Spy Classroom - Volume SS3 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Honeymoon Raker

The taste of dirt filling his mouth was vile, and Vindo’s eyes shot open.

Upon spitting out the damp soil, he realized it was mixed with black blood. He could still breathe just fine, so he assumed he’d taken a wound to his digestive organs. He was also hemorrhaging tremendous amounts of blood from his left arm. The pain racing all through his body snapped him back to his senses.

…That was a long dream I just had.

As he rose to his feet, he thought back to the situation that had just befallen him.

His head had been filled with thoughts of his exchange period with Lamplight. All his recent memories had gotten dredged up, including the time Pharma had asked for Lamplight’s help on a mission, the fight in the art museum Lan had given him a report on, the time Queneau had been off working a completely different angle while the rest of them battled the Discourse on Decadence, the violent confrontation he and Vics had had, and the moon he’d seen during the farewell party Lamplight had thrown.

Given how the last memory had been one of Adi, he had an idea of what was going on.

I’m no fool.

Vindo laughed at himself a little.

He knew full well the name of the phenomenon that had just happened to him.

That was my life flashing before my eyes, wasn’t it?

When people were on death’s door, random memories welled to the surface. Their minds understood they didn’t have long left to live, so their brain cells went into overdrive plumbing their past for a plan that might help get them out. Any memory might hold the secret to survival, and it was important to check them all. That was the science behind the phenomenon of people’s lives flashing before their eyes.

However, Vindo failed to come up with a tidy plan.

He had no way of escaping the man before him—the man with three right arms looming in the darkness.

The man was wearing a black coat long enough to completely cover his body. His hood obscured his face from view, but his three right arms were distinctive enough to make up for that. His real arm was marked with fat scars, and it was joined by a pair of prostheses that shone with a mechanical luster. They looked to be pretty hefty, yet the man wielded them with ease.

As the man watched Vindo rise to his feet, his body quivered. “To think I would overpower you so completely. I must truly be one of the great heroes of our era.”

His voice was filled with fascination.

“Ah, I can feel retirement inching away from me.”

Vindo didn’t know the man’s name.

That was code name Black Mantis—a member of the enigmatic Galgad spy unit Serpent, and one of the people who had driven Avian to ruin.

The tragedy had struck during their mission in the Fend Commonwealth.

“Firewalker” Gerde was suspected to have been operating there, and Avian’s job was to follow her tracks. Gerde had belonged to the legendary spy team Inferno, and she’d disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Wanting to get to the bottom of why that was, Vindo had relied on his memories to find the apartment building where he’d last met her. Believing it to be her hideout, he’d searched its premises.

As his teammates worked to gather eyewitness reports about her, Vindo himself tried to find the entrance that connected to the building’s basement. The one he’d used during his last visit had been blocked off, so he needed to find another one.

It took him a good long while to make his way down to the basement, but when he got there, he discovered documents detailing a terrible plan that had been put into motion behind the global scenes.

He immediately got in touch with his team.

In the dead of night, he summoned Avian to the flat they’d been using as a base. Vics, Queneau, Pharma, and Lan came in one after another. All they were waiting for was Qulle.

Qulle arrived late with a look of absolute desperation on her face.

“Everyone, hurry! We need to—”

She froze midsentence. The team had all been working separately, and none of them had any idea what she was trying to tell them.

However, the unsettling wave of hostility that hit them certainly gave them an inkling.

“Programme Number One.”

First, Queneau died in an explosion.

When the grenade came smashing through the window, he immediately dived atop it and covered it with his body. As everyone else stood there dumbfounded, it exploded beneath his chest. It was obvious the wound was fatal; the bottom half of his body was completely mangled. Unidentifiable clumps of flesh that must once have been fat or guts went splattering across the floor.

“………Aye.”

A crack splintered across the mask he always wore, and his mouth poked out from beneath. There was a faint smile on his lips.

“Brother Queneau?!”

As Lan’s scream split the air, Vindo and the others sprang into action.

They could tell they were under attack. The first thing they did was flee into the hallway. Outside the room, there were agents waiting for them with guns drawn. Based on their attire, they were likely with the CIM.

These people weren’t trying to capture Avian, but rather going straight for the kill. That was a departure from the standard anti-spy playbook.

Inside buildings, though, Vindo’s power was absolute.

Using the door he had just opened and the building’s structural beams as cover to avoid the bullets, he bounded off the walls and floor. In a blink, he’d closed in on their foes and sliced through their carotid arteries with his knives.

