Business Trip to the Partner Company (2)
"...wake up."
"Wake up!"
"I said all of you, get up!"
His head hurt. Clutching their temples as they came to, the captives realized they had opened their eyes somewhere they had never seen in their lives.
The quicker among them dredged up their last memory from before they collapsed, and their faces went hard. Seized by unknown assailants, then waking in a strange room. In this world, it was an all-too-common story—and for those who had lived in the lawless slums, a familiar one besides. They had been taken as specimens for some mad mage, or they were bound to be modified and sold off as slaves.
Just as sobs threatened to break from those who had already read their fate—
"It's too soon to despair!"
The voice of the young man who had woken them rang through the room.
"The ones who dragged us here must have been careless. They never took the Magic Inscribed Drive I was carrying. We can get out."
Announcing that he had once dealt in illegal, cracked Magic Inscribed Drives, he called the others in and began pressing the drives into their hands. As he urged them to break out together, someone asked, carefully:
"B-but..."
"If we go out there, the mages will just kill us all, won't they?"
It was the bitter, self-mocking lament of people who had lived their whole lives under someone's boot. The young man granted the possibility without a fight.
"That may well be so. The trifling spells a Magic Inscribed Drive can cast might not even amount to a joke in the eyes of a real mage."
"But tell me—what difference is there between standing up now and dying, and slowly withering to death in the hands of mad mages?"
Was a life spent praying that someone else would die in your place, just so you might claw through one more day, any kind of life at all? He spoke of the mages' horrific experiments and their ruined humanity, crying out that he would rather rise and die than live on his knees.
Once every spare drive had been passed out, the young man looked slowly around the room.
"I know you can't bring yourselves to trust me. For all you know, I might use you as bait and slip out alone. So I'll go first and draw their eyes."
He left them with a single instruction—the moment the outside grew loud, they were all to run—and stepped through the door.
In the solemn quiet that followed, those who remained waited for the signal to rise. Not one of them, of course, had any idea that the young man had already made the rounds of three slave holding pens, delivering much the same incitement at each.
A warning tone that scraped the eardrums. Lights strobing red. All of it an alarm announcing that the slaves had broken out.
Taknia, chief of the branch, flipped irritably through the feeds. The slaves in Holding Pen Three appeared to have escaped en masse. He thought of the supplier responsible for that pen—some middling outfit out of a nothing city. Etna, or whatever it was called. The next time he met that handler, he would make them pay. With that vow, he called his subordinates.
"Finish it fast. I don't care if you blow off an arm or a leg, but leave the heads attached. They're merchandise for the main tower. Keep them alive. That's all."
His men were seasoned combat mages, masters of the art of twisting a human's bioelectricity until the mind simply switched off. Vagrants who couldn't even cast proper magic—they'd have them down in under five minutes. Now and then someone with a stubborn will resisted neural manipulation, but strike the body and break that will, and they always submitted to the spell in the end.
A disturbance of this scale he could settle on his own authority. Taknia swallowed his irritation and sat back down.
I am not rotting in a dead-end post like this. Sooner or later I'll get back to the main tower and...
The noise again.
Taknia, waiting on the all-clear, twisted his face. Alarms began sounding one after another, as if breakouts had started in the other pens as well.
"So a clever one slipped in among them..."
Anyone with a working head knew that the more people tried to run, the easier running became. They weren't stopping at the pen where they themselves had been locked away. They were pulling the slaves from the other pens into the escape with them.
This was only a temporary collection depot, not a magic tower, and they had never spent much on the facilities. Even so, to smash through bulkheads and attempt a breakout that easily, some wild mage or the like had to be mixed in. Wild mages—those who had never properly learned magic and yet worked mana by instinct—were goods the Torres Magic Tower paid dearly for. And yet.
"Useless fool. How many times did I say it. When you deliver a wild mage, either hit them with a stronger anesthetic or cut the limbs off outright."
Taknia ground his teeth. In a mass breakout, and one with a wild mage in it, one or two of them inevitably got away. He could already see the scolding waiting for him from the old men at the main tower. Rage began to fill him from head to toe.
Crito, wasn't it. I'll report this to the main tower and make sure he tastes the humiliation.
First, though, he did have to report. The reprimand for losing a precious wild mage was on an entirely different scale from a handful of ordinary slaves slipping the net. He pressed the emergency signal transmitter.
Nothing happened.
Into his bewilderment drifted an unfamiliar voice.
"A word, if I may."
"Who's there...!"
Mana surged. The dormant prosthetic body woke. Enhanced optic nerves found the intruder inside a field of vision washed red.
In truth, the intruder was not even hiding.
"Is this the office of Director Taknia, chief of the Torres branch?"
He was simply standing in the doorway, blocking it, asking the question in a perfectly even voice.
Taknia felt a wrongness. Something was certainly there, and yet he could not seize on what it looked like. A blur that would not settle in the eye even when he looked straight at it. Camouflage magic? Optical camouflage that bent visible light was a concealment spell favored chiefly by the schools of the light attribute.
He used the slaves' breakout as cover, hid himself, and smashed the relay to the main tower...
Taknia took the intruder's measure. A master of camouflage could melt perfectly into the surrounding scenery and erase the caster altogether. This one was merely blurred. His presence was unmistakable. So his skill was a clumsy second-rate at best. It had to be. And yet an incomprehensible dread crept over him.
