Maybe she was choosing to turn a blind eye. Either that, or the situation was so dire that she legitimately hadn’t noticed.
On seeing how firm Lukas’s resolve was, Wille let out a sarcastic laugh. “Man, you really are an idiot, huh?”
“Hey, you’re the one who followed me out here.”
“Yeah, ’cause I knew you’d never be able to pull this off on your own.”
“Well, I’m glad one of us was thinking straight. Dang, what a great brother I’ve got.”
“Magnificent.”
“Yeah, magnificent.”
A hint of a grin played on Lukas’s face.
“I’m all in. If that’s what it takes to protect Inferno, I’m down to put everything on the line.”
Lukas truly did act as the team’s backbone.
More than anyone else, he was right there at the team’s center. He was able to provide support to the technically skilled members of Veronika, Guido, and Gerde while at the same time offering guidance to the less-experienced Heide and Klaus.
Everyone knew that he was going to be the next boss of Inferno someday. And his brother Wille followed him every step of the way.
That was why the two of them had gotten to work in the Lylat Kingdom.
“Let’s do this thing. We’re gonna take this country, and—”
By a strange twist of fate, a pair of girls would end up finishing that sentence for him two years later.
Nine years after the Great War, the Inferno twins put a plan into motion in Lylat.
Ten years after the Great War, “Torchlight” Guido and the rest of Serpent’s machinations brought Inferno down. “Bonfire” Klaus survived that purge, and he went on to found Lamplight.
Eleven years after the Great War, after overcoming many missions, Lamplight defeated Serpent and enjoyed a vacation on Marnioce.
Then another year passed, and twelve years after the Great War, a pair of up-and-comers made their move.
She’d long since gotten used to how lonely mornings felt.
With drowsy eyes, she headed over to the washbasin to clean her face. The cold water splattered out and soaked her all the way down to her neck. She returned to her bedroom, stripped out of her wet nightclothes, and put on her school uniform. The ribbon mandated by her school’s dress code was wrinkled, and though she pulled it tight to try to remove the crease, it always came right back, so she had to go get her spare ribbon from the dresser.
The whole series of events took place in a run-down apartment in the Lylat capital of Pilca.
When she opened the curtains, the bright sunlight came streaming in.
Her roommate, who was still lying in bed, let out an annoyed groan before curling up in a ball over on the corner of her bed in an attempt to escape the light.
Exasperated as she was by the way her roommate showed no signs of getting up, she went over to the room’s mirror.
Unsurprisingly, she saw herself on its surface, but something about her looked different today.
“Huh,” said Erna. “I think I might have grown a little taller.”
She took a moment to admire her reflection.
Erna had been keeping her hair short recently, and that had distracted her so much that she hadn’t really noticed much else. Her legs were peeking out of her skirt a lot more than they had when she first arrived there in Lylat.
“I guess that makes sense,” she muttered idly to herself.
A full two years had passed since she got scouted onto Lamplight from her spy academy.
The Abyss Doll bioweapon mission was two months long, the Corpse assassin mission was a bit over a month, and the Purple Ant mission in the United States of Mouzaia was a bit over a month, too. Then, after three months where it was just one thing after another, she’d fought and reconciled with Avian over in the Far East, shared a one-month honeymoon with them, gotten dragged into a web of Serpent and CIM deception in the Fend Commonwealth, had gone on vacation, and after all that, she’d spent a year living in the Lylat Kingdom.
Erna, who’d been fourteen when she joined Lamplight, was sixteen years old now.
It was no wonder she’d grown.
“Yeep!”
After pumping her fist in triumph, she turned back to her blanket-swaddled roommate.
“Annette, you need to get up. We’re going to be late.”
She walked over to the bed and shook Annette.
“…I’m taking the morning off, yo.”
Erna couldn’t help but sigh. “They’re going to expel you, you know. What kind of exchange student sleeps in basically every day?”
“You take things too seriously.”
“…Hmph.”
“You should try taking a page from my book… Zzz…”
When Annette got like that, there wasn’t a lever in the world that could move her.
If Erna stayed with her any longer, she was liable to be tardy herself. After a plain breakfast of bread and soup, she headed straight to school.
At present, she and Annette were exchange students at St. Katraz High School.
After she’d spent a full year walking to school, the route there had become a familiar sight. As she got closer to campus, a handful of people she knew came up to her. “Good morning,” they greeted her with voices rich in refinement and class. “What lovely weather we’re having today.”
St. Katraz was a girls’ school, and all of them were girls wearing the same uniform as Erna’s.
“Yeah, morning…,” Erna replied softly.
Interpersonal communication was hardly Erna’s forte, so she’d had her misgivings about her ability to fit in as a student, but she’d actually made some friends.
Her predisposition for unluckiness—which was really a desire for punishment—had gradually been getting better of late as her self-esteem improved. She was still able to sense the early warning signs of misfortune, but she didn’t accidentally get the people around her caught up in her bad luck anymore.
Without that, she was a perfectly adorable high schooler who just happened to trip over her tongue sometimes.
The other girls gave her radiant smiles. “Did you hear? Homecoming is next month, and this year, they’re going all out. I daresay we’re going to be swamped preparing.”
“Ugh, but we have exams next month, too…,” Erna said, groaning.
“It’s so unfair, isn’t it? That does remind me, though. A new restaurant just opened near the station, and the food there looks to die for. I hear that famous chef John Dumont is the one running it.”
“Ooh, we should go.”
“Tee-hee, you should see the way your face just lit up.”
It was just the sort of pleasant conversation that any students might have.
Erna was quite taken with her new lifestyle. She did feel pangs of loneliness at times, but she would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy studiously doing her schoolwork and hanging out after school with girls her same age.
Occasionally, though, she could feel the wall that existed between them.
“Oh dear, would you look at that?” one of the students said, making no effort to hide her disdain.
There was a man sitting in front of the school gate dressed in shabby rags. He had an empty can and a sign that said “NEED MONEY OR JOB.”
There was a line of cars dropping off students in front of the school, but despite the pleading looks the man gave to the drivers, none of them paid him any attention. The students refused to even look him in the eye as they went inside.
“Good heavens, the homeless are at it again.”
“How positively filthy. Why aren’t the school guards doing anything about him?”
“What a dreadful way to start our morning. Make sure to hold your breath when you walk past him.”