The Founding Ceremony and the Business Plan (3)
Arabelle desperately arranged her face into what she hoped was a natural smile.
Where did it leak? How?
Her true feelings, of course, were nothing of the sort.
Arabelle herself was the head of this city's Information Guild, and to the outside world she was known as an ordinary human—no peculiarities to speak of, or, to put it another way, no racial weaknesses. Even among the guild's own members, only a bare handful knew that more than seventy percent of her real body had been replaced with magical cybernetics.
She did not run her organization carelessly. From the very start, she had set watchers on those executives under her who might have known what she could do. And naturally, neither Carisia nor Ortes had left any trace of recent contact with her people.
Ortes went on smiling that thin smile of his, eyes on a document whose contents she couldn't begin to guess. His presence was so faint that if you failed to focus on him, he seemed liable to vanish from right in front of you—and that, more than anything, made him frightening.
Don't tell me he slipped into my base under stealth magic. I was certain there wasn't a mage in this city better at concealment than I am...!
Still smiling, Ortes continued as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary.
"If anything I say from here on happens to be mistaken, please correct me. Personal particulars, I find, are most accurately confirmed with the person in question."
It was, unmistakably, a threat. Should she amend him with anything other than the truth, Arabelle could already guess what would become of her.
"Captured by the Lernaean School. Injection of the Arachnid Queen's genes."
A secret hidden more carefully even than her magical cybernetics—a secret that ought to have been hers alone—spilled from his mouth, and a horrific memory rose with it.
In this city, the poor who couldn't properly wield mana being ground underfoot was hardly different from daily life. What had been waiting for Arabelle, though, was a misfortune unique even among those.
"The portions irreversibly altered by the School's experiments were excised and replaced with prosthetics."
The building where Hydra Inc. now stood had once been the magic tower used by those who called themselves the Lernaean School.
The three magic towers of Etna City were each held by a different school. Of the three, the Lernaean School was the weakest as a power, and at the same time the most savage.
A tower core, the power source of a magic tower, charged its mana in one of two broad ways: by gathering surplus mana out of the air, or by having the tower's own members pour mana into the core by hand. In the higher towers—those advanced enough to interface with the Ten Realms—the Realms themselves supplemented the supply. The Lernaean Magic Tower had never been anything like that accomplished.
For the concentration of surplus mana in the air to rise, the surrounding area first had to be thick with beings who possessed mana of their own. In this world, the poor were all but synonymous with humans who had very little mana, and most of the Lernaean School's territory was slum. So the School was a weak tower, poor in mana; yet those under its rule were weak as well, and that was precisely why it could swing its authority with such brutality.
Arabelle had been one of the people caught in that grip.
"You're processing the excised mutant tumors and putting them to work as familiars. And you handle a drone or two on the side, I believe?"
With every word Ortes spoke, old scenes surfaced in Arabelle's mind: the mages of the Lernaean School who had made her. The power to command the kin she had gained from the Arachnid Queen's factor. Hacking ability, drawn from limbs rebuilt as prosthetics and a brain specially reinforced. The modifications required to intrude upon Aether Space, that semi-real space born of a bizarre fusion of mana and electromagnetism. Once, she had been nothing more than an intelligence instrument of the Lernaean School, tyrants of this whole district.
"Your unique magic is Reduction, isn't it? There would be restrictions, I'd imagine—only inanimate objects, or only things linked to you by mana. You don't need to tell me."
Arabelle met Ortes's hazy eyes.
Years had passed since she escaped, staging it to look as though a counterattack had killed her while she was hacking another school's tower. The records concerning her would long since have been disposed of. Partly that was the destruction of evidence, so the other schools would never find her; partly it was that Arabelle herself had been a singular success, impossible to reproduce, and preserving the data would have meant nothing.
So how, exactly, had this man learned all of it?
A maxim left behind by some nameless soul came back to her. The unknown is the greatest fear.
Ortes, who had been watching her hold the silence without letting a shred of dismay show, spoke with a thin smile.
"I'm relieved. It seems none of the information was wrong."
So it wasn't something he gathered himself. Or a bluff?
Arabelle strained to pull a clue out of his phrasing. One thing, at least, she could be sure of. If there had been an error in that information, whoever provided it would have vanished for good.
"I'm relieved. It seems none of the information was wrong."
Back when I'd written down the story from the novel, I'd taken the opportunity to organize the abilities and histories of the people the Carisia of the book kept under her, too.
Of the eight directors, Arabelle looked the closest to her portrayal in the novel and seemed comparatively loyal, so I'd tried a little question-and-answer on her. Fortunately, my memory didn't appear to be the bad sort. Which meant the work still ahead of me was coming into sharper and sharper focus.
"There is... something I wished to ask."
I was turning over who to interview next when Arabelle opened her mouth.
Why is she using honorifics on me?
On Carisia, maybe.
"Director. Please don't."
"In what sense do you mean that?"
"That. I don't hold any proper rank at Hydra Inc."
