WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 86
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The Great Chaos (3)
The warning that the Ten Towers had arrived left my mind reeling.
No, actually. The bitter emptiness that had filled me to the brim vanished in an instant, so in a way, I suppose I'd call myself cleaned out.
There was no time to wallow in sentiment. I gripped the high-frequency blade.
This disaster hit like a bolt from a clear sky, and the survival instinct in my head was already ringing alarm bells. First, let's get the situation straight.
'Argyrion and the Ten Towers are both here?'
But why would the two of them show up together?
There shouldn't have been anyone but me capable of high-level enough troublemaking to make both of them appear in the same place at once.
Surely another troublemaker hadn't shown up out of nowhere to follow in my footsteps, at this point. If a rival of that caliber existed, my future planning would get hopelessly tangled.
I worked to untangle my crowded thoughts.
First, let's assume, as the priest of Pluton reasoned, that Adusiam's core did something that caused both Argyrion and the Ten Towers to show up.
If the golem the Mage King made sent out a distress signal, it most likely went out toward the Ten Towers.
That's assuming the golem doesn't know its creator was betrayed, though.
Then does that mean the Ten Towers' involvement came first, and Argyrion followed after?
Somehow, Argyrion detected the rare case of an Elder-level Ten Towers figure personally sortieing out. They must have picked up on the anomaly of an Elder rushing out through some intelligence network of their own, and dispatched a unit to interfere with the Ten Towers' business in turn.
'That's probably about the shape of the scenario....'
If so, then Argyrion knows about the Ten Towers, but the Ten Towers don't know Argyrion exists.
If I can get the two factions to recognize each other and start fighting before they notice the Order of the Divine Name, I can slip out of here without a scratch.
To move on this plan, first I need to pin down exactly where the two factions are.
In other words, that means using my eyes again. Not just half-open, the way I did when I filched the sacred relic, but wide open, in full bloom (滿開).
Seems like I'm getting a lot of use out of my eyes today, of all days. I can practically feel dry-eye syndrome setting in. Maybe I should've packed eye drops.
I opened my eyes.
* * *
Kore's senses expanded in a strange way. The way a person tastes with their tongue, or sees with their eyes, it felt as if the entire temple had become an organ for sensing some sixth sense.
The chatter of the Order's people. The shapes of intruders wrapped in camouflage magic. Even the ripples in the air's flow left by drones moving cunningly hidden in the dark, all of it, she could feel.
Ah-
Kore adjusted her own voice. No one inside the Great Temple could hear it now. It hadn't projected on a physical level, but on a more fundamental one.
You could call it a matter of reception. In this world, there were many channels for communication, from physical vocalization, to mental telepathy, all the way to conversation between soul and spirit.
Even within the same category, there were still many different layers of 'channel' beneath it. Take the body, for example: there's the range of sound a human can hear, and there's ultrasound beyond it that they can't.
If she was inside the Great Temple, Kore had the capacity to send her voice through any of those channels, but whether people had the capacity to hear it was another matter entirely.
Her voice just now had gone out only on a channel synced to the Great Temple's emblem, one only Kore herself could hear. Kore searched out other channels. A spiritual channel linking together those who held divine power.
Then, all at once, she felt something strange.
Ortes was looking up at the empty air.
As if he'd actually heard her voice just now.
His cold eyes were no longer shut behind his eyelids. That gaze, glinting cold like a blade, stared into the empty air for a moment, then before long he took off running somewhere again.
'What in the world is that...?'
Kore tucked her suspicion away and went on connecting a channel to each of the Order's members one by one, when a starkly foreign voice came flying at her.
"Can you hear me?"
It was Ortes's voice. But Ortes was still just running along. There was no one nearby to be having a conversation with.
"I'll trust that you can hear me, Priest of Pluton."
A voice utterly steady even as he ran. As Kore's eyes wavered, Ortes's notification continued.
"I'll be the one to draw the attention of those two factions. You should focus on hiding the Order's other members as well as you can."
It was too bizarre a reaction, coming from someone who'd just been saying 'it'll be a disaster if the Ten Towers discover who I really am.'
"Right now, the aftershock from the space magic Argyrion and the Ten Towers used is still lingering. Even if you tried to teleport using Prodito's sacred invocation, there's a high chance you'd get swept into the extradimensional realm. Once the two of them clash and enough time has passed, retreat then."
What in the world do you even want?
"Ah. My apologies, but I can't hear a word you say."
A blatant dismissal.
Kore tried to find a channel connecting to Ortes, but couldn't find one no matter what. She couldn't even guess what kind of channel would be compatible with the alien esper power dwelling inside him.
If she transmitted on every channel inside the temple at once, her words would probably reach Ortes too, but that would only get her caught by the Ten Towers or Argyrion as well.
Kore swallowed down her questions and her indignation, and refined what she needed to instruct the Order's members to do.
A route that could bypass both the movements of the drones the Ten Towers had deployed and the sightlines of Argyrion's intruders, gathering everyone together in one place.
* * *
Ortes looked up at the ceiling again. It wasn't an action with any real meaning behind it. His eyes' field of vision had already stepped outside the physical limits of the retina.
It was more a kind of habit. He could see a riot of colorful esper fields moving, tracing complicated paths against one another.
