In Search of the Lost Kaicl (3)
I let Arabelle's bluster wash past me and gathered every scrap of data I had left across dozens of the Phytoes Magic Tower's production models into a single folder.
If my guess was right, decrypting that heap of dummy data in one particular way would produce the regular reports Kaicl received.
And how was I supposed to figure out that particular way?
"I'm counting on you, Director Arabelle."
"Pardon?"
I walked out of Arabelle's hideout without so much as a glance back.
Work, after all, comes down to aptitude. My specialty is solving things with my body, so anything that calls for specialized knowledge is better left to a specialist.
From behind me came a mutter. "The president and the secretary, the exact same rotten temper...!"
I must have misheard. Unlike Carisia, who hands down overloaded workloads as orders without a second thought, I only ever ask—and only within the limits of what someone can actually do.
I needed the truth confirmed by month's end if I was going to wedge myself into the rite at the start of the month. Three days left, give or take. With Arabelle's ability, she ought to dig it up before then.
Arabelle gulped water in a rush. So much of her body had been replaced with prosthetics that, so long as mana was supplied, she could keep her vital functions going without water or meals.
Right now, though, she was starving for the clarity of cold water. She felt ready to boil over from the inside.
Damn it.
She couldn't simply curse Ortes, because he had been right. Something really had been hidden in the information.
It wasn't the latest encryption used by the orthodox magic towers. It was the opposite.
An encryption built on the sacred glyphs once used by the cults of gods long vanished—a notion so classical that no one would ever have thought to reach for it.
For the first few days after Ortes dumped the work on her, Arabelle had poured everything she had into the decryption, and no matter how many times she tried, not a single clue surfaced. In a fit of rage she fed every decryption method in the Information Guild's database into an automatic simulator and ran them all, and what turned up, by sheer luck, was an encryption from an old age measured in centuries.
Sacred glyphs. A language that recorded the words of the gods.
She had heard that in that distant old age there existed a technique called the Sacred Edict, which received the power of the gods and worked miracles. Names that had all sunk beneath the waves of history by now.
Come to think of it, if it were a Sacred Edict, that could explain Ortes's presence even without magic, couldn't it?
For a moment she entertained the possibility that Ortes wielded Sacred Edicts, then let out a hollow laugh.
A man like that, a priest? Unless he took his own president for a god, he wasn't the sort to put his faith in anything else. Above all, the idea that the gods would look fondly on that vicious temper and share their power with him didn't even make sense.
Swallowing her anger, Arabelle headed for the room of the man who had dumped the work on her. She wanted to throw the report in his face, but she couldn't bring herself to do it, and carefully held out the stack of documents instead.
Ortes read the report through without ever dropping his smile. To Arabelle, that expression looked like a provocation. See? Just as I said.
That thought evaporated in the conversation that followed a moment later.
"As I thought. I'll have to prepare."
"Prepare? For what—digging?"
"No. A mage on Kaicl's level would have prepared countermeasures against an intrusion of that sort. So we'll have to go in through the front door he left ready."
"The front door..."
Only then did Arabelle remember that Ortes had come to her in the first place because he found the Phytoes Magic Tower's monthly burnt-offering rite suspicious.
"You're planning to dive into the lava?!"
Ortes shrugged, as if to ask what the problem was.
No doubt about it.
That smile was pure satisfaction that what he had reported to the president had not been wrong. Loyalty that would accept death itself, so long as it carried him one step closer to Carisia's goal. No. Fanaticism.
A powerful mage could surely survive even inside lava, and this time there was circumstantial evidence that one would not simply sink, but be carried somewhere else. Even so, accepting a lava dive that willingly belonged to an entirely different dimension.
A chill ran down Arabelle's spine. By what method had Carisia created a follower this extreme? Would she herself, someday, end up like Ortes?
The thought terrified her.
I cursed the fate that had set a situation like this aside for me.
From the moment I opened my eyes in this ridiculous world, I had known that luck and destiny were not on my side.
Even so.
I had braced myself, but actually going into the lava? There had to be a limit. It had been a while since something this absurd.
I couldn't voice a complaint in front of a director about work tied to the company's long-cherished project, so I kept my face under control for dear life—but Arabelle's expression had stiffened, ever so slightly, and I wasn't confident I'd pulled it off. She might have caught my dissatisfaction. Better to lay some groundwork in advance.
"Director Arabelle."
"...Yes."
"This stays a secret from the president."
We serve the same boss. Just this once, please pretend you didn't see it.
Taking advantage of the edge of dawn, Ortes slipped without much difficulty up to the offerings the Phytoes Magic Tower's automatons had lined in order.
