WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 104
──────
Resolving the Misunderstanding (1)
I fled the headache-inducing meeting and went straight to Karisia.
"President. This is bad. Lampades wants our company's trade secrets."
"Could you explain that in a bit more detail?"
For some reason, Karisia was already rubbing her temples. Not that there was much more to explain, really.
"You know Lampades brought Knemon here at my request. Well, instead of asking for some material form of payment, Lampades wants to know what I plan to do with Knemon."
The moment Lampades heard that I'd called Knemon in to get a list of Magic Towers secretly hoarding ancient sacred relics behind the scenes, there was a good chance it would leave him with a very bad impression of our company.
Karisia nodded slowly. Her expression suggested she somehow understood exactly how Lampades felt.
"How did you explain this man Knemon to Lampades?"
"Lampades already knows Knemon and I are friends. He doesn't know how we drifted apart, so that's the only part I explained."
It felt a little embarrassing, like dredging up my own dark history, but I told Karisia how Knemon and I had ended up growing distant.
At my explanation, that it was probably because I'd used up half the artifact without even consulting him, Karisia tilted her head.
"What exactly did the artifact do, that you could hand over the rest without a second thought?"
"It's nothing much. I suppose you could call it a high-powered bomb. When I tested it, it turned out not to be as good as I'd thought."
Karisia's gaze felt strangely cold. Maybe it carried some feeling along the lines of, 'So even after that, you still think of me as some bomb maniac?'
I hurried to explain myself.
"I can guess what you're thinking, but what I wanted from that artifact wasn't more firepower."
"Then what was it?"
"Precision, I suppose you could call it. Um."
Strange. The more I talked, the more it felt like I was sinking into a swamp.
"I suppose I should start by explaining how the artifact works. Whoever pops the soap bubble interferes with whatever being they're looking at through it, and erases it."
"So the target is whatever the bubble is 'looking at.'"
Karisia's gaze turned to my face, or more precisely, to my eyes. A deep, searching look, as if trying to see straight through my eyelids to the blue irises hidden beneath.
"Yes. As you've probably guessed, I was curious how it would work if my eyes and the artifact's mechanism worked together."
When I popped the Bubble of Erasure, I'd kept my eyes wide open.
What that means is, at that moment, my field of vision was reflecting the raw information and history held by everything in the world.
I'd hoped the Bubble of Erasure could interfere even with abstract domains like "history" or "the past."
...But it couldn't.
My range of perception widened, and as a result, the surrounding area was destroyed on a fairly large scale.
The damage even reached the dimensional walls invisible to ordinary sight, and for a moment the extradimensional realm overflowed through them.
But it never reached the performance I'd wanted.
I'd been looking through that bubble at the ruins I'd just come out of.
What I focused on in particular, among the ruin's stored information, was the part about "facilities destroyed by explorers,"
If the Bubble of Erasure could reach even into the domain of the past, if it could undo "the destruction caused by explorers" as though it had never happened,
then the ruin's facilities would be restored to their original state.
Erase a "fact that occurred" in the past, and the present rewrites itself as a result.
When I first read out the Bubble of Erasure's ability, I'd despaired, thinking, 'All that suffering, and what I found is just some fancy eraser?' but once this idea occurred to me, hope welled up in me again.
If erasing the past had really been possible, I could have looked at myself and deleted the very fact that "I'd fallen into this world," then gone back.
I couldn't tell Karisia what I'd actually been thinking at the time, so I fudged the truth a little.
"Take scars or incurable diseases, for example. If you could erase the very fact of them, imagine the endless possibilities."
"With ordinary sight, something like 'seeing' history is impossible. It's something only your eyes could manage."
"Yes. So I used the artifact several times, adjusting my eyes' output, to see whether I could interfere with the past."
I shrugged at Karisia. The Bubble of Erasure could only erase things with substance, in other words, things that could be interfered with by some specific means, whether mana or physical force. It was useless against abstract concepts like "the past."
"Still, it's a shame. It would've been quite useful against the Ten Towers... ah."
Karisia let out a low sound of realization. Probably thinking about the Ten Commandments.
"Yes. The Ten Commandments have one foot in the realm of Ascension. Ascension is a domain that transcends the physical, material world. I've never tested it directly, but even if you poured the bubble's entire remaining solution over the Ten Commandments, it probably wouldn't do a thing."
