The Pressure Interview (1)
A stranger who spoke, as if it were nothing at all, of the secret Kaicl had spent his entire life unearthing.
To drag that identity into the light, Kaicl poured mana into his prosthetic eye. Split away from the visual feed his living left eye sent to his brain, the right eye's observations rose up on their own.
In the left, the blurred features of a human face were still there. In the mechanical right eye, driven by mana, there was only something like a human shadow—and even that refused to hold a shape.
An eye of flesh is riddled with blind spots, a crude and hopelessly incomplete thing beside a meticulously engineered prosthesis. So why was it the mechanical eye that could not catch that figure? There was no way to account for so grotesque a phenomenon.
A soft step. It came one pace closer.
"How, you say? An odd choice of words."
A heavier tread, and Kaicl gave a pace of ground.
"Did Simon Magus not attempt ascension? The procedure for claiming a seat in the heaven where the gods reside. What is strange about inferring divinity in one who meant to stand upon the same footing as the gods?"
"Because they hid it!!"
Kaicl screamed it, seized by a fit. Every fact the thing was speaking was a secret the Ten Towers had buried.
"Because they hid the truth that the end of the magic which drove the gods out was only the birth of another god! What are you? Where did you come from!"
"Frankly, that much is too paltry to even call a secret."
The intruder murmured on, remarking that if the Ten Towers had truly meant to hide it, they would have started by changing the name ascension itself.
"Shall we speak in practical terms? Up to a certain point, quantitative expansion would have been equivalent to qualitative improvement."
Correct. The more of Mount Etna's essence he absorbed, the more refined and powerful the magic he could wield through the mana of the Artificial Decalogue.
"But there is a limit. A stage comes when the volume of mana may keep rising, and the level of the magic does not. I imagine you have been stranded at that stage for quite some time."
Through the left eye, the man's smile was plain to see. Through the right, a human-shaped darkness that had carved reality out and settled into the hole.
"Your failure—of course I know of it. Even so, I pay my respects to the fierce effort that carried you all the way there."
"Who are you! Where in the world did you come from! Are you an assassin sent by the Ten Towers!"
No. The Ten Towers were not so idle as to spare attention for a failure like this. Checking the other towers while racing toward ascension kept them busy enough on its own. And yet where, besides the Ten Towers, could there be anyone capable of making a being this incomprehensible?
"Oh dear. Haven't I been introducing myself for some time now?"
The Lernaean Magic Tower? No. A tower of that caliber could not possibly harbor a being like that. Now that he thought of it, the man had said the Lernaean was the closest thing. Something out of the Lernaean Magic Tower? No. Its vessel was not large enough to hold a being this incomprehensible.
Kaicl forced his trembling body straight and stared at it. He had to fold the gaze of his left eye back together with the readings of his right. However long he watched the man through that right eye, the only thing that grew certain was that he could learn nothing at all. If only to beat down the fear, he needed his vision returned to what it had been.
Clap.
In that instant, it applauded. There was no hostility in the motion, but it was more than enough to shatter his focus.
"Pardon me. You seemed unable to concentrate."
It noticed a spell that operates only inside my own body?
The thing wanted Kaicl observing it with his right eye. He could not begin to guess why.
"There seems to be a misunderstanding, so allow me to introduce myself again. I am Ortes, of Hydra Inc."
"Hydra Inc.?"
The something that called itself Ortes gave a small shrug.
"It ought to be in this month's data, the batch prepared by the Phytoes Magic Tower's automatic information-gathering program. An upstart magic tower that wiped out the Lernaean school and took their place. Something of that sort."
"Are you the president?"
The smile visible only to the left eye deepened.
"The president? Hardly. At Hydra Inc. I don't even receive an executive's treatment. On the organizational chart, I suspect I'm closer to an ordinary employee."
He could not believe it. Through the extremity of his confusion, Kaicl groped after the purpose that had brought the other here.
"The Artificial Decalogue.... You came looking for me over a failure even you acknowledged?"
"Until now, it has been a failure. But if you come with us, that will change."
A long, unhesitating stride. Before the shadow closing in, Kaicl could only fall back, helpless. His heel struck something and announced there was nowhere left to retreat, and he realized he had backed all the way to the Artificial Decalogue's control apparatus.
"So this is the Decalogue. Set beside the true one, the integration rate is lacking, and so the size has grown somewhat excessive—but the mana compression is beyond any comparison with an ordinary magic stone."
