Adlet kept smiling. He had no idea who the eighth really was. It didn’t seem likely that he could continue to evade the other Braves, either. But if he stopped smiling, it would all be over.
“You’re deluded.”
“No. I’m determined.” As Adlet smiled, he thought about the eighth: who it might be and what kind of powers they might have. He searched his memories to see if, perhaps, he had overlooked some clue, anything out of the ordinary. After he’d been thinking for a while, Fremy suddenly spoke.
“Why did you want to be one of the Braves of the Six Flowers?”
For some reason, this was new and surprising to him. Fremy had seemed uninterested in the other Braves all this time. This was the first time she’d shown interest in another person. “Why are you asking me that?” asked Adlet.
“Because you’re ordinary.”
“…”
“Hans is a genius. Goldof, too. But you’re not. You’re just an ordinary person with a lot of strange weapons.”
“You’re saying I’m weak? Me, the strongest man in the world?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how an unremarkable person like yourself could become such a powerful fighter. That’s what I want to know.”
Adlet didn’t reply. Hans and Goldof were geniuses, and Adlet was ordinary. He couldn’t deny that. He couldn’t touch either of them when it came to pure swordplay or martial arts. “It’s thanks to my master,” said Adlet. “I hesitate to say this, but he was a little crazy. He was obsessed with killing fiends. He spent all his time by himself, deep in the mountains, devising new weapons and then coming up with ways to use them. He didn’t do anything else. You wouldn’t even think he was human.”
“…”
“He hammered the skills into me. I trained every day until I puked and couldn’t move anymore, and when that was over, I was confined to my desk to study. I learned about making his tools and poisons, refining gunpowder, and even cutting-edge science.”
“Science? Even that?” asked Fremy.
“I’m grateful to him. He made me the warrior I am. Learning a normal style of combat wouldn’t have made me the strongest man in the world.”
“I know that man,” she said, and Adlet looked at her. “Atreau Spiker,” Fremy continued. “He was one of my targets. He was quite old, so he was low on my priority list, though.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy,” said Adlet.
“I heard all his disciples ran away. They couldn’t handle his severe training.”
“Your information was wrong. There was one who didn’t run away: me.”
“How were you able to put up with it?”
Adlet didn’t reply.
“Something happened, didn’t it?” pressed Fremy. “There was a reason you wanted to be one of the Braves of the Six Flowers.”
Adlet suddenly remembered his conversation with Nashetania in the prison. She’d asked him all sorts of things, but Adlet hadn’t told her everything. The subject was heavy for him and not something he could talk about easily. Some things were like that. “When I was a kid, a fiend came to my village.” And yet, why did it feel so natural to talk about his past now? “I couldn’t believe it. I’d thought that fiends were creatures from some faraway land. My best friend tried to hit it with a stick. I was crying when I stopped him.”
“What was this fiend like?” asked Fremy.
“It was shaped like a human. Its body was patterned with green- and skin-colored mottles. At the time, it seemed like it towered to the heavens, but I think it probably wasn’t actually that big. About the same size as Goldof.”
“It had three wings, didn’t it? Three crow-like wings on its back.”
That was exactly right. “You know it?” he asked.
“Continue your story.”
“It didn’t attack us or eat us. It just approached us with a smile and patted my head. It was kind. Unbelievably kind. The fiend called the adults of the village to convene together and told us kids to go to sleep. Of course, there was no way I could fall asleep. I trembled all night in my guardian’s arms.”
“And then?” prompted Fremy.
“The next morning, the fiend was gone. No one had been killed. No one was even injured. I was relieved. And then the village elder told us that the entire village would move to the Howling Vilelands and that from that point on we would be ruled by the Evil God.”
“…”
“Every single adult in the village said the human world was going to end and there was no way the Braves of the Six Flowers could win. But they all believed that if we joined the Evil God right away, our lives would be spared. After speaking with that fiend for just one night, it was like they were all completely different people. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was quiver in my boots. The only ones who opposed this plan were my guardian and my best friend. But the fiend had also said one more thing—to prove our loyalty to the Evil God, the villagers should go carve out the hearts of anyone who objected and bring those hearts to it.”
“That seems like something it’d say,” Fremy remarked.
So Fremy did know the creature, after all. “What was that fiend?” asked Adlet.
“It’s one of the three commanders that govern all fiends. It was also the one that came up with the idea of making a human/fiend child and ordered my mother to bear me.”
“…”
“Continue,” she said.
“Neither my guardian nor my best friend hated the villagers for it, no matter what. The fault lay with that fiend, not the people of the village. My best friend told me not to hate them. My guardian told me that things would surely go back to how they’d been before, that one day we could live together peacefully. Pick us some mushrooms again. Let’s make the defense corps again, they said.”
“What happened
