Spy Classroom - Volume SS2 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The Spy Who Loved Us

“That’s right—and make it quick. It’s embarrassing, leaving it trashed like that.”

After briefly conveying his instructions, Klaus set down his receiver. Then he sat at his room’s desk and let out a small exhalation.

He’d been making the call to the Foreign Intelligence Office’s general affairs division. His request was simple—that they repair the room that used to be Hearth’s and now belonged to Lily. Annette had blown the room to smithereens just before the Corpse mission. They’d been too busy since then to get around to it, but now that they’d finished their job in Mitario, they finally had some downtime.

Once it was fixed, the room was going to be Klaus’s. The girls had insisted that it was only right that he inherit Hearth’s old room, so it had been agreed that he would take it over. Klaus had been using the tiny room meant for the person on the bottom of the pecking order ever since his time on Inferno, the team that preceded Lamplight, but the moment for him to graduate had finally come.

Now Klaus was acting as Lamplight’s boss in every sense of the word. It had taken him a while, but at long last, his resolve was firm.

I have to say, these are some big shoes I’m going to have to fill.

Whenever he closed his eyes, he always remembered the image of that woman with her hair so crimson that it looked like it was on fire. She was code name Hearth, aka Veronika, and she was the person Klaus had called “boss” so reverently.

“Hey, Klaus. There’s one more thing I need to tell you…”

She taught Klaus not just how to be a spy, but how to approach the world. The rest of the team taught him all sorts of skills and techniques, but when it came to Klaus’s emotional development, it was hard to overstate the impact she had on him.

Klaus let out another breath.

He was proud to call himself the Greatest Spy, but there were a lot of shortcomings he needed to shore up before he could even think about calling himself the Greatest Teacher or the Greatest Boss. For instance, the way he communicated with his subordinates wasn’t anywhere near as proficient as the way Hearth used to.

…Actually, this might be a good opportunity to get the girls involved.

With his course of action set, Klaus left his room. It was noon on the dot, and that meant that it was lunchtime. When he arrived in the dining room, he found the eight girls sitting at the table. All of them, aside from the rather glum-looking Thea, were happily eating their pot-au-feu.

“Ah, perfect. Just who I was looking for.”

“““““Ack?!”””””

Several of the girls jumped.

Klaus gave them a confused look. “Hmm? Why do you look so startled?”

Their reactions didn’t make sense to him.

For whatever reason, five of the girls—Lily, Sybilla, Sara, Erna, and Monika—had nervous twitches in their faces. They shoveled pot-au-feu into their mouths to try to hide it, but their hands were trembling.

Lily gave him a forced smile. “I’m, uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

“The contractors who’re coming to fix Lily’s room will be here this evening. These are special spy repairmen. I imagine this won’t be the last time we need their help, so I was thinking that one of you could join me to see them in—”

“““““What?!”””””

The five of them trembled even more. Again, there was something very off about the way they were reacting.

“…Seriously, what’s going on with you people?”

“J-just one of us?” Lily asked.

“Hmm? Yeah, that was the idea. There’s no need for all of you to expose your faces to them.”

“S-so one and just one of us will be a-alone with you waiting for the contractors!”

“Why are you just repeating back what I said?”

Was there a problem with them doing something together alone with him?

…I don’t know why, but I’m getting a bad feeling about this.

Five of the girls were acting strangely shy. Something was clearly off about them, but each time he tried to address them, they recoiled in discomfort.

Klaus’s instincts as a spy were telling him that something unpleasant was going on. Perhaps it would be best if he took his leave.

“Look, it sounds like you’re busy, so I’m not going to make it mandatory.”

With that, he briskly made his way back out of the dining room.

…Communicating with your subordinates truly is one of life’s biggest challenges.

By the look of it, he still had a long way to go before he could fill his Inferno boss’s shoes.

After Klaus left, with the mood in the dining room still awkward, Grete spoke up. “…I have a suggestion, everyone, if I may.”

The girls had just started digging into the apples they’d bought for dessert.

“Once our break is over, the plan is to start our usual training back up alongside our domestic counterintelligence missions. I was thinking it might be a good idea to game out some overarching ideas for our schemes.”

Lily gave her a thumbs-up. “Ooh, good thinking. I like where your head is at.”

“Thank you… Now, to that end, we’re going to need somebody to tail the boss while he—”

“““““?!”””””

Just like before, Lily, Sybilla, Sara, Erna, and Monika all twitched. Several of them dropped their forks with their apple slices still skewered on them.

Grete didn’t understand what had prompted such a reaction. She gave them a puzzled look. “………?”

“T-tailin’ him, huh?” Sybilla replied in an oddly high-pitched tone. “As in, like, followin’ right behind him? That’s kinda, y’know… It feels almost like a date.”

“…I’m afraid I don’t see the similarity,” Grete said.

“For stuff like this, I think it’d be better for Grete to do it. Like, in case there’s some kinda misunderstanding.”

“What kind of misunderstanding…?”

Sybilla hastily waved her hands and retracted her statement. “Ah, no, that’s not what I meant! I meant one of the rest of us might, uh, screw up or somethin’.”

Grete blinked in abject bewilderment. “I certainly don’t have a problem with being the one on tailing duty, but wouldn’t it make more sense to have someone with more stamina like you do it?”

“Wha—?! N-nope, count me out!” Sybilla replied, making a big X in front of herself with her arms.

“Or what about Sara? She could use her animals to track his scent.”

“I—I can’t!” Sara pulled her newsboy cap down over her face. “I’d really rather sit this one out!”

“…Or perhaps Monika, would you mind stepping in?”

Monika squinted at her like there was nothing she would have rather done less. “I don’t wanna.”

Grete was dumbfounded. Every single candidate she’d been considering had shot her down cold. “…Is everyone under the weather today or something?”

Beside her, Lily and Erna were staring at the floor and doing their absolute best to avoid having the conversation turn their way. Lily, in particular, was letting out unconvincing fake coughs and pretending to have a cold. “Y-yeah, I’m not feeling so good…”

Grete was no fool, and she realized that there was something off about the vibes in the dining room. Without knowing the cause, though, all she could do was be perplexed.

Incidentally, this is what was going through Lily’s, Sybilla’s, Monika’s, Erna’s, and Sara’s heads, respectively:

“I—I can’t bring myself to tell her…!”

“Grete’s the last person I want findin’ out. I wouldn’t be able to face her afterward!”

“Honestly, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole thing. It might be true, sure, but it might not.”

“B-but still! He just made a move on me! He was trying to make time for us to be alone together!”

“I still can’t believe it! I-it doesn’t make sense…”

They were all thinking the exact same thing.

“How could Teach “have actually “fallen “in love “with me?!”””” ”

This was right after the five of them had been infected by the misunderstanding caused by the “Klaus loves you” note. Each and every one of them was under the misconception that Klaus might well have romantic feelings for them, and they were all desperately trying to figure out how they should react to the revelation.

