WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 70

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Business? Meeting (3)

Ortes pronounced their ruin with an unruffled smile.

The Mage King's return was not simply shocking news. It was shock itself.

An archenemy reaching past the Twelve Great Gods themselves, to every cult in existence.

The end of the Mythic Age.

The one and only Ascended.

To those who served the gods, the Mage King's name was the very equivalent of fear.

The round table, which even Hwiakin's furious shout hadn't been able to fully quiet, fell utterly silent.

A being who should have vanished thousands of years ago, come down to this land once more?

A declaration so overwhelming it seemed to bleach every thought white. Even Hwiakin, who had demanded Outis prophesy 'the greatest calamity,' was no exception.

The ruin Hwiakin had foreseen wasn't the Mage King's return. The two might sit in similar territory, both catastrophes poised to sweep the whole world, but....

'How could anyone utter such a lawless prophecy?'

What that man had spoken was closer to a curse than anything else. Hwiakin's own foresight was the product of meticulous entreaty, sacred invocation woven together with thorough reason and calculation.

But hadn't Outis, without a shred of evidence, simply invoked that dreadful name, the Mage King, purely to deliver a shocking, reckless claim?

A mage without precedent or successor, one who had toppled cult after cult and risen to a station no different from the gods themselves, a being whose power was so overwhelming that his ascension had almost come as a relief, why would such a being descend to the earth again?

That was no prophet. That was a madman.

...or so it ought to be.

The vision from moments ago still flickered in the air. Something descending at the heart of a mist of ominous fate that blanketed the celestial sphere.

As cult leader of the Phoibos cult, Hwiakin could read the elements of a vision like this. The mist surrounding whoever descended was nothing less than the fragments of fate that the one descending could twist and command.

Every fate that gathered there knelt in worship before him. A scene as though the world itself had been made for him alone.

What else could possess such an overwhelming presence? The gods who had departed? Some extradimensional being reaching its hand into this world?

"At the very most, three years from now. The Mage King will reclaim a body and rise again."

"You truly have gone mad!"

Hwiakin cried out convulsively. Perhaps it was simple denial, an unwillingness to believe that the scene Outis had shown was a future actually bearing down on them.

"My, do even you know nothing of this?"

Outis's smile deepened. It was the bitter smile that prophets wear for those who struggle helplessly against fate.

Seeing on another's face the very expression they themselves used to wear, Hwiakin felt a helplessness beyond words.

Demos, the one who had brought Outis here, was every bit as bewildered by his words. Demos had summoned Outis because of the vote to decide how to respond to Argyrion.

Two positions were on the table: turn a blind eye to Argyrion's expansion, or quietly feed clues to the Ten Towers to drive Argyrion out.

Right now, the majority favored looking the other way, or even cooperating with Argyrion outright.

It was the result of a calculation: hamper the Ten Towers' pursuit of Argyrion, let Argyrion grow stronger, then let the two sides tear each other apart, all to the Order of the Divine Name's own benefit.

But Demos thought differently. Most of the silver-thread hosts Argyrion used in its attacks were believers, and among them, mostly ordinary worshippers who couldn't wield divine power and so couldn't even resist.

Turning a blind eye to Argyrion, let alone supporting it, meant lending a hand to the deaths of the innocent. To prevent that vice, he had invited the prophet of Phoibos.

Demos had believed that a man who could see the future would testify to just how terrible the future born of innocent deaths would be, that he'd counsel a way forward that produced no victims at all.

'But then, out of nowhere, the Mage King?!'

Demos stared at the prophet of Phoibos amid his confusion. The smile at the corner of the man's mouth didn't so much as waver.

As though he'd foreseen even this.

* * *

'It's fine, it's fine, they didn't catch on....'

I let out an inward sigh of relief. Honestly, up until about halfway through, I'd been a little rattled, wondering if I should've brought along Phoibos's crystal after all.

But the moment Hwiakin's whole demand of me boiled down to "just tell me something dangerous," I knew I'd already won.

Prophecy can't be cross-checked in the first place. Whatever I said, they could always claim, "That's a fake prophecy!", and I could just as easily fire back, "Or maybe your own powers just weren't good enough to see it?"

Because everything about a prophecy, from witnessing it to interpreting it, comes down to subjectivity. If a sacred relic or sacred invocation got involved, sure, maybe the truth of a prophecy could actually be determined.

But even accounting for that variable, my prophecy stood firm.

'Because it's straight from the original work.'

I'd gotten burned a few times trusting the original work's descriptions blindly, sure, but so far, none of the big-picture setting had ever actually been warped.

The Mage King returning in 2077 was the most basic premise of the original work. For the Order of the Divine Name, it was simultaneously the most shocking future imaginable and an irreversible fact.

Somehow Hwiakin's expression had turned pretty grave. Had that been too big a shock to drop? I glanced around at everyone else.

Ah, right, everyone else had their faces covered. I snuck a look at Demos, who'd brought me here, and his face was every bit as stricken.

I guess if you'd spent your whole life being hunted by the Mage King's heirs, or more precisely, the heirs of the ones who betrayed him, this would be a subject you couldn't help reacting to badly. But...

"My, do even you know nothing of this?"

I could understand the Ten Towers not expecting a return, since they were the ones who'd struck him down themselves, but it was a surprise that even the Order of the Divine Name, who ought to regard the Mage King as a mortal enemy, hadn't so much as guessed at his resurrection.

I'd figured they'd have some kind of lead on the Mage King's resurrection.

I'd been assuming the reason the Order of the Divine Name vanished by the time of the original work was the Mage King's resurrection, something like: they moved aggressively to stop it, got caught easily in Blasphemia's surveillance net as a result, and were wiped out in the end.

'Guess not. Then what in the world was the actual reason the Order of the Divine Name disappeared?'

* * *

A priest who had stayed silent this entire time, ever since the visit of the one who was no one at all, finally spoke.

"...Truly bold, and arrogant besides. You don't act like a prophet of the gods. You act as though you were a god yourself."

He was a giant of a man, dressed in a white toga, his head likewise covered by a white hood. His dignified voice rolled and boomed, filling the round table hall entirely.

There was a power in the giant's voice that overwhelmed everyone present. Even the curtain of dread that the terrifying prophecy had cast seemed to draw back at the sound of it.

"And you are?"

"I am Philoxenon, who serves Aigio, foremost among the Twelve Great Gods."

The word "foremost," used to describe Aigio. The other priests might have looked uneasy at it, but none of them objected, because Aigio truly was, in name and in fact, the chief god of the Order of the Divine Name's entire pantheon.

To put it simply, if Phoibos was "the god who sits at the highest point of the heavens and sees the farthest," then Aigio was the heavens themselves.

"Lord of the Heavens. Master of Oaths. Earthly vicar of the one who grips the thunder! A pleasure to meet you. As I've already said, I am Outis."

Reciting such grand epithets, Outis looked for all the world like a jester mocking a king. Philoxenon answered in a solemn, dignified voice.

"So it is. As you say, Aigio governs oaths. And so I have been granted a sacred invocation that discerns the truth of any oath."

Oh, great. Ortes muttered to himself. There really was a sacred invocation like that?

Philoxenon raised his hand, and a scale formed there, made of self-luminous lightning. On one side of the scale rested a single eagle feather.

"This is a sacred invocation that weighs your conscience. If you truly believe what you've said to be the truth, place a single strand of your hair on the opposite side."

* * *

I plucked a hair without hesitation.

Honestly, I did hesitate a little. Wasn't I about to lose a perfectly good hair follicle for nothing? But if you're going to run a con, you can't, no.

If you want to convince someone, you can't afford to look like you're hesitating. I set the hair I'd plucked onto the lightning scale.

Philoxenon asked, stern.

"Where did you hear this prophecy, that the vanished mage would return?"

"I did not hear it. I saw it with my own eyes."

If that scale really read minds the way Philoxenon described, it would come back true. I had, after all, read the original work back on Earth.

Sure enough, the lightning scale wobbled, then tipped toward the hair. Philoxenon asked again.

"Do you believe in the future you've testified to?"

"That is not the only thing I believe. I believe what came after as well, everything I witnessed beyond that point. The Mage King's path will bring ruin upon our world."

The scale stayed tipped toward my hair, unmoving. A deep sigh escaped Philoxenon.

"...My questions are finished. If any of my fellow believers have more, speak them now."

A brief silence followed. While the priests traded glances, sizing each other up, one of the questions that had surfaced earlier amid the uproar rose up again.

"What's the secret to passing a Blasphemia interview?"

"The way I earned my Blasphemia identity wasn't through an interview. If I had to name it, it was more of a hands-on trial. I stood on the same battlefield as Blasphemia's agents more than once, and it was through a mission serious enough to draw out even a secret inspector that I ended up with the identity I hold today."

I answered while staying as close to the truth as I could manage. I really had been on the same battlefield, sure. Just not on the same side, so we'd fought each other instead.

When the scale didn't budge, I heard someone click their tongue. Had they been hoping to infiltrate Blasphemia?

"What do you think of the Ten Towers?"

That would be Prodito, still running a loyalty screening. I answered quickly.

"Bastards who put the world at risk chasing pointless nonsense?"

Seeing the scale hold still, Prodito rose to their feet and clapped.

"Pass...! You pass!"

Urania smacked Prodito once on the back of the head and turned a suggestive look my way.

"Are you interested in dating right now? If you are, how about me?"

She said it while gently lifting her veil. Golden hair spilled down over skin like polished white jade. It played out like a scene straight out of a movie, or an ad.

I fought down a laugh threatening to escape me. It'd be a lie to say the features showing through her veil weren't striking, but I was the one who attended Karisia most closely, out of everyone.

Someone who saw Karisia's face nearly every single day wasn't going to be swayed by a honey trap at this point.

"I have no interest in dating, and none in you."

The scale didn't move. Urania clicked her tongue once and asked again.

"What, you have someone you like?"

It was a simple question.

"Heh. There is no one."

The scale wobbled, and tipped toward the eagle feather.

Wait. Why?

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