WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 23: Bad Dog

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When I threw the pot at the regressor yesterday, the pot that should have been full of stew was completely empty. Someone had eaten every last bit before I even arrived.

There were two likely suspects: Azzy, or something hiding in the cafeteria.

But the thing hiding in the cafeteria had turned out to be a golem, and golems did not eat food. With one suspect naturally eliminated, the culprit was now obvious.

When I interrogated her, Azzy's eyes went wide as she cried out. How about that? Startled, weren't you?

"Did you eat it all?! By yourself?!"

"You ate it!"

"No! Woof! I didn't eat it! I was hungry, but I waited! We were supposed to eat together!"

Despite my fierce questioning, Azzy denied it to the end. Even now, when the culprit seemed so certain, she insisted on her innocence strongly enough to shake my cool, rational judgment.

Was it really not her? Or was she just being stubborn because, as a dog, she had forgotten the inconvenient facts? Mind reading did not work on her, so I genuinely had no idea. If she were human, I would have known right away whether she was telling the truth.

Still, other people who could not read minds somehow went on living without knowing the truth. When someone lied, they looked for evidence and witnesses, then came to reasonably accurate conclusions. Just for today, I would follow their methods.

"Anyway, we'll know once we check. Captain AB! Were you in the cafeteria all night yesterday?"

『Affirmative. This office has been connected to this unit since approximately four yesterday, gathering information.』

"Then did you see who stole the stew from the pot yesterday?"

『Affirmative.』

"Good. Time for the reveal. Ta-da!"

Humming to myself, I lifted the golem by its armpits. Somehow, I thought I heard a faint hiss of escaping air from its microphone.

Holding the golem carefully from behind, I looked around and spoke.

"Captain AB. Go ahead and choose. The culprit who crawled out in the dark like a rat and secretly ate the stew from the pot last night!"

Now then. Who would the golem's finger point to? Well, there were not that many directions it could point. One, maybe.

The golem slowly raised a finger. I watched eagerly, anticipating the future that cold steel would reveal.

The golem's hand pointed at me.

Huh?

"It was me?!"

Good heavens. The sort of twist a mystery story should never pull! Was it really me? Something my unconscious self had done?

『Negative. I was not pointing at you.』

The golem shook its head and raised its finger again. Looking closely, its finger was aimed just past me. Even when I tilted my head out of the way, it did not follow.

Wondering what it was pointing at, I slowly followed the direction of its finger as if dowsing for a water vein. Each time, the direction shifted slightly. Correcting my course as I went, I eventually found a perforated iron cover and, beyond it, a drain. It was where water ran when leftover food was washed away.

It looked too narrow for a person to fit through. With a dreadful suspicion, I looked down at the golem.

"...You're saying there's something in here that stole the food?"

『Correct.』

"Is there a rat in there or something?"

『A foolish question. There are no subterranean animals or insects of any kind in Tantalus.』

"Right. There isn't even mold here. Damn it..."

This was land cursed by Mother Earth, a place where Mother Earth's workers could not intrude. That was why I had naturally been certain Azzy had stolen the food. In the Abyss, the only living beings were me, Azzy, and the regressor. Anyone would have suspected the dog, the most easily tempted by desire and the least intelligent, first.

And since I could read thoughts, I knew the regressor had not eaten it either. Elimination, empirical inference, every clue had pointed to Azzy.

Yet there was a third party. It was a completely unexpected result.

Come to think of it, had I not faintly heard thoughts from the cafeteria last time too? I had casually dismissed them then, but the clue had already been there. It was only right to assume there was some other being in Tantalus.

Either way, the past was the past. What mattered now was deciding what to do. I did not want to stir up a hornet's nest, but if I was going to handle it, it would be better to act while Azzy was here. If it was a monster, I would not be able to manage it alone.

When danger lay ahead, dogs had always been humanity's old friends.

"Azzy."

"Woof!"

"She says the thing that stole your food and mine is down there."

"Woof woof! Bad!"

"Bad, right? So let's pull it out and scold it. Can you get it out?"

I was too scared to pull it out myself, so I had to make Azzy do it. Dogs were humanity's finest friends.

Azzy came over to my side. Instead of immediately digging into the drain, though, she looked up at me with a deeply dissatisfied expression.

"But you were worse! I didn't eat it! I waited nicely, but you yelled that I ate it!"

Ah. She remembered that. I had hoped she would forget, but apparently she was not that stupid. Dogs seemed to have better memories than goldfish, at least.

Still, Azzy was the King of Dogs. A being who could be persuaded with words. A mere dog, I would talk her around with my eloquence.

"Azzy. Is that what's important right now? We have a common enemy. The real thief who stole our food."

"Woof! I didn't eat it!"

"Right. Sorry for suspecting you. For now."

"Woof! I didn't eat it!"

"Yes, yes. I said I was sorry. Let's get along from now on."

"Woof woof! I didn't eat it! But you shouted that I did! You got mad! We're not friends!"

"Well, Azzy."

"You were bad! Woof! Bad!"

"..."

Phew. No helping it, then.

This was a disaster I had brought upon myself. I had to pay the price.

I went back to my room and took out the leather ball for the first time in a while. After only a few days without maintenance, it had already gone flat and soft.

