WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

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

Chapter 003

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Surviving at a Street Stall

[Anything repaired or upgraded.]

The makeshift stall was up, but customers didn't exactly flock to it.

Thinking about it, even I wouldn't find it easy to hand over some random item to a rickety stall like this and ask for a repair. It'd be a relief if they didn't take me for a con man.

Still, it wasn't as if I'd built the place without a thought in my head. Where I was standing, Ground Zero, was the very bottom of Gaon Mega City, the slum of slums.

Nearly everything that circulated in this neighborhood had to be defective or broken. And among the people holding that kind of junk, there were bound to be some who couldn't afford the steep cost of repairs.

...Still, sitting there doing nothing made me a little nervous, so I added one more line under the sign.

[Gear that garages couldn't fix or wrote off as scrap: welcome]

* * *

The night market street of Ground Zero, the slum of Gaon Mega City. Jack, a third-rate mercenary, was furious down to the roots of his hair.

"Fucking bastards, selling shit like this and calling it a weapon?"

In his hand was a broken rifle.

Of all days, today was the day he had an escort job lined up, guarding a drug transport vehicle for a local gang. And just a moment ago, during a check, he'd found a fatal fault deep inside the rifle.

He'd rushed to a nearby technician for a repair, but the answer was hopeless.

"To fix this, I'd have to rip out almost every internal part. The repair alone would run at least thirty thousand credits, and it'd take three days on top of that. Might be better to just buy a new one, no?"

In the end, Jack had no choice but to carry the gun back.

He didn't have the repair money, and the rifle had to be ready by tonight. The gang that had hired him had never let a mercenary who bailed on a job live in peace. Get on their bad side, and forget his livelihood, he'd be found dead tomorrow.

Wandering the street with his nerves stretched thin, Jack spotted a stall.

'What the hell is that?'

In one corner of the market street stood a stall that looked built out of cardboard. Burned into the cardboard's surface was lettering, as if seared in with something hot.

[Anything repaired or upgraded.]

The owner of the box stall was a single young punk who looked like a pretty boy, wasted down to nothing, practically starved to death.

'That guy's an engineer?'

Normally, becoming an engineer took quite a lot of equipment and skill. The finer the work an engineer did, the more natural it was for them to be practically plastered in prosthetics.

But the engineer in front of him had no prosthetic arm, let alone a toolbox, nothing but empty hands. Probably some cheap-drug addict who was half out of his mind.

He was thinking exactly that when the scrawny bastard suddenly jumped to his feet and started adding another line to the sign.

[Gear that garages couldn't fix or wrote off as scrap: welcome]

Seeing that, Jack came up with a neat trick.

'This gun's busted and useless anyway.'

The plan was to hand the already unfixable rifle to the kid, and when he couldn't repair it, pin the blame on him for breaking it and squeeze him for money.

He didn't look like he had any money, but even if he didn't, Jack could at least take out his anger on him.

Jack walked up to the cardboard stall and tossed the rifle onto the counter in front of the guy.

"Hey. Scrawny. Fix this."

* * *

So, my first customer at last.

A rough-looking, brown-haired Westerner came walking toward me and flung a rifle onto the cardboard counter.

"Hey. Scrawny. Fix this."

A fearsome giant, easily over 190 centimeters. Yellow eyes soaked in some drug or booze, surgical scars here and there on his body, and a cheap prosthetic arm peeking out from under his leather jacket.

The classic mechanized mercenary built on mechanical prosthetics, the kind you saw all the time in Fupunkalypse too.

A mercenary with a cheap prosthetic like that was, more often than not, a low-level member of a gang or a mercenary band. In other words, a thug.

The glance I stole at his eyes showed more suspicion and malice than trust, of course. Probably he'd brought a broken item just to see what I'd do.

I started by looking the thing over.

'A Kawaguchi Heavy Industries piece, huh.'

Even in Fupunkalypse, three hundred years in the future, low-level mercenaries ran this company's guns into the ground. They'd flooded the market with so many units that people were still swapping out parts and using them three centuries later.

Which meant it was a familiar item, one I'd handled countless times.

<Detection Magic> Spellbreaker's Magic Eye (-15 Pt)

Originally, it was a function combat mages used to look into the structure of an enemy's magic circle or defensive ward.

But no combat mage would spend 15 points just to peer into and dismantle a circle or ward that had already been cast, so it was a dead function the mage build never touched.

For an engineer, though, the Spellbreaker's Magic Eye boasted peak efficiency. It could be used to look inside equipment without taking it apart.

Lifting the rifle and pretending to inspect it here and there, I released mana threads with no properties and pushed them in.

Shhhk.

The threads in my hand slipped inside the rifle and spread through it, I could feel.

At that moment, I drew the mana in my heart up and gathered it into my eyes.

