WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss

Chapter 12

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Looking for the Lost Kaicel (2)

Ortes suddenly appears with an outlandish request.

Arabel did not resort to cliches like 'What did you say?' Instead, she prepared a more formal retort.

"There were a few hacks on the Pithos factory during the artificial Ten Commandments commotion. But the data on the factory is just the basic operating system of the automatons. Nothing noteworthy beyond that."

"That is precisely what matters. The operating system of the automatons, it is still being consistently updated, is it not?"

Arabel searched the data in her auxiliary brain and nodded. The Pithos Magic Tower's automatons were indeed receiving steady updates.

"But that's just mechanical work by the tower's artificial spirit. There's no secret message from Kaicel hidden inside."

Ortes merely shrugged and smiled. It was clear he had no intention of backing down.

I want to see that grinning face get properly crumpled someday. Arabel swallowed her desire and began the operation.

***

Ether Space. A sub-realm created by layers upon layers of magical resonance. A semi-realistic place situated halfway between reality and unreality.

Ordinary mages access Ether Space through astral bodies while deep in meditation, while a few exceptional cases connect their brains directly to Ether Space.

Arabel was the latter.

Connecting the physical body and Ether Space directly allows far more freedom in exerting mana than using an astral body, but it also increases the threat of death.

The mages who die with their brains burned out while hacking an opponent's Magic Tower are usually those who attempted this kind of direct connection.

If a firewall is as advanced as the Ten Towers, it can destroy the physical body in reality via the astral body. Fortunately, the Pithos Magic Tower's firewall was not at that level.

In Ether Space, Arabel was the very image of a queen spider. Spider-type droids made from her flesh infiltrate the Pithos Magic Tower's physical servers to aid the intrusion.

The moment the four spider droids inject Ether virus venom into the real-world servers, the Pithos Magic Tower's server activates its vaccine program.

That was precisely the moment Arabel had been targeting.

The vaccine program incarnated as a wolf encircled in flames inside Ether Space. The virus injected by Arabel's droids appears as tens of thousands of spiders.

The flame wolf spews fire from its entire body, burning the spiders. The moment the vaccine program's resources are concentrated on incinerating the virus.

The web thrown by Arabel snagged the data stored in Ether Space.

She reads the data, copies it, and returns it to its place. It takes about 15 seconds for the vaccine program to incinerate all the viruses.

For Arabel, who had done life-or-death tightrope walks in sub-second units while being used by the Lernian Magic Tower, this was more than enough time.

***

What now. I'm scared.

Every word from Arabel, who had fused with a hyper-mechanical spider, shook my expectations.

Well, there's no way others wouldn't have thought of something I came up with in five minutes right after hearing it from Bertrand.

If my guess turns out to be completely wrong, there's nothing left I can do.

Ah. There is one thing.

Running to Karisia and asking her to find him for me. I don't even want to think about the aftermath, but it's better than total failure.

While I was agonizing over how to prostrate myself to make Karisia pity me more, Arabel opened her eyes, apparently finished with her work.

"You're much faster than I expected."

"Because the current Phytos Magic Tower doesn't have a mage directly controlling the firewall. It is, in a sense, the limitation of an unmanned magic tower."

Arabel shrugged and snapped her fingers. The cables connected to her spine detached one by one.

"Still, don't think about occupying the Pithos Magic Tower itself through hacking. That would require hacking the tower's core itself."

"Hacking a tower core connected to the Ten Commandments' authority is suicide. I know that well."

I'm not the type of person Karisia is. I only give tasks that people can handle. Arabel, whether she knew I was staring at her with grievance or not, continued disassembling her external computing device with an indifferent air.

Arabel, having descended from the iron spider, threw a USB toward me.

"Take it. The machine control programs of the unmanned factory are about all that's in there."

Reading information extracted from Ether Space is a simple task for mages above a certain level.

For mages. Of course, I'm not a mage.

I have tricks like the Magic Imprinting Drive, so it's not like I'm limited to physical attacks, but it does sting a bit at times like this.

"Could you lend me a reading tool? My workspace isn't organized yet."

"...You're cautious. Of course."

Why the sudden compliment. It doesn't seem like she's mocking me for not being able to use magic.

