could stop. Many of them believed that the rumor was actually true.

The old man smiled. “So please, don’t give up. Eventually, the hero will—”

“Don’t be absurd,” Patrick said, flatly rejecting the man’s nonsense. There was no sense lending credence to the baseless claims of some random woman. “I’d drop it if I were you. False hope will only cut you in the end. Nobody can overthrow the king, so all that’s left for us to do is kill as he—”

Midway through Patrick’s sentence, though—

“Stop right there. Hold your position.”

—something else caught his attention.

The man, who’d been about to take a step forward, yelped in confusion.

They were heading down the building’s sixth-floor hallway, and so far, they’d found nothing. They’d scoured every inch of every room, and the girl was nowhere to be found. They’d assumed their target was hiding somewhere on the seventh floor or above, but now, they’d finally had signs of life.

Patrick pointed down by their feet. “It’s a wire trap. If you trigger it, it’s set to release some sort of gas. Good money says it’s poisonous.”

“Oh dear…,” the man groaned. “I didn’t even notice…”

The trap had been cleverly set up. The wires were laid along a seam where one hallway joined with another, and a sprayer sat hidden behind a pillar.

“And what’s more”—Patrick carefully cut the wire with his knife—“the trap is double-layered.”

There was a second wire attached to the sprayer itself. If anyone carelessly touched it while trying to remove it, it would end up activating.

Their target was the one who’d set it up, no doubt.

She knew we were coming…?

It didn’t take long for Patrick to figure out what had happened.

She must have intercepted our radio comms… And now we’ve given her time to set up for the fight.

“Huh?” the man said, sounding puzzled all of a sudden. “I hear a noise coming from upstairs… It sounds dull and intermittent…”

“Yeah, she’s laying another trap. We need to stop her before she makes our lives any harder than she has already.”

The dull sound continued echoing out. Patrick didn’t know what it was, but there was a chance she was setting up something big.

The worst-case scenario would be if she blows herself up… After all, she knows there’s no way she can actually beat us all. Is she tampering with the water pipes to blow up the entire building? No, there’s no way she has the tools for that…

Spies didn’t hesitate to lay down their own lives. No matter what it was she was up to, they needed to stop her as soon as possible. The thoroughness of their search had given her too much time as it was.

Patrick and his six allies climbed the staircase that led to the seventh floor. However, there was something barring their way at the top.

“So now we’ve got a barricade, huh?”

There was a series of office desks piled on their sides to stop anyone from entering the seventh floor. The structure was as tall as a person, and there were even tabletops wedged tightly into the gaps to prevent people from slipping through them.

“Is this some sort of trap, too?” one of the Worker Ants groaned. “Or should we dismantle it?”

Patrick sank into thought. Why had the enemy gone and built the structure?

“………No, we climb over. Our opponent is plotting something. Any tiny amount of time we give her is enough for an elite spy to set countless plans in motion.”

Luckily, the barricade didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. Once Patrick thought of scaling it, he realized how easy it would be. Using one of the desktops as a foothold, he ascended the barricade and surveyed the situation on the seventh floor.

The light fixtures there had been smashed, leaving the floor dim and gloomy. There were five conference rooms by his count, and all their doors were closed. The main hallway also had a window, but it was only there to let in light and didn’t actually open.

“Let’s see if we can’t do something about that.”

Patrick gave a specific order to one of his allies and sent them back down to the first floor. Then, keeping a close eye out for traps, the remaining six Worker Ants climbed over the barricade one after another.

Once they were over, they took deep breaths. The only areas left were the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors. It wouldn’t be long before they found the spy they were looking for.

As soon as all six of them reached the seventh-floor hallway, the old man let out another murmur. “I hear the noise coming from above. What should we do, skip straight to the eighth—”

Patrick cut him off. “It’s a decoy.”

“Huh?”

“I can smell it. The spy’s on this floor.”

As a Worker Ant, Patrick had put down plenty of experienced spies, and right now, his instincts were telling him that the noise was being used as a distraction. The enemy was making it seem like they were doing something noisy on the eighth or ninth floors, but in truth, they were actually there on floor seven.

“Go ahead,” Patrick ordered one of the Worker Ants.

Without so much as the slightest look of disapproval, the twentysomething-year-old woman nodded and walked unflinchingly down the seventh-floor hallway. As soon as she arrived at the conference room at its end, her situation took a turn for the worse. She let out a pained gasp, then collapsed to the floor and convulsed.

“There’s poison gas!” one of the others shouted.

Sure enough, there was a buildup of poison gas at the end of the hallway.

Suddenly, gas began blasting out from spots all over the hallway. There were sprayers just like the kind they’d seen earlier affixed to the backs of all the pillars. An acrid smell began permeating the entire hallway.

