WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 81
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To the Great Temple (2)
Demos led them out beyond the city, to an isolated spot, and opened a golden door through Prodito's sigil. The instant Ortes crossed the rippling golden veil and leapt across space, darkness filled his entire field of vision.
'Wait. That's not darkness at all, is it?'
It was a black rock. Enormous enough to fill his entire field of vision.
Not like the coarse surface of basalt. If he had to put it into words, it was obsidian without any luster, but far darker than obsidian's own color.
Ortes recalled a memory from his time on Earth. A photo of Vantablack, or whatever it had been called, the darkest material in the world, he thought it had looked something like this.
The massive rock mass made of pure darkness felt unreal, like a single drop of ink spilled into the real world.
'Uluru, in Australia, was it? If you dunked that whole rock in Vantablack paint, this is probably what it'd look like.'
"Is Pluton's Great Temple on top of this black stone?"
"You can see it...!?"
Demos's body gave a small, startled tremor as he spoke. For a moment, Ortes didn't understand the reaction, but before he could even think it through rationally, his well-trained instincts answered on their own.
"Seeing with the eyes of the flesh isn't everything. Having been chosen by the sacred relic of the one who sees far, wouldn't its authority naturally be with me?"
"I see. Truly astonishing. To me, this spot looks like nothing more than a kind of crater. All I can see is an abyss the light never touches...."
Ortes looked at the black rock again. Massive enough to feel unreal, the rock looked so solid it seemed almost like a kind of fortress.
"The black stone you're seeing is the Great Temple itself. They say it was carved slowly out from within the rock. What lies underground, stretching down through the earth, is far larger than what shows on the surface."
Ortes quietly opened his eyes. It was to analyze the structure of Pluton's temple ahead of time. A diligent embezzler scouts out the assets worth skimming well in advance.
But the information pouring in through his half-lidded eyes was nothing like that practical kind.
The ancient seal the Mage King had laid struck Ortes's mind with a violent flood of information.
Ancient magic wrapped around that entire massive rock mass. A chain of magic circles, hundreds, thousands of spells layered one atop another. The extraordinary formulas condensed into the magic shone with an incomprehensibility so dense that an ordinary mage would need to stake an entire lifetime on it just to grasp a single stroke.
The chain formed by magic linked to magic was itself another magic circle. The countless varied spells engraved into it functioned as components of one single, enormous formula.
That final spell isolated Pluton's Great Temple itself from reality.
It stripped the temple of its form, and hid the temple's substance. Form and substance had been peeled apart, scattered into separate dimensional planes.
Ortes closed his eyes. Only then was the information, searing enough to fry his brain, finally cut off.
Rubbing his temples out of habit, Ortes went back over what he'd just witnessed.
'What kind of insane magic is this, seriously?'
Splitting an existence's very components into form and substance, then sealing each away separately.
'If I had to compare it to a game, I guess it's like an invisible wall and a glitched-out texture....'
An invisible wall you can't see but that still exists, you can touch it, break it. On the other hand, an object you can see but that has no detailed data behind it, just a texture, allows no interaction of any kind.
A temple with no form couldn't be perceived, and a temple with no substance couldn't be touched. It was magic strange enough to cross from wondrous straight into uncanny.
'And the Order of the Divine Name can actually break through a seal this insane?'
As far as Ortes could tell, magical power on the level of an Apex Magic Tower wouldn't come remotely close to unraveling the Mage King's seal. Maybe if one of the Ten Towers itself showed up, it could at least begin to understand the seal's structure.
"Gods, sing of the wrath, μῆνιν ἄειδε θεούς!"
At some moment amid the suffocating silence, a strange voice sounded from far away. Slowly, the sound drew closer.
It was a kind of song. A hymn, likely beginning with Aigio's cult and passed on like a round, cult to cult.
Every time the lyrics passed another verse, divine power gathered more densely. The brilliantly shining divine power lit up the abyss, and slowly, the form that had vanished beyond reality began to show through.
Ortes opened his eyes again to grasp the situation, and a different sight met him. Beyond the Mage King's seal, Pluton's temple was releasing divine power, as if answering the round of song.
'Good god.'
The Order of the Divine Name wasn't unraveling the seal through any magical principle or intricate counter-magic. Like prophecy, which follows an entirely different track from prophecy magic, the workings of divinity needed no logic.
All that was needed was output enough to pierce straight through the Mage King's seal.
The two divine powers, inside and out, reached out toward each other. With only a single dimensional wall between them, the radiances touched. Crack. A sound like something breaking rang out.