Upon fleeing the building, they found themselves met with another furious rain of gunfire. They were surrounded by over fifty hostiles.

It was clear their opponents had a skilled commander at their helm.

“Programme Number Seventeen,” a female voice echoed out from the darkness. With every command, their foes changed up their formation, and the bullets began coming from a whole new angle. When Avian tried to flee, their enemies cut them off, and when they tried to hide, they found people had already been posted in every building they approached.

Although the Avian members avoided taking any direct hits from the veritable hailstorm of lead coming their way, the bullets chipped away at them nonetheless.

Even so, Avian didn’t give up. They killed what enemies they could and fled into the darkness. Vindo put down nine hostiles, and Vics got seven.

When they reached the river, they pulled out a new move.

“Lan, you need to go.”

“Prithee, wait. Brother Vindo, I—!!”

The moment Lan tried to protest, Qulle shoved her into the river from behind. They needed to make sure at least one person survived to report their intel back.

The battle raged on long after they’d evacuated Lan.

It took them over an hour to break the siege. Qulle used her Ultrahearing to find them a route, and they sniped their foes, stole the guns from the foes they’d downed, and used the guns to kill more foes still. It became impossible to tell if the blood they were caked in had come from themselves or from others.

After heading north along the river, they arrived at a spot so full of plum trees it was practically an orchard. There must not have been anyone managing it, as the trees were withered and the crows had gorged themselves on the ripe plums littering the ground. There were no electric lights there, just the still glow of the moon.

At long last, they’d shaken their pursuers.

However, they still needed to put some more distance between themselves and their foes. Vindo, Vics, Pharma, and Qulle headed up the river in a single file line.

“I couldn’t even keep track…of how many of them we killed. We need to find out…what the hell’s going on. ♪” Vics said through gritted teeth as he clutched at the spot where his arm had taken a bullet.

Up ahead, Vindo nodded. “It sounded like you had some intel, Qulle. What’s going—?”

He turned around just in time to see it happen.

At the back of their formation, red blood bloomed from Qulle’s throat.

The newcomer carried herself nimbly as she quietly took Qulle’s life, wielding her serrated knife with the fluid movements of a dancer. “Hee-hee!” The moonbeam was her spotlight, and she basked happily in its glow as she flashed a toothy, sadistic grin.

“Chaos! And! Turmoil!”

The girl laughed, both her shoulders bare and exposed. She had a graceful build and long, slender limbs. The scars running down her arm stood out like ghastly lightning bolts.

“Those are the vibes we’re working with, huh? Hee-hee-hee. I never expected you to actually escape from Belias, y’know. They’re kinda useless, huh?”

As realization dawned on Vindo that they’d been cut off by yet another foe, a new voice came from a different direction. “Don’t screw around, Green Butterfly.”

That voice had a decided menace to it.

A large man came out from behind the plum trees and charged at them. Despite his size, his movements were swift. He brandished his right arm. It was concealed under his coat, and something came shooting out of it, attacking Vindo and Vics at the same time.

The two of them tried to evade, but those things extending from the man’s right arm were faster.

“Vics! Vindo!” Pharma shrieked.

The objects that had just shot out from the man’s arm were another pair of right arms. They gave off a metallic luster. They were clearly artificial.

The two prosthetics whizzed through the air, narrowly missing Vindo’s and Vics’s throats.

Vindo grabbed Pharma by the collar and put some distance between themselves and the many-armed man.

“My aim was faulty?” the many-armed man muttered in bewilderment. “No, it was tampered with… Fascinating. So you’re manipulating my body.”

Pharma had the ability to control people’s interest and focus through her body language. It was thanks to her efforts that they’d survived that initial strike.

“But how long will you be able to keep your little trick up against me?”

The man’s three right arms stirred, and a wave of bloodlust emanated from him.

Vindo fought through the chill that seemed to spread through the air and tried to gauge their opponent’s strength. This man was in a whole different league from the CIM agents. This wasn’t the kind of foe they could beat with their stamina and ammo reserves as exhausted as they were.

Vindo made a snap call.

“We’re getting out of here.”

Remembering the way Queneau and Qulle had been killed filled him with an incandescent rage, but the logical part of his brain led him to make the correct decision as a spy.

He turned and fled from the massive man.

The girl the man had called Green Butterfly circled around with her gun at the ready like she’d read his every move. “Hee-hee, you really think we’re gonna let you—GYAHHH?”

