WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 48
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Don't Hold Back, Tell Me If It Hurts
[Dex (My Doctor) : Ah, yes. No customers at the moment, so it's quiet. Please come in.]
After checking the message, Vivian carefully stepped into the alley with the safehouse.
"Huh? Is that...?"
The change was obvious the moment she entered. A neon sign hung there.
Vivian walked up and studied it.
[ Titan Garage ]
"...Titan..."
Looking up at the sign, Vivian murmured it under her breath.
A giant. Grand name to hang on that skinny frame. Strangely, though, she didn't feel like laughing.
Vivian found herself smoothing her coat sleeve. The tip of a gleaming white new prosthetic hand peeked out from the cuff.
The Synix Cardia Basic. She'd gone into debt yet again for it, banking on the money that would come in once she won the lawsuit. And she still had a long way to go paying back Mr. Go Jin-tae.
She had no regrets, though.
You cut the sandbags loose, so now all you have to do is run. The words he'd said. She wanted to climb higher, if only for Dex, who'd said them. And to do that, she needed something better than her old prosthetic.
"Haah..."
Vivian let out a deep sigh.
Once a week for a year. A promise she'd offered up on her own. And yet, hounded by the lawsuit prep, she hadn't kept it even once.
"Whoo."
She sucked in one more big breath and pushed the door open.
Creak.
The place beyond the door was nothing like it had been the first time.
One workbench, one chair, a few tools hanging on the wall. That was all she remembered of the workshop. Now it was packed to the brim with equipment she'd never seen, a gun bench and a storage locker along one side, and even a disassembler and an incinerator settled into the corner.
And on the workbench in the middle sat a pair of jet-black legs.
Prosthetic legs in a pitch-black casing. Even Vivian, who knew little about body-arts prosthetics, could tell they were fantastically expensive gear.
And it looked like they were taking the whole thing apart, piece by piece.
'...What kind of customers does this place take?'
"Big bro! A customer's here! A pretty lady!"
Vivian stopped short.
It was a child's voice. But no matter how she looked around, there was no child in sight.
"...Zino. We agreed to stay quiet in front of customers."
A man rose from behind the workbench.
Safety goggles pushed up on his head. Leather gloves on both hands. Over his shirt, leather straps ran across his shoulders and chest and joined at his back. The child's voice had definitely come from around that man's chest.
Was that a work outfit? Vivian tilted her head for a moment.
"Doctor. It's been a while. Oh, and that voice just now is Zino, my android assistant."
"Pretty Doctor lady! Nice to meet you!"
As they said it, Dex showed off his chest a little.
Only then did Vivian spot the android core hanging at his chest.
What an odd way to use an android. An engineer really was different.
The moment the greetings were done, Dex's eyes had dropped to her prosthetic.
Vivian laughed without meaning to.
Same as ever, this man.
The day they first met, he'd grabbed her hand before they'd even exchanged hellos. She'd been so flustered then.
So this time, Vivian held out the prosthetic first.
"You want to see it, don't you? I'll show you first this time."
"...It's Synix. The Synix Cardia Basic."
Dex pressed a gloved fingertip against the wrist joint and gave a short whistle.
"No defects this time. You bought a good one."
"That's a relief. If you'd said it was defective again, I really would have cried."
"That would be a problem. All we've got at the garage is cheap tissues."
Vivian's mouth relaxed on its own.
"Boss, is that a customer?"
A woman came walking out from the back. Amber eyes, orange hair. A pretty woman. An energetic charm, quite unlike Vivian's own, stood out about her.
"Yes. The doctor I told you about, Vivian. Doctor, this is Rita, an employee of our garage."
"Oh. Hello."
Boss. Employee. It nagged at her somehow, but Vivian shook her head to scatter the thought.
Right. Of course he'd have one employee. It would be hard to run a garage alone.
"...I should apologize first. I promised weekly checkups, and because of the lawsuit prep, I haven't made it even once. I'm sorry."
"Oh."
Dex blinked.
"Now that you mention it, you did."
Vivian was left speechless.
Not one word of resentment. Not even a sign that he'd been waiting. Somehow, that hurt her chest a little.