A crack split open in midair. A fissure reaching from the night sky down to the ground. From within the crack, the radiance of divine power came pouring out.
"-And so they held the funeral rites."
The instant the hymn's final verse rang out, the crack torn into reality finally collapsed. In the place where, only a moment ago, there had been nothing but a vast pit, an enormous rock mass the color of black darkness now rose up.
An auspicious aura swirled around that black rock, the immense divine power left over even after dismantling the Mage King's seal.
Taking that light as their guidepost, the Order of the Divine Name's priests broke into a sprint.
The time left to reclaim the sacred relics was short.
* * *
I showed a reasonable amount of courtesy, guiding Demos and the rest of Enyalios's priests to the place where their sacred relics were enshrined.
"How could this be...."
One of the priests muttered something under his breath. I answered with an easy, amiable smile.
"Isn't it only natural, when I can both see it and feel it? I've settled what I owed for Demos inviting me along, so now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go about my own business."
"...Be careful. As I already said, there isn't much time left before Blasphemia arrives. If you want to stay safe, you'll need to be out of here within the hour."
I gave a perfunctory nod and, without hesitation, took off running.
From the moment I left the priests behind, my eyes stayed half-lidded. Getting caught scooping up other relics would make for a genuinely awkward excuse, so I kept them open just enough to serve as an early warning, to sense any priest closing in on me.
'Even not fully open, the range they picked up on kept creeping wider, so I had to shut them every so often....'
Not that it was any real trouble. How hard could it be to just close your eyes for a second?
To reset the expanded range, I needed to stay squinted the usual way for a few seconds, in other words, keep the eyes' performance suppressed as much as possible.
A downside that meant nothing at all, unless some enemy happened to be lurking just outside my range, ready to strike from behind in those few seconds.
Not unless this place turned out to be some den of mages all crawling out of the woodwork to kill me. Everyone in the temple was just a priest, too busy scrambling to recover their own cult's relics to bother with me.
'According to Demos, they'd agreed to recover every relic first, regardless of whose it was, and sort out the distribution later, but it seems people's hearts don't run quite that neatly.'
Even now I could feel the priests up on the floors above, scrambling busily about. A frantic struggle to find their order's relics. Divine power bursting out everywhere. They were probably tracking their relics through sacred invocation.
I went hunting for artifacts belonging to cults outside the Order of the Divine Name, or put differently, relics of the minor cults that didn't belong to any of the Twelve Great Gods.
While the Order of the Divine Name scoured the temple for their own gods' sacred relics, I'd claim the sacred relics of countless nameless cults instead.
There was a physical limit to how much I could carry, so I'd need to pick out only the very best among the nameless cults' relics.
* * *
The lower level of Pluton's temple. Silver sparks flashed in the darkness.
It looked like a much smaller reproduction of the very fissure in the world that the Order of the Divine Name's chant had just caused.
Unlike the Order's chant, which had torn open a fissure large enough to fill an entire field of vision, the one opening now was barely large enough to fill a single stone chamber.
Scale wasn't the only difference. The color of the force warping the world was different too. Not the brilliant gold from before, but a cool silver.
Sparks kept flying from the fissure, the World Wall's own effort to mend itself and seal the crack shut. Just then, a hand shot abruptly out of the fissure and seized the empty air.
Craaaack!
A brutal, forceful grip tore the fissure wider, wrenching it open. Through the ruptured World Wall, the silver figure walked out.
It looked like a golem built out of brass instruments, though its color was silver.
Spiraled instruments like tubas or horns formed its limbs, and its frame was packed with what looked like organ pipes. With every step it took, the valves and buttons meshed together smoothly, moving with a kind of formal, mechanical grace.
If its limbs were instruments, its head was a unicorn's, a horse-like skull with a long, jutting horn.
The silver figure sent out a signal, following the order its old master had left behind. One, to the kin who served the same master alongside it. One, to the master's disciples.
The place the master had sealed was under attack.
Answer the summons at once and annihilate the enemies.
The power of old, familiar enemies. It could feel the power of gods who ought to have vanished from this world.
Spreading its raw mana out to gauge the enemies' strength, it gave a sudden shudder. It had picked up on a divinity unlike anything it had ever sensed before.
A foreign, alien divinity, unknown even to a thing that had, alongside its master, devoured countless priests from countless cults.
The unknown was always the most dangerous variable.
It was a threat it needed to grasp fully and eliminate, as swiftly as possible.
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