The same would likely hold true for the Tower Masters connected to the Ten Commandments, and the Elders beneath them.
If an Elder happened to step outside their tower, I couldn't say it would have no effect at all, but within each of the Ten Towers' domains, wherever the Ten Commandments' authority reaches, it has to be considered pointless.
"It's nothing new, but honestly, it's absurd. This so-called Mage King..."
Karisia was probably thinking about something I'd told her before. About the Mage King who was supposedly coming in three years.
"Ha ha. Our goal isn't to defeat the Mage King, it's the fall of the White Light, so isn't this a lot simpler?"
I swallowed back the words trying to leap out of my throat.
You're plenty terrifying yourself, you know, the one who made even that Mage King experience "failure." After all, you did succeed, in the end, in destroying the White Light Commandment.
Judging from the fact that she'd gone so far as to actually shatter one of the Ten Commandments, the original novel's Karisia, the White Nameless, must have had magical ability that reached into the realm of Ascension.
The current Karisia, I wasn't so sure about.
She didn't show the original's ruthless obsession or cold-bloodedness, but in its place, she often revealed a strange, inventive way of thinking, a knack for improvisation.
'Well, a person's fundamental nature probably doesn't change, so the potential to shatter one of the Ten Commandments is probably still in there somewhere.'
"So, president. What should I tell Lampades?"
* * *
Karisia guessed at the misunderstanding Lampades and Knemon were probably laboring under.
'They probably think Ortes has called Knemon in with some wicked scheme in mind again.'
It was best to keep the artificial Ten Commandments plan under wraps as much as possible. With the Ten Towers currently lumping Argyrion and the various cults together to justify a great purge, a plan as radical as building an artificial Ten Commandments out of sacred relics looked, from any angle, like exactly the kind of thing that would get them reported.
'But if I just leave this to Ortes alone, there's no telling what kind of misunderstanding might come out of it. This is a bind.'
After a moment's thought, Karisia made up her mind.
"I'll explain it to the two of them myself, so bring them to my office. You just stand there without saying a word, or better yet, stay outside entirely."
"What? I'm good at explaining things too."
Memories of days past flickered through Karisia's mind.
He was good at explaining things, all right. Good at making the listener misunderstand exactly right. And not just any ordinary misunderstanding, either.
Take Kyne right now, wasn't she still confused about which mistaken idea to believe about Ortes, "a great villain who exploits even people's souls," or "the Prophet of Phoibos"?
The fact that he could plant two completely opposite misconceptions in someone's head at the same time spoke to just how extraordinary a level Ortes's way with words had reached.
'Whether that extraordinariness is the good kind is a separate question, though.'
"...Never mind, I'll just cover for it myself. Just go bring them."
Ortes, who took a fair amount of pride in his own presentation skills, left the room looking a little dejected.
* * *
"The president has agreed to see you."
'So the "personal matter" thing really was a lie after all.'
Ortes had definitely told them, about the favor he wanted to ask Knemon, that "it was a personal matter, one that wouldn't be interesting to hear about."
But it turned out to be a matter serious enough that he needed the president's own approval.
Even supposing Ortes and the president had a "personal" relationship of some kind, if something involved both of them, the two people running all of Hydra Corp, then it could hardly stay contained to the scale of a personal matter.
Both Lampades and Knemon followed Ortes out, caught in a strange tension.
Thud, thud. Footsteps echoing through the dark corridor like a discordant note.
Creak, the door opened.
"Go on in."
"...You?"
A question in an unsteady voice. It was Knemon. Ortes's smile seemed to deepen, somehow.
"The president has given her orders. Only the two of you are to go in. I'll stand guard outside."
The absolute loyalty Ortes showed toward the president. It was a phenomenon neither Lampades nor Knemon could make sense of. Every time they saw or heard it, it felt like their sanity was being planed down, shaving by shaving.
The moment the two of them stepped into the president's office, the door closed without a sound.
Beyond the huge glass window, Etna City's darkening sky was reflected. Against that dim backdrop of sky, Karisia looked back at them.
"Please, sit, and make yourselves comfortable."
It was an unreasonable request.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
