Unable to hear or see anything, Adlet lay weakly in the fiend’s stomach. The air was thick and humid, and it was hard to breathe. But he didn’t care about that anymore.
“Let me…die…,” Adlet moaned. “I’ll do anything, please. I beg you, let me die.” His pleas would reach no one. Not even the fiend that had swallowed him.
The hippo-fiend had him bound inside its stomach with a tentacle that grew from its mouth. All his limbs were constricted, right up to his neck, and the tips of tentacles were shoved into both his ears. His eardrums ached. He didn’t resist.
“…Let me die.”
It wasn’t just the betrayal of his allies that he regretted—he regretted the whole fight this far, his life, everything.
What had he been fighting for? What if he’d been unable to protect Fremy in the temple and had let her die? What if he’d been killed in the Phantasmal Barrier? None of this would have happened. They would have been able to foil Tgurneu’s plans.
All this desperate survival and struggle had been in service of Tgurneu’s motives.
What if he hadn’t apprenticed to Atreau? What if he’d given up on revenge and sought out a normal, happy life? Then what?
Tgurneu had said Fremy would have died without him, and that was completely right. Who would have managed to protect her in the Temple of Fate but him? If he had given up on his revenge, someone else would have been chosen as the seventh. That person would surely have failed to protect her and let her die. And if that had happened, the Braves would have won. If he’d just never existed, the world would have been saved.
Who the hell was he? He wasn’t the strongest man in the world. He wasn’t a Brave of the Six Flowers who would save the world. He wasn’t a hero who got revenge for his loved ones, either, or the one person who could make Fremy happy.
Who was Adlet Mayer? The answer was already clear.
Tgurneu’s puppet. Tgurneu’s toy.
✦ ✦ ✦
Hans had been unable to stop the hippo-fiend from swallowing Adlet. The corner of the square where Tgurneu and its guard stood was walled off by the spider-fiend’s thread. The viscous silk wouldn’t be cut by Hans’s sword. He was powerless.
But even if the thread wall hadn’t been there, Hans probably wouldn’t have been able to save Adlet since forty of the fiends under Tgurneu’s command were now attacking him.
“Göt you!” Four swiped out with their claws from all four sides. Ducking so low that his torso skimmed the ground, Hans jumped forward and slipped between the legs of one to escape the trap. He tried striking the fiend from below while he was at it, but no sooner was he underneath than another attacked him. With the strength of his arms alone, Hans switched his trajectory and just barely avoided its claws.
But he didn’t even have a single moment to rest. Once he’d evaded that, another fiend was waiting for him.
He’d never faced enemies like this before. On an individual basis, they were all stronger than the ones he’d fought before coming to the ruins. What was really exceptional, though, was their sense of coordination.
Hans constantly kept moving, trying to create a one-on-one situation, but after well over half an hour of combat, he hadn’t managed it, not even once. It was as if they were reading one another’s minds as they fought.
Exhaustion was slowing him down. He couldn’t quite block their attacks anymore, and he was so covered in blood that he didn’t have a clean patch of skin on him. He’d still cut down ten of the forty fiends, but his stamina was already gone. He couldn’t relax for so much as a second, and this had been going on for too long. This task of searching for the slightest escape route and surviving each moment trapped in the silk cocoon was beyond even what Hans could take.
“Sorry for the wait, Hans.” Tgurneu left the hippo-fiend to turn his attention to the Brave. The spider-fiend sucked up its silk, removing the wall that separated them, and Hans’s opponents stopped fighting to surround him at a distance and watch.
“You were so quiet. You don’t think that was cold? I think you should have encouraged him to overcome the power of love and kill me.”
Hans didn’t reply. He knew it was pointless. Adlet had put up a fight, but that was just part of Tgurneu’s game. Hans had expected Adlet to give in and leak the plan.
But when Adlet had lifted his head to the sky and wailed, Hans had uncharacteristically felt for him. Even now that they were enemies, Hans had never hated Adlet.
Hans was more of a villainous type but not the sort who got pleasure out of torturing his enemies. In his line of work, he saw people like that quite often, but it only ever disgusted him.
“You were truly foolish,” said Tgurneu. “Had just been done with it and killed Adlet, you would still have had a chance at winning. It was all that stupid scheming that made things turn out like this. Now Adlet’s in my hands, and you’re all alone. Hey, how do you feel right now?”
Hans wanted to bluff and say Neowt so bad , but he was so tired, the words wouldn’t even come out of his mouth.
“The world will be destroyed because of you. Your foolish decisions have brought it all to an end. Your family, your closest friends, the woman you love—everyone is going to die, because of you. So come on, tell me: What do you feel now?”
Hans got the feeling then that he was starting to understand Tgurneu, just a little bit. The fiend was obsessed with love. It found pleasure in making those who felt it suffer. Not like the knowledge was worth anything, though.
“You’re real meowin’ crazy.”
“I get that a lot. I’m sick of hearing it,” Tgurneu said with a smile.