Spy Classroom - Volume SS2 - Chapter Pr

Prologue

The Spy Teacher Who Loved Me

A loud thunk rang out.

When Thea carefully scooped out the surrounding dirt with her shovel, a small metal box emerged from the ground. It was just about the right size to fit in a pair of hands without spilling over the side. Thea cast her shovel away and picked up the box.

There was a lock affixed to it, and her eyes went wide.

“It’s really here…”

One of her teammates had built Thea a metal detector, and she’d been using it to scour the halls of the mansion called Heat Haze Palace. The fact that she hadn’t found what she was looking for after three whole days of searching nearly led her to assume that it wasn’t in the manor at all, but right when she was about to give up, she hit pay dirt in one of the garden’s flower beds.

Thea gasped.

After taking a deep breath, she pulled something wrapped in a piece of cloth out of her pocket.

“This is the key that Hearth left me…”

She stared transfixed at the key.

Hearth was the former boss of the legendary spy team Inferno. She had been lauded as the Greatest Spy in the World who’d helped end the Great War, and she had once saved Thea’s life. It was impossible to understate the impact she’d had on Thea’s life. Not only did Hearth rescue Thea from a kidnapping, but she also inspired her to become a spy and even delivered hope to her right before dying at Purple Ant’s hand during their battle in Mitario.

Now that I think about it…

As Thea reminisced, a question suddenly dawned on her.

…how did Ms. Hearth know Teach would bring me to Mitario?

That there was a head-scratcher.

Shortly before Purple Ant killed her in the Mouzaian metropolis of Mitario, Hearth had spread an urban legend about a dark-haired hero and introduced a chink into Purple Ant’s armor. However, it all seemed a bit too convenient.

Thea decided to sort through all the predictions Hearth would have had to make.

Future 1: Purple Ant’s minion Roland, aka Corpse, would run into Klaus.

→ Plausible. As a matter of fact, Hearth had taken steps to plant the idea in Roland’s head herself.

Future 2: Klaus would head to Mitario after Hearth died.

→ Plausible. Klaus would have no trouble turning the tables on Roland and extracting the pertinent intel from him. Considering how strong Klaus was, it was a pretty obvious prediction to make.

Future 3: By the time Klaus went to Mitario, he would have built a new team.

→ More or less plausible. According to Roland, Hearth already knew that she’d been betrayed. It wouldn’t have been much of a leap for her to foresee that Inferno would get destroyed and that Klaus would have to put together a new group of allies.

Future 4: Klaus would recruit Thea onto that team.

→ There’s no way, right?

That last bit was the one that didn’t make sense. Thea hadn’t joined Lamplight until after Hearth died, so Hearth would have had no way of knowing it would happen. However, the way Hearth had laid her groundwork in Mitario made it seem like she’d been certain of it. How could she have guessed that that future would come to pass?

Thea couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

…Well, I suppose there’s no sense racking my brain over the matter. Knowing Ms. Hearth, perhaps her abilities simply transcend common sense.

After trying to convince herself, Thea turned her attention toward the box she was holding.

“To the girl who will surpass me.”

Before her death, Hearth had left a pair of presents for Thea: a short yet powerful message and a mysterious key. Not even Klaus had known what lock it might pair with, so Thea had gone searching all through Heat Haze Palace. Now she’d finally found a box that might be what she was looking for.

She gulped, then slotted the key into the lock. A satisfying click rang out.

Thea let loose a small yelp. She’d finally done it. She’d finally tracked down the gift Hearth had left for her. As she tried to suppress her accelerating heartbeat, she took the box back to her room, then delicately opened its lid. What she found inside was a smaller wooden box. Hearth had clearly taken great care to make sure that no water managed to seep in.

Thea opened the wooden box, too.

“………Photos?”

Inside, there were a number of scenic photographs of a building. It was two stories tall and made of timber. Something about it gave Thea an odd sense of déjà vu, but you could find structures like that just about anywhere in the world, so she couldn’t pin down what it might be.

There was something written on the back of one of the photos.

“Klaus s you.”

“Huh…?”

Thea’s eyes went wide. She hadn’t been expecting Klaus’s name to come up.

All in all, it was a strange message. The most important bit had been left completely blank, and there weren’t any signs that the section had rubbed off. As far as she could tell, it had been left unwritten from the get-go.

Thea let out a small sigh. That was Hearth for you, she supposed. Apparently, she’d intended to make Thea work for her present. It didn’t take long for Thea to pick up on the idea behind the message.

“I suppose she wants me to figure the rest out myself.”

The world was awash in pain.

The decade since the Great War’s end brought about an era where nations turned to spies rather than soldiers to advance their national interests. The small Din Republic was no different, and it had built up intelligence units and sent operatives out across the world.

One such unit was Lamplight, a peculiar team made up of eight female academy washouts led by a boss named Klaus. By successfully capturing the deadly Purple Ant over in the United States of Mouzaia, Lamplight managed to get a lead on their archenemies, the Galgad Empire intelligence team Serpent. Then, after returning home without suffering a single casualty, they had taken one of their well-earned post-mission holidays.

During that holiday, the message Hearth left behind gave rise to something of a commotion.

There was a fell creature roaming the halls of Lamplight’s base, Heat Haze Palace.

Every nook and cranny of the manor was luxurious and extravagant, and at first glance, one would expect the residents to be living in the lap of luxury. However, the entity striding around it seemed wholly out of place. Its long black hair was splayed out in every direction, turning it into some writhing black blob, and the face peeking out from behind that hair was as pale as a corpse and had heavy bags around its eyes. Lifeless, delirious mumbles occasionally spilled from its mouth.

