WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 84

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The Great Chaos (1)

It wasn't a fight.

What Kore witnessed wasn't a fight. It wasn't even a hunt, or a chase.

It was mockery.

To the very end, Outis turned Adusiam's own attacks back against it to bring it down. When one of its usual sonic rounds struck Adusiam's left arm, silver metal filings burst and scattered like a shower of flower petals.

With every sonic round he deflected, another limb was pulverized. Every time he shattered another piece of Adusiam's body, Outis spoke to it as though mocking it.

It was only once every one of Adusiam's limbs was gone that he finally took a step forward.

Only then did Kore realize Outis hadn't so much as moved from where he stood while deflecting every sonic round. From start to finish, he'd been toying with Adusiam.

His voice, murmuring as he advanced slowly, carried clear.

"Defective, is it."

A chill slid down her spine, as though ice had been driven straight into it. Kore had no idea what he could possibly mean by "defective."

Her reasoning began.

Outis had expected some kind of response from Adusiam, and when it failed to show that response, he'd judged it "defective" and started punishing it himself, or perhaps disposing of it outright.

'The response he wanted.... Obedience? From a golem?'

Outis had raced straight down to the Great Temple's innermost depths without pausing to collect a single other artifact along the way. He hadn't been after an artifact at all, he'd been searching for something else, and was that something this golem of the Mage King's, Adusiam?

Why would Outis have expected the Mage King's legacy to obey him? Kore flinched, stepping back without meaning to.

She couldn't let him find out she'd been here. He was far too dangerous to drag into a plan meant to strike down the Pope.

It was the moment Kore turned to flee.

"What are you doing over there?"

Outis's words struck her back like a blade cutting through the dark.

* * *

I blinked a few times. I'd kept my eyes open a good long while, subduing Adusiam. I'd taken its limbs apart well enough that there was no real risk of a sudden ambush now.

Now it was time to talk with the priest in the corridor, the one who'd been in my field of view ever since I'd started fighting Adusiam.

Clearly not an ordinary priest, my eyes ached every time they tried to properly make out the shape. I'd had a hard time forcing my focus to stay locked on Adusiam when it kept trying to drift over there instead.

That much densely compressed information had to mean serious training, whether it was divine power or Qi or something else entirely. So why had they just been standing there watching?

"....."

Not a field of vision crammed with data and text this time, but the priest's actual shape, seen with ordinary eyes. One of the priests from the Order of the Divine Name's gathering.

"If you were watching, you might have lent a hand."

"...You. So you really can see me?"

"Yes. Why act so surprised over something so obvious?"

The moment the words left my mouth, a thought struck me: 'huh.'

Did that mean I wasn't supposed to be able to see her in the first place?

A conversation with Demos came to mind. A twelfth priest who'd definitely been there in that room. Yet Demos himself hadn't remembered her, or maybe hadn't even perceived her at all.

A priest of Pluton, then? My thoughts started tangling.

* * *

A soft crunch. Outis took a step forward.

Kore tried to assess the situation calmly. At her own speed, she couldn't outrun Outis. Even if she fled, she'd be caught before long.

Getting through this moment safely came first.

"Hmm."

Outis rubbed at his jaw.

"Why don't you come out and we'll talk. There's nowhere to sit in the corridor, is there?"

Outis brushed the nearby rubble clean with a couple of casual pats of his hand, then sat down right there. He looked neither hostile nor guarded in the slightest.

Kore stepped forward carefully. Outis held the initiative here, that much was beyond question.

"When did you realize I was hiding myself?"

"After the gathering ended? Though it's a bit fuzzy, admittedly."

A blatant lie. If he hadn't noticed her presence back at the gathering itself, he never would have called it "something so obvious."

"There's so much I'm curious about, when it comes to someone who serves Pluton."

Kore forced down her unease. His way of speaking felt like it saw straight through people. If she hadn't already met the Pope, that unease might have shown on her face.

"I might not be a priest of Pluton at all, might I? Even a priest of Estia would have standing enough to sit at the Order's table."

"Come now. Let's be easy with each other. Estia's sacred invocation has nothing to do with concealment, does it? Even if she could hide someone, it would be more in the direction of an illusion showing some peaceful hearth scene, nothing close to a way of making someone genuinely 'invisible.' Wouldn't you agree?"

A question that felt almost leisurely. Kore couldn't help but nod.

"I can give you a couple of other reasons too. This is the deepest point of the Great Temple's underground levels, and there's only so many kinds of people who could navigate a temple they're visiting for the very first time this well. A priest, say, who worships the god enshrined here closely enough to resonate with the temple itself."

'Then what about you?' rose to the tip of Kore's tongue.

"Now then. There's something I'm curious about."

How does my soul look, to you?

It was a question she genuinely couldn't make sense of. When Kore failed to answer, Outis tilted his head and asked again.

"Pluton is the god of death, after all. Doesn't that mean you'd have a sacred invocation that can read a soul's flow, or its history?"

