Adlet was dashing haphazardly through the ruins. He’d gained some distance from his pursuers, looking for his opportunity to take the fake command center by surprise again and stick the light gem on the leopard-fiend.
“Wait, Fremy! Dön’t ally yourself with the hümans!”
“Being on their sïde is going to get you kïlled!” She could hear the fiends’ voices here and there. They had been calling for her surrender for about fifteen minutes now.
Adlet said to her, “You get that they’re not actually concerned about you, right, Fremy? They just want to use you.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Fremy replied. But Adlet’s ears didn’t miss the trembling in her voice. She was rattled. Tgurneu must have wanted to attack her emotionally to make her screw up.
Tgurneu always has been the worst kind of heel , Adlet thought, hating Tgurneu all over again.
“…Yes, there’s no way the fiends could care about me,” Fremy muttered as if trying to reassure herself.
Abruptly, Adlet wondered—though it was true Tgurneu was the worst kind of heel, was it the case there really wasn’t one shred of affection in its heart? Fremy had said the fiends all hated her. But did they all really loathe her? Some of them might actually care for her, in their heart of hearts.
Just like the white lizard-fiend that died to protect her.
The thought struck him that maybe Fremy would be happier if she returned to the fiends, but he shook his head, tossing it from his mind. Fremy hated Tgurneu. She had sworn to keep fighting as long as it lived. Even if there were some fiends out there who did care for Fremy, that didn’t matter. Adlet would kill Tgurneu and defeat the Evil God. That was the only way to make Fremy happy.
Above their heads, an aerial fiend was yelling—not at Fremy, but at the seventh…Hans. “Where äre you? What are you döing, seventh?! You don’t mean to bétray us for the Braves, do you?! Betrayal will not be fórgiven! If you réveal even part of the truth to the Braves, pünishment from Cómmander Tgurneu will be instantaneous!” The aerial fiend continued, “Prótect Cómmander Tgurneu! Prévent the Braves’ attacks and kill them all! You should underständ that if by any chänce something happens to Cómmander Tgurneu, your loved one will die!”
So Tgurneu doesn’t know where Hans is, either? Adlet thought. Had Chamo gotten him, or had he concluded the situation was disadvantageous and fled? Or was he thinking about saving that “loved one”?
“That could be a lie—Tgurneu’s attempt to confuse us. Ignore it,” warned Adlet.
About twenty minutes must have passed since then. Adlet, Fremy, and Dozzu were hiding in the shadows, avoiding the enemy’s pursuit. The fiends were still crying out for Fremy’s surrender, and she was still ignoring them. Just as Adlet was thinking Tgurneu’s plan to unsettle Fremy had failed, he suddenly heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice. He looked all around, searching for the source. But no one was there.
“And so we meet…unknown warrior from a thousand years in the future. I am known as the Saint of the Single Flower.”
The voice carried dignity, benevolence, and bottomless strength. For a moment, Adlet thought the Saint of the Single Flower had been revived, escaped her chains in the Temple of Fate, and was about to join them. But he quickly realized—the voice he’d just heard had come from the crest on his right hand.
Fremy and Dozzu both looked calm. Their ears were focused on the chatter of the fiends echoing around them. Only Adlet had heard that message.
The next words emerging from the crest chilled Adlet to the bone. “Brave warrior. I bestow upon you the seventh crest. The world…” Then, just as suddenly as the voice had come, it was gone. Dumbfounded, Adlet waited for it to continue.
He was certain she’d just said I bestow upon you the seventh crest . Adlet looked at the crest shining on his right hand. It couldn’t be… This is the seventh crest? It couldn’t be… I’m the seventh?
There’s no way , he thought. But the words from the crest had been mysteriously convincing. Adlet was certain they were true—not based on any reason, but instinctively.
His crest was different from the others. It had a peculiar, special power, unlike the other Crests of the Six Flowers. Which was evidence in favor of the revelation that Adlet was the seventh.
He was the one. There was no longer any room for doubt.
✦ ✦ ✦
“All right. That should do it,” Tgurneu muttered, and then the flower petal on its tongue instantly disappeared. The petal had been created by the Saint of the Single Flower one thousand years ago, a hieroform that controlled the seventh crest. Whoever held the flower petal could choose who to give the seventh crest. The one who held the petal could also impart to the bearer the message left by the Saint of the Single Flower a thousand years ago. Tgurneu had only let Adlet hear the first part.
Tgurneu had revealed the closely guarded secret to Adlet: that he was the seventh.
“We can’t be wasting time. Number seventeen, it’s time to go to work.”
The minion that stepped forward in response to Tgurneu’s call was a tentacled caterpillar-fiend, so repulsive a human could hardly stand to look at it. It possessed powerful healing abilities. In exchange for lacking even the slightest offensive capabilities, it could heal the wounds of any fiend. What was truly awesome about it was that it could even heal damage to a fiend’s core to some degree.
Two fiends had been designated as a number seventeen. One was installed beside the wolf-fiend so it could heal Fremy in case anything happened. The other was with Tgurneu.
“Now then, this is an important task. Failure is not permitted. Treat this mission with the utmost care,” Tgurneu said. Atop its head were horns roughly the shape of a leafy strawberry top, and one of the vines growing from them sharpened into a needle. Tgurneu used it to pierce its own body.
✦ ✦ ✦
Learning that the crest he bore was the seventh confused Adlet, and he was given no time to calm his mind before the next disaster came bearing down on them.
Fremy noticed he wasn’t himself and started to say something, when suddenly, she was spitting blood.
“Fremy!” The moment Adlet saw it, he completely forgot about the voice he’d just heard. Keeping Fremy safe was everything. All this business with the seventh crest was second or third priority.
Looking at Fremy’s chest, Adlet found a strange, red, ring-shaped mark there.
He’d seen this mark before.
It was about a year ago, back when he’d been spending day and night in training under Atreau Spiker. Atreau had been researching fiends the whole time, too.
One day, someone had sent a number of fiend corpses to Atreau with an explanation that a soldier had found them in hiding in the Verdant Land. No sooner had the soldier discovered them than one pierced its own chest with its claw and died. The others began spitting blood at the exact same moment. The soldier had apparently been confused as to why the fiends had died without a fight.
Though the acquisition of corpses was a common event, Adlet wondered what kind of connections Atreau had to get them. Puzzled, Adlet had waited for Atreau to finish inspecting the bodies.
After some time, Atreau had pointed at them and said, “It seems certain fiends have a strange power.”
“Oh. But they all have strange powers, don’t they?”
“It’s not the ability that’s strange. It’s the purpose.” Atreau showed him the corpse. There was nothing odd about the one that had killed itself with its claws. There were, however, strange marks on the chests of the others, shaped like circles of red thread. “The fiends had something done to them. First of all, I found a kind of parasite in the one that stabbed itself. And all the other stiffs had strange tumors inside. Those tumors had some power that was the cause of death. A fiend used its ability on them.”
“What kind of ability?”
“It’s obvious to me that it kills a whole bunch of other fiends when a certain one kicks the bucket. Now then, what would be the purpose of such an ability? Were they afraid of a secret getting out…?” Atreau mused.
Figuring it was nothing important, Adlet had left Atreau to go back to his training. Following that, Atreau had continued researching this chain death but ultimately came to the conclusion that he wouldn’t gain much in the way of results and gave it up.