WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became the Slit-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss ◈
Chapter 95
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Each Side's Own Guess (2)
The Order's priests held the sacred relics in their hands. Ancient relics steeped in a pure divine power that couldn't be found anywhere in this age, now that magic had corrupted every corner of the world.
Among those relics, the most venerable few, the ones steeped most deeply in the breath of the gods, had to be sacrificed for the Pope's plan...
But even the relics that remained were enough to become a new wind for the Order of the Divine Name, which had been in decline.
It was an omen of a new age.
But right now, they couldn't feel that joy. Their comrade, Hwiakin, the one who had stayed behind in the temple until the very end, hadn't returned.
Philoxenon, cult leader of the Aigio cult, stroked his white beard. Along with Hwiakin, Philoxenon belonged to the oldest generation among the Order's priests. Philoxenon was a cool-headed man, but he and Hwiakin had been comrades-in-arms for decades. It was hard to stay detached about a comrade's life or death.
And then, at some moment, the world began to tremble.
It wasn't like an earthquake. It wasn't a physical tremor from colliding tectonic plates, nor the aftershock of magic driven by mana.
The purest divine power, the kind they'd thought this age would never let them feel again, was shaking the world.
Before they knew it, the priests realized the ground beneath their feet had turned black. It resembled the hue of Pluton's Great Temple, the very place they had just been searching for sacred relics.
It wasn't merely similar. The black, deeper than any shadow, was identical to the walls of the Great Temple they had witnessed with their own eyes.
Beneath their feet, the black mass of rock rising up and shaking the earth was Pluton's Great Temple itself.
"This is...!"
One priest let out a cry mixing astonishment and joy.
The members of the Order of the Divine Name no longer merely sensed the omen of a new age.
Instead, they were witnessing the new age itself.
The radiant glory of the Mythic Age. The ancient temple had returned once more into the Order of the Divine Name's hands.
* * *
Kore hid Pluton's Great Temple within the shadow of the earth, then headed for the Pope's chambers. It was a result that truly bordered on a miracle.
Inside the temple lay a vast quantity of sacred relics that the various cults' priests hadn't managed to carry out. Whether it was right to consume them for the Pope's plan was a separate question, but for the Order of the Divine Name, it was an unqualified boon.
The Pope held in his hand the most precious artifact the Order of the Divine Name had found, the one whose origin traced back the furthest among all the cults' sacred relics, and was praying over it.
What his hand held right now was one of Elimon's sacred relics, a necklace made of sea pearls. The Pope knelt beneath the altar and stretched his two hands, the necklace resting atop them, up toward the sky. It was the very image of a priest pleading with the gods.
Which god that prayer was directed toward, or whether it was truly a prayer for the gods at all, was impossible to say.
The relic traveled back through hundreds, perhaps thousands or tens of thousands, of years, slowly reclaiming its old form. A gray touched with dust, a spotless white, a radiance that seemed to hold the starlit gleam of a night sea.
A sacred brilliance flashed within the white pearl. But the Pope didn't stop. The pearl kept regressing further and further into antiquity. The layers of history built up inside the oyster's mouth reversed themselves, one by one.
All the way back to fragments of soil and dust, before it had ever been shaped into a gem.
And so what remained in the Pope's hand was the remnant of a sea pearl reduced back to a few grains of sand, and the primeval divine power that had once dwelt within it.
The Pope gathered that primeval purity and breathed it into the thick darkness behind the altar. Starlight flickered on and off within the dark.
The cluster of divine light, glittering like a comet, soon spread out into the darkness behind the altar. It was a sight better described as "seeping into" the dark than "being swallowed" by it.
The darkness pulsed to some rhythm, like a beating heart. Within it, a light as varied in color as a nebula tried to bloom, but it faded away before it could.
"Still not enough..."
The Pope rose to his feet, turned, and looked down at Kore.
"I heard you've taken the Great Temple in hand. Congratulations."
Kore felt an inexplicable chill in those words of congratulation. For any priest to take hold of a temple consecrated to the gods, in other words, to possess it, was impossible.
No, it wasn't even a question of possible or impossible. It was a sacrilegious act that must never be done. How could a priest, a mere servant of the gods, dare to covet what belonged to the gods themselves?
From that outrageous choice of words, Kore could infer what the Pope was really thinking.
Pluton's Great Temple was another rallying point binding the Order of the Divine Name together, and to make proper use of it, Kore herself, as Pluton's priestess, was indispensable.
It meant that the Pluton cult and its priestess, whose very existence had until now only been known in whispers, would be officially recognized as another center of the Order of the Divine Name.
