“The other two gave us the slip, huh? Well, them’s the breaks.”
Nike shrugged in the Nicola University quadrangle.
The scattering Knights of Valor members had been captured one after another. This time, the Genesis Army made sure to handcuff them. The reason they hadn’t the first time around was because they were trying to build a cooperative relationship with them, but that appeared to have backfired.
The brown-haired girl showing up had made a proper mess of everything.
Nike looked down at the girl lying unconscious by a statue. Sara, she’d called herself.
She handed her sledgehammer back to her agent Thanatos.
“Ma’am… Just who is that brown-haired girl…?”
“That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? Shame she bashed her own head in and knocked herself out.”
The girl had done it to preserve information, no doubt.
For all of Nike’s talents, not even she could torture someone who was unconscious. It would have taken some serious guts to pull that off. Sara hadn’t even given Nike an opening to stop her.
For the time being, Nike ordered Thanatos to treat Sara’s wounds. She couldn’t have the girl dying on her.
As Thanatos stanched Sara’s bleeding, Nike took another look at her. Her face seemed so young. “What do you think, Thanatos?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I thought it’d be nice to get your take on things for a change.”
“Whaaat…? I’m not worthy…”
After hesitating for a bit, Thanatos shared his thoughts.
“…The part about being the LWS Troupe’s representative was a lie. If she was, it wouldn’t have been worth risking herself to save a bunch of measly students… And if she was a Galgad spy, she would have played things differently… Their methods are a lot cruder and more ruthless than hers… The blond girl’s papers did say she was an exchange student from the Din Republic…but there’s a good chance that was fake, so it doesn’t really tell us—HURGH!”
From out of nowhere, Nike kicked him in the flank. “I’m not asking you to spell out the obvious. What I want to know is, what’s beyond that?”
Thanatos had finished patching the girl up. Now it was her own vitality that would determine when she would next wake up.
“What are the brown-haired girl and her allies plotting for after the revolution’s end?”
“What do you mean?” Thanatos choked out as he clutched his side.
“I’m thinking their real target might just be the same as the LWS Troupe’s—they’re gunning for the Nostalgia Project.”
That obnoxious secret society had viewed revolution as a simple means to an end, too.
When Nike’s thoughts turned to the men she’d once been forced to fight, she licked her lips.
“People who are trying to attack the Nostalgia Project…” At long last, Thanatos was on the same page. “Then that means…they must be with Serpent…”
“Oh, I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions. It could also be—”
When she trailed off, it was because a smile had overtaken her face.
She could feel her temperature rising. The heat was coming from her abdomen.
“…You seem excited, ma’am.”
“When you get to be my age, it’s not often your womb throbs like this.”
Nike laughed and opened her eyes as wide as they would go.
“It doesn’t matter who they are—for the sake of my unending first love, I can’t let them lay one goddamn finger on the project.”
Thanatos let out a heated pant. “Ah… Your heart really does still belong to—”
Nike punched him in the face. For some reason, what he’d been saying rubbed her the wrong way. She wanted him to get his kicks from her physical abuse, not from some strange fantasies.
As she stomped on Thanatos’s unconscious body, the rest of her people came trickling over. Unsurprisingly, the blond and pink-haired girls had given them the slip. The Knights of Valor were wholly irrelevant, but those two had proved themselves to be priority targets.
The Genesis Army agents waited for Nike to speak.
She hadn’t told them the truth about the LWS Troupe, but there was little point in trying to play it off now. She’d taken care not to surround herself with the kind of operatives dense enough for that sort of thing to fly.
Of her fifteen agents, she turned her gaze to two of them in particular. They were a man and a woman who’d gone above and beyond during that mission. Nike had poached those two up-and-comers from the navy.
“Aion. Circe. Could I ask you two for a favor?”
Over in a brasserie in the tenth arrondissement, “Pandemonium” Sybilla was at a bit of a loss.
Her partner, “Meadow” Sara, had gone radio silent on her. They’d been hitting up the Lylat Kingdom’s military bases and Royal Guard outposts across the world in search of supporters for their revolution when they discovered a huge Royal Guard contingent gathering at the Bertram Mines. Rumor had it that they’d even clashed with the workers.
In truth, the mines were a trap designed to lure out spies and secret societies. Sybilla and Sara fell for it hook, line, and sinker and headed straight there. The only reason they were able to gather intel without getting rounded up was thanks to Sara’s The High Plain of Heaven. She was the one who sent mice carrying recording devices into all the various Royal Guard offices. Many of the devices went missing, and only maybe one percent of the recordings they recovered were actually useful, but they sent out so many that eventually, they got results.
Midway through their investigation, though, Sara went off on her own.
From what Sybilla understood, Erna and Annette had arrived at the mines not long after she and Sara left. Then Annette used a discarded The High Plain of Heaven to pass along some information about their secret society. When Sara realized that Erna and Annette were in danger, she talked things over remotely with Grete before rushing to Erna’s and Annette’s sides.