The Founding Ceremony and the Business Plan (2)
Business plan.
That was the first thing I wrote on the blank page. If the jumble of notes I'd been scribbling about the future ever fell into someone else's hands, it was the safest title I could hide behind.
I meant to burn the lot once I'd sorted my thoughts. Even so, the odds that Carisia would suddenly walk into the room and ask what I was writing were not zero, and it felt wiser to have an excuse prepared.
No matter how suspicious the contents, a business plan would earn me nothing worse than an oh, there he goes again. Even if she looked over my shoulder this very moment, she would dismiss it as idle fantasy. A ten-year plan? A hundred-year plan? She would scold me to think about tomorrow before indulging in nonsense like that.
The first thing that surfaced was the number 2077.
The original work this world was built upon—hadn't its title been something like The Arcane King Who Returned in 2077? Whether the word was resurrection, return, or something else entirely, I couldn't say. A fading memory is a cruel thing.
Damn it. If I'd known this was the inside of a novel, I would have written the whole thing down before I forgot.
The title didn't matter. Having talked myself into that, I strung a few words together.
2077. Resurrection. The Ten Arcane Precepts.
The first person in this world to systematize magic had been the protagonist of the original: the Arcane King.
When that Arcane King ascended, he divided his wisdom into ten attributes and left the pieces behind. Those first artifacts were the Ten Precepts. His disciples inherited them and each founded a school, and those schools became the ancestors of the magic towers. Even now, modern mages grind themselves raw for the chance to become one of the chosen few who can interface with the Ten Precepts.
…That was the history this world believed. The truth written in the novel was somewhat different.
The Arcane King's disciples murdered their master as he attempted to ascend, tore his authority to shreds, and each claimed a share. In other words, the Ten Precepts were the Arcane King's sundered power itself.
The murdered king had prepared a contingency against the failure of his ascension, and thanks to that insurance he succeeded in resurrecting across a vast gulf of time. The opening of the novel was his bewilderment at the distance between the mythic age in which he had died and the thoroughly cyberpunk year of 2077.
The spine of the story was the resurrected Arcane King, Simon, reclaiming the Ten Precepts and with them the power to pierce the heavens and ascend.
So our employer is Simon's enemy.
Strictly speaking, Carisia had not been his enemy from the beginning. She appeared as a rival in the course of his quest to recover the Precepts, and only at the end did the two of them fight with their lives on the line.
The reason was simple. The Arcane King's purpose was to interface with the Ten Precepts and recover the wisdom he had lost in the process of resurrection. Every other mage who coveted the Precepts wanted the same thing: the vast store of wisdom accumulated, layer upon layer, by all who had connected to them from the mythic age down to the present, and through that wisdom to draw closer to ascension.
Carisia was different.
Carisia wanted to break the Ten Precepts. Specifically, the Precept of Light.
At that point I tore at my hair. How had I failed to recognize the rival who stood against the protagonist over the single most important element in the novel? And yet it couldn't be helped.
In the original, Carisia had no name.
The Hydra's middle head. The Nameless Witch. Or, more simply, White Nameless.
Those were the names the novel had used for her.
Damn it. A kid who looked expensive at a glance had told me she had no name worth giving, and I'd taken it to mean that someone of her caliber simply didn't care to associate with a nobody like me. Calling her miss, miss every time was a nuisance, so I'd lifted a name from some research institute I'd happened across and stuck it on her.
"And after all that circling, it comes to this…."
My head ached.
A white-haired young lady who fired death beams—on that description alone, White Nameless should have been the first name to come to mind. But the name Carisia had blinded me, and I'd walked straight into an identity I never imagined. Only in the moment I heard Hydra Inc. at the founding ceremony did I finally understand who she really was.
Strange, how close we'd grown, and still she had never told me her true name. Either it was a secret she wouldn't share at our level of familiarity, or she had never had a name to begin with.
I stared down at the business plan, at the word I had dashed off beneath the Ten Precepts.
White Nameless leaves the story by destroying the Precept of Light with a grand spell that costs her her life. She vanished still nameless, so there was never a chance for her true name to come to light. All that circulated afterward was the guess that she might have been a test subject out of the White Light Magic Tower.