So that barricade’s job was to give the gas time to build up…

The tabletops wedged into the gaps had turned the entire floor into a closed space. “Hold your breath!” Patrick shouted. “If we retreat back to the sixth floor, we can—”

Before he could finish, though, someone cut him off by rushing out of one of the conference rooms.

That someone was a silver-haired girl. Her face still had adorable hints of childishness to it, but in contrast, her chest was full and well-developed. She looked to be about seventeen or eighteen.

That was their target. Patrick was sure of it.

The girl turned her gun toward them. Her finger was already fast on the trigger, and several of the Worker Ants leaped away. It was a natural reaction when someone pointed a gun at you, and they, too, had spent countless hours training. The king’s order was absolute: Find the option that gives you the best chance of carrying out your mission. They’d entered the enemy’s line of fire, so it was their duty to take evasive maneuvers so they could get ready to strike back.

However, doing so caused them to reflexively suck in air, and the poison gas seized its opportunity.

“Shit… I breathed it in…!”

Another Worker Ant hit the floor.

The silver-haired girl didn’t fire. The gas might well have been flammable, and she wanted to avoid igniting it. The gun had been a bluff all along. She was a clever one, that was for sure.

As Patrick watched his teammates fall, he found himself bewildered. I don’t get it. How’s she moving around like that without a gas mask?

The girl was just a teenager, yet she was fighting them with a brazen confidence.

Does she think she can actually beat us…?

Patrick found the notion baffling.

After stowing her gun away, the girl drew a new pair of weapons. In her right hand, she was holding a knife, and in her left, she had a needle. There was something viscous on its tip—likely poison.

Her lips moved. “This is me being seriouser than serious.

“I’m code name Flower Garden—and it’s time to bloom out of control.”

Her eyes burned with resolve, and she brandished her poison needle.

As Lily was fighting for her life, a girl showed up outside the building.

“Time to see how Sis is doing, yo.”

It was Annette. She’d used the nearby pay phone to relay the intel to Thea. All she needed to do was wait for backup, but she returned to the building anyway.

She wanted to help Lily out.

She was hard to read at the best of times, but she did have a certain degree of fondness for Lamplight. If nothing else, she loved the milk custard Sara sometimes made.

Annette stood motionless as she observed the building. There were four suspicious people hanging around it. They pretended to just be passing by, but every so often, they shot meaningful looks up at it. They were Worker Ants, stationed to make sure their target didn’t escape out a window.

Annette went up to one of them.

“Excuse me,” she said, putting on a childishly innocent smile as she addressed the woman by the entrance. “Is it all right if I go in? My dad left something inside, and he asked me to go grab it for him.”

Thus began the performance.

Her job wasn’t to attack from head-on but rather to provide backup by drawing away the enemy’s focus.

“Hmm…?” replied the slim woman in her forties. She looked back at Annette with eyes as gentle as if she was looking at her own daughter. “And whose child might you be? I’m so sorry, but the building is off-limits at the moment.”

“Wait, but my dad told me that anyone could just walk on in.”

“………”

“And also, what do you mean, whose child am I? My dad’s the vice president here, yo. How do you not recognize me?”

“………………”

“Actually, who are you? Nobody’s supposed to be here this late, and you’re supposed to need a key to get in. That’s weird, yo. I’m gonna call the cops.”

By making up random lies as she went, Annette was able to corner her opponent bit by bit.

At that point, the woman reacted in a way she hadn’t expected. All of a sudden, she drew a knife and slashed at Annette. When Annette dodged, the woman pulled out a gun as well and fired off a shot.

The bullet just barely grazed Annette. A few tufts of her hair floated gently to the ground, and one of her ponytails came undone. As she fell on her backside, she tilted her head. “………?”

“Oh, no, sorry.” Still holding her gun, the woman gave her an apologetic bow. “It’s not like I saw through your lies or anything. For all I know, you might actually be the vice president’s daughter. I’m so sorry for startling you.”

“…”

“I just wanted to make you into a wax doll. You’re just so terribly adorable, I couldn’t help myself. I preserved my firstborn, but you’re even lovelier than her. Oh, how disgraceful. I’m getting a little wet.”

“………”

“This is my calling, you see. I process cadavers. I can’t fight, so on my own, I never had enough materials for my wax dolls…but ever since the king chose me, my life has been so complete.”

“……………”

“Perhaps I’ll strangle you. Don’t worry, though. I’ll cover up the rope marks with a ribbon. You’ll still make a wonderful doll.”

The woman quietly pulled out some rope and stroked it back and forth to test its strength. Her breathing grew heated and her face flushed as she approached Annette.

Annette rose to her feet and wiped the dirt off her skirt. “I had the wrong read on you, yo.”

“Hmm?”

“You’re kinda like me. It’s that same feeling—so transparent and sparkly and beautiful.”

Annette reached toward the woman—

“That means I don’t have to pull my punches, doesn’t it?”

—and gave her head an adorable little tilt.

