Business Trip to a Partner Firm (1)
Carisia—or, more precisely, the original novel's White Nameless—clashes with the protagonist.
Which raised a problem. What was the very first thing that put Hydra Inc. on the protagonist's radar?
White Nameless had never taken much interest in actually running Hydra Inc. She treated the company as nothing more than a means: seize the right to administer a magic tower, swell her power, and so arrive at the Ten Realms. Whatever the underlings did beneath her was no concern of hers.
Because of that, the eight directors were free to pursue any "business" they liked, so long as they filled the quotas Carisia had set for each of them.
The trade Crito chose was violence. His merchandise was slaves.
"What are you talking about? I'm a fair merchant. Direct report to the president or not, without a proper reason—"
And as a rule, the slave traders of a novel were the sort fated to get tangled up with the protagonist and go down in flames.
Crito, regrettably, was no exception.
"I'm well aware that your dealings with them are not a simple transaction between merchant and client."
Crito flinched, his whole body trembling. Green blood shifted beneath skin dyed an uncanny color, and the flesh itself seemed to shiver.
"The Torres School had a hand in remodeling your body. From the slaves you secured, you picked out those with outstanding aptitude and offered them up."
"...Arabelle?"
He was asking whether Arabelle, Etna City's greatest information broker, had already grasped his secret. I decided to raise her standing a little.
Of the eight directors, she was the easiest to talk to, and capable besides. If I vested her with enough authority to pass among the others, it would pay off later.
"No. It wasn't a matter that required asking Director Arabelle."
Arabelle was capable of uncovering his secret. The means by which I had uncovered it, however, was not her information guild. One sentence, two meanings. Crito seemed to have caught both; he couldn't muster a retort, and sank into thought.
In more senses than one, that hardly human body of his was the Torres School's handiwork. The nervous-system modification in particular—the one that granted reflexes dozens of times those of an ordinary person—was the school's secret art.
The Torres School was a circle of mages who dealt chiefly in lightning, but they preferred fiddling with brains to loosing electricity from their hands. Control of the flesh, they liked to say, came down to the brain's electrical signals, and so their taste ran to driving micro Magic Inscribed Drives into the skull and making puppets of people. Along the way they had also developed a method for rebuilding a body into one optimized to carry those signals.
Their dearest wish, like that of any other mage, was to read the Ten Realms. Their methodology, though, was rather novel.
If we can't earn the qualification by skill, we just have to connect somehow, don't we?
The creation of the ultimate magical hacker—one who could break illegally into the Aether Space of the Ten Realms—was how they meant to see that wish fulfilled. And in the middle of remodeling the vessel that was supposed to make it real, the protagonist bursts in and ruins everything.
While casting about for a way to make contact with the Ten Realms, Magic King Simon clashes with the Torres School and rescues a certain slave who was meant to become their greatest masterpiece.
A cyborg heroine who commands lightning. Astrape.
Astrape's personal story looked as if it would close with a battle against the Torres Magic Tower, and yet—
The question of which slave trader first sold Astrape is what eventually sets Hydra Inc. and Simon at each other's throats.
The reason the Magic King uncovers White Nameless's faction—quietly drawing up, beneath the surface, a plan to destroy the Ten Realms—is none other than this Crito. From there the butterfly effect links tail to tail, until White Nameless meets her end in the blast, dying together with the Ten Realms.
If Carisia dies as she does in the original, the genre of the world itself changes, from arcanepunk to apocalypse. A society where civilization still exists, however much only the powerful get to enjoy it, collapses into an apocalypse in progress: everyone simply goes down together, and all that remains is a wretched struggle against monsters from another dimension.
No way I could live in a world like that.
I had tumbled through life until now and only just scraped together enough competence to keep my own hide intact. What was I supposed to do if the entire world went under?
So my first goal was to keep Carisia from dying the way she does in the original. My second was to resign at a decent hour and spend the rest of my days loafing and eating well. I had already set aside enough money to live comfortably for a lifetime. The only thing that had to stay in one piece was the world I would be living it in.
It had been quite some time since I started turning over how to accomplish Carisia's aims without ever coming into contact with the protagonist.
