WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 64
──────
Grave Robbing and Theft (7)
I looked down at the scroll fragments in my hand.
'Is this really going to solve it...?'
A scroll of forced contract and a scroll of spirit binding. Along with a scattering of minor curses and scrolls holding some kind of lightning-rod barrier.
It was clear Toress Magic Tower had put considerable effort into capturing the lightning giant.
All that careful preparation, and they'd fled without ever getting to use it properly.
They apparently hadn't had the wherewithal to grab the scrolls on their way out, because the deep layer's final chamber had been littered with quite a few of them, abandoned.
Most of them were scorched black by lightning, barely holding any shape at all.
I'd wrapped the biggest surviving scroll around the rest of the fragments and carried them out like that.
Watching the silver-thread worm and the lightning giant tear the place apart like something out of a monster movie, I tried to imagine how the original novel's excavation of this ruin would have gone, if I'd never come here at all.
'One thing's certain, at least: the excavation succeeded.'
In the original novel, the protagonist was the Mage King, and his companions kept growing with every Ten Commandments arc, so Astrape hadn't been given any especially large share of the focus.
But during the chapters tangled up with Toress Magic Tower, that changed. She was, without question, the leading heroine there.
Toress Magic Tower appeared as a mid-tier tower with considerable hidden strength, standing as a genuinely threatening antagonist to Astrape, and to that whole arc. If they'd suffered a failure this catastrophic during the excavation, they wouldn't have had the resources left for any of that.
'It's 2074 now. Even with three years left until the Mage King's resurrection in 2077, that's not nearly enough time to clean up a mess this colossal.'
If things had gone the way the original novel described, the silver-thread worm wouldn't even exist, but even without it, I doubted Toress Magic Tower's excavation team could have stopped a rampaging lightning giant on their own.
Which meant, given the circumstances, they must have successfully excavated the giant without incident.
'If I hadn't been here, the development pace of this ruin would have slowed by at least a few weeks, maybe months. With steady, careful development, they'd have gotten into the deep layer without ever waking the giant...'
Force a contract onto it using a scroll?
That alone didn't feel like enough. I turned my gaze toward the giant.
The writhing silver-thread worm had spread across the giant's entire body, taking on the shape of something like a human skeleton. If you thought of the giant as a building, the worm had become something like its structural framework.
Picture an anatomical chart: bones rippling silver, flesh made of storm cloud, and veins running full of lightning.
It looked closer to some monstrous creature straight out of myth.
'Purely in terms of combat, they'd probably each be stronger apart, but the look of this fused thing is a lot more overwhelming... wait.'
The silver-thread worm was continuously absorbing mana from the giant. The giant, whose body was made of lightning-attribute mana, should have been drawing steadily closer to disappearing.
Instead, the giant's body stayed exactly as it was, neither shrinking nor expanding. The worm was still growing, little by little, but its rate of growth had noticeably slowed.
'The giant's absorbing the raw mana back out of the worm.'
The larger the worm grew, the more surface area it shared with the giant, and the more raw mana it lost back in turn. Which meant its net absorption kept shrinking, and its growth rate along with it. Before long, once the two sides' absorption balanced out, the worm's growth would stop entirely.
That the worm could absorb mana and store it as raw mana without any loss, I could accept, more or less. Trying to judge something extradimensional by this world's own standards would be foolish anyway.
But the reverse, the giant absorbing raw mana and converting it into mana without any loss at all, was much harder to explain.
Converting raw mana into mana, and then reabsorbing that converted mana, both steps should have bled loss.
'Reducing absorption loss to zero, isn't that exactly what the Talisman of Thunderknell does?'
But I definitely hadn't sensed any artifact's presence in that final chamber of the deep layer.
I watched the giant. Once the silver thread rooted all the way down into the tips of its limbs, both sides' absorption would become perfectly equal, and the movement would stop, for a while at least.
It was a bit like two fists pressed together, each pushing back against the other with exactly equal force from opposite directions, so neither could move at all.
The moment either side gained the upper hand, that precarious balance would collapse, and the victor would devour the loser.