“I’m code name Forgetter—and it’s time to put it all together, yo.”

The sound of a motor revving up rang out right at the woman’s feet. There was a robot there wriggling like a massive centipede. It was long and slender, and it moved quickly, first crawling up her foot, then coiling all the way around her leg.

With that, it exploded.

It was an incredibly weak explosion, but it was still plenty to destroy a body part it had completely enveloped. The woman’s leg shattered as though it had been plucked right off her hip. Her eyes went wide, and she passed out.

The corner of Annette’s mouth curled upward. “Welp, there goes my last bomb. I gave all the rest of my weapons to Lily.”

Annette left the woman behind without so much as glancing at the blood that had started gushing from her wound. It wouldn’t take long for the other Worker Ants surrounding the building to realize that something was amiss and come running over, and Annette needed to be out of there before then. With no weapons, she had no way of fighting them.

After putting some distance between herself and the building, she turned back around to reassess the enemy’s strength. “If she’s got seven of those guys going after her…,” Annette determined, “…then she’s gonna be in for a rough time, yo.”

With that, Annette had given all the backup she could. She’d trimmed the enemy’s ranks from twelve to eleven. It was an impressive result by any measure, but it was far from enough to turn the situation around.

Lily cocked her head as she stood in the seventh-floor hallway. Why were her foes so weak?

There were six people collapsed face down in her sea of poison gas, all of them clutching guns. They clearly were no ordinary civilians, but they seemed too incompetent to really call them assassins.

Huh… Were they secretly pushovers?

Now, that was anticlimactic.

Poison gas attacks like that were her specialty, but even so, she hadn’t expected it to actually take out six whole people. Why, they’d gone down before she even needed to stab them with her poison needle.

She took a look at her downed foes and tried to deduce what was going on.

These people were able to frame me for murder, so I assumed they were going to put up a hell of a fight, but these guys were hardly better than amateurs. I can’t believe I beat them with my very first attack…

She continued staring at them.

Also, who even are these people? I assumed they were Purple Ant’s minions, but is that not what’s going on? Are they foreign agents? Some sort of local Mitario gang, maybe?

At that point, Lily had no idea who it was she was truly dealing with. Unlike Sybilla and Monika, she’d never fought a Worker Ant directly. She’d delivered her report as quickly as possible in order to protect her allies, but she didn’t have a good read on how strong their enemies actually were.

Lily headed over to her prone opponents so she could search their belongings.

There was no denying that she wasn’t paying as close attention as she could have been. Lily was unbeatable in spaces full of poison gas, so it was only natural for her to get a bit careless. And that was precisely the way Patrick wanted it.

“______!”

Patrick should have been unconscious, but he rose to his feet without warning and assailed her with his knife. Lily tried to twist her body to dodge the attack, but Patrick managed to get a clean stab in on her right shoulder. Then, when Lily frantically tried to swing her needle, he sent her flying with a fierce kick to the abdomen.

Lily just barely managed to land without hurting herself, but she got sent rolling across the ground all the same. She pressed down on her shoulder wound and shot a glare at her foe. “Why isn’t my poison working…?”

“I was faking it. If anything, I’m curious why you thought it would.” Patrick shrugged, as if to say that everything had gone exactly as he planned. “You already told us you had poison gas in your arsenal with that trap down on floor six. Between the hallway sealed off by a sketchy barricade and the window that didn’t open, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what your plan was. I’ll admit to being surprised that you didn’t need a gas mask, though.”

“………”

“By the way, you want me to tell you the actual reason your poison failed?” Patrick pointed at the ceiling. “It’s simple, really. We turned on the AC. All we had to do was hold our breath for two minutes, and we were able to circulate out all the air on the entire floor.”

Patrick had remembered the control panel on the first floor, and he’d sent someone down there ahead of time. The building had only just finished construction, so its equipment was completely brand-new.

“You got done in by your own scheme,” Patrick declared coldly. “There’s a dull noise coming from upstairs. You were probably using it as a diversion, right? Well, that was what kept you from noticing that we turned on the AC, and now, all we have to do is kill you a little at a time.”

The other five people who’d collapsed in the hallway rose as one. All of them had only been pretending to breathe in the poison gas, and now Lily was up against six assassins in more or less peak form. What’s more, they were even standing between her and the stairs. The building only had one stairwell, meaning that Lily had nowhere to run.

Patrick launched a front kick at Lily with movements just as fast as the ones from his previous attack. She tried to fend him off with her knife, but he kicked it out of her hand.

“Looks like you’re right-handed,” Patrick said with a smirk. “Pretty hard to fight with that injury, huh?”

“Y’know, I don’t like a single thing that’s coming out of your mouth!”

Lily turned her back on her foes and ran. A jolt of pain shot into her shoulder midway through her dash, and while she did lose her balance, she managed to right herself before she toppled over.

