I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss - Chapter 88

WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

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

Chapter 88

──────

The Great Chaos (5)

Argyrion, transformed into the shape of metallic angels. Seeing their forms, Tallo's smile deepened.

It was because Tallo was an Elder of the Silver Iron Tower.

Even if their transformation had come from an extradimensional power, if what resulted was metal, it was worth studying. No, if anything, the very fact that this metal had originated from the extradimensional might be exactly what set his hunger to research it ablaze.

This world's elements had already been picked apart, one by one, over the course of history, at the hands of the Ten Towers, so anyone wanting a new subject to study had to either make one themselves or bring it in from outside the world.

The silver-thread samples Argyrion had used left the Silver Iron Tower disappointed. Aside from their tendency to erode living creatures, they'd shown little else of note.

So what use might the material composing those "angels" show, given they'd been shaped by the extradimensional even more deeply than the silver thread?

Tallo checked his auxiliary brain's computation progress. Forty-seven percent.

He hoped they'd hold out until the spell was complete. If they collapsed before this grand spell even finished, that would only prove them worthless scrap, unfit for research after all.

* * *

Gunsmoke and flashes of mana light embroidered the sky. Ortes watched the two sides clash, smiling with satisfaction.

'Now this is a fight.'

Not fighting yourself, but making others fight instead. Back when I worked as a fixer, it took quite a lot of trial and error to grasp this simple piece of wisdom.

Getting Argyrion and the Ten Towers to clash with each other had been simple enough, helped along by the good luck that the Ten Towers mage had limited his familiar's automatic tracking targets to "anything with mana."

The real problem started here.

'How do I stage the end of this fight?'

Whether I eliminated Argyrion or the Ten Towers, I had to take out at least one side. Or, ideally, both.

If Argyrion made it out of here alive, they'd assume the Ten Towers were running some kind of suspicious excavation and act accordingly.

There was a good chance they'd burn resources hunting down an excavation the Ten Towers weren't even running.

And if word of this site reached the Ten Towers instead, how would they read it?

'Probably something like, Argyrion tried to loot the ancient Mage King's ruins.'

In that case, the Ten Towers would tighten surveillance over ancient ruins as a whole. Bad news for me, and for Hydra Corp.

'Taking out both sides at once carries too much risk. I don't have anything with the firepower of magic.'

It would've been nice if I'd actually learned proper Qi technique. The one who taught me the basics of handling something like Qi just told me there was no point learning that stuff, and only ever showed me the fundamentals of esper power, the basic trick of body enhancement.

Then again, I don't actually know what my own esper power really is, myself. All I know from context is that it isn't mana.

Still, it's good for more than just body enhancement, I can use it to keep the eyes suppressed too, so I don't regret the time I spent learning it...

I made up my mind.

Best case: eliminate both sides, so that neither headquarters got accurate word of what happened here.

If I couldn't take out everyone and had to settle for one side, second-best was to eliminate the Ten Towers and let Argyrion get away.

I needed to time my entry into the fight.

I watched the metallic angels clash with the magitech weapons. At a glance, it looked to favor the angels, who kept unleashing one powerful spell after another, but I could see the "gate" feeding them extradimensional raw mana was slowly running out of durability.

'At this rate, the Ten Towers will win without much trouble.'

Good. Let's crash in pretending to be on Argyrion's side.

Take down the Ten Towers mage first, then use the moment Argyrion lets its guard down to set up their elimination.

If no opening showed itself, well, that couldn't be helped.

I threw on the clothes I'd picked up earlier off an Argyrion commander.

* * *

Tallo waved his fingers. Weapons synced to his will wove a cunning web of fire.

The weapon blueprints, input from his brain and output through his fingertips, rolled out loaded with all manner of formulas.

It might as well have been a live demonstration of his weapons' performance against Argyrion's angels. Tallo used special rounds loaded with mana of various attributes to test the angels' resistance, attribute by attribute.

'Tougher than expected.'

The results exceeded his expectations. Uniform resistance across every attribute, plus a self-repair ability.

The regeneration ran on principles alien to conventional Magic Engineering. Without question, an ability originating from the extradimensional.

If the Silver Iron Tower could reproduce that with its own power, it would draw one step closer to ascension than any of the other Ten Towers.

"You made a fair effort, in your own way. I'll give you credit for that much. But it's a pity."

