I Became the Narrow-Eyed Henchman of the Evil Boss

It wasn’t hard to deal with the magical beasts one by one. Even without fully opening my eyes, there were things I could ‘see’ to some extent.

Simple-minded creatures like that were particularly easy. I could clearly feel the instinct of knowing where and how to move to kill them.

I increased my eye resolution. The attacks I had sensed as intangible intuition crystallized into visual information.

A translucent blue light trajectory. That was the path the beast was charging toward.

I timed my strike to align with that blue line. The beast couldn’t overcome the inertia of its charge and was pierced through the neck.

It felt more like a repetitive task than a fight or a hunt.

Had I taken down about thirty beasts charging at Neuro? The beasts were now showing hostility toward me instead of Neuro.

“But what can a beast without a tamer do?”

I calmly repeated my task. Surely not all the humans here died without resisting. Let’s say I took down around twenty while resisting.

I had downed thirty beasts. Since Dimedes had taken down 120, that meant about seventy were left.

I assessed my physical condition. There were still some remnants of the backlash from my recent awakening, but against mindless magical beasts, the injuries were negligible.

“All done!”

A familiar voice was heard.

Whoosh! The sound of slicing through the air came first.

Followed by the booming sound of a creature’s flesh bursting apart.

I saw a magical beast’s head exploding in the distance. The arrow shot by Neuro was a costly and deadly item enchanted with Explosion Magic.

“What kind of magic circle it is, I’ll think about it after crushing those beast bastards!”

I threw a joke to lighten the mood.

“Uh, do you not want to take the fur?”

*

Asking if I should skip the fur, Neuro smiled wryly behind his gas mask.

Hunting without injuring the beast as much as possible and collecting the by-products was the hunter’s job. Orthes was asking himself whether he would act as a ‘hunter’ now.

It would be a lie not to want to answer yes. But the model answer wasn’t that.

The model answer was.

“Hah. Let’s kill them all first and think about that later!”

A declaration of “I will focus on my duties as a director of Hydra Corporation.” Neuro saw that a hint of a smile had deepened at the corners of Orthes’s mouth.

“Good then. Let’s deal with them first.”

Bzzzzt-

The four drones operated by Neuro aimed their barrels at the ground from the sky.

And then they fired.

Orthes dashed through the hail of bullets. Neuro felt a curious sensation. This was undoubtedly a battlefield where machine guns were firing from above.

However, he never thought Orthes would be hit by the blind bullets.

*

It didn’t take long to take down all the magical beasts. It was a bit annoying to dodge or deflect due to that guy carelessly shooting his gun.

“Phew. It’s my first time catching this many beasts in just half a day, not even a full day.”

“Really? You’ll have to update those numbers later.”

Neuro’s body jolted. The thrill of seeking the honor of the hunt would bring even greater glory, wouldn’t it?

“Now to look at the pictures──”

Just then, the crystal in my pocket rang.

Bipedal, but impossible to consider as primates, were grotesque creatures. In the center was an old man wrapped in a robe.

The blood of the grotesque beings and the magic circle drawn at this place coalesced into a single point in the air.

The liquid that sloshed together was refined into a piece of thick blood. And the old man who drank that blood disassembled into five branches, tearing apart this plain as well.

Then, beyond the shattered space, extra-dimensional light approached. The almost indescribably colored light seeped into the plain, and the vision (幻視) ended.

A warning from the Relic of Phoibos.

I hurriedly looked around.

“Huh? Why is that?”

“It seems it’s not over yet.”

Neuro, hearing my words, moved the drones to start reconnaissance without a second thought. The hunters’ association members must have liked that he obeyed his subordinate’s words so well.

“…Oh dear.”

Neuro’s voice tinged with bewilderment was heard as he manipulated the proxy gauntlet to project a hologram.

The scenery on the screen wasn’t of reality. It showed a blue background dotted with yellow and red objects.

“Is it a thermal imaging camera?”

“Yeah. Look there.”

A considerable number of something was wriggling and approaching us. It was hard to distinguish the appearance with the thermal imaging camera, but one thing was certain: they weren’t in the shape of ordinary creatures.

“That looks like twenty… no, about thirty?”

Thirty?

Counting Dimedes and the tamed beasts he brought, that made thirty-one.

I shifted my gaze in the direction the thermal camera was pointing. Peeking beyond the magical veil they surrounded themselves with.

The appearance of bizarre life forms that looked like various species sliced and glued together flickered briefly.

“They’re using Charmed Magic.”

“Are they mages? So did the ones who drew this magic circle come looking for us themselves?”

“No. They’re humans we know.”

I drove the High-Frequency Blade into the ground. The blade smoothly cut through the earth, and I turned it horizontally to fling away the earth and bodily fluids, splattering the approaching enemies.

“To be precise, they aren’t entirely human.”

The face covered in Charmed Magic blurred with a red and murky hue, revealing contours. A regular person might have trouble distinguishing a human from a face smeared with mud and blood, but the ones here were hunters.

Neuro, a hunter who’d trained his sharp eyesight for a long time, realized its identity.

“Dimedes…!”

*

Neuro could only recognize it through the jawline. The eyes densely poked all over his entire face moved in a grotesque fashion as if stirring up the mud, creating a bizarre atmosphere.

Seven eyes locked onto Orthes and Neuro. There was no sign of intelligence in that gaze.

Words from someone who had been a part of the terror that overshadowed Etna City.

“That sight… is it a Synthetic Beast Chimera? A mage capable of manipulating life enough to turn humans into chimeras in just a few days. Could it be from the Green Tree…”

Was this the situation where they had to fight a mage belonging to the Ten Towers? Neuro’s nerves were on edge. This might be the most dangerous hunt yet.

Excitement, fear, and anticipation swirled around. As I aimed the bowstring at that pile of feelings, Orthes’s words cooled my heart.

“No. Dimedes’s former director was originally a Chimera.”

Not just cooling, it froze me solid.

“Originally?”

“Yes. They fed humans to the beasts without hesitation, did they not? They could have given them regular meat or feed. In fact, it was a disguise to hide their true identity.”

Chimeras were a collective term for synthetic beasts created by combining various magical beasts.

Among such chimeras, those made using sentient beings were special. They were called Nox Chimeras, possessing both the strength of beasts and the cunning of sentient beings.

However, there was a critical flaw in Nox Chimeras. If the quality dropped even slightly in the production process, the wildness of the beasts would overwhelm their intellect, leading to a gradual decline in intelligence.

To revive the deteriorating intelligence, they had to consume the brains of other sentient beings.

Now, Neuro understood why Dimedes’s crew was so well-versed in hunting humans. They all had to be beasts that consumed people.

It was information that even he, who had been Dimedes’s rival, was unaware of. The secret that the beast trainers’ faction had desperately hidden.

How casually Orthes whispered such a secret, as if it were nothing.

‘What on earth is this guy.’

How far and how much has he seen?

Neuro, in shock, reflected on his own track.

It was fortunate that there weren’t too many facts I couldn’t say proudly to others.

*

‘I shouldn’t get cocky just because I mistakenly thought the Ten Towers were the enemy.’

Was it okay to speak so freely about the director’s secret? But after all, it was already certain that Dimedes was to be dismissed.

With things being like this, there couldn’t be much time left for Dimedes’s life. They couldn’t keep a dead person in the director’s seat.

In fact, we could see him as already dead on a sentient level.

Chimeras, as can be inferred from their classification as synthetic beasts, were originally artificial life forms.

Of course, dangerous artificial life forms would have control devices grafted onto them.

Whether he was fortunate to have killed the mage who created him in Etna City to gain freedom, it was possible that now those control devices had been taken over, and his self had flown away.

The independent ego of ‘Director Dimedes’ had collapsed, and what was there was just a chimera named Dimedes.

I concentrated on the faint lines I could see. The lines entangled with the chimeras led somewhere in the bizarre rocks of this plain.

The lines of mana connected to someone who dominated the chimeras. It was likely connected to the old man in the robe that the crystal had shown.

“Director Neuro.”

For some reason, there was no answer. Was he tense in front of the pack of chimeras?

“I’ll leave one alive. Please prepare for capture.”

As a hunter, he must have some capture equipment, right?

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