WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 87

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The Great Chaos (4)

Argyrion split into four groups covering every direction, top, bottom, left, and right, and pushed into the unnamed ruins.

And the infiltration squad that had pushed in from the east went dark, leaving nothing behind on the comms but a horrific scream.

A clear anomaly. The commanders of the other three infiltration squads were busy exchanging opinions.

Splash.

It sounded as if the noise of water was coming through the comms.

Through the static crackling in the channel, a voice came through that felt endlessly ominous.

「Ha ha, everyone. Where are you all off to in such a hurry?」

* * *

The moment the western infiltration squad's commander spotted the suspicious figure, he cast a spell. It was pure instinct honed as a Blasphemia agent.

Lightning bolts built for both power and speed, made to subdue a person. Five spears of lightning (雷槍), each fired at a different vital point.

But the flash of lightning never reached the man. From the very moment the spell began forming, "water" had risen up to block it, and now lunged straight at the commander instead.

The barrier built into the artifact activated, and the water only rushed at the commander more fiercely for it.

'The barrier's taking continuous damage. Given the weight and density, this isn't ordinary water. This is...!'

Splash. The man stepped into the water again.

"I regret that we have to meet like this. You could have remained good friends of the Ten Towers, you know."

An unmistakably mocking tone. Argyrion's agents had little trouble figuring out who he was.

"The Ten Towers...!"

So the distress signal really had been forged by the Ten Towers after all? Or was it something wrung out of a captured prisoner under torture?

"I'm simply grateful you've all gathered here like this. Though I do regret that, since you were taking your time coming down, I had to come out and greet you myself."

The arrogance peculiar to the Ten Towers bled through his words, the kind of self-satisfied posturing that only comes from believing yourself in absolute control. Argyrion picked up no small number of clues from the way the man spoke.

These ruins were a well-built trap, an antlion's pit where the deeper you went, the greater the price to claw your way back out.

"Run, now! It really was a trap!"

"Oh dear. I've still got plenty more prepared, you know?"

「What's happening! Report your status!」

"Even the distress signal was part of the Ten Towers' trap from the start! Get out, whatever it takes!"

As the commander gathered mana again to try to break through the transparent "water," the liquid's charge only grew faster. Having once worked as a Blasphemia agent, his instincts for this kind of threat were sharp.

"It's a liquid familiar that tracks by reacting to mana! Suppress all mana output and retreat to the surface, now! I'll buy time here!"

The operatives under his command didn't make the mistake of getting swept up in misplaced sentiment and dying alongside their commander. They suppressed every ripple of mana as best they could and evacuated swiftly.

Beyond the barrier, Argyrion's commander glared at the Ten Towers mage standing before him. The same "water," endlessly pouring in to gnaw away at the barrier, kept his view from ever clearing.

But that faint, insufferable smirk hanging at the corner of the man's mouth still somehow leapt straight into view, unmistakable at a glance.

It was always like this. The "chosen ones" who belonged to the Ten Towers, always.

The expression of a cruel little god drunk on the power to crush lives like toys, the way a child toys with ants.

The artifact's durability was at its limit. The barrier would have to be redeployed manually. To hold the Ten Towers mage back even one more minute, one more second...!

"Damn the Ten Towers. You traitors have some nerve...!"

Gritting his teeth, the commander unleashed a spell. Cast just before the barrier gave out completely, the fire magic managed to dry up the stream of water, if only for a moment.

His vision cleared at last. Now, if he could just raise the barrier again-

The commander looked straight into Ortes's blue-glowing eyes.

The ominous blue hue pouring through his retinas dragged a faded old memory back into the light, one touched by the extradimensional realm's blessing. A nightmare in blue.

"You...! You're-!"

"Oh dear."

Ortes activated the high-frequency blade. In the next instant, the commander's entire field of vision was dyed with that eerie blue light.

* * *

A warning alarm surfaced in Tallo's mind, a message sent directly to his computational auxiliary brain from the observation drones he'd scattered around the temple.

『Moving object observed near the entrance.』

Tallo smiled, pleased.

"Sharper than I expected, aren't they. Well, I suppose that's only natural, they were dogs we raised ourselves, after all."

Had they realized the one controlling the liquid metal attacking them was on the surface rather than inside the temple, and given up pushing deeper in to go wipe him out directly instead?

A fast, accurate call. As a rule, the stronger the familiar a mage commands, the weaker their own personal defenses tend to be.

A powerful familiar was, more often than not, synonymous with enormous mana consumption. So tactics built around a familiar tended to split into two kinds: stay close enough to be protected by it, or keep well away and let the familiar do all the fighting while the mage stayed out of it entirely.

