WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 47
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Pretty Is a Feature Too
Valeria stood at the window, looking down at District 8's night.
The cigar at her fingertips had burned halfway down.
Ever since her prosthetic eye had been repaired, she'd had no real need to smoke, but when her nerves ran tight, her hand still went to it.
She'd given Seol Gye-hyeon his first assignment. And one tied to the upper tiers, at that.
Of course, it wasn't that nothing weighed on her. Valeria was fully aware that this was bound to be a dangerous job.
In an assignment like this, losing either Seol Gye-hyeon or Rita would be a waste.
But Valeria herself had declared, with her own mouth, that she wouldn't give any support, so she couldn't put someone at his side openly.
So just in case, she'd had a few people secretly tail them as guards, but...
"I'm sorry, Godmother. We lost them."
Her guards had failed to keep up the tail, and now all she could do was pray the two of them were safe.
Bzzt.
The terminal rang. There was no caller ID. But Valeria sensed in her gut that this was the call she'd been waiting for.
"Godmother. This is Baek So-ha of Baekdu."
Valeria set the cigar down in the ashtray.
"Go ahead, young lady."
"The commission I entrusted to you, the repair of the prosthetic, has been completed in full. And..."
A pause came from the other end, the sound of someone catching their breath.
"Seol Gye-hyeon and Rita did more than what I entrusted to them. Remarkable children, I must say."
Valeria's eyes narrowed.
Baek So-ha was the heir of an upper-tier megacorp. That meant she had, by default, pride in her bloodline and in where she lived. And a person like that had praised people from Ground Zero, the lowest tier?
They really must have done far more than the job.
"The payment has already been sent. And let me tell you one more thing."
"I'm listening."
"From now on, whenever Baekdu needs an engineer, I shall entrust the work only to Seol Gye-hyeon, through you, Godmother. That is how Baekdu treats its benefactors."
Click.
Valeria stared down at the terminal for a long while. Then, slowly, very slowly, the corners of her mouth lifted.
'My plan worked perfectly.'
The truth was, it was rare for people from the upper tiers to seek out a broker in the lowest tier. Coming down as far as Middletown was common enough, however low they went, but there was almost no reason to come all the way to Ground Zero.
So usually, in a case like this, it would be a rich family's offspring on a sightseeing trip for kicks, or someone who'd lost in a corporate war and needed to hide for a while.
Yet a company from the upper tiers had come looking for Valeria. Saying they needed someone to take a commission.
And the condition they'd set was a laughable one. A pureblood female engineer with black hair and black eyes.
There was no such engineer in Ground Zero. No pureblood woman would ever eat grease for a living at the bottom of a pit like this.
But there was one close enough.
'Seol Gye-hyeon.'
Valeria had known right then. This wasn't a job, it was a bridge.
Seol Gye-hyeon, or Dex, as he was known, was an extremely charming and skilled individual. And on top of that, he had pureblood in him.
A greenhorn daughter of the upper tiers could surely win him over in an instant.
As an engineer, or perhaps as something more.
If Seol Gye-hyeon somehow formed ties with Baekdu, then whoever held Seol Gye-hyeon would be touching Baekdu as well.
And on top of that, if that punk really was connected to the highest tier, something might show itself in front of the upper-tier people.
That was the calculation behind giving him this assignment.
That was also why she'd added one line at the end of the commission form. That there would be much to gain if it succeeded. Partly to see whether that greenhorn could understand what it meant.
And now, that calculation had landed.
Baek So-ha's own mouth had named Seol Gye-hyeon and Rita. She'd said they'd done more than what was needed.
'About now, they should've reached the garage.'
Valeria had sent the settlement at that exact moment.
Now the punk would get in touch.
Ding.
The terminal rang.
[Godmother, thank you for everything until now. It seems you no longer need to give work to our Titan Garage.]
She read it once.
She read it twice.
Thud.
The cigar slipped from her fingertips and rolled across the carpet.
"...That crazy bastard?"
Without a thought of picking up the cigar, Valeria hit the call button at once.
...
When the call ended, Valeria took out a fresh cigar and put it in her mouth.
Just now, Seol Gye-hyeon had gone at her, Valeria, in all earnest, to win. She'd felt the spirit of someone charging in with every card he could play already calculated.
He still threw his life onto the table too easily in places, and he didn't price his own worth accurately enough, which meant he was making deals at a loss.
But the more she saw of him, the more she liked him. From his nerve to his repair skills.
He was someone she had to keep in the palm of her hand. If he didn't die, he was the kind who could change the world.
That was why she'd accepted every condition he threw at her. The situation had changed now. In truth, it had reached the point where she was the one who should be sticking close to Seol Gye-hyeon to pick the upper tiers' information out of him.
"Roman. From now on, put guards on Seol Gye-hyeon. Two or more. Make sure Seol Gye-hyeon himself never notices. Have them watch him at all times, and if he looks to be in danger, save him."
* * *
The next morning, I opened my eyes and went straight to the workbench.
Two prosthetic legs, the Blackhorn Captain's, sat on top of it.
After we'd come back from eating out last night, I'd stared at them for ages before falling asleep, and now, the moment I woke up, I was sitting here looking at them again.
"Big bro. Looking at that again?"
