WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 59
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Grave Robbing and Theft (2)
For Toress School and Argyrion to conduct regular trades, the first excavation site seemed better suited than the second.
That was based on an analysis of the two sites' size and excavation progress. The first site was larger in scale and workforce than the second, and since its excavation was still in its early stages, frequent personnel turnover wouldn't be out of place there.
Which meant, from Argyrion's perspective, needing to periodically swap out silver-thread hosts...
Arabel, who'd been happily laying out this line of reasoning, suddenly realized she'd said "too much." At some point, Ortes had slipped out of the room.
The only two people left in the president's office were Karisia and herself.
Arabel worked hard to keep her face carefully blank. She hadn't actually said anything out loud about the secret inspector or whatever else, not yet.
'All I did was float a theory that there's something going on between Toress School and Argyrion...'
But like any brilliant mage, Karisia's insight was extraordinary. Surely she'd already realized, from how confidently Arabel had been speaking, that she'd caught on to Ortes's hidden identity.
Waiting in dread for the verdict, Arabel noticed a strange smile playing at the corner of Karisia's mouth.
"I heard you well, Director Arabel. That's enough for now, off you go."
'Wha, what was that?'
Arabel realized she'd just been spared execution. Maybe Karisia thought highly of her intelligence-gathering, her insight?
Unexpected mercy. Maybe it was, to some degree, a declaration that she'd be let in on the secret.
Her thoughts a tangled mess, Arabel...
"Guess I'll just finish that nap."
decided to return to the dreamland she'd been banished from by that sudden summons.
* * *
Arabel's reasoning looked, at first glance, pretty sound.
But there was another problem.
Time.
For Argyrion to cooperate with Toress Magic Tower on such a large scale, it would take a solid foundation of business trust, built up over a substantial stretch of time.
It didn't make sense that they'd have built a cooperative system at that level the instant the Elysion terror attack happened.
For that reason I'd taken Arabel's theory as half a joke, but Karisia seemed to think differently.
If I had to pick between the two sites, she advised, I should head for the first excavation site, the one Arabel had guessed was where Argyrion and Toress Magic Tower conducted their trades.
In truth, "advice" from the president was advice in name only, effectively closer to an order. I didn't add anything and just followed it.
For convenience, Arabel's report just called it "Toress School's Site 1," but of course it had its own proper name.
"Crete, huh..."
It was an isolated island floating on a vast lake, ruins that weren't currently used as a city. From the look of it, they'd hauled in a portable mana core, the kind normally reserved for mana-engine trains, just to run a large-scale excavation of the place.
I used the downtime to log onto the Ether Network. The place I searched was FixerNet, where fixers post reviews of jobs and ratings of clients.
I skimmed through the reviews for Toress Magic Tower's jobs.
The first thing that came up was a post warning that if you got assigned to slave escort duty, it would just ruin your mood for nothing, so it wasn't recommended. I filtered out anything involving slaves.
As excavation work always was, there wasn't much beyond posts saying it was grueling labor.
The ordinary reviews, thick with boredom and exhaustion, actually put me more at ease.
'If something like the Talisman of Thunderknell had already been found, FixerNet would be a lot noisier.'
If the talisman had already fallen into Toress Magic Tower's hands, getting it back out would turn into a real headache.
'If it's in transit to the main tower, or being studied at some branch, fine. But if it's already sitting in the main tower's vault, that's going to be a whole ordeal.'
After skimming FixerNet a few more times, I decided what to do next.
'Seems like there's a fair amount of danger inside the ruins. I'll go in as a day-labor fixer, get a feel for the place...'
and if things go sideways, I'll open my eyes and just find the artifact and take it.
* * *
The Toress School mages running the excavation on the island of Crete were always thirsty for fresh manpower.
By nature, excavating ruins came with a heavy body count.
Ruins from the Mythic Age, having originally been spaces consecrated to the gods, were packed with installations meant to summarily execute unauthorized intruders, and ruins from the late Mythic Age, having gone through wars against mages, were practically wallpapered in anti-magic traps.
Were ruins from the Magic Age any friendlier to mages? Of course not.
The Magic Age was the origin of the present era's whole mindset, Magic Towers scheming in secret to steal each other's secret arts, murdering each other's spies.
Mages of that era, who plundered the magic others held dear and ruthlessly disposed of anyone who tried to steal their own, were never generous toward the generations that came after.
So traps and monsters lurking inside the ruins were nothing unusual. An environment saturated with mana had kept those traps intact even against the decay of time.
