WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 42

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Rest? (1)

It had been a rare, priceless rest. Right after the meeting ended, a few directors had asked for a share of the Divinity Investigation workload. But as Office Head of the Divinity Investigation Office, I authorized none of it.

It was a manpower problem.

To avoid another sudden death like Dimedes's, you'd need at least two directors working together, or one director paired with me....

Two directors, off on a business trip at the same time?

Etna City still had plenty that needed sorting out. You couldn't just pull people as high up as directors out of the picture on a whim.

Neiro and Dimedes had both built their careers mostly around fighting, which was why pulling them out of Etna City had never caused much trouble. But if old man Bertrand or Arabel left the city for even a few days, the damage would be significant.

"That delinquent Cryton had turned into the reigning tool king of the construction site these days...."

With gangster work off the table and human trafficking banned outright, he seemed to be practically vibrating with pent-up energy. But I had no intention of cutting him loose.

If he touched the slave trade again and drew outside attention, things would get complicated fast. Until the protagonist arrived and clashed with the Ten Towers, Hydra Corp needed to stay below the surface.

The junkie Meconion had nothing pressing to handle inside the city at the moment. The problem was, she'd never been the right pick to send outside in the first place.

'She's not exactly strong in a fight herself, she's the type who commands followers instead.'

To minimize the fallout from pulling a director off duty, the best option was for me to handle Divinity Investigation alone. Bringing one director along, like last time, was the next best thing.

If only there were some way to dump the field work for Divinity Investigation onto the other directors too. I grabbed a sheet of paper and started scrawling down whatever came to mind.

"A deployment chart sorting directors by combat ability, based on Blasphemia's ruin risk assessments? You're writing this the moment the meeting's over?"

Gah.

"President?"

"Your door wasn't closed, so I let myself in."

Karisia waved a hand and said, "Hi there," the same as always. Well, the same as she always was in front of me, anyway.

She'd set aside the tailored suit jacket and combat gauntlets she usually wore, dressed instead in ordinary clothes.

"This is an invasion of privacy. You should not simply walk in outside of working hours."

Karisia laughed. "Ha."

"So you're going to kick out the president, then?"

I sighed and tidied up the papers I'd been scrawling on. Karisia never showed up without some reason.

Last time she'd barged in out of nowhere too, listened to my report on the directors' movements, and then fallen asleep partway through, but I was sure she'd had some grand reason of her own for it.

"What brings you here?"

Karisia seemed to mull something over for a moment before speaking.

"That Kyne girl. Before she enrolls in Museion, we need to either erase her divine power or hide it, don't we?"

"Yes. If she has lost her faith, her divine power will not recharge, so it would be best to exhaust what remains of it entirely and erase it."

* * *

At that same moment, Kyne was praying to Bacchus. He was a god who hadn't saved her family from betrayal, but she knew no one else to pray to.

She knew the names of other gods, of course. But the god she'd believed in, the god her family had believed in, was Bacchus.

This wasn't a prayer for herself alone, so Bacchus was the only one she could turn to.

"Protect my family's souls from that man's clutches, and please, don't let my resolve break...."

With her chance at reunion and farewell held hostage, Kyne had no way to defy the slit-eyed man. But if he meant to use that leverage to make her a tool in some wicked scheme, she would never forget the guilt of that evil, not for a moment.

That her will might never be fully stained by the slit-eyed man's wickedness, that was what Kyne prayed for, again and again.

* * *

"I see it a little differently, though...."

Ortes raised a question at Karisia's murmur. She shook her head and said it was nothing.

'Did he really say that with no thought behind it at all? Honestly.'

However she looked at it, it read exactly like a seasoned villain threatening someone through their family. Whenever Ortes showed a side of himself so absurdly clueless, Karisia found herself unable to tell whether it was an act or genuine.

"Magical skill's going to matter a lot for passing the Museion transfer exam. None of the directors are really suited to teach her, are they?"

"Yes. Though if we widen the pool to people outside the company, Geryones or Kaicel would be suitable enough to teach the fundamentals."

"If it's just fundamentals, I'll teach her myself. I've got some free time these days anyway."

"You, personally?"

Ortes rubbed his chin and nodded. Setting aside her position as Hydra Corp's final decision-maker, Karisia was, without question, the most suitable choice for teaching magic.

For one thing, her skill alone made her the best in Etna City. Her duties as president were the real obstacle, but if she said she had "free time," that meant she genuinely had room to spare.

Having confirmed Ortes's agreement, Karisia brushed off her clothes and stood up.

"About the Divinity Investigation work."

"Yes."

"If the directors are each too useful here in Etna City to send out, bring in fixers or mercenaries instead. Draw up a proposal and submit it, and I'll approve the budget right away."

"What would we even do with money we saved by pinching pennies?" Karisia said with a faint smile.