Her obnoxious voice cut off midway through.

“Out of the way, lady.”

Vindo dodged her shot, then bore down on her in a flash. She never had an opportunity to react. By shifting his center of gravity, he took the ten-foot gap between them and closed it with a leap so fast it looked like he’d teleported. After using his footwork four times in succession, his knife reached her throat.

“Those moves…” Green Butterfly’s eyes went wide. “Were those Firewalker’s?”

The best he could do was nick the skin of her throat.

She was no pushover, either. Vindo could probably have successfully killed her if he were in peak form, but fighting for over an hour had drained him of his strength.

He kicked Green Butterfly in the stomach, but while he was busy driving her off, the many-armed man drew ever closer.

“Fall back. I need to engage my full strength.”

The man was still over thirty feet away. There was no way his prosthetics could reach that far.

Vics took advantage of the distance to lay down some suppressive fire. His aim was true, and his shots flew straight at the man’s head.

However, an ominous voice rang out like it was echoing directly inside their heads.

“Now the Unrivaled purge can begin—Surmounters, avail me.”

Vindo gasped, and in that moment, the fight was decided.

Black Mantis had been working on his prosthetic Surmounters for over a decade.

Back in the United States of Mouzaia, he’d been consumed by a desire to become a hero and thrown himself into their development. Upon discovering how expensive R & D could be, he’d become a spy, headed to the Galgad Empire, and decided to start embezzling his operating funds. After accepting White Spider’s invitation to join Serpent, he’d managed to secure funds from Galgad’s intelligence agency and finally complete his prosthetics.

The mechanical arms were too unwieldy for anyone smaller than him to use, and they were perfect for burning, cleaving, and strangling people.

But they had one function more terrifying than all the others—their shock waves.

By using a burst of superheated, pressurized steam, he was able to shoot out a blast of extremely fine iron sand that could repel bullets and destroy everything in its path.

Pharma and Vics were the first to get hit by the shock wave, and the two of them went flying. Vics’s extended arm got crushed, and Pharma was a bloody mess. Vindo had immediately sidestepped, but not even he managed to fully escape the blast.

Thanks to the distance, he was able to regain his balance, but by the time he managed to lift his head, he’d already lost his teammates.

Black Mantis fired from his left hand and shot Vics clean through. Vics had been protecting Pharma with his body. However, Black Mantis’s second shot got her, too.

“It’s not happy work,” Black Mantis said happily, “but this is my duty. Ah, for the hopes of Galgad’s people rest upon my shoulders.”

“……………”

Right as Vindo began truly seeing red, Black Mantis held his arm out again.

A second shock wave exploded out.

Once again, Vindo got blasted away. He couldn’t block with his knife. Any suppressive fire he laid down would be pointless. He tried to shield himself with his left arm, and it left his skin shredded and flayed.

His body rose into the air, and he hit the back of his head on the way down. The strength drained from his body as his brain rattled in his skull. He’d been fighting constant battles for some time now, and he’d reached his limit.

He crawled along the ground, wincing at the taste of dirt in his mouth and bracing himself for death. He couldn’t even muster the willpower to stand up anymore.

“You’re still alive?” Black Mantis muttered in surprise. The fact only served to heighten the man’s fascination, and he launched into a rapt soliloquy.

Vindo reached for the moon.

He himself didn’t know why he’d done it. The first quarter moon was making its descent in the western sky. There was no way he could ever reach it, yet he felt as though it was fully within his grasp.

“Derangement must be setting in,” Black Mantis said pityingly. “This country has a word for people like you: moonrakers. They’re fools who try to rake the moon’s reflection off the surface of a pond—just the way you’re doing now.”

After scoffing, he slowly made his approach.

“Worry not, O moonraker. I shall put you out of your misery.”

The two creepily long prosthetics glinted, then began whirling as though overjoyed to have received a command from their owner. He was planning on using every ounce of his strength to pulverize Vindo’s flesh.

Despite the peril he was in, Vindo kept on staring at the moon.

Eventually, the last of his strength left him, and his consciousness cut out as though sleep had taken him.

When it did, he saw something—his life flashing before his eyes, and the solemnity of the moon he’d looked up at during his time with Lamplight.

It wasn’t his first time fighting someone who completely outmatched him.

The scars that had been etched in his flesh sent heat all through his body.

There was “Firewalker” Gerde.

