A Dark Fantasy Spy

One day, the Celestial God called upon three disciples and asked them.

“What do you think of me?”

The first disciple, who counted the stars, replied,
“You are the shield of faith, the scale that corrects the order of heaven, and our judge who protects the law.”

The second disciple, who diligently took notes, answered,
“You are the light that illuminates the world, the lamp that drives away idle thoughts, and our teacher who imparts wisdom.”

Upon hearing the two disciples’ responses, the Celestial God closed his deep-set eyes and shook his head.
At that moment, the third disciple, who carved rocks, spoke up.
“You are the creator of all things, our living Father who embraces with love.”

To this, the Celestial God smiled and said,
“Truly correct. I shall build a temple upon your rock. I will entrust you with the keys to ascend to the heavens, and you shall drive away those who flatter with their lips, those who speak falsehoods with their tongues, those who come to me without true faith.”

This passage serves as one of the important grounds explaining and legitimizing the Pope’s rights.
The confession of faith is a paramount element in all religions. Through a genuine confession of faith, the third disciple who received the keys to the heavens ascended to the position of the Pope.
In time, the three disciples became the founders of various sects, but disputes between the sects did not cease.
During the wave of the Reformation sweeping across the continent, after a council was dissolved, the Pope resolved the conflict by annihilating the believers of the two sects.

Today, clergy buy and sell their positions. Faith has degenerated, and religion has become tainted by the secular. Clergy who criticize this are arrested by inquisitors from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, regardless of their rank.

I will ask the Pope who has lost his rock.
Does the one who killed his brother, sharing the same father, deserve to hold the keys to the heavens?

– Declaration of a prominent bishop and theologian advocating for the Reformation (1546.11.10 – 1590.02.18. Elected Pope with the support of the bishops and cardinals, he was sentenced to death during a religious trial, and the sentence was carried out on the same day by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.)

—

Episode 14 – One Religion, One Faith, Two Saints

Camila’s mischief only ceased after inhaling two pizzas, a whole chicken, and three bags of snacks.
“Are you waking up?”
“Urgh….”
I patted Camila’s back as she lay sprawled on the sofa.
After polishing off the breakfast spread and splurging on takeout food, her face turned pale as she said,
“I told you to eat moderately.”
“Well….”
“Why did you overeat like that?”

Camila finally opened her lips with a white face.
“The meals provided at the lodgings or by the army were meager. I occasionally got food from Lucia, but the food served at the cathedral was terrible….”

For the past few months, Camila had been staying in the North.
The imperial government provided accommodations for their precious guests, serving top-notch beds and meals made from local ingredients, leaving nothing out.
The issue was that this highest standard was based not on the empire as a whole but rather on the North.

The North was an area under martial law due to conflicts.
The Crown Prince demanded the military to end the conflict; however, merely the higher-ups’ concerns could not improve the devastated situations of the North.
The hotel had rooms that were somewhat well-managed, thanks to urgent repairs from the military government headquarters, but there was nothing they could do about meals.

Stale, lifeless bread, dry cold fried food, creamy textures reminiscent of a full moon cake, and dry meat were simply high-calorie human fodder masquerading as food.
Of course, the imperial government wasn’t devoid of conscience; they did at least send generously prepared meals cooked by the royal chefs under preservation magic every three days.
However, Camila was active at the frontlines, not at the rear bases.
With the transportation network obliterated, supply deliveries to the combat unit were almost nonexistent, and the meals at the frontlines were unimaginably dire.

Though the government took great care to deliver sumptuous feasts prepared with love to the frontlines, how easy could it be to bring a food truck into a battleground? In the bitter cold, not only was Camila starving, but even the monsters in the woods faced the same plight.
The moment the aroma of the feast drifted through the air, everyone, including Camila, knew it meant a call to arms. It was hardly easy to retreat to the rear just for a meal, especially when asking those who traveled hundreds of kilometers to deliver a feast to ensure the menu wasn’t aromatic enough to draw attention.

