Don’t give up, he told himself. But self-encouragement would not compensate for his lack of knowledge. As Goldof listened to Fremy blast the earth, he kept pondering.
“Hmm. Shallow thinking, Fremy.”
Meanwhile, Tgurneu was flying far above. This time it occupied the body of what was now just a crow-fiend head. After the Braves had attacked it and driven it away, the commander had been observing the situation in the lava zone from the air. With the crow-fiend’s sight, it could discern quite clearly what Adlet and the others were up to.
Fremy and Rolonia were blowing up the terrain to search underground. The very idea made Tgurneu laugh in derision. It would never hide Nashetania via such simplistic methods. Adlet was barking up the wrong tree, too. Tgurneu had tricked him into believing in a hieroform that didn’t exist.
I’ve won this one. How long would it take for them to realize their mistake? By then it would be too late. “…Hmm.” Then Tgurneu found Goldof outside the gem’s area of effect. He was hunched low, searching for something. So he still hasn’t given up, it noted with surprise.
Goldof’s presence was convenient indeed. The boy had lured the Braves into the trap, and his foolish behavior had confused the others, too, distracting them from what was really going on. Even now Goldof was trying to save Nashetania all by himself, withholding his valuable information from Adlet. There was no way in hell Goldof would manage to save her. The other Braves would soon kill him.
Just in case, Tgurneu had instructed its pawns to finish him off, but that would probably not even be necessary. Reassured, it continued surveying the scene below, eagerly anticipating the look on Goldof’s face when all his hopes were dashed.
Still hidden behind the rock hill, Goldof kept thinking. There was only one fiend power for hiding he knew about, and that was Nashetania’s stealth power. But Fremy had said that even that ability could only be used to hide a person for ten seconds at most. There was no way a fiend could hide for hours on end.
Or maybe Fremy was the seventh, and some stealth-fiends actually could hide for long periods of time. But Goldof was forced to reject that possibility, too. Adlet had said it was impossible to maintain that hypnosis for hours on end. If Fremy was the seventh, that meant Adlet was a real Brave, so if both of them said something was true, Goldof had to believe it was.
So then, what other way could there be?
Maybe there was a fiend that could put Nashetania in its stomach and then shrink itself. If so, then it would make sense that Adlet and Fremy couldn’t find Nashetania no matter how much they searched for her. Or maybe some fiend could expand the blade gem’s area of effect, meaning she was even further away. Various ideas popped up in his mind, but without any clues to go on, he couldn’t sort any of his ideas out. He realized that he was just wasting his time with wild speculations. He had no evidence, and no clues to guide him.
“…”
Once more, Goldof looked over toward Fremy and Rolonia as they kept blasting every section of earth. Maybe they were right and Nashetania was hiding underground. A burrowing fiend—that was a simple sort of ability, and certainly plausible. Some of Chamo’s slave-fiends had similar skills. He could just keep waiting for Fremy and Rolonia to find Nashetania. The moment they did, he’d attack them and take her to safety. That was the only idea he could come up with.
But would that be enough? Was the fiend that had swallowed Nashetania actually underground?
“…”
No. Goldof was sure that if it were, Tgurneu would have done something to stop Fremy. Since it would want to avoid Nashetania’s discovery, it would have been forced to act.
So she wasn’t be buried anywhere. At the very least, they weren’t going to find her using Fremy’s methods. There was some other kind of power keeping her hidden, and he had to find out what it was.
The wheels in his mind kept turning.
In the lava zone was a fiend. Looking up at the sky, gazing at the sun, it wondered, How much longer now until Chamo Rosso is dead? No matter how long this dragged on, at this point Chamo couldn’t last longer than an hour and a half. If the fiend could stay hidden until then, its mission would be complete. It would have helped to kill Chamo, the strongest of the Braves of the Six Flowers. It was eagerly awaiting that glorious moment. The death of a Brave was a fiend’s greatest joy.
The creature was a large lizard-fiend with stone skin. It stood stock-still, about eight hundred meters from Chamo’s location. It had been there for two hours with Nashetania inside its stomach. Its tongue was wrapped around her throat to keep her still, and Tgurneu had instructed it to immediately strangle her and crush her windpipe if she tried to say anything. Right now it seemed she was unconscious.
The fiend had no name. If it had to give one, it might say “specialist number twenty-six.” It was one of the fiends with unique abilities that Tgurneu had cultivated. About a century ago, its superior officer had ordered it to refine its talent for concealment, and it had spent the past century remaking its own body. This had made it fragile and markedly decreased its capacity for combat, but its stealth abilities had been honed until they were peerless.
About four hours earlier, the fiend had tucked Nashetania into its stomach. Then, when Nashetania had called out to Goldof for help, it had