The chain of misunderstandings had thrown everything into chaos.

Meanwhile, Annette had picked up on everything that was going on more or less by intuition and was wearing a wide grin. “Feels like things are getting real interesting, yo!”

In her pure, unsullied wickedness, she’d decided not to clear up the misunderstanding.

“…For now, I suppose we should just table this discussion about our training for later.”

Meanwhile, Grete had no idea the misunderstanding was even occurring, so she elected not to press the issue any further. She had a big decision of her own she was about to have to make.

As soon as Grete and Thea left the dining room, Annette began making her mischief.

“Yo, Klaus and I have plans to hang out tomorrow. Does anyone wanna come with?”

“““““?!”””””

“I bet he’d be super happy if one of you tagged along.”

“““““_______?!”””””

“Also, is it just me, or has anyone else seen him researching popular spots to go on dates?”

“““““______________ ?!”””””

“I gotta say, it feels like I just found a new toy.”

Annette smiled contentedly at the way her teammates were reacting to her statements. All she had to do was say words that they associated with Klaus and romance, and it threw their hearts into disarray. Annette, it should be noted, was a monster, and the demon child lurking within Lamplight’s ranks took full advantage of the misunderstanding to try out all sorts of malicious pranks. The other five girls were completely at her mercy.

By the time they’d all finished eating their dessert, Sybilla and Erna were completely wiped. “F-for now, let’s just wash the dishes and not think about anything else.” “A-agreed.” There wasn’t a hint of life left in their voices.

Even Monika, who was normally so cool and unflappable, had been thrown for a loop. The last person she’d been expecting might well have feelings for her, and she had no idea how to deal with it. She didn’t even have a way to verify if it was true or not. She pinched the bridge of her nose with a sour expression on her face.

Meanwhile, Sara was completely panicking. She stared blankly at the ceiling and looked like she was on the verge of fainting at any moment.

Finally, Lily’s thoughts were anxiously turning.

Oh, this is bad…!! Her ears were bright red, and she was burying her face in the table. This is no time to be worrying about breaks and missions! How am I supposed to act around Teach now…?

Lily had a stronger sense of responsibility than most, and she was making a sincere effort to figure out how to deal with the problem at hand. As the girls’ leader, how did she want to handle their boss’s feelings?

Why did this have to happen? It’s not like I want to have that kind of relationship with him. If anything, I’d much rather support Grete in her quest for love…!

That right there was the heart of the issue and the biggest reason the five of them were all racking their brains so hard—Grete. It was common knowledge among the girls that she was in love with Klaus. She tackled her missions and succeeded in them with an intense level of devotion on his behalf, and while there were some discrepancies in their exact attitudes, the whole team was rooting for her love to bear fruit.

Now, though, it turned out that Klaus might be in love with them!!

That revelation had caused nothing but problems, and it was tormenting the girls to no end.

I—I can’t let the others find out what’s going on. If I do…!

It was all too easy for Lily to imagine the worst-case scenario. From her perspective, the only people who knew the truth were Erna and Annette, the two young’uns, but how would the others react if the whole team found out?

She could practically see them already. No, no…, Grete would say sadly with tears welling up in her eyes. If the boss has made his choice, then that’s all there is to it… Oh, my stomach hurts…

Meanwhile, Sybilla, Sara, Monika, and Thea would look at her with contempt in their eyes. I misjudged you, Lily, Sybilla would say. I can’t believe you’re the kind of asshole who’d choose a guy over her friends.

That was pretty awful of you, Miss Lily, Sara would agree.

Oh, so you used your position as team leader to seduce him? Monika would sneer. You make me sick.

I must say, I never expected you to be so forward, Thea would remark. You must have been, to win him over after the rest of us failed so many times.

That would be a complete and utter tragedy!! Lily screamed internally. If that happened, the team’s interpersonal relationships would disintegrate, and Lamplight would end up as the kind of ugly, oppressive work environment you normally found only in suspense novels. I—I need to stop that from happening, no matter what it takes!

With thoughts of that terrible future flashing through her mind, Lily rose to her feet.

“I’ve made up my mind…”

She bit down on her lip and fixed her gaze straight ahead. The fires of determination were burning in her eyes.

Once the others turned their attention her way, she went on. “Everyone, I need you to listen up. I’ve been holding this back, but that’s not an option anymore!”

“What is it this time?” Sybilla asked in exasperation as she looked over. Given the fed-up expressions on the others’ faces, they too were pretty sure that this was just Lily on her usual brand of nonsense.

“There’s something I need to ask your advice about!”

“Advice?” Sybilla replied. “What kinda advice?”

“R-romantic advice.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Sybilla was shocked, and she wasn’t the only one. Every pair of eyes in the dining room was as wide as could be.

Lily ignored their reactions and loudly went on. “I’ve made up my mind—tonight, I’m going to tell Teach how I really, truly feel about him!!”

““““ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THAT!!””””

The sheer force of their retort rocked the walls.

While the dining room was continuing to descend into madness, a different story was progressing up on the second floor.

“Grete, I was wondering if I could get your help with something,” Thea said, stopping her partner in crime in the hallway. Thea had just finished fixing up her appearance, combing her hair, and reclaiming her usual beauty.

“Of course. What is it?” Grete said, turning around as she stood in her room’s doorway. Thea couldn’t bring herself to describe what her business was, and Grete stared at her for a moment before giving her an understanding nod. “I assume this is about Hearth’s message.”

“Is it that obvious?” Thea replied with a tired look on her face. “I’ve gotten about as far as I can on my own. Would you mind if I picked your brain for a bit?”

With that, the two of them relocated to Thea’s room. Thea had been agonizing over the matter for days, and there were dozens of pieces of scrap paper strewn all about. Her room normally had a rather mature aesthetic to it, what with its display cases full of brand-name items, but at the moment, it had been reduced to a cluttered mess and left reeking of ink.

Thea would have liked to have been able to solve the puzzle on her own, but no matter how hard she tried, the answer refused to come to her.

“Klaus s you.”

Try as she might, she couldn’t fill in that blank. She did have those photos that had been paired with the message as hints, but even after thoroughly investigating them, she had no idea what building it was they were depicting. Her deductions had hit a dead end.

Grete took a look at the pictures laid out on Thea’s desk. “Well, to start, what kind of relationship did you and Hearth have?”

It was understandable why she would ask. The Lamplight girls didn’t tend to talk much about their backstories, and Thea was no exception. She’d never gone out of her way to share any specifics, so all the others knew was that Hearth had saved her at one point.

“That’s a fair question. This is how it all happened.”

Thea decided to reveal her past to Grete.

