I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With - Chapter 26

WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

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

Chapter 26

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Flawless Build

Normally in Fupunkalypse, the all-metal build was the one made for newbies just starting the game.

Some of the perk builds the perk-and-flaw system offers let you gain magic or abilities by default, but they also help you acquire a talent in that direction.

Seol Gye-hyeon, the original owner of this body, would have had the talent to become a pretty decent mage if only his body had been in working order. He had four magic talents, after all.

But Fupunkalypse was built so that to get a decent perk, you had to take a flaw. Naturally, newbies were bound to feel burdened by playing through the game with flaws.

On top of that, even if you got a perk talent in that direction, it didn't help much early on. It took time before you grew into it.

So the build recommended to newbies was none other than this all-metal build.

You combined and installed as many low-output prosthetics as possible to raise the strength of your body to the maximum.

That got you past the weak early game, let you enjoy the mid-game content, and gradually got you used to the game.

In the end, though, an all-metal build with no talent and no high-output prosthetics had a ceiling, so it was hard to climb past a certain point.

Worse, the low-tier prosthetics kept sucking away your lifespan, so the character's lifespan was short too. In Fupunkalypse, where the usual goal was to last 100 years, it was a build that was honestly hard to use.

So what do you do? Well, you accept that character's limit and make a new one. You're used to the game by now, so you fill in a few flaws here and there and carve out your own build.

But one user didn't want to admit there was any such limit.

┗'Flawless All-Metal': Flaws are defects, and an all-metal build that picks no defects has to be the strongest of all builds.

That was what they said, and they'd been clinging to one all-metal build for years.

Naturally, the replies were always about the same.

┗You didn't skip the flaws, you just couldn't get the perks, dumbass

┗Flawless = talentless

┗Bro that's a newbie-graduation build, you gotta graduate, bro

┗'Flawless All-Metal': If you have no talent, you install prosthetics. That's the essence of this game.

┗Essence ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Even after getting beaten up for years like that, that person never scrapped the character.

And then one day, they posted something on the board.

『Solved the all-metal build lifespan problem.』

The content was simple.

┗'Flawless All-Metal': The reason prosthetics suck away your lifespan is that they draw the share your dantian can't handle out of your life force. So just make them skip the dantian. Let the prosthetics eat mana directly. This is the conclusion I came to.

At first nobody believed it. If that worked, somebody would have done it long ago.

┗Like that'd work?

┗What the fuck is this ㅋㅋㅋ

┗Quit the bullshit~

┗Post a screenshot of the lifespan loss numbers

┗'Flawless All-Metal': (screenshot attached)

┗ ??

┗wait ???????

But it worked.

The lifespan loss numbers visibly dropped, and every prosthetic they'd installed started putting out its full output. When people saw a newbie build clearing content all the way through the mid-game, the board went completely upside down.

For a while after that, the build was all the rage. Even I gave it a try. But within a month the craze was bound to die out completely.

┗This build's contamination number is climbing way too fast?

Of course, none of the players were afraid of contamination itself. In a game set in an apocalypse, contamination was just a number you managed every day.

Avoid contaminated zones, use antidotes, and if it got bad, lie in a purification station for a few days and you were fine.

So everyone thought the same thing.

┗Is a little contamination a big deal? Managing that is the game

┗One trip to the ruins raises it more than that anyway

┗Antidotes are cheaper than lifespan, yeah

But as everyone played with that build, they found out. Contamination wasn't fully solved by using antidotes and lying in a purification station.

The residual contamination, what was left even after you cleared it, the number that wouldn't come down with antidotes or purification stations, was climbing unusually fast on this build alone.

┗Lay in the purification station for 3 weeks and residual dropped by 2

┗2 in 3 weeks???

┗My residual's at 41 right now, what do I do

┗Just fold the character

Once the residual passed a certain line, the character's options turned gray one line at a time and stopped responding to clicks.

The only things you could still press were kill, destroy, and move on.

┗Wait this is my character so why isn't it listening to me

┗My character just forcibly attacked an NPC, I never pressed that

┗Isn't attack the only button you could press?

┗fr ㅋㅋ

At that point most users let go. A character could always be remade. By about a month later, only one person was left using the build.

┗Hey All-Metal. You still running that?

┗'Flawless All-Metal': Yeah

┗What's your residual

┗'Flawless All-Metal': 82

┗Is the game even playing normally?

One line 'Flawless All-Metal' wrote under that is still stuck in my memory.

┗'Flawless All-Metal': Well, the character's still not dead anyway.

* * *

Eyes off the multicolored smog outside the window, back to the customer.

That had been a game. A game where you could delete the character and raise a new one.

