WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

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

Chapter 62

──────

Grave Robbing and Theft (5)

Argyrion's mages gritted their teeth.

The agent, undoubtedly from Blasphemia, had pitted them against the silver-thread worm and then sauntered off without a care. He was clearly trying to recover evidence, the secret pact with Toress Magic Tower, scattered throughout the middle layer.

At least one of them had to break away and stop him.

But the silver-thread worm was the problem.

Just as a mage drew in raw mana and refined it into mana of their own, the silver-thread worm did the opposite: it broke mana back down into raw mana, and the more raw mana it took in, the more its own body swelled.

The freed worm had apparently already absorbed a considerable amount of mana, its body now more than ten times the size it had been while confined in the sealed chamber.

The threads packed densely across the worm's entire body lashed out viciously. Argyrion's mages chanted one high-tier spell after another, spells that would normally have left them staggering just from the attempt to cast them.

An attack made possible only by the blessing of "the cause." Pillars of fire surged up, melting away both ceiling and floor.

The scorching flames proved effective against the worm as well. In an instant, roughly a fifth of its body melted away and vanished into the fire.

But that didn't mean it had stopped the worm's movements. They called it a "worm" for convenience, but in the true sense, it wasn't anything like an actual living insect.

No, it couldn't even really be called a living thing. Its behavior made far more sense understood as a machine built with the sole function of devouring mana.

The worm tore off the parts of its own body caught in the flames and pressed forward again, toward the two mages with their high-quality mana.

At the same time, to repair the flesh it had lost, it sent its threads out again into the mana circuits scattered throughout the middle layer. As the ruin's control center, there was no shortage of mana circuits to draw from.

Flicker. The middle layer's lights blinked.

Proof that parts of the ruin's systems, drained of mana by the worm, were starting to malfunction.

But neither Argyrion nor the handful of Toress Magic Tower mages still left in the middle layer had any attention to spare for that.

If they didn't focus on the fight against the otherworld beast in front of them right now, they'd lose their lives.

* * *

The deep layer of the ruins on the island of Crete, and within that, its very lowest point. In the ruin's darkest place, mages were shouting threats.

"Didn't you say you were ruin exploration experts! You slow bastards!"

Dozens of fixers and mercenaries clung to the door, but the final gate held firm. Privately, they all regretted Outis's absence.

'Damn it. If that visor guy were here, he'd have popped this door open in an instant...!'

"The protective spell's too strong! Even you Toress mages will need to lend us mana if we're going to have any shot at unraveling it!"

The Toress School mages didn't trust the fixers. Underneath it all, these people were thugs. What would they do if they lent them mana, only for the fixers to turn on them the instant the door opened?

"You haven't even run out of mana yet! Quit the backtalk and-"

That was when it happened. With a grinding creak, a crack ran through the protective spell wrapped around the gate.

"Wh, what? It's opening!"

It was a stunning coincidence. The silver-thread worm, spreading its roots through the middle layer, had thrown the mana supply sustaining the protective spell into chaos. The sealed chamber at the very bottom of the deep layer had a separate mana source to maintain its own protective spell, but there was a brief instant before that source kicked in.

The fixers' relentless struggle to break the protective spell drove straight into that instant and brought about its collapse.

"Pour everything in before it repairs itself! Overload the magic circle and bring it down!"

Befitting a gate that sealed off the deepest point of an ancient ruin, the protective spell was extraordinarily refined. Being ancient magic, the technique itself was old-fashioned, but its durability was beyond imagining.

But even a spell like that couldn't keep running smoothly once dozens of fixers had poured their mana into it. Once it reached the critical threshold of destruction it could withstand, the door turned blue.

To be precise, it was the colorless protective spell wrapped around the door that had turned blue.

There was simply too much residual mana leaking out from the spells it had canceled out. One final blow was added, and before long the entire blue barrier shattered like a pane of glass.

A roar that seemed to shake the entire underground deep layer, and a storm of mana. The fixers dropped to their knees under the pressure of pure mana pouring out from the destroyed protective spell, since they'd used up almost all their own mana just breaking through it.

The Toress Magic Tower mages, on the other hand, weathered the mana storm with comparative ease. They'd conserved their strength, and they'd had plenty of time to brace for the aftershock of the protective spell's destruction.

They shot the fixers, sprawled every which way, a sidelong look. Not even close to a threat at this point.

"Wait. We broke the protective spell, but the alarm and the other spells are still-"

One of the fallen fixers staggered upright and called out the warning. But the Toress Magic Tower mages paid it no mind.

Anxiety that they might lose the spirit-human to Outis, and a defiant urge to push back against the ominous prophecy.

The complacency of having faced no accidents at all up to this point.

And on top of that, a self-satisfied conceit, convinced that, unlike those ignorant fixers, they alone carried the lofty ambition of one day reaching the Ten Commandments. All of it combined into the judgment they made.

'Whatever's in there is just a spirit whose sense of self has faded away over more than a thousand years, isn't it. The fact that it's still managed to hold onto its existence proves it's of exalted rank, but shut away in an isolated chamber like this, it couldn't have properly absorbed mana either....'

Their preparations to subdue a human spirit weakened over centuries were already thorough. Ancient scrolls containing spells of forced contract and spirit binding. Compared to a Magic Imprinting Drive, they took time to use, but since the forced-contract spell itself had been lost to history long ago, it survived now only in scroll form, the kind occasionally unearthed from ancient ruins.

Armed with a variety of artifacts meant to weaken a lightning spirit, the mages stepped into the stone chamber with confident smiles.