She told Grete about how she was the daughter of a newspaper company’s president, and seven years ago, back when she was eleven, she got kidnapped by a group of Galgad spies. How they kept her imprisoned abroad for more than two weeks, and how she’d fallen into such a deep despair that she’d begun craving the release of death. How one day, after she heard a woman and a boy talking outside her prison, a furious noise sounded out and a crimson-haired woman rescued her. How the men who’d captured Thea lay dead behind the woman’s back, and one of them had a crowbar sticking out of his head.

She then told Grete about how, after the rescue, the crimson-haired woman (who Thea would later learn was Inferno’s boss, Hearth) spent the next ten days looking after her. How it had seemed like there were other Inferno members around but that Hearth was always the one who took care of her. How each night, Hearth had regaled her with tales of espionage as bedtime stories and how Thea had come to idolize Hearth.

That was the long and short of how Thea and Hearth had met.

“Well? Was there anything you figured out after hearing all that?”

“I suppose the very first thing that comes to mind,” Grete said without so much as pausing to think, “is that the boss might have been present when Hearth saved you.”

“Exactly. That was the first thing I thought of, too.” Thea had spent no small amount of time considering the possibility. Hearth’s message could easily have been Klaus knows you. “And it’s true that when it happened, I heard what sounded like a woman and a boy talking.”

Klaus would have been thirteen at the time. He had joined Inferno when he was ten, so there were no issues as far as the timeline was concerned.

If that was the case, though, it gave rise to a whole new mystery.

“The problem is, Teach himself denied it. He told me that he’d never met me before.”

Thea had looked into the matter back when they were training just before the Corpse mission.

“Seven years ago, Inferno saved my life. Do you not remember that incident where Imperial spies kidnapped the only daughter of a major newspaper’s president, Teach?”

“…I’m not sure. I might have been on a different mission at the time.”

When she asked him, Klaus had denied it, and given who he was, she doubted he had remembered incorrectly.

There was that odd pause before he answered, though.

That said, it could have just taken him a moment to sort through his memories.

Grete took stock of that new piece of information. “That leaves two possibilities. The first is that the boss met you back then, but he’s choosing to conceal that fact for reasons unknown.”

“And the second is that we actually never met, huh.”

Either way, there were questions still unanswered. If they’d met, why was Klaus keeping it a secret? And if they hadn’t, what other connection could she and Klaus possibly have?

That was the spot at which Thea had reached her dead end. She didn’t feel like she had enough information to unravel the mystery on her own.

“First things first, I was hoping to narrow down which of the two it was,” she said. “Do you have any idea how I might do that?”

“Hmm. Well, from what I know…”

Grete had answered all her other questions with hesitation, but there, she stopped mid-sentence. With an oddly meek look on her face, she laid a finger on her lips and quietly closed her eyes.

“Grete?”

When Thea said her name, Grete slowly opened her eyes. “…The truth is, there’s someone I had plans to go see today. She might know things about the boss’s past that we don’t.”

“Wait, you actually know someone who can help?!”

Thea could hardly believe her ears. The girls had been dying for ages to find someone who knew about Klaus’s past. The nature of their training exercise—needing to defeat Klaus—had left them searching for intel on his personal life and weaknesses, but without any way to find someone with access to that information, they’d given up on that line of inquiry. If Grete had info that priceless, why had she been keeping it to herself?

“I find it unlikely that she’ll actually tell us anything…”

There were hints of tension, perhaps even animosity in her voice.

“…but I need to face her head-on. Running away isn’t an option.”

When Grete told Thea who it was she was talking about, Thea stared at her in shock.

Back in the dining room, the misunderstanding was still going strong.

“Tonight, I’m going to tell Teach how I really, truly feel about him!!”

““““ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THAT!!””””

When Lily told the others about the once-in-a-lifetime levels of resolve she’d worked up, they reacted with vehement opposition. Upon getting brutally shut down by everyone present, Lily was taken aback. “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!” She forcefully slammed the table with her hands. “Why not?!”

“H-how, uh, how to put this…?” Sybilla scratched her head in hesitation, then put on an awkward smile as she averted her gaze from Lily and glanced off in the wrong direction.

“So let me get this straight,” Monika said, calmly stepping in. “You want to tell Klaus how you feel about him, right?”

“Yup.”

“And those feelings or whatever, they’re romantic in nature?”

“Yup. I want to tell him exactly how I feel.”

““““ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THAT!!””””

“Again, you gotta tell me why!” Lily cried when the other four rebuked her in unison yet again. She’d assumed that they would be completely on her side for this, and she hung her head. “I really gotta tell him that I don’t want to go out with him, though…,” she mumbled, but sadly, the others were all so out of sorts that they didn’t pick up on what she’d said and assumed she was telling them the exact opposite of that.

“There’s really no easy way to explain it…,” Sybilla replied. She furrowed her brow, and Sara, Erna, and Monika all made the exact same expression.

The thing is, I’m the one the boss is in love with, Sybilla thought to herself. When she asks him out, he’s a hundred percent gonna turn her down.

B-but it’s not like I can just tell her, You should just give up because you’re going to fail anyways, thought Sara.

She should really rethink this, thought Erna. It’s too dangerous to go poking that bear right now.

Meanwhile, Monika started asking herself some questions. Wait, could it be? Do I just have this whole thing wrong?

The stories weren’t lining up, and Monika and Monika alone was beginning to notice it. She tended to think pretty logically, and as a result, she was the first to unravel the misunderstanding. She glanced over at Annette, who was sitting off to the side. She was the one who’d shown Monika that message, and at the moment, she was covering her mouth with her hand to hide the massive grin she was wearing. “Time to observe them with zipped lips, yo.”

She was clearly enjoying herself more than a little.

“………” “_______!”

Monika gave her a pointed glare, and Annette noticed that Monika was looking her way.

For a little while, everything was silent.

“…Hey, Annette, come over here.” “Time to get out while the getting is good, yo!”

Annette fled, Monika gave chase, and before long, the two of them were gone.

The good news was that one person had finally figured out the misunderstanding that was happening, but the bad news was that that fact had gone completely over the other four girls’ heads. All of them were still operating under the assumption that Klaus was in love with them.

Lily turned a deaf ear on her friends’ objections and continued shouting. “C’mon, I need your help here. I-I’ve, like, never done this before. I have no idea what I’m even supposed to say!”

“Y-y’know what, I get it. If this is something you gotta do, then there’s no stoppin’ that.” The others had been taken by Lily’s show of passion, and their attitudes started softening. “But even so, I’m sorry,” Sybilla said apologetically. “I dunno how I’m gonna look you in the eye after this.”

“Is what I’m doing really that wrong?!”

The look on Sara’s face went serious, and she squeezed her fists tight. “B-before you do this, Miss Lily, I want you to promise me that we’ll always be friends, no matter what.”

“What sort of weird ritual is that?!”

After hearing their stern warnings, Lily clutched her head in dismay. “Man… I never knew that telling someone how you feel about them was this big of an ordeal.”

“I-in my opinion…”

Erna was the final one to speak. She timidly raised her hand.

“…we should go get some sweets, j-just in case there are any hurt feelings afterward.”

“Good call. We’re gonna need loads,” Sybilla said.

“I—I agree,” Sara concurred. “J-just in case!”

Certain that Lily’s declaration of love was going to end in disaster, the others hurriedly tried to figure out how they were going to patch things up afterward. “Hurt feelings?” Lily said with a puzzled look. “Ah,” she realized. “Yeah, I can definitely see Teach feeling hurt after this.”

In any case, the suggestion of going and buying sweets had a consensus, so the girls started getting ready to head out.

Lily gulped at the unexpected turn of events. “I—I guess it really is important to be ready for anything…!!”

“Be ready for anything,” Grete said. “This is going to be dangerous.”

The girls never took their guns with them out into public, but Thea and Grete had stashed theirs in their pockets. Two hours after they left the manor, they arrived at their destination. It was somewhere that Thea had been before: the administrative district in the Din Republic’s capital.

The district was full of office workers coming and going, and in one little corner of it, there was a building with a sign describing it as the Cabinet Office Economic Research Center. It was impossible to know who worked there or what they did, but most people simply walked right past it without sparing it a second glance.

However, Thea knew what that building really was.

The Cabinet Office had an intelligence agency under their direct authority—the Foreign Intelligence Office—and that there was their prison. Some of the spies who got captured on Republican soil ended up getting imprisoned there. Once, their ranks had included the feared assassin Roland under the moniker Corpse.

Thea and Grete stood together in the dimly lit corridor and waited. They’d been told that the person they were looking for was due to be released that day. Thea had never met the woman in person, but she certainly knew who she was. Back when Roland had been shaking the world to its core, she’d helped him carry out his many assassinations by infiltrating the Din Republic and getting hired by the politician Uwe Appel.

The sound of footsteps on the marble floor clacked down from the end of the hallway. Eventually, the woman in question arrived.

“It’s been a while, Olivia!”

“Well, if it isn’t the crazy bitch!!”

There stood Olivia Fischer, Corpse’s favorite disciple and Uwe Appel’s cruel, traitorous head maid. Her long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail, she was wearing a white dress, and her features had an unmistakable sturdiness to them.

The moment she spotted Grete, she immediately rushed forward and swiftly wound up for a knife-hand strike.

Grete and Olivia were mortal enemies. Thanks to a little help from her teammates, Grete had ended their deadly showdown by successfully capturing Olivia. It was no wonder she wanted to kill Grete on sight.

“If you lay so much as a finger on me in here—”

Grete didn’t flinch, not even the moment before Olivia’s attack would have landed.

“—they’ll throw you right back in that cell. You’ll get a chance to experience that protracted torture all over again.”

“……!!”

Olivia froze. She shot an uncomfortable look backward and surveyed the corridor. She’d just remembered that she was in enemy territory surrounded by Din spies.

“Once Roland passed away, they decided that you didn’t pose much of a threat anymore,” Grete said flatly. “They determined that you were nothing more than a puppet that Roland had been manipulating—and if they hadn’t, you would have been summarily executed.”

“He wasn’t… He didn’t…!!”

Olivia’s eyes went wide, and her voice was gravelly. By the look of it, she’d already known that Roland was dead. Thea had played a big role in the situation that had gotten him killed, and a feeling she couldn’t quite describe suddenly washed over her.

“…I’m going to kill you,” Olivia growled menacingly, her voice bristling with rage. “I’m going to crush your fucking skull. You and everyone else…!!”

“Go on, then. Try me,” Grete taunted her.

Thea rarely, if ever, saw Grete get that aggressive. “H-hold on, now,” Thea said, trying to defuse the situation. She was just now remembering that Grete had a habit of losing her cool when it came to matters involving Olivia. Thea stepped between the two of them. “L-let’s all just take a deep breath. You just spent a long time getting tortured, Olivia. I can’t imagine you’re in any state to fight right now anyway.”

The arms extending from Olivia’s dress were little more than skin and bones. She’d probably spent much of the past two months in agony, and Thea doubted that she’d had a proper meal that whole time.

A skeptical look crossed Olivia as she took a disappointed step backward. “…What are you even here for? Did you come to laugh at me?”

“I had a question for you,” Grete replied. “Would you mind telling us about our boss’s past? I want to know everything that got leaked to Galgad’s spies.”

“What? I already told your goon squad everything I know.”

With Roland dead, Olivia had no reason to continue being loyal to the Empire.

“…Information like that doesn’t get shared with people as low on the ladder as us.”

“Well, I don’t see how that’s my problem. I don’t have a single goddamn thing to say to you.”

“Roland died in the city of Mitario.” As Olivia crossed her arms in annoyance, Grete pulled out a small item. “This is from the collar of the shirt he was wearing. I’ll give you this as a keepsake.”

In her hand, she was holding a small strip of cloth. Shortly after Roland died, she’d cut his collar off with a knife.

Olivia gasped and stared intently at its button.

“………Fine,” she replied with an uncomfortable nod after a long pause.

It was a rare display of pettiness from Grete. After all, handing over the memento was the whole reason she’d gone there in the first place. Perhaps she was trying to avoid wounding Olivia’s pride.

Olivia made an annoyed gesture with her hand. “That said, there isn’t much to say. All Roland told me was to call for him as soon as I ran into Bonfire and to avoid fighting him no matter what. Then he showed me a photo and gave me the guy’s name.”

“I see… May I ask what name that was?”

“He taught me quite a few of them. Klaus, Lone, Crowbar, Practical, Ax, the Dust King… I think that was all of them? Anyway, that’s all I know.”

After rattling off her answer, Olivia snatched the cloth out of Grete’s hand.

“I really appreciate it.” Grete thanked her, to which Olivia scoffed and started walking toward the exit. Her back was practically screaming that there was nothing left to talk about.

“…Where are you planning on going?” Grete asked.

“I’m heading back to my homeland to see if I can try making an honest living. I’ve had enough of espionage for one lifetime.”

As Thea recalled, Olivia was from a small eastern nation. They had no plans to visit it anytime soon, so this was likely to be the last they ever saw of her.

Olivia continued striding toward the exit, but once she was halfway there, she came to a sudden stop. “Hey, Grete,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “There’s something you should know.”

“What’s that…?”

She gave Grete an intense look. “The thing about us humans is, we can live just fine without being loved. Life’s nicer when you’ve got a guy on your arm, sure, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. You’ve got a hell of a needy side, so I thought you could do with a reminder of that.”

Thea didn’t know the specifics of their feud, so she had no way of knowing what to truly make of that advice. However, she did sense a gentleness to Olivia’s tone.