The Magic Towers hated wasting their precious mages on work that trivial and tedious.
So subcontracting the work out to fixers and mercenaries was an inevitable conclusion.
Smitia, the mage assigned as interviewer on the island of Crete, couldn't hide their bewilderment at the fixer standing before them, who'd claimed to have come "after seeing the job listing."
Wearing a visor over the face and clad in a powered suit, the figure looked exactly like the famous Spartoi of the Black Darkness Tower.
To put it more bluntly, it looked like a golem, or an undead.
"I don't know where you saw a job listing for this, but..."
Smitia, expression sour, pulled out three contracts.
One was a corporate subcontract for mercenaries belonging to companies above a certain size. Another was for fixers affiliated with small offices. The last was for solo fixers working alone.
Of the three, drifting solo fixers with no company or office behind them were actually preferred over corporate mercenaries or office-affiliated fixers. In most cases, they had no legal representative to pay compensation to if they died.
The visored stranger apparently belonged to that last category too, picking that contract without hesitation.
"You know how to activate a contract, don't you? Pour your mana into it."
Magic contracts, where both parties poured in their mana in place of a signature, were the most widely used form, since they were so hard to forge.
But the visored stranger shook his head. A deep, distorted voice came out.
"There's an issue with my prosthetic body's mana-discharge drive system. I can't use that form of contract. We'll do it by signature."
"With that kind of setup, how do you even keep your head attached... well, guess that's not my problem."
Maybe he wasn't a mage at all, maybe he used Qi instead. Smitia, curiosity spent, tossed over a pen. The visored stranger signed without hesitation.
"Outis (Ουτις)? Obviously a fake name."
"Isn't that true of anyone who ends up rolling into a place like this? Having a secret or two you can't talk about is nothing special."
"Hmph. Even if someone comes looking for you, Toress Magic Tower won't protect you."
"I'm aware."
A blunt reply. Losing interest, Smitia answered in a businesslike tone.
"Go to the workforce management office over there for the details."
* * *
This is why I like being a fixer.
I thought, reading over the contract in my hand. A scam of a contract, rigged every which way in the payout ratio to fleece some drifter fixer with no office and no track record.
The kind of circumstances that would drive a fixer to sign something like this were obvious enough, and that was exactly why even a fairly suspicious-looking character didn't draw much particular suspicion.
Plenty of bottom-rung fixers were carrying around some quasi-legal or outright illegal secret. But if you tried to hire only vetted people, the price stopped making sense.
The workforce manager, who oversaw all the subcontracted labor, looked over my contract, then sent over an Ether Network address and a password.
"The excavation team heads out every morning. It's split into surface and deep-layer teams, and you have to apply in advance on that webpage for which one you'll join. Detailed information, difficulty ratings and all, is on the webpage too, so make sure you know it."
The password seemed to be for the dormitory set aside for outside labor. I gave a vague nod and turned to leave.
'Looks like today's dig is already wrapped up. Might as well get a rough feel for how the site runs...'
* * *
The site manager felt his heart pounding. Outis, meaning "nobody," was the single most common fake name people who broke into the fixer trade used.
But even among all those nobodies, there were some with rather distinctive traits.
Despite going by the name of nobody, those particular ones got singled out from all the other Outises and treated as something special.
One had four eyes. Another's hair burned like flame.
Another never used a magic contract, only paper ones.
'.....'
Stories about these distinctive Outises had become something like urban legends within the fixer trade. Unconfirmed rumors said that any job the four-eyed Outis joined turned into a jackpot, and that the flame-haired Outis was secretly a scout for the Red Flame Tower.
Naturally, the Outis who refused magic contracts had a rumor of his own trailing after him too, less a rumor than a ghost story, really.
'Whatever site he visits, without fail, something goes wrong.'
A rumor known only to a handful of people who'd cut their teeth in the fixer trade.
The Magic Towers' higher-ups dismissed urban legends like this as nothing but irrational superstition among the failures who couldn't even get into a tower. Reporting it would earn you nothing but a lecture to "think rationally, you're supposed to be a mage," not a serious hearing.
The site manager swallowed.
'It's been years since the rumors about the Outis who won't use a magic contract died down. It's probably just a coincidence...'
* * *
Crammed into a six-person dormitory room, I found myself thinking back to old times.
'Back when I was getting chased all over the place, I used to use this kind of fake name a lot, to launder my trail.'
It was exhausting at the time, but now it was the kind of days I could almost call a fond memory.
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