I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss - Chapter 39

WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 39

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The Order's Betrayer (3)

What a lunatic.

While Sikton had been running his mouth, I'd cautiously cracked my eyes open just a sliver to check on him, and now I turned over what I'd read from his thoughts.

Normally I lived with my eyes in a permanent squint, so even opening them further only revealed a little more of my irises.

I'd worried that opening them all the way might tip him off, so I hadn't been able to read down into his deeper consciousness. But even just the memories floating on the surface of his mind were enough to piece together roughly what had happened.

The man was a fanatic who believed, without a shred of doubt, that he would reach Bacchus's garden.

The process behind his ritual preparations was jaw-dropping too.

Sikton had originally been the right hand of the Bacchus cult's leader.

Sikton was the Bacchus believer the cult leader turned to first, the moment word came down that the Order of the Divine Name's council had passed the motion to "become independent from the gods."

On the surface, Sikton pretended to go along with the Order of the Divine Name's will, all while secretly preparing his betrayal.

Bacchus was the god of pleasure and revelry. Protocol called for throwing a grand festival before convening any council.

Timed to that festival, Sikton had slipped poison into every cult member's cup.

The poison he'd prepared wasn't the kind of neurotoxin or bacterial toxin that would affect him too, so he could drink the same cup and come away unharmed.

What Sikton had poisoned the drinks with was a magical nanomachine, a swarm of microscopic spirit-bodies, a single spirit split into anywhere from a hundred thousand to several hundred thousand fragments.

Once the festival ended and preparations for the cult's council began, Sikton gave the order to his microscopic spirits.

Having reduced the entire cult to brain death, Sikton set about performing his ritual using the divine power in their bodies, and the lives held within them besides.

And this cave was exactly where the Bacchus cult's grand council, the one that gathered everyone, had been set to convene.

'What an absurd man, honestly.'

I'd never once, since coming to this world, met a god face to face or heard one's voice directly.

Common sense said, though, would a god actually praise someone for tossing his own believers onto the altar as offerings?

Anyway, the situation was settled for now. I should call down Neiro, who was waiting up above, and have him go through the cave while he was at it.

He was a professional hunter, so he'd be good at sniffing out things like hidden vaults.

At least better than I would be.

* * *

Neiro followed Ortes's lead down into the deep cave. It wasn't luxurious, but care had clearly gone into it somewhere. The smoothly carved floor and walls attested to the devotion the Bacchus faithful had poured into it.

'Ortes said he settled things with the enemy's ringleader here.'

Stepping into a stone chamber set off to one side of the cave, sure enough, there was the corpse of an old man, head separated from body.

Red blood soaked a purple robe. Where the blood had seeped in, the fabric slowly shifted from indigo-violet toward a deep magenta.

Neiro examined the corpse of the Bacchus cult's bishop with care.

'...Nothing?'

There wasn't a single defensive wound, the kind that should show up in a fight, or at least from any will to resist.

Neiro swallowed hard and turned over the bishop's severed head where it lay in the corner.

The severed head wore a smile. One not unlike the smile Ortes himself always wore.

The instant Neiro saw that smile fixed on the head, his heart slammed against his ribs.

No. How could this even happen?

Was it some magic that acted on the mind?

'If he could pull off brainwashing, he wouldn't have leaned on Geryones with authority and brute force, he'd have just brainwashed him outright. It's unlikely to be mind-manipulation magic.'

Then how in the world could he make an enemy die smiling like that, beheaded and all?

Neiro considered analyzing the bishop's corpse further, then thought better of it. That Ortes had left the whole scene entirely in his hands meant that much trust had built up between them.

And that "trust" surely included trusting him to tell the difference between what to say and what not to, what to look at and what not to.

Neiro thought of himself as a hunter. Until now, he'd compared Ortes to a beast.

The most incomprehensible beast he knew of, and the president who kept that beast on a leash.

But thinking it over now, that wasn't something you could even call a beast. Neiro himself was confident that, given enough time and budget, he could hunt down any beast there was.

Wyverns, said to rule the skies, and their kin among the flying dragons, desert deathworms, swarms of man-eating mosquitoes mutated by mana-stone influence. Neiro took pleasure in turning the tables on the very predators that had claimed so many other hunters' lives.

Ortes was far too strange to be measured against any beast that actually existed in this world. More like a monster out of legend...

'Ah.'

So that was it. That was why it was Hydra. The many-headed water serpent said to have been slain by a hero of myth, said to carry the deadliest venom in the world.

If Karisia was the immortal head of the Hydra, Ortes was its venomous fang.

There didn't seem to be anything worth salvaging from the bishop's corpse. His grapevine staff held some power distinct from mana, but it was faint.

"Not quite enough to call a sacred relic. Must have just gotten a priest's blessing."

Might as well take it anyway. Even a faint trace of divine power beats none at all.

