Chapter 64: The Brigade’s War Council

Goldenrod Hotel, Royal Capital. Top Floor.

The entire floor had been rented out. Footsteps passed through the hallway now and then — soft, hesitant, as though afraid of disturbing someone.

No one was resting.

Three girls sat around a square table in the suite's living room.

Spread across the tabletop were several sheets of paper, covered in fragmented notes and arrows drawn between them.

The tea had gone cold. Beside it sat a plate of biscuits, barely touched.

---

Fenria's ears were the first to droop.

She could run for three days and three nights without breaking a sweat — but the atmosphere in this room was suffocating. Suffocating enough that even her tail had lost the will to wag.

"The Scribe made a mistake." Kira's voice cut through the silence. "And it definitely wasn't a mistake of ability. It was emotion clouding his judgment."

Her finger tapped one of the notes on the table. The date of the Academy attack, and the date of Seraphina's disappearance — only one month apart.

"The attack on the Academy — the Scribe would never say it out loud, but deep down, he blames himself. He thinks he didn't do enough." Kira looked up. Beneath her bangs, her eyes carried that familiar glint—the one that meant she'd already chewed through three layers of implication before anyone else had finished the first sentence. "Kind people always carry the heaviest guilt. And when you carry guilt, your focus fractures. Your judgment slips. That's why this time he missed a step — why he didn't place Seraphina somewhere absolutely safe."

Fenria's ears popped up.

"Ah think so too."

The agreement landed with absolute certainty. Fenria nodded so hard her chair rattled, completely unbothered by the complex logic Kira had just laid out.

---

Lumina said nothing.

She sat by the window, hands folded on the table, fingertips tapping a slow rhythm against the back of her own hand.

Her stillness was absolute — so absolute that Fenria stole one glance at her and immediately shut her mouth.

Kira, too, paused her rapid-fire analysis. Waiting.

Lumina's gaze rested on the scattered notes, but her focus wasn't on any single line.

She was thinking about something else.

Something from a long time ago.

---

They had been fifteen.

The three of them had trekked all the way back from the northern frontier — over two mountain ranges, through three townships — until they finally reached the old house.

When she pushed open the door, dust motes rolled lazily through the amber light of sunset.

The table was still there. The chairs, too. On the windowsill, the same flower pot — long dead. The air held no scent of cooking smoke, no sound of voices.

She checked every room upstairs and down.

The wardrobe was half empty. The beds were neatly made. In the corner, the wooden toy chest sat with its lid half open, its contents diminished by a third. In the kitchen, the dried provisions and spices had been taken — but every pot, every plate, every bowl remained untouched.

A planned relocation. Not a hasty flight.

She stood in the doorway for a long time.

Long enough that Fenria squatted on the floor and started plucking at her own tail fur. Long enough that Kira had studied every grain of dust in the house.

"How long ago?" Kira asked.

Lumina drew a fingertip across the windowsill. The thickness of the dust gave her the answer.

"About thirty months," she said.

And then she began to wonder.

The reason the three of them had left the old house was to train — to gain real-world experience. When they returned, their guardians were gone.

Her question at the time had been simple: Why did the Scribe and Lady Witch leave? If some calamity had made it impossible to stay, then where was the calamity now?

They had wandered for two, nearly three years. They came back unscathed. They pushed open this door without incident.

No signs of battle. No claw marks on the walls. No scorch marks on the floorboards. The clothesline in the yard still stood where it always had.

Before they left, the Scribe had told them that a powerful calamity required both him and Lady Witch to remain at the old house — to keep it sealed.

But when they returned, they were gone. Which meant the calamity was gone too.

That question had lived inside her for years.

Until the day of the Academy attack.

---

She had stood on the rooftop of the teaching hall and heard the words from the Scribe's own mouth: "Everything went according to plan." "It's been handled." And Lady Witch said he'd been watching the Academy Headmaster all along.

He had known from the start. He had infiltrated the Academy early. He had been prepared.

Lumina hadn't had time to think it through then.

But afterward, when that long-buried question resurfaced, she pieced the timeline together in her mind.

The three of them left the old house. Lady Witch and the Scribe departed shortly after — based on the dust on the windowsill, approximately three months later.

Three months.

Not because the calamity hadn't been resolved. No — because it couldn't be resolved while the three of them were still there. The moment they acted, it would be a battle between a Hero-class and a Demon King-class. A collision of that magnitude could level an entire mountain range. Three children wouldn't even be able to stand.