"More importantly, how did the lawsuit go?"
"It's not over yet. Arcana keeps dragging it out."
"So the extra pay isn't..."
"...Right. Not yet."
Dex's shoulders visibly slumped. Vivian found it funny, and a little comforting.
"Then, late as it is, let me keep my promise first."
Vivian took off her coat and hung it on a chair.
"Could you sit comfortably and roll up your sleeve?"
The same words as that day.
"Yes. I'll take the checkup."
Dex pulled off one glove and rolled up his sleeve as if it were nothing. The arm was still skeletal.
Vivian carefully took hold of that wrist.
Mana filled the new prosthetic. Smoothly, to the very fingertips, without a single leak. A sensation she'd never once felt with the old one.
This time, she'd be able to see deeper and more precisely.
"Then I'll begin."
Vivian's mana flowed into Dex's wrist.
She slowly followed the circuits inward. The path was still damaged to a painful degree, and she could feel in it someone's vicious malice.
And the moment she reached the area near his heart,
"...?"
Vivian's eyebrows twitched.
His heart was beating, full of mana.
'That can't be right.'
It had been a tattered heart, riddled with holes, mana dribbling out of it. A heart that Life's Warm Current had barely managed to improve even a little. A heart so ruined that, with her skills, dozens of procedures still couldn't have restored it.
And yet now, mana was flowing through that very heart.
'...Did it heal in the meantime?'
Vivian pushed her mana a little deeper along the grain of the heart.
Astonishingly, the holes were still there. But at one of them, the biggest one, something was connected.
Vivian followed that path upward.
'...A mythril alloy circuit?'
A circuit had been engraved on the skin. Thin silver lines spread across his whole chest, centered on the heart.
And the end of that circuit led out of his body. Along the leather strap that crossed over the shirt, to something hanging at his chest.
A mana core drive.
The mana pouring out of that core ran along the circuit in his chest and flowed into the punctured heart.
Only then did Vivian understand.
'...He's tricking it.'
His heart.
The circuit made the heart believe that the mana coming in from the outside core was its own. It left the broken heart broken and moved everything the heart was supposed to do outside the body. Now that she thought about it, the safety goggles. The leather gloves.
They were all the same. Eyes, hands, heart. Instead of repairing his broken body, this man had taken its functions and set them outside it wholesale.
Vivian held her breath.
She had learned countless ways to repair a heart. She knew how to replace one, too. But the idea of deceiving a heart had never once crossed her mind.
As a fellow mage, it gave her goosebumps.
'But... if it goes like this...'
Contamination would build up inside a heart that was already hurt. It wasn't a problem yet, but there was a chance that the accumulated contamination would turn into one someday.
'I'll have to come every week and purify it myself.'
Then, as Vivian traced the circuit in his chest again, she noticed one more thing.
The grain of the lines that made up the circuit.
She remembered it. On the day they first met, that thin thread of mana he'd drawn from his fingertips to rummage through her prosthetic.
'...He did it himself.'
In that instant, her admiration slowly settled.
There would have been nowhere to do this procedure for him. No hospital in the upper tiers would have taken him, and even if one had, he couldn't have paid the price.
So he'd done it himself.
Because nobody would fix him. Or rather, nobody could.
To get his old self back, by whatever means.
Drip.
Something fell onto their clasped hands.
"...Doctor?"
Dex's voice reached her. Vivian couldn't answer. If she opened her mouth, it felt like everything would come pouring out.
"Big bro. The doctor lady's crying."
"...I know. I can see."
A flustered voice. A voice that truly had no idea why.
That made the tears even harder to stop.
Without letting go of his hand, Vivian just shook her head.
"...No. It's nothing."
Dex hesitated for a moment, then groped around on the workbench and held something out.
Tissues. The same cheap tissues from the general store, like that day.
This time, Vivian took them.
Once she'd wiped her tears and gathered herself, Vivian got ready for the procedure.
"I have something amazing to tell you."
"Yes. I'm ready to hear it."
"After I put down the sandbags, I really could go farther."
"Huh? Does that mean..."
"Yes. My tier went up. I'm at the end of the mid tiers now, Tier 6. The wall above that... is still far out of reach, though."
