WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 46

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Elysion (2)

Tap, tap. I walked toward Lampades, deliberately letting my presence and footsteps be heard.

I was already known for having no presence to speak of. If I just appeared out of nowhere in front of him, he'd probably jump out of his skin.

We'd been friends, but it had been years since we'd last been in touch, so my face might well have grown hazy in his memory by now.

Lampades turned his head, as if he'd caught the sound. Something about the way he turned it, slow and stiff, looked almost like he had a muscle cramp.

No. That was a pale, bloodless face, sweat running down it. This was nerves.

Was he anxious about the listing review?

Fair enough. He'd called it his lifelong dream, so it made sense he'd be tense. What should I say to cheer him on at a moment like this?

I thought it over for a moment, then settled on words of encouragement that would work no matter the occasion.

"Well, well, a pleasure to meet you. You have made your dream come true!"

* * *

Thud.

It was strange.

Elysion's foot traffic ranked among the highest anywhere in the world. It was the kind of place where it would be strange not to hear footsteps.

And yet this particular footstep sounded unusually clear. Unlike the directionless noise all around, it felt like a sound aimed only at Lampades himself.

Thud.

A second sound reached him. Closer this time.

Lampades's breath grew ragged. No. It couldn't be. The dark elf who loved machinery slowly scanned his surroundings.

That slow movement wasn't caution so much as a struggle to stall an inevitable ruin.

Like a child who senses a parent's fury and hides their wrongdoing even knowing full well that punishment is coming regardless.

Lampades switched off his antenna's sound-collection function. The range of his auditory sensor, sharp enough to catch whispering lovers from far away, narrowed all at once.

Thud.

Even so, the footsteps didn't disappear.

They came from exactly the direction he was about to turn his face toward. There was no avoiding it.

Lampades finally turned his head.

That blurred face came into view. Across it hung the same ominous smile as before, unchanged from the past.

"Well, well, a pleasure to meet you."

Lampades couldn't get a word out. You. You.

"You have made your dream come true!"

Weren't you dead?

Lampades's response, when it came, owed less to any logic or thought than to sheer social reflex.

"It's still a bit early to say I've made my dream come true. It's only just the paperwork..."

That was the limit of Lampades's reflexes. Fortunately, the augmented-reality display flickering at the edge of his vision was already offering greeting suggestions from his secretary spirit intelligence.

"...review that I've passed. The practical's the biggest wall, isn't it?"

"Oh, come now. A Magic Tower that has already cleared the paperwork stage would obviously pass the practical too. It is as good as done."

"Thanks for the encouragement."

Dozens of everyday conversational phrases, all suggested by the spirit intelligence, kept surfacing in Lampades's field of vision. But he couldn't bring himself to pick a single one. What he actually needed to know wasn't any of that garbage.

"You... you're, I heard you were dead. That's what I heard..."

"Ah. I have never experienced death."

* * *

So that was why his face had gone so pale the moment he saw me.

Fair enough, it was a situation Lampades could easily misread. On the job where I'd met Karisia, everyone but me had died to the client's betrayal, and I'd vanished right afterward, fleeing together with Karisia.

The other fixers on that job probably hadn't even left bodies behind, so word had likely spread as something like "missing in action."

And in the fixer and mercenary trade, "missing in action" was just another way of saying "dead, but we never found the body."

Looking at things from Lampades's side, a friend he'd believed dead for years had just turned up out of nowhere. It could have been the opening of a horror novel, or a mystery.

I stepped closer, hoping to ease Lampades's nerves.

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Here, look."

I spread both hands out in front of him.

"Am I not alive and well, standing right here?"

* * *

It made no sense.

Lampades kept repeating those words to himself.

After that day when only he and Ortes had survived out of ten fixers, he'd scraped together funds for a Magic Tower with everything he had, and the moment he'd hit the bare minimum needed to open one, he'd retired.

Even while building up the record he needed for the listing review, he'd spent his days on edge, wondering if that man might come looking for him again someday.

A fear that Ortes might turn up out of nowhere, saying something like, "The whim that spared your life back then has expired."

And then he'd heard the news. Missing in action.

The place where Lampades had worked as a fixer was land notorious as the front line against the extradimensional.

A place an ordinary person would never even hear the name of, one where even someone at rock bottom would sooner sell off their own organs than set foot in.