He could see Argyrion's alien extradimensional field, and the neatly ordered mana field distinctive of a high-ranking mage, embedded in the small flying craft the Ten Towers seemed to have scattered around.
The Order's people were moving in perfect coordination, as if they'd received some kind of revelation.
Not just moving, either, they'd taken up positions at chokepoints good for an ambush, readying themselves to annihilate the enemy.
'I see. So that's what it was, when that strange description suddenly got added to the Great Temple.'
With his eyes opened as wide as they could go, heading toward the Ten Towers, Ortes had at some point noticed a strange new description had been added to the Great Temple's own description, beyond the usual entries for material, maker, or the sacred invocations it had been granted.
It was somehow garbled, partly broken up, but piecing together only the characters he could actually make out, it read something like "the Apostle's Eyes, Ears, and Mouth."
Ortes guessed that whatever had caused that description to appear had something to do with the sacred relic he'd handed over to the priest of Pluton, and refined the plan in his head.
'My face is public property anyway. Gets put to good use, then gets forgotten just as easily. Selling it off once or twice more at this point won't change much.'
He already knew his face didn't even come out right on cameras that ran on mana. He was confident that even if Argyrion's combatants were carrying some kind of body-cam, it wouldn't be able to capture his face properly.
'The real problem is that Argyrion would find out their old enemy is still alive, though.'
Ortes weighed the return against the risk. Argyrion's leadership had tried to kill Ortes and Karisia, only to end up adrift in the extradimensional realm instead, so they'd probably already been harboring some suspicion that the enemy they'd been hunting might still be alive.
Surely Argyrion and Blasphemia wouldn't be sharing intelligence with each other.
Inside Blasphemia, the target of the Golden Desert Operation was already considered dealt with, since he'd arranged the circumstances to make it look exactly that way. The Elder dispatched from the Ten Towers wouldn't have any interest in what the lower ranks got up to, and even in the unlikely case he knew about the Golden Desert Operation at all, he still wouldn't know that Ortes was alive.
All told: Argyrion's suspicion would only turn into certainty, that was all. There was no way word of his survival would reach Blasphemia or the Ten Towers.
'No problem showing my face, then.'
Karisia, closely tied to the White Light, might be a different story, but he had no mana of his own to speak of, so there was no reason the Ten Towers' Elder would bother paying him any mind. Ortes resolved to bring back out the troublemaking skills he'd honed back in the days when Blasphemia had been hunting him down.
* * *
Tallo began moving his own drones more aggressively.
Aside from the left arm that had already found its first host, the remaining three limbs crept along quietly, scouting out their next hosts.
'Hm. Has Argyrion only just started the excavation, then?'
But the inside of the ruins was unexpectedly quiet. All he could see were Argyrion operatives entering from a different direction, none of the ancient artifact that had sent the signal, nor anyone actually excavating it.
'Must've sensed the ruins' barrier being damaged and sent out the signal, then. Good thing not much of it's been contaminated by the Eroded's mana.'
He could see a sight where the Mage King's marvelous craft remained preserved in its purest form. Tallo's alloy skeleton shifted as it curved into a smile.
He shifted his attention from his other three drones to the Argyrion agent his drone had already latched onto.
Normally, once he'd seized a body, he needed to read the memories out of its brain, but with a brain warped by the extradimensional realm's influence like the Eroded's, reading its memories was difficult.
Not to mention, once he'd already torn the brain apart, reading any memories was a lost cause. He was shaping the liquid spirit-intelligence metal into a kind of artificial brain to control the Eroded's body, but its nervous system was structured differently from a human's, so mismatches kept cropping up.
Noticing their comrade acting strange, another Argyrion agent asked.
"What's wrong? Did you sense some trace of a curse?"
"It's nothing."
Damn. His voice had cracked.
Sensing something off, mana gathered in the suspicious Argyrion agent's hand. Tallo grinned and set the liquid metal in motion.
With a wet hiss, like air escaping, the body of the agent wearing the left arm burst open. And from his torn-apart carcass, liquid metal sprayed out in place of bodily fluids.
"What-?!"
The liquid metal that splattered across the Argyrion agent's whole body warped itself into something like serrated teeth. The swarm of spirit nanomachines, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, moved in perfect unison and began grinding through the victims' bodies.
Gragagagagagagack!
The liquid metal shattered mana fields and protective suits in an instant, grinding through flesh as it went. Those who managed to scream were the lucky ones. Whoever met the liquid metal face-first had their vocal cords ground away first of all.
Screams echoed through the Great Temple. Unfortunately, the covert pursuit was over.
From here on, it's a hunt.
All the liquid metal stored in the other three drones he'd already smuggled in was released at once. From the outside, it looked like nothing more than clear water, a mere few dozen liters of liquid.
Tallo gave the order. Grind down everything that carries mana.
He turned his attention away from the drones he'd given orders to, and began preparing a spell.
An arcane secret art (秘義) of a great mage, one that could bring Argyrion down no matter how hard they resisted.
* * *
Kore witnessed a sight like water devouring people whole. An army of liquid, surging forward with a gurgling churn.
One branch of it was tracing a path headed straight for a collision with Ortes, who was trying to climb up toward the surface. Before Kore even had a chance to shout a warning, the water brushed right past Ortes's ankles.
And nothing happened at all.
"...?"
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