WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

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

Chapter 24

──────

All-Metal Build

"Mage, Old Man Gordon's disciple!! Please!! Save my boss!"

The moment those words came through, the identity of whoever was outside clicked.

The low-level Black Dog gang member who'd shaken me down on my very first day in this world.

The one who'd smashed my stall, tried to extort protection money out of me, and run for it the second Old Man Gordon showed up.

Realizing that, the rest of the situation fell into place almost instantly.

Somewhere in the war between Mantis Crew and Black Dog, an executive had been wounded, and this low-level thug had dragged the injured man all the way here, hoping to save him.

Back then, the thug had mentioned the name of the boss they answered to.

Rex the Butcher, wasn't it?

'How did they know I was here?'

What a headache.

"...Boss. Let's just not open it."

Rita seemed to be thinking the same thing. She spoke to me with a worried look.

I shook my head at her.

"No. I think we have to open it."

"You've got a reason to open it despite the risk?"

"For one, it's a familiar face. They know my face, they know I'm connected to Old Man Gordon, and judging by this, they know where I live too."

If we refused to open the door and even one of the two came out of this alive, Black Dog would surely come here for revenge.

"...It'd be dangerous, but they couldn't come after us that directly. Not when they know about your connection to Gordon."

"Yes. Good point. That's one of the problems too. I'm a self-employed business owner, hired by Old Man Gordon and working out of Old Man Gordon's building. If I don't open the door, I'd be dragging his name through the mud, wouldn't I?"

I explained it that way because Rita, sent by Old Man Gordon, was standing right there, but my own thinking was a little different.

If I didn't open this door and word of it somehow reached Old Man Gordon, I had a strong feeling I'd end up in his bad books.

An ordinary landlord could be disappointed once and forgotten, but Old Man Gordon seemed to be a far bigger bigshot than I'd assumed.

In this world, becoming a bigshot meant being half out of your mind. And what came back at you for disappointing someone like that was hard to predict.

"...If you tell him I'm the one who said not to open it, it might be okay."

Rita deflated a little the moment Old Man Gordon's name came up.

"Well, maybe so. But there's one more reason we have to open it."

"...A reason we 'have' to open it?"

"Yes. This job didn't come through Valeria's hands, so we don't get skimmed for a commission."

Rita snorted at that.

"Somehow I feel like I'm working for a madman."

I couldn't help snorting too.

"Then I'll open it, boss. As your employee. Just in case."

Nodding at Rita's next words, I took a step back.

The moment the door opened, a familiar face came into view first.

It was definitely the one I remembered. The first Black Dog member I'd laid eyes on after arriving in this world.

There was one difference from that day, though.

The Volkov-made prosthetic arm the thug used to wear around like a trophy, corporate brand on full display, was gone.

To be exact, only the part from shoulder to elbow remained, and everything below it was completely smashed. A few leftover cables sputtered out electricity with a zzzt.

All of that was still wired into the nerves, so it must have hurt. Shouldn't they be getting themselves fixed first? The thought had barely crossed my mind when-

"Mage! Please!"

The thug staggered inside and let the man slung over a shoulder collapse onto the floor. Only then did I get a proper look at the one who'd been dragged here.

"...Rita, lock the door first."

"Understood, boss."

The man laid out on the floor could hardly be called a person.

Both arms, both legs, chest and abdomen, eyes and ears, even the skull. Most of what was visible was prosthetic.

And every piece of it was mismatched.

Left arm and right arm, left leg and right leg, all different. Different makers, different specs. Even the left leg had a different brand above the knee and below it.

"What the hell is this? Did he come from the future?"

The words slipped out before I could stop them.

"Huh? What do you mean, boss?"

"Ah. Nothing. I was just a little startled."

'All-metal build.'

That was what they'd called the full-body prosthetic build in Fupunkalypse.

A build that bolted on as many prosthetics as possible to gain power.

Prosthetics in this world couldn't just be attached any which way.

One of the most important factors was the user's tier.

The higher the user's tier, the more the amount and quality of mana they could feed into a prosthetic changed, and so the higher the output of the prosthetics they could wear.

And that was where builds diverged the most.

Just choosing which part of the body got which prosthetic, within the output your character's tier allowed, made for a completely different build.

Serena, for instance, a mana-discharge build, had probably dumped most of her output into the performance of her dantian core drive and her prosthetic arm.

That was the only way that build worked.

I hadn't seen it properly, so it was only a guess, but Valeria's secretary Roman had probably split his prosthetic output across the arms and spine, maybe down as far as the legs.

That was the textbook way to run a body-arts build.

In other words, in this world, attaching more prosthetics didn't make you stronger.

Even so, there were people who chose this build.

