“Rolonia! Don’t stop! Rip off his armor!” Adlet yelled, thrusting the spear again. Goldof jumped, and the lance thudded impotently into the ground.
Goldof thwarted all their attacks. Rolonia’s whip landed hit after hit, but his armor blocked every one, and she failed to reach his blood. It wasn’t due to the quality his armor—it was his reflexes that were truly fearsome. Rolonia was aiming very precisely for the gaps in Goldof’s defenses, but he warded off everything with only slight adjustments.
“Ngh!” Still intercepting her strikes, Goldof reached out to seize his spear. If Adlet gave him the slightest opportunity, Goldof would snatch it back. But if Adlet stopped attacking, Goldof was likely to target Rolonia instead.
“Adlet,” Goldof said, blocking Rolonia’s whip. “Don’t kill…Her Highness.”
“Enough of your bullshit!” Adlet yelled, stabbing out the spear. He was going for Goldof’s armor. If he could just rip off one plate, then Rolonia could finish him off with her whip.
“Whywhywhywon’tyoudieyouwon’tdiedon’ttouchAddydon’ttouchFremydon’ttouchChamoDIEEE!” Rolonia screamed. Then the trajectory of her whip changed. It flailed in circles around Goldof, trying to ensnare him.
This is bad, thought Adlet. She’s getting anxious.
“Her Highness…” Goldof began. Right when the whip was about to catch him, he leaped high, his large frame soaring just like Hans’s as he slipped through the tiniest gap in the whip’s path. When he landed, he charged for Adlet. The red-haired Brave whirled Goldof’s spear around frantically, but he was a moment too late. What hit Goldof’s shoulder was not the spearpoint, but the haft. Goldof’s large hand grasped the weapon.
Adlet instantly judged that he couldn’t hope to best Goldof in a wrestling match, and so he released the spear. Then, too fast for the eye to see, he pulled out a pain needle from a pouch at his waist. If he could stab Goldof with it, it would cause intense pain; no matter how tough Goldof was, he would be out of commission for a few seconds.
Adlet tried to aim for Goldof’s hand with the needle right as it grabbed the spear—and that was when he noticed.
“!” Goldof wasn’t going for the spear. He was going for the needle. Goldof released the spear and seized Adlet’s hand. Squeezing with unnatural strength, he forced Adlet to drop the needle, then quickly snatched it out of the air between two fingers and threw it.
“Rolonia!” There was no way Adlet’s cry would be fast enough.
Rolonia screamed and pressed a hand to her cheek, crumpling to the ground.
I have to protect her, he thought, pulling out a smoke bomb.
But Goldof immediately snatched back his spear, and then, out of the blue, said something very unexpected. “Listen…the enemy…isn’t the princess… It’s Fremy.” Then he thrust the blunt end of his spear into Adlet’s stomach.
After making sure Adlet was down, he turned away from the pair and escaped.
“…Damn it.” Adlet couldn’t chase after him. He couldn’t even move. Even if it were an option, leaving Rolonia was not. Somehow, he struggled to his feet and went over to pull the needle from Rolonia’s cheek.
“I-I’m okay, Addy.” Rolonia engaged her power as Saint of Spilled Blood to bleed the wound on her cheek. It looked like that was enough to get all the poison out.
They chased Goldof for a while, but he was too fast. Adlet and Rolonia lagged farther and farther behind. Goldof was running along that same one-kilometer-radius arc. After about a quarter way around the circle, they lost sight of him.
Then, from far away, they heard gunshots. Fremy was fighting—and the sounds were coming from the very direction Goldof had run. “This is bad,” said Adlet. “At this rate, Fremy’ll be fighting two-on-one.”
The two of them sped along over rock hills and the depressions between them. They could still hear Fremy’s gunshots.
“Fremy!” Adlet called. Standing at the top of a rock hill, he finally caught sight of her. She was in a narrow valley, at the center of a circle of fiends. Goldof didn’t seem to be anywhere nearby. “We’re joining in!”
There were about fifteen enemies. Surrounded, Fremy was dodging this way and that as she squared off against the fiends. Close-quarters combat was her greatest weakness.
“Fremy! Watch out!” he shouted.
She had lost her balance. Adlet readied his sword, holding it tight, and aimed. He twisted the hilt to launch the blade, the recoil knocking him backward. The sword impaled a fiend’s face, and Fremy took advantage of the opening it created to slip out of the ring and approach Adlet and Rolonia.
“I’llkillyouDIEI’llkillKILLyouifyoutouchFremyI’llkillyoushowmeyourGUTSyourottenfiends!” Rolonia wailed as she swung her whip around. The fiends were advancing toward her and Adlet. The two of them gave up on chasing Goldof and fought the coming enemies instead.
Fifteen minutes later, the enemy corpses lay at their feet. Of course, Nashetania was nowhere around, and neither was Goldof. Moments earlier, they had seen a flash of light in the direction the princess had gone and heard a noise like thunder. Now, both the sound and light were gone.
“There you are. So this is where you landed,” Adlet said, picking up the blade. Compressing the spring in his sword hilt, he clicked it back into place.
“…You saved me there. That was close,” Fremy said, and she breathed a heavy sigh.
“What happened with Goldof?” asked Rolonia. “He ran off in this direction.”
“He passed by me earlier, running after Nashetania. I would have liked to kill him, but the fiends were blocking my way, and I couldn’t get around. And there was also a tiny fiend following Nashetania.”
“A tiny fiend? I wonder what that was.”
“I don’t know. It was nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“Really? Well, I’m glad you’re safe, Fremy.” Rolonia breathed a sigh of relief.
Fremy gave Adlet a reproachful look. “You let both Nashetania and Goldof get away,” she said, arms crossed. “Unfortunately, Adlet, every one of your ideas has been a failure.”
“…Yeah.” He looked down.
He had insisted that Goldof had merely been deceived by Nashetania,
