WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 39
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Because I Studied Hard
I examined the woman's body.
Her pale naked form was completely exposed, but the body itself was so horribly broken that it stirred nothing sexual at all.
If anything, it hurt to wonder how she was enduring this agony with a clear head.
Whirr... Whirr...
Zino, embedded in my chest, squeezed their camera shut. I could feel it.
It had probably been a bit too much for Zino to look at. I stroked Zino's core a couple of times, on purpose.
Rita, beside me, folded the woman's cloth just enough to cover the exposed rear.
I nodded at her.
"Thanks, Rita."
Only then could I properly check the woman's condition.
From the nape down to the middle of the back, the upper spine had kept almost its original shape. The real problem was below the waist.
From the waist down, the spine had punched through the flesh and jutted out every which way. Misaligned metal segments had torn through the skin and poked out like broken bones sticking out of a body.
Dried blood, dark red, had clotted along the torn edges of skin. Yellowed, hardened coolant stains were smeared between, and a few severed nerve lines hung limp.
Two metal braces had been clamped on crudely. The bodyguards must have hammered them in as a rush job to keep the spine from slipping any further.
The workmanship was a mess, but without them she probably wouldn't have survived the trip here.
Both legs, from the thigh down to the toes, were prosthetics. Livid bruises had spread across the seams where flesh met metal.
It meant the shock the prosthetics took had traveled straight up into the body.
The right knee had caved inward. The joint casing was crumpled like paper, as if something monstrous had crushed it.
The left was worse. Below the knee, the leg was twisted the wrong way. Bundles of artificial muscle fiber had burst out through the split casing and dangled, snapped and shredded.
Both ankles were bent. The toes didn't point at the floor, they were folded toward each other.
And she was still lucid with this much damage?
She'd have turned off the pain function, of course, but it still must have hurt like hell. A fairly expensive drug was probably being pumped into her the whole time.
Having seen enough, I opened my mouth.
"At this level, it'd be better to strip out all the prosthetics and install new ones than to force repairs on these."
"That is out of the question."
The woman answered at once.
"In my position now, where would I find prosthetics of this caliber again? Whatever it takes, fix these."
I could only scratch my head at that.
"I'll look them over first and tell you whether it's possible."
I tapped Zino on my chest.
"And from here on, the AI that assists my work is going to talk. Please don't be startled."
"...Big bro. Can Zino talk now?"
"Yeah. Go ahead. But we have a customer here, so be careful how you talk."
"...Okay. Zino understands."
The woman, who'd been listening, suddenly snorted out a laugh.
"A toy you wear to put the customer at ease? Quite amusing."
"Zino isn't a toy!"
So much for the promise to be careful. At Zino's protest, the woman's shoulders shook slightly. She seemed to be holding back a laugh.
"...You did loosen me up a little. Good. I like it."
"...Then I'm glad."
As I said that, I put on the safety goggles and leather gloves I'd brought.
Then I activated the Grail mounted on the harness.
Whirr...
The mana inside the external heart began to stir, slow and slithering. Where it went from here, and how, was up to Zino.
The problem was that Zino had never done it even once.
"Zino."
"Yeah?"
"You can see big bro's heart right now, can't you?"
"Yeah! Zino can see it. Something warm keeps going back and forth between Zino and big bro, so Zino can tell."
One by one, I started using my magic, slowly.
First up was the most basic of the basics for me, Mana Thread Control.
"Zino. Remember how the mana spreads from the heart to the hand and gets used."
I spread my fingers in the air.
Swish.
A few strands of mana thread unspooled from my fingertips.
"Wow..."
"See it? It starts from the heart, goes through the chest, to the shoulder, down the arm, all the way to the fingertips."
"Yeah! Something warm went all the way down big bro's arm! And at the fingers it turned into thread!"
"That's right. Did you remember it?"
"Zino remembered! Zino's memory is for sure."
I ran through every spell I had the same way.
"From now on, when I use magic, you'll take this information and enter the data into the mana core. That's how I can receive mana from the core and cast."
"Zino thinks Zino can do it well from now on."
The client, who'd been listening to Zino and me, spoke up.
"How long do you intend to keep me waiting? End the lesson for the AI there. Begin the repairs at once."
"Ah. Yes. We're done anyway. From here, my hands will be touching you for the inspection. Please try not to tense up."