Ortes's hand reached past him to the controls. Kaicl's right eye witnessed it.
———!
And a resonance too primal to be put into language filled the mountain: a primitive pulse that ran down the slopes and at last set the whole of the city trembling. Wherever the cry soaked in, flame leapt up and volcanic heat surged. The cooling heart of Mount Etna beat once more.
Kaicl knew what it was.
"The Echo...!"
The echo Typhoeus had left upon this world. The thing Kaicl had spent a lifetime hunting.
The legendary great beast called the progenitor of all magical beasts—king of the beasts, and a god. Mount Etna was the last place where the deeds of Typhoeus, one of the gods who had since vanished, stood recorded. That was why Kaicl had tried to gather the volcanic heat of Etna City and forge an Artificial Decalogue.
If the Decalogue was the authority an ascendant had left in the world—a human who had obtained divinity—then might one not recover the remnants a god had left behind, gather them into one, and make something of the same kind?
What Kaicl had failed to account for was time.
Even the Magic King's ascension already belonged to an age men called ancient. So much time had passed since the era of the vanished gods that the records themselves had worn faint. Kaicl had underestimated, far too deeply, the power of time, which reclaims all things. However much of Mount Etna's volcanic heat he amassed, whether he could find even a splinter of the divinity belonging to the Typhoeus who had walked that age remained unknown.
Amid a frustration that did nothing but grow, just as he was ready to admit his failure, Ortes worked a miracle.
Kaicl's right eye replayed, with perfect clarity, what had happened an instant before: Ortes's hand, the hand that to the right eye looked like nothing but a black shadow, in the moment it touched the Artificial Decalogue's controls. Something that surged up out of the shadow wrapped the Artificial Decalogue.
Within it, having taken that something in, the afterglow of divinity stirred. The man called Ortes had crossed an abyss of time and called the echo of divinity back into the world.
"Wh-who are you?"
Kaicl asked it from his knees, before he even knew he had fallen. Giant that he was, his eyes still sat higher than Ortes's even then. Yet he could not feel, in any genuine sense, that he was looking down on Ortes. If anyone was doing the observing, it was Ortes.
"What manner of person are you, that you uncover the refuge I kept hidden, and ancient divinity answers your call?"
A smiling silence. With every second that passed, another bead of sweat gathered on Kaicl's brow.
"I am."
Ortes broke a silence that had felt like eternity.
"An employee of Hydra Inc."
That could not serve as an answer. Kaicl moved to demand a real one.
"The answer you seek lies with us."
Why did Ortes know the secrets of the Ten Towers? Why had his touch awakened the Artificial Decalogue? Before the heretic who had left the Ten Towers, there was someone reaching out a hand and offering the answer to every question.
"Do not be afraid. The one I serve takes up even the small and puts them to great use—so upon you, who have already produced a failure this vast, how great a success do you suppose would be bestowed?"
Kaicl took the hand offered to him.
No idea. What is this. I'm scared.
The conversation had felt badly off from the very first word, so I'd gone and played the part of some thoroughly shady mystery faction, pressing him hard enough that Kaicl couldn't take the first swing. Lobbing pieces of the original novel's setting at him, one after another, and backing him into a corner—that much had gone fine.
Watching the giant's face travel from bewilderment to shock, and from shock to terror, did sting a little. Still, if we could settle it with words and nobody had to fight, wasn't that a good thing?
Truth was, in the original—where White Nameless had up and used the Artificial Decalogue as a bomb out of nowhere—Kaicl never even got to appear. White Nameless had probably killed him horribly off the page. Scout one competent mage, and shave off even a single chance that Carisia would walk the same road White Nameless had. A perfect plan.
I'd meant to drop the pressure-interview atmosphere at a reasonable moment, poke at his invention, offer a little praise, and ease into the job offer with something glossy along the lines of our company has prepared these benefits just for you. Then the freak phenomenon the instant I touched the Decalogue. I couldn't begin to guess the cause.
Is it because of that mysterious facility this body came out of?
I had a hypothesis. What I did not have was a single piece of real evidence. Kaicl was staring at me with both eyes shining, looking about ready to throw himself flat in full prostration.
Cornered, and out of answers, I'd had exactly one choice.
Dump the whole of it on Carisia.
With her ability, meeting the expectations of a giant who'd picked up a depression researching in a hole under a volcano ought to be simple enough.