Grete shook her head. “…That’s a fair opinion to hold, and it’s probably even true. However, I can’t accept that.”

“Huh?”

“The only people who can say that a life without being loved is a life worth living and actually mean it…are people who’ve experienced being loved at least once already.” Grete’s expression softened. “And you’ve certainly been loved.”

“You and I are never going to be able to get along, are we?” Olivia muttered bitterly. Then she left.

Two women were standing on either side of the building’s exit. They were the Foreign Intelligence Office personnel who were going to be taking Olivia to the airport. Olivia got into the car parked in front of the building and disappeared from sight.

“I wonder if we’ll ever see her again?” Thea said quietly. “I’m sure it won’t be anytime soon, but—”

“Thea,” Grete replied somberly. “Olivia only has half a year to live at most.”

“What?”

“Once they get to the airport, the torture team is going to be drugging her. Before long, her memory will start becoming muddled, she’ll lose the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and she’ll start spreading incomprehensible lies before ultimately dying.”

Thea felt like she’d just been punched in the gut.

The only fate that awaited captured spies was a black hole of despair from which not a single ray of light could escape.

That was one of the Din Republic’s counterintelligence tactics, no doubt. Allowing captured spies to return to their home countries allowed Din to protect itself by disseminating nonsensical misinformation to hostile nations. Perhaps that was Olivia’s just deserts for all the people she’d helped Roland kill, but just or not, that was how many spies met their end in that world awash in pain they lived in.

“…Does she know what’s going to happen to her?” Thea asked.

“I can’t imagine that they would tell her in advance, no.” Grete squeezed her fists tight in front of her chest as though in prayer. “This time, Olivia, it really is good-bye.”

The two of them sat facing each other on the train ride home. There weren’t many other passengers, and the background noise was enough to drown out most conversations. It was the perfect spot for exchanging confidential information. However, it was a good long while before either of them opened their mouths.

The breaths Grete took as she sat across from Thea were deep and laborious. She’d clearly been nervous and probably even scared. She closed her eyes and sat in complete silence.

It wasn’t until the train was almost at its final stop, their port city, that either of them spoke.

“It feels like we hardly learned anything back there,” Thea said frankly. Unfortunately, Olivia hadn’t actually told them much. Roland had barely told her anything they could use. To be honest, Thea felt a little bit let down.

“Thea,” Grete said, “one of the names she listed was Crowbar.”

“Huh?”

Thea thought back. When she’d gotten kidnapped, the men who’d taken her had been murdered with a crowbar.

“It would seem as though you and the boss met after all. Back then, he was the person who killed your captors.”

One of Klaus’s old names was Crowbar, and it made perfect sense as a moniker a foreign spy might have given him. Just like how the Din Republic had known “Deepwater” Roland as “Corpse,” it wasn’t uncommon for a spy to be known by a different name by their enemies than the code name they used domestically. Could an enemy spy have chosen to call a boy Crowbar after seeing him wield one? Absolutely. And Klaus’s mentor “Torchlight” Guido fought with a katana, so it wouldn’t be odd for his pupil to favor a melee weapon as well.

Klaus had been there back when Thea got saved.

“B-but, then,” Thea said as she sorted through her thoughts, “why did Klaus hide that from me? He told me to my face that we’d never met before.”

“…………………………………………………………”

Grete sank into silence again, then placed a finger on her lips and assumed her standard thinking pose.

Thea’s breath caught in her throat.

The two of them had gotten close over the past half a year. Not only had Thea taken to mentoring Grete in the ways of romance, but they’d also formed a friendly rivalry as fellow members of the Intel squad and gotten through the brutal battle in Mitario by working together.

Because of all that, Thea could tell—Grete was acting.

“Come on, Grete,” Thea said. “You thought of something, didn’t you?”

“……………”

“Please, you have to give it to me straight. Whatever it is you figured out, I’m sure it’s the answer to the assignment Ms. Hearth left for me. No matter what it is, I have to face it.”

“Thea…” Grete looked back up. “How good are your memories from when you were kidnapped?”

Thea hadn’t been expecting that question. She blinked, unsure of what Grete was getting at.

Is there something I forgot?

It had happened seven years ago, so there were probably plenty of things she’d forgotten. Given how traumatic it had been, she couldn’t state with any confidence that she remembered every small detail with any sort of real accuracy.

She shook her head a little. “I don’t remember anything aside from what I’ve already told you.”

Grete inhaled sharply. There was a sadness in her eyes, almost as though she was about to cry. She shot an impassioned look Thea’s way. It would seem her keen intellect had led her right to the truth. “Now, afterward,” she said, “did Hearth take care of you all on her own?”

“Yeah, that’s right… Now that you mention it, why was it only ever her?”

Despite being in charge of an entire spy team, Hearth had looked after Thea herself. The team had Klaus and plenty of other members on it, but none of them had ever shown their faces.

“And all the corpses were men?”

“Th-that’s right… It was the men who kidnapped me.”

Ten people had been slaughtered, and there wasn’t a woman among them. Thea definitely remembered that all the people who had abducted her were men.

“Now, Thea.” Finally, Grete looked her straight in the eye. “I want you to remember that this is nothing more than a hypothesis, but what I suspect happened back then was—”

Klaus stood amid the ruins of Lily’s bedroom.

Lily had already cleared out all her belongings, so there was nothing inside other than its cracked walls and floor. Klaus felt a certain melancholy at the idea of remodeling the room where Hearth had once lived, but at the same time, it felt like it was the right moment to do so. After all, everything around it had been remodeled, too—both the team itself and the people who had belonged to it. Klaus was the boss now, and it was on him to pick up where Hearth had left off.

He stood in the center of the room, closed his eyes, and thought back to one of the missions they’d gone on together.

Seven years ago, Klaus had gone with Hearth to save Thea.

In a world awash in pain, a sullen look crossed the boy’s face. It was seven years ago, meaning that the boy was thirteen years old. His hair was cut shorter and neater than it was in the present day, and his face still had a youthfulness to it. He was clutching a heavy-looking crowbar and dragging it along the ground.

Deep within the dilapidated house, there sat a small door. Inside, visible through the door’s peephole, there was a dark-haired girl crouching lifelessly on the ground. She was filthy and dressed in nothing but her underwear. Her bare buttocks were covered in bruises from having been struck over and over, and her body was so limp, it was like she’d lost all hope as she simply waited for death to take her.

“That’s awful…,” murmured “Hearth” Veronika, who was standing beside the boy. Her brows furrowed in anguish as she stared at the girl. She was the person Inferno had been tasked with rescuing. A group of Galgad spies had recently made a move on the Republic’s major media outlets, and although the Foreign Intelligence Office had tried to stamp out the entire plot in one fell swoop, a few of the Imperial spies managed to give them the slip. Some of the desperate survivors had kidnapped a newspaper company president’s daughter and succeeded in evading the Foreign Intelligence Office’s counterintelligence network and fleeing across the border. Rescuing the girl had been deemed impossible, and as such, the Republic had given the job to Inferno.

