WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 89
──────
The Great Chaos (6)
Tallo watched the farce (寸劇) unfolding beneath him, bewildered.
'Why are they fighting each other?'
Judging by the newcomer's clothing and the way he spoke, he had to be a member of Argyrion too, so why were the angels attacking their own reinforcement?
Several hypotheses rose and fell in Tallo's mind. The most plausible one was that the extradimensional erosion had grown severe enough to shatter their sanity, to the point they could no longer even recognize their own allies.
He hadn't yet worked out exactly how the angel transformation functioned, but he'd caught one detail: the change only took hold once they opened a gate to the extradimensional. That likely meant they had to absorb raw mana from beyond the extradimensional past some critical threshold before the transformation could complete.
As a result of gorging on that extradimensional raw mana, even the last shred of reason that had let Argyrion, unlike ordinary Eroded, keep their sanity intact had been stripped away, and they'd started attacking even their own reinforcement...
If judged rationally, this was by far the most plausible hypothesis, but-
'Hmm?'
Argyrion's movements were too organized to be the actions of minds that had lost their reason. In an instant they'd split into two groups, one responding to the weapon's barrage of fire, the other attacking the so-called reinforcement.
They wove a web of fire from a variety of spells to work out which attribute would hit hardest, all while keeping up a steady sniping fire aimed at blind spots.
This kind of practiced, tactical movement was far too refined to pass off as the reckless flailing of a mindless monster.
To begin with, it was hard to believe that people still capable of casting proper 'magic' had truly lost their minds.
Then, another possibility.
"The one who just cut off my arm, is a third party impersonating Argyrion...?"
Now that was genuinely interesting.
For what possible reason would someone impersonate Argyrion, the sworn enemy of the world of magic, and then help Argyrion attack him?
"I suppose I only need to leave the head attached."
He still had more than enough mana to keep Spatial Alchemy running. Tallo calmly gathered up silver iron and alchemized a handful of aerial batteries.
Across the augmented-reality UI in Tallo's field of view, targets locked in for each battery one by one. Tallo's finger tapped, almost cheerfully, at the fire button floating in midair.
* * *
This was genuinely baffling. How on earth had my perfect plan been found out?
'Argyrion's discipline is sharper than I expected. Who'd have guessed they'd still ask for a countersign, even in a situation this extreme.'
I couldn't expect any support from the Order of the Divine Name, and I couldn't afford for any to show up either.
Whether it was the Ten Towers or Argyrion, the moment either side sensed a third party capable of meddling in the battle, they'd move to wipe that party out first.
They might start out with a conciliatory approach, but the instant they realized the Order of the Divine Name's true nature as those so-called 'superstition followers,' even if it didn't go so far as the two of them linking hands in friendship, there was a good chance both sides would move to deal with the Order all the same.
No support to expect from my own side, and now the two enemies who'd been fighting each other were turning their hostility on me together.
Damn it. Should I have waited until Argyrion was pushed a little further to the brink?
Can't be helped. Right now, my top priority had to be thinning out the enemy's numbers. Destroy Argyrion's gate, and-
KA-BOOOOM!
Bombs rained down from the sky, right onto the spot I'd been about to run toward.
No, it wasn't aimed at just that spot. This was an indiscriminate bombardment across the whole battlefield. Insane, did this guy have mana rotting to waste or something?
The roar of the explosions kept coming, one after another, like the buzz of a chainsaw.
I snapped my eyes open. The impact points where the shells would land, and the blast radius each one would reach, sketched themselves out before me.
Gate destruction: canceled. The only way I'd survive now was to make full use of Argyrion!
I ran through the gaps between impacts, twisting my whole body to dodge the trajectories of incoming shells. The safe zone I needed to survive kept shifting by the second.
Eyes wide open, information about the battle overhead poured in.
The first volley scattered the group of Argyrion members who'd been surrounding me.
They'd responded to the blasts cleverly, flying up to an altitude higher than the aerial batteries themselves, clear of the blast radius.
The angels cast their spells at the aerial batteries the Ten Towers mage had alchemized.
The first angel summoned clouds.
The second added the water element, turning them into storm clouds.
The third sent electricity coursing through them.
A chain of spells flowing together so smoothly it might as well have been cast by a single caster. Thunder swept through the cluster of aerial batteries, soaked now in cloud.
A gap opened up in the bombardment below, ground the angels had cleared to protect their gate.
The other angels accelerated hard to secure it.
