WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 41

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Corporate Scholarship Student (2)

Before the full meeting with the other directors convened, Karisia was speaking with Ortes alone.

"We've placed the brain-dead bodies into preservation capsules, and sent Sikton's and Dimedes's corpses to Divius's operating room for a detailed analysis...."

Tap, tap, tap. Karisia's right index finger drummed against the arm of her chair.

"Is something the matter?"

"I understand the rest, but why are we preserving the brain-dead believers from the Bacchus cult?"

"As I mentioned, it is a measure to recruit the child we found on site. She has more than enough talent."

"You said she had talent for Black Darkness magic."

Ortes nodded. He already knew Karisia had been watching his conversation with Kyne, through the screen, all along.

"She would likely stand out even if we sent her to Elysion this very moment."

"What about her divine power? Having been born and raised in the Bacchus cult, she should have considerable talent there too, wouldn't she?"

"That will be difficult. She is a child who watched with her own eyes as her fellow believers were betrayed by a friend and left to die. Divine power requires faith, and restoring her belief in Bacchus would be a hard thing to ask of her."

Ortes's answer came without a moment's hesitation.

Karisia pursed her lips. Was collecting people with a talent for magic some kind of hobby of his?

"Is that really recruitment?"

"Pardon?"

"Listening to it, it sounded less like recruitment and more like some kind of demonic temptation. The child looked like she was about to faint."

"That could not be so."

Ortes shrugged once and went on. It was, admittedly, a remarkably smooth excuse.

"I merely laid out her own inner self for her, in detail, before she committed herself to revenge. You know as well as anyone, President, how difficult it is to take revenge on a target that large."

That much was certainly true. Even Karisia, who could confidently claim to surpass anyone alive when it came to talent for magic, found herself the weaker party the moment the fight was against the Ten Towers.

It was precisely to overturn that gap that she'd gone through the trouble of founding and running this company in the first place.

"I understand the situation. I have entrusted you with full authority over the Divinity Investigation and our objectives, so do as you see fit."

Ortes bowed at the waist. Karisia waved a hand to signal there was no need to go that far, and murmured quietly.

"Let's hold the damage and results report in one hour. I leave it in your hands."

"Yes, understood."

Once she went down to the meeting room, everything would be prepared as thoroughly as always, from gathering the directors to summoning outside figures like Kaicel and Geryones. Every necessity, handled to perfection.

"Haaah...."

Karisia stretched and thought.

If you'd prepared the Bacchus cult's brain-dead believers to keep Kyne on a leash, what had you prepared to keep me on one?

What would it take to leash you?

* * *

I looked over the faces gathered for the meeting. Neiro had quietly signaled he wouldn't be attending, citing exhaustion.

Since I'd been present for both the hunt for Dimedes and the search of the Bacchus cult's base, I could handle the field report on my own. I tossed him a few token words of thanks for his trouble and told him to go rest.

Geryones wore the look of someone who had no idea why he'd been summoned. The reason was to fabricate a story where Dimedes had died in battle among Etna City's Magic Towers.

Kaicel's face carried a hint of anticipation. He'd come rushing the moment he heard we'd secured the cult's relics.

Everyone took their seats according to protocol and waited. From somewhere far off came the sound of footsteps, click, click.

I judged the timing and opened the door. Karisia stood right in front of me.

I followed her in as she entered the meeting room.

Karisia took the seat of highest honor and spoke.

"We will now begin the results briefing on this investigation into the Bacchus cult."

* * *

"First, there is a matter I need to report. Former Director Dimedes's death has been confirmed."

Ortes, tasked with the briefing, delivered news that was shocking from the very first line.

"Former Director Dimedes, along with thirty demon-beast tamers and one hundred twenty demon-beasts under his command, were all wiped out. The circumstances, the condition of the remains, and the handling of the demon-beast byproducts are all summarized in the next section of the report."

Meconion, the half-spirit, had little interest in a tedious meeting like this one. Beating, breaking, and killing weren't what she was after, intense pleasure was.

The only reason she'd bothered to attend at all was to see the relics of the Bacchus cult, the god of pleasure and revelry.

Once the briefing on the cause of Dimedes's death wrapped up, and just as someone floated the idea of staging it so Geryones looked like the one who'd killed him, Meconion raised her hand.

"Yes. Director Meconion."

"So. What'd you bring back. Anything in there that might help with my line of work?"

"There is a little, though not much...."

Ortes manipulated the holographic display. A few bunches of grapes appeared, along with what looked like seeds.

"This is a grape variety the cult cultivated. Oddly enough, it grows well even underground, with hardly any light."

"Are there... no other relics carrying divine power?"

Kaicel asked, cautious, from the oversized chair prepared specially for him.

"A few exist, yes. But the vestments the cult leader wore, and the golden ceremonial cup used in their rites, did not retain nearly that much power."

"At least it's better than nothing." Divius muttered, having been called away in the middle of dissecting Dimedes.

It was the skepticism of a man who'd seen far too much junk, back in his Blasphemia days, from cultists claiming their trinkets carried divine power.

"For now, I would like to request research into extracting divine power from Bacchus's relics."

