Mission 31

Fiona privately laments what family life has done to Twilight, likening him to a blade with a chipped edge, yet she finds this softened version of him endearing and wants him all the more. Her plan remains unchanged: take the wife role away from Yor.

Briefing Loid, she lays out the target. Cavi Campbell, an energy magnate turned celebrated art collector, holds Lady in the Sun, a painting valued near one million dalc that once belonged to the late Colonel Erik Zacharis of Ostania's wartime military intelligence. Zacharis is believed to have compiled documents, the Zacharis Dossier, rumored to detail Eastern human experiments on prisoners of war alongside massacres carried out by the West, revelations capable of rekindling the conflict. The painting supposedly points the way to the dossier, and WISE means to secure it before the Eastern government learns it exists. With the artwork locked beneath Campbell's heavily guarded mansion, Fiona proposes an alternative to theft.

That alternative is Campbelldon, an underground doubles tournament whose winner selects one item from Campbell's collection. Fiona has registered the pair under the aliases Twain and Nafalia Foney, husband and wife. Loid admits his tennis experience is thin; she tells him to hug the corner and stay out of her way, intending to showcase her value to Operation Strix through her play. Loid, recalling a senior agent's advice to keep Fiona's ambitions contained, quietly dislikes the whole arrangement.

Their first opponents are Walson and Bobble, a duo that ruled the Grand Slam circuit ten years earlier, and the betting line of 120 to 1.3 makes the veterans overwhelming favorites. The pair promise a slaughter. Instead, Loid's opening serve scorches the far corner of the court, and he runs out the game without conceding a point; when the veterans target Fiona in the next game, she dismantles them just as completely. Among Campbell's associates, one manager stays confident, revealing that the Bolic Brothers will trial a new drug called Oso-R in the coming match. The scrawny brothers balloon into hulking masses of muscle, leaving Loid questioning the mission's supposed lack of risk while Fiona simply tells him to do his best.

The mission objective is established: win Lady in the Sun at the Campbelldon tournament to locate the Zacharis Dossier before Ostania's government can. Loid and Fiona debut their Foney couple aliases and crush former Grand Slam champions Walson and Bobble without dropping a point. The chapter closes on the steroid-enhanced Bolic Brothers as the next obstacle, and on Fiona's confirmed intent to leverage the mission in her pursuit of Loid.

Mission 31 runs 21 pages in Volume 6, released August 10, 2020, within the Campbelldon Tennis Arc and adapted in Episode 22. The cover assembles Loid, Anya, Yor, Bond, and Fiona. Cavi Campbell, Walson and Bobble, Dressen, and the Bolic brothers all debut.

The Lady in the Sun artwork is a rough Endo sketch of Hinatazaka46's Kumi Sasaki, and Campbelldon plays as a parody of Wimbledon, minus the prestige and legality. The Foney spelling is an English localization choice; later Japanese scoreboards render the alias as Phony. The Bolic Brothers draw partly on Younger Toguro from YuYu Hakusho.