I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss - Chapter 40

WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

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

Chapter 40

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Corporate Scholarship Student (1)

After taking down Sikton, Ortes had thoroughly searched through the Bacchus cult's lair and arrived at one conclusion.

'Nothing?'

A force that controlled not magic, but mana itself. There was no artifact, nothing that could be called the source of the power that had bound Dimedes.

'Then that means the source of whatever handles this mana isn't out there somewhere else. It's inside Sikton....'

Neiro, unsettled by that inexplicable force, felt he needed to figure out what it really was. He had no concrete logic behind it, but the instincts he'd built up over the years told him so.

The result:

"Director. Let's charter a mana-engine train and move every body here."

"How are we supposed to get them to the station?"

"By hand?"

Neiro thought about the distance between the nearest station and this stretch of stone plain. Even at his own pace, it would take half a day.

Carry that whole distance with dozens of corpses, plus one unconscious kid piled on top?

"Nothing for it, then...."

Neiro found himself recalling, on this trip, a line he hadn't heard since becoming head of the Hunters' Society.

When you're told to do it, you do it.

Honestly, he'd hauled plenty of byproducts after a hunt before. Sure, there were more of them than usual this time, but a group hunt run regularly through the Hunters' Society turned up numbers like this too.

It was work he was fairly used to, by now.

Though transporting this many humans, rather than beasts, was a first. Neiro began assembling makeshift transport gear out of materials and drones pulled from his bag.

"Ah, since I'll need to file a status report, I might have to bring along a few of Dimedes's chimeras too. Ha, moving them together should be a bit faster."

...you do it.

* * *

'Where...?'

An unfamiliar ceiling. Kyne let her gaze wander around the room. Everything was white.

It had a similar feel to the hospital where she'd once been admitted to get her prosthetic arm implanted.

"Ah, you are awake."

The bone-chilling voice she'd heard right before she'd collapsed. Kyne tried to bolt upright and flee at once.

Clank!

She tried to twist her body around in a hurry, but restraints were already fastened to the bed. Straps connected to the bed bound her at the legs and around the stomach.

"Do not worry. This is not a hospital, though we did find internal bleeding caused by spirit poison, so we administered a hemostatic agent and performed emergency surgery."

Realizing she couldn't run, Kyne glared at the slit-eyed man.

"Well then! A pleasure to meet you. I suppose introductions come first. For now, please simply call me the Office Head of the Divinity Investigation Office."

Divinity Investigation Office. Kyne repeated the name in her head. An intent to hunt down the cult so transparent, it couldn't be more Blasphemia if it tried-

"I should mention, beforehand, that Blasphemia does not use a name like this one. They call every faith a 'superstition.' Had we been Blasphemia, I imagine we would go by something closer to the Anomalous Superstition Investigation Squad."

"...What?"

It was the first time Kyne had spoken since coming to her senses.

"Ha. You are probably thinking something like this: 'Sikton struck a secret bargain with Blasphemia. Sikton betrayed the cult, and once he had outlived his use, Blasphemia disposed of him.' Am I right?"

Kyne had chosen silence, unwilling to give anything away, but the slit-eyed man nodded without a moment's hesitation.

"So I was right. Then you must be thinking this as well."

* * *

"Just what is heavenly Bacchus doing? Why couldn't the god my family believed in so devoutly save a single soul from that catastrophe?"

Kyne's body began to tremble.

It probably felt unsettling, a little. Like having a thought read straight out of her before she'd said a single word of it aloud.

"I should mention, beforehand, that I have never once used mind magic to tamper with your brain or your thoughts."

Since it was all based on what the original had described, it came close enough to that, I suppose.

"Kyne, you were disappointed in Bacchus, and you wanted revenge against Blasphemia and the Ten Towers who drove your cult to annihilation. But, ah, there is one crucial thing you are lacking."

"Who are you?"

I didn't bother answering. She'd learn everything once it came time to sign the contract.

"A means of revenge. Your innate divine power is not sufficient, so I imagine you intended to turn to magic instead. Am I right?"

Probably right. In the original, Kyne, who used to be a Bacchus believer, showed up as a mage.

Not just any mage, either. A refined one of the Ten Towers.

Back in Part One, the Mage King's goal was to make contact with the Ten Commandments and reclaim the authority of a bygone age. And in every episode where he moved against one tower's Ten Commandments, he'd meet one core ally.

Most of those allies ended up joining the Mage King, becoming part of the protagonist's party. Not every episode gained him a companion, though; some were one-off characters who betrayed him and died before the episode's end. And they weren't always people, either. Sometimes it was an AI.

Astrape, too, captured by Cryton the slave trader, was a heroine who first appeared as one of these "Ten Commandments-conquest allies" before she joined the group.

One ally per set of Ten Commandments. The one exception to that rule was the final enemy of Part One.

The White Nameless. In other words, Karisia, and no one else.

She'd been the protagonist's rival from start to finish, after all.

Kyne fell somewhere between Astrape and Karisia. If I had to pin it down, though, she ends up joining the Mage King's side eventually, so she's closer to Astrape.