The boy silently raised his crowbar overhead and got ready to smash down the door.

Veronika called out to stop him. “Klaus, wait.”

“What?”

“Don’t let the girl see you. In fact, you’re forbidden from interacting with her. Let the others know the same goes for them. Make sure everyone, especially the men, knows they’re not to show their faces around her.”

The boy shot her a confused look. He didn’t understand why she would give him an order like that.

Veronika’s voice grew harsher. “There are signs that she’s been sexually assaulted.”

“Ah,” the boy replied in detached understanding. Even at thirteen, he could understand exactly what she was getting at. It was no surprise, really. A glance had been enough to see that the kidnapped girl was attractive despite her youth. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what her captors had probably done to her.

The boy kicked his crowbar back up off the ground and rested it on his shoulder.

According to their intel, there were ten Galgad spies over by the front door.

“Listen to me closely, Klaus,” Veronika told him in her smooth, flowing voice. “Everyone has their circumstances, something that made them the way they are. Especially with how our world is awash in pain.”

“………”

“So never forget to think about their origins and the environment that created them. Never forget to resent the world. And know that I say this in spite of that—I want them all dead in the next sixty seconds.”

The boy broke into a dash.

There was a door across from the room in which the girl was being held, and the boy kicked it open and stormed inside. Sure enough, there were ten men in there, gathered around a map and planning out their next escape route.

“Hey, where the hell’d the kid come fr—?!”

With a single swing, the boy shattered the shouting man’s skull before turning his sights on the other nine. The boy’s body had yet to finish growing, and he took full advantage of the crowbar’s weight and centrifugal force to strike the men in the vitals one after another with the speed of a passing gale.

For the next little while, the room echoed with the sound of the men screaming and the crowbar crushing flesh. People who saw the carnage the boy wrought took to calling him Ax, a weapon of pure destruction, and people who saw the way he became one with his crowbar to obliterate his foes took to calling him Crowbar as well. There were all sorts of names that intelligence agencies the world over gave Inferno’s youngest threat when they decided to actively be wary of him.

This time, though, there wasn’t a single person left to tell tales of his prowess by the time his assault ended one minute after it began.

After burying his crowbar in the final man’s head without a moment’s hesitation, the boy stole the keys from the man’s pocket.

Meanwhile, Veronika was still standing by the door. “I should have done more,” she mumbled. However, there wasn’t a single thing anyone could have blamed her for. Inferno had come running the moment they got assigned the mission, and she knew that full well.

Veronika took the keys from Klaus. “I’m going to look after the girl until we can bring her home,” she said. “She’s going to need someone to stay by her side at all times, at least until the light of hope returns to her eyes.”

“…Got it.”

The boy felt that she was being overly protective, but he chose not to comment.

Veronika had ordered him not to let the girl see him, so he turned to leave. He didn’t want to stay in that dilapidated house a single second longer than he had to. The man-stink was still pungent, even with the smell of blood now permeating the building, and the boy hated the way it reminded him of what the men had done to the girl. All sorts of emotions he couldn’t stomach whirled up inside him.

“Hey, Klaus. There’s one more thing I need to tell you.” When the boy turned back, Veronika’s tone softened. “_______”

The boy stared at her, not so much as blinking. Her words had just wrapped him up like a warm hug, and the sensation was so memorable, it caused them to nestle deep in his heart.

As promised, Veronika handled the girl’s care herself. She didn’t let the men anywhere near her, of course, but she didn’t let the women help out, either. Veronika had little confidence that someone as rough-and-tumble as Gerde or as egotistical as Heide was equipped to provide the kind of mental-health care the girl needed.

Ten days in, the girl had become quite taken with Veronika. The boy never had a chance to witness that fact for himself, but the look on Veronika’s face told him everything he needed to know.

“She told me that she wants to become a spy,” Veronika said excitedly one night as Inferno was in the middle of eating dinner. From listening to her, you would have thought she was boasting about her own daughter. “She’s just like Klaus and Heide. Someday, she’s going to be a better spy than I ever was.”

The boy’s eyes went wide. It wasn’t every day that Veronika said something like that. From the sound of it, it was entirely possible that she was about to announce that Inferno had a new member.

The jacket-wearing man to Klaus’s right, “Torchlight” Guido, clutched at his head in consternation. “C’mon, boss, you gotta stop picking up stray kids like this.”

Inferno had lost several members in the Great War, and the team had to undergo an overhaul. Aside from the old guard of Veronika, Guido, and Gerde, the majority of the team was made up of youngsters like the thirteen-year-old Klaus, the seventeen-year-old “Flamefanner” Heide, and the twenty-year-old “Soot” Lukas and “Scapulimancer” Wille. Adding an eleven-year-old girl hardly seemed like a realistic proposal.

“You’re right,” Veronika said with a disappointed nod. “Someday, though, she’s going to join our ranks. She has such a pure, beautiful heart. She’s going to become a powerful spy and save us all.”

Her lips curled into a delighted smile, causing dumbfounded looks to spread across the rest of the team’s faces.

The boy continued staring at his boss as he etched the image of the single glance he’d gotten of the dark-haired girl—the girl Veronika had recognized as a brilliant spy in the making—into his mind.

The boy never forgot that girl, the one who would one day be known as Dreamspeaker.

When Veronika saw the boy—Klaus—staring at her, she gave him a big smile.

Seven years later, Veronika perished in the city of Mitario. When she died, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that Klaus would bring Thea there with him.

After thinking back to the mission he’d gone on with Hearth, Klaus let out a heavy sigh. His relationship with Thea, the girl who’d inherited Hearth’s will, was dubious at best and consisted largely of her sexually harassing him. However, it was unclear if Hearth had predicted that part, too.

There were a million things he wanted to ask her.

I’ve gotten over my sadness, he mused to himself as he stood alone and silently surveyed the room that had once been Hearth’s, but there are still so many things I wish you could teach me.

With that, he finished getting his feelings in order.

Perhaps I’ll go brew some of that herbal tea she used to love, he thought as he left the room.

“…And that’s my hypothesis,” Grete said as she concluded her explanation.

She’d just finished laying out the possibility that Thea had been sexually assaulted. There were plenty of things that supported the theory. For one, there was the fact that Veronika had chosen to be the one to look after Thea. There had been other people there, ostensibly other members of the team, but the team’s boss had taken care of her all on her own. However, it all made sense if Thea had been the victim of sexual violence. Most people would be loath to leave caring for a young girl who’d just been sexually assaulted to the men.

Grete gave Thea’s hands a squeeze and spoke somberly. “Again, though, this is nothing more than a hypothesis—”

“No, Grete, I think you hit the nail on the head. There isn’t a single answer that fits better.”

