WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 102
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A Messenger from the Past (2)
That strange bubble. Knemon called it, per what had been written in the old ruins, the "Bubble of Erasure." How much danger had he had to fight through just to get his hands on it?
Knemon slowly recounted the story of those days, roaming the extradimensional erosion zone together with Ortes.
"...You knew Ortes and I used to handpick nothing but jobs deep in the erosion zone, didn't you."
"Of course. Isn't that exactly why it became an open secret that the two of you were apocalypticists?"
"Ha. By that logic, what about you, showing up wherever Ortes went?"
"I wasn't the one tagging along after him. Ortes followed me around and used me as his shield without asking!"
"Ha. Sure he did."
Knemon let Lampades's protest go in one ear and out the other, and explained his own adventure. It began with records left behind in one of the erosion zone's ruins, information about research into extracting the power of the extradimensional realm.
"The records said that mages of the ancient era had created something destructive by condensing the extradimensional power into a single form. I was seized by an excitement I couldn't hold back."
He could take revenge on the Apex Magic Towers that had trampled his family's Magic Tower into ruin. A power capable of burning down Magic Tower society itself finally seemed within reach.
That was what Knemon believed, and he secretly proposed it to Ortes, who was every bit as fervent as he was about the ruin the extradimensional realm promised to bring.
Let's find that artifact together, the one imbued with extradimensional power.
Ortes and Knemon kept clearing commissions to explore deep into the extradimensional erosion zone, gradually gathering more clues and pressing further into its depths.
"We got our hands on this Bubble of Erasure at the very end of that journey. Though if I hadn't run, maybe it wouldn't have been the end."
Among the apocalypticists quietly circulating through fixer circles, Knemon boasted skill that put him among the very best. Whatever else could be said of him, he'd once been trained as a Magic Tower heir, an elite in his own right, and fixers who'd properly internalized real magical training methods were rare.
Add to that the secret arts of his vanished Magic Tower, and Knemon's magical ability stood out, not just among apocalypticists, but among fixers as a whole.
Ortes, though, was someone who couldn't be measured by any yardstick of magic. Something about him simply didn't fit the mold.
He solved even the most convoluted codes the instant he laid eyes on them, and no trap, however lethal, ever caught him.
As a guide for breaking into dungeons and ruins, no one alive surpassed Ortes. If there was any flaw at all, it was some quirk of his that kept him from ever casting magic himself.
Knemon believed that with the two of them together, there wasn't a ruin in the world they couldn't excavate.
And he was right. Even in spaces splintered into dozens of branching paths by extradimensional contamination, Ortes chose the correct one without a moment's hesitation.
When they finally gathered clues from dozens of ruins and stepped into the last one, where the Bubble of Erasure lay kept, Knemon felt a thrill unlike any he'd known before.
An artifact the ancient mages had poured this much of themselves into creating, just how far could its power possibly reach?
A power that would bring ruin to mage society, or at the very least, deliver an ending to those who'd stripped his family of everything, was about to fall into his own two hands.
Knemon's anticipation came back to him as bewilderment in equal measure the moment he actually laid eyes on the Bubble of Erasure.
The same reaction Lampades had had upon seeing the Bubble of Erasure himself, since, its grand name notwithstanding, the thing looked like nothing more than a child's toy for blowing bubbles.
The one who stopped Knemon as he seethed with frustration was Ortes, who had been quietly, silently studying the Bubble of Erasure.
"Have you ever heard Ortes speak informally to anyone?"
"Informally? Ortes?"
Lampades shook his head. That faint smile he always wore. That formal speech that chilled people to the bone. Those eyes, sliced so thin no emotion could ever be read in them.
Even if his features themselves couldn't be remembered, that ominous smiling eye, that curl of his mouth, and that formal speech, those alone seared themselves into the mind like a brand, didn't they?
They might as well have been the three defining elements of Ortes himself.
"...I saw it once."
Knemon recalled the moment Ortes had told him to try blowing a bubble.
* * *
"Damn it! Were the ancients out of their minds? All this trouble, for something like this stuffed away in the ruins!"