Described in the original as "the girl mage with two left hands," she'd been learning magic while hiding her dream of tearing down the Ten Towers.

Kyne's defining trait was being a mage who hated mages. A former believer who'd once had faith in a god, only to decide that god had abandoned her. Exactly which god she'd worshipped growing up was never spelled out, so learning she'd been a Bacchus follower came as a real surprise.

It was ironic that her sheer talent landed her inside the very Ten Towers she meant to tear down, but the Towers taught the widest range of the strongest magic there was, so she buried her anger and built up her strength there.

And when the Mage King finally arrived, she played a decisive role in his making contact with the Black Darkness's Ten Commandments.

The first time she laid eyes on the Mage King, she told him, "You're nothing but another wicked mage yourself, but I'll work with you to bring down the even more wicked Ten Towers," and in the end she became his companion, walking that road alongside him.

For Karisia's... no. For my own future plans, the best outcome is this: while the protagonist set to appear in 2077 clashes with the Ten Towers, destroy only the White Light's Ten Commandments, then disappear.

So the balance between the protagonist and the Ten Towers has to hold. In the original, the protagonist moved too fast. He was already reaching for the White Light's Ten Commandments before Karisia had even gotten her own plans properly underway.

If I can shave down, even a little, the number of people who were originally meant to become the protagonist's allies, that should slow him down.

* * *

Kyne felt her whole body trembling.

She told herself desperately that what she felt right now was "anger," but she knew better than anyone that it wasn't.

This was fear.

Everything the slit-eyed man had said, smiling, had been her own thoughts.

But they were thoughts that hadn't taken shape yet, still asleep like some raw, uncut stone inside the seething betrayal she felt toward Sikton and the resentment she held toward Bacchus.

That slit-eyed man had known her own heart faster than she had herself.

Kyne began to wonder whether the thoughts running through her mind right now had truly come from "herself" at all.

Maybe that man had planted those thoughts in her.

What was truly terrifying was that a feeling had begun to well up inside her, telling her it didn't matter either way.

Even if that man meant to plant anger and resentment in her and use her as some kind of tool, as long as she could get her revenge on the Ten Towers, some part deep inside her was willing to accept it, gladly.

If she hadn't learned, secondhand, from being around the Bacchus cult's elders, how to stand back and observe her own emotions, she might have, right this instant....

"Allow me to correct a few facts for you."

Paying no mind to Kyne's fear, the man's words went on. For some reason, she couldn't tear her eyes from those eerily gleaming, slitted eyes.

"First, we do not yet know who was behind Sikton. It was probably not Blasphemia. I checked Blasphemia's database a few days ago, and as it turns out, they hardly cared about your people at all."

"....."

The man's smile deepened at Kyne's silence.

"Of course, it was not us either. We had gone there to search for an employee who went missing on a business trip."

"An employee? You mean a company?"

"Yes, Kyne. We suspect there may be a third force connected to Sikton."

She barely caught the mutter the slit-eyed man added under his breath, something like "though, to be precise, it is not us. Just me." Only one question filled her mind: why?

Why put her own anger and resentment into shape, only to turn around and tell her that wasn't it?

Why lay every truth bare instead of burying it in the dark?

"Let us return to the subject of magic, Kyne. Should you choose to learn magic, we are prepared to support you with full sincerity."

"Wh...why?"

"Because you have talent, of course. You would need to learn how to conceal your divine power, or else abandon your faith, but you do have talent. The kind of talent even the Ten Towers would covet."

Snap. Ortes snapped his fingers.

An image projected onto the room's white wall. It showed people held inside capsules. Every one of them was someone Kyne knew.

"You have a natural gift for the Black Darkness affinity, necromancy in particular. Perhaps enough, even, to call back the souls of those people now trapped in brain death."

That struck something deep inside Kyne, deeper than anywhere else. Within the seed of resentment and anger, the flower of revenge lay in wait once more.

But if you looked at the ground where that seed had taken root, it was grief.

Grief, the wish to see the people who were gone once more. An emotion more primal than any passion.

* * *

'Kyne wouldn't realize that grief lay at the root of her own heart until after she'd fought against the Black Darkness Tower.'

But that couldn't be allowed to happen this time. I had to clear up her misunderstanding before her stray anger turned toward Hydra Corp. If she got the wrong idea and ended up harboring a grudge against our company, only to run into the protagonist somewhere down the line, it would be a disaster.

I wanted our corporate scholarship student brimming with pride, sheer pride, for Hydra Corp.

Overflowing with company spirit, shouting "When I grow up, I'm joining Hydra Corp!", only to get chewed out by Karisia....

No. I wanted a capable successor of my own, someone to support Karisia.

I held out my hand to Kyne.

* * *

"A full resurrection is close to impossible."

"But do you not wish to see them again, just once more?"

"Do you not wish to say your final goodbyes?"

Kyne began to cry. And she understood, at last, why the slit-eyed man had drawn out her thirst for revenge, only to scatter it apart again.

It had been to fasten a leash around her neck.

The leash was named hope. The hope that she could see them again and ease her grief.

"To see them all again...."