WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 82

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The Prelude to Chaos (1)

'Outis.'

Kore, Pluton's priestess, recalled the moment she'd looked into that soul.

Her entire field of vision had filled with blue light. A brightness bright enough to blind her.

People called it "reading the color of a soul," but the sacred invocation Kore used wasn't simply about seeing a soul's color.

What vices someone had accumulated, or what virtues. It let her discern the path a life had walked, up to that point.

To put it as a metaphor, a soul seen through sacred invocation looked something like an embroidered carpet. Some patterns shone gold, while other sections showed through stained in a dark, murky color.

But Outis's soul had none of that. No, it wasn't even visible properly.

A blue radiance that stabbed at the eyes. There was no way to make out what kind of life that soul had walked through. It was a strange thing.

As Pluton's priestess, the divine power Kore wielded stood at the very peak, both in scale and in mastery. Given enough preparation, she could probably see clear through even the soul of a demigod said to have once walked this ancient world.

Setting Outis aside, there had only ever been one other case where Kore couldn't properly make out a soul's color.

The Pope.

The vast veil of divine power the Pope wore distorted the invocation itself. Looking through it felt like peering through some warped kaleidoscope, impossible to make out any real shape.

Once, the Pope had drawn back that veil himself and let her see his soul, but Kore hadn't trusted the color she saw then.

She was certain that anyone capable of wielding divine power at the Pope's level could show only the parts of their soul they wanted seen.

'Is this Outis person the same breed as the Pope, then?'

Someone whose divine power was so overwhelming it warped the very shape the sacred invocation cast. And yet, the flash of light she'd seen was a completely different kind of distortion from the one she got trying to look at the Pope's soul.

Having agonized over Outis's true intentions, Kore decided to use this search of the Great Temple as a touchstone to gauge what lay within him.

Guiding Outis to the Great Temple fell, once again, to Demos of the Enyalios cult, same as before.

'If I slip in ahead of time among the assault party Priest Demos leads.... No, that man seemed to be able to see me.'

It wasn't certain, but at their last meeting, Outis had acted as though he'd noticed her presence. Not impossible, since Hwiakin, a priest of Phoibos just like Outis, had also been able to sense Kore's presence through the authority of foresight (先見).

'Even Cult Leader Hwiakin needed to activate a sacred invocation to see me. Outis didn't look like he was using divine power during the meeting. Was it some authority put out by that Phoibos relic he supposedly has? Or had he already had a sacred invocation running from the moment he walked into the Order's meeting...?'

Setting aside the plan to slip in among Enyalios's faithful and watch Outis from the very start, Kore decided instead to track him once they were inside the Great Temple.

As Pluton's priestess, Kore had a sacred invocation that let her sense people inside Pluton's temple. Naturally, it also let her tell, through the esper field she picked up off each individual, whether someone was a follower of Pluton or not.

'If I could attune to the Great Temple's emblem, I could sharpen the accuracy even further....'

Back in antiquity, when the faiths flourished, temples too had had a core sacred relic, much like a Magic Tower's mana core. Usually crafted in the shape of the enshrined god's own symbol, this relic was called the emblem (表象).

The emblem functioned much like a crown. Worn by its rightful successor, it granted authority befitting that role.

If Kore could resonate with the Great Temple's emblem, she'd be able to trigger the defensive sacred invocations engraved throughout the temple with nothing more than a gesture.

Even the sacred invocation for sensing outsiders would manifest with power on an entirely different plane. Not merely detecting an outsider's presence, but clearly identifying every single item held within the temple, that this room had a Glaupikos relic, and that room, an Elimon relic.

But it was said the Great Temple's emblem had been destroyed at the Mage King's own hand. Even if she tried to search out its remains, they'd likely be sealed outside reality, just like the Great Temple itself.

Kore set aside the train of thought carried down from her predecessors' memories. What mattered more than memories of a bygone age was the future still to come.

Among the esper fields her sacred invocation picked up, whichever presence felt distinctly unfamiliar would be Outis.

She'd move through his blind spots and watch to see what he'd do.

'For a while at the start, at least, Outis will probably stay near Enyalios's people.'

Demos would probably ask Outis to help find Enyalios's sacred relics. However outstanding his prophetic powers might be, there had to be a limit.

If Outis was hiding some other purpose he needed to carry out inside the Great Temple, he'd likely refuse Demos's request. Even a prophet's foresight, however gifted he was, wouldn't come free.

