WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 35

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Chimera Hunt (3)

It wasn't difficult to deal with the demon-beasts one by one. Even without opening my eye properly, there were things I could "see" to a certain extent.

That was especially true for creatures with such simple minds. I could clearly feel the instinct, where and how to move to kill them.

I raise my eye's resolution. The attacks I had felt as formless instinct take shape as visual information.

A translucent blue trajectory. That was the path the demon-beast would charge along.

I time my blade to meet that blue line. The demon-beast, unable to overcome its own momentum, had its neck run through.

It was less a fight or a hunt and more repetitive labor.

By the time I had struck down some thirty demon-beasts charging at Neiro, the creatures were now baring their hostility toward me instead.

"But what can a beast without its tamers do?"

I calmly repeat the work. Not everyone here had died without resisting, I'm sure. Suppose the resisters had taken down about twenty.

I've struck down thirty. Dimedes brought 120 demon-beasts, so around seventy should remain.

I gauge my body's condition. The backlash from my last eye-opening still lingers, but against demon-beasts that lack proper intelligence, it's a wound of no consequence.

"Done!"

A welcome voice called out.

Swish! The sound of air being split came first.

Then came a burst of noise mixed with the sound of living flesh rupturing.

I saw a demon-beast's head burst apart in the distance. The arrow Neiro had loosed was a costly, lethal thing with explosive magic enchanted into its tip.

"Let's figure out exactly what kind of magic circle it is after we grind those beast-bastards into pulp!"

I tossed out a joke to ease the tension.

"Ho, surely you don't need to collect the pelts?"

***

The question of whether the pelts needed saving. Neiro gave a wry smile behind his gas mask.

Hunting beasts with as little damage as possible and harvesting the byproducts was a hunter's way. Ortes was asking him whether he would act as a hunter now.

It would be a lie to say he didn't want to answer yes. But that wasn't the model answer.

The model answer was-

"Ha. That's something to think about after we've killed them all!"

A declaration that he would focus on the work as a director of Hydra Corp. To Neiro, the smile hanging at the corner of Ortes's mouth seemed to have deepened just a little.

"Very well. Take care of those first, then."

Whirrrr-

The four drones Neiro controlled aimed their muzzles from the sky toward the ground.

And fired.

Ortes sprinted through the hail of gunfire. Neiro felt a strange sensation. It was unmistakably a battlefield with machine guns spraying from above.

Yet he never once thought Ortes would be hit by a stray bullet.

***

It didn't take long to bring down all the demon-beasts. Thanks to that old man firing away without a thought for the aftermath, dodging and deflecting had been a bit of a hassle, though.

"Phew. This is the first time I've caught this many beasts in just half a day, not even a full one."

"Is that so. You'll be updating that record soon."

Neiro's body gave a small start. As a man who pursued the honor of the hunt, he must be pleased at the prospect of gaining even greater honor.

"Now, let's take a look at the imag-"

At that moment, the crystal in my breast pocket rang.

Grotesque lifeforms that walked on two legs but had appearances that couldn't possibly be called primate. At their center, an old man wrapped in a robe.

The blood of the grotesque lifeforms and the magic circle drawn in this place gathered to a single point in the air and compressed.

The liquid that gathered with a squelch was refined into a single mass of thick blood. Then the old man's body, having drunk in that blood, split into five, and this plain, too, was torn apart into five.

Beyond the shattered space, extradimensional light arrived. The vision ended as that light, its color beyond description, seeped into the plain.

It was a warning sent by Phoibos's sacred relic.

I hastily looked around.

"Hm? What's wrong?"

"It seems it isn't over."

Upon hearing my words, Neiro moved his drones to begin reconnaissance without much question. No wonder the Hunters' Society people liked him, he listened so well to those beneath him.

"…Oh no."

Neiro's voice came through, tinged with bewilderment. He manipulated his proxy gauntlet to bring up a holographic image.

The landscape on the screen wasn't in the colors of reality. Yellow and red objects were scattered like specks across a blue background.

"A thermal imaging camera?"

"Yeah. Look there."

A considerable number of somethings were writhing and approaching us. It was hard to make out their forms on the thermal camera, but one thing was certain, they weren't ordinary living creatures.

"At this rate, twenty… no. Around thirty?"

Thirty?