If the one controlling the familiar was somewhere far from the battle itself, the reasonable inference was that they were the type who poured everything into feeding it mana, leaving their own combat strength low.

But their reasoning fell short.

That kind of "general" logic might have worked against a greenhorn among the Ten Towers, an apprentice, maybe one of the refined ones at best.

But Tallo was already an Elder of the Ten Towers.

Ordinary magical common sense meant nothing to him.

He was still in the middle of finishing his spell, but that posed no problem when it came to dealing with inferior mages who didn't belong to the Ten Towers.

Tallo assigned two of his three computational auxiliary brains to chanting the spell and drove his palm into the ground. Metallic components buried hundreds of meters beneath the soil gathered themselves together. The blueprints for lethal weapons stored in his computational brain printed themselves out from his fingertips.

A munitions factory running on soil as raw material. This was the very reason the Silver Iron Tower's mages were called a one-man army.

He could see Argyrion's lackeys charging over. If they were coming anyway, he'd rather every last operative deployed here showed up too.

"Saves me the trouble of doing this twice."

He'd rather excavate the artifact at his leisure, in a pleasant environment. Tallo flicked a finger.

The autonomous mobile batteries took aim at their targets.

* * *

"When did-!"

The Argyrion operatives who'd escaped to the surface froze in horror.

To keep from being picked off one by one, they'd stayed in contact inside the ruins and banded together, fleeing the Ten Towers' vicious familiar, the "water."

Just as they regrouped for a moment to debate whether to retreat, they spotted magitech weapons closing in slowly from the horizon.

Should they go back into the ruins and scatter through a different exit?

But a cold glint of metal flashing across the sky stopped them. Every exit was being watched. Splitting up would only get them picked off one by one.

They were certain they hadn't sensed another mage's mana at all, not even up until they'd first breached the ruins. So how could there be a siege net of magitech weapons woven this tight?

Even resorting to spatial-transfer magic seemed close to impossible. Not because the Ten Towers lacked the capacity to move troops that way, but because if a spatial spell on this scale had been cast, there was no way Argyrion wouldn't have detected it.

Unless it was the work of superstition followers operating on divine power instead of mana...

Argyrion's commanders sized up the situation fast.

There was only one Magic Tower that could deploy via small-scale spatial transfer and still raise an unmanned legion (無人兵端) on this scale. A Silver Iron mage. And an Elder-class one, at that.

"They papered the whole ruins with traps and deployed an Elder-class mage outside on top of it?!"

"This is bad. Maybe our distress signal wasn't forged after all, maybe it leaked out of a captured comrade."

The Ten Towers' Elders didn't move carelessly. To those devoted to ascension, worldly conflicts were nothing more than petty squabbles.

For an Elder like that to step in personally suggested that some plan known only to Argyrion's upper leadership might have been exposed.

"If we make it back, we'll need to go over the list of missing comrades from top to bottom. Did someone turn traitor?"

"Or maybe they've developed a spell that can read memories even out of a mind blessed by 'the cause.' The Ten Commandments' power knows no bounds, after all."

They weighed the situation with cold clarity. Even if every Argyrion operative deployed here threw themselves at it together, whether they could bring down a single Elder was doubtful.

"I'll do it."

So they made their choice.

One of Argyrion's commanders drove a silver stake into his own heart. The silver stake slowly melted, circulating through his veins. As the commander's skin turned silver, his body began to bend and warp grotesquely.

Around the hole torn open in his heart, the human flesh crumpled inward into a circle. Amid a grinding, crunching sound, the silver circle expanded.

The hole in his heart grew larger along with it. And from that hole, a silver tide began pouring in.

It was power descending from 'the cause.'

As the silver tide soaked into Argyrion's flesh, the others' bodies began to transform too. Their skin turned silver, just like the commander who had first driven the stake into his own heart, but it didn't end there.

Their bodies themselves warped as though clad in gleaming armor, and blade-like feathers sprouted from their shoulder blades to form wings.

Grateful for the power and grace filling them, they raised their silver wings and beat them. The raw mana carried in each wingbeat freed the Argyrion members from the pull of the earth.

At that moment, the magitech weapons opened fire. Amid the gunsmoke (砲煙), the glow of specialized rounds carrying each attribute flashed. The angels of 'the cause,' now airborne, charged forward to annihilate the enemy while the gate of grace stood open.

Watching the sight from a distance, Ortes let out a lament.

"Seriously? Now they're flying too?"

* * *

Kore, watching Ortes through the Great Temple's power, murmured.

"That lunatic con artist..."

Driving Argyrion up to the surface with a handful of words, then setting them against a Ten Towers mage like this. Does that man work magic with nothing but his tongue?

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