White Nameless's death becomes the turning point of the original. The Arcane King's incomplete ascension, and the string of later contenders attempting their own, had already riddled the dimensional barrier with holes. Her death was what finally shattered it altogether, and mana from beyond the dimension began to pour through in earnest. She was the one who drove this world—already a cyberpunk society split by magical inequality—even deeper into the abyss.
I vaguely remembered the explanation. The method she had used to destroy the Precept of Light was too violent, and the world could not withstand the aftermath. How is destruction supposed to be anything but violent? The problem was not the violence itself. It was that she had not taken the Precept apart slowly, piece by piece, but smashed it all at once. The longing for ascension that mages had piled up inside the Precepts erupted in a single burst and tore the dimensional barrier apart. Something like that.
With the Arcane King closing in, the only means left to White Nameless had been a spell that burned her own soul to break the Precept. I could understand that much.
Which meant the thing I had to do was….
"President. You must not become the sort of idiot who writes dying into the plan."
"What are you saying, all of a sudden?"
Wouldn't it be enough if I could make her attached to living?
"If you have time to waste on drivel like that, kindly focus on your work. I will be away from my post for the time being."
Three days after Hydra Inc.'s founding ceremony, Carisia gave notice that she would be leaving her post in order to transfer the title of Tower Lord.
The eight syndicate heads, now to be called directors, were thrown into confusion. Confidence in one's own strength was all well and good, but to abandon the seat in the turmoil right after an organization had been founded? What if several of the directors joined forces and plotted a rebellion?
She had seized the organization with overwhelming power, but Carisia was still only human. She was not some unreachable grand mage striving for ascension. Gather the people, prepare the means, wait for the moment, and she could be killed. Once the authority of the magic tower was in her hands, there would truly be no way left to resist. If assassination was to be attempted, this was the last chance.
At least a few among the eight directors believed as much.
In the very instant those thoughts took shape, Ortes, standing behind Carisia, opened his mouth.
"President. You must not become the sort of idiot who writes dying into the plan."
The words shook everyone who had been weighing the risk and return of rebellion.
Carisia's brow twitched, the look of someone who did not consider it worth hearing. She left behind nothing but a calm order to focus on the work, and walked out of the conference room.
Arabelle swallowed, having guessed the meaning buried in that exchange.
Focus on the work while I'm away. Anyone can see that means she's leaving an acting president in charge.
Even after Carisia was gone, Ortes remained where he stood, wearing that same faint smile. He did not take the empty seat. A silent notice, she supposed, that only Carisia was permitted to sit in the president's chair.
"The president is as quick on her feet as ever, I see. In that case, Directors, I believe you all have a great deal of time to spare. Shall we speak, one at a time?"
"Not here. In the interview room."
Arabelle prayed she would not be the first. Third or fourth would have been perfect. From the face of whoever went in ahead, she might glean some clue about what was going to happen inside.
"We'll begin with Director Arabelle. That's all right, isn't it?"
How could she dare shake her head? Arabelle forced her expression under control and nodded.
In this world, the words magic tower carry two broad meanings.
The first is a school: mages of similar doctrine gathered into a tower. The second is a facility: a tower that purifies mana from beyond the dimension and supplies it throughout a city. As a rule, a tower of the first kind forms around a tower of the second.
The Tower Lord credentials Carisia meant to go and renew were tied to that second meaning.
After the head of the Lernaean Magic Tower's lord—former owner of the Hydra Inc. building—had evaporated, the tower's mana distribution apparatus had gone on running by itself. But if Carisia were formally registered as Tower Lord and gained free control of the tower, then one-third of this city, Etna City, would become her property in the truest sense.
In this world, mana occupied the same place electricity and running water had held in the modern society I came from. And just as a person can go on living with the power cut and the water shut off, there were ways to get by even if the mana was blocked. A mage could always supply their own. It would simply be enormously inconvenient, and an enormous pain.
Arabelle struck me as exactly the sort of person who would hate that inconvenience most of all. If Carisia died before the formal registration, she would rejoice and scheme in the shadows for the Tower Lord's seat. If Carisia completed the registration, she would bow her head beneath her without a moment's hesitation.
And for good reason.
"Director Arabelle. What percentage of your body has been converted to prosthetics?"
Because she was someone who had undergone arcane prosthetic surgery, and could not live without magical electricity.