Dimedes and all the demon-beast tamers he'd taken with him, together they numbered thirty-one.

I turned my gaze toward the direction the thermal camera was showing. I peered past the magical veil wrapped around them.

The forms of bizarre lifeforms, as if countless species had been haphazardly cut apart and stitched together, flickered into view.

"They're using camouflage magic."

"So our opponents are mages. Does that mean the ones who drew this magic circle came themselves?"

"No. They're people we know."

I drive the high-frequency blade into the ground. I twist the blade, which has easily parted the earth, and flick it sideways. The mud and bodily fluids launched by that rebounding force soak the approaching enemies.

"Strictly speaking, though, they aren't human."

The faces wrapped in camouflage magic, soaked in a murky red, revealed their outlines. An ordinary person would have struggled to tell anyone apart through mud-and-blood-covered faces, but the man here was a hunter.

Neiro, a hunter who had sharpened his eye for such things over countless years, recognized their identity.

"Dimedes…!"

***

It was an identity Neiro had barely discerned by the line of the jaw alone. Eyes packed densely across the entire face, rolling and churning, shifted the mud about and gave off a grotesque air.

Seven pupils fixed on Ortes and Neiro. In those eyes, not a trace of intelligence could be found.

Such was the end of one who had been a pillar of the terror cast over Etna City.

"That form… is it a synthetic demon-beast, a chimera? A mage who can manipulate life so freely as to turn humans into chimeras in just a few days. Surely not from the Green Wood…!"

A situation where he had to fight a mage of the Ten Towers? Neiro's nerves stood on end. This might be the most dangerous hunt of his life.

Excitement, fear, and expectation surged through him in a whirlwind. The moment he drew his bowstring, feeding on that lump of emotion, Ortes's words cooled his mind.

"No. Former Director Dimedes was originally a chimera."

Not merely cooled, frozen solid.

"From the very beginning?"

"Yes. Didn't they deliberately feed humans to their demon-beasts? They could have given ordinary meat or feed. In truth, it was a disguise to hide their own identity."

Chimera was the collective term for synthetic demon-beasts created by combining multiple demon-beasts.

Among such chimeras, those created using a sentient being like a human were special. Possessing both the raw power of a demon-beast and the cunning of a sentient being, they were called Nous Chimeras.

But Nous Chimeras had a fatal flaw. If the completion rate fell even slightly short during the creation process, the demon-beast's wild nature would overwhelm its intelligence, gradually degrading its intellect.

To revive their deteriorating intelligence, they had to consume the brains of other sentient beings.

Neiro realized why Dimedes and his gang had been so adept at hunting humans. Because all of them were man-eating demon-beasts.

Even Neiro, who had been Dimedes's rival, hadn't known this. It must have been a secret the demon-beast tamer faction had desperately concealed.

And Ortes, reciting such a secret with utter nonchalance, as if it were nothing at all.

"Just who in the world is this man."

How much had he seen, and how far ahead?

Neiro, along with his shock, reflected on his own past deeds.

It was a relief that he had few things he couldn't proudly tell others.

***

"I can't have him freezing up over a mistaken assumption that the Ten Towers are our opponents."

I wondered whether I should really be blurting out a director's secret, but Dimedes's dismissal was already all but certain anyway.

Reduced to that state, Dimedes didn't have much life left in him. You can't keep a dead man in a director's seat.

In fact, as a sentient being, he should already be considered dead.

As evident from its racial classification as a synthetic demon-beast, a chimera is by nature an artificial lifeform.

Dangerous artificial lifeforms invariably have a device implanted to control their minds.

In Etna City, he'd luckily managed to kill the mage who created him and earn his freedom, I assume, but now the control device had been seized, or something, and his ego had been blown away.

The independent ego known as "Director Dimedes" had collapsed. What stood there was nothing more than a chimera whose individual designation was Dimedes.

I focus on the lines faintly showing in my vision. The lines woven through the chimeras' bodies extended to somewhere on this plain of grotesque rocks.

Lines of mana that likely reached to whoever had taken control of the chimeras. Probably connected to the robed old man the crystal had shown me.

"Director Neiro."

No answer came, for some reason. Was he tense at the sight of the chimera horde?

"I'll leave one of them alive. Please prepare to take it captive."

He's a hunter, so he should have some capturing equipment, right?

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