I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss - Chapter 91

WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

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

Chapter 91

──────

The Great Chaos (8)

Damn it.

He's not dead. Huh.

* * *

His eyes opened.

There was a gap in his memory, the last few seconds missing. He checked the situation again.

The brain, the finest computing device he owned, had suffered damage beyond repair. The auxiliary computation devices linked to it were spitting out malfunctions of their own.

The Tallo doing this thinking right now was the personality of an auxiliary brain chip that backed up the main brain's memories in real time, an electronically uploaded self, so to speak.

Long ago, with the Yellow Thunder Tower's help, he'd succeeded in duplicating himself to a near-perfect degree, but since the chip's computational power fell short of his original brain's, he'd kept it in reserve as a backup self, a contingency prepared for exactly this kind of emergency.

A powerful mana seized the soul just as it was trying to depart. A necromantic binding formula followed. What served as the reliquary was, fittingly, the mana core linked to his own brain chip.

From the moment the brain was destroyed to the moment the soul was bound took only a few seconds. Defense in the interim fell entirely to an artifact set to trigger automatically.

A short-range teleport, and in an instant, a physical barrier went up. Backup Tallo checked the state of his body.

'I suppose everything above the neck can be written off as worthless now.'

The auxiliary computation devices, finely calibrated to the brain's own wavelength, had lost their purpose the moment the brain itself was smashed apart. He'd need to find some other use for them.

Naturally, the Spatial Alchemy sustained by Tallo's own computational power came undone as well. Tallo's judgment was quick.

Before the Spatial Alchemy could fully unravel, he prepared the weapon best suited to this fight.

He scattered mana across the entire barrier. The silver-tinged earth surged upward. With Tallo as its core, even the air itself was transmuted, becoming one vast silver sphere.

From the sky and from the ground. Transmuted silver iron rushed toward Tallo. A typhoon of silver iron with Tallo himself as its eye.

Tallo swept his fingers through the air. With a rough, indifferent motion, his own brain was taken apart, and three auxiliary brains dropped into the storm of silver iron.

The powerful transmutation forced synchronization onto the auxiliary brains. There was some margin of error, but syncing with the brain chip succeeded well enough.

The auxiliary brains spread out in an inverted triangle centered on the chip. Using the three auxiliary brains and the brain chip as anchor points, Tallo traced out a magic circle.

The torrent of silver iron doubled as a sculpting tool in its own right. The iron pouring in was shaved and gouged, taking shape.

Limbs honed sharp as crystal. A body gleaming with a strange light.

It was a giant of steel.

* * *

This is exactly why I hate the Ten Towers.

The giant stood tall, blotting out the sun, looking down at me. Blinding backlight streamed over its silver body. The light pollution alone was obscene.

The giant took a single step forward.

Just from that one step, the ground screamed. A tremor greater than the clash between Lord Thunderknell and the silver-thread worm.

"Would it kill you to just die quietly?"

The instant I split Tallo's head in half, his body vanished into the distance. My eyes caught the teleported Tallo's new position, but it was too far to chase down with just a handful of Magic Imprinting Drives.

I cushioned the impact of the fall using the 「Gust」 Magic Imprinting Drive like a shock absorber, but the distance between us had already opened up. By the time I closed in, the bastard's spell was already complete.

The result: Tallo withdrew his Spatial Alchemy and transformed into a robot that looked to be several dozen meters tall. With his computational power for casting magic visibly degraded, maybe he'd decided that something as complicated as a barrier was actually the wrong move now.

But turning into a robot by gathering up all his silver iron in one place?

A mage's final trump card, and it's a combining robot. Even a passing dog would laugh.

The genuinely funny part is that it actually worked.

Boosters unfolded across Mecha-Tallo's back and ignited with a searing roar. Riding the acceleration of the explosive burst of flame, Mecha-Tallo's right fist crushed one of Argyrion's angels flat.

From behind. From directly above the crown of its head, a spot that would be a blind spot on a human, angels took aim with their spells. But right at that moment.

A crackling, mechanical synthesized voice cut through the air.

「Ha! Did you really think a radar's field of view was the same as a human's?」

Tallo thrust his left hand out forcefully. There was nothing there but empty air.

And then.

「Rocket Punch!」

It had to be a machine's synthesized voice, and yet there was an unmistakable glee to it that no amount of processing could hide. The left hand he'd thrust out detached cleanly at the wrist and shot off, jetting exhaust behind it, straight at the angels overhead.

Now I understood why Argyrion, who probably kept dozens of silver-thread worms on hand, had gone to such lengths to avoid all-out war with the Ten Towers.

An Elder scrambled here on emergency dispatch, who probably hadn't even had time to prepare properly, could still put on a show like this even after having his throat slit. If the actual Tower stepped in for real, what kind of weapon would they bring?

