WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 550

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Sacrifice and Fortune

The land of the Kingdom of Ten Thousand had bone altars.

Relics of atrocities committed by savage humans in the distant past. The traces of slaughter so habitual and so chronic that it defied easy dismissal as mere massacre. Terrible altars built by stacking the bones of consumed humans, layer by layer.

Most evidence of those brutalities scattered across the Kingdom of Ten Thousand had been erased, but a few couldn't quite be wiped away and had since been repurposed as something like graves. Mugul, black mage and priest of the Demon God, stood at one such bone altar.

Leather drums beat their rhythm. Sacrifices drained of reason walked forward in slow procession. Mugul directed his minions and puppets as he prepared the forbidden rite.

Even as he readied the long-awaited ceremony, Mugul's mind was uneasy. He leaned on his skull-tipped staff and muttered with evident displeasure.

"...A rite performed while being driven out is one that struggles to succeed."

But there was no helping it. Someone from beyond the plains was coming for him.

The civilized feared the savages beyond the plains, but the savages revered whoever came from beyond. Civilized folk who arrived in this land bearing weapons and tools never seen before, carrying shocking ideas and philosophies, reshaped the land in ways that shook everything to its roots. That reshaping was too sudden and too irreversible, reconstructing lives in forms that could not be resisted.

The most powerful and most overwhelming of them all had been Sorcerer King Agartha. The great woman who wove together countless tribes that should never have been bound and from them built the Kingdom of Ten Thousand.

Though her line had been cut off by some incident, the strange awe directed toward her still lurked in the dark corners of the jungle.

Even Mugul, who held sway over the jungles of the Kingdom of Ten Thousand, couldn't drive out that unsettling feeling.

"There were auspicious signs. The crows circling the sky, the crescent moon, the rising blood, all of them foretold the rite's success. It would be foolish not to proceed."

Muttering to himself, Mugul lifted his staff and steeled his resolve. Then this obstacle that had appeared now was also an auspicious sign. Cross this trial, and the desired result would surely follow.

"It was something that had to be done regardless. The timing has merely moved up a little."

Mugul shook his staff. Something enormous stirred within the bone altar.

"Come whenever you like. I will deal with you myself."

By that hour, however, the regressor and I had already slipped into the sacrifices' prison.

A path with the bone altar visible in the far distance. Rather than attacking the black mage outright, the regressor had proposed infiltration, saying there would be people the black mage had locked up somewhere nearby.

The easiest way to deal with a black mage was a surprise attack. As with all mages, an unprepared black mage was unusually weak.

The wiser approach, though, was freeing the sacrifices before attacking.

"This is exactly why I hate black mages. I wasn't particularly trying to rescue these people, but I end up doing it anyway."

The regressor grumbled as she neatly sliced through the iron bars with Skywarbler.

Just as a wealthy miser keeps cash stacked in a private vault, a black mage always kept sacrifices ready on hand. This black mage had hidden them well, his assets and his liability both, but a sweep of the regressor's Seven-Colored Eyes revealed them immediately.

Anyone with a shred of decency couldn't help but prioritize freeing the sacrifices. Not purely out of a sense of justice.

"It's a rational decision. A black mage's power scales with the number of sacrifices. Every sacrifice you save chips away at what he can bring to bear."

"What I hate is being forced into it. The black mage will obviously have countermeasures prepared."

Still grumbling, the regressor called out toward the people huddled deeper inside.

"Everyone out. If you don't want to die."

The people locked inside the prison hesitated for a long moment. The unexpected rescue was too strange to trust.

"We're saved!"

Even so, there was at least one person who still had her wits. A slender jungle-tribe woman in worn leather clothing stepped forward.

"Finally saved! Great Warrior, great spirit, mother of all trees! You have sent an incarnation to deliver us from that wicked sorcerer!"

She came forward, her voice overcome with relief, and shouted back over her shoulder.

"Everyone, come out! If you don't, your blood and flesh will quench the sorcerer's thirst!"

At that, the people who had been slumped lifelessly stirred and lurched upright. As though she were their leader, the sacrifices followed her words and shuffled out of the prison.

The regressor cut through every rope and chain, then pointed back the way they'd come.

"Right. For now, get out and find somewhere to hide. Stay here and you'll get caught in the fighting and die."

"Where should we go?"

"Anywhere that isn't here."

"Understood. Everyone, hold on. Even if it's hard, we have to keep moving..."

A woman leading sacrifices who had lost their reason. Genuinely brave and spirited.

Almost impossible to believe she had been a sacrifice waiting only for the day of her death.

'Just as my master said. They came here to find the sacrifices first.'

The black mage Ramnu hid her true thoughts and kept the sacrifices moving.

To a black mage, sacrifices were wealth and risk combined. Unlike money, they had legs, they'd bolt without warning, and in bad cases might even pick up weapons and come at you themselves.

That was why, when storing sacrifices, you broke their will through terror and fear, and clouded their reason with drugs and scents. That was the only way they'd willingly offer their lives on the altar when the time came.