Patrick unhurriedly gave chase. By his estimation, she was in no state to fight anymore. She hadn’t even been able to keep a decent grip on her knife.

The thing was, the hallway was a dead end for her. She could try shooting the sealed window open, but they were seven floors up, so it wasn’t like she could just jump out, and if she tried shimmying down the side of the building, the Worker Ants on the ground would shoot her dead.

Lily ultimately ended up fleeing to the men’s bathroom. It had five urinals, two stalls, a single locker full of cleaning supplies, and a drainage pipe running along its ceiling. There wasn’t anything special about it.

“If you try to follow me,” Lily yelled, her voice frenzied, “I’ll blast you with my poison gas! Even with the AC running, the bathroom’s still a confined space!”

“That’s true. It would be easy enough for you to plug the bathroom’s exhaust port,” Patrick replied as he followed her in without a moment’s hesitation. “But the question is, do you even have any poison gas left? After how much you burned through filling up the entire seventh floor?”

“………”

“Either way, it’s fine. If I get taken down, the others can just wait for the bathroom to ventilate. Then someone else can come in and kill you. And if they get taken down, they can send another one in. There’s no way you have enough in stock to beat all of us.”

Lily brandished the gun in her left hand.

Patrick grinned. “See, I knew you were out of gas. Looks like pretending to fall for your trap was the right call.”

Lily fired a bullet, but her offhand shot ended up going wide. Patrick’s footwork was intentionally misleading, and it had completely thrown Lily’s timing.

Patrick closed in on her and sank a punch into her gut. Then, when she lurched forward, he swept her legs out from under her and dropped her onto the ground.

“This is checkmate,” Patrick declared, stamping his foot down on Lily’s face as she lay prone on the floor. “Nice resistance you put up. Futile but nice.”

“Ughhh…”

Lily reached out to try and lift herself off the ground, but Patrick stomped down on her hand. “Now, talk. Who are you? Which country are you spying for? Where are your allies?”

“What is this, an interrogation…?”

“Look, I’m not a monster,” Patrick whispered softly. “Tell me everything, and I’ll spare your life.”

Lily very much doubted that he would let her go, even if she answered his questions. She shook her head. “I’m not telling you a thing.”

“Why? Surely it’s gotta be a better option than just dying here.” There was a hint of mockery in Patrick’s voice. “I don’t get it. Is your motherland really that precious to you? Or what, are you covering for your allies?”

“………”

Lily offered no reply to his question except silence.

Lily wasn’t talking, and Patrick looked down at her and sighed.

No dice, huh? May as well just kill her, then.

Only a small handful of Worker Ants were under orders to interrogate the spies they captured, and as slaves unable to disobey their king, all they could do was faithfully fulfill their missions. That said, Patrick didn’t want to stick around any longer than he had to. He’d just gotten a report that the Worker Ant stationed at the entrance had been killed with a bomb. The girl’s allies were probably fast approaching.

Patrick drew his automatic and gently pulled back the slide. It made a satisfying sound as it loaded a bullet into the chamber, and he pointed the pistol at Lily.

…Another child, brought low by the world.

He felt an emptiness inside him. Here he was, about to end another young life the same way he had Ouka’s.

There’s no way I could ever defy the king. I have no use for false hope.

Sadly, it was clear to see that his target lacked the power to rebel against the king. She was no great spy. She’d failed to defeat even a single one of her twelve Worker Ant foes, and now she was lying on the bathroom floor like a loser. Looking at the blood spilling from the wound on her shoulder, she was in no state to even fight. Patrick pitied her for how fleeting her life was. He laid his finger on the trigger.

“…Here’s the thing about me.” At last, Lily spoke, her lips faintly moving as she lay face down on the floor. “The hell I was born in was way worse than this. Back there, people got killed so casually, it’d blow your socks off.”

“Huh?”

“As everyone I knew collapsed and died around me, I wished as hard as I could. I wanted to live. But that wasn’t all. I wanted to shine. I wanted to get back at the world that treated me like garbage. I wanted to bloom brighter than anyone else, and I wanted everyone to fawn over me. I know it sounds egotistical, but it’s true.”

“………?”

Patrick was bewildered at the speech Lily had started giving. What was she even talking about? What was there for her to talk about, other than begging for her life? This soliloquy had come completely out of left field, and Patrick had no idea what to make of it.

The thing was, Patrick didn’t know.

He had no idea how much tenacity the girl before him had taken with her through life. He had no idea what being in that dying village had carved into her soul. And he had no idea what eight years of being mocked and ridiculed at her academy had done to stoke that flame.

For there was something burning in “Flower Garden” Lily—a well of emotional fortitude that never ran dry, one that let her keep grasping for victory no matter how badly the deck was stacked against her.

Patrick knew none of that, so all he felt was irritation.

Why the pointless show of stubbornness?

