That was the day it all started, he realized.
“You’ve got a special assignment. Starting tomorrow, you’re going to split off from the rest of the team and carry out a solo mission.”
On the day his mentor Guido gave him a special task to complete, Klaus left the Din Republic spy team Inferno and undertook a grueling mission. However, that had all been part of his mentor’s scheme. Guido had betrayed them for the mysterious Galgad Empire spy team Serpent, and his plan was to separate Klaus from the others before assassinating all of Inferno. When Klaus went to the Bumal Kingdom, he found a trap waiting for him there as well.
“What an idiot of a pupil I’ve raised. Look, when you finish your mission, I have a title for you to introduce yourself as.
“The Greatest Spy in the World.”
What had been going through Guido’s head when he said that? Klaus wondered. Given what kind of person Guido was, it could well have been a cruel bit of irony. Either that, or perhaps there was a hope behind those words that not even Guido fully understood. Would it be delusional to pray that it was the latter?
Klaus learned about Inferno’s downfall the day he returned from his special assignment. The news plunged him into the depths of despair, but even so, he knew he needed to act. A single glance at Guido’s brutally mangled corpse was enough for Klaus to tell it was a fake. Klaus knew Guido better than anyone, and he knew that if he wanted to fool his old mentor, it was going to take spies that Guido knew nothing about. To that end, Klaus recruited female academy washouts to build Lamplight.
Guido was summarily defeated. After sacrificing himself to save Klaus, Guido mentioned Serpent in his dying breath.
That marked the beginning of their mission to hunt down these other spies. Klaus began rounding up every spy that tried to infiltrate the Din Republic, and he took extra care interrogating the most skilled of their ranks. In doing so, he was able to find out about Purple Ant from a man named Corpse. Capturing Purple Ant yielded little in the way of actionable intelligence, but doing so offered a different sort of reward altogether: The girls of Lamplight grew and became the best teammates Klaus could ever ask for.
Their battle against Serpent continued from there. When their sister team Avian was taken out, they left behind information about Serpent in their dying moments. Klaus and the girls took that and rushed to the Fend Commonwealth to take out the Serpent members lurking there. After that, Lamplight managed to track down some confidential documents in the hideout of an Inferno member that Serpent had killed.
That document was about the Nostalgia Project, a secret plan concocted by leaders from the world’s largest nations to prepare for a projected second world war.
Seeing that made Klaus realize they’d uncovered one of the world’s great mysteries. It was why his mentor had betrayed them, why he’d lost Inferno, why Avian had been killed, and why Serpent had been born.
Two years after Lamplight’s founding, he was finally a hair’s breadth from the truth.
That was what brought him to Darton, the capital of the Galgad Empire.
Klaus could never get used to the smell that hit him when he stepped onto the Galgad Empire train platform. When he breathed in the air, it tasted of rust.
It had been a while since he’d last visited Darton. He hadn’t been since the bioweapon retrieval mission, and nearly two whole years had passed since then.
Galgad had once lived in splendor and had colonies across the world. Klaus’s homeland of Din had nothing resembling the tall spires that defined the Darton skyline, so they never failed to impress. With all the hustle and bustle in its capital, one would never have guessed that the country was in the middle of a protracted recession. Come to think of it, Klaus supposed that their economic situation had been improving over the last few years. Galgad may have lost the war, but there was no denying that it was still one of the mightiest nations in the world.
Galgad intelligence would be on the lookout for Klaus, so he’d worn a disguise. By putting in fillings, wearing glasses, and donning a beard, he’d completely altered his appearance. Even people who knew him personally wouldn’t notice him walking by.
At present, he was operating alone.
He hadn’t brought a single one of his Lamplight subordinates with him. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t even seen them in nearly a year. All their communication had been written, and not once had he met them in person.
“For the next year, Lamplight will be parting ways.”
Klaus had made an announcement at the end of their vacation in Marnioce, and true to his word, he’d split Lamplight into two-person cells. Right now, they were carrying out their missions at the sites he’d assigned them.
Everything they were doing, they were doing to uncover the full details of the Nostalgia Project.
Klaus could still remember their final meeting like it had been yesterday.
