WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 001

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I Survived 100 Years in the Game of My Life, and Then...

The name of the game I was playing was 'Fusion Punk 2333 Apocalypse,' or Fupunkalypse for short.

An indie game that had been pushing countless gamers to their limits since the day it launched.

While everyone else threw down their controllers and deleted the game in the tutorial, I stuck with it for several years.

"That game must be pretty fun, huh? Every time I see you lately, you're playing it."

"So you're saying you were out of contact again because you were gaming?"

"Which matters more to you, a game event or our anniversary?"

"Forget it. If all you're going to do is game, I'm going home."

"Let's break up."

The game had sucked me in so thoroughly that I broke up with the girlfriend I'd dated for three years, but it hadn't concerned me much. It was the game of my life, so good that even the time I'd spend on a girlfriend felt like a liability.

The game was a hardcore roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world, hundreds of years after some catastrophe destroyed the cities of the future.

In this bizarre junk heap of a world, where martial arts and magic, mutant creatures and robots, psionics and future tech were all mashed together, the job I'd chosen was a crafting-class engineer.

A crafting class hadn't been the plan from the start.

"Getting gear to boost my specs is so damn hard."

Starting out on a combat class, I'd realized as I played on that this was a world that ultimately came down to gear.

A world where warriors and mages needed high-performance enhancement cyber gear, and out-of-control psionics needed suppressor parts to stop them from going berserk.

But getting gear that could actually deliver proper performance was brutal. You couldn't find it unless you had a connection to a good technician.

"Wait, they're selling gear like this at this price? Conscienceless bastards."

And finding a good technician in this world was like plucking a star from the sky.

"Ah, screw it. This is disgusting. I'll just make it myself."

A new character, made with a "fine, I'll give it a shot" attitude, and that was how it started. But the more I dug into the crafting class, the more charm it turned out to have.

An apocalyptic world swept over by destruction. Finding intact gear and technology here was close to impossible. The equipment scattered everywhere was all half broken and wrecked.

"Wow. I only fixed it up from nearly scrapped and it still performs this well, so how good would it be fully restored?"

True to its future tech, it kept working by sheer force even when half smashed, but to my eyes that was a pity, and I wanted to see that technology in its complete form.

The tech tree I dug into was both vast and detailed. A crafting system so deep and refined that you couldn't call it a mere game. Its depth captivated me in an instant.

And then came the realization that, through the engineer job, the old technologies really could be restored.

"Was this tool originally used for this?"

It gave me an enormous rush. It really felt like I was restoring the technology of a civilization that had truly been destroyed.

But there was one major problem.

The limitation of the crafting class, which had no combat power.

Getting shot dead by a robber who broke into my shop was routine, and so was being killed on the spot for refusing a jerk of a customer who complained the repair fee was too high. There was even the time I died instantly in a shootout set off by a customer who fired their gun to "check the performance" of the product I'd just repaired.

"Don't shoot in my shop!!! You fucking bastards!!"

In a roguelike, death means starting over from the beginning. But the threat from these small fry became familiar quickly as I played. The real problem came after that.

Becoming the exclusive engineer of some bigshot.

That was where the real trouble began.

You'd think becoming a bigshot's exclusive engineer would get you treated well? Wrong.

If you become someone's exclusive engineer, that person's enemies become your enemies.

When a war breaks out between bigshots, an engineer like me becomes the number one target, eliminated even before the cannon fodder.

Because we're basically the enemy's key supply base.

Even if you go work under someone so strong they have no enemies, it ends the same way.

"Poison this time, and without leaving a trace? Persistent bastards. Were you that jealous of the favor I got?"

"Fuck... this time you're burning down the workshop while I'm asleep, with me in it?"

My 130th character spat blood and died after drinking poison slipped in by a bigshot's subordinate, and my 200th character's workshop burned to the ground, leaving no trace of them at all.

And so it went, 300 times.

Dying, being reborn, and dying again, over and over, until I finally realized how to survive as an engineer in this game.

Don't trust others too much.

Don't look weak.

And be careful of the bigshots.

Only after figuring that out was I able to survive in this insane game for a long time.

