Adlet had to have figured out the final secret that Tgurneu had been guarding. There was no need to hide it now. It could even tell them itself.
Of the fifty fiends Tgurneu commanded, forty were under its direct control. The only ones who weren’t were specialist number eleven, number seventeen (which had the healing ability), and the aerial messenger fiends—only the ones with special abilities necessary to carrying out Tgurneu’s plans.
Tgurneu had been preparing for the day of the final battle for a long time, and it had cultivated a fiend that would serve as its body for this fight—one that existed purely to be controlled by Tgurneu.
Specialist number one: Tgurneu’s ultimate weapon. It was a mixed-type fiend, multiple fiends fused into one to create something powerful. It was the same type as Tgurneu’s three-winged body, but what made it unique was that these forty fiends, fused together, moved as independent units.
Specialist number one was composed of a unit Tgurneu had designated as the supervisor and thirty-nine other dependent units. The dependent units moved according to the supervisor unit’s thoughts, and everything the supervisor saw and heard was transmitted to the dependent units. This enabled the forty fiends to act as one.
The most important point was this: When the dependent units were not receiving any orders from the supervisor unit, they could make their own decisions. Units who couldn’t move without being ordered to were useless, no matter how many there were. But specialist number one could act in perfect coordination or let units make their own choices. Tgurneu had made the perfect combat squad a reality.
Each individual unit was below average in strength, but Tgurneu made up for their weaknesses by lending them its own power. Tgurneu’s main body was inside the stomach of the supervisor unit.
Tgurneu hadn’t made specialist number one its ultimate weapon because it was convenient for hiding.
It was simply because it was strong.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Fremy! Dozzu! Scatter!” Adlet yelled. While evading the fiends’ attacks, he ran across the town square, away from the others. “Fremy! Put up a smoke screen! Dozzu, just keep moving! Shake them up!”
Having realized that the majority of the fiends in this square were being controlled by Tgurneu, there was just one thing Adlet could do: find the brain. And to do that, he had to figure out the nature of their enemy.
Fremy manifested a bomb in her hand, forming it in the shape of a stake. She tossed it at the ground, and it stabbed into the earth and exploded in a great cloud of dust. Dozzu ran into the smoke, slipping around the fiends’ legs to fire off many small lightning bolts to disturb their formation. And as Adlet evaded the fiends, he observed them.
They were moving independently, after all, just like when he’d fought with Chamo’s slave-fiends. They weren’t just puppets following orders.
And though the fiends stuck in the smoke screen were losing sight of Dozzu, the fiends outside the dust cloud still had a lock on it. So the fiends couldn’t share visual information with one another, it seemed. Even if one saw something, that information wasn’t communicated to the others.
So then… , Adlet thought, scanning the horde. One would be acting as their brain. That fiend would be watching over the whole battlefield to understand the combat situation and give instructions.
“…Keep going! Run all around, Dozzu! Blind them, Fremy!” Adlet yelled as he searched for a fiend that was acting unnaturally, one trying to observe everything and keep out of Fremy’s and Dozzu’s range of attack. That fiend would be the brain, and Tgurneu would most likely be inside it.
Jumping into the cloud of dust Fremy had provided, Adlet ran, avoiding the enemy’s eyes. If not for the blind, he wouldn’t have been able to evade them anymore. His whole body hurt. The nostrum from Piena he’d used to force his wounded body to keep moving had worn off. But still, he jumped into the smoke screen and evaded enemy detection.
Even if he did manage to find Tgurneu, what then? Could they defeat it with just Fremy and Dozzu? With all his tools gone, Adlet couldn’t even help.
✦ ✦ ✦
I expected you’d do as well, Adlet. You’re making the correct move , Tgurneu said to itself. Adlet had accurately discerned specialist number one’s ability, and what’s more, he was taking logical steps to find out which was the supervisor unit.
But this was nothing Tgurneu hadn’t already anticipated.
Tgurneu had been practicing with specialist number one for the past hundred years. It had selected the most intelligent of its subordinates and made them fight it as it controlled number one. It had disclosed the absolute secret of number one’s ability and ordered them to try to figure out which fiend was the supervisor unit.
At first, Tgurneu’s opponents had been able to discover it immediately. Tgurneu would wind up revealing its identity in its behavior, whether it was being passive about attacking or surveying the area unnaturally.
But Tgurneu had practiced this way over and over—and it had been harsh. It had even sometimes ordered its subordinates to try with all their might to kill it. And at the end of all that long training, Tgurneu had learned how to fight using number one. It was able to make the supervisor unit under its control move exactly as the others did while still avoiding any fatal attacks from the enemy.
Tgurneu was proud. Now, no matter how long any battle went on, it would never give a single clue to its opponent—and its foe’s attacks would never hit the supervisor unit, either. Tgurneu believed all its years of effort would never let it down. It was nothing if not a hard worker.
If the Braves of the Six Flowers had all come to Tgurneu fully prepared and all the dependent units were killed, then—even with number one’s abilities—it would have been helpless. But number thirteen’s poison had worn down their stamina, and with the help of its subordinates, Tgurneu had fended off half the Braves and prevented any concentrated assaults. So there was no way it could lose.
It was looking forward to this. Even though the Braves had come within inches of defeating Tgurneu, they would fail and retreat. The fiend was fighting for the opportunity to see Fremy’s and Adlet’s faces when it happened.