Right before Lamplight dispersed, Klaus summoned the girls to the Heat Haze Palace’s main hall just like always.
“The Nostalgia Project began in the Lylat Kingdom, and our job is to learn everything we can about it.”
As far as they knew, it was the Lylat prime minister who’d proposed the project in the first place. The Fend Commonwealth and United States of Mouzaia were another two major countries that were involved. Lamplight needed to conduct its investigation somewhere among the three, and the project’s birthplace in the Lylat Kingdom seemed like the best option. Mouzaia’s counterintelligence agency ran a tight ship, and the Fend Commonwealth was in such disarray at the moment that it would be difficult to pin down who was and wasn’t involved in the project. Between that and the circumstances Klaus would explain later, it was clear that Lylat was the correct choice.
The girls stared at Klaus intently as he explained the specifics of their operation.
“We’re going to be putting two plans into motion simultaneously.”
He held up two fingers, then immediately lowered one of them.
“The first will be the frontal attack. We’re going to target people close to key Lylat movers and shakers—the prime minister, the king—and try to learn about the project that way.”
That was straight out of the standard spy playbook.
All they needed to do was get close to the prime minister’s aides and secretaries and get them talking. They could bargain with them, blackmail them, whatever got the job done. Sometimes, gathering intelligence was simply that easy. Breaking into official residences and wiretapping them was an option as well.
If stealing state secrets was always that straightforward, though, then their jobs would have been a cakewalk.
“Honestly, I expect us to run into trouble. Nike reigns over the country with an iron fist. There’s a reason they call her the Invincible Tactician God. The moment we move in, she’ll take steps to block us. That’s why the first plan is just a decoy and the next one is where we’re really putting our money.”
They wanted to avoid directly fighting Nike if at all possible. It would be better to choose a plan with higher odds of success, even if it meant taking a more meandering path to get there.
“That’s where plan two comes in—the plan to cause a revolution in the Lylat Kingdom in order to neutralize Nike.”
Upon hearing that, the eight girls all gasped.
However, Klaus knew that plan was their best option.
Uprooting a nation’s entire government was the ultimate move a spy could make. At the end of the day, Nike was nothing more than a public servant. By changing the people she answered to, even she could be rendered powerless.
“I—I have a pair of questions, if I might.”
A dark-haired girl with an elegant figure—“Dreamspeaker” Thea—raised her hand with a look of bewilderment on her face.
“First of all, I was hoping you could tell us more about Nike. I’ve certainly heard the name before, but what kind of person is she? How is it that even you would have trouble beating her in a fair fight?”
A couple of the other girls nodded. “She is pretty famous.” “I think I mighta heard about her at my orphanage? Though I always heard her name as Calico…” “Over in the States, they say she’s a soldier called Elm.”
From the sound of it, many of them were at least familiar with her.
“That all just goes to show you how notable she is. She’s an anomaly among anomalies, known even by children with no connection to espionage. Yet she exists all the same.”
In terms of name recognition, Nike probably surpassed even the legendary Hearth. That was in large part because Hearth had never sought out fame, but still.
“In the world of our trade, there are people called the Ending Spies.”
The girls looked at Klaus in confusion, so he continued his explanation.
“It’s a group of seven spies who brought the Great War to a close—Hearth, Torchlight, Cursemaster, Shadowseed, Banshee, Yatagarasu. And rounding out that list of seven monsters is Nike.”
It was only a small fraction of spies that called them that, but the fact that they were the best spies in the world was undeniable. Even with Hearth, Torchlight, and Shadowseed dead and Banshee retired, their legacy lived on.
“Even compared to the others, Nike has little in the way of weaknesses. She uses her massive notoriety to eloquently rally the people of Lylat behind her, she has countless connections in the international community, and she’s popular among her agents. And that’s not even getting into her devastating fighting skills. All that said, I could beat her—or at least, I’d like to think I can, but I don’t have hard evidence actually backing that up.”
That was why his superiors had ordered him in no uncertain terms to avoid fighting her. At the moment, “Bonfire” Klaus was an asset the Din Republic couldn’t afford to lose.