WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 51
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Enemies of the Ten Towers (1)
Karisia, waiting for Ortes to come back with Kyne, heard a strange sound.
A cracking noise, coming from the barrier sealing off the entrance to the listing review hall.
'That barrier should have had more than enough strength to stop mindless silver-thread hosts.'
Karisia hadn't cast the barrier spell herself, but reading the completeness of the formula woven into it was simple enough.
It wasn't the kind of barrier that could be broken by mere physical assaults from hosts capable of little more than spreading the silver thread's infection.
'Is someone dismantling the barrier?'
Karisia channeled mana into her gauntlet. If at all possible, she wanted to slip away from the listing review hall without drawing any attention to herself.
'But...'
Karisia's eyes shifted.
At the end of her gaze stood Lampades Tower. Its people, most of them research mages, seemed unlikely to hold up against an assault massive enough to break through a barrier like that.
'Ortes said they'd be useful to our goal, so I suppose it's worth protecting them.'
Karisia's ultimate goal was the destruction of White Light, one of the Ten Commandments. She sometimes phrased it as the collapse of White Light Tower, but what actually kept the name "White Light" alive in the first place was the Ten Commandments itself.
To erase White Light from the world for good, she would ultimately have to destroy White Light's own Commandment.
That was also the reason she'd put more and more weight behind creating the artificial Ten Commandments, a project that had started as nothing more than a cover story to hide her real goal of destroying White Light.
The line she sometimes threw at Ortes, "let's use the artificial Ten Commandments as a bomb to destroy White Light," had been half a joke.
Put another way, that meant it was also half serious.
The artificial Ten Commandments, compressed from the mana Kaicel had spent years siphoning from Etna City's own land, held the potential to become the greatest bomb in the world.
Karisia had kept a close eye on that possibility.
No one alive knew the lower bound of force required to destroy one of the Ten Commandments.
No one had ever tried. So Karisia had kept the maximum firepower she could bring to bear, mutual annihilation with White Light through a runaway detonation of the artificial Ten Commandments, in permanent reserve as one of the means available to her.
It was that same logic that had led her to appoint Ortes, the person she trusted most, as the head of the "Divinity Investigation" meant to bring the artificial Ten Commandments closer to completion.
If, by some chance, even the full extent of her own magical power proved insufficient to destroy the Ten Commandments, the only remaining option would be detonating the artificial Ten Commandments.
A final move to overturn the whole situation in one stroke, should every other plan fail.
Beyond serving as a bomb, the artificial Ten Commandments had another use as well.
Backed by the Ten Commandments, a Magic Tower Master could wield power inside the Commandment's mana field that was nothing short of demigod-tier.
Two things lay latent within the Ten Commandments: mana, and spell formula. Against a Tower Master capable of unleashing ancient high magic with an inexhaustible well of mana behind it, Karisia didn't blithely assume her own victory.
'If I'm fighting alongside Ortes, the odds shift meaningfully in our favor, but...'
The odds that either she or Ortes would suffer an irreversible injury were extremely high. No, "high" wasn't even the right word. A certain future was closer to the truth of it.
That wasn't the ending she wanted.
Mana fields, as a rule, repelled and canceled each other out. As a tool for suppressing the Ten Commandments' own mana field and sealing off a Tower Master's authority, the artificial Ten Commandments worked just as well.
What had begun as a cover story had become a core project directly tied to Hydra Corp's real purpose.
Losing people who could do so much to help finish the artificial Ten Commandments, to something as cheap as a terror attack by the Eroded, would be far too great a waste.
"Everyone, step back."
A low, quiet voice. The mages at the listing review hall found themselves obeying before they even realized it.
CRACKLE-CRACK!
The cracking from the barrier sharpened. Doubt and fear began to fill people's eyes. How on earth had a silver-thread host managed to break through a spell?
The quicker-witted among them arrived at a grim possibility.
The silver-thread hosts couldn't have broken the barrier on their own, but what about the Eroded mages who called themselves Argyrion?
CRASH!
The mana making up the barrier was destroyed completely. A roar swept over the area, like glass shattering but far more violent. Several of the mages who'd helped raise the barrier collapsed, bleeding.
"So here you all are! Future comrades!"
It wasn't the voice of the terrorist who'd read out the manifesto, but this one was unmistakably an Argyrion member as well.