Eventually, Camila ended up eating more meals from the operational units preparing food locally than the feasts delivered to the battlefield, or she choked down the combat rations procured by the imperial Ministry of Defense at the lowest bid or frozen food bought from PX.
There was a reason Camila sought Lucia at the cathedral before anything else—
Feeding someone who loves to eat with mass-prepared meals, combat rations, and frozen foods in turn spelled disaster.
“So you ate all week?”
“Yes….”
“That’s impressive.”
I looked at Camila as if confronting a retired soldier who vanished during a mission.
The intensity of my gaze must have overwhelmed her, as she burrowed deep into the blanket.
“I brought digestive aids, so eat them.”
“Thank you….”
“Ugh, this idiot.”
I just can’t deal with this.

—

It had already been around ten days since I started living under the same roof as Camila.
We were residing in a townhouse located in the Abbas capital, the very townhouse owned by the Nostrim Family.
“So how did you come to own such a house? It looks incredibly expensive.”
“We didn’t buy it.”
“Then, you mean…?”
“It was a gift.”

The townhouse in the capital originally belonged to my maternal grandfather’s estate.
Long ago, my mother, serving as a royal court maid to the Crown Princess (who is now the Queen), got married to my father, and the ownership transferred to them.
“My grandfather, who is now my step-grandfather, gifted the townhouse to my father as a marriage present, insisting they shouldn’t travel far for work since both were employed in the capital.”
“Working in the capital? What jobs do they have…?”
“My father is a Treasury Department Official, and my mother is a Royal Court Maid. They met while passing in and out of the palace.”
“Wow!”

Camila’s admiration for the romantic love story of the Nostrim family matched her age perfectly. Having regained her vitality after taking the digestive aids, she began to curious about my parents’ past.
“Are you close with your parents? What kind of people are they?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
I replied nonchalantly.
“I didn’t see them much when I was young.”
“Oh….”
Though civil service is known for maintaining a work-life balance, it does differ case by case.
Military, police, fire, and intelligence agencies are notoriously known for their murderous workloads, and other government sectors aren’t much different.
A prime example would be prosecutors and judges. Often, when I visited the National Intelligence Service, I’d run into prosecutors dispatched from the Justice Ministry, and they would complain about their colleagues complaining about daily late nights and weekend work being a regular occurrence.
The Nostrim family elders faced similar circumstances.
“My father, working at the Ministry of Finance, usually took the weekends off but couldn’t come home. Traveling all the way down to the countryside only to head back up to the capital would take a day. During budget season, he wouldn’t get off work at all.”
“…….”
“As for my mother, working for the royal family, her situation was even worse. She would have to commute from her lodging, never knowing when the palace would call her in for something. If the couple couldn’t see each other, how must the children have felt? So during vacations, we would all take a train up to the capital to see our parents.”
“So, it sounds like you were close with your siblings…?”

“Were you close with your siblings?”
I chuckled as I responded.
“Since our parents were never home, we did stick together. But can a bunch of kids control each other?”
Of course, I sulked if my siblings ate all the good food, and I yelled to stop playing because I had academy homework to do. The Nostrim siblings’ childhood was quite a sight.
Fighting and causing trouble every day, making the steward and nanny exhausted, while our parents commuting to the capital lived with anxious hearts.
When Ayla bit Adela for taking her toys, both parents flew home via Warp Gate. For a week after that, the two of them seriously considered quitting their jobs to stay at home.
I could probably count on one hand the people who heard such stories.
I concluded my reminiscence, reflecting on those days.
“It was a mess.”

Camila could only stare, astonished, at the unveiled mischief of the Nostrim family.
It seemed she realized she accidentally cast the spell “Taluula,” as she fumbled through her words in embarrassment.
“Uh, uh, uh….”
Her brain, having been schooled at Cambridge, began working swiftly. Choosing her words carefully, Camila abruptly changed the topic.
“How was your relationship with your parents?”
“I just told you.”
“No, I mean your relationship with them originally.”
“…….”
The second inquiry about family history made me hesitate for a moment.
Though my body was present in the townhouse, my consciousness had shifted back to a small government dormitory.
In the damp, moldy air of the dormitory’s living room, early in the morning. Dressed in a suit, my father fastened an insignia to his collar.
A small five-pointed star insignia, only usable by employees of the Information Command. Hastening, my father grabbed his passport, put on his shoes, and stepped out.
While waiting for a father who might not return, I gazed out the window.
Suddenly, a voice called my name and snapped me out of my reverie.
“…Huh.”
As the scenery outside my window vanished, Camila stood there instead.
“Are you okay?”
“Uh… uh….”
I nodded profusely, wiping the cold sweat with my hand.
“I’m fine. I’m okay.”
“Of course.”
“I must be okay.”

