Having dropped its performance as Tgurneu, the wolf-fiend charged after Fremy again and again, and she blocked the attacks with the grip of her gun as she rolled backward to avoid her assailant.
The wolf-fiend was strong. Even after being shot multiple times, it still wouldn’t go down, and there was no time for her to create any bombs.
She had to go to the source of that flash grenade—and quickly. She had to drive back the fiends around them and buy her allies time to get away. This was Fremy’s job, as the one whose attacks covered the widest range.
“Ngh!” But the wolf-fiend could tell what she was trying to do and was attacking fast and hard to keep her from doing it.
“It’s so säd, Fremy. If you’d obediently súrrendered, we would have fórgiven everything,” it taunted.
“Please, Fremy, find a way to push the enemy back!” pleaded Nashetania.
“We can’t carve a way through on our own!” cried Dozzu. With fiend after fiend piling on, it wasn’t able to fire its most powerful lightning blasts. Nashetania’s steel wasn’t enough to clear a path, either.
Suddenly, Rolonia briefly stopped fighting with her whip and ran toward Dozzu, grabbed its small body, and flung the fiend eastward.
“!”
As Dozzu bounced and rolled away from the enemies that had encircled it, Rolonia’s whip wrapped around Fremy and threw her in the same direction.
The fiends took that as their chance to descend upon Rolonia. She defended herself with her armor, but it couldn’t absorb all the impact.
“This isn’t good! Nashetania! Help her!” Dozzu yelled.
But Rolonia said, “I don’t need it!”
For just an instant, her whole body turned red, and crimson mist spewed out through the gaps in her armor. Her Saint’s blood was a fatal poison to every kind of fiend. The fiends around her screamed within the fog. She had thrown Fremy and Dozzu away because her attack would have felled them, too.
“Rolonia!” Fremy yelled.
But within the cloud of blood, Rolonia raised her hand to Fremy, telling her not to come help. Fremy realized what she wanted. She meant to ensure their escape alone.
Fremy wanted to help her but desperately resisted the urge. Revealing no hesitation, she turned away and raced toward where the light had been. Dozzu and Nashetania had slipped out from the cloud of blood and the crowd of fiends, and they joined her.
“Ngh!”
After escaping the mass of fiends, the trio was only able to run for about a minute. The enemy had responded to the wolf-fiend’s call and was moving to surround them, pressing close from both sides to catch them in a pincer attack.
Nashetania kept them back with blades shooting up from the ground. “I’ll handle this.” She stopped and turned away from Fremy and Dozzu. The fiend seemed upset at this, but Nashetania smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Dozzu. I won’t be dying yet.” Then, with a swipe of her slim sword, she faced the fiends close on their tail. “Because I have Goldof on my side.”
Fremy kept sprinting toward her goal, and Dozzu, with more than a few backward glances, followed after her.
✦ ✦ ✦
The fiends tightened their formation around Tgurneu to charge Chamo. Chamo’s slave-fiends were dispersed over a wide area, so the unit made a beeline for Chamo through the center of the line. The moment Adlet and Hans saw it happening, they sprang into action, running straight at Tgurneu and splitting up to either side in perfect coordination—Adlet to the right, Hans to the left. The few fiends on the flanks switched targets to the two men.
Adlet smiled. Just what he’d been hoping for.
Adlet ignored the attackers and ran backward. Grabbing onto a building to his side, he used the stakes hidden in his boots to run up the wall. The fiends crashed into it, and the building shuddered. Next, he threw the needles in both his hands at Hans’s opponents. Now that the attacking fiends were distracted by the needles from behind, Hans instantly slipped past them and went for Tgurneu at the center of the formation.
Tgurneu had been focusing on Chamo and was helpless to stop him. The slave-fiends were blocking the rest, so they couldn’t shift to protect Tgurneu.
“…Oh de—”
“Meow!”
Adlet’s goal had been to feign a pincer attack as he analyzed the fiends, then back up Hans’s attempt to kill Tgurneu. Hans had picked up on it without so much as a word exchanged between them.