It was a lucky thing the Ten Towers mage's powerful spell had broken Argyrion's angels' encirclement, but.
'Can I even make it out of this alive?'
Flying was a genuinely brutal advantage. The plain fact that my attacks couldn't reach them while theirs could reach me was about as unfair as it got.
I checked over the Magic Imprinting Drive I had on hand.
「Fireball」? Couldn't exactly use flame as a foothold. 「Iron Wall」. Useful, but I was up against a mage of the Silver Iron Tower. Using a metal-attribute spell and having it turned right back against me would be a headache I didn't need.
The attributes I had that could make something like a foothold right now were ice, earth, and wood, more or less.
Wind, conditionally.
'Let's give it a shot.'
I sprinted toward Argyrion's human gate.
* * *
The gate had to be protected.
One of their comrades had already resolved to make the sacrifice needed to open a second gate. But right now they were trapped inside the barrier the Ten Towers Elder had deployed.
The barrier was blocking their connection to the cause. They needed more time to search out a channel that still reached it.
If the first gate were destroyed before the second could open, their bodies would be alchemized in an instant, and they'd be stripped of their freedom.
The angels who dove to recover and shield the comrade who'd become the gate felt a gust of wind, one that hadn't come from any of their own wingbeats.
Something was closing in.
The instant they looked back, flame billowed outward. Amid the wavering fire, the fire-shadow of a magitech weapon flickered and scattered. In the battlefield's gunsmoke and noise, the shape of whatever was approaching stayed hidden.
But looked at calmly, the smoke from that flame might be thick, yet its actual heat amounted to little, easy enough to see through. A water spell, completed in an instant, snuffed the fire out.
The stream of water gathering at their fingertips didn't fire properly. It bent, not along the trajectory they'd set, but off in an entirely different direction. Before they could even register the strange anomaly, a blade sank into the angel's throat.
Normally, even the reinforced cutting edge of a high-frequency blade shouldn't have been able to breach an angel's silver flesh.
But the instant the blade Ortes swung touched that throat, the spell-structure forming the angel's flesh twisted into something grotesquely deformed.
From the point of contact, the skin split and burst outward, flesh flung out of itself, the result of the warped, shattered spell-structure. Ortes moved fast, layering a fire-attribute Magic Imprinting Drive spell over the angel transformation's blessing.
Flame surged up from the wound where the blade had lodged. It looked as though the angel were bleeding fire instead of blood.
It was the result of flame bleeding into the 'angel' shape the angel-transformation spell, the one that turned a human into an angel, was meant to produce. As long as mana kept flowing from the cause, this Argyrion angel would go on burning without end.
Ortes planted a foot on the crown of the angel whose throat now streamed fire and leaped off it. While that one angel had been busy with Ortes, the other three had already secured the gate and taken to the air.
He swapped in another Magic Imprinting Drive. Beneath Ortes's feet, hanging in midair, a cube of packed earth blinked into existence.
He had just over a second before the drive's charged mana ran dry and the mound of earth dropped away. Ortes planted his foot on the cube and jumped again.
But it wasn't enough. The angels' flight outpaced Ortes's sprint. There was no closing the gap between something crawling the ground and things soaring the sky.
Another wave of freshly alchemized aerial batteries swung its muzzles down toward the ground. Argyrion's angels could sense it without a doubt, this faceless impostor was about to turn into a sieve and drop out of the sky.
That was the moment vines shot out, wrapping around the blade in Ortes's hand. 「Growth」, a basic wood-attribute spell.
Normally it was a spell suited to little more than growing simple flowers, but depending on what plant you fed into it, a use like this became possible too.
A modified carnivorous-plant seed he'd ordered from Meconion's flower shop. The vine lunged out greedily and seized the angel by the ankle.
Ortes used the elastic snap of the vine he'd caught to launch himself upward. The angel caught in the vine's grip pitched, its body twisting off-balance.
Just as the angel's body began its involuntary descent toward the ground, the aerial batteries opened their second volley.
Exactly as his eyes showed him, the storm of shellfire raining down on Ortes was entirely blocked, every last bit of it, by the falling angel's own body.
Leaving the angel driven into the ground behind him, Ortes readjusted his grip on the blade in midair.
The high-frequency blade, gripped in a reverse grip, plunged into the angel's shoulder, the last one left standing among the three angels who'd descended to secure the gate.
"Let's go together."
Ortes pointed at Tallo, floating at the center of the barrier.
"Just that far."
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