Grete’s theory offered an explanation for the biggest mystery of all—the fact that Klaus had denied ever having met her. They’d met in the very place she got assaulted, and Klaus had been trying to be considerate. By and large, women who were the victims of sexual violence detested the idea of anyone having witnessed the scene of the attack. As a man, Klaus had decided as an act of kindness not to tell her that he was there.

“It’s fine,” Thea said with a smile. “I never thought of my body as clean in the first place. And besides, it’s not like I didn’t already realize it on some level.”

The new revelation answered another mystery, as well—it explained why Thea had slept around so much during her academy days.

There was a psychological concept called overwriting, and while people tended to assume that female sexual-assault survivors were likely to develop androphobia, there were actually some cases where the opposite was true, and they became sexually uninhibited. Having repeated sexual encounters was a way for them to process and take back ownership of their trauma. Doing that ran the risk of deepening their psychological scars, so it wasn’t necessarily recommended, but for Thea, it had likely served as a sort of adaptive behavior. Doing so was what had let her become as talented of a spy as she was, and it was all thanks to the hope her savior had imparted in her.

“All this did is remind me all over again just how much Ms. Hearth did for me.” Thea wiped away the tears that were starting to well up in the corners of her eyes. “And how…she’s gone now……”

She’d finally found her answer. Hearth’s message was something along the lines of, Klaus supports you. They were words designed to help her face the past, as well as to remind her why it was she had become a spy.

The world was awash in pain.

Thea had heard that Hearth had been ravaged by disease, and when she realized that her death was fast approaching, she’d probably been planning on entrusting her mission to Klaus. Her hope had been that when Thea eventually got to Inferno, she and Klaus would take steps to change the world together.

“Ms. Hearth…”

Thea squeezed her hands together in front of her face and closed her eyes.

The train began decelerating. The number of buildings near the tracks picked up, and more and more shadows began falling over Thea. The sun was starting to set, too.

“I swear, life is just so full of pain,” Thea murmured.

“…It is, isn’t it,” Grete replied with a glum nod. She was probably thinking about the way she and Olivia had just parted ways.

Eventually, the train arrived at the port city where their base, Heat Haze Palace, was.

“Let’s go back,” Thea said. “Back to our home.”

“Yes, let’s. I think we could both do with a nice cup of tea.”

They exchanged a nod, then began walking in silence. They didn’t say a word their entire way there. They both had too many things they needed to ponder, and they both wanted a chance to immerse themselves in their raging emotions.

After going all the way from the station on through their fake seminary school, the two of them arrived back at Heat Haze Palace. When they opened the door, they found an unexpected figure standing stock-still in the foyer.

“………”

Klaus was staring into the main hall, clearly at a loss for words. It was rare to see him so thunderstruck. What could possibly be happening farther within?

“Is something wrong?” Thea asked as she peered inside.

When she did, her attention was immediately grabbed by the bizarre entity in the middle of the room.

There stood Lily, fully upright and completely passed out with her mouth full of cake.

“What in the world HAPPENED in here?!”

It was Thea’s turn to play the straight man, and the sheer force of her retort shook the very walls.

The reason Lily ended up smothered in cake was, unsurprisingly, the aforementioned situation. While Thea and Grete had been somberly deciphering Hearth’s dying message, the cascading misunderstandings had been causing Lily and the rest of the morons to sink further and further into disarray.

There was Lily, who’d been certain that Klaus was in love with her and determined to turn him down for the sake of the team.

Then there were Sybilla, Sara, and Erna, who’d misunderstood Lily and thought that she was about to profess her love to him.

As the bona fide psychological war with everyone reading far too much into one another’s words and actions continued, they ended up deciding to visit every cake shop in the city and buy sweets on the assumption that someone was liable to have hurt feelings over Lily’s confession. “I feel like we really don’t need to buy this much!” Lily blustered at several points during their journey, but the other girls shut her down with stern looks on their faces. “R-remember, this is just in case!” Sybilla said. “And it’s really important! It probably won’t matter, but there’s a slim chance that it will!” Sara added. “I agree! We should go visit another shop!” Erna concurred.

The three of them were all stalling for time. Their thoughts raced.

Shit, what’s the play?! All I can do now is drag this out as long as I can!

Oh no… I’m not ready for all this… I need someone to come save me.

I don’t want to see Big Sis Lily get hurt, but I know he’s going to turn her down.

Their thoughts were fully in unison.

“““After all, I’m the one the boss is in love with!!”””

In the end, their misunderstanding continued unresolved all the way through to the evening. Without anyone around to talk sense into the three of them, their doubts slowly but surely solidified into certainty. Once they’d visited every last bakery in the city, though, they lost the pretext they were using to delay things, and before they knew it, they returned to Heat Haze Palace and ended up back in the main hall.

Once the four of them finished setting their armloads of cake boxes down on the table, Lily smiled. “All right, I think it’s time I went over and had that chat with Teach.”

Seeing how cheerful she looked caused knots to tighten in Sybilla’s, Sara’s, and Erna’s chests, and Sybilla was the one who got hit the hardest. She and Lily had been chumming it up like two dumbass peas in a dumbass pod for a while now, and Lily had never once expressed interest in romance. Now, she’d finally worked up the nerve to tell someone how she felt about them. Sybilla would have loved nothing more than to be able to cheer her on.

The problem is, I’m the one Klaus is in love with! (Note: not actually true.)

Sybilla pursed her lips, cursed the cruel hand fate had dealt her, and planted herself in front of Lily. “Look, Lily, you gotta call this off!”

“Hweh?”

“I can’t explain why, not right now. But I’m beggin’ ya. At least give it till tomorrow. I gotta have a talk with the boss today, so at least wait until after that.”

Once Sybilla gave her impassioned speech, Sara and Erna came and stood beside her.

“I’m in the same boat!” Sara said. “I won’t let you through to see the boss, Miss Lily!”

“I feel the same way,” Erna agreed. “I want to protect our friendship!”

The three of them were all standing in Lily’s way.

Lily was completely taken aback. I—I don’t know why, but they’re all acting super weird!

There was clearly something serious driving them, but she couldn’t afford to back down, either. “I can tell you’ve got your reasons, but this is something I have to do! I have to protect Lamplight!” she shouted.

“Some people just can’t take a hint!” Sybilla shouted back. “I’m tellin’ you, back the hell down!”

They were past the point of talking things through. That last exchange had made that fact abundantly clear to everyone present. Lily took a resolute step forward—

“Hraaah! If that’s what it takes, then I’m gonna get seriouser than serious! Eat thiiiiis!”

—and grabbed one of the cakes to use as a weapon as she rammed herself at her three opponents.

As he listened to Thea’s screams, Klaus’s frown grew deeper and deeper.

