Hans picked up the fragments of the crushed flash grenade, and Adlet sliced at him. Hans rolled backward to avoid his blade. Hans fumbled with the shards, trying to generate a flash, but it was no use. It was beyond repair.
Adlet checked his pouches again, making sure he had broken every single tool that could be used to call their allies.
“I wön’t let you!” A fiend’s claws stabbed toward Hans’s back at the same instant Adlet threw a needle that grazed Hans’s torso.
Hans gave up on his attempt at repair and tossed away the wreckage of the flash grenade. “Neowthin’ I can do ’bout it. Looks like help ain’t comin.’”
“My, Hans. Giving up already?” asked Tgurneu.
Adlet attentively held his sword at the ready.
Tgurneu, for its part, didn’t even adopt a fighting stance. “Why don’t you put more serious effort into calling for your allies? If you’re lucky, someone might come to save you, you know?”
Hans smiled back. “Are ya sure mew don’t need to call fer help? Ya think ya can stop me here with just fifty-odd fiends?”
“I think fifty is quite enough. Besides, Adlet is on my side. And most of all, so are the miracles of love.”
“Meow-ha-ha-ha-ha! Real funny guy.” Hans went straight for Tgurneu with his sword, but fiends immediately blocked his path. Adlet didn’t even have to do anything.
The young man had been watching the fiends fight. The unit under Tgurneu’s command was frighteningly powerful. On an individual level, they weren’t that strong, but they had an unusually competent chain of command and the ability to work together. About ten were protecting Tgurneu, while another ten stood in a group farther away, on standby. The rest were all going right for Hans.
Hans tried to find a break in the circle around him and cut toward Tgurneu, but the fiends maintained their line perfectly. Adlet could see no holes Hans might break through.
The Brave attempted to kill a fiend in the line in order to disrupt their formation, but they countered that, too. He darted in every direction in an attempt to create a one-on-one situation, but the fiends always responded by guarding one another. Whenever Hans found an opening, another fiend would step in from the side to defend its ally.
Adlet tried to join in the fight, but his imprudent attempt at interference had the opposite effect.
“You stay out of this, Adlet,” commanded Tgurneu.
Watching Hans’s fight from a distance, Adlet considered. Hans was being backed into a wall. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before he succumbed. But had a man as sharp as Hans failed to predict this situation? Had he not predicted that Tgurneu might sense the threat he posed and come to kill him?
Most troubling of all, Adlet had yet to see any despair in Hans’s eyes. Adlet was certain he had another card in his hand.
✦ ✦ ✦
Hans was playing the part of the cornered hero, out of options after his machinations had failed, but that was a bluff—and Tgurneu was falling for it.
He had two plans. The first had been to blackmail Adlet into killing Tgurneu. That had been a total bust. There was no way he could have anticipated the existence of the Book of Truth. However, he’d taken the possibility of failure into account from square one.
His real plan was to lure Tgurneu out of hiding. Hans had predicted Tgurneu would conceal itself from the Braves, but not even Tgurneu could sit there and do nothing once it became aware that its own seventh could be used against it.
Everything about this was just as Hans had anticipated.
Inside Hans’s pocket was the earthworm slave-fiend Chamo had sent out. It was hidden in his clothing—tied up like a ribbon.
The messenger earthworm had heard everything: Hans threatening Adlet, the conversation with Tgurneu, and where Tgurneu was. The messenger earthworm was smart enough to make its own decisions and report everything to Chamo. So if Hans quietly released the restrained earthworm while Tgurneu and the fiends weren’t looking, it would slip out past the cocoon and return to Chamo.
The reason Hans was fighting the fiends now was to gauge their abilities, and he’d tried to steal that flash grenade from Adlet to convince Tgurneu that he was at the end of his rope.
“Mrow! Damn it, ya cheeky bastards!” Hans ran the circumference of the barrier, concealing himself in the shadows of the ruins. The fiends couldn’t keep track of every move he made. He was certain there would be a chance for him to release the earthworm.
Pretending to evade the attacks, he hid himself in a shadow of a building. But then, right when he was putting his hand into his pocket, about to release the earthworm—
“Dear me, what’s wrong, Adlet?” he heard Tgurneu ask. Adlet was barreling toward him.
✦ ✦ ✦
Adlet figured Hans had some way to contact the others, but he had no Saint’s power—or any tools like Adlet. That meant the means at his disposal were extremely limited. Chamo had to be his only option. Once he realized this, Adlet recalled that one earthworm slave-fiend had discovered him back in the Phantasmal Barrier. Was it perhaps lurking nearby? Or was Hans carrying it?
“Don’t let any earthworms escape this cocoon!” Adlet yelled as he used his light gem to illuminate the area and spotted an earthworm slave-fiend slithering at full speed along a crack in the flagstones.
Adlet threw the pain needles in his right hand at the creature, but Hans batted them all away with his sword. The instant before the earthworm would have slipped out of the thread cocoon, Adlet launched the needle in his left hand.
Hans tried to block it, too, but Tgurneu seized that moment to swing at Hans from behind, allowing Adlet’s pain needle to pierce Chamo’s minion inches before it got away. The worm writhed, spewing fluid from its mouth.
“Stop the slave-fiend!” Adlet shouted as Tgurneu plucked up the earthworm between its fingers. The fiend tied up the pest and kneaded it a bit so it couldn’t move.
Hans’s sword arced toward Tgurneu’s fingers, but Adlet blocked it. When Hans lunged forward in an attempt to reclaim his messenger, the fiends held him at bay.
“…Phew, that was close. So you still had another trick up your sleeve? I really can’t take my eye off you,” Tgurneu said, summoning a fiend on standby a ways away. The bat-fiend approached Tgurneu’s side and took the earthworm slave-fiend in its mouth.
“Go discard it somewhere far away,” said Tgurneu. “Toss it into the sea or something.”
The bat soared through a hole open in the top of the cocoon and flew away. With the fiends holding him back, Hans was unable to stop it.
Hans was acting cool as ever, but Adlet could clearly see fear behind his smile. For the first time, Adlet was seeing Hans after he really had exhausted every avenue.