“Roger.” Chamo nodded, surprisingly obedient.
“The humidity in this forest is always fairly high,” Adlet explained. “It’s right by the sea, so the sea wind carries the moisture over here. If you can suddenly lower the air temperature within the forest, you could create fog instantaneously.”
“Wait,” said Mora.
She just keeps interrupting over and over, thought Adlet.
“Then how would you lower the temperature so quickly?” she asked. “That would also be impossible without a large barrier created by the Saint of Ice or the Saint of Snow.”
“You’re a hardheaded woman, Mora,” he said. “They didn’t lower the temperature. They raised it.”
Mora was silent for a while. And then she lifted her head as if having realized something.
“It really was a magnificent plan,” said Adlet. “The scale of the idea was extraordinary. To think that they would control nature itself in order to ensnare me.”
“The Saint of Sun…Leura,” murmured Fremy.
Exactly right, thought Adlet.
Immediately after departing on his journey, he’d heard rumors of the Brave-killer. Famous warriors had been assassinated one after another: Matra, the master archer; Houdelka, the swordsman; Athlay, the Saint of Ice; and Leura, the Saint of Sun. When Adlet had first heard that story, one of those had felt out of place: Leura, the Saint of Sun. Though she had wielded incredible power as a Saint, she was so old, she’d have been incapable of fighting. He’d wondered why the killer would have targeted her. And then Adlet had met Fremy. When he found out she was the killer, he’d asked her, Did you kill Leura, the Saint of Sun, too?
Fremy had replied, I don’t know anything about that. Of course she didn’t. It had been six months prior that Fremy’s fiend comrades had betrayed her. She hadn’t killed any potential Braves after that. Leura had gone missing just over a month before all this began. Fremy had not been involved in the assassination of the Saint of Sun.
So then, who had done it?
“Let me ask you one thing, Mora,” said Adlet. “Would it have been possible for Leura, the Saint of Sun, to raise the temperature of this whole area? I bet it would. As we all know, she is famous for being powerful enough to roast an entire castle, if she pushes herself to the limit.”
“I-it would be…possible,” replied Mora.
“Would she still be able to do that now, even at her age?”
“Leura’s lower body has wasted away, and she can’t move from her chair,” said Fremy, in place of the faltering Mora. “But her power over the Spirit of Sun has not been affected by her physical decline.”
Adlet nodded and then entered the crux of his deductions. “Let me explain the seventh’s plan. First, the seventh and their allies abducted Leura, the Saint of Sun, and forced her to cooperate. They probably took her family hostage or something to that effect. Leura raised the temperature of the whole area, as she had been instructed. Most likely, over the course of nearly a month.” Adlet looked over the faces of all present. “You should all remember that when we arrived here, you thought it was unusually hot, right? That was Leura’s power.” Everyone present remembered the previous day’s events and nodded.
“Next, the impostor’s allies attacked the fort and killed all the soldiers in it, and one of them pretended to be a soldier there. Or perhaps some of the soldiers at the fort were allies of the seventh to begin with; we don’t know which. Then the mole told the Braves of the Six Flowers about the Phantasmal Barrier and gave them fake instructions.”
“What if one among us knew how the barrier was really activated?” asked Mora.
“Then the plan would have failed,” said Adlet. “But the chances of that were low, because the king who built it was secretive and told only a limited number of people that the barrier even existed.”
“And then?” asked Mora.
“The seventh used these fiends to lure us to the temple, and when I opened the temple door, they sent a signal. At that signal, a nearby fiend and ally of the seventh killed Leura.” The one who’d sent the signal was the transforming fiend that had been near the temple. Adlet figured that strange laugh had meant it was time to kill Leura. “Once Leura was dead, her power of sun terminated. The temperature suddenly dropped and the fog appeared. We were completely fooled into believing that the barrier had been activated.” At the time, Adlet had felt a shiver run down his spine. But that had not been his mind playing tricks—the air temperature really had been dropping. At the time, he hadn’t even considered that the change in temperature had been part of the enemy’s trap.
“After that, the seventh approached the altar nonchalantly,” Adlet continued, “using our confusion as cover to activate the barrier for real at that point. The rest requires no explanation. All that was left was to wait patiently until I became suspect and everyone decided I was the seventh.”
“Wait! What proof do you have?” demanded Mora. “This is all nothing more than supposition!”
“I’m still not done yet,” said Adlet. Fremy had finished treating him. He tried to stand, but Hans stopped him.
“You leave this part to meow,” said Hans. “You just need to do the explainin’.” Adlet squatted down with the tree trunk at his back. One by one, Hans searched the bodies of the fiends scattered about the area.
Adlet continued. “Now then, the final problem: Where did the seventh hide Leura’s body? She couldn’t have been killed far from the temple, because she had to be close enough for the killer to hear the fiend’s screech that was their signal. The seventh couldn’t be loitering around with Leura’s body, either. There was the possibility that they would run into Mora or Hans or Chamo. They could bury it, but it still might be discovered that way—because we have Chamo.” Chamo’s power was the ability to control the fiends that lived in her stomach. If she had sent