Hans sliced off the dog-fiend’s head with his sword. Headless, the creature thrust one forepaw into its stomach, ripped out the fig, and flung it into the air.
All the nearby fiends reached out for it. The slave-fiends launched an all-out assault then, holding back the underlings that tried to catch the fig and ripping up the body of the fallen dog-fiend.
Only one fiend escaped them, but Adlet threw his needles at it. The last-ditch effort was brought to a halt by a pain needle.
The fig hung in midair with no allies to catch it. Instantly, Hans’s blade sliced the fruit to pieces.
“…Äh.” One fiend cried witlessly. A heartbeat later, the rest began wailing and clutching their heads.
“Gyaaaaaaah!”
“Cóm…mander…Tgurneu… Cómmander Tgurneeeeeu!”
When they had all first entered the Howling Vilelands, Fremy had told her companions that fiends were connected with their commanders by a special bond. The moment Tgurneu died, the fact would be communicated to its whole army—and with such intensity that the confusion should turn them into a disorderly mob.
“…We won,” said Hans.
Still clinging to the wall, Adlet watched—as Hans and Chamo let down their guards, certain of victory. “Dodge!” he yelled an instant too late. Some of the fiends had ceased their grief-stricken writhing and were coming up on Hans and Chamo from behind.
Hans reacted to the warning and flipped around, and Chamo’s slave-fiends leaped out to protect her. Adlet threw every needle he had in an attempt to protect them.
“Meargh!”
But it all needed to happen a moment sooner. A fiend’s horn pierced Hans’s side, and another’s claw ripped open Chamo’s back. The wounds were deep—possibly fatal.
Adlet leaped from the wall, and the fiends attacked en masse to finish off Hans and Chamo. Adlet had no more tools left. There was no way for him to save them.
“Watch out!”
Then he noticed two figures rushing in. Lightning brought the fiends targeting Chamo to a halt while bullets tore through the one blocking Adlet. Adlet used that moment to scoop up Hans and escape the crowd of foes.
Fremy and Dozzu burst into the square, both covered in blood.
“Hans isn’t our enemy! Don’t attack him! You can’t let him die!” Adlet yelled.
Fremy and Dozzu seemed confused. But seeing Hans a mess of wounds inflicted by fiends, they seemed to understand he’d been fighting with Adlet and Chamo against Tgurneu.
The arrival of reinforcements made the fiends pause to pull close together and strengthen their defenses.
Fremy raised her gun while sparks crackled off every hair of Dozzu’s body. Cradling the motionless Hans, Adlet shifted behind them.
“…We will ask what happened later. Our priority is Tgurneu’s defeat,” said Dozzu.
“Which one of them is it, Adlet?”
Adlet couldn’t reply to Fremy’s question. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.
Just a moment ago, Tgurneu had been using the dog-fiend as its body. So the dog-fiend was either carrying Tgurneu’s fig or hiding it within itself. Dozzu had said Tgurneu could only control one fiend at once, and its power was nullified at a distance greater than seven feet. The dog had to have been holding Tgurneu’s fig, no question.
But the fig Hans had sliced up had been a dummy. Just a fig.
And the body of the dog-fiend had been trampled and savagely crushed by the slave-fiends. If Tgurneu’s fig had been inside it, it would have been long dead, and no fiend had taken a fig from the host corpse. Adlet had made sure of that. So where was Tgurneu’s real body?
When Adlet didn’t reply, Fremy gave him a questioning look. Then a fiend called out to them with a smile—a rhinoceros-fiend that stood on two legs. “I’m over here! Fremy! Dozzu!” Adlet couldn’t read the expression on the rhino’s face, but the way it spread its forelegs was clearly happy.
“I’m glad you’ve come. My heart leaps to know that two such longtime acquaintances will be my opponents in the final battle. A grand last fight calls for an appropriate foe.”
Fremy pointed her gun at the rhinoceros-fiend, but Adlet put his hand on the muzzle to stop her. “…That’s not Tgurneu.”
Fremy and Dozzu looked at Adlet.
“We got the wrong one. We still haven’t found it.”