WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 101
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A Messenger from the Past (1)
Ortes was an anomaly.
That isn't a reference to some incongruity as a member of mage society. He had no mana in him at all, not the faintest trace, and that alone barred him from ever entering magic, that privileged realm, in the first place.
Such "magic-incompetents" did exist, if rarely, at society's lowest rungs.
Though no one else had mana literally at zero the way Ortes did, people occasionally turned up whose talent for magic was so vanishingly small, whose sensitivity or command of it fell short even of casting the most basic spells.
The line of work these social castoffs threw themselves into was fixer work: the cheapest resource, sent into the most dangerous jobs.
Ortes was an anomaly even among fixers.
Because nearly everywhere he appeared and worked was the extradimensional frontier.
Meaning there was no record at all of him being active anywhere before the extradimensional frontier.
Fixers who worked such dangerous ground were usually people who'd staked their whole lives on fighting, or people who'd mortgaged their lives to debt, or both.
Plenty of fixers, after enough hardship, chose to launder their identities and live out their days unknown on the extradimensional frontier, but none of them were like Ortes.
A truly unknown quantity, someone for whom no method, however thorough, could turn up anything resembling a "past."
That was Ortes's anomaly.
Rumors ran wild: a mage from the ancient era who'd drifted through some extradimension and only now returned, an artificial human, some mage's idle plaything.
But none of the rumors ever came close to the truth about Ortes, and the last anyone heard of him was that he'd taken on some secret commission, after which he vanished without a trace.
And so "the Faceless Ortes" was fated to fade away, another common urban legend, the kind of drinking-table story fixers once told each other: "There used to be someone like that, you know."
Today was no different. A day when colored rain drizzled steadily down from storm clouds tinted with mana, glowing in five shifting hues.
With the discordant noise of raindrops hammering the shore as his side dish, he had a drink and looked back on old wounds, thinking, "it's about time I let this go."
Someday every memory of the past would be forgotten completely, fading away inside some bleached-out recollection. He could let it go as easily as the drink going down now.
...Or so he believed.
"Hey, Knemon. So this is where you've been holed up."
* * *
Knemon was struck utterly speechless with shock. He'd cut every last tie and been living like a mouse in hiding, back in his hometown. So why, all of a sudden, why now?
"Ah, it's the Faceless Ortes's messenger!!"
Lampades's face crumpled, a reaction that made it clear the title was anything but welcome.
But what could he do? It was true. He'd been chasing Ortes down for his own reasons, but he was no follower of the man.
Lampades was famous for tagging along wherever Ortes went. He even handled mediation and negotiations with other fixers on Ortes's behalf.
On the surface, it looked like a good-natured fixer looking after an Ortes who didn't quite fit in anywhere. But Knemon himself wasn't fooled.
Lampades had to be Ortes's foremost subordinate, without question. What else could it mean that on the one ruins-survey job the two of them had been sent on together, only the two of them had come back alive?
Of course, Knemon's guess didn't match reality. Ortes, finding that everyone else's face turned ashen the moment they looked at his own, had simply decided it was better to leave the negotiating to Lampades, paid him for his trouble, and left it at that.
But that private arrangement was never known within the fixer trade, and Lampades himself had no interest in letting it be known.
"I don't see why you'd call me that. Knemon, Ortes's friend."
"Tch, 'friend'? What's that supposed to..."
Knemon, about to snap back, deflated almost as fast. True enough, back when he and Ortes had really seemed to click, he too had thought of Ortes as a friend.
He'd fled the moment he witnessed the bottomless madness hidden beneath those narrow, slitted eyes, but before that, he'd truly believed Ortes was an irreplaceable comrade who'd stand beside him for his ideals...
Knemon laughed hollowly, sank down where he stood, and spoke.
"Right. Lampades. Is it Ortes? Is your master looking for me?"
"I did tell you once to watch your words. Still fond of playing with fire, are you?"
Lampades snapped his fingers. His hair, along with the rest of his body hair, stood on end, and the crackle of sparks rippled faintly through the air. The blade antenna grafted in where his elf's characteristic pointed ear used to be deployed, tuning the current running through his body.
Knemon read his intent from the strength of the mana Lampades was giving off. Not a readiness to fight. A threat.
If Lampades had truly come here to fight, he wouldn't have snapped his fingers to build up mana, he'd have completed the spell and fired it off immediately. Any fixer who'd survived the extradimensional front lines had that much quickness as a matter of course.
Knemon raised both hands. He had no intention of fighting, none at all.