A year of in-game time used to be my limit, then three years, then five, then ten, and at last, today was the day I'd make it to 100 years in this game.

"Finally..."

It was a miraculous feat that no veteran in the Fupunkalypse community had ever achieved.

There had been plenty of foreshadowing in the game that something would happen if you survived 100 years, but the game wasn't easy enough for anyone to break through all that and last 100 years.

For starters, living past 100 years isn't easy even in the peaceful real world. And surviving 100 years in this hardcore game, with its half-destroyed civilization and every kind of bullshit imaginable?

That was a realm that none of the famous veterans, who endlessly debated in the community and sharpened their combat builds, had reached.

But I had, against all odds, wound the clockwork of 100 years all the way to the end in this insane apocalyptic world.

There'd been plenty of heated debate about what would happen once you survived 100 years.

Everything from a rare item drop, to the city floating up into the sky, to learning the location of a hidden underground bunker.

All sorts of Easter egg theories had come up, but the most likely was the ending. The guess that an ending would appear.

The guess that if Fupunkalypse, a high-freedom roguelike with no real main story, were to have an ending, this would be the only place for it.

And I was looking at the result of all those guesses right now.

[Tallying...]

[Next: ENTER]

Just as I swallowed hard and pressed the ENTER button.

A system message I'd never once seen in any screenshot on the community appeared on my monitor.

[The Fusion Punk 2333 Apocalypse project has ended.]

[Survival time of 100 years achieved. Unlocking the hidden scenario.]

[Next: ENTER]

"What? A hidden scenario? There's more after this? Is this content real? What a godlike game."

I pressed the ENTER key again.

[Transfer user data to 2033, the starting point of humanity's collapse?]

[Pressing ENTER next means you agree.]

"Holy shit. So it's content where you go back 300 years to the past and stop the apocalypse? That's basically a whole other game in here. Why didn't they promote this? Or is it a teaser for the sequel?"

The screenshot button took a beating, and I could hardly wait to hear what the community would say when I posted what I'd just seen.

Thinking that, I pressed the last ENTER key.

"What the... where is this?"

My eyes opened on an alley I'd never seen in my life.

* * *

At first it seemed I'd just woken up in some unfamiliar alley in Korea. For Korea, there was an awful lot of sticky, unidentifiable filth and garbage on the ground, but somewhere in the Republic of Korea there was bound to be a gloomy back alley like this.

"Did I drink last night? No, wait, fuck. That's not it. I was definitely playing a game."

Doubting my own mental state, I went through my pockets to get a grip on the situation.

But there was nothing in them. No smartphone, no wallet, completely broke.

"Did someone really mug me in the middle of Seoul in this day and age...?"

Leaving my bewilderment behind, I started moving to find a main road so I could figure out where in Seoul I was.

But the more I walked, the stranger it felt. One moment the buildings had that familiar Korean feel, and the next they seemed bizarre and foreign somehow.

The people I passed along the way were all strange, too. From Westerners in filthy, grime-streaked clothes to East Asians with oddly distinctive hair colors. Even if I wanted to ask something, the words wouldn't come out.

And then, when I finally made it out of the maze of alleys onto a main road.

"...Holy crap."

It wasn't just somewhere unfamiliar I'd ended up. I'd fallen into a completely different world from the one I'd lived in.

Neon signs, a jumble of English, Korean, Chinese characters, and unidentifiable geometric script, blazed across the dark night street.

And the people walking among them looked even stranger. Cyborgs with gleaming metal prosthetic arms and legs, and mutants with reptilian skin drooling as they went, strolled the street as if it were nothing.

As I stared blankly at the scene, my gaze finally reached the sky over this city.

Colorful, gaudy smog, the kind I'd never seen in the sky of the Korea I came from, the kind that looked unhealthy just to look at, hazed the sky like embroidery.

Only after seeing that was I able to recall the name of this city.

"Gaon. Gaon Mega City."

It was exactly like the description of the city, said to have been destroyed 300 years ago, in the game I'd played, 'Fusion Punk 2333 Apocalypse.'

Right. I'd entered the world of the game.

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