The way she was acting rubbed him the wrong way. He’d given up on everything, and her raw willpower was painful for him to look at.

“What the hell are you—” he snapped at her as he started to put strength into his finger resting on the trigger.

“By the way, I gotta ask.” With that, Lily gave him the faintest of grins. “How much longer should I keep playing along with this game?”

Patrick’s read was off the mark.

Lily’s stubbornness wasn’t pointless at all. She’d put together the intel, Annette had delivered it, Thea and Grete had received it, and before long, they’d gotten to work using it to its fullest. The situation in Mitario had been outright doomed, and Lily’s unwavering spirit had completely turned it around.

Over in a multi-tenant building right off one of Mitario’s alleyways, Sybilla and Erna were getting cornered on the upper floors much the same way Lily was. Their guns allowed them to keep their foes at bay, but they only had a finite number of bullets. Eventually, their magazines ran dry, and they found themselves getting driven back and back until they ultimately ended up on the roof.

One after another, their foes reached the roof as well with firearms in hand. Barron had fought Sybilla on equal footing mere moments before, and there could be no doubt that each of their new opponents was just as skilled as he’d been.

Sybilla readied her knife and stepped in front of Erna. She was getting ready to launch an all-or-nothing assault. Erna realized that she was acting out of desperation. “Big Sis Sybilla…,” she warned her, but Sybilla had already accepted her fate.

“Close your eyes,” Sybilla said gently. “I’m gonna pull out at all the—”

She tried to tell Erna something, but before she could finish, she got cut off—by a thin, shadowy figure.

The gaunt Corpse, aka Roland, had just appeared on the roof as if out of nowhere.

“What?” Sybilla gasped. “The fuck’re you doin’ here…?”

“My new mistress gave me a job.” In his hands, Roland was carrying a pair of guns. He twirled them around as though to familiarize himself with their weight. “More importantly, you mind keeping your eyes peeled for me?” he asked, his voice ringing with a sort of ecstasy. “I gotta know—between Bonfire and me, who’s faster?”

The rest happened in a flash.

Roland rushed directly toward their twelve foes, guns akimbo. The hostiles responded to his frontal charge by returning fire, of course, but their bullets seemed to mysteriously slip by and fail to connect. In contrast, Roland’s quick-draw shots were uncannily accurate. He didn’t kill any of the Worker Ants as per Thea’s orders, but all the same, his technique was exquisite. He fired off precisely twelve shots, and by the time the last one landed, he’d successfully subdued each and every one of their foes.

““………””

Sybilla and Erna stared in shock.

The assassin Corpse had inspired fear across the globe, and inhuman feats like that were precisely why.

Meanwhile, over in a riverside alley, Monika had yet to give up despite the twelve snipers boxing her in. She and Sara hid in an insurance office and searched for a way to escape their predicament. They lacked the means to defeat all twelve foes, and while Monika had the skills to escape on her own, that would mean leaving her partner, Sara, to die, and abandoning her was a nonstarter. They were just one piece short of solving the puzzle.

Right as things started looking truly hopeless and Monika loudly clicked her tongue, the situation shifted. Something caused the Worker Ants chasing them to panic.

“This is the place, I think…”

A moment later, Monika and Sara heard a voice at the back entrance. The person who’d rushed to their aid was the spitting image of Klaus.

“Teach?” “Klaus…?”

Their eyes went wide for a moment, but it wasn’t long before they let out sighs. “…Nope, just Grete,” Monika said, slumping her shoulders.

“…We were short on personnel. I do apologize for not being the boss,” Grete said.

“I’m surprised you were able to find us,” Monika remarked.

“Well, Aiden was sitting on the roof…”

Monika squinted in surprise and looked over at Sara. Sara responded with a small nod. She’d used the cover of night to send over her pigeon. “That checks out,” Monika said. “So why’re the hostiles panicking like that?”

Grete raised her hand up to her own face. “I let them catch a glimpse of me just now. It would appear that they recognize the boss’s face. They seemed quite alarmed.”

“Who can blame them? Anyone would freak out if a guy they could never beat in a million years showed up.”

“I must say, it really is wonderful. This is far from the first time I’ve done so, but disguising myself as the boss always gives me the oddest feeling, like the boss and I have become one…,” Grete said bashfully. “It’s ever so thrilling.”

“Did the stress make you finally snap?” Monika quipped as she rose to her feet. “Jokes aside, that was good work, Grete. Thanks to you, we’ve got a real shot at making a getaway now. You mind helping me out, Sara? I need someone to come with me when I go sock Thea for the way she signed off on this nonsense.”

“…I did come with a plan in mind,” Grete offered.

“That’s what I like to hear. Let’s do this, us three.”

With that, Monika took out a handful of mirrors and wedged them between her fingers.

It was time for the girl who would one day come to be known in some circles as Flash Fire to show but a glimpse of what she would eventually become.

