Chapter 57

Classes resume at Eden Academy after the midterm break, and Anya strides in expecting glory. In her imagination, announcing her voyage on the grandest luxury liner in Ostania leaves Becky floored and even prompts Damian to declare the Forgers fit to visit his estate. Reality is crueler: Becky shrugs the trip off, reveals she has already sailed the Princess Lorelei herself, and mentions staying in the Imperial Suite, which reduces Anya to admitting her own cabin resembled a third-class cell. Emile and Ewen pile on with mockery, and Anya burns with humiliation.

As classmates crowd around Becky, who met the starlet Rachel at one of her father's parties, Anya grabs for attention by inflating her story. She describes villains from foreign lands, mangles the name of Sickle-and-Chain Barnaby into "Sickly Chain Bartebly," and, remembering the incident was hushed up and never reached the news, improvises that the attackers were undersea agents called the Octopeople. The class dissolves into laughter, and when the geometry teacher arrives and a student repeats the tale, the room erupts again while Anya turns scarlet.

After school, Becky consoles her downcast friend, passing along her mother's philosophy that a lie is fine if it helps you become who you want to be. George cuts in with a bleaker warning: lie too often and you end up friendless like him. At the Forger apartment, Yuri has dropped by to collect a souvenir from Yor and is his usual deafening self. When Anya trudges home and recounts her day, each adult weighs in on lying. Loid mentally composes a lecture on tactical deception before limply telling her lying is wrong. Yuri privately sorts liars into trash and himself, whose lies serve Yor and are therefore righteous, then loudly condemns all liars. Yor encourages Anya to simply be herself. In the silence that follows this display of hypocrisy, Anya concludes that a liar's life looks exhausting and resolves to knock it off.

Anya's boast implodes. Becky's Imperial Suite trumps her cruise story, and the improvised Octopeople yarn makes her the laughingstock of Cecile Hall.

The cover-up holds. Anya's classmates find her pirate story absurd precisely because the cruise incident never appeared in the news, confirming the SSS buried it.

Conflicting counsel on lying. Becky endorses aspirational lies, George warns they lead to isolation, and the three secret-keeping adults at home deliver hollow lessons in honesty.

Anya swears off lying. Surrounded by professional deceivers, she decides the liar's path seems too rough for her.

Mission 57 runs 15 pages in Volume 9 and released on December 13, 2021, with Anya as the sole cover character. Episode 35 of the anime adapts it alongside the previous chapter.

An artist named "Pecasso" appears on the first page as a nod to Pablo Picasso. In the Japanese text, Becky identifies Rachel as an actress on Berlint in Love, a detail the English release trims to backstage gossip about the show. The original digital release drew Anya and Becky without their hats across pages 12 and 13 except in one panel; the Volume 9 printing adds the hats throughout. Tatsuya Endo has said he loves the surreal final two pages and considers that closing gag the main theme of the whole manga.