Her face rose in his mind, his feelings for her tightening his chest, but he tried so hard to shake them all off. Adlet was fighting. From the outside, he would have appeared to be merely standing in silence, but he was embroiled in the cruelest and most hopeless battle of his entire life.
I want to make Fremy happy! He smothered the cry of his soul.
Have you forgotten that Fremy wants to kill Tgurneu, even if it costs her her life? Though she’d hesitated, she had rejected the fiends pressing her to surrender. If you want to make her happy, you have to kill Tgurneu. That’s what she really wants.
Adlet clenched his sword hard. The fiends surrounding him held their collective breath, but Tgurneu continued waiting, calm and motionless.
“Would my death really mean Fremy’s happiness?” Tgurneu asked, like it was reading Adlet’s mind. “I’ll tell you something nice. The dog Fremy cherished is doing well—as is her mother.”
Those words stopped Adlet’s sword flat.
Once again, Tgurneu cast the Book of Truth’s spell on itself. “[Fremy’s mother really does love her. She still awaits Fremy’s return, even now.]”
Adlet recalled what Fremy had told him in the Phantasmal Barrier, about the pain of betrayal she had suffered because of her mother and family. Back then, Adlet had sensed that, somewhere in her heart, Fremy wished to return to them.
“And not only her mother—plenty of other fiends await her return. I’d have liked to use the Book of Truth to show you this is true, but as I said before, it can be used only a limited number of times, and that was the last one.” Tgurneu had undone the spell on itself, so Adlet didn’t know if the latter part was true or not. But Fremy’s mother really did love her.
Adlet’s heart was faltering.
✦ ✦ ✦
Tgurneu was lying; it was still fully capable of using the Book of Truth. But Tgurneu would have been in trouble if Adlet told it to cast the Book of Truth’s spell on itself and say its intention was to make Fremy happy.
Of course, Tgurneu intended no such thing—it longed more than it could bear to see her face as she suffered in love. But it was still too early to be revealing those feelings.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Will you destroy the potential for Fremy’s happiness with your own hands when it’s so close?” Tgurneu asked, and again, Adlet was frozen on the spot. “Tell me about your plan. If they go through with it now, Fremy and I will both die. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, even if it meant her own life. But you don’t need to worry. If you betray the Braves, she’s going to be happy.”
Fremy, happy. Adlet imagined that future: all the fiends apologizing to her for everything; her face, seized with anger and then softening; her reunion with her mother and the dog she loved; her peaceful life in a world with no humans, praised as a hero among fiends.
Adlet could imagine all these things vividly.
That was when Adlet began giving up on all of it. The leopard-fiend. The words very nearly slipped out.
“…Ngh!” He hit himself in the face. “Her happiness doesn’t matter. She’s not one of us. No…right now, she’s my biggest enemy!” Hate her , he told himself. If he was going to excise his feelings for her, there was no other way than to hate her.
She was a fiend. Even if she was half human, her other half was a filthy fiend. That alone was enough reason to hate her. There was no reason at all to protect a fiend girl.
Think. Find cause to hate her. Adlet closed his eyes and recalled the past. The scene of his home village in ruin—the villagers transformed into the Dead Host.
And Rainer, who had died before his eyes.
“…You destroyed my village to make me the seventh.”
“That’s right. For you. In order to control you. I destroyed it to make you hate fiends.”
And why did you control me? To make me protect Fremy. Without her, my village would never have been destroyed.
My home was wiped out because of her.
Desperately, Adlet nurtured the hatred inside him, attempting to regain his former determination to devote everything to revenge. “Rainer…,” he said.
Tgurneu’s expression went blank. “Rainer? …Oh yes, he was your friend, wasn’t he? That poor boy joined the Dead Host, too,” it said. It wasn’t aware that, until the day before, Rainer had been alive.
In his heart, Adlet called out, Rainer, Schetra, give me strength. Give me the hate I need to kill Fremy. Give me the strength to crush this false love.
Hatred for Fremy welled within him. The fingers around his sword’s hilt strengthened, and he could feel himself slowly nurturing the strength to kill Tgurneu.
“But she didn’t know any of it,” said Tgurneu, and with that one line, even his desperate attempt at hatred vanished like mist.