“Ah, what a pain this all is. I have to take back the holy weapons, as well as the hunting weapon too. Anyway, S’yne, the next time we meet, I won’t take it so easy on you,” she said. The moron woman looked at S’yne with taunting contempt in her eyes, and then she pointed at me and spoke.

“Well then! Time to finally leave. See you again, Iwatani!” Throwing out these final words, the moron woman suddenly vanished into thin air, taking the still trussed-up Witch and Armor with her. Just when I thought we had a chance to turn the tide . . .

She’d known my surname too. She probably heard it from Witch or something. But still, it didn’t line up with what S’yne had said when we first met. She hardly talked about herself, after all. This seemed like a good time to have a serious discussion about that.

Raphtalia staggered shakily to her feet. I offered her some support.

“We lost,” she said.

“Not really. We achieved what we came here to do. But it’s true they let us go,” I conceded. Immediately after that, Glass and Sadeena appeared.

“Are you all okay?!” Glass asked.

“Oh my! What’s going on here? Did I miss all the fun?” Sadeena exclaimed and tilted her head to the side. The next moment L’Arc and Therese also arrived—and from the look of it, it was by getting caught in the teleportation trap.

“Kiddo! Are you okay?!” L’Arc asked. That moron woman really had picked her moment to escape. Had she just been lucky, or had she sensed the best moment to retreat? The second one, clearly.

So she’d had a full understanding of the entire situation . . . and yet chose to just play with S’yne instead of really using it. She’d had a lot to say, but she had analytical abilities that clearly outstripped the likes of Witch. She surely could have easily taken care of S’yne too . . . but maybe she had wanted to cause trouble for Miyaji and the others. Something she said had also suggested that Witch and Armor were newcomers to the organization. If she was one of those types who enjoyed reporting the failure of rookies to her superiors, that might explain it. So we had been saved by internal backbiting, at least in part.

“Glass, did you recover Kizuna?” I asked.

“Yes. I encountered Sadeena fighting along the way, so we joined up and managed to save Kizuna soon after that,” Glass reported.

“I don’t see her though,” I said, looking around.

“This situation came as quite a surprise to me as well,” Sadeena said.

“Chris is currently protecting Kizuna. I’ll explain about all that in a moment. Having recovered her, I rushed back to support you,” Glass said. Then I looked over at L’Arc. His use of “kiddo” had not gone unnoticed.