Subduing a monstrosity that had evolved that far would be beyond Toress Magic Tower alone; wouldn't it take several Apex Magic Towers, or one of the Ten Towers itself, stepping in?
I ruled out just leaving the monster loose to become one more headache for the Ten Towers. If the Ten Towers concluded Argyrion actually had the ability to deliberately create something like this?
The combined might of all Ten Towers would crush Argyrion outright. If the general view of Argyrion escalated from "a larger, more capable band of the Eroded than expected" into a serious threat, that three-way balance of power would collapse into ruin right there.
The way to prevent that ruin, the only way to learn the lightning giant's true identity and clean up this whole disaster, there was only one...
'Such is life!'
I had to open my eyes.
* * *
By now, the island of Crete looked no different from the dead center of a storm. The sky, stained black, poured down a relentless downpour of rain while lightning struck again and again.
Once the silver-thread worm burrowed beneath the giant's storm-cloud skin, its movements stopped. But the storm still raged on, and the ominous silence that followed was proof that neither side had actually been overpowered.
The mages dreaded what would be left standing once the fight finally ended, how monstrously powerful whatever won would be reborn as. It was some small mercy that the brief lull gave them time to tend their wounds and recast their defensive spells.
Lugret, the Argyrion mage, couldn't bring herself to call it a mercy at all.
A silhouette had appeared beyond the storm-cloud-covered ridge. The blurred shadow made no move to come closer to the mages.
It wasn't Karuto, who'd left earlier.
At some point, two clear blue lights bloomed from the silhouette, right where a person's eyes would be.
And in that exact instant, the giant's movements stopped.
Lugret thought of the grinning man who'd taken control of the silver-thread worm and turned it on them. Strangely, aside from the grin, she couldn't recall any details of his face at all.
But she was certain the figure out there now, radiating blue light from its eyes and preparing some uncanny spell, was him.
'Is he trying to have the silver-thread worm absorb the giant?'
He must have come to this exact spot to strengthen his control spell by getting closer to the worm. Karuto, who'd gone to stop him, had probably met his end.
Lugret pictured what would happen if that man succeeded, if the worm actually managed to absorb the giant the way he intended. Could he still control a worm that had absorbed all of the giant's mana?
'Even if Blasphemia had managed to copy the control spell, they couldn't have caught up to it completely yet. That's why he hasn't been able to give the worm any detailed commands, just a simple order to destroy.'
If so, there was still hope. He wouldn't be able to easily control a worm grown far too powerful, and if she could seize that moment...!
But the silhouette moved in a way completely different from what Lugret expected. The blue light snuffed out almost immediately. Then came a sudden burst of acceleration. Lugret's eyes couldn't keep pace with the silhouette's sprint.
When the light flared on again, it was right in the middle of the clearing.
Inside the giant's own body. Amid the storm clouds where silver thread and lightning were devouring one another, two streaks of blue light burned.
* * *
'Such is life!'
I sighed once more and threw myself straight at the fused mass of Lord Thunderknell and silver thread.
His information rolled through my mind.
Lord Thunderknell, Keranos. The last Magic Tower Master of the Manubia Magic Tower.
The Manubia Magic Tower had once been a formidable school that toppled the 1st generation Yellow Thunder Tower and ascended to become the 2nd generation Yellow Thunder Tower.
But they hadn't been strong enough, on their own, to stand against the whole of the Ten Towers. To wage the Succession War, Manubia Magic Tower had promised to share the Ten Commandments' wisdom with several other towers, and in the end, they'd succeeded in bringing down the 1st generation Yellow Thunder Tower.
They'd succeeded, all right.
The Manubia Magic Tower Master of that era was dead within ten days, before ever fully attuning to the Ten Commandments. Murdered by the betrayal of their own allies.
In the internal strife among the allies that followed the Ten-Day Reign, the identity of the 3rd generation Yellow Thunder Tower went unsettled for a long time, until at last the 1st generation Yellow Thunder Tower, having bided its time and returned with a vengeance, put down every other rival and reclaimed the name.
