Fremy attacked the fake command center once more, drawing their attention with smoke grenades and whittling them down with her bombs to break holes in their defenses.
The lower-ranking fiends pressed close together like a wall to protect the wolf. From behind, the wolf watched over the fight calmly. Beside it were the red number twenty-four and the leopard-fiend, and Adlet and Dozzu were targeting those two. Fremy defended her allies from the rear with her weapon at the ready.
Adlet pulled some vials from one of his pouches, wedging them between his fingers to throw them at the tight cluster of fiends. They burst in the air, raining down a sticky white liquid that clung to the creatures’ bodies. What Adlet had doused them in was a special adhesive mucus. Once it was stuck on you, it was hard to get off. Adlet had also explained to the others beforehand that it restricted movement, and the effect would last for some time.
“Thank you for the help!” Dozzu cried as it fired off a lightning strike. Unable to block it, several fiends were sizzled. Without missing a beat, Fremy wove through them, gun blazing.
“You can’t kill me using something like that, Fremy.” The wolf-fiend dodged her bullets with ease. “Stop this already. How long are you going to continue this meaningless fight?” it asked.
Ignoring it, Adlet threw mucus vials at the wolf-fiend, but it flicked them far away with its tentacles.
One of the bottles exploded in the air, though, splashing a little bit of the mucus onto the leopard-fiend. Fremy was relieved—the plan had worked. Getting the mucus on the leopard had been the goal of this attack.
It was only a tiny bit, not enough to hinder nor concern the fiend, but if they stuck the light gem onto that mucus, it wouldn’t come off easily. Now Adlet just had to nonchalantly approach the leopard-fiend and attach the light gem, and their objective would be complete.
But they couldn’t linger here long. They had to keep moving, or they wouldn’t be able to leave.
“It’s no use! Just the mucus isn’t gonna stop ’em! We’ll come back for another pass!” Adlet yelled. The three pulled back for the time being and made to flee from the fiend formation again.
The fiends of the fake command center pursued them in an attempt to cut off their retreat. A fiend came swooping down on Fremy from above the canopy.
She was about to shoot it down when the wolf-fiend yelled, “Everyone, stop fighting!” Its minions chasing them froze.
The unexpected change in attitude surprised Fremy, and she turned. Adlet and Dozzu stopped, too, watching to see where this would go.
“There’s no more reason to hide it. Fremy, you are the Black Barrenbloom, the secret weapon sent by me to kill the Braves of the Six Flowers.” They knew it was just the wolf-fiend pretending to be Tgurneu, but still, the real Tgurneu was behind this. Fremy wondered just what it had planned.
“My idea was to send you, the Black Barrenbloom, to the Braves and have the seventh protect you. But my plan has failed. Your identity has been exposed. Your role…is done now.”
“What are you trying to say?” Fremy asked without thinking.
“I’m sure you must hate me. Of course you would. It’s true that I hurt you. But I had no choice. I had to make you a real Brave, so I had to make you hate all fiends. I didn’t really want to hurt you.”
“…Shut up.” Rage welled up from the pit of her stomach—at Tgurneu, who had hurt her so much, who had used her so utterly at its whims and now claimed that it’d had no choice. Even knowing that what stood before them was just a fiend pretending to be Tgurneu, it was unforgivable.
“If we continue fighting like this, I’ll be forced to kill you. But I don’t want that. You’ve worked hard and served me better than anyone. You’ve gone through more suffering for my sake than any other fiend. Why would I want to kill someone like that?
“Leave the Braves’ side. Come back to me—to where you really belong.”
“How can you say that now…?” Fremy had made up her mind to ignore anything the wolf-fiend said, but the rage boiling over in her now would not allow that.
When she raised her gun, Adlet said, “Don’t listen to it! We’re running!”
“…I’m sorry.” Using her bombs to hold the enemies back, Fremy ran weaving through the ruins. From behind, she could hear the impatient call of the wolf-fiend. “Don’t ally yourself with the humans anymore, Fremy! That’s not going to make you happy! My subordinates actually thought of you as a comrade! They were all just pretending to hate you because I ordered it!” The wolf-fiend kept shouting. “Are you going to kill the friends who care for you?!”
“I told you to shut up!” Fremy threw a bomb at the wolf, but the other fiends shielded their leader. Some died, and the blast flung their bodies back. Until a moment ago, she’d thought nothing of their deaths. But now, it made Fremy turn away.
“Are you okay, Fremy?” Adlet looked at her with concern.
Do I look that awful? Fremy wondered. “I’m all right. I’m not going to have a change of heart because of that thing’s wheedling. Not after we’ve come so far,” Fremy said firmly. She was trying to shake off her hesitation by saying it out loud.
✦ ✦ ✦
Fremy kept fighting after that, but the fiends stopped attacking her. Instead, they all started calling out to her, begging her to come back.
A fiend that had, long ago, jeered at her and called her a half-breed, said, “I’m sörry, Fremy. I häd the wrong ídea about you. I—” Before it could finish speaking, Fremy shot it in the face.
A fiend that had once despised and tormented her family pleaded, “Fremy, I have to ápologize to y—” Before it could finish, Fremy blasted it to bits with a bomb.
“I was—under örders. To hürt you. So I did—” said a fiend from above. This one had tried to devour Fremy when she was a child. She shredded its wings with her bullets without a second thought.
Don’t worry about it , Fremy told herself. Tgurneu was just telling her what she wanted to hear in an attempt to deceive her.
“Stop ït! Don’t kill any möre of our friends! Why do you sïde with thé humans? They won’t accept—”
Without a word, Fremy fired again and again, silencing every fiend that stepped forward to speak to her.
Not long ago, she might have considered betraying the Braves.
Since that day six months ago when Tgurneu and her family had discarded her, Fremy had constantly wished that it was just another part of Tgurneu’s plan. She’d been waiting for the fiends to tell her I was only pretending to have abandoned you. I actually did care about you .
Even knowing they were lying, even knowing their kindness was false, she might have accepted their words.
“Fremy, I would hate to think…” Dozzu trailed off.
“Relax, Dozzu. I am absolutely not going to betray you,” Fremy said flatly. Bearing the pain in her heart, she kept on firing.
It’s strange , she mused. How could she so easily spurn their pleas for her surrender? What was different about her now compared to then? Adlet’s face rose in her mind. She recalled how he’d kept on fighting to protect her in the Temple of Fate, even when she’d been trying to shoot him.
She shook her head, driving out any distractions. This wasn’t the time to be thinking about that.