Sensors that detected mana were meaningless against an Ortes who had none. Most of the security built to counter mages was simply neutralized. He had not brought a Magic Inscribed Drive, erring on the side of caution, but breaking the security of an unmanned facility—and not even a core facility, only the offerings meant to be dumped into the lava—posed no real problem.
The first unit off each machine, manufactured across dozens and hundreds of production lines, sat stored inside container boxes. It was a scene out of a museum of automatons, or a department store.
Ortes climbed into an empty powered suit.
Feels like I've become the lead in that superhero movie, the one who goes around wrapped in a steel suit. Pretty sure that gentleman had a hard time because of the cold, not the heat.
Vrrrm—
A heavy rumble, and vibration climbed through the container. Transport had begun.
The closer they drew to the summit of Mount Etna, the stronger the heat grew. However much its fire had weakened, a volcano was still a volcano. Inside the container, and inside the powered suit within it, the air began to burn.
Damn it. Of all the places for that Kaicl to build a hideout.
Ortes cursed, several times over, the real-estate sense that had plainly hit the dirt along with Kaicl, and felt his body begin to tilt.
This was it.
If, by some chance, even a lava dive failed to get him into Kaicl's stronghold, he would have to get off the volcano at once. Variant combat arts he had picked up here and there, stolen, and refined drew up the power latent in him—a stance from which he could tear the powered suit apart and leap at any moment.
Thud. Clack. Screeeee—
They were not throwing the container itself. They were tilting the box and pouring out the offerings loaded inside. Ortes felt himself drop into free fall toward the furnace.
A gust of wind. Wind that had skimmed the lava, far from cooling a powered suit already heated to its limit, only laid one more shard of heat across it. When the huge lumps of metal struck the lava, molten rock leapt toward the sky.
Lava usually ran from eight hundred to twelve hundred degrees. Iron's melting point was 1,538. Nowhere near enough to melt a magical special alloy with heat resistance and durability beyond steel.
But that was a story from the Earth Ortes remembered.
The fire dwelling in Mount Etna began, without the slightest difficulty, to melt and eat through Phytoes alloy. Ortes went cold with disbelief.
No. Don't tell me—
Had even the data hidden inside the automatons' dummy data been a trick? The paranoia of mad mages!
Heat rushed in through the gap where the powered suit's faceplate had melted away. Ortes's eyes flew open on reflex.
And in the next instant—
Ortes was standing on obsidian tiles polished smooth enough to reflect his face.
Kaicl's hideout.
Kaicl came walking with his head bowed and swept the wreckage of the machines with one glowing eye. The scan finished.
Through the heaps of melted scrap, components shone a bright orange. Storage devices from the products he had made. As he approached to collect them, a deep depression closed over him.
He could not even sigh anymore.
This month would be the same as the last. The reports would tell him that the works he had created had faithfully pocketed the fire of Mount Etna. And still the work would not be complete. In theory the quantity of mana had already been met, and yet it would not properly activate, and he would go on supplying mana in the hope of finding whatever had gone wrong...
Thinking that, he raised his head, and something blocked his view.
His prosthetic eye, built to capture mana, displayed no color at all. He adjusted its angle of view and took in the figure as a whole.
A person?
At once he moved to prepare a dual casting—chanting a spell with his mouth while forming seals with both hands—then stopped, undone by the emptiness that washed over him.
"So the people upstairs have found me at last. Geryones? Or Lernian? An outside power from beyond Etna City?"
"Of those, the closest would be Lernian."
"A pity, then. What you've been hunting, calling it the Artificial Decalogue, is a failure."
Kaicl sat down on the floor.
No. What is wrong with this old man?
A giant who looked about twice my height came toward me, spraying some kind of light from one prosthetic eye, and the moment he saw me he launched into a lament about his lot in life. Years invested in making the thing, and still no progress to the next stage. A properly mage-like complaint that if he had known it would turn out this way, he should have left a few of the bastards who originally held the tower alive to use as research slaves.
At this rate, I might actually be able to settle it with words. Something along the lines of If you come under our company, we would be willing to provide a research staff of our own—sympathize, draw him in, and secure the Artificial Decalogue.
As a first step toward friendly relations, I gave Kaicl's words a suitably agreeable nod.
"That would be right. Reproducing the divinity inherent in the Decalogue isn't the sort of thing you can manage just by having a lot of mana, is it?"
Kaicl, who until a moment ago had been beating the ground in regret in the most literal sense, went rigid from head to toe.
"You. How do you... know that?"
His prosthetic eye began to spin wildly.