Tallo raised his right hand.

A message reading Computation complete flickered across his vision.

"In the end, this is the limit of those who don't belong to the Ten Towers."

The grand spell Tallo had been preparing activated. Spatial Alchemy (空間鍊金術).

The Silver Iron Tower's limits were, in effect, synonymous with the limits of the elements they could handle. True to the name Silver Iron, their world of magic existed for metal alone.

Ways to handle organic matter that wasn't metal were bound to be limited.

Even learning the magic of the Purple Earth or the Green Wood to route around that limit would be pointless, since it could never carry Silver Iron magic to its own extreme.

But mages were the sort who, rather than accepting the limits the world set, went looking for its loopholes instead. The Silver Iron Tower devised various means to gather and condense metallic elements.

Generating the element from mana, gathering the element already inside the earth, or, last of all,

converting existing matter into metal outright.

Tallo intended to alchemize the angels' entire bodies, sparing only the hearts and brains he meant to keep for research.

Alchemy, originally a procedure for transmuting matter to produce gold, had by this age evolved into an offensive spell of extraordinary power.

A barrier isolated a specific space from reality, and everything inside it was converted to silver iron. Spatial Alchemy, which reduced everything within sight to silver iron for as long as the caster's mana would allow, could rightly be called the crowning glory (精華) of the Silver Iron Tower.

And so the world began to be dyed silver.

The dim wasteland beneath starlight grew brighter and brighter, a reflected glow throwing back the very radiance the stars poured down. It looked as though the world's surface itself were being painted over in silver.

The angels hovering with their feet never touching the ground, silver angels now, had their own coloring shifting little by little too. The blinding sheen that had come from the extradimensional was being devoured by the color of a weapon refined for war.

The silver angels' bodies slowly began to stiffen. The weight spread from the ends of their limbs inward. They could feel control over every joint, as it turned to metal, passing over to Tallo.

For now, the blessing rippling out from the "gate" was offsetting Spatial Alchemy's effect, but if the gate closed, they'd lose control of their own bodies in an instant.

The only way to break this deadlock was for one more of them to become a new gate. It was the moment Argyrion's angels braced themselves for yet another martyrdom (殉敎).

A high-frequency blade, tracing a dark trail through the air, sliced clean through Tallo's right hand.

"You greedy Ten Towers bastards! I can feel your foul Ten Towers nature! Rise up, comrades!"

* * *

Tallo, his right hand severed, felt curiosity and bewilderment both at once.

To him, the body was fundamentally a consumable, and alchemizing a replacement arm for the severed one was simple enough. So the destruction of his own flesh, in itself, wasn't what threw him.

Why hadn't he sensed an enemy inside his own barrier?

Why hadn't that person become a target of the alchemy?

There was, fundamentally, only one reason Spatial Alchemy wouldn't take hold on someone: burning their own esper power to cancel out the alchemy's interference.

Whether you had a domain fully under your own control, like a barrier, the same as Spatial Alchemy itself, or you simply kept pouring esper power into your body to fend off the mana's intrusion, the underlying principle was identical.

If someone happened to have a perfect substance, immune to alchemy altogether, that would be a different story, but such a thing existed only in the Silver Iron Tower's vault.

So this new attacker who'd just crashed in had clearly launched the strike while enduring an enormous drain on their own esper power.

'Cutting off my arm as it floated in midair, with no gear and not a hint of mana. Was there someone among Argyrion who wielded Qi?'

Argyrion, too, felt just as bewildered.

Was this new reinforcement sent from headquarters?

It was possible the barrier the Ten Towers mage had deployed had cut them off from communications with headquarters. But the phrase that man had used, "you greedy bastards," was the problem.

Argyrion hadn't come to these ruins after some artifact slumbering inside.

They'd come because they'd received a distress signal from a comrade.

Naturally, the fact that the Ten Towers had been lying in ambush at the ruins could only be read as an extension of that same setup.

That the Ten Towers had either mimicked Argyrion's distress signal, or tortured it out of a captured comrade, and used it to dig this trap.

Whatever artifact might lie inside the ruins hadn't even entered their thinking from the start.

But this man's words carried some serious dissonance.

So it was only natural that the angels leveled their weapons at the unidentified person who'd approached wearing Argyrion combat gear.

"The cause."

"What?"

He didn't know the countersign.

"Kill him!"

* * *