With a long sigh, I raised my left arm straight. Then I rhythmically tapped from my elbow to my wrist with the fingers of my right hand. As I performed the prescribed somatic, my pitiful body wrung out mana and pushed it into my left arm.

"I never thought the day would come when I'd be the one to suggest playing ball. It's a disgrace to humanity. But remember this, mutt. I lost, not humanity."

Mana gathered. The mana spread throughout my body flowed through my veins toward the fingers of my left hand. A sense of omnipotence, as though I could accomplish anything, filled my fingertips.

At the same time, I could see the limits of that omnipotence. I keenly felt the disappointment of knowing that once I used this tiny amount of mana, barely enough to fill one finger, that feeling would be gone.

Why did I have so little mana? Grumbling to myself, I stuck a finger into the ball and recited the incantation for Level 0 standardized magic.

Level-zero magic that caused air itself to burst.

"Pascal."

With a pop, the leather stretched taut, and the ball swelled to a proper size. Since the ball had been stitched with small pieces inside and large pieces outside, suddenly inflating it did not let air escape through the seams. I pulled out my finger, sealed the hole with alchemy, then picked it up and headed for the cafeteria.

Azzy was there, her eyes brighter than ever as she placed her front paws on the table and wagged her tail furiously. She had gotten excited at the sight of the leather ball.

Holding it up, I said, "Will playing ball do?"

"Woof woof! And tasty food too!"

"Fine. I'll make it tasty."

"Awooooo! Great! Great! You're good! You're good now!"

"Then pull out whatever's in there."

Azzy nodded and immediately ran to the drain. She thrust her front paws inside, digging as though she were clawing up dirt. After scraping at the bottom a few times, she stuck half her head into the drain with her rear end stretched out and finally grabbed something.

An arm severed below the elbow.

A leg.

This time, a huge hand.

Then, whimpering, Azzy pulled out one final thing: a large torso with only one arm and one leg attached.

It had a muscular body that looked sturdier than a golem's, with short hair and a short beard. It looked like a venerable martial monk, but with an arm and a leg torn away, its appearance was utterly miserable. Clear muscle showed at the cross-sections.

"Urk."

I felt like vomiting. That was not a human being. That was a H-U-M-A-N.

The severed surfaces were clean. Judging by the twisted marks, it looked as though some huge giant had grabbed its limbs and snapped them off like a child playing with a toy. Yet there was no blood, and the bones were still firmly joined, making me wonder if it was a well-made anatomical model. Its body was horribly mutilated, but there was not a single bloodstain on its bronze skin, so I could not even tell whether it was truly dead. Still, since I could not hear even the slightest thought, it certainly seemed dead.

Someone must have attacked it, smashed its whole body apart, and thrown it into the drain. Perhaps it had endured for days on sheer vitality, only to die alone where no one would find it.

"Oh dear. How did you come to lose your life in a place like this...?"

The thought I had heard back then must have been its final cry. It was sad, but there was nothing I could do. Planning to bury the dismembered corpse, I picked up its severed right arm. The land was cursed by Mother Earth, but it would still be better to bury it...

When I grabbed the right arm, the right arm grabbed me back.

Huh.

What?

"Aaaaaagh!"

I was so startled that I tried to throw the arm away. But the right hand gripping me held incredible strength, so it only swung along with my hand and would not come off.

What the hell, that much strength from a severed arm? If it had been intact, it could have crushed my arm with grip strength alone.

This was not the time for that. I turned over my other palm and pulled out a hidden card. The Ace of Diamonds, a tough, flexible playing card densely woven from metal through alchemy.

I slipped the thin card between the fingers holding me. With a small twist, the fingers slid off. Once I had shaken them off one by one, from the little finger to the middle finger, I finally managed to tear the right arm free and throw it away.

"Huff... Huff... What is that?"

The right arm fell to the floor and tried to crawl forward using only its fingers before stopping, apparently having run out of strength. Faced with something beyond horror, something grotesque, I breathed hard.

I asked the golem, which looked at the right arm without much concern, as though it already knew.

"Captain AB. What is that?"

『A severed right arm that continues to move. I estimate that it belongs to an immortal race.』

"Was that also a trainee?"

『Correct. When the prison break occurred, it was seen being killed by another trainee, but it seems its immortality prevented its death. To recover even from injuries of that severity, its evaluation should be raised by one level.』

"You should've told me something like that sooner! You scared me!"

Azzy curiously poked at the right arm. Whenever it twitched, she jumped back in surprise, then returned whenever it became still again. I pushed Azzy aside, carefully picked up the right arm, and held it to the stump below the corpse's elbow.

The cross-sections fit perfectly, but they did not reattach. The right arm had separated and acted independently, as though it were a completely separate being.

Good heavens. A right arm that could move on its own.

"So that right arm ate the stew?"

『Affirmative. It instinctively sought food in order to heal the body that had fallen into a state of suspended animation.』

"What is that? That's scary."

Now even severed hands could move on their own. Tantalus really was full of every kind of monster.

The golem looked at me and asked, 『What will you do?』

"Do about what?"

『The immortal.』

"That? What am I supposed to do with that?"

At my irritated question, the golem turned its head and stared directly at me. A cold light glimmered within the crystal sphere, inorganic, no, inorganic matter itself.

『I propose that you eliminate the immortal before he revives.』

What??

Footnotes:

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