WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 93
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The Great Chaos (10)
Karisia didn't clearly explain the future she'd witnessed.
In the vision, the Ortes she'd seen fighting had already brought the silver giant down and was on the verge of tearing out its heart.
But at that moment. The Ten Towers had dispatched a second Elder.
Actually, there was no telling whether it would stop at two. Even as Ortes clashed with the Elder who was tearing the ground itself apart, the crack in space kept rippling, still hinting at a "next."
Karisia looked up at the sky. Judging by the angle of the stars fixed in the celestial sphere, it was a matter of some hours from now.
『What about the meeting with the partner company?』
『The plan was for them to slip away on their own once things wrapped up. If they've got any sense, they'll realize the situation's settled and pull back.』
As far as Ortes could figure, the Order of the Divine Name's priests might already have retreated.
The second gate Argyrion had opened came open fairly quickly, even with Tallo's barrier working against it. Noticeably slower than the first gate, sure, but fast, considering they'd had to work around a barrier a Ten Towers Elder had personally cast.
Maybe the angels were just skilled enough to breach the barrier with ease. But a more sensible explanation was available.
That Piraeos's sacred invocation had already punched a hole in the barrier, which made the breach that much easier.
When someone on the level of a Ten Towers Elder personally steps in, the right call is to retreat as fast as possible, even if it's a little risky. Ortes set aside the faint twinge of disappointment he felt toward the order and spoke to Karisia.
『President. Did you happen to bring a change of clothes? Between the blood and the sweat, what I've got on isn't fit to wear anymore.』
『You think I would?』
She probably does, though. Knowing Karisia, no matter how busy she is, she seems like the type to show up having accounted for the backup to the backup plan.
Ortes moved his body as fast as it would allow him.
The corpse of the silver giant, stripped of its once-brilliant sheen. Above it, angels who'd fallen here and there. And last, the black rock cliff, looming as if in silent witness over the sacrilegious battlefield.
Leaving every trace of the struggle behind him, Ortes soon vanished over the horizon.
* * *
Just as Ortes had guessed, the Order of the Divine Name's priests hastily pulled out of the site. Demos objected to the end, wanting to send the other Enyalios priests ahead and stay behind himself.
But even he had no choice but to listen to Hwiakin's persuasion.
Outside, Argyrion's angels and a Ten Towers mage were locked in battle. Ortes, Hwiakin explained, was behind it all stirring the fight along, and was in a position to retreat soon, so there was nothing to worry about.
"You have a duty as archbishop to protect the order's priests. No one can say what might happen during a hurried teleportation, with the situation still unstable. Go and look after your brothers."
"‥‥‥."
Demos couldn't turn his back on his own responsibility.
Hwiakin, as a priest of Phoibos, stayed to the very end so he could tell everyone the "safest" moment to teleport.
'It would have been nice if Prodito were here.'
Prodito, who'd granted everyone Piraeos's sacred invocation, hadn't taken part in this battle to reclaim the Great Temple. He was off carrying out a secret mission from the Pope.
And so the only one left in Pluton's inner sanctum until the very last was old Hwiakin.
Well, of course, there was actually one more.
Kore. Pluton's priestess.
She watched the scene outside with trembling eyes. Of everyone there, she was the one who could see most clearly how the battle raging around the Great Temple was unfolding.
The bloodthirsty combat prowess of the man who'd called himself Ortes wasn't what surprised her.
What truly astonished her was the absurd magic Ortes had shown, the same Ortes who'd denied any connection to the vanished mage so fiercely that he wouldn't even bring the man up.
The moment the silver giant's gun ports flew wide open, ready to pour fire down on Ortes, every one of its shells suddenly stopped working.
A sight that felt like the work of some god's miracle. But Kore sensed, instinctively, that this wasn't a power that could be dressed up in a noble word like "miracle."
Wasn't the only power capable of unraveling a Ten Towers mage's spell that easily, reducing it to nothing, the authority of "the vanished mage"?
'He has power like that, and he claims he has nothing to do with that mage...?'
It was a ridiculous contradiction. Surely he wasn't about to claim that was some technique in the same category as sacred invocation, or a Holy Decree.
What sacred invocation in the world could intervene in the very casting and completion of a spell and undo it entirely? A Holy Decree granted by a primordial divinity, the very embodiment of the world's providence itself, that might be another matter.
Even to the Order of the Divine Name, the authority of the primordial god, who commanded time and space itself, was a realm of mystery.
But as far as Kore knew, there was only a single person who could wield the primordial god's authority like that.
Kore's eyes suddenly caught Ortes opening his mouth to say something. The sight of the smile that always hung at the corner of his lips, gone, felt strangely alien.
'Talking?'
Talking to no one, alone, would normally be taken as a sign of oncoming madness. But Kore didn't think Ortes was that kind of madman.