"That's great. Congratulations, really."
Dex smiled. A face with no pretense at all, truly happy as if it were his own good news.
Seeing it, something she'd pushed down welled up again. Vivian bit her lip hard once and readjusted her grip on Dex's wrist.
"So today, I'd like to try a higher-level procedure than last time."
She wouldn't touch the heart.
That punctured heart, the circuit carved into his chest, the core outside. They were things this man had built up with his own hands. Vivian had no right to meddle with them carelessly.
The inside, though, was different.
A path crushed by someone's malice. A place even this man's skill couldn't reach. That path was the doctor's job, her job.
Vivian closed her eyes and drew up her mana.
Mana began to whirl inside the new prosthetic. An amount that couldn't compare to the warm current back then. With a defective prosthetic, her fingertips would already have been aching as if stabbed with an awl by this point.
It didn't hurt.
With not a single leak, whatever she poured in gathered at her fingertips just as it was.
"It's going to be a little rough. Don't hold back, tell me if it hurts."
* * *
The moment Vivian said that, Rita, who'd been watching us from the side, shoved a towel into my mouth.
Sitting there, I had no choice but to look up at her.
"?"
"Isn't this how it's done?"
Now that she mentioned it, it was. Every time I'd been about to do a painful procedure, this was what I'd done.
So I was finally getting the karma for it myself.
"...I'm starting."
"Mm-hm. Ah'm weady."
"[Life's Torrent]"
I bit down hard on the towel.
Whoosh...
"Mmph...!"
A tide of mana rushed in through my wrist.
No, it felt like someone had jammed a high-pressure hose into the veins on the inside of my arm and cranked the valve all the way open.
"Mmbbbph...!"
Elbow. Shoulder. And then chest.
Everywhere the torrent passed, something got torn away. Every time the crust of residue baked on like scabs was scraped off by the current, one layer at a time, every nerve in my body screamed.
"Mmbbbbbbbbbbb!"
Doesn't this count as me saying it hurts? You're not going to stop anyway!
I thought of the towels Rex and Baek So-ha had left in total ruin.
From now on, I should be kinder to my customers.
"Big bro! Are you okay? Your heart rate just shot way up!"
"Mmph."
It meant I was fine. It probably didn't get across.
As I clenched my teeth and endured, I started to notice something strange.
From the moment Vivian's mana reached my chest, the movement of the current changed. That violent flow turned aside, precisely, in front of the biggest hole in my heart. The mythril circuit I'd carved into my chest was the same. It swerved around it by a hair's breadth.
She was avoiding them. On purpose.
The spot where the mana core was plugged in, and the circuit I'd carved. She was leaving empty exactly the places that would be ruined if touched, and driving the torrent only into the collapsed path beyond them.
Holding a current this strong and still steering it that delicately.
Nice. Seriously.
The gamer in me thought it on its own. If I hadn't had the towel in my mouth, I'd have whistled.
And then, at some point.
"...?"
Something that had been blocked burst open with a pop.
The mana flowing out of the mana core ran without stopping, for the first time.
Until now, wherever my wrecked heart circuit made it stall midway, Zino had been the one who had to guide the mana through.
This time was different.
From chest to shoulder, from shoulder to fingertips. Without a snag, as if it had always flowed that way.
"Big bro!"
Zino shouted.
"The flow changed! The mana leaking is way, way down!"
In place of an answer, I spat out the towel.
The current was slowly dying down. I could feel Vivian carefully drawing back her leftover mana. And then her hand let go.
"...Haah."
Sweat had beaded on Vivian's forehead.
"It's not a perfect treatment."
The same words as that day. But her voice was much lighter than it had been then.
"Still, I've widened the paths around the heart quite a bit. Now the mana should flow with less blockage and less leaking."
"...Yes. I can feel it."
I clenched and opened my fist once.
And right then.
Ding.
A window I hadn't seen in a very long time floated up in front of my eyes.
[ User Seol Gye-hyeon: Status Change ]
Tier: Tier 1 → Tier 2
『Flaws in Effect』
You have successfully bypassed the tier cap of [Heart Mana Deficiency].
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