“…What goes in the blank spot…? …Seeks? …Knows? …Sees? …Ungh, and I don’t even get a hint… I—I guess I should start by writing out my theories…”

In truth, the creature was Thea. She normally carried herself with great pride thanks to her long, lustrous hair and her curvy figure, but at the moment, that dignity was gone without a trace. For the past three days and three nights, she’d spent every waking hour ruminating on Hearth’s message. However, nothing spoke to her as being obviously correct, so she’d been left aimlessly listing out ideas. She’d spent the whole time holed up in her room, neither eating nor bathing. Occasionally, she would come out and wander the hallways, mumbling incoherently before returning right back to her room.

From the outside looking in, it was downright unnerving.

“Guess Thea’s still in her funk, huh,” “Flower Garden” Lily casually offered from the dining room. Lily was a silver-haired girl whose distinctive features were her adorable looks and her sizable bosom. She was technically the team’s leader, and she’d been concerned about Thea for the last little while.

“Eh, I’m sure she’s fine. If she wanted help, she’d ask for it,” “Glint” Monika coolly replied. Monika was a girl who’d gotten rid of all her notable features besides her asymmetric cerulean hair.

Lily and Monika munched down on their breakfast toast as they continued their conversation.

“Yeah, but she’s starting to look like a ghost,” Lily said. “Whenever I run into her at night, it makes me want to exorcise her.”

“Yeah, she freaked Erna out so bad last night that Erna practically burst into tears.”

“Wait, Thea’s already claimed a victim?!”

“Still, I say we let her do what she wants. My only priority right now is enjoying my vacation.”

Blunt to the end, Monika promptly left the dining room after finishing her toast. She probably wanted to go back to her room and read.

She had a point. Unless Thea came and asked them for help herself, it wasn’t really their place to butt in. Instead, it made more sense for them to prioritize their own R&R. It was already eight AM, but many of the girls hadn’t even woken up yet, instead having chosen to leisurely sleep in.

Yeah, maybe I’ll take a trip over to the capital today.

With that thought in mind, Lily headed back to her room as well. It had been a while since she last had any time off, so it might be nice to dress up in something cute and invite her teammates to go hit up a bunch of cake shops. Alternatively, going on a spontaneous solo trip could be fun as well. It could even be nice to just laze around and stare at the sky without a thought or a care in the world.

Growing more and more excited with each subsequent idea, Lily arrived at her room. Her original bedroom had gotten blown up prior to their Mitario mission, so she’d taken a previously empty room and set up camp there instead.

When she opened the door, she found a single slip of paper lying on the floor. Huh? she thought as she leaned down to pick it up. On it, there was a simple message.

“Klaus loves you.”

“………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

Lily stared at the words and stood frozen in place for a good long while.

Spoiler alert: It probably went without saying, but Thea was the one who’d written that. As part of her process to try to deduce what Hearth’s message was, she’d been scribbling her hypotheses down on paper. Then, as she stalked the halls in a daze, she’d ended up dropping one of her notes, which coincidentally slipped under Lily’s cracked door.

That was all there was to it. However, Thea hadn’t come to Lily for advice, so Lily didn’t know a thing about Hearth’s message. To her, it looked like someone had tossed the paper into her room on purpose, perhaps even as an indictment. And if she took the words at face value—

Teach is…in love with me…?

—then that was the only way to read them.

Lily didn’t know who’d left it for her, but it looked as though someone had realized how Klaus felt and decided to inform her of it.

“WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!”

Lily’s scream echoed all through Heat Haze Palace.

That marked the misunderstanding’s first victim.

As Lily flailed in the hallway, another two girls came rushing over.

“What’s wrong, Big Sis Lily?” “Oh, this’ll be interesting, yo!”

One of them—“Fool” Erna—was a short blond who had a certain doll-like beauty, and the other—“Forgetter” Annette—was a bizarre-looking girl with ash-pink hair and a large eye patch over her left eye. When they arrived, they saw Lily staggering back and forth across the hallway and constantly bumping into walls with her face as red as a beet. Something was clearly very off.

First things first, the two of them hurried over to Lily and grabbed her.

“Calm down. You’re scaring me!”

“’Fess up, Sis. What’s going on?”

The two of them clung to her, boxing her in from both sides.

“Th-th-th…”

Lily had difficulty getting the words out. It was a rare sight, considering how her raw shamelessness usually allowed her to face any predicament with her head held high.

““Th?””

“Long story short!” Lily shouted. “Th-this is what’s up!”

She twisted and wriggled free from Erna and Annette, then left a piece of paper behind as she fled at top speed. Before either of the others could blink, Lily had already reached the far end of the hallway and disappeared around the stairs.

Having been left behind, Erna tilted her head to the side. “What could have happened?”

“I bet we’ll find out if we read that note, yo.”

Annette unfolded the paper Lily had dropped. It would appear that that was the message that had driven her mad.

“Klaus loves you.”

“Yeep…?” “Huh?”

Erna and Annette cocked their heads in unison.

“Who is the letter for?”

“I mean…Sis gave it to us on purpose…right?”

Lily had specifically given it to them, as though to say, You need to read this so you know what’s going on. Logically, that must have meant that the “you” in the letter referred to one of them.

The duo spoke in a daze.

“So this is saying…”

“…that Bro is in love with either you or me?”

With that, they reached their conclusion.

““_______________________!!””

They let out simultaneous wordless screams.

That marked the misunderstanding’s second victim, as well as its third.

Due to a series of coincidences, Hearth’s final message ended up causing a number of baseless misinterpretations, and listed herein is an account of the chaos that chain of misunderstandings brought down on their vacation.

As Thea agonized over the mysterious letter and Annette was confronted with an unexpected “revelation,” their thoughts drifted back to the way they’d spent their days up to that point.