"Even if Ortes isn't your master, it seems he's the one who sent you after me. What brings you here?"
He was asking, but Knemon already had a guess. The decisive reason he and Ortes had gone their separate ways. It had to be about the artifact they'd unearthed back then.
"He said there's something of yours he wants."
"Ah......"
Knemon let out a pained sigh. So Ortes really had come to get his hands on that thing again.
"He said he's prepared more than enough compensation."
"There's no such thing as enough compensation for that thing."
"I don't know what it is, and I don't care to. All I need to do is bring you to Ortes."
Knemon let out a long breath, then, with effort, spoke.
"Do you even know what the relic is that Ortes wants back?"
"I don't even want to know what it is. All I know is that I have to bring you before Ortes."
There was an unmistakable resolve in that. A stubbornness that called Ortes himself to mind, back in his fixer days. However Knemon tried to resist, that resolve, to hand the relic over to Ortes, didn't look like it would waver in the slightest.
And yet at the same time, Knemon could feel in Lampades that particular hesitation of someone forced to obey an order against his will. That he wasn't following Ortes by choice, that came as a real surprise to Knemon, who remembered the Lampades of the past.
'If I tell him the plain truth, maybe it'll shake him.'
If he was going to die one way or another, wasn't it better to at least get everything off his chest first?
Knemon beckoned Lampades over.
"Come inside. Let's talk."
Knemon, both hands still raised, didn't look like he was waiting for a chance to trigger some hidden magic circle or enchant-ware. It was a completely different air from the one he used to give off in his fixer days.
Lampades stepped into Knemon's house without letting his guard down.
"Do you know why I parted ways with Ortes?"
"No."
Once Lampades was inside, Knemon shut every door in the house, then started working the switchboard. After a sequence of complicated button presses, he pulled down a lever, and a heavy thud sounded from the living room.
It was the sound of a hidden door opening beneath the living-room rug.
"...You really do live a complicated life. Is there any need to set up a secret vault like this instead of just using magic?"
"Because the eyes of a faceless man see everything."
Lampades didn't bother asking what exactly those eyes could see. That Ortes's faintly glowing eyes could sense mana was something he already had a vague sense of.
'But is it really worth going this far, building a security system with no mana signature at all?'
Still turning it over, he went down. There, in the middle of the basement, sat the artifact Knemon had guarded like his own life for years.
"...?"
But the artifact didn't look worth the value that would make Ortes covet it, or Knemon fret over it so anxiously.
"Am I seeing this correctly?"
"Yeah. That."
A semi-transparent container holding some kind of liquid, and, fitted into it, a lid with a ring attached.
"It's a bubble wand."
'Has this bastard lost his mind?' Lampades's face went dead serious.
Paying no attention to Lampades's doubts, Knemon approached the bubble solution with great care. Then, even more carefully, he twisted the lid open and drew out the ring that made the bubbles.
Then, doing his absolute best, he blew, just the barest breath.
It was right after that that Lampades, who'd been muttering behind Knemon's back that the man had to be out of his mind, was struck with shock.
Because the instant a bubble no bigger than a fingernail popped, everything standing in front of it vanished along with it.
A gust of wind blew through the basement in that instant, wind stirred up as the remaining air rushed to fill the void left where air itself had been erased.
Lampades saw that the stone wall in front of Knemon had been gouged into a round hollow. It wasn't so much physically eroded as simply erased, in that exact shape.
"This... is a weapon of destruction Ortes and I found in ruins deep inside an extradimensional erosion zone."
"An artifact that erases, exactly as it appears, whatever shape shows up inside the bubble?"
Knemon nodded, grim. He remembered what Ortes had said once they found this terrifying weapon.
The moment Knemon himself had been cheering, having finally gotten his hands on the power to bring the Magic Towers crashing down, Ortes had whispered, in the coldest voice imaginable.
'I have no interest in something like this.'
Sickened by the obsession and madness he glimpsed behind those words, Knemon had given up being an apocalypticist.
Lampades swallowed without meaning to. If something like this ended up in the hands of the Faceless Ortes, what might he do with it?
What in the world did he mean to do with a bubble that erased reality itself?
* * *
"By the way, once your friend Knemon gets here, what are you going to do?"
"First, I'll hand him a keyboard and have him write out every Magic Tower currently in violation of the ban on sacred relics. As for how we actually pull the job off, I'll figure that out as I go."
It would take at least a month before he could even meet this friend Knemon, so surely one or two good ideas would come to him before then. Ortes said this with an airy shrug.
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