"Knemon. Why don't you try blowing it."
"What?"
"The bubble, I mean. Blow one."
Beneath Ortes's characteristic slitted eyes, a glint of blue showed through. That eerie glow carried a pressure that allowed no argument.
With a soft breath, the bubble swelled up along the current of air. Faintly tinged with rainbow colors, it looked no different from a toy children played with.
"Damn it all!"
He'd kept hoping right to the end, but sure enough, he couldn't sense any esper power in it at all. If he'd felt even a hint of unusual mana from that toy of a bubble, Knemon might have been thrown by its appearance, but he wouldn't have been disappointed.
But this was just a bubble. Neither the soap solution nor the ring that formed the bubbles felt special in any way.
Ortes stood behind Knemon's back and gave an instruction.
"Pop it."
"What?"
"The bubble, I mean. Pop it."
It was an instruction that made no sense. Was something supposed to change just from popping it? Knemon quietly peered into the bubble.
'What is this? It's already been several dozen seconds since I blew it.'
The bubble neither sank nor burst. It simply drifted through the air. As if entranced, Knemon moved his finger toward the bubble endlessly floating there.
The bubble burst the instant his finger touched it. Swiftly, and without a sound.
And the moment the bubble popped, the scenery Knemon had been looking at through it was crushed away as well.
No, it wasn't only the image reflected in his sight that was crushed. The scenery he'd actually been looking at vanished right along with the popping bubble.
Just like foam on water.
Anticipation and hope surged up in him again. Before he even realized it, Knemon burst into wild laughter.
"Ha, hah. Krahahahahahaha!"
The ruin's bulkhead, protected by ancient magic so thoroughly that not even a storm of offensive spells could so much as scratch it, was crushed away without leaving a single trace.
A secrecy so complete that not even a trace of the mana that inevitably accompanies every spell could be sensed. A simplicity that made the whole act effortless, paired with a destructive force that rendered any defense meaningless.
A thrilling shiver ran through Knemon's entire body.
This was it. This was the power. The power to achieve the revenge he'd longed for all this time, finally, in his own hands!
"Would you mind if I gave it a try myself?"
"Ah, of course, of course. This artifact only exists because of you, after all. Thank you, Ortes. You really are the best partner I could ask for."
Ortes accepted the bottle and ring with that same unreadable smile of his. He slowly lifted the bottle and examined it.
"Knemon."
"Hm?"
"I would like to run a quick test. Let's head up top."
Retracing their steps back out of the ruins didn't take long. Every trap along the way had already been disarmed on their way in. And even if some delayed trap had cut them off, they could simply erase it with this artifact now.
Once above ground, Ortes boldly blew a bubble. A palm-sized bubble drifted up buoyantly into the sky.
"Knemon, what do you say we make that mountain peak our target?"
The mountaintop, stained by the extradimensional realm and glowing in murky, five-colored hues, was faintly visible in the distance. Knemon carefully lowered himself to fit the peak into the bubble's field of view, then popped it.
A storm broke loose.
Every object occupying the space around the mountain peak vanished at once. Not even the air itself could escape whatever it erased, so the flow of the atmosphere became violently tangled. The currents rushing in to fill the void turned into a savage vortex of wind.
Once the storm raging over the peak died down, the result finally came into view for Knemon's own eyes.
The mountain had been gouged deep in the shape of a perfect circle.
A hollow shape reminiscent of a crater. But it was gouged out far too smoothly to have been from a meteor strike.
What Knemon felt went past a mere shiver into something closer to genuine awe.
This artifact seemed to have no limit at all. Just aiming it at a Magic Tower from a distance and popping the bubble could bring about an unprecedented catastrophe!
An overwhelming euphoria swept through his entire body. Knemon turned to face Ortes, his joy written plainly across his face.
Surely Ortes had to be feeling the same sense of achievement, that he'd just seized the power to overturn the world, the power to tear out mage society by its roots and replace it, that stagnant thing that would otherwise fester forever!
But Ortes was astonishingly cold. That didn't mean the smile had left his face.