* * *

I want to save money!

...was something I could never say, not even with a blade at my throat. Since Karisia doesn't use blades, she fires beams.

My whole goal here is to save up money and enjoy a lavish retirement, you know.

After Karisia left, I read back over the stack of papers I'd been writing. Bringing in mercenaries or fixers instead of directors would, admittedly, save both time and manpower.

"The problem's security, then."

The thing is, you can't exactly trust mercenaries. From what I'd experienced back in the fixer business, there weren't many people worth trusting, fixer or mercenary alike.

From the moment I'd woken up in this world to the day I met Karisia, I'd spent most of my time in the fixer business, so it wasn't like my track record there was short.

Still, spending a long time in the industry didn't normally mean getting betrayed more times than you could count on both hands.

Employers, colleagues, it didn't matter who, they'd all betrayed me their fair share. Hearing lines like "Before you could betray me, I figured I'd go first...!" had left me genuinely speechless.

Even the job where I met Karisia had ended with the employer betraying me.

Maybe having no name for myself made me look like an easy mark to stab in the back. Most of my career as a fixer had been spent on jobs in high-risk zones bordering extradimensional space, backwater towns in the middle of nowhere, so there'd never been much chance to make a name for myself.

'...No good memories there, so let's just think about work instead.'

Normally, the line between a fixer and a mercenary comes down to scale. A one-person independent operator counts as a fixer; someone who belongs to a mercenary company and moves as part of an organization counts as a mercenary.

The ancient mercenary bands had gradually grown in scale into mercenary companies, and as those came to dominate the market, the very meaning of the word "mercenary" shifted, until it came to refer to the companies themselves and the people who belonged to them.

In that shift, a new word rose up to describe individual-scale operators, the kind once known as independent mercenaries, and that word was "fixer."

Honestly, there's a certain flavor of "we're nothing like your average mercenary!" in how fixers themselves tend to insist on the word.

Even though, if you actually looked at most fixers' backgrounds, the majority had simply gone independent because they didn't want to keep paying the brokerage fees mercenary companies skimmed off the top.

I called up the list of fixers and mercenary companies I'd kept memorized back when I was still active in the business.

The first filter was trust. The next was skill. Names crossed themselves off the list one by one.

I searched the Ether Network for whatever names remained. In this business, it wasn't unusual at all for a shop owner who'd been in operation as recently as the day before to turn up dead and shuttered.

Crossing off name after name like that...

'There's nobody left at all?'

Damn it. Those cursed mercenary companies. They dropped like flies the moment I applied the trust filter. Guess there was only one option left, after all.

"If I go find the guy who said he was setting up his own Magic Tower, he'll treat me right, at least."

Among the Magic Towers that had applied for this round's listing review was one with his name attached. Lampades Tower.

He was the only colleague who hadn't stabbed me in the back on that job where everyone else had. His character, no, his elven nature, was clearly well above the industry average.

When I saw him, I'd have to ask whether he'd be willing to send some of his mages our way.

There wouldn't be any Divinity Investigation work for about a month going forward, anyway. Until then, I could rest a little.

'That's it for work today!'

I lay down on the bed. Maybe I'd been on too many business trips lately, sleep came crashing down on me almost instantly.

『Hey there! Office Head of the Divinity Investigation Office! Hey, you!』

...and it went and vanished somewhere else entirely.

What woke me, sleeping without a single thought for once, was a call from Divius. I'd left him with the job of dissecting Dimedes and Sikton.

"What seems to be the matter?"

『That Sikton bastard, something weird turned up in his skull, I'm telling you. Get over here quick and take a look.』

Ha, damn it.

I clicked my tongue once and changed my clothes. Nobody ever just leaves me be for five minutes.

* * *

Divius looked at Dimedes's corpse and thought.

'Our names sounded so alike that curses meant for him used to land on me by mistake, more than once. Well, good riddance to him, dying like that.'

Barely five minutes after he'd sent word, the sound of Ortes's footsteps echoed through Divius's operating room.

"What is it you found?"

As always, his face carried a faint, quiet smile. Divius wondered whether that expression stayed exactly the same even freshly woken from sleep, or whether the man simply hadn't slept at all and had been waiting.

Divius figured it was probably the latter. Given Ortes's personality, there was no way he'd let himself rest while some risk factor concerning Karisia was still sitting out there unresolved.

'Heh. Good thing, then. I was right to contact him straight away, even at this hour.'

His calculation had been correct: no matter how exhausted he was, Ortes would always put anything connected to Hydra Corp, and by extension Karisia, above everything else!

Divius led Ortes over toward Sikton's skull.

'Why am I standing here in the dead of night, staring at some Mysteries of the Human Body exhibit....'

Ortes, roused straight from sleep, felt a headache creeping in.

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