The entire main hall was covered in icing, and the air hung thick with a sweet, sugary smell. More than a hundred confections lay splattered all across the walls and carpet, and the girls had fainted amid it all with their bodies covered head to toe in cake.

There were so many things to comment on, it was hard to know where to start.

Lily was passed out stock upright with cake overflowing from her mouth, Sybilla had keeled over and passed out in front of the main hall’s door with her body covered in cake, Sara lay collapsed on the floor with both arms full to brimming with cake, and Erna was so thoroughly covered in icing that her entire body was white. It was clear that a great battle had unfolded there, but what wasn’t clear was why.

In all likelihood, the morons had gone and done something moronic again.

Klaus decided to start by shaking everyone awake and lining them all up. He gently wiped the icing off Erna’s face but left everything else as it was. Then he gave them a questioning look. “So, uh…what’s going on? You’ve been acting strangely all day.”

“Errr, so, uh, about that…”

Lily cast her gaze downward in embarrassment. The others’ expressions were similarly awkward.

That was when Monika arrived in the main hall dragging Annette, who she’d tied up with rope, along behind her. “I finally caught the little pest.”

Annette, for her part, was kicking her legs back and forth in delight. “I look like a bagworm, yo!”

Monika handed Klaus a slip of paper. “Pretty sure this is what’s to blame!”

““““Huh?!”””” cried the icing-covered girls.

When Thea saw the paper, she smiled. “Oh, hey, the note I wrote. I must have dropped it somewhere.”

Upon hearing that, the four dunces gave the most shocked reactions they’d shown all day. ““““WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!””””

Klaus gave them a deep nod. “It would appear there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding here. Why don’t each of you explain one by one what happened. That should let us get to the bottom of this.”

With that, they finally started resolving the misunderstanding. Starting with Lily, they all explained both how they’d found the accusatory-looking note and what they had thought and done thereafter. It was pretty funny, hearing it all laid out like that.

“You people have a bad habit of operating on nothing more than gut instinct and momentum,” Klaus pointed out.

Lily gave her shoulders a despondent slump. “Yeah, you’ve got us there…”

As far as the situation itself went, Klaus had no comment. He did scold them for making a mess of the main hall, but that was all.

Now that the misunderstanding had been cleared up, cheerful smiles spread across the faces of the girls who’d been laboring under it. It was clear that they’d been spending the entire day worried sick.

“Heh-heh.” “…Tee-hee.”

A pair of chuckles escaped Thea’s and Grete’s lips.

“Hmm?” Lily said, giving them a questioning look, at which point Thea burst out into full-on laughter.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha! You all are so funny! How can you be so pure and innocent?! It’s adorable how inexperienced you are with romance! You were so self-conscious and so confused—oh, I love it!”

Her smile was so lighthearted, it was like she’d just been exorcised and freed from an evil spirit’s grasp. Tears pooled up in the corners of her eyes. For the next little while, her whole body shook as she continued letting out loud, heartfelt laughter. Grete had to clamp down on her mouth, too. “It really is kind of hilarious… Heh-heh, oh, you’re all so wonderful,” she said through her laughs. It was a wild departure from the reserved way she usually carried herself.

The other girls stared slack-jawed at the giggling duo.

After a desperate attempt to catch her breath, Thea looked over at Lily. “You know, Lily, I really need to thank you. You cheered me right up.”

“…Huh?”

“I’d like to express my gratitude as well,” Grete said with another laugh. “All my melancholy just vanished like it was never there.”

Lily gave their thanks an icing-covered tilt of her head. She had no idea what they were even talking about.

“………”

Through the whole exchange, Klaus continued watching over them.

“Hey, Klaus. There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” Veronika said.

It was seven years ago, and Klaus had just massacred Thea’s captors. His body was drenched in the ten men’s blood. At the time, he had yet to master the art of defeating his foes without getting himself dirty. The walls were a striking shade of red, the air hung thick with the smell of blood as unidentifiable fluids seeped from the broken men’s bodies, and the room across from that one held a young girl who’d lost all hope sleeping like a corpse.

There was no word to describe that place but hellish.

However, Veronika offered him a thin smile all the same. “No matter how much pain washes over the world, never let it break you. Hope is never unassailable, but the same is true of despair. Never forget the power the world has to put smiles on people’s faces.”

With the gentle expression still playing on her lips, Veronika went and opened the door to where the girl was being held.

Even as Klaus hurriedly turned to leave, he could still hear how warm her voice was.

“You’re little _______, right?”

Klaus himself wasn’t sure why that memory had sprung to mind.

When he looked at Lily, though, it dawned on him. There was something his boss had once taught him: Even in this world awash in pain, never let your smile fade.

Klaus wasn’t the only one who harbored pain. There was Grete, who had a complex about how her face looked; there was Annette, who’d had her very existence rejected by the woman who raised her; there was Thea, who’d suffered deep wounds from having been kidnapped; there was Erna, who was tormented by her own twisted psyche and sense of self-loathing; there was Sybilla, whose heart had suffered a wound that would never heal from the situation with her siblings; there was Monika, who’d fallen into a depression over the limits of her own talent and the disconnection she felt with the people around her; and there was Sara, who was at a loss about her immaturity and the fact that she didn’t have a strong driving purpose in life. They all lived their lives agonizing, being hurt, and sometimes even hurting others.

That was what made Lily’s mindset and the way it generated smiles so surprisingly precious. Thea and Grete had been looking down when they first walked through the door, but now, their expressions were as bright and as cheerful as could be.

Even Klaus had to admit it. Lily really is the one who puts smiles on everyone’s faces here.

““““““““No way…””””””””

As Klaus stood there deep in thought, he suddenly noticed that all the girls were looking at him. Their jaws were hanging open like they’d just seen a ghost.

“Hmm? What’s going on?” he asked.

Lily’s voice trembled a little. “W-was that a smile I just saw, Teach?”

“I can’t say. I haven’t been doing much smiling recently.”

He reached up to check his cheeks, but that didn’t give him any definitive answers. The one and only time he remembered smiling recently was when Lamplight got back together. He hadn’t had much cause to smile ever since Inferno got wiped out.

Klaus made a shooing gesture with his hand. “More importantly, you need to hurry and get this mess cleaned up. The contractors will be here soon, and Lamplight’s going to be entering a whole new era.”

“No, no, you totally did!! What a red-letter day!”

The rest of the girls followed up on Lily’s assertion by excitedly nodding along with her. Klaus supposed that he must have been smiling after all. It was an odd feeling, realizing that he himself hadn’t been aware of it.

“Well, if I was smiling, then there’s only one reason why that would be.” Klaus crossed his arms. “I suppose it’s because of how much I love you all.”

“Seriously, enough with that stuff!” Lily cried with her face bright red.

“Magnificent,” Klaus softly replied.