Naturally, if you damaged them too badly they lost their value as sacrifices, so they had to be maintained with some care. But tending to humans was tiresome enough work. So any self-respecting black mage assigned such drudgery to their disciples under the guise of training.

'I played the part of a diligent, devoted disciple hopelessly smitten with my disagreeable master, hiding my true thoughts the whole time. Fooling these idiots who came to rescue the sacrifices is even easier.'

She had no idea her mind was being read clear as day. Ramnu was positively gloating.

'Master commanded me to report immediately, but there's no need for that. With sacrifices like these, I could conduct the rite myself instead. I'll steal the ceremony while they're busy fighting master. I'm the one who will become Ankhra's incarnation!'

A grand scheme, but Ramnu had one piece of bad luck.

Was it that I had mind reading? No, obviously not.

The regressor had grown suspicious.

"Hmm. People sure do listen to you well..."

The regressor's eyes flickered briefly through seven colors. The penetrating Green Eye looked through grass and stone and found the steel key hidden inside Ramnu's clothing.

A steel prison key. Not something a sacrifice should have. If she'd had a key, she should have escaped long ago.

"What?"

"Hold on."

"AAAAAAAH!"

Ramnu shrieked as the regressor's single slash opened a gash that spilled blood. Calling Ramnu careless would be a little unfair. Who could have expected someone with x-ray vision to find the key?

"There's a nasty scent filling this place. A drug? An anesthetic? Something like that. Not especially strong, though."

"Right. That's probably why people won't move just because we tell them to."

"I'll blow the scent away with wind, so you take the people somewhere. Without the sacrifices, the black mage is nothing."

"Heh heh heh. Nothing, you say?"

It was then. Ramnu, who had collapsed in a heap of spilled blood, slowly rose back up from the exact same fallen position, no hands pressed to the ground, no attempt to staunch the bleeding. Rising like a rewound film reel, Ramnu fixed us with a lifeless expression.

"You're in the palm of my hand. Did you think I wouldn't prepare for something like this?"

"What is this, puppetry?"

"Heh. Of course. A puppet who swallowed my finger. If I wasn't going to use a disciple as a puppet, there'd be no point taking one at all."

Puppetry: the art of planting a piece of oneself inside someone and seizing control through a certain hex. A spare life purchased at the price of one sacrifice and a piece of the body.

Mugul must have turned his own disciple into a puppet from the very beginning, watching us through her the whole time.

"So what."

The ambush was blown, but the regressor paid it no mind and severed the puppet's limbs in one sweep. No matter how powerful the true body was, a puppet was still a puppet. Smash it and be done.

Ramnu's body, limbs torn away, was quickly rendered useless. But the black mage beyond cared little about damage to the puppet. To him, she had been nothing but a puppet.

"No hesitation whatsoever... but what about this!"

The black mage scattered his blood further and chanted an incantation. More primal howl than language, the spell transformed the spilling blood into a red mist.

The red mist came rolling in. The regressor lightly sliced the air with Skywarbler and pushed the mist back.

"That's all?"

"It wasn't aimed at you!"

At the same instant, the sacrifices began screaming, their eyes shot through with blood. The hex of frenzy. Their reason gone and their minds soaked in drugs, the sacrifices lost any ability to tell one person from another and began to rampage.

The regressor clicked her tongue.

"Tch. Should have gone straight for the black mage. He's sharper than I expected."

"He must have known we were coming and prepared for it. What do we do? Kill them?"

"If you kill them, they'll just become the black mage's sacrifices. I'm going straight for the black mage's true body! You handle things here!"

"What? You're leaving me alone in the middle of all these berserkers?"

"You can do it, can't you? You won't die from this."

"That's not the same thing as having to do it!"

"No time!"

Cutting off my protest, the regressor thrust Jizan straight up. The sword energy split the ceiling clean in two, and starlight bled down into the dim underground prison.

"Take care of it!"

The regressor shot upward, leaving me alone among the crowd of berserkers. The frenzied sacrifices closed in as I stood staring blankly at the open sky above.

"Haaa. Why are all my opponents always like this..."

Nothing in their heads but the desire to tear into me with their teeth and nails. Not even thoughts, exactly, just hostility and instinct churning and crashing around inside them.

"Dealing with them isn't the problem."

The problem was that I couldn't kill these berserkers, but leaving them alive meant they'd attack me. What was I supposed to do with that.

"...I'll have to, I suppose."

One berserker shoved teeth toward me. Clack, clack. Snapping teeth trying to rip into my body. Scratch and claw marks opened all over me. The berserkers threw themselves at me like rabid dogs, craving the blood I spilled and the pieces of my flesh.

Instead of driving them back, I let the blood flow freely from my body.

Life naturally resists outside interference, but black magic blurs that boundary and reaches into the body and mind of other humans. In a broad sense, the nature of it was similar to vampirism. Vampirism under another's will, you might say.

Either way, black magic was a human technique. I let the berserkers drink my blood. It was a luxury I could afford because I had regeneration.

The blood I shed slowly flowed into the berserkers' bodies.

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