Carisia comes from some lofty old house to begin with, so she's unbearably fussy about this whole superiors-command, subordinates-obey arrangement. The proof was three days ago. After she took office as president, I called her Employer out of habit, the way I always had, and she answered with a death beam.
"Read generously, I'm the president's secretary at best. If anything, Director, you ought to be talking down to me. Yours isn't a rank that addresses me with honorifics."
If Carisia had seen this scene, she'd have had a word or two about what I thought workplace hierarchy was. Born on Earth, I just know she'd have been the prickly type who nagged everyone to mind the pecking order—no deference for anyone standing lower than the person you're speaking to.
Hearing me out, Arabelle's expression warped strangely, then settled back. I didn't think I'd said anything odd.
"All right. I'll stop with the stiff, formal honorifics."
As Arabelle bowed her head, red hair spilled from beneath the black veil.
A black dress that called mourning clothes to mind, a black veil, and red hair. It brought to mind a venomous spider, red marks set into a black body. Honestly, though, Spider-Man came to mind first.
I'd forgotten all about modern things these past few years, but ever since I realized this was the world inside a novel, pieces of my original world had started coming back. Man. I never even got to see that third animated movie, the one where a whole crowd of spider-people get together. It'd be out by now, wouldn't it?
"The polite speech I'm using now isn't some other intention. It's just habit. With the other directors, and with you—I talk the same way to everyone. If I drop into casual speech, strange people have a way of latching on."
Maybe it was the silence that had stretched while my mind was elsewhere. Arabelle seemed to think I was still irritated that the honorifics hadn't stopped, and launched into an explanation.
I nearly opened with it isn't that I dislike being spoken to politely, it's our president who— and filled her in on Carisia's temper, then thought better of it. If Arabelle reported what she'd heard straight to Carisia, the aftermath would be a genuine nightmare.
So instead—
"Oh. Good to hear. I'm the same way."
I decided to build a little rapport with a coworker I'd be seeing for a long time.
"I use honorifics because I'd rather not earn pointless hostility from people, but somehow they always look at me like I'm suspicious. It's sad."
That's because you look suspicious!
Arabelle forced down the shout that had surged all the way to her throat.
She had suspected as much from the moment he displayed that bizarre degree of loyalty—honorifics for no one but Carisia—but Ortes's inner world was not normal. A presence so faint that even looking right at him, let your concentration slip and he seemed ready to slide out of your field of vision. When a man like that spoke to you, of course you found it suspicious. Honorifics or otherwise.
The upturned corner of a smile that would ordinarily have left a good impression became, joined to that unsettling first look, exactly what it ought to have been: the uneasy grin of a man who might do anything. And considering what he had done since coming to Etna City, suspicious wasn't prejudice. It was close to fact.
When Carisia had gone around subduing the underworld with light, the confidant assisting those killings from the shadows had been Ortes himself. Who else?
Once the long speech on honorifics, suspicion, and the unfairness of it all finally wound down, Ortes let out a quiet "ah."
"Ah, my apologies. I've kept someone as busy as yourself for far too long. Would you call in the next person?"
Ortes, issuing Arabelle an order as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Proof that he himself took it as given that his station sat above Hydra Inc.'s eight directors. Without ever quite saying so, he was showing her who the company's number two was.
And yet he dislikes receiving honorifics, because he thinks it might trespass on Carisia's authority? At this rate, he could stand beside the fanatics in those cults that worship the vanished gods of old...
"Whom shall I call?"
"Let me see."
Ortes stroked his chin. Eyes that had been little more than a thin line sharpened all at once, and in the pupils faintly visible beneath his lids, something like a blue flame seemed to catch.
"Crito. Would you call Director Crito?"
In the next instant, that chilling ghostly pressure was gone without a trace. All that remained was one smiling man whose lack of presence was, in itself, suspicious.
Arabelle lowered her head and turned her back.
"Ah."
Ortes's voice reached her from behind.
"Should I, too, end up leaving on a business trip after the president, I'll be entrusting the oversight to you in the meantime."
An order to watch the other directors. Understanding at last why she had been chosen as the first to be interviewed, Arabelle could only accept it without protest.
Right after the founding, both number one and number two leave their posts. A loyalty test.
Turning that ill-timed worry over, Arabelle stepped out through the door.
Crito was a hulk of a man.
Not merely in the sense that he had been born with a powerful body. He had been crammed full of modification drugs from the Lernaean Magic Tower and every other tower besides, and had survived it all regardless—little different from a living weapon.
His rebuilt cybernetic eye was precise enough to observe the cells of a human body, and the flesh through which troll blood ran would, even if an arm were torn away, bind the severed part back on solidly within seconds so long as you held it to the wound. Every bone in him had long since been swapped for reinforced alloy. This was Crito, the man they called Etna City's human butcher.
"Right now... what are you—"
"End your dealings with the Torres School."
I never told a single soul about that!
"Allow me to be more precise. Terminate the contract under which you select and supply slaves to the Torres School, and receive brainwashing Magic Inscribed Drives in exchange."
He was face to face with an unknown he could not comprehend.
Come to think of it, you're the reason the protagonist has our company marked.