But if he agreed to Demos's request readily, then it was likely, just as Outis himself claimed, that he had no purpose beyond "fighting the Ten Towers and preparing for the Mage King soon to come."

If Outis really was someone trustworthy, someone who genuinely stood for the gods' cults....

'He might even become a rival to set against the Pope.'

* * *

Kore felt an emotion she couldn't quite put into words.

She herself couldn't quite work out what to call it. Her own inner self was filled with a calm resignation and worry, sediment built up over long years of her predecessors' memories.

In truth, the name of the emotion Kore felt right now was irritation.

The cruder word for it, being pissed off, might be closer to the truth.

It wasn't that she'd caught Outis secretly betraying the Order of the Divine Name. More precisely, she hadn't been able to.

Simply.

Outis was too fast.

Kore ran after Outis, running her hardest. The moment she sensed him pulling swiftly away from Enyalios's priests, she ran even more desperately.

But something about the movements of Demos and the other priests felt off.

If Outis had turned down Demos's request and gone his own way, they should have scattered to search for their own order's relics, or else given up and reverted to the original plan, sweeping every room they found and gathering up whatever relics turned up, regardless of which cult they'd belonged to.

But there they were, staying put in a single room the whole time?

It happened to be right on her way toward Outis. Just a quick look wouldn't cost her much time.

'...?'

Astonishingly, the room where Demos stood was packed full of Enyalios's sacred relics. The priests under him were sorting the relics in an organized fashion, preparing to carry them out.

'They found this the instant they walked into the Great Temple?'

Just how precise did a prophecy have to be, to pull that off?

Kore pressed down her curiosity and tried to resume tracking Outis. But she couldn't feel his esper field anywhere.

'Huh?'

Even as she told herself this couldn't be right, she widened her range. The Order of the Divine Name's other branches were slowly making their way through the upper floors.

Outis, alone, was advancing deep underground.

Kore gritted her teeth once and broke into a run.

But she couldn't catch up to him. The path Outis had taken wasn't a straight line. Every so often, she could sense him stepping into a room and back out again.

To find out what he'd been doing inside, she had to at least glance in once.

That was where the truly strange part began.

Every room Outis had stopped by held sacred relics. And yet none of them showed the gap in the display that should have been left behind, if he'd actually taken anything.

Of course, this was simply because Outis, weighing power against bulk, had only picked out relics small and compact enough to be worth carrying. Kore, needing to catch up to him, had no time to inspect each room carefully, and so she'd failed to notice properly, that was all.

As she opened door after door, only to be greeted each time by relics of the old age sitting there untouched, a certain thought began to circle through Kore's mind.

'Right now....'

Does he know I'm tracking him, and is toying with me?

No, surely not.

Kore forced down her boiling irritation and tried to reason it out rationally. Outis was searching for something, and since nothing else held any value to him, he'd been leaving each room over and over without touching anything else.

Depending on what that "something" Outis was searching for actually was, he might well end up an enemy of the Order of the Divine Name.

The Pope's choices weren't the best option, but they weren't the worst either. The lesser evil, so to speak. If Outis turned out to threaten the Order's very identity more than the Pope did, Kore had a duty to expose it.

She searched out Outis's trail once more.

He'd stopped moving entirely.

But something else was moving toward him. She analyzed the ripple of its esper field. Not priests wielding divine power.

Closer to a mage, if anything.

Setting aside how a mage could possibly have infiltrated a Great Temple only just freed from its seal, the question of why it was heading straight for Outis pressed in on her.

Kore ran. Toward the place where Outis had stopped.

* * *

'I've got a bad feeling about this.'

This eye's perceptive range goes beyond any ordinary field of view.

Every scrap of information from all 360 degrees pours directly into my brain. Even the scene behind me, one my retinas definitely aren't catching right now, comes through vividly.

If I wait a little longer in this state, the eyes start tapping into information broader and more comprehensive than mere visual data.

The path a life had walked. Where the very flagstone I'm standing on had originally come from. The ratio of divine power drifting through the surrounding air.

And one strange mana-structure that hadn't existed a moment ago.

'No, wait. Is this even mana?'

It feels closer to raw mana than to mana, an odd, mutant strain of extradimensional raw mana that no human hand has ever refined.

'It's closing in.'

I switched on my high-frequency blade.

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