Just as the fixer had warned, the alarm spells that hadn't been dismantled went off. Along with the deafening noise, a chaotic pulse of mana could be felt.

But wasn't the being meant to hear that warning already asleep, and had been for a thousand years? The mages' smiles only deepened.

At the end of the narrow passage was a sealed chamber with a domed ceiling.

Inside the chamber sat a human figure, cross-legged in meditation. Blackened and shriveled, it looked like a corpse burned to death.

This had to be the one who was once master of the ancient Magic Tower on the island of Crete, reborn as a spirit-human through the secret art of spirit-transformation.

"Mana levels?"

If that thing had actually failed to become a spirit and was nothing but a corpse, it would be the worst kind of joke. The mage analyzing the artificial spirit through a pair of glasses-shaped artifacts nodded.

"I can sense lightning-attribute mana inside it, very faint, but there. Looks like it's fallen into dormancy from a lack of mana."

A perfect moment to use the forced-contract scroll. It was just as the senior Toress Magic Tower mage was about to breathe mana into the scroll.

Rumble!

A peal of thunder rang out. The Toress School mages scrambled to activate the spirit-binding scroll, but by the time they looked, the spirit-human was no longer where they'd seen it.

Zzzzzzzt...

A crackling, air-scorching sound reached their ears. They turned their heads toward it. A human shape, charred black as charcoal. From within it, flashes of golden thunder leaked out.

In the next instant, they saw the spirit-human's hand buried in the stomach of the senior mage who'd been holding the forced-contract scroll.

"Guh...?!"

The senior mage felt the mana that had filled his body get drained away in an instant. Struck by lightning from within and without at once, his body scorched black and crumbled into ash before he knew it.

One of the mages who witnessed this took aim with the spirit-binding scroll. At that instant, the spirit-human's body scattered into countless fragments of lightning, then reassembled right in front of him.

Not exactly in front of him, to be precise. It reassembled around him.

"Huh?"

The mage holding the spirit-binding scroll felt his entire field of vision flood with gold. That was the last thing he remembered.

Having trapped the mage inside itself and blasted him apart with a burst of lightning in an instant, the spirit-human began drawing in the mana he'd carried, tinting it with its own lightning attribute as it absorbed it.

Only then did the remaining Toress Magic Tower mages grasp the situation, and they scrambled to flee, each trying to outrun the others.

A self worn away over centuries. With only a faint, obsessive attachment to some cherished wish left inside it, the spirit-human had no intention of forgiving those who'd dared to invade the Magic Tower Master's own laboratory.

Especially not when they were so temptingly full of mana.

The spirit-human once known as Lord Thunderknell raised his head.

Mana. He could sense it above, too.

He'd been starved for mana for a very, very long time.

The mind the alarm spell had roused offered no resistance to the urge to feed.

* * *

'Strange...?'

I'd found a few artifacts and stowed them away nicely, but the Talisman of Thunderknell itself was nowhere to be seen.

'Don't tell me it's in some other ruin, not this one?'

That would be a problem. If word of the chaos here reached Toress School's main tower, security would tighten several times over.

Or, if they failed to cover this whole mess up and the Ten Towers found out about their collusion with Argyrion, Toress School could get crushed, tower and all.

Either way, getting my hands on the Talisman of Thunderknell would slip further out of reach. I felt a headache slowly building.

'Staying here too long isn't a good idea, in any case. Let me try slipping out first....'

Craaack!

A strange, thunderous noise filled the middle layer, the sound of something like leather being forcibly torn and ripped apart. I turned my eyes toward the source.

It looked like Argyrion's mages had realized they shouldn't keep fighting in an environment where the silver-thread mass could just keep absorbing mana. Using powerful telekinetic magic, they were ripping the mass out of the middle layer like weeds pulled from soil.

A body more than ten meters long was hauled out. The sight of tens of thousands of writhing silver threads called to mind a centipede, and it was every bit as repulsive.

The other mages in the middle layer headed for the passage while Argyrion's two agents held the silver-thread mass in place. They weren't abandoning the two to make their own escape, they were widening the entrance by blasting the passage with explosive magic.

'Planning to drag the mass all the way up to the surface to fight it there?'

It was the reasonable choice, since fighting on down here, without a spell powerful enough to incinerate the whole mass in one shot, would only turn into a dragged-out war of attrition.

I didn't move until they'd hauled every last thread up toward the surface.

'No Talisman of Thunderknell in the middle layer either. Should I watch how they deal with the silver-thread mass first, then head back?'

* * *

And on the surface.

The fixers were fleeing out of the abyss's gaping mouth. A giant of lightning and storm cloud, one that devoured people whole, chased at their heels.

Strangely, it went after the Toress School mages instead of the fixers, which was the only reason they'd managed to escape at all.

The fixers sprinted straight for that morning's assembly point. Now that they'd made it this far, they figured they'd finally have a moment to catch their breath. They could get on a boat, or anything at all, and flee the island.

"Th, there!"

The fixers, gasping for breath, lifted their heads.

What met their eyes was the silver-thread worm, its body writhing in that unnatural way. A mass so huge it would take a dozen-odd people laid end to end just to match its size, scattering silver threads in every direction as it hunted for a victim to bury them in.

The assembly point had nothing carrying mana, which made it a suitable place to fight the worm. Argyrion's mages had lured it all the way there on purpose.

"What... is that..."

Krrrrrumble-!

Behind the fixers, frozen in stunned disbelief, a roll of thunder sounded. It was the cry of a starving giant.

Ortes was making his way toward that very place.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried