I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss - Chapter 56

WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

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

Chapter 56

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Decision (1)

"...I still haven't seen the Ten Towers' real power."

On their way out of the listing review hall, Kyne murmured the thought quietly to herself.

True enough. The reason Karisia had brought Kyne all the way to Elysion was to confirm whether she truly had the resolve to stand against the Ten Towers, in genuine cooperation with Hydra Corp.

Could she witness the Ten Towers' overwhelming power firsthand and still keep her thirst for revenge against them unbroken?

But the Ten Towers hadn't stepped in for this terror attack. Blasphemia could be considered an extension of the Ten Towers' power too, but Kyne had never once seen the true mysteries the Ten Towers actually kept in reserve, wielded in earnest.

I nodded.

"That is certainly true. I expected the Ten Towers to step in and crush Argyrion's attack in a single blow, but instead, it ended up shaping into a standoff with Blasphemia, surprisingly enough."

"So from the Ten Towers' perspective, they don't even see the need to step in themselves? To the point where their subcontractor, Blasphemia, is considered enough?"

There was no way for me to know what went on in the minds of the Ten Towers' leadership.

The moment we reached the mana-engine train station, the loudspeakers crackled to life again with that same static noise.

This time it wasn't Argyrion hijacking the line for a pirate broadcast, like before.

「Attention, mages of Elysion. Extradimensional infectants scattered by the terrorist organization are still lying dormant throughout Elysion.」

「Specialized personnel have been dispatched to deal with the infectants. If you spot one, please refrain from approaching and contact Elysion's Safety and Disaster Bureau.」

「The infectants appear to have been scattered primarily in infrastructure and other locations with high normal foot traffic-」

Kyne tensed visibly. A mana-engine train station really was exactly the kind of place a silver-thread host could be lying in wait.

"Set your mind at ease, Kyne. We have the president with us, do we not?"

"Ortes, are you thinking of dumping this on your president?"

Karisia took it as a joke. But I hadn't meant it as one. Honestly, I doubted any number of silver-thread hosts, however many came at her, could so much as scratch her.

"No. That's not it. Something's... off."

Far off, I saw a formation approaching, visors down. I could feel dark-attribute mana coiling around them.

Karisia identified them in an instant.

"Undead soldiers from the Black Darkness Tower. Then again, I did think it'd be either Silver Iron or Black Darkness."

* * *

Even after the situation had wrapped up with the self-destruction of Argyrion's mage, the Ten Towers hadn't taken their eyes off Elysion.

It was because of one simple inference: Argyrion wouldn't have sent only a single terrorist. If the mastermind behind the terror attack was killed before the goal was fully accomplished, Argyrion would have wasted its manpower for nothing.

Operating on the assumption that there had to be at least one backup operative ready to carry the plan forward even if the mastermind was taken out early, the Ten Towers launched an additional search operation.

Of course, that backup operative had already been dead for some time, his brain cooked by Karisia's magic, but the Ten Towers still hadn't received any information about whoever had attacked the listing review hall.

Silver Iron Tower and Black Darkness Tower clashed over how to staff the search team. Silver threads infected mages and replicated themselves using mana as fuel.

Everyone agreed that Silver Iron's automatons or Black Darkness's undead were the right tools to minimize casualties from silver-thread infection. They were tools that could simply be rebuilt if destroyed.

"Can you not see it just by looking at the silver threads? Automatons, belonging to the same metal category, seem a poor match against them. Sending the undead is the response with the fewest variables."

"If anything, it's precisely because they share the same category that there's an approach worth trying. Silver Iron's secret arts might well be able to bring those silver threads under our control too."

Needless to say, both sides were driven by naked greed for anything born of the extradimensional.

In principle, anything extradimensional was supposed to be jointly sealed and monitored by all Ten Towers together.

But every one of the Ten Towers knew the truth: behind the curtain, all of them were studying the extradimensional in search of clues to ascension.

This time, only the two towers best suited to dealing with silver threads were showing open greed, but depending on what secrets Argyrion actually held, the attention of all Ten Towers might yet turn this way.

Neither tower had any intention of yielding a fresh lead to the other, so the two settled on dispatching their own forces separately, agreeing not to interfere with each other.

The automaton and undead legions that descended on Elysion scattered according to their respective masters' orders. Under the pretext of hunting down any remaining silver-thread hosts, a near-paranoid search operation began.

That it was Black Darkness's undead, not Silver Iron's automatons, who crossed paths with Kyne, was nothing more than the product of chance.

* * *

Kyne sensed a familiar power inside the undead. Confusion swept over her at the same time.

Because it was a power that shouldn't have been able to exist in Elysion, the sacred ground of mages.

Divine power. The power of those who believed in gods.

The undead legion, methodically dismantling silver-thread hosts, looked nothing like the skeleton soldiers of old folktales that the word "undead" usually brought to mind.