Even granting that the Silver Iron Tower specializes in many-against-one combat, wasn't this a bit much?

KA-CRAAASH!

The left hand Tallo had launched slammed into the ground along with several of Argyrion's angels. The angels' crushed, mangled remains were a horror to look at. Once a body ended up looking like that, regeneration or not, it didn't matter anymore.

'If the angels still had any sense left, they'd be looking to run by now.'

If Argyrion managed to slip away from this place, there was finally a method I could try. If they were going to run, sooner would be better...

「Now then! My dear research subject, the one who blew up my brain while it was still under warranty, where might you be!」

I prayed that Argyrion had lost every last shred of sense.

* * *

Tallo focused on recalibrating the auxiliary brains, which kept throwing up new malfunctions.

He couldn't compute the movements of this enormous body on his own, so for now he'd improvised, repurposing what parts he had, but once he made it back to his Tower, he'd need to either commission the Green Wood Tower to regrow his brain (unlikely to actually be feasible) or have proper dedicated parts made instead.

There was a gap of several seconds between command and execution. A mage's real skill lay in correcting for that gap in real time, but this wasn't Tallo's original brain running things anymore, was it.

Even so, the current situation was thoroughly enjoyable. This mighty giant of silver iron was, for now, his own body.

Strength beyond any comparison to a body made of mere flesh and skin. He could crush a mountain peak with a fingertip, topple a city with the toe of one foot.

Savoring his own destructive power, he tried to call the left arm he'd dropped on the ground back to him.

「No retrieval, then.」

He couldn't recover the arm he'd fired off, not right now. Just maintaining this body was already pushing his limits; he had no room left for the complex trick of drawing back a launched piece of himself and reattaching it.

The various weapons built into this body, too, likely couldn't be regenerated or reused once expended.

This wasn't a form he could sustain for long anyway. Better to overwhelm everything at once with sheer force, shed whatever parts he didn't need, and head back to the Tower.

「Of all the spoils I bring back to the Tower, the most precious will be...」

Tallo thought about that 'knight.'

Skill accomplished enough to break through an anti-Qi field and cut him down. Was this what the head of an old knight house, a master of Qi techniques the likes of which he'd only ever read about in ancient texts, was actually like?

This was no ordinary man.

Right now, this was a far more interesting research subject than Argyrion. The extradimensional mana held in the angels' silver skin, he'd been able to grasp its structure to some degree by transmuting it, eroding them back in return.

But how exactly the man had broken through the anti-Qi field, that he couldn't even begin to guess. Given the circumstances, it was certain he'd neutralized the field somehow, but the few seconds' worth of memory from when his brain was destroyed hadn't been backed up.

A true researcher, after all, thrilled at the unknown.

Tallo ran the radar mounted across the giant's body at full capacity. Where, exactly, was that knight now?

* * *

Where am I? Climbing your leg, obviously.

The thought traveling through Mecha-Tallo's mana circuits stabbed into my mind. That strange mix of excitement and obsession was unpleasant.

This was better than being in midair. Back then I'd had to force out extra hang time using the drives, but now, at least, there was a wall to grab and climb.

Four points of light throbbed inside the giant's body. One near the heart. The other two, at the shoulders and lower abdomen. I didn't have the firepower to smash all of those in one blow, but...

'There's another way.'

I checked what little remained of my Magic Imprinting Drives.

* * *

Tallo felt mana stirring near the giant's knee. He turned his gaze there and found that familiar 'knight.' The one wearing Argyrion's colors, yet, unlike the angels, still holding a human shape all on his own.

The pitch-black sword in his hand looked familiar. Its blade was lodged in the giant's knee. The tremor in mana he'd felt no doubt came from that high-frequency blade.

Tallo deployed a small fraction of the killing weapons mounted in his body, a test shot, meant to gauge the man's durability.

Grk-chk.

But something went wrong. A malfunction in the firing sequence.

The muzzle failed to open. The warhead detonated anyway. Then, an explosion.

The chain detonation was instantaneous. The explosives built into the thigh all went off at once. The inside of the giant caught fire.

Mecha-Tallo's left thigh flushed red-hot and began to melt, bubbling like something boiling. The colossal body pitched to one side, buckling. It teetered on the edge of balance, then finally began to fall.

In the instant of toppling, Tallo made his judgment.

This was that knight's doing.

If you could trigger a chain detonation before the shot even fired, then, conversely.

What if you simply self-destructed from the very start?

* * *

Ortes spat out a curse.

Near the knee where he hung, every gun port along the whole of Mecha-Tallo's right leg opened.

Every target was him.

A zero-range detonation that didn't care in the slightest about damage from the chain explosion it would cause.

This was going to take some resolve.

Just as Ortes drew out his esper power, about to wrap it around his eyes.

『What are you doing right now?』