The nameless intruder's whole body was indistinct. Only the black slab of a thing in his hand was perfectly clear.
"Taknia. That is you?"
He had climbed high enough that he rarely entered a fight himself these days, but Taknia was, in his own way, a practical combat mage who had come up from the very bottom. He knew the weapon in the intruder's grip. A high-frequency blade. An invention of some school that worked in sound—a weapon built on the principle that loading a blade with tones pitched beyond what an ordinary living thing could hear raised its cutting power.
High-frequency blades are mass-produced, but they're no cheap toy for a man with nothing. Has another tower caught the scent?
A fool, even so. If he had come in secret, he should have struck from ambush.
Taknia activated the Magic Inscribed Drives built into his right hand, one to a finger. The stored lightning spells released all at once. A five-layered chain of electricity surged at the intruder.
In the same breath he fed the next command into the computation chip mounted in his brain, alerting the subordinates linked tightly to him that an intruder was here. Contact with the main tower could be cut in advance by destroying the relay. The short-range link between the brain chips granted only to the Refiners of the Torres School—that, surely, no one could block.
No answer came.
"Were you looking for these?"
Thud. The intruder tossed something across the floor. Five chips, the blood on them not yet dry. Every one of them killed by a single blow aimed precisely at the brain chip, before they had even had time to send a word.
What Taknia did next was the thrashing of instinct beaten into him on the battlefield. He hurled his whole body sideways with everything he had.
A black line was drawn from the intruder out past the spot where Taknia had been standing a heartbeat before. A high-frequency blade, thrown in the instant the chips had pulled his eyes. The black edge shattered the control panel of the facility monitor set into the office wall and buried itself there.
Taknia screamed, convulsively.
"Which tower sent you! Flauros? Typhon? Straight from Hwangroe itself!"
The cry was also a bid to buy even a little time. With electricity-manipulation magic he would somehow revive the circuit inside the panel—the one tied to the microphone—and broadcast what was happening here. If the mages sent to put down the slaves heard combat from the office, they would grasp the situation and come to save him. That was the calculation.
"Where would you prefer it had been?"
An absurd question came back.
"If you have a preference, do say so. I will have you sent along to match."
"You son of a bitch—!!"
A taunt telling him to choose the manner of his death. Taknia began pouring out the magic he had prepared.
The first spell: neural disruption. The intruder, as if it were only to be expected, did not so much as flinch. Had it taken, neural overload should have dropped him where he stood.
The second was a manipulation of the nervous system as well, but the target was not the intruder. It was Taknia himself. He honed his sense of touch until he could read the very flow of the air, and drove his reflexes to their limit.
The third granted the lightning attribute, and only to the parts of him rebuilt as prosthetics. Yellow electricity crackled and flashed with a vicious light.
All of it in a single breath. Taknia leapt. A gamble, taken because the intruder had thrown his weapon—a close-quarters rush riding a modified body and heightened reflexes.
If the current so much as brushes him once, he's paralyzed. Then the victory is mine!
Closing the distance did not take a second. Certain of the win, Taknia looked into the intruder's face. Close enough that each could see the other's irises. The figure that had been blurred came into focus.
He's smiling?
The intruder's Magic Inscribed Drive activated. It was no threatening spell. Flowing Water Shot—a basic water-attribute spell that compressed water and fired it. In the hands of a skilled mage it might have been something. As a low-output provisional spell stored on a drive, it was a weak thing at best, good for shoving a person back and leaving a bruise.
However.
Electricity was running all through Taknia's body. He snatched desperately at his mana, trying to draw it back, but he was too late. The sphere of water struck him, burst apart, and soaked him through. Yellow current drove into the parts of him that were not prosthetic. Taknia's scream tore out of him.
In that very instant the intruder—Ortes—finally moved his feet.
He recovered the blade lodged in the wall in a flash. Before Taknia, hurled back by the Flowing Water Shot, could even hit the ground, the sword swept through and took the right arm. The high-frequency blade had no habit of returning to a sheath. The black arc simply continued. The right arm, with its built-in Magic Inscribed Drives—the most dangerous weapon on him—was gone. Next came both legs. He carved the agility out of the man.
Thud—
By the time Taknia's back slammed into the floor, only one of his four limbs remained.
"What... what are you."
He spoke through his fear, shaking. The clash had been brief, but he knew. That man was no mage.
If the blurred outline had been camouflage magic, then in the middle of a violent fight the spell should have come undone—or at the very least the flow of mana should have been felt. From that man he felt no flow of mana at all. A mage who could control the current of mana perfectly would have had no need to go to such trouble subduing him. That was a realm only an elder of the Torres School, or a tower lord, could show, and Taknia would have died before he even knew it had happened. That the spell drawn out while going so far as to use a Magic Inscribed Drive had been magic of the most basic order was probably for the same reason.
Most mass-produced Magic Inscribed Drives could hold very little mana. Spells above a certain level could not be cast on the mana stored in the drive alone. The user had to pour mana in themselves.
Ortes stepped in close to the head of the man still desperately trying to name him. A thin smile. Backlit in red, the intruder looked down at him, and Taknia shut his eyes.
"You seem ready to talk now."