“How much longer should I keep playing along with this game?”

As soon as the words left Lily’s mouth, a major change took place. Namely, the bathroom’s water pipes burst.

When the pipes running along the ceiling ruptured, they poured their water out all over Patrick. He sensed danger, but he decided to finish Lily off before taking evasive action. He went to pull the trigger.

However, Lily’s counterattack was faster.

Electricity flowed freely, and before Patrick knew it, it felt like his entire body was on fire.

“GAHHH!”

He screamed. Lily had just turned on her stun gun, and the water spurting from the pipe became a de facto conducting wire linking the stun gun and Patrick. And that was Annette’s modded stun gun, so it went without saying how enormous the number of volts it was putting out was.

As the person operating the stun gun, Lily received the current as well.

“…OW!”

However, she fought through it with willpower alone and charged at Patrick.

“This damn girl…!!”

The other Worker Ants had been watching it all unfold from the bathroom’s entrance, and they moved in to pin Lily down. The pipe had already stopped dumping out water, and taking down a single injured girl was no challenge at all. A pair of middle-aged men stormed into the bathroom to try and steal Lily’s stun gun.

“Watch out! There’s more water coming from behind—”

Patrick’s warning was too little, too late. All of a sudden, a surge of water came from outside the bathroom and spread across its floor faster than the men could close the gap. It was barely more than an inch deep, but it was more than enough to soak through the men’s shoes.

Lily flipped on her stun gun and plunged it into the water to unleash its current. The men rushing at her screamed, passed out, and collapsed on the floor before they could reach her.

Naturally, Lily herself took a full blast as well—as did Patrick, for that matter. Her legs wavered as a wide grin spread across her face. “Ah, man. I guess with this much water, the current gets too diluted. Looks like taking out everyone on floor seven in one go was too much to ask for.”

She limped over to the locker full of cleaning supplies. “Ooh, found some rubber boots,” she said as she tossed her own shoes aside and replaced them.

The look on Lily’s face was one of pure confidence. Nobody could lay a hand on her. Patrick had taken two full blasts, so he couldn’t even hold his gun. The Worker Ants inside the bathroom had been rendered immobile by Lily’s electricity. And the Worker Ants outside the bathroom didn’t have a clean shot at her, and if they tried to get closer, they too would fall victim to her stun gun.

The water pooling in the bathroom had already risen to the two-inch mark. She must have clogged the drains ahead of time, as it showed no signs of flowing out.

“Getting blasted by water out of nowhere is scary as hell,” Lily said with a laugh. “I had that happen to me once, you know. Right when I first met Teach, we went out on a lake in a boat. I thought I had him right where I wanted him, but then he got me, just like I got you.” She gazed off, basking in nostalgia.

However, there was something Patrick was far more interested in than her idle anecdotes. “Where did all this water come from…?”

“I’ve spent this whole time building it up on the eighth floor. I smashed up the pipes on floors eight and nine, and the dammed-up water slowly flowed down until it came to a stop at the seventh-floor barricade. The building’s water tank is up on its roof, see. Once I messed with it to make it overflow, it flooded the place in no time.”

“So those tightly packed tabletops—”

“—Weren’t for the poison gas at all. Looks like my gamble paid off. I figured that anyone skilled enough to notice the double-layered wire trap down on six would choose to leave the barricade up so they could pretend to get hit by my poison gas. You were way better at playing dead than I expected you to be, so that gave me a bit of a scare, but this water attack was my real plan all along.”

Patrick groaned. How could a girl that young have been thinking that many steps ahead?

The barricade had been so blatant—would destroying it have been the right call after all? No, no. Even if he had, she would have just saved her poison gas and switched to a different strategy. The girl had never given up on victory. Despite being driven as far into a corner as one could go, she’d kept her wits about her and weaved lies together in a determined attempt to survive.

“Fall back to floor six!” Patrick shouted at his allies outside the bathroom. “The water will drain once we destroy the barricade! Then we can just shoot her!”

Patrick still had three teammates left. If even one of them made it to the stairwell, their victory would be assured.

“You think I’m letting you escape?” However, Lily broke into a run. “I’m in seriouser than serious mode here! Welcome to the stun gun party—and ’cause I’ve got these rubber boots, I get to walk away unscathed!”

She’d gotten shot full of electricity twice over, but it didn’t appear to have dulled her movements in the slightest. She dashed across the flooded floor and rushed out of the bathroom.

Patrick dragged himself after her in an attempt to give chase.

By the time he left the bathroom, Lily and the other Worker Ants had already started fighting. All of them were equipped with guns, but having to draw a bead on their foe before they could fire meant their speed was no match for Lily’s stun gun—not with how soaked the entire seventh story’s floor was. Patrick was able to avoid the blast by leaping atop the conference room doorknobs, but most of the others weren’t so lucky. The electricity from the modded stun gun traveled through the water as fast as lightning, shot through the soaked shoes, and indiscriminately shocked the people wearing them.

