Short Mission 18

Over thirty years in the past, Donna Schlag, then a Berlint University of Education student, watches news break that Martha Marriott, an old Eden Academy schoolmate, has joined Ostania's Women's Combat Battalion as a volunteer amid the First East-West War of Unification. While classmates trade gossip about Martha's fighting reputation, Donna, who barely spoke to her and once looked down on her, finds herself struck by that resolve and swears to build the same strength.

University military training does not carry her far, so Donna combs through books hunting for the secret of ultimate power. Her reading leads to Eastern ideas like budo and shugyo, then to legends of ninja with impossible abilities. She trains alone, invents a ninja persona, and shows up to class in full costume under the alias Goraimaru Narukami, bewildering everyone around her. The phase leaves her embarrassed in hindsight but grants a middling level of strength, which she eventually unleashes on Murdoch Swan and his followers during her punishment of them in Chapter 127.

Martha's enlistment inspires a vow from young Donna. After washing out of military training, Donna turns to books, ninja lore, and solo practice under an invented alias, the origin of the fighting ability she displays against Murdoch Swan decades later.

Short Mission 18 is a three-page extra chapter of Tatsuya Endo's SPY x FAMILY manga, numbered 127.3 within Volume 17 and tied to the Eden Scandal Arc. Published on January 19, 2026, it features Martha Marriott and Donna Schlag as cover characters. The book that fuels Donna's obsession is credited to Horafuki Tarou, a satirical pen name: horafuki means braggart or liar in Japanese, while Tarou is a generic placeholder given name, together flagging the book's unreliable contents. Her alias Goraimaru Narukami stacks thunder and lightning kanji; Narukami is a classical term for the thunder god Raijin, and Goraimaru joins a word for pealing thunder with the traditional masculine suffix -maru.