—

Time seemed to fly as the weekdays passed. Before I knew it, January was drawing to a close.
The Imperial Army, having launched a massive offensive, was reporting daily victories.
As someone who personally experienced how severe information control could be, believing the military’s propaganda was foolishness, yet my job as an information officer was to sift through their propaganda for useful information.
During my stay at the townhouse, I utilized OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) to collect information related to the current situation in the North.
To be precise,
“Not doing it? You’re so idle.”
“…Why am I even doing this?”
I outsourced it.
With some free time on my hands, I decided to make the most of it by training Camila.
This week’s topic was OSINT.
The procedure involves gathering and analyzing intelligence from newspapers, broadcasts, the internet, academic journals, magazines, papers, and publications.
“Since the 1980s, the importance of public-source information has greatly arisen. It’s a method of intelligence gathering used not only by advanced intelligence agencies such as the CIA, SVR, DGSE, MSS but also by agencies in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.”
This was a part Camila, who had interned at SIS, was well aware of. Interns at intelligence agencies usually deal with translation or OSINT tasks.
While there are interns assigned to work abroad with regular staff, such occasions are notably rare and typically entail heavy responsibilities.
Most interns entering intelligence agencies are essentially the lowest of the low, just like recruits.
For reference, Camila was one of those interns; technically, it’s in the past now though.
As I watched Camila diligently working through OSINT, I crossed my arms.
“Wow…. You remind me of the good old days.”
“When?”
“Of course, my time at the Information Command.”
Back in my Information Command days, my very first mission after completing the training period was OSINT.
It involved gathering and analyzing intelligence from Chinese media and websites like Baidu. No matter how aggressively the Chinese Public Security controlled information, they couldn’t wholly prevent useful information from circulating.
Lost in memories of my rookie days, I began regaling Camila with my stories.
“Whenever you connect to the internet, logs start getting left.”
“Neat.”
“When my seniors warned me to be careful while accessing Chinese websites. So they always told us to use DuckDuckGo or Yandex. But those Chinese guys are incredibly quick to shut down such access, you know? So the new recruits’ primary mission was to find ways to minimize traces while bypassing restrictions.”
“And then?”
“Oh, but my silly colleague forgot all that and accessed the Chinese internet directly. Using the company computer, no less! What do you think happened?”

What happened? Of course, he was totally screwed.
As soon as he connected to the Chinese internet with the company computer, the military intelligence contacted the office immediately. My seniors, enjoying drinks at the barracks, rushed back to the office upon receiving the call from military intelligence.
What followed was a predictable disaster.
“The computer was immediately replaced, and my colleague was dragged off and beaten like a dog.”
“He was beaten? As a new recruit?”
“Doesn’t matter if they’re a recruit or not; do you think that person, an officer at the time, would care? When a security incident occurs and the chief of the intelligence command lays into them, do you think they’d control their anger? Whether newcomer or seasoned, they got brutally roasted.”
Ultimately, that colleague was marked from the start as a hopeless recruit. Everyone else had similar fates.
Sticking an unregistered USB into the intranet-connected computer, leaking information about classified materials onto the internet, and even a kid who entered the technical information department infected their computer while investigating a North Korean virus.
Consequently, a senior who was supposed to be handling the students was punished. Even investigators from the National Intelligence Service had to show up, leading to a full-blown crisis.
It was said that those on the upper ranks were often too lenient on us, while the more senior cadets had a field day tearing into people. I had the fortune to be deployed to the field, so I was unaware of this disastrous situation where my batch mates had to walk on eggshells every day.
Lost in these thoughts of nostalgia, I sighed deeply at Camila, who appeared to be overwhelmed.
“So make sure to do it well.”
“Oh come on, there’s no way I’d do something like that!”
“Are you confident then? Alright! Let’s take it up a notch with cipher study and data recovery as well.”
“…What?”
“Encryption, decryption, data recovery. There are three essential skills for anyone working in an intelligence agency. Without these, can it even be called an intelligence agency? It’d just be a Tanzanian sleuth shop.”
I had Camila under my wing, teaching her about cryptography and data recovery techniques.
I had her recovering destroyed storage devices and decrypting instructions hidden within plain text for her assignments.
At first, Camila kept up despite the intensity, but as time went on, her expression soured more and more. Eventually, she reached the point of trying to escape through the window.
I apprehended her mid-flight and dragged her back to the security terminal.
“Ahhhh…!”
In the end, Camila lay face down on the desk, sobbing.
“This isn’t real! The movies lied to me…!”
“Why are you crying about this? Did I ask you to hide information in HEX code or was it altering files?”
“I’ve only ever analyzed files! I’ve never dealt with encryption!”
“This is just part of the job, regardless of position. So just bear with it. Oh, speaking of movies, here’s a note: when asked about your motivation during intelligence agency interviews, don’t ever mention movies. You will absolutely get roasted for that. No interviewer appreciates that.”
The reason why the SIS interviewers laughed when Camila brought up 007 was that they always roasted recruits who learned intelligence from movies.
007? Jason Bourne? Sicario? Kingsman? None of those cool spies exist in real life.
If you enter the field thinking you’ll wear slick suits, you’ll inevitably find yourself working with locals who only speak dialects and who’ll make you weep at the sight of cockroaches. For reference, that’s my story—I went on my first deployment to China and ended up speaking dialects instead of Mandarin more than once.
Moving deeper into advanced courses, I trained Camila rather than doing the usual beginner’s training.
Camila, who had been weeping, managed to regain her composure and steadily followed the training.
Then came the day when everything changed.
Suddenly, the security mobile phone rang while I was updating the situation in the North, so I left Camila to answer the call.
“Communications security. This is Frederick.”
-“Major. This is the office chief from the Magic Tower Embassy.”
“Ah, yes, Director. What brings you here?”
It was news that Francesca’s investigation had concluded.