"Yeah."
"You looked at it for ages yesterday too."
"I haven't learned it all yet. The technology inside is just that incredible."
I pulled down my safety goggles.
[Spellbreaker's Magic Eye]
Beyond the jet-black exterior, the inside of the legs peeled away, one layer at a time.
...Wow.
My mouth fell open on its own.
Every now and then I got to look inside a customer's prosthetic for repairs, but more often than not that was only to find the cause of a breakdown.
You couldn't exactly stand there gawking at a prosthetic's technology with the customer right in front of you, could you?
Customers had to get their repairs done fast to get on with their own work.
So every time, I'd seen a customer's fine prosthetic, repaired it and nothing more, and had to stand there drooling.
But now it was different.
No customer, nobody rushing me. Nothing to fix. All I had to do was look as much as I wanted.
...Technically, it wasn't even mine.
"Big bro, your heart sped up again."
Zino whispered to me, carefully, in a quiet voice.
"This is fine. This one's not a secret. Any engineer's heart would race looking at this."
I started at the toes and worked slowly upward.
The first thing to catch my eye was a thin layer packed in sheets from the sole to the shin.
A shock-dispersal layer.
Baekdu's leg art, Cheonji-gak. A technique that drives the foot down from a height. The impact carried in that secret art affects not only the opponent but the user too.
So this leg was built not to send that recoil up into the thigh, but to channel it down through this dispersal layer and out into the floor. A structure that left none of the force it absorbed in the body.
Next was the inside of the calf.
Compressed mana cells were packed in tight. A storage device that took in mana a little at a time during normal use, then released it all at once for the decisive blow.
And finally, the instep.
The circuits converged so that the mana drawn down from the dantian, through the spine, all the way to the toes, gathered at this single point on the instep. A path for driving scattered force into one spot.
Studying this gear closely brought an image to mind.
Rita, stumbling in as if collapsing the moment the door opened.
Her hair had floated up, charged with static, and blue lightning had spread along her veins under her skin. The electricity leaking from all over her body had crackled without rest.
And the forearm that had shattered blocking her opponent's attack.
I looked at the legs on the workbench again.
Everything Rita needed was in here.
"Big bro. What are you thinking about?"
"Protective gear for Rita."
"Mm, figures. Boss is kind! Praise the kind Boss."
Right then.
Rita came out from the back, her face a mess from sleep.
"How's the arm?"
"You used a ton of expensive medicine on me, Boss. I think I'm fine now thanks to the company benefits. Our company's the best, I'm telling you."
Rita swung her arm around to show me, then let her eyes fall on the legs on the workbench.
"You were looking at that?"
"Yes. Rita, can I ask you something?"
"Sure. Go ahead."
"What do you want to do with these?"
"...Me?"
Rita blinked and pointed at herself. She looked like she'd never expected to be asked that.
"Aren't we selling it to pay off the debt?"
"Huh?"
This time it was my turn to blink and point at myself. I hadn't expected that question either.
"But Baek So-ha gave it to you in the first place."
"Well, yeah."
Rita tilted her head.
"If I got it, didn't the garage get it? I'm a garage employee."
...Who is this person?
"And the garage has to do well for my paycheck to come through. You said so yourself, Boss."
For a moment, I couldn't say anything.
It was what I'd told her the day we took our first commission. Getting it handed back to me like this was something I hadn't seen coming.
"You know these would fetch a lot of money if sold, right?"
"Yes, of course. I'm not stupid. It's a prosthetic a megacorp captain uses. Obviously it's expensive."
"And you'd still leave it with the garage?"
"Well, more like leaving it with you, Boss. I trust you."
"...That's moving. Really."
I'd said it like a joke, but I was genuinely moved. How should I put it. It felt more and more like having real family.
This must be why some people only want to work at small companies or startups.
"...Then I'll take it that it was entrusted to me."
I pushed my goggles up and pointed at the legs.
"But I won't sell them. I'm going to make Rita's gear out of them."
"...My gear?"
"Right. It's a prosthetic now, but I'll turn it into gear you wear on your hands. Like a gauntlet."
Rita looked back and forth between me and the legs.
"I'd like you not to get hurt that badly next time. It'll protect you, and I'm planning to add functions that boost your abilities too."
Rita went quiet. She stood there for a long while, then slipped her gaze away and rubbed her arm. The spot that had cracked yesterday.
"...Is that okay? You have to pay off the debt."
"It's okay. It's an investment."
I added it with the most shameless face I could manage.
"If our garage's security staff gets hurt, that's lost business. Do you know how much the medicine cost yesterday?"
"...Ahaha. I figured you'd say that."
Rita laughed. It was her usual light, brush-it-off laugh, but the corners of her eyes were a little red.
"Then please make it."
Then she snapped back to her usual face and held up one finger.
"But make it pretty. I hate clunky stuff."
"Function comes first."
"Pretty is a feature too."
I had no rebuttal to that, so I just ended up laughing.
"Understood. I'll make it pretty."
Right, then. Shall we get started?
Right then.
Ding.
The electronic circuit on my wrist chimed briefly. A message popped up in front of my eyes.
[Vivian (Doctor) : Dex. Would it be all right if I came by the garage today?]
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