The fixers who gathered in a place like that, or rather, the ones who actually managed to survive there, were the very best the trade had to offer.

Every single day meant fighting a war against Eroded creatures spilling in from the extradimensional.

And the last job Ortes had ever been sent on was a special mission that filtered five names out from among even those top-tier fixers.

The details of the job were never disclosed. All anyone could do was guess, vaguely, from the fact that five fixers had vanished around the same time and none of them ever turned up again.

A top-tier fixer failing a job and dying, that too was common enough on the front line against the extradimensional.

But Lampades had never believed Ortes was dead. The man had a track record of coming back alone, unnaturally so, time and again, from jobs he'd been sent on.

The reason he'd only just now, years after Ortes's disappearance, finally gone through with the listing review was that Ortes might appear in front of him at any moment.

Ortes had said as much once, clear as day.

'I am rooting for your dream. Once you have made it come true, I will come see you.'

By every indication he was certainly dead, but Lampades had spent years agonizing over whether word might come tomorrow that he'd survived after all, and only now, at the listing review he'd finally worked up the nerve for-

Lampades came face to face with Ortes.

'Ah...'

The Faceless Ortes had returned.

* * *

"How have you been, all this time?"

"So-so. I've been busy building up the record I needed to clear the paperwork stage..."

Lampades's eyes flicked elsewhere. It looked like people from Lampades Tower were over there.

"Oh, are those people from your Tower? Let me say hello-"

"No! No, there's no need. Everyone's coming to Elysion for the first time in a while, so I gave them the day off. Can you imagine how awkward it'd get if the Magic Tower Master butted in?"

The words burst out of Lampades in a rush. It had the feel of a model Tower Master's thoughtfulness toward his own people.

"Wow, I really envy the people at your Tower. They get to serve someone on a completely different level from my own company's president."

"President?"

"Ah. My apologies. I forgot to mention it."

I handed Lampades a business card printed with simple personal details, an Ether Network mail address and the like.

It was a card for external use that Karisia had prepared while getting ready for our trip to Elysion. Since I couldn't reveal the title "Office Head of the Divinity Investigation Office" to outsiders, it had been swapped out for "Office Head of the Secretariat."

There was something fairly funny about a secretariat with exactly one member, its own office head. Though, come to think of it, the Divinity Investigation Office wasn't much different if you actually counted the staff, since it was just me too.

'Still, Kyne should be joining the roster soon enough, as something like an intern.'

Lampades's face twisted into something bizarre as he read the card I'd handed him, then settled back to normal.

"You, at a company. I can't really picture it."

Ah, right.

"It is true that back in my fixer days, I worked alone, unaffiliated with anyone. But like I told you before, it is all a misunderstanding. Whenever I tried approaching people, they all pushed me away, so I had no choice but to work alone."

* * *

"I am not someone who lacks social skills like that."

Even now, smiling as he said it, Ortes's features remained faint.

If you asked any passerby to describe Ortes's face, nothing would stick in their memory, and all they'd manage to say was, "He was smiling."

Lampades himself was no exception. Unlike some stranger passing by, he could probably recall a bit more, at least.

A faint smile, narrow slit eyes. A memory with no clear face to it, only a smile left behind.

That was why Ortes was called the Faceless Ortes.

Lampades recalled the ghost-story-like rumors that followed the man: that he always came back alone, that he swallowed other people's faces and went around wearing them.

He'd never experienced the second story firsthand, but he himself had very nearly become a victim of the first.

He could read Ortes's implication easily enough.

A president "on a completely different level" from himself. Lampades was someone who'd witnessed Ortes's true nature by having survival forced on him. If this president was different from someone like himself, there were only two possibilities.

Did that mean this person was a monster like Ortes? Or did it mean they were far more naive than he was, with no idea what Ortes actually was?

"Ah. There she comes now."

Lampades followed the line of Ortes's politely extended hand and turned to look.

Hair so white it seemed to know nothing of darkness. Golden eyes that looked as if the shimmer of stars had been lifted whole and set into them.

There was no way she was the same kind of thing as Ortes.

"Someone I owe a great deal to, after my last job. I currently serve her as president."

'Ah...'

So she was someone who'd fallen into Ortes's clutches without ever learning the truth!

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