So Lady Witch sent them away to train.

They waited until the girls were gone before they moved.

And once it was done, the Scribe took Lady Witch and left.

Lumina's expression hadn't changed when she reached that conclusion. She simply pulled her fingertip back from the windowsill and closed her fist around it.

She had never told Kira and Fenria.

The gap was too vast. Radiant-class — the three of them combined hadn't even crossed the threshold of Orichalcum, let alone Radiant. Even Star-class was an ocean beyond their reach.

Speaking it aloud would only make them feel useless. And for Fenria, feeling useless hurt worse than getting beaten up. For Kira, it stung more than a miscalculation.

So she stayed silent.

---

"Boss?"

Fenria's voice pulled her back. Lumina raised her eyes and found both of them staring. Kira's finger had frozen on the edge of a note. Fenria's tail hung suspended mid-wag.

She remembered one more thing. The third year of their training.

They'd been passing through a town in the kingdom's north. There was an academy there. Kira wanted to take a look; Fenria insisted on tagging along. The three of them climbed the wall, slipped into the teaching building, and eavesdropped on a class in Magical Theory through the back door of a lecture hall.

Everything being taught was stuff they already knew cold.

Not convinced, they sneaked into the advanced academy campus and sat in on a higher-level class. The result was the same — foundational knowledge Lady Witch had taught them years ago.

That night, camped in the wild around a bonfire, Fenria hugged her knees and muttered, "Turns out everything they teach in academies is useless."

Kira, unusually, didn't launch into a lecture. She poked at the fire for a long while before speaking. "What the academy teaches, Lady Witch already taught us. What the academy doesn't teach — she taught us that too."

Lumina hadn't joined the discussion. She sat beside the fire, thinking about something else entirely.

Magical theory and combat tactics — Lady Witch taught us those.

But what about world history? The rise and fall of ancient empires no textbook mentions? The deeds of great heroes? The corruption of the religious orders? The territorial maps of commercial empires?

Those were taught by the Scribe.

She remembered it clearly. When the Scribe taught them, his textbooks were handwritten — the characters crooked and uneven — and the content inside could not be found in any academy library she had ever visited.

History that no history book records. Truths that no textbook dares to print.

Lady Witch taught things that were ahead of the academies.

The Scribe taught things the academies would never teach.

---

"Do you remember what Lady Witch and the Scribe taught us?" Lumina asked, surfacing from the memory.

Fenria's head snapped up. She blinked.

"Of course Ah remember." Then she pointed at Lumina. "And Ah think so too."

Kira's eyes went wide beside her. "She didn't even say anything yet."

"Ah know what Boss is about to say."

The three girls looked at one another and smiled. The tension in the room cracked, just a little.

---

"So what do we do now?" Kira asked. "Do we go storm the Knight Order headquarters and rescue the Scribe?"

Fenria's ears stood ramrod straight. "Ah think we should."

Lumina resettled her hands, fingers resuming their rhythmic tap against the back of the other.

"If the Scribe wants to leave," she said, her voice cool and level, "he can leave on his own. If he hasn't left, it means he doesn't need us to."

Kira blinked.

Fenria tilted her head, thought for a second, then nodded. "Makes sense. Ah think so too."

"It's all part of his plan." Lumina paused after saying this. Her eyes fell to the note bearing Seraphina's name.

"Therefore," she looked up, "the Scribe did it on purpose."

Kira hadn't caught up. "Did what on purpose?"

"Left a ten-minute window for the other side to act." Lumina's finger stilled on her hand. "Let Seraphina get taken."

Fenria's tail stopped wagging. Kira's eyelid twitched.

"He knew someone was going to kidnap Seraphina. He walked her to the station — ten minutes from her house. That wasn't an oversight." Lumina's analysis was objective. "If he wanted to guarantee her safety, he would have walked her to the door. He didn't — because if he walked her to the door, the other side wouldn't have dared to move."

"W-wait a second." Kira pushed her bangs aside, her speech beginning to accelerate out of control. "So the Scribe is using Seraphina as bait?"

"Protected bait," Lumina corrected. "He must have already arranged a contingency. Let the Cult believe they've succeeded. Then follow the thread and pull the entire organization out into the open. All of them. In one sweep."