Massive frames wrapped head to toe in black reinforced-fiber artificial muscle. The dull, ink-black sheen of the helmets covering their faces let nothing show through the visors. Metal plates fitted over where a heart would be hinted that each concealed an undead core underneath.

Ortes murmured to Kyne, who had felt the divine power radiating from the undead.

"Try not to look so tense. You will draw suspicion."

"How-!"

"The undead Black Darkness Tower fields are not like conventional undead. Mages who become liches store their souls in reliquaries to draw closer to immortality, do they not? They have simply refined the same method."

They summon the souls of those they've killed into mana stones, creating a kind of makeshift reliquary. Then they build an artificial body to house that core.

The skeleton itself was cast from reinforced alloy, and every single strand of the specialty-fiber muscle carried the same top-grade reinforcement magic engraved into Blasphemia's own agents. That was why Black Darkness Tower's undead legion had a durability on an entirely different level from any conventional undead.

A crystallization of capital that only one of the Ten Towers could have made real.

Fitting a soul-summoned soul stone into an artificial body looked so much like planting a seed that they came to be called the Spartoi (Σπαρτοί), meaning "the sown ones."

These special undead, steadily refined by Black Darkness Tower over its long history, could draw on the full power of the soul housed within, while ensuring absolute safety by severing the link between soul stone and body the instant that soul tried to resist.

"There is one problem with this method. Use an ordinary soul as the base and all you get is a slightly sturdier undead. To make the Spartoi cost-effective, you need souls that actually accumulate power, mages, in other words, or..."

Ortes deliberately let the sentence trail off. That much was already enough for Kyne to understand.

A mage's soul. Or a priest's.

Kyne tried to count how many Spartoi must have descended on Elysion. At a glance, it looked like more than a few hundred, maybe close to a thousand.

The number of ordinary believers, in the simple sense of people who believed in some god, might still run into the tens of thousands even now, perhaps past a hundred thousand.

But how many priests were there, people who actually accumulated divine power in their souls and worked miracles with it?

Even gathering every priest from every order combined, it was doubtful the number would even reach ten thousand.

Kyne asked, stunned.

"How could there be so many of them?"

At a glance from Ortes, Karisia spread a sound-blocking barrier. Moving slowly out of sight of the mage controlling the Spartoi, Ortes murmured.

"Ah, it's a simple story, Kyne."

Originally, this world was ruled by priests. They'd held the same position mages hold now, in both status and numbers.

"Where do you suppose all those priests went?"

The soul stones planted inside the Spartoi were physical evidence of a massacre, layered up over thousands upon thousands of years.

"Well. They would not waste a soul that's actually endured over a thousand years on some mass-produced weapon like that. A soul that's held together that long without wearing down is precious, after all. Factor in compatibility across different eras' soul stones, and you're probably looking at one or two centuries, at most?"

"...You can really make an enemy's soul submit that easily?"

"A soul's will to resist and the use of its power have to be treated as separate matters. The Spartoi's artificial body remains entirely under Black Darkness Tower's control, after all. Though forcing down that resistance and extracting power by brute force does burn through the soul faster."

How many soul stones do you think the Ten Towers have stockpiled by now?

Ortes's murmured explanation ended on that question. Kyne realized the Ten Towers truly did treat their believers' souls as nothing more than consumables.

They were nothing but batteries to keep the Spartoi running. In that the sacred invocations available depended on whichever soul was installed, maybe the better comparison was to a Magic Imprinting Drive.

It was a horrifying fate. The Ten Towers' attitude of using human beings as disposable goods, in the most literal sense of the word.

What Kyne had seen wasn't the Ten Towers' power. It was their ugliness.

The vengeance that had lived in her as a vague, shapeless mass finally took on a concrete form.

'The talent I was born with....'

As it happened, Kyne's mana carried the dark attribute, the very attribute of Black Darkness Tower, the tower that commanded the Spartoi.

Kyne understood, then, exactly what she had to do.

Ortes had used the promise of reuniting with her family as leverage to make her learn dark-attribute magic, telling her that necromancy, dark magic's own art of soul-summoning, could let her meet her family's souls again.

Necromancy was a magic that dealt with both summoning and banishing souls. Ortes had been preparing her, from the very start, to face exactly these Spartoi.

Even knowing she was being used by him, it wasn't an offer she could have refused.

It wasn't only the calculated reasoning that she'd get her family's remains back only if she obeyed Ortes.

Having now seen souls exploited like this, in Black Darkness Tower's own hands, Kyne herself couldn't look away from their misery and misfortune.

Those captured souls had to be sent back to wherever they truly belonged.

Surely, every moment of it, from Argyrion's terror attack to this sighting of the Spartoi, had already been laid out within Ortes's foresight.

Before a fate she couldn't refuse, Kyne opened her mouth, her face set with grim resolve.

"...I've decided, Ortes."

* * *

"I'll join Hydra Corp. You really are cunning, aren't you."

...?

Out of nowhere?

What had I even done to deserve that. I scratched my head and answered.