In other words, Kore would emerge as a new figure capable of rivaling the Pope's authority.
As the Pope himself had put it, "Kore, who had taken hold of a temple," could become the Pope's one and only rival.
'No, surely not?'
Only now did Kore realize why Ortes had "handed over" the temple to her.
The trust between Kore and the Pope could never be the same as before, and never would be again. No matter what testimony Kore gave from now on, the Pope would have no choice but to judge her claims through some degree of prejudice.
The Order of the Divine Name's head had been split in two.
The Order should originally have become the Mage King's greatest enemy. But the day its will could ever be unified as one was now gone forever.
It might change, even now, if Kore threw her full support behind the Pope's plan. But Kore still couldn't bring herself to accept it.
The Order of the Divine Name had grown stronger. If the Great Temple's sacred relics were added, along with the Pope's creation, which today took one more step toward completion, it might just be able to recreate the ancient golden age.
To put it another way: the Order's strength had grown to a level that could rival the Ten Towers, while at the very same time, its internal will would never again be unified.
The phrase Ortes had declared, "an enemy of the Ten Towers," rose to mind again. He had restored the Order's old power, making it possible for the Order to become an enemy of the Ten Towers.
A dagger poised to pierce through the Ten Towers, whose every nerve was fixed on Argyrion.
Ortes himself had reportedly advised, "The Order should wait for its moment, until the vanished mage and the Ten Towers turn on each other." But would the Pope really see it the same way?
How was the Pope really taking that prophecy, that the vanished mage would return? Did he believe that if his plan succeeded and that impious creation was completed, it could bring down even the vanished mage?
Or did he simply not regard Ortes's words as a prophecy at all?
Whether he knew of Kore's confusion or not, the Pope merely stood there smiling faintly.
The Pope's thoughts turned to the flickering lights on the altar.
The altar, down to eleven flames since Phoibos's light had gone out. In Pluton's Great Temple, five sacred relics connected to the altar had been found, and just now, one of them had been brought out.
Since he had extinguished Elimon's light with his own hand, ten flames should remain.
But.
Only nine flames remained, flickering.
Someone, somewhere other than here, had snuffed out an old priest's soul.
* * *
Haltos had received news that was undeniably good, yet left him uneasy.
A unit Argyrion had dispatched had clashed with a Ten Towers Elder.
-That couldn't be helped. That suspicious distress signal was highly likely to be a trap. That was exactly why only a small unit made up entirely of volunteers had been sent.
The clash ended with the dispatched unit wiped out, and when the signal cut off, the follow-up unit that rushed in pursuit couldn't even recover their bodies before being forced to withdraw.
-The Ten Towers had always been an absolute power. As Blasphemia's former Deputy Chief, Haltos knew their might better than anyone else. Given that the enemy had been a Ten Towers Elder, simply learning the unit had been wiped out was already more than he'd hoped for.
But through the unit's desperate struggle, the Ten Towers Elder had died as well.
-Did that even make sense?
Even assuming the secret art of angelization had exceeded every expectation, their opponent had been a Ten Towers Elder!
But the fact remained: the Elder's corpse had actually been found.
The fact that no one had directly witnessed the battle itself was reason enough to doubt its reliability. At the same time, he'd heard the fight had taken place inside a barrier cast by the Silver Iron Tower Elder's own Spatial Alchemy. Naturally, no one could have observed what happened inside that barrier.
The follow-up unit had observed a massive barrier go up, and by the time they arrived, the barrier had already been dismantled. And at the site where the barrier had vanished, the Elder's corpse remained.
The circumstances couldn't have been more straightforward. There was no possible interpretation other than that the Elder maintaining the barrier had been killed, releasing the spell.
Asking who had killed the Elder would have been laughable. Scattered across the site were the corpses of unit members who had become angels.
Beyond that.
In this day and age, who but Argyrion would ever dare rebel against the Ten Towers?
To anyone looking at it, this was a scene where the unit's life-or-death struggle had produced a miracle.
An unease he couldn't quite put into words. Even as Haltos ordered his people not to act rashly for the time being, he was already searching for a way to make use of the shocking fact of the Elder's death.
"So exposure really is the most effective way, in the end."
The moment authority tarnishes even a little, it invites doubt.
If he announced to the whole world that an absolute power like a Ten Towers Elder had fallen, more people would turn their backs on the arrogant traitors of the Ten Towers and awaken to the cause.
Every effort at reasonable inference ultimately converged into chaos.
It was the moment the seed of misunderstanding that Ortes had planted and cultivated finally bloomed.
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