He wasn't wrong. But she genuinely hadn't been able to read his soul properly at all.

'Does that mean he already knows I tried to see through his soul, on the Pope's own orders...?'

It was a genuinely cunning way of speaking. Kore found herself thinking he really did seem like the Pope, and chose her answer carefully.

"Why would you be curious about that? Are you afraid of dying, or something?"

"Is there anyone alive who isn't afraid to die? But my interest in my own soul is closer to curiosity than fear. I'm curious where my soul came from."

"...Curious where it came from?"

It was a strange thing to say. Wasn't it almost as if he were saying he was something that shouldn't exist in this world in the first place?

Past moments swept through Kore's mind like a storm.

The prophecy that the Mage King would return.

His disappointment at Adusiam's refusal to obey him.

The claim that his own soul had come from outside this world.

Outis himself had said someone visiting the Great Temple for the very first time couldn't possibly navigate its geography so well. But then how did Outis himself know his way around Pluton's Great Temple so easily?

-What if this wasn't Outis's first time in Pluton's Great Temple at all.

Outis's own esper field, one whose divine origin even she, Pluton's own priestess, couldn't identify, one she couldn't even confirm was divine power at all.

-What if that esper field was a fragment of some new divinity that had never existed in this world until now.

Surely not.

Surely Outis himself couldn't be...?

Before Kore could even recover from the shock her own reasoning had dealt her, Outis's words came pouring out.

"I've always wanted to meet a priest of Pluton. If you attended the Order's gathering as a representative, you must rank among the very best the cult of Pluton has to offer."

It was a crossroads. Kore had no idea what on earth she should say.

After a moment of hesitation, she slowly opened her mouth.

"I can't see it. Your soul. There's no history, nothing, just a blue glow that goes on and on."

This much, at least, was true.

"Maybe that's just because there's not enough to go on. Won't you tell me more about yourself? Same as magic, a sacred invocation aimed at someone gets more precise the more you know about the target."

This was a gamble.

It was true that knowing more about someone did sharpen the effect, but whether that would even work on someone like Outis, who seemed to lie entirely outside the limits of any sacred invocation, was anyone's guess.

Kore waited for his answer, her heart trembling.

If Outis truly was "one who came from outside this dimension, someone Adusiam was originally meant to serve," then there ought to be an answer that had to follow.

"Is that so. This is troubling. Hm...."

Outis might not let her live, once she'd heard his answer.

But it was precisely at the moment of death that Pluton's power manifested most fully. If she used every last drop of divine power she held as a priestess, she might yet be able to leave a final message for the others in the Order.

If Outis truly was the being she suspected, one so dreadful she could hardly bring herself to put it into words, hope rested with the Pope alone.

"It's strange to put it this way, but there's really nothing special I did. I just had a bit of trouble near the extradimensional border zone, that's all."

"You, 'Outis' is an alias, isn't it? Tell me your real name."

"My real name, you mean."

For a moment, Outis's faint smile seemed to thin out into the air and vanish entirely. But only for a moment. That smile so distinctly his own was already back in place on his face.

"Right now, I'm nothing more than an enemy of the Ten Towers."

"...You said you were an enemy of the Ten Towers."

Kore recalled what Outis had testified before Philoxenon's sacred invocation.

'I believe what I testified.'

'The vanished mage who brought down the Order will return and bring ruin upon the world.'

'The prophecy of the return isn't something I heard from anyone, it's something I witnessed myself.'

...At a glance, that testimony made it seem as though Outis regarded the vanished mage as an enemy. So did his grand strategy of pitting the Ten Towers and the vanished mage against each other.

But that strategy had been laid out to persuade the Order into eliminating "Argyrion." Outis had said that if the Ten Towers and Argyrion wore each other down fighting, neither would have the strength left to face the vanished mage.

But couldn't the opposite happen instead, a strengthened Argyrion and the Ten Towers joining hands to stand against the vanished mage together?

What if he'd steered the Order toward driving out Argyrion specifically to head off that very possibility in advance?

"You, an enemy of the Ten Towers, are an enemy of the vanished mage...."

Outis's eyes gleamed.

At that moment, Pluton's temple shook. Attuned to the temple as she was, Kore felt a phantom pain, as if her own body had been run through.

"Gahk?!"

Kore hastily activated her sacred invocation for tracking outsiders. Familiar esper fields, priests whose divine power she could sense. But they weren't the only ones.

A group carrying the extradimensional realm's ominous raw mana had slipped in, hidden. Argyrion, without question.

But that wasn't all, either. A massive surge of mana no ordinary mage could possibly hold. Esper fields blazing outward on a colossal scale.

Mages of the Ten Towers had come.

Unable to make sense of the situation, Kore looked at Outis. Had he been dragging out this conversation with her, all this time, aiming for exactly this moment?

To keep her from noticing the intruders in Pluton's Great Temple?

Outis, hands folded together, watching her, asked.

"Is something wrong?"

Still smiling, as ever.

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