WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 61

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Grave Robbing and Theft (4)

Reasoning it through logically, it was obvious: Outis had noticed he was being followed and fled, leaving the powered suit behind.

The trackers who'd followed Outis fell into two broad groups. The first were trackers acting on Toress Magic Tower's orders.

Toress Magic Tower wasn't the kind of outfit to let a suspicious character like Outis vanish on his own terms. They'd simply subcontracted the job out, worried that if one of their own mages went after him directly, he might sense something was off.

They'd made the sensible read of the situation: an unidentified suspicious individual calling himself Outis had fled.

The other group were fixers close to the site manager. The site manager had tried hard to forget the rumor, but he suspected this might, just possibly, be some kind of omen.

He'd quietly passed along, only to the hunters he was close with, a rumor about Outis, the one who only ever signed contracts on paper, or put another way, the one who never left a trace of his own mana behind.

Having heard the rumor, the fixers had cheered at the miraculous pace Outis showed, but once he turned back after declaring, "nothing but misfortune waits beyond that door," unease swept through them.

And now. The fixers stood face to face with the sight of Outis gone, leaving only his clothes behind like a shed skin.

One of them spoke up.

"Did anyone... see what was inside the visor?"

No one had.

The fear grew steadily stronger.

As several circumstances piled on top of each other, terror seeped into the second group of fixers. They cried out.

"The rumor! The rumor was true!"

The fixers who'd been about to contact Toress Magic Tower voiced their confusion at that strange reaction. Relief, at finding someone else to share the rising fear with. Hushed whispers. The site manager's story spread.

Among those who went by the alias Outis, there was one Outis in particular.

The most ominous Outis of all. Wherever the footprintless Outis appeared, disaster always followed.

Toress Magic Tower's subcontractors shook their heads, forcing the thought away. They couldn't let themselves get swept up by some unverified rumor like that. Better to think about the special bonus they'd get for this extra job. Then one of them suddenly glanced behind them.

"...How did we even get in here?"

"Following Outis, obviously."

"How do we get back out?"

"......"

They looked over the passage they'd followed Outis in through.

In truth, this passage was still unexplored territory, one of the countless places Outis had come across on his way down to the very bottom of the ruins, and left untouched because no one had bothered with it.

A trace of unease about unexplored territory had lingered. But every place Outis had set foot so far had turned out to be safe.

They'd been able to decide to follow him only because they trusted Outis's instincts.

But now, hadn't that very Outis vanished without a trace?

The fixers realized they'd have to escape a grotesquely tangled maze of unexplored territory on their own.

Cut off in a silence and darkness that had lasted since ancient times, they were now isolated.

* * *

I felt a little bad for the fixers who'd followed me. That place had a fairly tangled layout, so getting back out would take some trial and error.

From what I'd seen, there weren't any lethal traps in there. The passage's structure itself was just complicated and confusing. As long as they didn't overdo the caution, thirty minutes should be plenty to find their way out.

'My deepest apologies if this ends up making you miss the meal ration.'

After going through all that trouble, there's nothing quite as miserable as missing a proper meal on top of it. I hurried my steps, thinking back on the sorrows of my old fixer days.

My hunch that most of the Toress Magic Tower mages on the island of Crete had swarmed toward the deep layer hadn't been wrong.

There wasn't much manpower left on the surface at all. Sure, it made sense that outside hires like fixers wouldn't be around, since this was normally peak exploration time, but there should still have been a few supervisors posted to prevent anyone from slipping away.

Now, it seemed even the mages who were supposed to be handling that supervision had rushed off to the deep layer. I dug through my memory and headed for the middle-layer exploration team's assembly point.

'When they split up by exploration site this morning, the middle-layer group gathered here separately.'

Finding the middle layer's entrance from the assembly point wasn't hard. When a large number of people move around, footprints inevitably get left behind. The traces carved into the ground by dozens, hundreds of footsteps were clear enough.

The surface layer and deep layer had their entrances in different places too, but the middle layer was tucked away somewhere even more isolated.

"They said it was something like the ruin's control tower. For security, I guess?"

What good does it do to put the entrance somewhere out of the way and carefully screen who gets in, for security's sake, if people don't do their jobs properly in the end? This is exactly how it gets broken into.

I opened my eyes, just slightly. Narrow enough that anyone but Karisia would look at me and ask, "How's that any different from your usual slit eyes?"

Even that much changed the dimension of what I perceived. It wasn't like when my eyes were fully open, where the whole scene turned into text, but intangible information that shouldn't have been visible in the first place still poured in.

Esper fields, for instance. The sphere of influence an esper-power holder occupied with their own ability. I could see a handful of esper fields wandering through the middle layer's interior.

The fields reflected in my eyes were brimming with mana, the mages' particular esper field: a mana field.

Maybe because the middle layer was such an important place, there still seemed to be mages who'd stayed behind instead of heading for the deep layer. I explored the middle layer while dodging the presence of those esper fields.

The gleaming silver passage, clearly maintained as thoroughly as Toress Magic Tower could manage, gave off a futuristic air unbefitting an ancient ruin. Maybe they'd modernized it, hoping to station people here long-term.

'Lucky they hadn't gone so far as to lay down a full-scale surveillance network, though. That would've been a real pain.'

I arrived in front of a door somewhere in the middle layer. Trying to gaze past this door in particular sent a splitting headache through me, unlike the reaction I got looking at ordinary matter.

It was the kind of headache I usually got trying to parse something with an esper field, or an object with a highly compressed structure, like an artifact.

'No mage's mana field here. This is an artifact storage room.'

