The rocky hills of the volcanic region made running difficult. Adlet and Rolonia jumped over ditches and dodged geysers of hot steam as they pushed northward. After about five minutes of running, they heard gunshots. Fremy was battling fiends.
They arrived at the rendezvous point Hans had indicated. Fremy had taken up a position at the summit of a rock mound, shooting down at the fiends attacking her from below. “Nashetania ran west! Follow her!” she yelled.
Adlet didn’t hesitate. He turned away from her and headed west. Scanning around from the top of the highest peak in the area, he could see something moving in the shadow of a mound about three hundred meters away. “You’re not getting away!” he said, breaking into a sprint to give chase. He found Nashetania among the twenty fiends speeding across the rock hills. She was riding the back of a wolf-type, glancing behind her as she fled.
When Adlet descended the rock hill, two fiends rushed up from below to attack him. A spider-fiend spewed thread at him, while a big snake-fiend spat fire. Adlet sprang backward, but the rock beneath him crumbled where he landed, sending him tumbling down the slope.
“What are you doing, idiot?!” Fremy swiftly sniped the spider.
“Sorry.” Adlet gave her a quick apology as he scrambled to his feet, dodging an attack from the snake-fiend before slicing its head off. The uneven footing of the volcanic terrain made this bout particularly challenging. It restricted the agility characteristic of his fighting style.
“Addy! Incoming!” Rolonia cried. Another fiend approached him from the west.
“You take it, Rolonia!” Adlet said, and he darted past the enemy to pursue Nashetania. She was probably sending her forces out a little at a time just to slow them down while she and her fiends focused on escaping.
Rolonia pulled out her whip. When a fiend’s claws were almost to her neck, her shriek ripped through the lava zone. “Don’tmoveyourottendirtyvileverminI’llstopyourbreathI’llstopyourheart!” In an instant, her whip had slashed bloody, gushing ribbons into the fiend.
The three of them kept on sprinting after the swarm, closing the distance bit by bit.
Adlet ran side by side with Fremy and apologized. “I’m sorry, Fremy.”
“?”
“If I’d listened to you and been more cautious, things wouldn’t have ended up like this.”
“Don’t be stupid. What’s the point of apologizing to me?” she replied, sounding uncomfortable. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not angry, and I don’t care.”
Adlet nodded and kept his pace.
He realized that Nashetania was running in an arc. She was drawing a half-moon with a one-kilometer radius, the pit where Chamo lay at its center. Adlet had originally been heading north, but now he was already turned in the opposite direction. Just as Mora had sensed, Nashetania couldn’t move more than a kilometer away.
They were now within a hundred meters of their target. Fremy manifested a bomb in her palm and plugged it into the barrel of her gun. She fired, and the explosive fell ten meters off from Nashetania’s side. Adlet made a simple sling with some rope to launch another bomb at the fleeing traitor.
“Is her plan just to keep running like this until Chamo dies?” Fremy asked as the chase continued.
“Maybe. But at this rate, we’ll catch up!” Rolonia replied.
She was right—if they kept bombarding Nashetania to slow her down while they pursued her, they would eventually catch her. Against just Nashetania and twenty-odd fiends, the three of them were sure to win.
“Something’s fishy, Adlet,” said Fremy.
“Yeah, I think so, too,” he agreed. They halted their assault, slowed down, and ran just fast enough as to not let Nashetania slip away entirely.
“What’s wrong? We’re not going to fight them?” Rolonia was confused.
Nashetania would know that she could not evade them forever just by running around the one-kilometer circle, and there was no way she could keep defending herself with just twenty fiends. If that was all, then she practically showed up just to get herself killed. But Nashetania had to have something else up her sleeve, maybe a special means of getting away. As they continued tailing her, Adlet pondered what the trick might be.
Fremy had clearly noticed, too, and tried to puzzle out what Nashetania was thinking. “This feels like a diversion to me, Adlet.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Is she waiting to be attacked?”
“…Maybe to spring the same kind of trap as the one she pulled on Chamo,” Fremy suggested.
But Adlet didn’t think that was possible. On the way to the Howling Vilelands, he had journeyed together with Nashetania for eleven days. Once he had discovered that she was the impostor, he had reinspected himself and all his equipment, thinking she might have placed something on him during that time. But he’d found nothing odd. At the very least, she hadn’t set any traps on his person. Fremy and Nashetania had been in contact for only one day. It seemed unlikely that Nashetania would have had the time to sneak something on her, and this was the first time she had ever met Rolonia. Adlet figured that Chamo was the only one who had been loaded with a blade gem.
“Would there be any other reason for Nashetania to be such an obvious idiot?” asked Fremy.
That was when it hit him. “Fremy, have you been watching Nashetania this whole time?”
“No, I lost track of her a number of times…Oh. A transforming-type fiend?”
Adlet nodded.
Rolonia said, “Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean that the Nashetania we’re chasing right now might be a fake, a transforming-type fiend in disguise,” Adlet clarified.
Some fiends could transform into any shape they wanted, and there were more than a few of them. Adlet had encountered one such creature himself during the Phantasmal Barrier fight. A shape-shifter wouldn’t be able to transform into Adlet or Hans. In order to create the perfect replica of someone, the fiend needed either that