Starting from Sikton's ritual chamber, Neiro made his way through the rooms one by one, then raised a hand to the side of his gas mask, near the ear.

"Office Head of the Divinity Investigation Office. This is Neiro. Something's come up that needs confirming."

It was for a comms call.

Neiro found a room where dozens of people had been arranged in grotesque positions.

They were the members of the Bacchus cult that Sikton had reduced to vegetative states.

* * *

"What do we do with these bodies?"

"Hah..."

A sigh escaped me. Strictly speaking, they weren't corpses. Nanomachines... no, microscopic spirits had simply gone rooting through their brains and left them brain-dead.

Their hearts hadn't stopped, so they were alive. Alive, technically.

"These are people who fell prey to a cluster of microscopic spirits."

"What? Spirit poison? Even if only their livers had been swapped out for enchant-ware, no, if they could handle any esper power at all, shouldn't their esper field have crushed the spirits and kept them from acting..."

I brought both hands together in a gesture of prayer. These were people whose whole way of life had nothing to do with enchant-ware or anything like it.

"...I see. Didn't they say the Ten Towers hunt down superstition-followers the moment they use divine power? The habit of keeping their own esper field small must be etched into their bodies by instinct. No wonder spirit poison worked on them."

"If the brain has been ruined like this, there is essentially no chance of recovery, is there?"

"I don't have much experience using spirit poison in hunting myself... but I'd say it's a lost cause. No use to us."

Cough!

A cough sounded from the corner of the room.

Neiro immediately drew his bow and leveled it. Trembling all over, someone crawled toward them with difficulty. It was a girl.

"I'll kill... I'll kill..."

* * *

Through blurred vision, the girl looked up at the two of them. A stranger in a gas mask, and someone else, someone she could barely bring herself to look at, someone for whom even lifting her head felt like a kind of blasphemy.

A flash of blue light seemed to pass by for an instant.

"This is interesting. I had thought everyone here was brain-dead."

He bent his knees and lowered himself, meeting her eyes at her level. A blue glow shone faintly from behind his eyelids, his irises, barely visible through the slits, like thin blue threads.

The corners of his mouth were raised, but the single lines that were his eyes gave no telling whether he was smiling or not.

When the masked stranger tried to say something, he raised a finger to his lips. "Shh." A gesture demanding silence. The masked stranger took a step back.

The smiling-faced man spoke.

"Do you remember what happened here?"

"Sikton, Sikton..."

"Yes. Bishop Sikton betrayed the people of the Bacchus cult. And your name?"

"Ky...ne."

"Kyne, is it."

The smiling-faced man stroked his chin.

"Unfortunately, your family cannot come back. Sikton's poison had already burrowed too deep. You have had enchant-ware implanted in your body before, have you not?"

Kyne didn't answer. The wariness she felt toward this stranger, suppressed until now by the haze of her pain, was only just beginning to stir.

"Take a look at her right hand. The fit seems a bit mismatched."

But her silence proved pointless anyway, the masked stranger had already spotted the prosthetic where Kyne's right hand should have been.

The cult's people had generally refused enchant-ware implants, unwilling to accept the touch of wicked mages.

But they weren't cruel enough to deny even a child that same enchant-ware, not when young Kyne had caught some unexplained infection that rotted her right hand until it had to be amputated.

Limited by what money they could raise, they'd bought the cheapest enchant-ware available at the time and grafted a left-hand part onto the stump where her right hand used to be.

That was how the youngest member of the Bacchus cult in attendance at the grand council, and its only enchant-ware wearer, had come to be.

"Very well, Kyne. Who was it you wanted to kill?"

Kyne didn't answer this time either. She had no idea what relationship these two people might have to Sikton, the one who had killed everyone.

They had all been so kind to her. Grandfather Teires. Grandmother Agave. Uncle Pentos...

"Might this be the one, perhaps?"

The smiling-faced man set a severed head down in front of Kyne. That strange, smiling head unmistakably belonged to Sikton.

Kyne looked at the severed head and understood everything.

Sikton must have made a deal with Blasphemia, who had been hunting down the cult's elders. Wipe out the Bacchus cult, and he'd be given wealth and power in return.

True to that bargain, he'd tried to kill every last person in the cult, and had gone to claim his promised reward in triumph, only to be discarded.

"You people. Every last one of you Blasphemia, all of you-!!"

Having screamed out in fury like that, the girl soon lost consciousness.

* * *

"What... are you playing at?"

I shrugged. Neiro's question probably meant to ask why I'd let the kid named Kyne live.

It was because I'd seen that Kyne girl before.

A girl mage who'd had a prosthetic arm grafted on backwards, ending up with two left hands.

In the original.

"She had talent, you see."

"Talent?"

Left alone, she'd have grown up to become one of the Mage King's companions.