—

The pristine white marble was kept spotless, without a speck of dust.
It was so clean that the transparent marble faintly reflected the features of the person standing on it.
The hallway was lined with marble tiles, supported by stone pillars reaching up to the vast ceiling.
Guided by a priest, Lucia slowly made her way down the corridor.
“Go on in.”
The young priest bowed his head as Lucia approached the massive door.
Lucia reciprocated the gesture and took a deep breath before stepping through the opened doors by the guards.

A grand hall that could comfortably accommodate hundreds of cardinals and bishops.
Within that enormous hall were four individuals.
One was Lucia, who entered through the door. The other two were the guards standing upright beside the Pope.
And then—
“Ah, you’ve arrived?”
The old man seated on the throne spoke in a faint voice.
The leader of the order, boasting thousands of years of history—the Pope.
Pope John XVI gazed at Lucia.
“Thank you for answering the invitation. Come closer.”
“Yes.”
Lucia crossed the hall to reach before the Pope.
The two guards accompanying the Pope barely flinched at the saint’s entrance. Standing firm with weapons in hand, they merely fixed their gaze straight ahead.
As the Pope beckoned to them, his soft voice echoed in the now desolate hall.
“I have matters to discuss, so the guards may step back.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
With the two guards gone, only the two remained in that space as the Pope’s faint voice resonated once more.
“Come closer.”
Lucia stepped just a bit forward.
“Closer.”
At the Pope’s instruction, Lucia took her time to walk closer. Ascending the low steps adorned with a red carpet prepared for the elderly Pope, she finally arrived at his throne.
The Pope, John XVI, began to speak, his voice low.
“Preparations for the canonization ceremony must be in full swing, and I’m sorry to call you here all of a sudden. I had originally intended to come to you, but as you can see, I’ve grown very feeble.”
“I’m alright.”
“Thank you.”
Upon Lucia’s reply, Pope John XVI smiled softly.
“May I ask how the preparations are going?”
“Of course. Everything is proceeding smoothly.”
“Hmm… I see.”
The Pope, seated on his throne, slowly nodded his head. As his head wobbled, a single white hair escaped from his immaculate robe.
With a weakened sigh, the Pope turned his gaze toward Lucia, opening his mouth.
“The reason I called you today is to discuss those who will participate in the canonization ceremony. There are matters regarding your future activities as a saint, and there are things I want to discuss about the future.”
“Please speak.”
“Before that, I wish to ask you something. There’s no need to feel pressured, but I would like you to answer honestly without concealment.”
“Yes.”
The Pope faced Lucia and posed one question.
“What are your thoughts on the Magic Tower?”