***

Arabel was taken aback by Ortes's paranoid security awareness. Did he think she had planted malicious code in the Magic Imprinting Drive she handed over?

A choice made considering the possibility of spyware being installed if he read it inside the tower's facilities. It was only natural he wouldn't trust her, since she had only recently submitted to the name of Hydra Corporation.

But Arabel found it a bit unfair as well.

She had no intention whatsoever of attempting something like code injection. From the day she was warned by Ortes, Arabel had not even considered betrayal as an option.

Sure, she had minor complaints, like that grinning face getting on her nerves, or the president being scary, but that was that.

Her body, which had been remodeled into a dedicated Ether Space vessel by the Lernian Magic Tower, was inefficient. Even with fully charged mana, she'd need an alternate power source after about six hours of external activity.

Since Karisia could cut off the mana supply to the area where the Information Guild was located, and Ortes already knew her true identity, Arabel couldn't afford to upset them.

'The goal of becoming a new king seems too far-fetched, but...'

Arabel observed Ortes as he displayed the compressed Ether data stored on the Magic Imprinting Drive through a holographic projector, a familiar sight.

Most mages prefer to plug the data directly into a terminal connected to their nervous system rather than use external tools like that.

Because it's faster, simpler, and allows absorbing a large amount of information at once. The ability to block malicious information is something mages who would attempt such things all possess to some degree.

Nevertheless, a person accustomed to handling Ether data through external devices. Several hypotheses rose in Arabel's mind.

One. He is genuinely concerned about being hit by a severe piece of malicious code.

Two. He has a habit of creating backup data.

Three. He is not a mage.

The first and second could be considered extensions of an occupational hazard.

Mages who dealt intensively with information were bound to see at least once a corpse whose brain had been consumed by malicious code and who had died while attempting to breathe through their skin.

Or at least, lost a few days of memory before and after reading the code. If one had that experience, it was inevitable to acquire external devices for safer information reading.

'The third possibility is...'

Arabel furrowed her brows. Honestly, it had the lowest probability.

Nevertheless, keeping all possibilities in mind was the professional conscience of someone who handled information.

'Come to think of it, I've never once seen him use proper magic.'

He does land fatal blows using basic magic through the Magic Imprinting Drive appropriately. But isn't that combat style closer to a warrior or assassin's methodology than a mage's?

'Huh?'

Maybe he really isn't a mage. Even looking through all the records of when Karisia and Ortes swept through the underworld of Etna City, there was no record of Ortes using powerful magic.

As she meticulously examined the hypotheses, Arabel recalled the final problem.

That faint presence. That, at least, couldn't be explained without magic being involved.

'If it were an artifact enchanted with that kind of magic, it wouldn't be impossible...'

What other abilities could cause miracles without being magic?

"Director?"

The voice that woke Arabel from her puzzle-solving daydreaming was Ortes's.

"Did something go wrong during the data decompression? I built it with performance that shouldn't normally hit its processing limits."

"No. What are these seemingly useless files among the basic installed files for each automaton model?"

Arabel, who had been reading the code of the data projected as a hologram, slowly shook her head.

"Just what I said. Useless dummy data. It's data pre-installed for operating system rollbacks or updates, and normally does nothing at all."

"Is that so."

Ortes began extracting only those dummy data. Watching his busy hands, Arabel carefully observed the situation and posed a question.

"So you're not certain?"

"Director, what do you mean by that all of a sudden?"

"Back at the meeting, you confidently said Kaicel was under the volcano, didn't you? But now you're moving cautiously, as if you don't know anything."

It was a question meant to probe the nature of Ortes's information gathering abilities. Both last time and this time, Ortes seemed intent on verifying the information once more.

A pattern of behavior that appears when one cannot trust the source of information. Depending on his answer, she could narrow down the candidates for the group from which Ortes obtained his information.

"I am 99 percent certain."

Ortes answered simply, without any hesitation.

'That throws all my predictions off.'

"If the information is that certain, why are you so fixated on cross-verifying it?"

A word skillfully straddling the boundary between question, provocation, and interrogation. Ortes's expression remained perfectly calm.

"Ordinarily, I would agree with that reasoning."

***

"But it concerns the President. If it isn't 100 percent, I cannot tolerate it."

What kind of nonsense is he spouting now. Is this because he hasn't been properly chewed out by Karisia?

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