The source of that absurd raw-mana-absorption ability was the Ten Commandments themselves, one piece of the Mage King's wisdom that Manubia Magic Tower had received from the Ten Commandments during the Ten-Day Reign.
That the Ten Commandments' wisdom, aimed in an entirely different direction from anything extradimensional, produced an effect of the same nature, was a strange coincidence.
For a long time, Manubia Magic Tower had bided its time, waiting to take revenge on the traitors. Keranos, the last Master of the Manubia Magic Tower, judged that the secret art was impossible to wield as a human, and sought to become a spirit so he could take his revenge on the betrayers instead. But...
He failed.
Completely.
The reason, I couldn't tell. My brain was already on the verge of overload; I couldn't analyze Lord Thunderknell any further than that. Just keeping the flood of information from the silver thread and the other mages from overloading my brain outright was already all I could manage.
'As a side effect of the failed spirit-transformation, Lord Thunderknell's self had been slowly dissolving away. It's just that the excavation sped up so much once I got here; if it had taken any longer, his sense of self would have evaporated completely, leaving nothing behind but the bare function of absorbing raw mana.'
The rest of the truth was easy enough to work out. Toress Magic Tower had originally meant to bind whatever remained of Lord Thunderknell's body with a contract scroll and use it as a mana-conversion device.
That was the true identity of the Talisman of Thunderknell. A talisman made by compressing the body of a great mage who'd turned himself into a spirit.
I'd heard there were funeral services that turned a person's remains into gemstones, and this was exactly the same idea. Except Toress Magic Tower's purpose wasn't remembrance, it was exploitation.
'Damn it. The original novel described it as something found in a ruin from the ancient Mage King era, so I'd just assumed it turned up as a finished artifact.'
In other words, the Lord Thunderknell in front of me right now was raw material. Raw material that happened to eat people, that was all!
I shouldn't take the original novel's descriptions at face value unless every last detail was actually spelled out. Same as with the high priest's residual thoughts left in the Phoibos relic, there were more things scaled down from the truth than I'd expected.
'If the original novel's Toress Magic Tower had compressed a spirit's body into a tool through a contract, then I should be able to pull off something similar right now.'
I took a deep breath again. I needed to stitch the formulas from those shattered scrolls back together, one after another, and link them to Lord Thunderknell.
The silver-thread worm was a bonus. It was, after all, some kind of summoned creature from an extradimensional origin too, so a forced-contract spell should work on it as well, probably...
It was a relief that both of them had all but lost whatever intelligence they'd once had. Let's begin.
* * *
His eyes open. Ortes's eyes could perceive intangible information, the essence carved into whatever they looked upon.
Inside Lord Thunderknell's body, residual mana swirled from the mutual absorption between mana and raw mana. Like a spiderweb twisted into dozens of overlapping layers, one strand of that tangled current now held a fragment of scroll.
The scroll, drawing in mana, activated. With only a fragment of its formula left, it should have just absorbed a little mana and faded away. But Ortes kept stitching the scroll fragments together, one after another, without pause.
It looked like a mosaic held together with Lord Thunderknell's mana and the silver-thread worm's raw mana as glue. He wove the formulas remaining in the scrolls into a single new current of his own.
Ragged as it looked, the shape of a formula took form. Strung between Lord Thunderknell's thunder-filled veins and the silver-thread worm's silver bones, the formula began to bind them both.
Crunch. Lord Thunderknell's right arm folded inward. So did the bone made of silver thread.
Then the left leg, then each of the other limbs. They gathered inward, crumpling like a sheet of paper being crushed.
Having turned himself into a spirit through the secret art of spirit-transformation, Lord Thunderknell's very existence had degraded into something like a formula itself.
Layering a formula of forced contract and binding over an existence like that, the contract's power was amplified to match the full weight of Lord Thunderknell's own presence.
A binding overwhelming enough that even the silver-thread worm, linked to him now, couldn't hope to break free.
Even the storm that had been raging on Lord Thunderknell's own mana, even the storm clouds hanging over the sky, converged into a single point. Into Ortes's grip.
Where the storm had gone into hiding, Ortes stood holding a golden orb inlaid with silver thread.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
