Chapter 62

In Luwen, a town in eastern Westalis, four boys stage a mock war between East and West. The one nicknamed "Advisor" wins as usual, dropping a pot on "Major" with a length of string and catching "General" from behind with a rubber band to the head. Advisor, the child who will grow into Twilight, admits he gets carried away whenever he plays a role. His friends tease that he needs proper military gear to earn a rank, but his strict father disapproves of such toys. At home, the boy announces plans to enlist with his friends and rages about killing the monsters of the East; his father slaps him, demands to know what he actually knows about Ostanians, and insists there will be no war and that peace, not conflict, deserves his hopes. The boy storms off, noting bitterly that his father preaches peace while fighting with his mother.

Wanting a soldier set anyway, the boy invents a school reference book and takes his father's pocket money, receiving a warm promise of a trip to the upcoming town fair in return. Guilt gnaws at him. After showing off the purchase at the hideout, he leaves to help set up the fair, chats with the croquette seller about how ordinary Ostanians really are, and plans to earn the money back and apologize. At that moment a shell obliterates the boys' hideout, and radio bulletins announce Ostanian forces pouring across the border.

A second bomb levels the town square with the boy inside the blast radius; his toy helmet saves his life. His mother spirits him away to her uncle's home in Kielberg, where word of his father never comes. Vowing to confess his lie when his father returns, the boy instead loses his mother to an air raid, finding her remains in the rubble of their shelter. Years of scraping by alone follow. Under the alias "Roland Spoofy" and a falsified age, he enlists and turns his tactical gifts against the East, wondering how many corpses stand between him and dawn. In the mountains he captures a scruffy Ostanian deserter, who begs for food, cites a psychology experiment about how planted ideas flip opinions, calls the war a pointless diplomatic disaster, and claims the Luwen bombing was a false flag. Enraged, the young soldier nearly executes him, but hesitates at his father's remembered question, and an Ostanian patrol's bullet, again stopped by his helmet, scatters them both.

Wounded off the front lines, he is stunned to find General, Corporal, and Major alive; they had chased after him just before the first bomb fell. The reunion is short. Their next deployment is a recklessly planned campaign, and only their dog tags come back. Grieving, he concludes he never understood the war he was fighting: "Ignorance isn't bliss. Ignorance is weakness. Ignorance is a sin." A military intelligence recruiter who knows his real identity then offers him a coerced path into espionage, calling information the strongest weapon of all. At the station, his belongings are burned, and he shrugs off surrendering a name no living person remembers, claiming no reason at all for joining as a group of children passes by. His new handler, Sylvia Sherwood, is ordered to forge him into a first-rate operative by any means.

Twilight wakes from the memory in a cold sweat on the Forger sofa, where Yor mentions his tossing and turning. Anya probes his mind but finds it clouded. Reminded that he fainted over her Tonitrus Bolt, he starts fretting about Operation Strix, then asks whether the incident brought her closer to Damian. Hearing that it did, he tells her friends matter and should be cherished, an answer that quietly stuns Yor and Anya. Bond's growling stomach breaks the moment, and the family settles into the living room over hot onion soup.

Twilight's childhood revealed. The spy grew up in Luwen playing war games, clashing with a pacifist father whose pocket money he took under false pretenses.

The destruction of Luwen. Ostania's border assault kills his parents and, he believes, his friends, forging his hatred of the East.

Soldier, then spy. Enlisting as "Roland Spoofy," he loses his reunited friends to a botched operation, renounces ignorance, and is conscripted into military intelligence under Sylvia Sherwood.

The first meeting with Franky. The Ostanian deserter who challenged his view of the war is revealed to be Franky, placing their friendship's origin on opposite sides of the battlefield.

Past meets present. Waking among the Forgers, Loid passes his hardest lesson to Anya: cherish your friends.

Mission 62 was serialized in three parts on April 4, April 18, and May 16, 2022, at 19, 23, and 30 pages respectively, the first chapter in the series split three ways; Volume 10 collects them as one chapter. The anime spreads the material across Episodes 39 and 40. Twilight's real name is blacked out throughout, and the official English Volume 10 synopsis calls him [REDACTED].

The chapter is dense with references and confirmations: the boys' "Flash"-"Thunder" password mirrors the Allied sign-countersign from the Normandy landings, wartime Prime Minister Adner nods to Konrad Adenauer, and the friends' dog tags resemble German World War II designs. It also establishes that Sylvia was Twilight's mentor from his recruitment onward. The volume release fixes several art issues, including Major's uncolored hair on the opening page, and the book Yor reads at the end is titled Kaji, Japanese for housework.