Fremy was behind her in pursuit. “Mora! Stop right there!”
“If you’re going to shoot me, then shoot!” Mora ignored Fremy, grabbing a fiend. The muzzle of Fremy’s gun spewed fire, and a bullet skimmed Mora’s arm, a scrap of her sleeve dancing in the air.
“Fremy! If you kill Auntie, I’ll kill you!” Chamo cried from behind them. She was chasing them with her slave-fiends in tow.
“It looks like the Braves are attacking. Half of you, go slow them down,” Tgurneu ordered. Its subordinates inside the barrier obeyed and moved out. Mora tracked them with her powers, and when she scattered the fiends, Chamo’s slave-fiends finished them off. More and more of them came to stand in her way. The Saint of Mountains punched down a gigantic dog-fiend and then forced down a lion-fiend until its neck snapped. She plunged forward—ever forward.
“Mora! Go back to the Bud of Eternity!” Fremy’s bullet skimmed her shoulder.
Mora ignored it and kept on running. As long as Chamo was there, Fremy couldn’t kill her, and there were fiends attacking the gun-toting Saint, too.
“Auntie! This is so sudden! What’s going on?! Chamo won’t understand if you don’t explain!” The fiends came after Chamo, too, though she fought them off as she desperately chased after Mora.
The situation was chaos. Mora kept pressing forward, while behind her, Fremy attempted to stop her. Chamo was preventing Fremy from killing Mora while also trying to stop her charge. The fiends attacked all three of them indiscriminately. From the outside, the entire scene must have looked like a comedy.
As Mora fought, she employed her abilities to watch Tgurneu and its minions from afar. They were moving into formation. The one that seemed to be the highest-ranking among Tgurneu’s minions, the monkey-fiend, was giving orders. The commander was sitting on the tail of a reptile-fiend, hand on chin, observing. There were now eighty or more fiends standing in Mora’s way. These were not the sort of numbers she could handle on her own—but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t let Tgurneu get away.
“Go back, Mora! What are you trying to do?!” Fremy surged forward to stand in front of Mora, blocking her way.
“What else? I’m going to kill Tgurneu!” Mora screamed.
Fremy hesitated. If she had been certain that Mora was the seventh, she probably would have shot her, heedless of Chamo’s presence. But Mora was not attacking her allies—she was trying to attack Tgurneu. “Are you the enemy? Or are you just a hopeless idiot?”
“You’re in my way! Move!” Mora ordered, and quickly slipped by Fremy, blocking the shot that followed with one of her gauntlets. When her companion threw a bomb at her, Mora did not flinch.
“Just what is Mora trying to do?!” Fremy asked Chamo.
“Chamo doesn’t know, either!”
Mora yelled, “You two, help me out! Cut a path before me!” Fremy and Chamo were confused. But I won’t let that trouble me, she thought. She would not rely on anyone else now. She’d always known that she was the only one who could save Shenira.
At the foot of the mountain, by the barrier, Tgurneu turned toward the battlefield and smirked. “Mora, I can hear your voice from all the way over here. I think you should try not to get so worked up.” Only half of its forces were fighting. The rest were simply in formation, waiting patiently. Even as Mora approached, Tgurneu did not appear the least bit anxious.
“Auntie! What’re you trying to do, charging in all by yourself?! Do you want to die?!” Chamo yelled.
That was exactly what Mora intended to do—she would die if it meant her daughter’s life would be saved. Mora had regrets. Her own naive ideas—that if they all just worked together, they could kill Tgurneu and that she still had time before Shenira would die—had invited this situation. She would hesitate no longer. She would accept death, for her daughter’s sake.
How much time had passed? Mora’s sense of time was shot.
A massive fiend shaped like a reptile stood in her way, one of the higher-order fiends previously accompanying Tgurneu. She had been fighting it for a long time. She punched it over and over again, but it never went down. “Move!”
She would kill Tgurneu. That singular thought had consumed Mora for the past three years. She had trained her body, refined her techniques, and sparred with the strongest warriors in the world to compensate for her lack of experience in real battle. Together with Willone, Saint of Salt, she had created a barrier to entrap Tgurneu. With Liennril, Saint of Fire, she had created the ultimate weapon to defeat Tgurneu. But all of that did not diminish the anxiety in her heart.
Mora had told Willone that she didn’t plan to kill one of the Braves of the Six Flowers in order to save her daughter’s life. However, Mora had known all along that no matter what happened to her, she couldn’t abandon her daughter. If Tgurneu escaped now, she would slay one of the Braves.
“Chamo, retreat! We should give up on Mora!” Fremy yelled. She lobbed bombs at the approaching fiends, running from the attacks. “Mora is going to kill herself! If that’s what she wants, then let her do it!”
“No! Chamo’s taking Auntie back! You just run away by yourself!”
Fremy had already given up trying to shoot Mora. She had her hands full with the enemies swarming toward her.
“You’re in my way! Silence! Don’t bar my path!” Was Mora yelling at the fiends or at Chamo?
She plunged her hand into the mouth of the reptile-fiend that loomed before her, seizing its tongue. She dug her feet into the ground and let out an earth-shattering shriek, hurling the fiend over her shoulder. Another hundred
