“Fremy! Shoot it down!” Adlet yelled. Holding the Saint’s Spike in his left hand, he threw poison needles with his right. Fremy fired a shot. The crow’s head dodged the bullet, but a few of Adlet’s needles hit the target. Still, even as the crow’s head lost its balance in the air, it flapped on desperately to escape.
“The head is its main body!” Adlet yelled, hurling the Saint’s Spike. Tgurneu just barely managed to avoid the deadly missile whizzing past its wing.
“S-someone, come to me! Stop the Braves!” Tgurneu yelled. But no one was there to reply. “Damn it, no one’s coming?! You incompetents!”
It was now too far away for Adlet’s needles to reach. Fremy kept up the attack, and a number of her shots grazed their mark, but none were good enough to bring it down. Tgurneu continued on, disappearing into the distant sky.
“…Damn it!” Eyes still on the sky, Adlet punched the ground. Steam rose from his fist thanks to the heat of the earth. They had missed their best chance to kill Tgurneu.
Now that it was over, he went to go pick up the Saint’s Spike he’d thrown. These were his strongest weapons, and he had only three left. He had to take care of them.
“I’m relieved. I thought you really would join forces with Tgurneu,” Rolonia said once Adlet had returned with the Saint’s Spike in hand. She seemed reassured.
“Of course I wouldn’t. The enemy of my enemy isn’t my friend.”
“Somehow, though, it seems more pathetic than I imagined.” Rolonia gazed off in the direction Tgurneu had gone.
“That’s an act. It’ll casually do that sort of thing to make us let our guard down,” said Fremy. “So what do you think about what Tgurneu said, Adlet?”
“I don’t know. It felt like a pack of lies, but I also get the impression that some of it was true. At the very least, though, it was not actually going to cooperate with us. It was looking for an opportunity to kill us.”
“Yeah…I picked up on that, too,” Rolonia agreed with a nod.
“It’s not even worth considering,” said Fremy. “Everything that comes out of Tgurneu’s mouth is lies. The impostors are Nashetania and Goldof, and the mastermind behind it is Tgurneu. It came to us with an offer to work together to make us let down our guard. Dozzu doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“That would be the natural assumption, wouldn’t it?” said Rolonia.
“There’s no way that two different fiends would separately come up with the exact same plan,” said Fremy.
“No,” said Adlet. “If Tgurneu were just coming to kill us, it wouldn’t have had to approach us all alone. It’d just have to send its whole army here. At the very least, there was some reason that Tgurneu couldn’t order its minions to do it. Much of what it said just might be true.”
“But how much?” Rolonia asked. Adlet was silent.
It was clear a complex situation was forming within the fiends’ ranks. But who was against who, and why? Was Nashetania really Dozzu’s assassin, or was she working for Tgurneu after all? Who was Goldof? Was he Tgurneu’s follower or Dozzu’s? Or was he actually a real Brave? Their plight was nothing but unknowns.
But they weren’t going to win this through hesitation. Adlet had to figure out what to prioritize and what to leave until later and then act. “We’ll kill Nashetania and save Chamo. That should help us figure out what’s true.”
Fremy and Rolonia nodded. The trio climbed up the rock hill and started running once more.
Adlet, Fremy, and Rolonia resumed searching for Nashetania. First, they went to the spot where Nashetania had disappeared, according to Tgurneu. It was the same place Adlet and Fremy had checked out once already. There were two fiends’ corpses, burned up by lightning, along with evidence that Nashetania had summoned her blades. But nothing else. The three of them carefully searched the ground and surveyed the area but didn’t discover anything that seemed like it might be a clue. Rolonia licked the earth but couldn’t detect anything from the blood of the scorched fiends.
“There’s nothing here. It’s just these fiends’ bodies,” Fremy said grumpily.
“Tgurneu was just trying to trick us, after all,” said Rolonia. “It has to be that.”
What the fiend had said rose in the back of Adlet’s head. Not a fiend’s power. Tgurneu had suggested that what hid Nashetania was the power of a hieroform belonging to Goldof. Should he believe that?
“Let’s split into two groups,” he said. “I’ll try asking Mora about hieroforms and what kinds have been passed down in the royal family of Piena. If they did have any, I’ll ask what methods we could use to break them. You two, search any places she might be hiding.”
“But there’s nowhere…” said Rolonia.
“Underground, I suppose,” said Fremy. “There isn’t anything else.”
“How can we search underground? If we could use Chamo’s power…”
“It’s okay, Rolonia. I’ll find her,” said Fremy, and she created a bomb in her palm. The object was oddly shaped, like a thin spike. She tossed it, and it landed upright in a crack in the rock. After a loud boom, the explosive had gouged out a section of the hill. “If she’s hidden underground, that’s convenient for me. I’ll scour the area with my bombs. I’ll bury her alive and then torture her to death.”
“Hold on,” said Adlet. “There aren’t any other possibilities?”
“Well…” said Fremy, “Rolonia said that there were fiends lurking near Chamo, didn’t she? She could be in one of their stomachs.”
Nashetania had used the technique of hiding inside a fiend’s belly back in the Phantasmal Barrier—though it hadn’t been herself but Leura, Saint of Sun.
“Let’s kill all the fiends within the gem’s area of effect and tear open their stomachs,” Fremy suggested. “Is there anywhere else she could have hidden?”
The three of them kept thinking. Nashetania’s modus operandi was to do
