WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 75

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The Butterfly Effect of Troublemaking (1)

Something was off.

Haltos, the leader of Argyrion, furrowed his brow. Blasphemia's pursuit was moving far faster than expected. The chaos caused by the silver-thread hosts shouldn't have been contained this quickly.

There were even times when Blasphemia struck Argyrion's agents before they'd finished spreading the silver thread at all.

If Haltos hadn't sensed something amiss in so glaring an anomaly, he never would have been selected as an agent for the Golden Desert Operation in the first place.

"Nastion."

The shadow beneath Haltos's feet rippled. It stretched, rose slowly, and stood on two legs, a shape with no features at all, pure black, darkness taking on human form.

"Is there a traitor among us?"

The mouthless shadow spoke. Strangely, its voice seemed to come from every direction at once, evenly, everywhere.

"Our comrades stand without shame even in the shadows. Every one of them is worthy of upholding the cause."

That only made the current situation make even less sense. If it wasn't the work of some mole Blasphemia had planted, then how in the world could information be leaking out at all?

Haltos ran back through the methods Blasphemia had used to gather intelligence, back when he'd still been one of them, one by one. But no method he knew could gather information this thoroughly without leaving a single trace of evidence.

"...No. There was one."

Future-prediction calculations powered by the Ten Commandments were an advanced resource available only to the Ten Towers themselves. Even if Blasphemia, no more than a puppet organization of the Ten Towers, put in a request to use it, they'd have a hard time getting approval for a future prediction.

The Ten Commandments were so powerful in their very existence that they themselves acted as variables disrupting any future prediction, so a proper prediction required using more than half of them at once. It was a limited privilege, invoked only in secret councils where the Ten Towers' elders gathered, or at the end of some deft bargain.

But Blasphemia had another means of peering into the future, one that didn't require the Ten Commandments at all.

"The Basement Prophet...."

Blasphemia recognized the danger superstition-followers posed and sought to eliminate them. But at the same time, it never denied their usefulness either.

The prophets, Phoibos's priests chief among them, were especially useful.

The fate awaiting the prophets who'd struck a bargain with Blasphemia, whether to save their kin or to escape being hunted down.

The 'Basement Prophet,' made by linking the prophets' brains together in parallel, was one of the mysterious tools Blasphemia had created.

"...Wasn't the Basement Prophet taken offline after the Monster of the White Light was born?"

Nastion asked. The Monster of the White Light. The Ten Commandments' bastard child. It was a variable so vast it shook future prediction to its core, much like the Ten Commandments themselves.

A true prophet's prophecy was, by nature, closer to 'foresight' than 'prediction,' a stolen glimpse of a single moment in the future, with no logic or causal chain behind it at all.

But the 'Basement Prophet,' a crude imitation cobbled together from prophets' corpses, leaned much closer toward 'prediction.' By excluding the Ten Commandments, the countless branch points of the future, from its calculations right from the start, it sacrificed accuracy for the ability to run at all....

The Monster of the White Light had dealt the Basement Prophet a fatal blow. It was a variable that exceeded the very limits of what the device could calculate.

No matter how many times it was restarted, no matter how the resulting prophecy was interpreted, all that ever showed was a blue light.

"Just as the Basement Prophet originally excluded the Ten Commandments from its predictions, wouldn't they have built a new Basement Prophet that excludes the Monster of the White Light instead?"

"Superstition-followers' numbers have been dwindling from constant hunting. With the supply of materials already reaching its limit just to maintain the existing Basement Prophet, I'd think building a new one would be difficult."

"Perhaps our old superiors compromised with reality and decided to use the superstition-followers' artifacts after all. What matters is that they've begun tracking us through some non-magical means like that one."

Nastion couldn't deny it either. If no traitor existed, the only thing that could explain how Argyrion's every movement was being read so precisely was the intervention of some means other than magic.

"What should we do?"

"The silver-thread terror was always going to hit a limit as far as blinding the Ten Towers went. It's a shame we won't even make it three months, when the goal was to buy about half a year...."

Haltos's calculations grew complicated. The first priority was disrupting the prophecy. The second was destroying whatever new 'Basement Prophet' Blasphemia had forged.

There were two ways to disrupt the prophecy. Argyrion could likewise use its own prophets to wage a battle of reading the future, or it could make the future itself, the very thing being read, more complicated.

"What about the Magic Towers we deal with?"

"Every one of them has grown timid since Toress School's annihilation. A few are quietly trying to sever ties with us, or showing signs of angling for a plea deal."

"Then we'll have to make use of them."

Haltos looked out the window.

A massive magic circle was taking shape, drawn from the raw mana accumulated through the silver thread. A passage to the extradimensional.

The gate still needed far more time before it would be complete.

"For the cause, and for the truth."

* * *

Blasphemia and the Order of the Divine Name had formed a joint front against Argyrion, with me as their bridgehead.

Actually, calling it a joint front wasn't quite right, since each side believed I was their own private spy, working for them alone.

『Director Neiro, please head to the Elimon ruins. Director Divius, please head to the Piraeos ruins.』

And while the two factions threw themselves at Argyrion, Hydra Corp used the opening to push the Divinity Investigation forward at full speed.

Most of the investigation sites had no conspicuous sacred relics left behind, there was always a reason Blasphemia had left a place alone. But if we scoured an entire shrine down to bare stone for artifact fragments, or, failing that, just hauled off the altar itself, Kaicel could extract divine power from it.

The artificial Ten Commandments was slowly, but steadily, accumulating divine power.

『If you find anything unusual, please contact me. I will be making contact with the nearby Blasphemia agents.』

After handing out individual assignments to the directors heading out on the Divinity Investigation, I set off on my own. A message Niobe had sent me earlier had asked to arrange a meeting.

I'd turned her down a few times already, using the excuse that I was busy tracking Argyrion. At the same time, I'd handed off the information the Order of the Divine Name gave me to Niobe, telling her to use it however she liked. It was meant to provoke a collision between Blasphemia and Argyrion.

Niobe seemed to have put the information I passed along to good use. Her messages carried one report after another of Argyrion agents captured or killed. The operation was a success.

Since tracking down Argyrion was currently Blasphemia's single biggest objective, Niobe, who always brought back the scoop, had probably climbed no small number of ranks in the process.

If she'd been reporting the intel I fed her as her own achievement, she'd probably become an elite agent with something close to solo-operation authority by now, wouldn't she?

And now that same Niobe had requested an audience, insisting that "we really do need to meet, just this once." The proposed meeting spot was a Blasphemia safe house near the area I'd flagged as Argyrion's next likely appearance.

I had no desire to take on needless risk just to meet her, but refusing over and over would raise its own suspicions. So I made every preparation I could and headed for the designated location.

* * *

For a while, an agent codenamed L13 had been the biggest topic of conversation inside Blasphemia.

The very first incident where traces of Argyrion had surfaced, Branch Chief Nardanit of Charlotte's breach of duty.

The Elysion terror attack, where Argyrion had revealed its name in earnest.

The name L13 had even surfaced on the island of Crete, where Toress Magic Tower's treasonous dealings had taken place.

That was thanks to the instructions Ortes had left before vanishing from the scene, telling Toress Magic Tower's captives and fixers that if the Ten Towers' interrogators ever asked for his name, they should answer "L13."

Blasphemia, reviewing the testimony, couldn't help falling into confusion. An agent whose every trace had gone dark ages ago, how could he possibly still be out there operating, alive and well?

Was it possibly a fake identity Argyrion had fabricated to spread disinformation?

It was Audit Office Head Salmosia who put that suspicion to rest.

Niobe had faithfully carried out the instructions Ortes gave her, not to trust the existing reporting chain, and to relay anything genuinely important to the Audit Office Head or to L13 himself.

Rather than disguising the Argyrion sighting information she received from L13 as her own evidence-gathering or deduction, she decided to pass all of it straight to the Audit Office Head instead.

As a result, Salmosia, brimming with enormous trust in the agent known as L13, dismissed every objection raised inside Blasphemia out of hand.

From that atmosphere, even the rest of Blasphemia had roughly guessed at L13's identity. An unknown agent belonging to the Audit Office could be nothing other than a secret inspector.

How exactly L13 tracked Argyrion still remained shrouded in mystery, but everyone understood perfectly well that digging into a secret inspector's "secret" was never a wise thing to do.

Salmosia had elevated Niobe to a position much like L13's dedicated handler. And Salmosia had wanted to meet, in person, the most capable agent loyal to him.

And so.

"I've heard everything you reported through Niobe. I understand your caution, given there are apocalypticists inside the Ten Towers colluding with Argyrion, but don't you think it's worth coming home now and then?"

"It is an honor to see you again, Audit Office Head."

Ortes stood face to face with Salmosia.

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