But here and now wasn't inside a game. It was reality.

Where there was no character anywhere that could be erased and made again.

"Then... even if I get stronger, I'll forget why I wanted to get stronger in the first place?"

"Yes."

A short answer. The explanation was already done. All that was left was that man's own decision.

After closing his eyes for a moment and opening them again, Rex spoke. The old blazing emotion was back in them.

"I'll do it anyway."

Looking into those eyes, I let out a long sigh. What else could I do? I'd said I would help, so I had to.

"I won't do the same procedure on every prosthetic. I'm only planning on four spots. You don't need more than that. Too much isn't good for you either."

From among the cabinets holding the materials Serena had brought yesterday, I pulled out a sheet of paper. With mana thread drawn out from my fingertip, I sketched Rex's body and prosthetics onto it.

"Your eyes and ears get used less and take less mana than the other prosthetics, so I'm leaving them out. The skull, chest and abdomen were modified for durability, so their output is allotted low. I'm leaving those out too."

Marking the prosthetics in the drawing with an x, I went on.

"That leaves both arms, both legs and the spine. The legs go together for balance, right? The spine is your core prosthetic, so I'm including it. What's left is the right hand or the left. Which is better?"

The more expensive of the two was the right hand, naturally. I figured he'd pick it for that reason, but...

"...The left hand is the prosthetic with more meaning to it. Go with the left."

If the customer himself said so, fine, we'd go that way.

The left arm first, then.

It was the simplest in structure and the easiest to retry if it failed. The plan was to get a feel for it here, move on to the legs, and finish with the spine.

"It's a modification, so it might take a while. Just lie back there and get comfortable."

"How long will it take?"

"No idea. Honestly, it's my first time doing this for real."

Rex laughed out loud at my frank answer.

"Well, that's reassuring."

With that, I walked over to the workbench.

What I was about to do came down to building a mana charger. The first thing I'd ever made after coming to this world. The difference was that back then it was a device set outside to charge a battery, and this time it had to go inside a person's body.

Four parts were needed.

An intake motor to draw in the air. A mana coil to catch the mana particles in it. A filter to screen out impurities. A compressor to compress the mana.

Luckily, there was no need to dig through trash to make them this time.

I opened the material storage cabinet Serena had brought.

'...Feels good every time I see this.'

Properly made mana coils sat sorted by spec. Up until yesterday, copper wire wound by hand was all there'd been, and now the place was starting to feel like a real garage.

With proper mana coils on hand, there was no need to make one. I picked out a coil in the spec I'd use and set it on top.

I'd worried about whether the rest of the parts would be there too, but surprisingly, most of what I needed turned up one by one as I dug through Serena's storage cabinet.

'As expected of a Mantis Crew garage.'

Come to think of it, that was ironic.

The reason Mantis Crew and Black Dog were at war was that Black Dog had raided Mantis's garage, massacred the engineers and carried off the goods.

Of course, that wasn't true. The one who'd actually turned the garage upside down was Mantis Crew's Silver Thorn, Serena herself.

And those goods had gone around and around and landed in my hands...

'And now they're getting ready to go into this man's body.'

So right now, with the loot from the raid Serena had pinned on Black Dog, I was bringing a Black Dog executive back to life.

Shaking off the stray thoughts, I reached for the parts.

I laid them out according to a familiar blueprint and drew the mana circuit. Since I'd done it once before, I got a mana charging module done in no time.

This time fiddling with the circuit alone wouldn't cut it, so I opened up the left arm's casing completely.

'What a mess.'

Parts that looked meant for entirely different prosthetics were wedged in here and there. Apparently someone had tried to boost performance with them.

To my eyes, though, quite a few of them were unnecessary, and the specs and placement were a mess too.

It wasn't that whoever fitted these had no skill at all. If anything, they had some. Without skill, you couldn't force it to run like this.

I boldly pulled out a few of the unneeded parts and slotted the module into the space.

Then, with the cutting property of the mana thread and high heat, I cut the casing away without hesitation.

Zzzzzing.

Then I seated my module exactly where the casing had been cut. Last, I connected the module to the prosthetic's circuits, and when I closed the casing...

"Looks pretty convincing, doesn't it?"

How to put it. It had turned into something like the air intakes you often see in robot mecha shows. You know the type, right? The robots that suck air in with every exertion and puff it out of the exhaust as they power up. It was exactly that shape.

The two legs were repetitive work, not much different from the arm.

Without much trouble, I finished the work through the legs perfectly.

But...

"The real hurdle starts now."

"Mm."

"Anesthetic and pain control will go in, but it can still hurt. Raise your hand if it does."

Letting out a big sigh, I opened up the spine frame.

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