Two of the Worker Ants screamed in pain and dropped their guns. However, Lily got hit by the blast as well.

“Arrrgh! My hands were so soaked that the rubber boots…ended up being useless!”

No shit, Patrick silently quipped. The girl seemed like kind of an idiot.

After staggering for a second, though, Lily puffed her chest right back up. “But like I said, unscathed! Electricity just doesn’t work on me!”

That’s clearly bullshit, Patrick quipped again.

Lying as easily as she breathed, Lily ditched the rubber boots and ran across the floor barefoot as she moved in to bring down the Worker Ants heading for the barricade. She should have been too injured to even think about fighting, yet her self-injuring attacks were running roughshod over the Worker Ants.

What the hell is that girl even made of…?

Patrick perched frozen against the wall with his feet still balanced atop the doorknobs. He tried to aim his gun at Lily, but his fingers were so numb, it slipped from his grasp entirely and fell to the floor. However, it was hardly his fault. If anything, Lily was the weird one for being able to run around like that after taking so many blasts.

“Flower Garden” Lily was still going. No matter what she was up against, she never stopped moving. And “Flower Garden” Lily never threw in the towel. After all, she knew what true hell looked like. Patrick had given up and declared the king’s domination to be impossible to overturn, yet there that lone girl was, trying to stand against it.

Eventually, one of the Worker Ants threw themselves against the barricade. The water on the floor flooded out, taking all the built-up hydraulic pressure with it. Lily pressed her stun gun against her final foe and knocked them out, but there was no stopping the water once it started draining.

Patrick pumped his fist. Now that the floor wasn’t flooded, the stun gun was nothing to fear. All he had to do now was wait for his allies to recover and finish off the incapacitated girl. He broke out into a wide smile. “At last, we finally wo—”

“Good work, Lily.”

A calm voice echoed across the seventh floor.

Over at the edge of Patrick’s vision, he saw Lily’s entire face relax. “You sure took your sweet time, Teach…,” she mumbled happily as she slowly crumpled toward the ground. “………The win is mine.”

Her body had taken all it could. She closed her eyes and slumped against the intruder like the final taut strings keeping her upright had just been cut. Patrick couldn’t get a clear view of who they were from his angle—

“Magnificent.”

—but immediately after he heard that word, the figure bore down on him with tremendous speed and severed his consciousness.

After tying up the Worker Ants, Klaus picked up Lily’s unconscious body and carried her down the stairs. The countless suicide attacks she’d done with her stun gun had knocked her clean out, and her clothes smelled burned. Klaus was pretty sure that she’d gone far past the point that willpower alone should have been able to carry her, yet she’d managed to endure all the same. Even when surrounded by assassins, her quick wit and dogged tenacity had allowed her to buy the time she needed.

…In the end, she chose to rely not on poison, but on her memories of our skirmish.

Looking at the state of the battleground, he could more or less piece together what tactics she’d used. It was a very Lily strategy. Out of everyone on Lamplight, she was always the one who put the most of herself into her training.

As her instructor, he was given a mixture of pride and endearment at that fact.

“………Hnn.” Lily let out a small groan. She must have been coming to her senses. “Ahhh,” she sighed when she looked up at Klaus. “You really did come for me, Teach. I half thought I’d imagined it.”

“I did. You made it.”

“If you’re the real Teach, you should prove it by treating me to a nice dinner.”

“Well, maybe I’m a figment of your imagination after all.”

A hollow look crossed Lily’s eyes. “What happened to the others…? Are they okay?”

“We’re not out of the woods yet, but we were able to enact countermeasures. And it’s all thanks to you.”

“So was Purple Ant behind all this?”

Klaus nodded. “It looks that way. I’m heading over to Thea next to finish him off.” Thea had gotten Roland to tell her where Purple Ant’s hideout was. The plan was for Thea to infiltrate it, then have Klaus come in after she’d gotten visual confirmation of their foe.

“Hnngh.” After Klaus told her all that, Lily wriggled her way out from Klaus’s arms and collapsed unceremoniously on the floor. “…In that case, you should go get ready. I’m good. I can walk on my own.”

Perhaps that was her pride as Lamplight’s leader speaking. She smacked her trembling legs and clung desperately to the stairwell’s handrail.

“I’ll stay with you until we join back up with Annette. Being on your own is rough.”

“You already mopped up all the enemies in the building, though, right? Then everything should be aces.”

“………”

The look in her eyes was dead serious. It was hard to believe that that declaration was coming from a girl who’d just been inches from getting murdered.

“You should really consider relying on me from time to time,” Klaus suggested.

“………?”