The door was sealed with a complex security spell, but a spell finished off into such a stable structure was actually the easier kind to unravel.

No need to open my eyes wide and pull off something like Spell Formula Overwriting, the way I would against an attack spell. I just pulled out a Magic Imprinting Drive and set it off, the most basic of basic attack spells: Little Flame.

Cheap as it was, the flame built up at a fairly sluggish pace. But that was exactly what I'd intended.

The output was so low that it'd take quite a while before the security spell judged it as reaching the threshold of an attack.

The mana slowly climbed in density. Sensors built to detect an attack began, little by little, to activate.

I mapped out the structure of the circuits feeding mana to the sensors. Three mana-supply circuits currently active, one backup. Cut all three, and the design meant the spell formula would still run fine as long as the backup circuit remained.

Three seconds left until the Magic Imprinting Drive finished activating. Three seconds until the security spell would let out its alarm.

Plenty of time to sever the circuits connected to the spell formula.

I cut all four mana-supply circuits at once, backup included.

Some magic circles repair themselves periodically even after their mana-supply circuits get wrecked like this, so there was no time to waste. I made short work of the remaining physical lock with the high-frequency blade.

I opened the door with total confidence.

Behind the door, which opened without a sound.

Skreeeeeeeek...

There was a mass of silver thread, clustered denser than anything I'd ever seen.

"Huh?"

* * *

The reason Ortes had dismissed Arabel's "Toress-Argyrion black-market deal" theory was simple: timing.

Not even ten days had passed since the Elysion terror attack. There hadn't been enough time for Argyrion to prove itself a viable trading partner to Toress Magic Tower and convince them they had a product tempting enough to be worth the risk of a Ten Towers extermination order.

That much was true.

That is, assuming Argyrion's recruitment efforts had only started after the Elysion terror attack.

Ortes had once told the priest of the vanished god he'd met in Elysion that the Elysion terror attack had been nothing more than a show of force, and the real silver-thread hosts had likely already been spread across the world.

'Already.'

More than a month had passed between the day Sikton was killed and Kyne rescued, and the day of Elysion's listing review. Plenty of time for Argyrion to join hands with its secret allies.

Back then, Argyrion didn't even carry the image of "Elysion terrorists" yet. If anything, after the attack, Argyrion was in a position to pressure its secret allies.

'Do you really think you'd walk away unscathed if your dealings with us came to light?'

That was how the deal between Toress Magic Tower and Argyrion had held together. Silver-thread hosts were manufactured in the ruin's middle layer, a place only a limited number of people could enter. The finished hosts were mixed into Toress Magic Tower's slave-trafficking network and spread across the world.

To streamline the manufacture of silver-thread hosts, Argyrion kept one silver-thread mother-body stored in the Crete ruins. Under normal circumstances it stayed dormant, and even if some accident set it off, it was sealed under such a rigorous security spell that the odds of it running out of control were vanishingly small.

"Ha, damn it. We're screwed."

That was when Ortes showed up...

* * *

An alarm rang out through the entire middle layer. Argyrion's agents frowned.

"Those Toress Magic Tower bastards, they ran off saying they might lose the deep-layer treasure. Is that fixer hunting them down instead now?"

"It'd be a problem if we lost this outpost. We might have to step in ourselves, if it comes to that."

Even as they spoke, gathering their gear, Argyrion's agents were still quite at ease. They weren't the elite operatives who'd taken part in the Golden Desert Operation, but they were skilled enough to have slipped past Blasphemia's surveillance and joined Argyrion in the first place.

With their own natural talent on top of the blessing of "the cause," they were no longer the kind of people an ordinary mage could hope to touch.

"Hm? Wait."

Skilled mages that they were, the two agents could tell something was wrong. That massive presence wasn't coming from the deep layer at all, it was right beside them.

"Damn it, the silver-thread worm (銀絲蟲)?!"

"How did it escape! If the seal was breaking, the security spell should have gone off!"

"Maybe the worm ate through the mana and tore it apart!"

"No. A silver-thread worm outside a mage's control only has the primitive instinct to devour whatever living thing is nearby! Even if it ate through the circuits, the security spell should still have gone off with the backup circuit alive! Someone must have-"

As they rushed forward, a human shadow fell across their path.

Despite the silver threads flooding in behind him like a tide, he walked forward slowly, as if he were merely out for a stroll.

The silver threads didn't dare come near the presence walking toward them without so much as a footstep.

'It's him.'

'He's the one who set the silver-thread worm loose, and now he's driving it toward us.'

'There's only one organization that could have figured out how to activate and control a silver-thread worm this fast. Former comrades, and now traitors.'

"Blasphemia! How did you find this place!"

No answer came back. The silver-thread worm shot its threads, honed sharp as awls, out toward its old master. Argyrion's two mages instinctively braced for battle.

* * *

'What the hell were those two doing?'

I watched the mages locked in an all-out fight with the mass of silver thread.

'Here I was moving as quietly as I could, since it seemed to react sharply to vibration and sound...'

Every time I so much as said a word, that mass of silver thread had tried to drive a thread into me. Proof its sensory organs were concentrated in touch and hearing. Once I slipped out using a stride that cut down on vibration, it seemed unable to detect me at all, stretching its threads toward mana it could sense elsewhere instead.

Since it grew bigger by sucking up mana, I'd figured following it closely would lead me to an artifact, so I'd been trailing after it quietly, holding my breath.

'And then those two had to go and shout, provoking it, for no reason at all.'

'No, wait. This isn't all bad luck.'

While those two are busy fighting the silver thread, let's clean out the middle layer!

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