So they figured me out , Tgurneu thought, but it couldn’t compliment Adlet for being as sharp as ever. After this many clues, anyone should have been able to figure it out. Just as the boy had surmised, the rhino-fiend did not carry Tgurneu’s real body.
Had Adlet and Hans not found it strange that Tgurneu hadn’t run when Chamo arrived and threw that flash grenade? Obviously, this was because Tgurneu was certain it would never lose.
✦ ✦ ✦
The moment Adlet saw Fremy, he wanted to thoughtlessly drop everything and embrace her. But they were in the middle of a deadly fight. He could hug her after Tgurneu was gone.
“Chamo…can you still fight?” Adlet asked. She nodded. A slug slave-fiend was doing some first aid on the gashes in her back with a tentacle, but most of her slave-fiends were starting to ooze back into mud form. She was only barely able to keep going.
“Protect Hans. And hold back the fiends coming from the outside.”
“…Okay.”
Breathing and replying seemed painful for her. She just lay on the back of the slug-fiend, gasping. One slave-fiend swallowed the unconscious Hans while the rest spread outside the square in unison. Even wounded and exhausted, Chamo was still trying to fight.
“What do you mean? The rhino has to have Tgurneu’s real body. It’s not acting, like the wolf-fiend was. That’s the real one.” Dozzu sounded genuinely confused.
“I don’t have a perfect understanding of this either,” said Adlet. “But Tgurneu isn’t in there.”
With the rhino in their center, the fiends pressed toward them as a tight unit. The party was inching backward.
“We killed a different fiend before. It looked like Tgurneu was controlling it, but it wasn’t inside. I think the one that’s talking now might be the same. Tgurneu isn’t there.”
“That’s ridiculous. There’s no way Tgurneu’s ability could…” could do that , Dozzu must have been about to say before it shut its mouth. It must have realized it wasn’t aware of everything Tgurneu was capable of. “Then…where is Tgurneu?”
Adlet searched for the answer, but his head wouldn’t work right. Exhaustion and blood loss were wearing him down.
“What are you talking about, Adlet? I’m right here. This fiend has swallowed me,” Tgurneu taunted, and the fiends launched themselves forward. Fremy and Dozzu frantically kept them at bay, but with no tools left, Adlet couldn’t even defend himself properly.
“Adlet!”
“Watch out!”
Fremy and Dozzu both protected him. With their help, Adlet evaded the attacks, running this way and that. It didn’t seem Dozzu would use the stake Mora had given it—because there was no point. They were the ones who were cornered now.
Think. Remember , Adlet told himself. He had been here with Tgurneu longest, so he was the only one capable of seeing the truth behind this ploy. There had to be a clue among everything Tgurneu had said and done—all the words and deeds of the other fiends in the battle. If they were trying to hide something, they were sure to let something slip somewhere.
“Ngh!” A cluster of fiends rushed at Adlet, and though he attempted to dash back to escape, he couldn’t shake them off. Dozzu tried covering him with a lightning strike, but one enemy shielded the others with its own body as they hounded Adlet.
“Pull yourself together!” Fremy threw a bomb with one hand as she fired with the other, and, finally, Adlet got away.
A number of strange things had happened, and Adlet hit on the greatest of the questions they raised: How could these fiends be so amazingly coordinated at all?
When they’d been fighting Hans and when the mouse-fiend had taken the fig from the dog-fiend, the majority of their comrades had moved as one. There had been no indication that they were taking orders from somewhere. They’d given no signs, exchanged no eye signals.
It was strange. While they were pretending to be in chaos after Tgurneu’s “death,” they’d circled around behind Hans and Chamo. Was it even possible for all the fiends to come up with such a complicated strategy together and carry it out at the same time?
But not all the fiends had been a part of that perfect coordination. The goat-fiend beside Tgurneu and the spider-fiend that had created the silk cocoon had acted based on their commander’s verbal orders, just like normal fiends.
What was different about the ones that could coordinate perfectly and the ones that didn’t?
“We haven’t…found Tgurneu? That’s impossible…it couldn’t be…,” Dozzu muttered. Its tiny body nimbly slipped among the fiends’ legs, but what it was doing was dangerous—practically a suicide attack.
“Stop it, Dozzu! That’s too risky!” Adlet yelled.
Dozzu didn’t listen. It made contact with the rhino-fiend and fried it with a point-blank, full-power lightning blast. It fell, but another fiend attacked Dozzu from the rear. “Wahh!”
It was a beetle-fiend with spikes all over its body. One pierced Dozzu. For such a tiny fiend, even one spike would do grave damage.
“Unfortunately, I’m over here. But you’re as weak as ever, Dozzu. You haven’t changed at all in the last two hundred years.” The beetle-fiend began speaking in Tgurneu’s tone.
“…It can’t be.”
Then Adlet arrived at a frightening possibility—one he didn’t want to think about. But it was the only possibility.
Tgurneu was controlling the majority of the fiends here.