Ortes was gazing off toward somewhere far away, as if someone were there beyond it. He spat out some emotion or other, and then his expression changed entirely, back to his usual faint smile. Somehow, it looked like resignation.
And with that, he started walking in the direction he'd been looking.
It looked like a scene of someone being summoned away.
The fact that something existed that could give Ortes orders filled Kore with a dreadful fear.
Who else could give orders to a fragment of the vanished mage?
No one but the vanished mage himself.
While Kore gasped under that dreadful fear, Ortes was crossing the black rock cliff. It couldn't be helped, the spot where Karisia had been watching him was in the exact opposite direction from where he'd fought Tallo.
Climbing down the cliff, then walking across the rock again. Drop by drop, Ortes's blood soaked into Pluton's Great Temple.
By the time Ortes vanished from the Great Temple's domain, that blood had soaked all the way into the temple's core.
Gooooo-!
The temple shook, accompanied by a strange resonant sound. Kore felt a massive pulse of divine power surging in through the emblem she was attuned to.
"What... is this?"
The temple felt like it had suddenly reverted to the old Mythic Age. The temple's sacred invocations, dormant for the past hundred years, reclaimed their own light, pouring radiant power through everything around them.
Kore felt that Pluton's Great Temple was alive and moving right now. She sensed, instinctively, that she could command this massive mass of rock itself like her own limbs, maybe even more easily than that.
Here was the answer to why this temple could become the last stronghold to stand against the Mage King.
Just as Pluton roamed the world through the invisible veil, without ever showing itself to any living creature, Pluton's Great Temple could likewise move its own dwelling place.
Every sacred relic in this vast temple, which had been waiting only to awaken, and the temple itself, had now fallen into the order's hands.
Kore felt joy and sorrow at once, two contradictory emotions.
Because the sacred relics' holy radiance would, in the end, fade in the Pope's hands.
* * *
Pluton's Great Temple vanished without a trace. The black cliff itself stretched across the ground like a massive shadow, and then disappeared entirely.
The site of the wondrous event was followed by a massive surge of divine power. Blasphemia was the first to learn of it.
Blasphemia reported the fact to the Ten Towers, and the Ten Towers in turn realized that the place the divine power's wave had radiated from, and the place a distress signal had come from, from the Mage King's Legacy, were one and the same.
Something terrible had happened.
The Ten Towers tore space open and rushed Elders to the scene. What in the world had happened there?
And they found Tallo's corpse. Deep inside the faded giant, Tallo's brain chip was gone, vanished somewhere.
The auxiliary computation brain remained, but that device was never meant for memory in the first place. All it could offer was a way to retrace the shape of the battle through log analysis of what magic had been used.
And around it lay angels, bodies bearing the wavelength of the extradimensional.
Dyed a silver somehow different in hue from the Silver Iron Tower's own, they were unmistakably Argyrion.
The Ten Towers thought.
'Was Argyrion strong enough to bring down a Ten Towers Elder with what amounted to a single squad's worth of people?'
'And what exactly was that wave of divine power, and that signal that kept invoking the Mage King? Could it be that this "cause" they keep talking about is...?'
* * *
Argyrion thought.
The moment contact was lost with the Argyrion agents who'd been dispatched, Argyrion rushed new agents to the scene.
The scene was shocking. Their comrades, who'd used the still-unperfected secret art of angelization. Those proud wings, crushed and mangled, lay pitifully driven into the ground.
But what was even more shocking was another body lying beside their comrades' corpses. The shape of a giant.
The immense mana radiating off the mages hovering in midair, looking down at the giant. Unmistakably, Ten Towers Elders.
Which meant.
'Our agents brought down an Elder...!'
"Argyrion is strong!"
The junior agent murmured that, pride swelling in their voice, and the senior agent clapped them on the shoulder to shut them up.
He quietly raised a hand to his lips. This place was somewhat removed from the actual scene, but there was no telling what bizarre, ghastly means the Ten Towers Elders might use to detect them.
The right move was to get out of there as fast as possible and report back to headquarters.
'There's no way our agents are as strong as the junior's certainty makes it sound.'
This was an objective judgment. Even accounting for the mana boost from angelization, only the leadership could actually go toe-to-toe with a Ten Towers Elder.
And yet, the fact that a Ten Towers Elder had been defeated like that meant...
'It's not that we've gotten stronger. The Ten Towers have gotten weaker!'
Not some catalog stat like mana capacity that simply grows over time, but a mental edge that could only be honed through life-or-death real combat.
The Elders, who'd held absolute authority and reigned at the top of the Magic Towers for at least several decades, had surely forgotten how to actually wield their power, however strong their mana might be.
'We have to make the most of this situation before they shake off their complacency and sharpen their edge again.'
The delusion spread like a plague.
Chaos arrived. Great chaos.
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