And yet . . . I was hardly the Wisest King of Wisdom, but I definitely had a bad feeling about this. I was scared of something happening like when we fought Kyo, with L’Arc and the others summoned away by a wave right in front of our eyes. Then there was the issue of Itsuki’s old comrades. All sorts of materials fanned the flames of my unrest.

“Did you find out what weapon power-up methods the musical instrument vassal weapon holder knows?” I asked.

“Well . . . when Kizuna made contact with the other three holy heroes, we sat down and had a chat . . . and found out quite a lot then,” Ethnobalt said.

“Glass, what about you? And, Raphtalia, you too,” I asked.

“The other three, apart from Kizuna, were pretty stingy, it seems . . .” Raphtalia said, giving a roundabout answer. It was true that Kizuna wasn’t the best type of person to be handling such negotiations. She’d probably offered up her own secrets in exchange, or something like that.

“The allies of the other heroes were pretty vocal with their distrust. Kizuna shared hers, to try and win them over, but she was the only one. Then there are probably leaks from Yomogi’s old allies and the traitor who stole L’Arc’s scythe. We can’t be sure he hasn’t heard about some of them,” Ethnobalt analyzed. I guessed it was lucky that none of the other three holy heroes had shared their power-up methods. But there was always the chance they had been forced to talk before they were killed, of course. Perhaps it was through the use of more hostages.

This all meant that the enemy might have knowledge of more power-up methods than we did. Even if that was the case, though, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be maximizing their potential.

“Whatever the trap is, we aren’t going to make any progress until we spring it. Rather than sitting around waiting, we are better off charging in before we miss our chance completely. Even if the enemy does use Kizuna as a hostage, they can’t afford to kill her,” I reasoned. The ironic thing about hostages was that they only had value for both parties when they were alive. If Kizuna died, then we would surely just rip them to pieces.

We weren’t dealing with a moron here. Takt hadn’t understood that at all. He had been a moron.

“Leave the intimidation to me,” I said.

“You are unpleasantly confident. With you on our side, Naofumi, it almost feels like we’re the bad guys,” Glass said.