Gerde had trained Vindo there in the Fend Commonwealth two years ago, back when he had still been with the Military Intelligence Department, and after clobbering him senseless for several days straight, she had asked him for a favor.

“I’m gonna need you to lend Little Klaus a hand.”

They were words not just from a teacher, but from someone who’d saved him as a child many years prior.

“You’ve got potential, sonny. Enough that you might actually be strong enough to stand by his side someday.”

Then there was “Bonfire” Klaus.

The man Gerde had told Vindo about was so strong it made him wonder if he needed a hand at all. Vindo had spent a month attacking Klaus with everything he had, and he’d failed to so much as scratch him.

“Once your mission is over, you should come back to Heat Haze Palace.”

On the evening of the farewell party, there had been a marked softness in Klaus’s voice.

“Next time, I’d like to welcome you as a friend.”

“…This is insipid.”

Those were the first words that spilled from Vindo’s mouth.

He squeezed his knife in a backhand grip and mustered the last of his strength to stand up.

Remembering his honeymoon with Lamplight, thinking back to his time with Adi, and reflecting on his encounters with the strong all made him feel like his vision had just cleared. He pushed past his limits and forced his body to move.

“Still you fight?” Black Mantis smiled in glee. “Not bad. I see you’re determined to struggle to the bitter end, even when faced with overwhelming might. As the Unrivaled, you have my respect.”

Vindo had no desire to entertain the man’s drivel. Instead, he threw his final smoke bomb, dashed away, and quickly carved some gashes in one of the plum tree’s trunks. He was using a cipher only intelligible to Din spies. In his message, he left details about the girl called Green Butterfly and the many-armed man.

The smoke bomb only bought Vindo a few seconds. Black Mantis had been ready for his attack, and it didn’t take long for the wind-force from Black Mantis’s prosthetics to blow the smoke screen away. Black Mantis shifted his gaze over to Vindo’s new position. “What were you hoping to achieve?” he muttered.

Vindo spun his knife in his hand and reassumed a combat stance. “Moonraker, huh? That’s what you called me?”

“Hmm?”

“I appreciate your keen eye. I already knew the phrase, mind you.”

“Is that so? Forgive me for wasting your time, then.”

“Not at all, I got a kick out of it. You made a total ass of yourself.”

Black Mantis scowled in displeasure.

Seeing that tickled Vindo pink, he grinned. “You clearly have no idea where the word comes from, do you?”

He launched into the tale in order to rile his foe up.

“One night, when these crooks were moving their smuggled goods, they screwed up and dropped them in a lake. They tried to fish it out with rakes, but unlucky for them, a tax collector happened to be walking by and asked them what they were doing. Thinking fast, the crooks pointed at the reflection of the moon on the water’s surface. ‘We’re trying to scoop up this cheese floating in the lake,’ they said. ‘What a bunch of idiots, trying to rake up the moon,’ the tax collector said with a big laugh, then left.”

After delivering his story in a single go, he made his confident declaration.

“So you’ve got it backward.”

“……”

“The real idiot was the guy who laughed at the moonrakers.”

“……………”

Having realized his mistake, Black Mantis quivered in frustration.

“…And what of it? Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a doomed man.”

The composure was gone from his voice. He may have been strong, but that very strength made him especially susceptible to being taunted.

“Someone like you could never understand,” Vindo said. “You’ll never know what it felt like to try to grab that moon.”

Vindo had no intention of explaining himself.

He had no intention of explaining the strength that the moon he sought—that the moon Adi had looked up at—that the moon he’d seen during the farewell party with Lamplight—and that the honeymoon he’d spent with those washouts had granted him.

“We’re spies. When we die, we take our intel—the proof that we lived—and hand it down.”

“Take your empty delusions and perish.”

Unable to contain himself any longer, Black Mantis unleashed a shock wave from his prosthetics.

Vindo predicted its timing and dodged the blast by a hair’s breadth.

He’d seen the attack twice before. Given Black Mantis had been left unscathed both times, the shock wave clearly didn’t reach behind him, and with the way he needed to plant his feet to use it, he had no ability to respond to his targets quickly changing course. Plus, he couldn’t use it repeatedly, either.

Using his trademark footwork, Vindo circled around to a spot the shock wave couldn’t reach.

Black Mantis was undaunted.

“Anyone could think up that counter.”

He spun around and lashed out with his prosthetics. Even without their shock waves, his Surmounters were still fully capable of slashing and strangling.

But the moment Black Mantis tried to catch Vindo mid-movement, his body swayed.

“______?!”

