Ch.86The Great Chaos (3)

The warning about the Ten Towers’ arrival left my mind in a daze.

No. The bitter emptiness that had filled my inner self vanished in an instant, so in a sense, I could say I felt cleansed.

There’s no time to hesitate, lost in sentimentality. I gripped my high-frequency blade.

In the face of this bolt from the blue disaster, survival instinct rings alarm bells in my head. First, let’s assess the situation.

‘Arguilion and the Ten Towers are here?’

Why are those two coming together?

I thought I was the only one capable of causing enough chaos to make those two appear in the same place.

Surely another troublemaker hasn’t emerged to follow in my footsteps. Having such a distinguished competitor would completely derail my future plans.

I organize my cluttered thoughts.

Let’s assume, as the Priest of Pluton theorized, that Adusiam’s core did something that resulted in the appearance of both Arguilion and the Ten Towers.

If the golem created by the Mage King sent a distress signal, it most likely sent it to the Ten Towers—assuming the golem doesn’t know about the betrayal its creator suffered.

So the Ten Towers intervened first, and Arguilion came after?

Arguilion somehow detected this rare case of an elder from the Ten Towers deploying personally. They must have sensed this anomalous situation through some intelligence network and dispatched troops to interfere with the Ten Towers’ operation.

‘This scenario seems plausible…’

If so, Arguilion knows about the Ten Towers, but the Ten Towers may not know about Arguilion’s existence.

If I can make the two forces recognize each other’s presence before they notice the Divine Faith Order, I could make them fight each other and escape safely from here.

To execute this plan, I first need to determine exactly where these two forces are located.

In other words, I need to use my eyes again. Not half-open like when I stole the sacred artifact, but fully open.

I seem to be using my eyes a lot today. I feel like I’m developing dry eye syndrome. I should have brought eye drops.

I opened my eyes.

***

Core’s senses expanded in a peculiar way. It felt as if the entire temple had become an organ for perceiving a sixth sense, just as humans taste with their tongues and see with their eyes.

He could sense everything—the chatter of the Order’s people, the intruders cloaked in camouflage magic, the disturbances in airflow caused by drones cleverly hidden in darkness.

Ah—

Core modulated his vocalization. No one in the Grand Temple could hear his current voice. It was a voice that propagated at a more fundamental level rather than a physical one.

It was, so to speak, a matter of reception. In this world, there were various channels for communication: physical vocalization, mental telepathy, or even soul-to-soul dialogue.

Even within the same classification, there were various layers of “channels.” Taking the physical as an example, there are sounds within the audible range for humans and ultrasonic frequencies beyond human hearing.

Core had the capacity to transmit his voice through all such channels within the Grand Temple, but whether people had the capacity to hear it was another matter.

His current voice was transmitted only on a channel that only Core himself, who was attuned to the Grand Temple’s representation, could hear. Core searched for other channels—a spiritual channel connecting those with divine power.

Suddenly, he noticed something strange.

Ortese was looking up at the empty air.

As if he had heard the voice just now.

His cold eyes were no longer confined beneath his eyelids. That sharp, blade-like gaze stared into the void before darting off somewhere else.

‘What on earth…?’

As Core was connecting channels with each member of the Divine Faith Order while harboring suspicion, a distinctly different voice reached him.

“Can you hear me?”

It was Ortese’s voice. But Ortese was still running, with no conversation partner in sight.

“I’ll assume you can hear me, Priest of Pluton.”

His voice remained unwavering even as he ran. As Core’s eyes wavered, Ortese’s declaration continued.

“I’ll draw the attention of those two forces. You hide the other Order members as best you can.”

This was a bizarrely contradictory response from someone who had just warned that being discovered by the Ten Towers would be disastrous.

“Right now, the aftershocks of the spatial magic used by Arguilion and the Ten Towers still linger. Even if you try to teleport to Prodito’s sanctuary, there’s a high chance of being swept into another dimension. Once their collision occurs and enough time passes, that’s when you should retreat.”

What exactly are you after?

“Ah, I’m sorry, but I can’t hear anything you’re saying.”

Blatant disregard.

Core tried to find the channel connecting to Ortese but couldn’t locate it. It was difficult even to guess what channel would be compatible with the alien ability residing within him.

If he transmitted simultaneously on all channels within the temple, his words would reach Ortese, but that would only expose them to the Ten Towers or Arguilion.

Swallowing his questions and indignation, Core refined the instructions he would give to the Order members.

A route that would bypass both the movements of the Ten Towers’ drones and the gaze of Arguilion’s intruders, allowing them to gather together.

***

Ortese looked up at the ceiling again. It wasn’t actually a meaningful action, since his vision extended beyond the physical limitations of his retinas.

It was a kind of habit. He could see diverse ability fields tracing complex trajectories as they moved.

He could see Arguilion’s alien extradimensional fields and the orderly magical fields characteristic of high-level mages embedded in the small flying objects that the Ten Towers seemed to have dispersed.

The Order’s people were moving in perfect unison, as if they had received some kind of revelation.

They weren’t simply moving but were setting up positions at strategic locations, preparing to ambush and eliminate the enemy.

‘Indeed. I wondered what was happening when that strange description was suddenly added to the Grand Temple.’

Ortese, who had been heading toward the Ten Towers with his eyes fully open, detected at some point that a strange description had been added to the Grand Temple’s explanation, beyond the material, creator, or sanctity descriptions.

Though somewhat fragmented, the legible parts could be read as something like “the eyes, ears, and mouth of the Apostle.”

Guessing that the reason for this added description had to do with the sacred artifact he had handed over to the Priest of Pluton, Ortese refined his plan.

‘My face is public property anyway. Well-used and well-forgotten. Selling it out once or twice more at this point won’t make much difference.’

He knew that even cameras operating on magical power couldn’t properly capture his face. He was confident that even if Arguilion’s combatants had something like body cameras, they wouldn’t be able to fully capture his face.

‘The problem is that Arguilion will learn that their old enemy is still alive.’

Ortese weighed the returns against the risks. Since Arguilion’s leadership had attempted to kill Ortese and Carisia only to end up adrift in another dimension, they probably already suspected that their target might still be alive.

Surely Arguilion and Blasphemia wouldn’t share information.

Within Blasphemia, they believed the target of Operation Golden Desert had already been dealt with. He had prepared the circumstances to ensure that. The elder dispatched from the Ten Towers wouldn’t care about the activities of underlings, and even if by chance they knew about Operation Golden Desert, they wouldn’t know that he was still alive.

In summary: Arguilion’s suspicion would only turn into certainty, but news of his survival wouldn’t reach Blasphemia or the Ten Towers.

‘Revealing my face won’t be a problem.’

Unlike Carisia, who was closely connected to the White Light, the Ten Towers’ elder wouldn’t bother with someone like him who had no magical power. Ortese resolved to employ once again the chaos-making skills he had used when being pursued by Blasphemia.

***

Talo began moving his drones more actively.

Apart from the left arm that had found its first host, the remaining three limbs quietly slithered about, searching for their next hosts.

‘Hmm, is Arguilion just starting the excavation?’

However, the interior of the ruins was unexpectedly quiet. He could only see Arguilion members entering from different directions, but not the ancient artifact that had sent the signal from inside the ruins, nor its excavators.

‘It seems the signal was sent when it detected the barrier of the ruins being damaged. Fortunately, the areas contaminated by the intruders’ magic aren’t extensive.’

He would be able to see the Mage King’s marvelous craftsmanship preserved in its purest form. Talo’s alloy skeleton twitched into a smile.

He shifted his gaze from the other three drones to the Arguilion member who had been fitted with a drone.

Normally, after taking control of the physical body, he would need to read memories from the brain, but it was difficult to read the memories of an intruder whose brain had been altered by extradimensional influence.

Moreover, after the brain had been torn apart, reading memories was a remote possibility. He was controlling the intruder’s body by forming the liquid elemental metal into a kind of artificial brain, but the neural structure differed from humans, causing continuous misalignments.

Another Arguilion agent questioned his colleague’s strange behavior.

“What’s wrong? Did you detect traces of a curse?”

“Nothing at all.”

Oh dear. The voice cracked.

Magic concentrated in the hand of the Arguilion agent who sensed something suspicious. Talo grinned and controlled the liquid metal.

With a hissing sound like air escaping, the body of the agent fitted with the left arm burst open. And from his torn body, liquid metal gushed out instead of bodily fluids.

“What the—?!”

The liquid metal that covered the Arguilion agent’s entire body transformed itself into gear-like structures. A swarm of hundreds of thousands of elemental nanomachines moved in perfect unison, beginning to grind away at the victims’ bodies.

Kkkkkkkk!

The liquid metal instantly shredded through magical fields and protective suits, grinding away flesh. Those who screamed were among the luckier ones. Those who faced the liquid metal head-on had their vocal cords ground away first.

Screams echoed throughout the Grand Temple. Unfortunately, the stealthy tracking was over.

Now it was time to hunt.

The liquid metal stored in the other three drones that had been infiltrated in advance was completely released. A mere few dozen liters of liquid that appeared transparent like water on the surface.

Talo gave the order: Grind everything with magical power.

He withdrew his attention from the drones he had commanded and began preparing magic.

The arcane secrets of a grand magician that could easily overthrow any resistance from Arguilion.

***

Core witnessed that scene of water seemingly devouring people. The undulating mass of liquid advancing.

One branch of it was on a trajectory to collide directly with Ortese, who was trying to reach the surface. Before Core could issue any warning, the water brushed past Ortese’s ankle.

And nothing happened.

“…?”