Having exhausted her strength, every muscle in Mora’s body went limp. Unable to support herself, she fell to the ground. The gauntlets normally looked so light on her hands, but she could now hardly lift them.
Still, she couldn’t afford to pass out yet. Mora clung to consciousness, even as it felt like she would fall into darkness. She used her power of mountain echo to shout to the heavens: “Everyone! Flee from this place! Poison spews up from underground! I managed to stop it, but we must not linger!”
Her mountain echo spread through the whole ruins, where the battle continued.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Meow-hee , it’s just like she said, huh?”
Mora’s mountain echo had reached Hans and Tgurneu’s battle. The stench rising from the ground made Hans cough reflexively. But the foul scent grew no stronger, and Hans could still move. Had the poison succeeded, the Braves would all mostly likely have died.
“Hmph. Mora is better than I thought.” Tgurneu seemed somewhat embarrassed.
But Hans could tell the poison was definitely working. Slowly, his body was being paralyzed.
“This is very much like her, though, I must say. If she’d only been a bit faster, she may have been able to avert the Braves’ deaths. Foolish, right where it counts.”
“Naw. She bought me the time to kill ya, at least.” Hans kept running, darting through the spaces between the dozen or so fiends surrounding him. The situation hadn’t changed one bit. His struggle to survive continued.
✦ ✦ ✦
Mora’s mountain echo reached Fremy’s ears, too. That was close , she thought with sincere gratitude toward Mora. That had been an amazing feat, considering she’d been encircled by enemies and in mortal danger.
“…The Braves are so stubborn. And I wanted to put them out of their misery quickly,” Fremy said to the wolf-fiend. She was betraying the Braves right now, so she couldn’t appear pleased that they’d been saved.
“Relax, Fremy. This poison has no effect on fiends. And we’ve already made sure it doesn’t work on you, either,” the wolf-fiend confided.
“Then Dozzu will be a problem. Leave that one to me,” Fremy said, firing at Dozzu—making sure the fiends wouldn’t be able to tell she was shifting her aim off slightly.
“I misjudged you, Fremy! We fought with you as allies! Just what do you take us for?!” Dozzu cried, while also sending her a flicker of an eye signal. It, too, realized she wasn’t attacking seriously. There had been no time to explain the situation, but it seemed to understand Fremy had pretended to surrender for some purpose.
“Please don’t worry! It will take a while for the poison to circulate fully through our bodies! We still have enough time to stop Fremy and save Addy!” Rolonia glanced at Fremy with a look that said It’s okay . They wouldn’t waste the time Mora had bought for them. They were going to save Adlet.
Fremy fired at Rolonia, and her bullet skimmed Rolonia’s pauldron. Fremy deliberately gave Rolonia an opening as she loaded a second shot.
With a look of resolve, Rolonia’s whip snapped, aiming for Fremy’s heart. Fremy pretended not to notice and closed her eyes.
The tip of Rolonia’s sharp, pointed whip pierced Fremy’s chest and writhed around inside her, ripping out the flesh of her heart. With a spray of blood, Fremy collapsed backward, and the wolf-fiend yelled, “Number seventeen! Don’t let Fremy die!”
Gotcha , Fremy thought.
✦ ✦ ✦
Specialist number seventeen, who had been observing the battle from safety, went as pale as it could get. The one mission assigned to it was to prevent Fremy’s death. It immediately rushed to the fallen woman’s side. Nearly all the other fiends, including the wolf-fiend, defended number seventeen from Nashetania, Rolonia, and Dozzu’s assault.
With her heart carved out, Fremy very nearly died on the spot, but number seventeen glued its body to her to plug the open hole in her chest.
Its ability was more like repair of the body than healing. Fluid spewed from its body could transform into flesh for the target fiend. It dammed the gushing blood from the gaping hole in Fremy’s chest in a heartbeat, then went to repairing her shredded heart.
That was when number seventeen’s eyes lit on the red mark on Fremy’s chest. It knew that mark.
Number seventeen was not in Tgurneu’s confidence; it didn’t know who the seventh was or for what purpose Fremy had been created, either.
But it did know about the chain death.
It had been about fifty years earlier, long before Fremy was born, when Tgurneu had summoned number seventeen. At that time, Tgurneu had still been using the body of the three-winged fiend. It told number seventeen then about a fiend with a strange power. It was a chain-death fiend with the ability to kill another fiend instantly the moment a different, designated fiend died. It had seemed impossible to understand how such an ability might be used, no matter how you twisted your brain.
Tgurneu had said it was currently researching the chain-death ability in depth. Could the ability be undone with the power of a Saint? Could it be undone with a fiend’s ability? If so, how could that be prevented?
“This chain-death ability will be an important element in our coming battle with the Braves of the Six Flowers,” Tgurneu had said. “I must eliminate even the slightest possibility of it being undone. I must use all means at my disposal to perfect it. And I need your help in this research.”
Number seventeen had had no choice. It had accepted the order.
The chain-death fiend would extract a very small part of the designated fiend’s body; then, after modifying the flesh, it would transplant it into the body of a different fiend. This extracted flesh would assimilate into the recipient, becoming part of it.
Then, when the donor died, a parasite implanted in its body would sense the death and emit a unique signal to turn the donated flesh into a powerful pathogen that would kill the recipient.
Number seventeen had used its ability to seek out a way to heal the red mark. But the transplant assimilated with its recipient completely. It also changed the nature of the body. Even when the focus of the disease was removed, it quickly regenerated into its previous state. Number seventeen had declared that if it couldn’t remove the mark with its power, no other fiend would be able to do so, either.
Tgurneu had been very satisfied by those research results.