Chapter 63

Mission 63 of Tatsuya Endo's SPY x FAMILY ran on June 13, 2022, spanning 25 pages within Volume 10 and the Loid's Past Arc.

Television coverage introduces Jonas Wellman, a celebrated Ostanian opera veteran booked for a cultural exchange performance in Westalis, an event many hope will ease tensions between the rival nations. The tabloids strike first, burying him under lurid claims: affairs used to funnel secrets westward, mob ties, contempt for his countrymen and for disabled veterans, and bullying of castmates. Cornered by the press, Jonas insists none of it is true.

At WISE Safe House D, Sylvia Sherwood orders a distraught rookie to keep the smear coverage from crossing the border by any means. When he balks, she slams the wall beside him and repeats herself. The rookie admits he now despises Jonas because of the stories, and Sylvia points out that those same tabloids once served as National Unity Party propaganda organs during the war, their sources dubious at best. She demands he reason from evidence, since lives can hang on a single scrap of intelligence. Word arrives of a death threat against the singer, prompting Sylvia to dig into the police file and rework the event's security, all while privately wondering whether her old training of Twilight was too gentle compared to these recruits.

A rebuttal piece later clears Jonas of every accusation, and the rookie flips his opinion just as thoughtlessly, earning a fist to the head. Sylvia refuses to write off the death threat, and while watching a live broadcast outside Jonas's office she spots a guard who does not belong. She phones a nearby kebab vendor, one of her assets, to shadow the man. When the impostor draws a silenced pistol, the kebab man stalls Jonas's group with free food while Sylvia whips the weapon from the attacker's hand with her belt, then drops him with a strike under the jaw before he can use his knife.

Jonas flies west in triumph, cleared and cheerful, while Sylvia nurses a sore shoulder. Debriefing reveals the attacker as Pance Karmer, an ex-soldier turned drifter with a record of assaults, fixated on punishing the corrupt and warped by excessive pride in his own wartime service to peace, a failing Sylvia warns her own people to guard against. When the rookie vows to stop being fooled and plans to attend a performance in apology, a colleague floats the possibility that Jonas is actually defecting, since one mistress was reportedly a crime boss's wife. The bewildered rookie begs for the real story, and Sylvia simply tells him to dig up the answers on his own.

Tabloid outlets flood Ostania with scandal stories about opera singer Jonas Wellman on the eve of a cultural exchange concert in Westalis, and Sylvia orders WISE to block the coverage from spreading west.

Sylvia identifies a disguised assassin outside Jonas's office during a live broadcast, coordinates a kebab vendor asset to intercept, and personally disarms and knocks out the attacker, later identified as embittered war veteran Pance Karmer.

Jonas departs for Westalis fully exonerated, though a WISE agent's aside suggests the singer may be defecting to escape a vengeful crime boss, leaving the truth deliberately unresolved.

Throughout, Sylvia mentors the WISE Rookie on objective analysis, punishing his knee-jerk opinion swings and closing with the demand that he stop waiting for easy answers.

This chapter marks the first appearances of Jonas Wellman, Pance Karmer, and the kebab vendor, and it is adapted in Episode 41 of the anime. Flashbacks revisit Sylvia's days drilling a young Twilight, and she declines to call him in for the operation because he is still recovering from his collapse in Mission 61.

The license plate on the WISE vehicle ends in 63, matching the chapter number. The kebab vendor may allude to Turkish guest workers in postwar West Germany, the community credited with popularizing doner kebab in German cuisine.