WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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

Chapter 90

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The Great Chaos (7)

A quiet whisper, one that might almost have looked peaceful. But what it implied was catastrophic.

Tallo looked as though he were simply floating there alone, with no guard at all, but a closer look revealed an intricately constructed web of fire built to shoot down anyone who approached him.

Most of the aerial batteries not currently bombarding the ground had been deployed to protect Tallo himself.

There was a reason Argyrion's angels weren't simply unleashing every spell they had all at once, and were instead preparing another gate to recharge their mana. They didn't have enough mana to sweep away the countless weapons deployed inside the barrier.

It tried at once to shake its body and throw him off, but Ortes's hand was faster than the angel's wingbeat.

GRK-CRACK!

He gripped the hilt of the blade lodged in the angel's shoulder and twisted it to the right. A ripping sound of bone and muscle tearing apart followed. The instant the angel writhed in pain, a spell streaked toward the spot where it had just been beating its wings.

Not the automatic targeting fire of an already-built weapon, but a spell aimed and chanted directly by the Ten Towers mage himself.

The spell's glow, missing the angel, flew off into the distance and swept across the ground.

Argyrion had no time to spare a glance at the ground, but Ortes was different. He studied the earth the spell had swept.

'...Flowers?'

The ground, soaked in the spell's glow, swelled up in a strange way. The earth rose and clumped together into an eerie shape, one that looked like a steel rose stamped out of a mold.

Ortes's eyes parsed the spell's mechanism. It multiplied the iron and other metallic components inside a target, then blew it apart from within.

If an ordinary human had been hit by it, their whole body would have ended up looking like it had been skewered on iron spikes.

For a Silver Iron Tower mage who worked with metal, it was a technique capable of the finest, most refined control. Since the caster could halt the spell after tearing open only part of a limb if they wanted, it could serve equally well for killing or for subduing, one might say.

'Can I counter this?'

Ortes twisted the sword hilt lodged in the angel's shoulder once more. The angel screamed and thrashed, nearly plummeting from the sky. That it hadn't let go of the gate even now was a remarkable feat of willpower.

'If I block it with my blade, the blade's own structure will get wrecked...'

The problem was that even if he countered with Spell Formula Overwriting, that wouldn't nullify the spell itself.

If he blocked that spell with his blade, the metal in the blade would multiply abnormally and its shape would be ruined. Even if he responded with Spell Formula Overwriting, that would only mix another element into the multiplying structure, it wouldn't stop the multiplication itself.

'It'd be better to close the distance and interfere with its direction before the spell formula finishes forming.'

His eyes flashed a warning. He could see the line of fire (射線) of a spell aimed straight at him. Not the shot of a battery Tallo had alchemized. A lethal spell Argyrion's angels were preparing.

'This is as far as it goes.'

Ortes's eyes read in the battlefield's information.

While Tallo had been showing interest in him and treating the fight with something like an observer's detachment, preparations for the second gate had finished.

The angels were ready to sacrifice even one of their own comrades if that was what it took to kill Ortes. The lines of fire drawn thick in every direction proved their resolve.

Of course, Ortes had no intention of obliging them by dying.

He drew the high-frequency blade and dropped. As he fell, he swung the blade at the gate the angel held fast in its grip.

Argyrion realized the attack hadn't destroyed the gate and sneered at Ortes.

But Ortes had never been aiming to destroy it in the first place. He'd slipped the basic light-attribute spell 「Glow」 into the spell formula constructing the gate.

The silver glow pouring out of the gate began growing brighter and brighter.

A blaze of light so intense even "brilliant" fell short of describing it. Too much brightness, and you couldn't see anything at all anymore. Amid that shining blindness, only Ortes's own sight stayed clear.

Ortes didn't expect this trick to buy him much time. A mage on Tallo's level might well have already modified his own eyes with something like infrared vision, and Argyrion, their senses scrambled by the extradimensional, probably didn't perceive their surroundings through visible light alone either.

But there was still a delay before their senses could switch mechanisms. Ortes triggered the 「Growth」 drive again, calling out vines, and seized the angel's wing.

The angel was dragged down toward the ground. By the reaction, Ortes shot up high into the air.

For this one moment, he held the highest altitude on the battlefield.

He triggered the drive a third time. 「Gust」. Riding the raging wind at his back, he dove toward Tallo.

And Tallo watched him come.

"He's using nothing but the Magic Imprinting Drive... Barely any mana signature to speak of, so his magical attainment must be poor. Then is that extraordinary physical prowess from Qi (鬪氣)?"

