“What do you mean?” asked Fremy.
“When we were on that hill, I figured out what Tgurneu really is. Let me explain. We—me, you, and Rolonia—spent the whole day talking about Tgurneu’s mystery.”
“We did.”
“We used all the brains and powers we had at our disposal to try to figure out why the Saint’s Spike didn’t work. The conclusion we reached was that Tgurneu couldn’t have blocked the Saint’s poison with its own power.” Adlet outlined Rolonia’s analysis and how Tgurneu lacked anything to make it immune. “So that means that another fiend, or a Saint, was helping Tgurneu. But then, what kind of power could nullify the Saint’s poison? Some detoxification power? The power to die in his place? Even though I’ve inherited all of Atreau Spiker’s knowledge, and Fremy was one of the fiends herself, no matter how much we racked our brains, we couldn’t come up with any fiends that had powers like that.”
“So then…?”
“Then a Saint? Couldn’t be that, either. We went to the hill where Tgurneu first attacked us and searched underground, but there was no trace of any humans. No Saint helped. At this point, I was at the end of my rope. For a minute, I was about to give up.”
“We don’t need to hear ya gibber on about meow hard it was. Just get to the point,” said Hans.
“It was what Goldof did, just by chance, that gave me the big hint.” Adlet told them about how Goldof had tortured the fiend in the tunnel. “There was one thing it said that bothered me: If I had Commander Tgurneu’s power, you trash would be nothing.”
“What’s so odd about that?” asked Fremy.
“Don’t you think that’s a weird way to put it? Shouldn’t it be, ‘If Commander Tgurneu were here’? Why did that fiend choose to say, ‘If I had’? What it said led me to a hypothesis—that Tgurneu has the ability to give other fiends power.”
“I’ve never heard of an ability like that,” Fremy replied.
“We know of one other fiend that had the ability to give power to other fiends—the strongest fiend that ever lived, the one that was there at the Battle of the Six Flowers seven hundred years ago: Archfiend Zophrair. You’ve all heard of it, at least.” All of them, excepting Fremy, nodded. “Zophrair was called a controller-type fiend. Its ability was to amplify the powers of other fiends by giving them a part of its flesh. By doing that, it could take complete control of the fiend and make its body do whatever Zophrair wanted.”
“Yes, I do seem to remember reading something like that, but…,” said Mora.
“That’s when I realized the controller-type power could negate the Saints’ blood.”
“Wh-what do you mean?” asked Rolonia.
“Recall how the Saint’s poison affects a fiend’s body. First, it becomes deranged and overcome with pain. A fiend that’s been affected will writhe in agony, unable to think straight. Next, it’ll lose its sense of balance. Then it won’t be able to move. Finally, it begins to experience visual and auditory hallucinations, and then memory loss, and within five to ten days, it’s dead. In other words, the effects are like nerve toxin on a human. The poison destroys the brain and the motor center.”
Fremy lifted her head as if she’d just realized something.
Adlet continued. “But what if the poisoned fiend was under a controller-type fiend? What if it wasn’t moving under its own will, but was in fact a puppet? On the surface, it’d look like the Saint’s poison hadn’t worked, right?”
“You can’t mean…” Fremy trailed off.
“Tgurneu—or the three-winged fiend we thought was Tgurneu—was being used by a controller-type fiend. Tgurneu is the one manipulating the body of the three-winged fiend.”
“This so sudden, it’s hard to believe, though, meow.” Hans tilted his head.
“Wait,” said Fremy. “Do you even have any proof of that? If that three-winged fiend isn’t actually Tgurneu, then where was the real one? I’ve believed that was Tgurneu all this time. And when I think back, I just can’t believe that there was another fiend behind that one.”
“Of course you wouldn’t have realized,” said Adlet. “Tgurneu was always planning to get rid of you, so it made sure you wouldn’t know what it really was.”
“What is it, then? What is the real Tgurneu?” she pressed.
Adlet scanned the faces around him. It seemed the three who’d gone to the hill with him—Hans, Rolonia and Goldof—already understood. “Look at this.” He pulled a tiny, sand-covered object from a pouch at his waist. This was what the four of them had been searching for on the hill where they’d been attacked, the thing Goldof had stumbled upon.
“What’s that piece of trash?” asked Fremy.
“Meow, so that’s what it was. I can’t believe it. When ya told us to look fer this thing, I thought you’d gone crazy,” said Hans.
“This is a piece of the fig that Tgurneu was eating.” Adlet recalled when they had been fighting Tgurneu, and suddenly, the fiend had pulled out this fig and eaten it. At the time, he had seen a tiny piece fall from the corner of its mouth. “Fremy, do you remember when we explained what the controller does to take over other fiends?”
“I do.”
“This kind of fiend exercises its power by giving a part of its flesh to another. Basically, it makes the other eat part of its body.”
“No…”
“This isn’t just a fig. It’s a fiend,” said Adlet, and from a pouch at his waist, he pulled out the solution that reacted to fiend excretions. When he sprayed the fragment, it turned orange. “The fig that three-winged fiend had—that was the real Tgurneu.”
“This is unbelievable,” said Mora.
“Do you remember, Mora,” said Adlet, “when you were negotiating with Tgurneu, was it eating a fig like this?”
“I’m sorry. I truly cannot recall. I get the feeling it was, though.”
“Fremy,” Adlet said, addressing her next, “the
