“Nike hears everything,” Suzie whispered, glancing around in terror. “If you say bad things, she’ll come after you!”
Naturally, the twins knew all about Nike.
As members of Inferno, they’d worked together with her during the Great War. She was a spy who surpassed human limits in a whole different way than Hearth did.
A slim smile spread across Lukas’s face. “Who cares? I hate to break it to you, but I’ve never lost. You’re talking to a master gamer who’s won a thousand matches straight.”
“That’s a lie, by the way. He gambles away money all the time.”
“Here’s the bottom line. If you’re gonna work for us, then there’s one thing you gotta understand.” Undeterred by Wille’s correction, Lukas patted Suzie on the shoulder. “It doesn’t matter how strong our opponents are—us brothers always come out on top.”
He gave her a confident grin and stuck out his tongue.
In his head, he was thinking back to what Gerde had told him.
Back at Heat Haze Palace, Inferno’s base, Lukas found himself feeling suspicious.
Nine years had passed since the Great War, and Klaus had just been given a special mission, so he was going to be away from the team for a while. That in and of itself was fine and no particular cause for concern, but something about the way Guido had assigned him the task didn’t sit right with Lukas.
That was why he went and paid a visit to the lounge, where Inferno’s most senior member—“Firewalker” Gerde—was relaxing.
Gerde was an old woman dressed in a casual outfit of jeans and a tank top that left her strapping biceps fully bare. She was chugging down beer and listening happily to the radio.
When she saw Lukas come in, she raised her beer bottle in the air. “What’s going on, Lukas? You finally decided to take my training?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Granny G. I just saw my life flash before my eyes.”
Lukas evaded her offer with a pained grin, then said, “Hey” and asked his question.
“Is it just me, or have things been weird between Guido and the boss lately?”
The moment the words left his mouth, Gerde set her bottle down on the table. “Now, you listen here, sonny. How much do you know—?”
“Just what me and my brother have guessed.”
Naturally, Wille had shared the same doubts. If anything, Wille’s ability to pick up on things like that far exceeded his own.
“My brother’s pretty worried. ‘They’re carrying a dangerous weight,’ he told me. And if he’s freaking out, then I gotta assume something big is going on. There’s this weird rumor I overheard, see?”
Lukas spoke the fateful words.
“A rumor called the Nostalgia Project.”
Gerde’s eyebrow twitched. She was dead easy to read when she was drunk. “…Well, well, well. And where’d you hear about that?”
“During a mission with Guido, when I was taking this soldier chick for everything she had.”
Lukas hadn’t been given the details on what they were doing.
He’d been blindly following Guido’s instructions out in a neutral country, and his orders were to follow a woman. When Lukas got bored of just idly tailing her, he invited her to a gambling den and cleaned her out. After he’d relentlessly egged her on and attacked her psychologically, she’d lost her composure and had begun muttering under her breath:
“Mr. Spider had such hopes for me, and look at what I’ve done! What shame I’ve brought on the name Silver Cicada!”
“How could one chosen to stop the Nostalgia Project such as I lose to a mere civilian?”
The woman assumed that no one had heard her.
However, Lukas had mastered the art of reading lips, and the slightest of facial twitches was enough for him to tell what she was saying. Whoever this Silver Cicada woman was, she’d gotten sloppy. The way Lukas had broken her down played a key part in that, but still.
Guido never ended up telling him what he did to the woman and her allies.
After he finished explaining himself, Gerde shook her head. “The boss made the call not to tell you two. It’s not my place to say any more.”
“What the hell, you mean she’s icing us out?”
“It’s proof of that girl’s conviction, I’d say.”
“……………”
Lukas pursed his lips in annoyance at his failure to get Gerde to blab.
If she didn’t want to tell him, there was little more he could do. Gerde knew all of Lukas’s tricks, after all. They’d been working together for over a decade.
He hadn’t come away completely empty-handed—now he knew that Inferno’s boss was grappling with a problem so thorny, she couldn’t consult her own team about it—but that only served to exacerbate the frustration bubbling up inside of him.
“Shit, man. I don’t like this one bit. Maybe I’ll go hit up Klaus and Wille and just go on a big rampage. Just you wait. Once we get going, we’ll have every politician in the country tearing their hair out. We’re not happy, and we’re about to make it everyone’s problem!”
Lukas limbered up his arm and started to get up to leave.
“The project got started in the Lylat Kingdom.”
All of a sudden, Gerde spoke up.
“Hmm?” When he turned to look, he saw her letting out a resigned sigh.
“Don’t mind me, just talking to myself. That’s all I can really reveal…” She popped a pair of cigarettes in her mouth and lit them. “Inferno’s standing at a crossroads right now. I’m glad we’ve got you looking out for us.”
As he stared at the long, thin curl of smoke she exhaled, Lukas found his resolve growing firm.
“I picked up what Granny was putting down. Bottom line is, this rotten kingdom is up to no good. And the boss and Guido are wrapped up in it.”
After putting Suzie to bed in their hideout, the twins celebrated having completed the first stage of their plan and poured themselves glasses of the expensive wine they’d looted from Isaac’s base.
Lukas chugged his down in a single swig and smoothed back his hair. “That means we’ve only got one option. And hey, I never liked this country much anyways.”
The two of them made the call to infiltrate the Lylat Kingdom all on their own. They hadn’t told Inferno’s boss about their plan. They’d taken a mission they knew they could finish in a month and lied about needing a year to complete it, then had spent all their time since then living in Lylat.
That said, they knew better than to believe that the boss wasn’t aware that they were running wild.