To cultivate Qi to that degree, the haphazard training methods passed down by word of mouth among mercenaries wouldn't be enough. He'd have needed a proper, genuine method of Qi cultivation.

And Tallo knew perfectly well where a "proper" method like that had originally come from.

The most common form of Qi seen in the present age came from combat-application programs injected to boost the performance of specialized close-combat droids.

Being a Silver Iron Tower mage, Tallo was well versed in the design and history of combat droids too. The root of the Qi techniques injected into those droids traced back to family secrets that knights of an older age had sold off.

"Remnants of knights left behind by the times!"

At last, the identity of that mysterious reinforcement, the third faction, came into clear focus.

The only esper power the Ten Towers had actively suppressed was divine power, but other powers had gradually been pushed aside and weeded out by magic besides.

Spirit sorcerers, absorbed under magic's own umbrella. Shamanism, its mysteries dismantled once it was slapped with the label "primal magic." And knights' Qi, which barely clung to life selling off its secrets, before it, too, eventually faded into obscurity.

It seemed one of these forces, forgotten over the long years, was trying to seize this chaos as a chance to reclaim its old standing.

"That's it. Huh. If it's one of the ancient knight houses, they'd have been granted an artifact or two, at least."

Now it finally made sense. Even the true identity of this ruin.

How on earth could a relic of the old Mage King still remain to this day? Not everyone who followed the Mage King had been a mage. No small number of knights had followed that overwhelming power too.

Some had sworn loyalty of their own will, drawn to the Mage King's hegemonic might, while others were knights whose oath of loyalty was loyalty in name only, in truth nothing more than surrender.

Loyal subject or traitor, it made no difference, the Mage King had granted tokens to those who followed him. Gifts that would have been glory to some, and humiliation to others.

This ruin...

"It must have been a castle or manor estate granted by the Mage King. The signal that reached the Ten Towers was a magical beacon-fire. A trap set by an ancient knight house."

To think they still had the strength left to pull something like this off. He'd assumed the knight houses had all fallen into ruin, swept away by the tide of the age. Had they gone underground instead, the same way the superstition followers had?

Tallo traced back through the history of magical society. The number of knight houses that had gradually vanished, pushed aside by magic, was far too great. If that had actually been a kind of absorption into an underground organization disguised as ruin...

'That force must be sizable indeed. It'd probably overwhelm any ordinary Apex Magic Tower.'

The reason for disguising this as Argyrion's work and trying to drag down the Ten Towers was simple too. Right now was a time when the order the Ten Towers presided over was in more turmoil than ever before.

If a Ten Towers Elder were killed under circumstances like these, at the very least, the standing of the Tower that Elder belonged to would take a heavy blow.

'And there's no guarantee this scheme is a one-time thing. They'll probably keep up a sustained campaign.'

The fate waiting for a fallen Ten Tower was obvious. The Succession War.

The knight houses' remnants were probably angling to play the hidden hand behind some Magic Tower ambitious enough to scheme for the Succession War and try to become one of the new Ten Towers.

Or maybe the order was reversed. Perhaps some Magic Tower looking to launch a Succession War had reached out to the knight remnants first, offering a deal: help us, and we'll bring you back into mainstream society.

But that plan had fallen apart the moment the real Argyrion showed up, and improvising, they'd disguised themselves as Argyrion reinforcements and tried to kill the Ten Towers mage, only for that to fail as well.

Having finished his deduction, Tallo shook his head slowly.

"A blade fitting for a band of anachronistic castoffs, sloppy through and through. Still, it was entertaining."

Knights, drawing their swords only to spring a trap. For people who supposedly revered chivalry, wasn't that a genuinely pathetic fall from grace?

"A body that's mastered Qi to its peak, is it. Whatever it turns out to be, it'll be useful to take. I'll need to look at his memories too."

Mana gathered in Tallo's hand. Preparation to make direct contact with Ortes's charging body and cast an alchemical transmutation. Having mastered Qi, Ortes might put up some resistance, but if Tallo poured his own mana in directly, that was a different story.

'I'll deal with everything but the brain and organs, right here.'

At the same time, several layers of defensive magic unfolded around him. At the core of that magic was the anti-Qi field, developed to fend off assassination droids built specifically for the purpose.

It was a spell that reacted to Qi by driving the mana density inside the field to an extreme, rendering any attack useless. Just as a person's movements are hindered underwater, where the density is higher than air, this was a space that hindered the movement of anything carrying latent Qi.

Ortes's black blade touched the field. Tallo, anticipating that Ortes would slow, reached out his hand. The instant even a fingertip made contact, that arm would turn into scrap metal.

The anti-Qi field was pierced without any resistance at all, and Tallo's head split in two.

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