Behind the Argyrion mage stood row upon row of automatons, their frames and artificial muscle exposed, stripped of any skin.
Each strand of that muscle fiber looked to be made of the same silver thread. As the silver automatons filed steadily into the listing review hall, the Argyrion mage spoke.
"Let's break free, together, from the wicked clutches of the Ten Towers, for the greater cause-"
The mage's eyes locked onto Karisia. An old, fear-soaked memory, dulled by exposure to the extradimensional, came rushing back.
"You..."
Karisia snapped her fingers. Her metal gauntlet rang out with a sharp note.
And a hemispherical membrane of light rose up to seal the entrance of the listing review hall.
* * *
A survivor of the Golden Desert Operation. Iobates, one of the two mages Argyrion had sent on this operation, spat out fury at the sight of a great enemy descended straight out of the past.
"How can you be here?!"
Karisia, for her part, wasn't fond of exchanging words like that.
It was a judgment grounded in the combat theory she'd learned from Ortes.
A dense magic circle formed in the air at the tip of her index finger, aimed at Iobates. Targeting and tracking layered onto the loaded beam.
Discharge.
The whole sequence, from Karisia aiming her finger to the light firing, was quiet enough that it barely registered as an attack at all. In a fight between mages, sensing an attack meant sensing the flow of mana that heralded a spell.
But the mana flow behind Karisia's magic was suppressed to an extreme degree.
It was an attack without warning, honed through her long game of cat and mouse with Blasphemia.
Iobates didn't try to dodge the strike. He'd seen too many comrades fall to that same trick before. It wasn't a spell he could dodge through skill alone.
Instead, he threw up layer upon layer of mana barriers. The tracking-enchanted beam bent and refracted as it wove between them, still closing in.
"Haaaap!"
The beam's bent trajectory, forced to break through the barriers one by one, bought just enough time, enough for his telekinesis to drag a silver-thread automaton into place.
Iobates slammed the automaton straight into the path of the killing beam. Its frame melted in an instant, the mana stone inside shattering along with it.
The beam vanished the moment the automaton was destroyed. Iobates threw himself hastily in among the rest of the automatons.
It was time bought at the cost of one silver-thread automaton. Iobates took stock of what he had left.
'About twenty automatons trapped inside this barrier, and no connection to the ones outside it. Is that enough to bring down that monster?'
By any sober measure, it wasn't. Whatever unpredictable factor had been at play, that monster had fought and beaten every single agent deployed on the Golden Desert Operation, all of them. Unless Captain Haltos were standing here, this wasn't an opponent he could take on alone.
The best option left was to escape this place and get word of the monster back to Argyrion.
Having settled on that, Iobates looked to Karisia, searching for some clue that might unlock the barrier.
And that was the end of it.
* * *
Iobates's brain cooked.
It was the curse Karisia had prepared, doing its work.
To look at something is to acknowledge that it exists. That was exactly why certain monstrosities could curse another being through sight alone.
Because witnessing a curse let its nature take root inside the witness. Karisia had shaped her curse by folding her own mana attribute into that very mechanism of "witnessing."
Witnessing, or the act of "seeing," belonged, strictly speaking, to the domain of light.
Wasn't the form of light the human eye could register called visible light? Most camouflage magic, when sorted by school, fell under the light attribute for exactly that reason, because it manipulated visible light.
The principle behind the curse Karisia had built was simple. It amplified, to an extreme degree, the output of the visible light entering the eyes of anyone who looked at her.
As a result, Iobates died, unable to put up anything resembling resistance.
'This would be tough against a Tower Master, though.'
That was Karisia's own assessment. A number of conditions had lined up this time to make her mana control overwhelmingly superior to her opponent's, which was the only reason the spell, piercing her opponent's mana field to amplify the light's output inside his own brain, had actually worked.
A curse that couldn't punch through a mana field to begin with was meaningless.
It also seemed unlikely to land as a killing blow against a high-ranking Eroded, one who wouldn't die even from having their brain destroyed outright.
'Well, I suppose I'll talk over how to improve it with Ortes once he's back.'
Karisia calmly took apart the automatons that had lost their controller. She was clearing the place for Ortes's return.
* * *
Ah, damn it.
"You Blasphemia bastards! Where are the members of our order you dragged off?!"
How did the Order of the Vanished God end up crawling in all the way out here?
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