Someone had just thrown a rock at him.

It was about the size of a fist, and it had flown in silently from Black Mantis’s blind spot and landed a direct hit.

Vindo had seen it all happen.

Vics…!

There was still breath in Vics’s lungs.

Even as her own life slipped from her, Pharma had used her skills to the fullest to extend Vics’s. In the final moments before he perished for good, he had used his raw arm strength to carry out his surprise attack.

It was far too amateurish to truly call teamwork.

All the same, Vindo wasn’t about to let that brief opening in Black Mantis’s defenses slip by.

“I’m code name Flock—and it’s time to gouge clean through!”

He slipped past Black Mantis’s prosthetics and plunged his knife forward at lightning speed.

He failed to impale the man’s throat.

At the last moment, Black Mantis gave up on attacking and devoted his full efforts toward evasion and defense. He blocked the knife strike with his mechanical right arms. Sparks flew as metal clashed with metal.

Black Mantis moaned.

The sound of something breaking rang out.

“My Surmounters…!”

Vindo’s knife plunged into the attachment point connecting Black Mantis’s shoulder to the mechanisms, and the two prosthetic arms dropped off.

Black Mantis toppled over backward with a look of horror on his face. One follow-up from that knife, and even his life would be in grave danger.

However, he quickly realized something and let out a long exhale.

Vindo had already breathed his last. The blades extending from the prosthetics had sliced a deep gash in his gut, and he crumpled lifelessly to the ground.

There was a feeling only those who’d attained a certain state of mind could comprehend.

The Din Republic’s legendary spy team Inferno had referred to that state as having fire in one’s heart. However, not even they themselves could have really described what that entailed. The best they could have done was say it was something spies came to understand when they went through a period of explosive growth.

Klaus had achieved it at age nineteen during a battle against the Serpent member Silver Cicada.

Monika had achieved it at the tender age of sixteen during a mission in the Fend Commonwealth.

And in that moment, “Flock” Vindo had achieved it as well.

Not only had he destroyed Black Mantis’s weapon, but he had also done so in a way that would take time to fix.

If not for what Avian had achieved there, Lamplight’s mission would have gone radically differently. Monika would have died, and when Klaus had gotten attacked in that train with his arms bound, he might very well have lost as well.

Vindo was standing in a world of all white.

It was blindingly, beautifully white, and there was nothing around him. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. However, he concluded it was all a hallucination conjured up by the fact that he was on death’s door and didn’t give it much more thought. “Not like it matters,” he snapped.

He turned to the white void.

“…If I made different choices, could we have avoided this?”

Faint as they were, he still had doubts. He would’ve had to be made of stone not to at least question himself a little every time Vics had called him out.

Countless “what-ifs” swirled through his mind. What if he’d cooperated with Vics—what if he’d listened to what the rest of Avian was telling him—what if he’d bonded with his teammates the way those Lamplight girls did—what if he’d quit being a spy altogether like the Discourse on Decadence…

There had been countless options available to Avian. Lamplight and the Discourse on Decadence had shown them that. But Vindo hadn’t taken any of them. He couldn’t.

“Nah, that’s not it. They just don’t get it.”

That, he was sure of.

Every time Vics had scolded him and told him to work on his teamwork, irritation had welled up in Vindo’s chest. There was a reason for that, and he spoke it aloud.

“Avian was perfect. There wasn’t a single thing we needed to change.”

They’d been fine just the way they were.

Avian could never have become like Lamplight, nor should they have tried. They’d had a style all their own.

The Avian members had fought hard after losing Adi. Vindo had improved his skills, and the other members had honed their techniques as well. In order to fill the huge hole they’d been left with, they had fought and egged each other on as they’d completed their missions. Vics had been coming after Vindo to the bitter end.

The team had lacked for nothing. They’d inherited Adi’s spirit, and the moon had been full the whole way through.

“As a spy team, Avian didn’t have a single flaw.”

When he said that, she—the woman who’d been standing before him for who knows how long—the boss who’d built Avian from nothing—the person called “Sky Monk” Adi who’d once inconvenienced him to no end—gave him the conflicted look of someone who lamented their early reunion, yet who’d been eagerly awaiting it for ages, and who was unable to hide her joy at getting to see him again. Then she smiled softly.

“That’s absolutely right, Vindo.”

She said it a little pompously, as though wanting to remind him she was his superior.

Unsure what he ought to start chewing her out for first, “Flock” Vindo closed his eyes.