Through all of it, Crito still hadn't managed a word. His thoughts were clearly dragging on, so I decided to hand him an easier choice.
"How many days from now are you due to offer slaves as tribute to the Torres School?"
"Tribute?! They and I are equals! It's business—"
Crito looked at the president's right hand. Eyes like a thin line, impossible to tell whether they were open or shut, impossible to read. From beneath the lids, an uncanny blue light seemed trained on his heart.
"I'll see the matter handled simply. I'll accompany you on that tribute run."
The bluntness of handled carried a bad omen. The man was saying he would erase the Torres School's stronghold by himself, and there was neither confidence nor arrogance in it—only the flat calm of a declaration that the thing would, of course, come to pass. The posture of someone stating that one plus one is two. It only drew the noose tighter around Crito.
"That place is nothing more than a branch of the Torres School...."
All he could produce was a shabby threat that leaned on the school's prestige. In truth, even Crito himself couldn't be sure whether he was threatening Ortes, or excusing himself: that the Torres School was simply so vast he had had no choice but to meet their demands.
At those words, the corner of Ortes's mouth lifted. He wore a smiling face as a rule, but this smile was unmistakable.
"Good."
Crito gave up on understanding him.
"Fine. I understand. I'll follow the order. But."
There was one thing he could not accept. He had committed no betrayal of the company. He had merely kept a special client. If they had noticed his hidden connections, shouldn't an upstart power like Hydra Inc. be thinking about how to make use of its ties to the established powers?
The Torres School was a mid-tier school, able to exert its influence across any number of cities. The magic tower facilities under its control could not be counted on two hands. Etna City's slums were already in Hydra Inc.'s grasp; expand the trade outright and secure the school's full backing, and bringing all of Etna City under one rule would come into view.
Why, then, order the dealings cut off so harshly?
"If the company backed our trade with the Torres School, the profit would be enormous. You're not even considering cooperation with them as an option?"
"Hm."
Ortes stroked his chin, as if the point had failed to reach him. Then he let the words fall.
For the service of discovering Astrape and presenting her to the Torres School, Crito would be granted leave to deal with the school's main tower. That his trading partner was still only a branch told me Astrape had not yet been sold to them.
Which meant I could head off, in advance, the very incident that would catch the protagonist's eye.
From Crito's side as well, cutting his losses at minimal cost before the trade truly swelled might not be pleasant, but it was the best choice available to him. Breaking things off after dealing with the main tower, and breaking them off after dealing with a branch, were aftershocks of entirely different magnitude. That was the sense in which I had said good—though I had no idea why Crito had looked at me the way he did.
When I answered his grievance, the complaint that I was being needlessly difficult, by dropping Carisia's name just enough to cover it, the emotion in his eyes—something I couldn't quite put a name to—only grew thicker.
I blinked a couple of times and shook the stray thoughts loose. There was no point fretting now over something from a few days ago.
"How much longer until we arrive?"
"About thirty minutes!"
The driver of the mana-engine trailer Crito had assigned me answered, wound tight with nerves. Behind the cab, in the cargo hold, the people collected as slaves lay loaded in suspended animation.
"Ah. I'll take charge of everything myself, the disposition of the slaves included. You should get clear ahead of time."
Start a brawl the moment we reached the collection depot, and the odds of the job going sideways climbed fast. Me, alone, against every mage in the branch? Get grabbed by some grunt, and let the officer in charge report to the main tower that a mysterious intruder had appeared and request backup, and the whole thing turned into a headache.
A commotion over slaves escaping through lax management, on the other hand, was a regular enough occurrence. They wouldn't report a disturbance of that scale straight to the main tower. While the rank and file moved in a mass to put the slaves down, the advantageous play was to pick off the branch officers with the authority to call out—one by one, starting at the top.
"Their... disposition, you mean?"
The driver looked at me with a distinctly uneasy face. It might have sounded a little threatening.
"Ah, rest easy. It won't be the sort of thing you're picturing. Once we arrive, put some distance between yourself and the place, and no matter what you hear, wait until I come out."
To the driver, who nodded in a rush, I added one more line, just to be certain.
"If you head back ahead of me, I'm in real trouble, you know?"
I don't know how to drive this thing.