That was as far as the thought got.

"Guh... Aaaaagh!"

The all-metal man on the floor started screaming.

With every scream, his limbs twisted in different directions, convulsing.

"Ah...! Ah! Mage! Please, save our Rex!"

I'd half expected it, but so this was Rex.

"Let's get him up there first."

I pointed at the prosthetic procedure table Serena had brought.

There were too many prosthetics to go through with my Spellbreaker's Magic Eye alone. In a case like this, it was better to borrow some help from the procedure table.

It would be far less precise than mana thread combined with the Spellbreaker's Magic Eye, but there was no helping that.

"Y... Yes...! Yes! Th-thank you! Thank you, Mage!"

"First of all, I'm not a mage... Well, I am a mage, but... just think of me as an engineer for now."

"Yes. Yes. Understood. Thank you, Engineer."

The thug scrambled to hoist Rex onto the procedure table.

At once I started going over the table's interface to check his condition.

'This really looks like a setup from the future.'

These were the kind of prosthetics commonly used in Fupunkalypse, that is, in the future three hundred years from now.

Take only the good parts of low-tier prosthetics and force them together through modification into a higher-performance one.

How it turned out depended on the skill of the engineer who'd modified them, but it wasn't a particularly good method. Low-tier prosthetics were low-tier for a reason. Forcing their performance up didn't necessarily produce good results.

And above all, using prosthetics like that for a long time badly reduced the character's vitality.

Meaning the character's lifespan dropped.

Of course, in the future there'd been reasons it had to be that way. In a world that had gone through the apocalypse, people had to force-modify or combine whatever prosthetics they had, however they could.

The people of that era had reasons to make that choice.

But this was 2033. A world where genuine parts could be bought with money. Nobody should have any reason to do something like this.

No, nobody should, normally.

'So this guy deliberately modified his own body like this.'

A complete lunatic.

I could guess why he'd done it, but that wasn't what mattered right now.

"How did this happen?"

The gang member, who'd been watching me with an anxious face, answered.

"We got hit by a sudden ambush, and partway through the fight, he started complaining of pain. We managed to get off the battlefield somehow, but from then on he could barely hold his body up."

"Did he take a hit?"

"...Huh? Ah, yes. He did get hit, but considering how Rex fights, it shouldn't have been a strong enough attack to do this."

"Seems like there's been a lot of fighting lately."

"Yes. That's right. As you know, we've got a war going with Mantis Crew lately, so..."

Hearing that much, I turned back to the interface.

'The frequent fighting lately has completely thrown off the balance between the prosthetics.'

With the balance gone, the mana circuits were badly misaligned in several places.

Six misaligned spots in total. All of them where one prosthetic met another.

"Ugh... Aaaaaagh!"

While I was still examining it, Rex began screaming again and writhing.

"He seems to be in too much pain, so I'm going to start with emergency treatment."

Taking the mana battery I'd left on the charger earlier, I connected it to my wrist.

First, a hand on the joint between the left arm and the chest.

The Spellbreaker's Magic Eye would have allowed far more precision, but just yesterday, fixing one of Valeria's prosthetic eyes had pushed me into a mana overflow.

This man's body might need far more mana than that, so to conserve every drop, I decided to work off the interface and concentrate.

A thin thread of mana pushed into the inside of the connection. A circle drawn around the misaligned mana circuits, a magic circle formed.

Then, using [Prohibition Command], I severed the mana circuits between the arm and the chest completely.

Whirrr...

The man's arm went slack in an instant.

"Aaagh! R... Rex!!!"

"...It's fine. This isn't dangerous. I'm shutting down the prosthetics that have problems. I need to concentrate, so please keep quiet."

"Hic... Rex... You have to save him... Please, you have to save him..."

"Okay, okay. Family member. Carrying on like this here is getting in the way of the procedure. Shall we go upstairs for a bit?"

Quick on the uptake, Rita led the thug upstairs.

The work went on.

The second, the third, the fourth.

Each time one was blocked off, Rex's screams grew fainter and his breathing started returning to normal.

Finally, when the sixth hole had been sealed completely.

"...Where...?"

Rex woke up.

"You're awake. This is a garage."

Only then did Rex look around and try to sit up.

"Hm?"

Naturally, the body didn't rise. I'd shut down every prosthetic.

"Sorry, but I've stopped all your prosthetics. If you'd kept using them like this, you'd probably have been dead within a few months."

The balance between the prosthetics had already collapsed and was eating away at his vitality. How much time was left... maybe half a year?

"I know. Put them back on."

"...You knew."

I let out a long sigh at the man's words. Apparently, to climb high in this world, you had to be out of your mind.

"If I could let you live longer in that body, would you believe me?"

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried