All at once, the battle turned into a chaotic melee. Now that Chamo’s slave-fiends could no longer fight, the assault began from all sides. Adlet and his allies frantically dodged the attacks while also defending against Tgurneu. Only Chamo stood frozen as she watched her slave-fiends writhe in agony.
“Chamo! Snap out of it!” Adlet yelled as he protected the girl from the advancing creatures.
But Chamo couldn’t hear him, senseless to everything going on around her. She clung to a giant slug slave-fiend, trying to wipe off the silver powder stuck to its body. “What the heck is this?! It’s hot! Really hot!” Smoke rose from Chamo’s hands as she brushed off the monster’s body.
Instantly, Adlet understood. That silver powder was emitting heat. Atreau had taught him about a certain kind of metal that radiated an intense heat when it came in contact with water. The powder from Tgurneu’s bombs was most likely that metal. Chamo’s slave-fiends were all aquatic, and heat was fatal to them. The fiend commander’s secret weapon could render their party’s most powerful fighter useless.
Adlet scanned the area. Rolonia was under intense fire, surrounded by Tgurneu and its horde, while Mora and Fremy somehow managed to protect her.
“Chamo! Make your slave-fiends fight! At this rate, we’ll all die!” he yelled.
“No! They’re all hurt! If they don’t get treated now, they’ll die!” Bawling like a child, she opened her mouth wide and yelled, “Nnngh! Guys! Come back! Come back!”
All the swamp creatures, still covered in silver powder, disappeared into Chamo’s mouth one after another. When she sucked them down, she moaned in pain, and then vomited up boiling white mucus. Inside the mire in her stomach, she was washing away the metal. “Come back, guys! At this rate, you’ll all get torn to pieces!” One by one, the slave-fiends disappeared from the battlefield.
Without thinking, Adlet yelled, “Chamo! Don’t call them back!”
“Shut up!” Chamo sucked up a few more and then vomited up another round of mucus.
“Think about our situation! They’re going to kill us!”
“Shut up shut up shut up! I don’t care!” Chamo stomped and yelled, and the attacking battalion flooded toward her. Adlet did all he could to hold them back. “Chamo’s pets are wounded!” she cried. “All those cute little guys, they’re crying, ‘It hurts, it hurts!’ Who cares about you?! They’re in pain!” As the last of the slave-fiends vanished from the battlefield, three hundred fiends stormed at the Braves of the Six Flowers.
The party had completely lost control. It took everything they had just to hold their ground against the surrounding fiends. Tgurneu stopped fighting and withdrew from the crowd to observe the battle. “You made quiet the blunder, Adlet,” it said. “You should have run. You should have known that you weren’t ready to fight.”
“Damn it!” Adlet cut down a fiend that was charging him and then pointed his sword and Tgurneu.
“Don’t, Adlet! You’ll die!” Fremy yelled. With her hands full fighting fiends, she couldn’t back him up.
“Stop! You cannot hope to match such a foe!” Mora shouted. But Adlet did not lower his sword.
Tgurneu smiled. “You shouldn’t be so reckless. I recommend you flee.”
“GAAAAAHH!” Adlet howled and sprinted for Tgurneu. To any onlooker, it would surely look like he had lost it and was charging in headlong. No matter how Adlet might struggle, he could not hope to stand up to one of the three commanders. However, Atreau’s former trainee had a plan. His seemingly reckless charge was an act to make the fiend drop its guard. Tgurneu would be sure to get careless. The greater its advantage, the less attention it would pay to what was going on—and if it thought that its opponent had lost his head, then all the more so.
“I’m disappointed,” said Tgurneu as it reached out to strike with a knifehand. It easily blocked Adlet’s charge, sending him rolling to the ground. The boy bounded right back to his feet and lunged again.
“Meow! What the hell’re ya doin’?!” Hans darted over in an attempt to protect him.
Adlet shot him a look. Their eyes met for just an instant. Hans should be able to figure it out—Adlet was distracting Tgurneu, acting as bait. Hans would understand and do what Adlet needed him to do.
Tgurneu thrust Adlet backward and sent him sprawling to the ground. Three fiends closed in from behind, while two more fiends on his left and right blocked off his escape. Adlet stood in place, ignoring the fiends that surrounded him, and pointed his sword at Tgurneu.
“Watch meowt!” Hans yelled, vaulting into the circle of fiends. Anyone would think that Adlet had lost his head and that his companion was trying to save him. But Adlet caught him mid-leap, and Hans used the Brave’s shoulders as a springboard to rocket toward Tgurneu.
“!”
The fiend was taken by surprise. It took a defensive stance in an attempt to block Hans’s sword—but Hans wasn’t trying to attack.
“Ya fell for it, meow.” He’d actually aimed for the cuff digging into Tgurneu’s left arm and the torn end of the chain that hung off it. Midair, Hans sheathed his sword, grabbed the chain, and yanked it with all his might, restraining Tgurneu’s left arm. At the same time, Adlet threw a smoke bomb at his feet. The fiends around him all froze, and in moments Adlet escaped from the circle.
Tgurneu tried to pry off Hans with its free hand, but Mora dashed in and restrained it to protect Hans. Now that both of Tgurneu’s arms were pinned down, Adlet ran straight at the fiend, pulling out the secret tool hidden within his left pauldron—a spike about twenty centimeters long. It looked like just a big nail, nothing irregular about it. But fitted onto the tip of that spike was the blood of a certain Saint.
It was common knowledge that Saints’ blood was poison to fiends, but up until this point, none save the Saint of Spilled Blood had made use of their blood as a weapon. To kill a high-order fiend