It was a sneer laced with contempt and disgust. The corners of his mouth were still turned up, but the air his expression gave off was so cold it verged on freezing.
Without a word, Ortes held out his hand, open. A silent demand to hand the artifact back.
With the bubble-making ring in hand, Ortes said,
"Get some distance away."
"Farther."
"Farther still."
Only once Ortes's shape had shrunk to little more than a silhouette did Knemon finally stop moving. He couldn't begin to guess what Ortes meant to do.
Knemon strengthened his eyesight. Through his vision, magnified several times over, he watched Ortes blow a bubble.
It wasn't especially large, just big enough to cover one eye.
And then Ortes opened his eyes.
A piercingly blue glow tore through Knemon's own retinas the instant the bubble popped.
Craaack, a sound he shouldn't have heard rang out. Until now, the only sound their bubble-destruction tests had ever produced was the wind kicked up by the aftershock.
A sound like something collapsing had no business being there.
Where, exactly, and what, had started to collapse?
Knemon looked down at the sky.
Then looked back up at the ground.
Something was wrong.
It had flipped.
The order of earth and sky had collapsed. The dimensional wall broke down, and the extradimensional realm's bizarre laws began pouring into the world. The plain truth that the sky was above and the earth below crumbled away, and the world was thrown into utter chaos.
Deep in the heart of the extradimensional erosion zone, the unstable boundary between dimensions had come crashing down.
It was a sight like the world itself being fed into some enormous grinder and ground down. Watching the catastrophe unfold from outside the boundary line Ortes had drawn, Knemon trembled with sheer exhilaration.
In that terrible, beautiful ruin, Knemon caught a glimpse of the end of the world of magic. He had no idea by what means Ortes had brought about such devastation, but if a power like that were truly given free rein, it might actually be able to bring the whole world down.
It was only a good while later that his mind turned to Ortes's safety, standing right at the center of the destruction, and by then the collapsed dimensional wall had finally repaired itself, the earth settling back below, the sky back above.
The site where the ruins had stood had turned into a bare, empty plain. The debris of what had once been the ruins lay shattered and scattered into the earth, strewn about like a mosaic.
Thankfully, Ortes stood perfectly calm in the middle of the now-flattened ground, the Bubble of Erasure still held in one hand.
Knemon dashed over, his face lit with delight. It felt like the ultimate reward for the long, grueling struggle he'd endured ever since being driven out with the loss of his family's Magic Tower.
And then Knemon heard the one line Ortes spat out, as if biting down on the words.
"I didn't come all this way to see something like this."
It was a viciously sharp tone. A voice so keen it seemed ready to cut down anything that came near.
Knemon couldn't bring himself to move any closer.
Then, all at once, Ortes lifted his head.
"Ah. Knemon. Thank you, this was put to good use."
Ortes tossed the Bubble of Erasure over as if it were nothing at all. Knemon scrambled forward and caught the bottle in a rush.
"I ended up using more of what's in the bottle than I expected, but there is still more than half left. I've used my share, so it's yours."
"Y-yours, you say?"
"Yes. It is not something I have any need for."
Ortes stretched with deliberate nonchalance, as if he'd just come back from an ordinary stroll somewhere.
"Well then, shall we go looking for the next artifact?"
"...What?"
Knemon couldn't make sense of what Ortes had just said.
"The next extradimensional artifact, I mean. Something more than this-"
Knemon's vision went white. He couldn't properly make out what Ortes was saying, what kind of plan he was talking about.
Even with an artifact that could cause the same kind of devastation as before, more than that?
Did he mean he wanted destruction greater than this, an even more thorough annihilation?
Knemon grew afraid of Ortes. Of that bottomless hunger. Of that madness that knew no satisfaction.
If his own thirst for revenge was a torch, then whatever Ortes carried inside him was like a wildfire, a fire the rain couldn't put out, one that would only die down once there was nothing left to burn.
A conflagration (劫火) that would burn the whole world down to ash.
By the time Knemon came back to his senses, he'd already fled the extradimensional border zone.
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