“I know I’m the one who stuck you with the role, but you don’t need to be so darn brave. By all rights, you should be scared. Frightened. But you hide it all behind a grin so you can keep the others’ spirits up. When things are looking bleak, you work yourself to the bone lightening things up with jokes. Isn’t that hard on you?”

“………………” After a long silence, Lily shook her head. “…Nah, not even a little.”

“Is that so.”

“Still, that might be nice every now and again. ‘Lily, the spoiled baby.’”

“That has an odd ring to it.”

“‘Lily, clinging to Teach’s clothes in the hopes he’ll pat her head.’”

“Now you’re almost sounding like Erna.”

“‘Lily, demanding that Teach gives her a lap pillow as a reward for a mission well done.’”

“I thought you preferred food.”

“‘Lily, weeping and begging for Teach to save her.’”

“…That just sounds like an ordinary Tuesday.”

“Seriously, though, I’m fine.” Lily shook her head again and quietly plopped herself down on the floor. “There might come a day where I toss my pride aside like that, but right now, I’m good. Thanks to you, I found a way that I can shine. That’s all I need.”

“I see.”

“Go ahead and leave that chest of yours open for another girl to use.”

With that, Lily closed her eyes as if drifting off to sleep. It was a bold thing to do. Tied up or not, the seventh floor was still teeming with foes. However, she was at her limit.

Klaus gently draped his waistcoat over her shoulders.

That marked the end of the battle fought in the Mitario office building.

Therein lay a record of the time “Flower Garden” Lily fought on her own to the bitter end.

After all her desperate scrabbling, she finally found something—a victory that was hers and hers alone.

Back in the Din Republic, Peggy let out a sigh in the principal’s office of her spy academy. It was a dreadfully cold day, the kind of day where the biting wind made you want to put on an extra jacket. The academy sat deep within the mountains, so all the air from their base came blowing right through it like a gift from afar.

On that day, Peggy was lost in thought. How were the students she’d graduated faring, she wondered?

“What’s the matter?” her younger male colleague asked with a laugh as he continued filing his documents. “Feels like you’re sighing an awful lot.”

“Oh, I’m just feeling a bit anxious,” Peggy replied with a smile. “I was wondering to myself how our alumni were holding up.”

The other teacher pursed his lips in agreement. “Oh, yeah, I feel you. It’s like, would it kill our bosses to let us know how they’re doing every so often? I get that we’re spies and that’s just how it goes, but still.”

In the world of spies, information was only shared on a need-to-know basis. Peggy and her coworkers had no way of knowing what kind of missions their pupils were being sent on or what kind of results they were achieving. They weren’t even told when their old students died.

As instructors, that not knowing stung. They couldn’t help but wonder what their girls were doing and where.

“Not even our top students were able to get good results on their graduation exam…,” Peggy said worriedly. “But the front lines were so short on hands, we ended up having to graduate them anyway.”

“Hey, it’s not their fault that the other academies had such heavy hitters. I hear that ‘Reverb’ Vindo and ‘Naval Mine’ Vics were even more gifted than their instructors. And wasn’t that ‘Projection’ Pharma girl who wiped our students out Holytree’s little sister?”

Peggy let out another sigh. “…I guess the world really is just a big place.”

There were students who’d gotten outstanding grades at Peggy’s academy, but even they’d failed to earn anything better than mediocre marks when they’d competed against the other academies’ top scorers. Just because someone did well in school did nothing to guarantee that things would go well for them out in the real world. The question was, then, what about the washouts? Surely, having done poorly in school didn’t doom them to repeat the same failures once they left, did it?

“Oh, that reminds me,” the other teacher said with a grin. “Did you see the paper this morning?”

“Not yet, why?”

“I don’t know how much of it I believe, but I found a fascinating article in it.”

He showed her the article in question.

The Shocking True Story of the Fiend Lurking in Mitario, Lillian the Devil!

Its headline read like something straight out of a tabloid rag, and the story was about a serial killer who’d shown up in Mitario, the capital of the United States of Mouzaia. After killing seventy-six innocent victims, she fled pursuit and ultimately perished. According to people who knew her from during her stay, she was an adorable silver-haired girl from the Din Republic. She had a job at a burger joint, a massive rack, a clumsy streak, a voracious appetite—

Right around when she got to that part, Peggy burst out into side-clutching laughter. Her colleague gave her a funny look, but she continued laughing undeterred.

The story was bullshit. She was sure of it. It had been spread to cover up something a group of spies had been doing behind the scenes, and there was no doubt in Peggy’s mind that a certain someone had been involved. The description lined up perfectly, and in all likelihood, she was alive. They’d probably just used her name to conceal who the body really belonged to.

“Looks to me like she’s doing just fine for herself,” Peggy said, wiping away a tear. When was the last time, she wondered, that she’d been in such a good mood?

If Peggy knew one thing, it was that “Flower Garden” Lily had only just begun making her mark on history. After leaving the academy, their little washout had gone out into the world and thrived.