At Ortes's order, Kaicel nodded along.

What they'd lost from the expedition into the Bacchus cult: Dimedes, and his whole organization. What they'd gained: a handful of relics carrying divine power.

"That's quite a loss...."

Arabel was the first among the directors to finish running the numbers. The other directors silently agreed with the sentiment. Who would have guessed that investigating a dying cult would end with one of Hydra's own heads evaporating entirely.

It had taken a string of coincidences stacking on top of each other to produce this result, but the perceived risk of "Divinity Investigation" as a line of work had shot up in an instant.

"First."

Karisia's golden eyes gleamed.

"The board's vacant seat will remain unfilled. Going forward, any staffing decision for Divinity Investigation work is to be reviewed by the Office Head of the Divinity Investigation Office before being approved."

With that, the meeting was largely settled. Dimedes was dead, and the cause would be disguised as a clash with Geryones's side. Kaicel would take charge of investigating the relics carrying divine power.

The byproducts from Dimedes's demon-beasts and chimeras were currently being processed by the Hunters' Society. The Bacchus cult's grapevines would be gifted to Meconion's garden.

Just as it seemed Karisia was about to declare the meeting adjourned, an unexpected statement came instead.

"And I intend to make the Bacchus cult survivor Hydra Corp's corporate scholarship student, and send her to Elysion."

* * *

Elysion. Paradise of mages.

If you drew a decagon using the locations of the Ten Towers as its ten vertices, Elysion sat precisely at the center.

Known as the place where the Mage King had ascended, Elysion was nothing short of sacred ground to mages everywhere. The purest mana in the world welled up there without end, and it connected to every one of the Ten Towers' Ether Networks, making it the place where news from the magic world gathered fastest.

Sitting at the exact center of the Ten Towers' domain meant the ambient mana there wasn't skewed toward any single affinity, a trait that made Elysion the center of research across every branch of magic.

In precise magical experiments, or large-scale ones, the error introduced by an affinity bias in the outside mana was a maddening variable to calculate around.

But Elysion is a place filled with mana of a kind that exists only in theory, mana in which every affinity is perfectly uniform.

Thanks to that property, any tournament or examination of sufficient scale and authority, things like the Magic Tower listing review or the Apex Magic Tower registration exam, was invariably held in Elysion. The only exceptions were the handful of competitions where one particular affinity mattered most, like a flame magic contest or the regular symposium on eternal-snow research.

With mages gathering there in such numbers, key facilities that touched multiple towers, the central exchange for listed Magic Towers, the magic patent office, and the like, had naturally been built in Elysion as well.

And among all those facilities, the one place every tower watched most closely was.

"I intend to write her a letter of recommendation for admission to Museion Academy."

Museion Academy. A cradle for geniuses, admission granted strictly by referral. The pinnacle of every magical educational institution, one where only a recommendation from a Magic Tower let a student so much as sit for the entrance exam.

"Grrrrr...."

A low growl rose from the throat of Talos, representative of Etna City's mutants. A sigh from the hulking half-dragon (半龍), his whole body covered in bronze-sheened scales, had a way of chilling the room in an instant.

"Director Talos. Please, speak."

Karisia had given him the floor. Talos, a half-dragon by mutation rather than birth, seemed to struggle with forming words, guttural noises catching in his throat again and again as he worked to steady his voice. At last, he spoke, slowly.

"Museion's, admission period-"

"You mean to say it is already past. Is that it?"

It was Ortes who finished the sentence for him. Talos nodded slowly, confirming it.

Ortes was more than a little surprised that Talos even kept track of a school's admission periods.

'Not a practical question, like how to conceal her divine power, then.'

He'd assumed Talos cared about nothing beyond looking after his fellow mutants.

'Does he have a child of his own, or something?'

Even in the original, Talos had never amounted to more than an image of monstrous strength, with no further description given, which made this unexpected remark all the more curious.

"It is true the regular admission period for Museion has already passed. That said, students who have received a letter of recommendation from a sufficiently prestigious Magic Tower may sit for a mid-term transfer exam. It is held roughly once every three months, and since this month is the Month of Flame... it falls next month. In the Month of Ice."

A sudden sense of foreboding struck Arabel, and she asked.

"Prestigious...?"

"Yes. Which is to say."

Ortes smiled.

"All we need is enough of a track record for the paperwork to clear the Magic Tower listing review. Any directors not currently assigned to Divinity Investigation work, please focus on apprehending Magic Tower fugitives for the time being. That is considerably easier than building up a record of magical research."

* * *

Dimedes died without catching a single criminal, and now the Magic Tower listing review paperwork is in trouble?

Just cook up an excuse and put the other directors to work on it.

I rejoiced, finally able to offload the workload onto someone else and catch a bit of a break.

* * *

The assembled directors took Ortes's smile to mean something else entirely.

To them, it read as a declaration: Dimedes's sudden death had left Ortes deeply disappointed in the directors' "competence," and now he meant to say, You're all useless, so I'll handle the Divinity Investigation myself.

Arabel marveled, despite herself, at Ortes's perfectionism.

'Look at him, really. The moment anything's connected to the President, he wants to handle every last bit of it himself....'

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