A heavy silence settled over the table. The only sound was the distant ticking of the grandfather clock.

Then Fenria slammed the table. "Ah think so too!"

Kira's fingers were already drumming against her chin, her eyes burning brighter by the moment. "It's logical. If I were the Cult, I'd think I'd gotten away with it too. The Academy incident was the same — he could have reported Oswald directly, but he chose to infiltrate instead, because that way he'd get more evidence. More names. This is the same calculus. If you stop the kidnapping outright, the Cult just tries a different method. Instead of playing defense, let them take her — and follow the trail back to the source. That's the Scribe for you."

By the end, her tone had slipped into that familiar reverence.

Lumina waited for her to finish before continuing.

"As for being taken in for interrogation—" her fingertip tapped the table once, lightly, "I suspect there are members of the Knight Order who have been corrupted by the Curse Cult."

Kira's pupils contracted.

Fenria's tail fur bristled.

"The Knight Order?" Kira's voice dropped. "The Royal Knight Order? They're that bold?"

"The Scribe was taken away by the Knight Order. If the Knights were entirely clean, the interrogation process wouldn't have looked like that." Lumina's tone remained steady. "The Scribe is staying inside because he's observing. Watching who speaks up. Watching who's in a hurry to push suspicion onto him."

"So he won't come out." Kira crushed the note in her fist. "Not because he can't — because he won't."

Fenria's fangs were already bared. "Those dogs—"

"Fenria." Lumina glanced at her.

Fenria's fangs half-retracted, but her tail kept lashing behind her like a whip.

---

"So what do we do now?" Kira set the notes back on the table and braced both hands on the edge. "We can't just sit here and wait."

Lumina rested her chin on her folded hands.

She held the position for a long moment. Outside the window, a flock of birds passed overhead, their shadows sweeping across the curtain and flickering over the table before vanishing. From the hallway beyond, muffled voices drifted in — members of the Magical Girl Brigade waiting in the lounge. She could hear their hushed conversation. Someone asked, "Is the boss still in the meeting?"

We can't keep relying on him.

The words circled in her mind.

"Find where Seraphina is."

Kira raised her hand like a student asking a question. "Why don't we just go ask the Scribe?"

Lumina raised her eyes. There was no reproach in them as she looked at Kira. No impatience.

"The Scribe is inside the Knight Order headquarters, executing his plan. And we—"

She paused. Weighted the next words.

"Cannot keep relying on him. We need to find a way to keep pace."

When those words landed, Fenria's tail stopped.

Then it began to wag furiously.

"Got it!" She launched out of her chair, fist smacking into her palm with a sharp crack. "Find that kidnapped rich girl! Show the Scribe that we can stand on our own!"

Kira stood too. Her hands, hanging at her sides, clenched into fists — tight enough that the veins on the backs of her hands rose against the skin. She said nothing. She simply pushed her bangs aside, turned, and headed for the door.

"Kira." Lumina called after her.

Kira turned back.

"Go to the lounge first." Lumina stood, smoothing an invisible crease from her jacket. "Assign the tasks. Everyone's tasks."

---

She walked toward the door at an unhurried pace. Fenria followed behind, ears high, tail cutting through the air like a banner.

The moment the door opened, every sound in the lounge died.

Two dozen pairs of eyes turned as one. Some stood at attention. Some still clutched half-finished cups of water. One had just hopped down from the windowsill. They ranged in age, in species, in background — but every single one of them wore the same expression.

Waiting for orders.

Lumina stood in the doorway and swept her gaze across the room.

"Everyone. Effective immediately, all field operations are suspended."

No one asked why.

"One objective only. Locate every possible site within and around the Royal Capital where the Cult could be holding a hostage. Abandoned dungeons, underground warehouses, facilities disguised as civilian buildings — none of them missed."

Her delivery was calm. Clinical.

But behind her, Fenria bared her fangs.

"You all heard that?" Fenria's voice rolled over the room like thunder. "Find that kidnapped poor thing!"

The lounge erupted in a cascade of responses.

"Got it!" "Heard you, Boss!"

---

Lumina turned her head slightly, toward the window.

The rooftops of the Royal Capital spread out in layered tiers beneath the afternoon sun. The spire of the Knight Order headquarters was nowhere to be seen. And the location of Seraphina remained unknown.

But it didn't matter.

She pulled her gaze back and extended her hand toward Kira.

"Map."