Even with that warning before I laid my hands on her, I felt her body tremble with a shudder through the glove.
So the reason they'd gone out of their way to find an Asian woman engineer wasn't only the nakedness. It seemed she also hated having a man's hands on her in the first place.
"I'm wearing gloves, so it's fine."
"...That is not it. It was a little cold, and it startled me, that is all."
"Ah, yes."
Without pressing the point, I got straight to deploying mana thread. Zino caught on to what I was doing and naturally began pushing the core's mana toward the gloves.
As always, I slipped the mana thread into the prosthetic, then used Spellbreaker's Magic Eye. This time the Eye unfolded through the safety goggles.
With this method, the amount of mana I could draw, which until now had come from my heart alone, went up dramatically.
If I'd taken a commission like this back when I had no external mana core, solving it would have been impossible.
'I don't even know where to start.'
First, the spine, the most thoroughly wrecked part.
A Geumgang-made one, and a custom job at that, it looked like.
The design for taking in a huge amount of mana in an instant and blasting it out was plain to see.
A prosthetic that could withstand this much output meant its owner's tier had to be just as high. A prosthetic runs, after all, by feeding on its owner's mana.
Her tier was probably 6th at the very least.
People usually call 1st through 3rd tier low tier, 4th through 6th mid tier, and 7th and up high tier.
Which meant that in her early twenties she'd already reached the end of mid tier, right at the threshold of high tier. Monstrous talent.
I followed the path of mana running down the spine.
The path began at the dantian, ran down the spine, and spread thick into both legs. The path toward the arms was far thinner by comparison.
'...A body arts build that uses the feet for offense, huh.'
For most body arts users, the weapon was the prosthetic arm. Whether they swung something held in it, fired a gun, or fitted the arm with a blade... Either way, attacking with the arms was far more stable.
But this young lady's build was a little different. From the dantian drive to the spine, and on to the prosthetic legs.
A build that made the legs the center of attack.
So her opponent must have gone after the legs and spine first. They'd have wanted to break her main weapon first.
"How long do you plan to just stare?"
The woman lying face down spoke in a sharp voice.
"I called you because I was told you were an engineer. Can a bottom-tier engineer like you really fix this? Do you even know what my prosthetics are? If there's no way, say there's no way. We must find another path."
The gazes of the bodyguards standing behind me pinned me too. They didn't say it aloud, but they were thinking the same thing.
Well, she wasn't wrong. I was a bottom-tier engineer, that much was true.
But it wasn't true that I didn't know what her prosthetics were. I had to set that straight. It was a matter of my pride as an engineer.
"It's a Geumgang spine. A custom, designed for your body from the start. And both legs are top-grade pieces made separately to order at Baekdu Precision."
The fingers gripping the blanket froze.
"Now I understand. Why you said these prosthetics had to be fixed, no matter what."
"...How can a bottom-tier engineer recognize all of that?"
"Because I studied hard."
Um... by dying about 300 times in the game, maybe?
"...I see. So it is possible if one works hard."
It sounded less like an answer and more like she was talking to herself.
Listening to her, I ran through the mana paths once more beyond the goggles.
Someone who used gear like this couldn't suddenly switch to a lower-grade prosthetic.
Custom body arts prosthetics have a graft rate nearly the same as living tissue. Not a machine attached to the body, but simply the body itself.
If a fight had smashed a spine and legs like that to this state, it was no different from the whole body being shattered. Dying would have been the normal outcome.
Yet somehow, this person had survived and was entrusting her body to me.
I started sizing up the job. On the surface it looked like a total wreck, but it was well within what I could fix.
"It may take some time, but I can fix it. Perfectly."
"Good. You have some spirit for a bottom-tier engineer. Just fix it properly."
"Yes. Then I'll begin."
But right then.
The senior guard who'd guided us here put a hand to her ear. She seemed to be on comms with someone.
Someone who'd never shown that side of herself until now was visibly flustered, enough that even I could tell.
Then the senior guard came over to the client and spoke.
"Miss."
"Speak."
"They've found out we fled to the lower levels. They say they're combing the lower levels like they're hunting rats."
"Is that so..."
At the report, the client shut her eyes tight for a moment, then opened them. Then she smiled brightly at me.
...I had a bad feeling about this.
"Engineer. The situation has changed. Do your best, and restore me to how I was as quickly as you possibly can."
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