A tingling sensation behind my eyeballs, and the inside of the rifle began to fill my head as if it had been taken apart.

'Wow, what a masterpiece of a mess.'

Residue had built up and hardened in the chamber and gas tube, probably from long use of lousy ammunition, and the rifling in the barrel was worn down.

On top of that, parts lifted from another gun with the wrong specifications had been jammed in, leaving the fit loose, so the recoil must have been far worse than the original's.

After a quick check of the gun's condition, I spoke as if it were nothing.

"Your shoulder must've been killing you with this. Right? Ever feel the recoil's way too strong compared to other guns?"

The mercenary's eyes went wide at that.

"Huh? Yeah. Compared to my buddy who uses the same gun, mine kicks way harder. How'd you know?"

"How do I know? Because I'm an engineer. Give me 3,000 credits and I'll just fix it so it fires right now, or 5,000 and I can kill the recoil completely. So, what'll it be?"

At my words, the mercenary scowled and started throwing his weight around right away.

"What? How's a repair that expensive? You crazy? Cut it in half."

Honestly, it was a little nerve-racking, nothing like watching it on a game screen. How many people living in modern Korea had ever faced eyes full of that kind of bloodlust?

But if this place shared the same world as Fupunkalypse after all, then what I'd learned from the game was bound to work here too.

I couldn't show weakness here, not for a second.

"What the fuck?"

Deliberately scrunching up my face, I shoved the gun back toward the mercenary.

"Then no repair. Get lost."

The most important thing here was the attitude that I had absolutely nothing to lose. That was what made the other side get anxious in the first place.

Sure enough, the mercenary's furrowed brows eased a little at my reaction.

"You little shit. Can you really take responsibility? If you can't fix it and this gun gets any more wrecked here, you'd better know you're paying for a brand-new one. Be ready for that! Huh?"

Reading from his manner, the one in a hurry was actually him. His words were tough, but the tone had softened a lot compared to before.

Probably it had a lot to do with my noticing the heavy recoil.

First, a palm held out flat.

"Payment up front."

"...You little shit. You've got some guts, for someone who looks like that."

With that, the mercenary pulled something out and tossed it onto the counter. Real paper bills, worth 5,000 credits.

Quick as anything, I snatched up the money and tucked it into my clothes.

"Oh, wow. Thank you, customer. I'll fix it to your satisfaction."

My tone had turned friendly too, unlike before. Once the money's paid up front, from then on they're a real customer.

Resting a hand on the rifle on the counter, I closed my eyes. From here on it was precision work, and without focus it wouldn't go well.

A few strands of mana thread from my fingertips got sucked in through the gaps in the rifle's chamber.

First, the <Heat> property went onto the threads.

Slowly, they began melting the low-grade casing residue caked inside the gas tube and chamber. The melted residue came out in one go, drawn out with precision telekinesis.

Next, the <Rotate> and <Heat> properties together went onto the threads to restore the rifling inside the barrel. Restoring the barrel to factory condition was out of the question, but good enough that it wouldn't cause trouble for everyday use.

Finally, the mismatched parts were shaved down finely with the threads' <Heat> and <Cut>, fixing the play.

"All done."

The mercenary, who'd been standing there dazed watching all this, took the gun back in a trance and gripped it again.

"Want to make sure it's really fixed? Ah, with a gun, it's hard to check right here, huh."

Lawless slum or not, nobody could blast away into thin air in the middle of a night market full of people.

'What if he turns out to be a pain who claims he can't tell if it's fixed and demands his money back?'

That was the thought going through my head when-

"...Oh, wow. Y-you don't even need to fire it. I can tell. It's perfect."

The mercenary's voice was trembling slightly, no, noticeably. The guy who'd been threatening me a moment ago to be ready if it broke suddenly bowed deeply at the waist.

"Th-thank you so much for fixing it! I'll take good care of it!"

'...What?'

Watching the mercenary's back as he walked away, I blinked blankly.

'He wasn't a pain, he was a gentleman? Guess you really can't judge people by how they look.'

Smiling with satisfaction at the retreating customer's back.

Maybe because the first customer had gone off without a hitch, two more customers came after that.

And amazingly, their reactions followed exactly the same pattern as the first mechanized mercenary.

People who started out doubtful, and sometimes even threatening, suddenly changed their attitude once I'd fixed their things and backed away with polite little bows.

Checking the healthy pile of credits, I smiled to myself. With this much money, I wouldn't have to go hungry for a few days or sleep on the street.

But around then, a slight, tingling pain rose near my heart.

It had to be because of [Heart Mana Deficiency], which still put some limit on how much mana I could use.

There was a way to get past this limit soon, but until that item was made, I had no choice but to use mana carefully.

I was thinking about calling it here and packing up when-

"Who the fuck are you? What fucking mage faction are you from, running a business here?"

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