WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 52
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The Boss of Black Dog
It was the day right after Hilda's visit.
I was nursing a headache from all the drinking the day before.
Tier 7s could really hold their liquor.
"Uuugh... Rita.... I think I'm dying."
"Nobody dies from a hangover, so drink this."
I gulped down the drink Rita handed me. It was some kind of fluorescent-colored stuff, but once it was down, my stomach did settle a little.
"So why did you drink that much in the first place?"
"Because Hilda kept pouring, so I kept drinking."
"And you took every single one, which is why you say you're dying."
"If I hadn't taken them, I might actually have died."
"Hm. Fair."
Rita coolly conceded, turned around, and made her exit.
"Big bro, your face is green. You look like you're gonna puke."
"Exactly right. I'm about to puke. Zino's so smart."
"Wow! Zino's smart!"
I was lying on the sofa, feeling my head pound and playing with Zino, when it happened.
Bzzt- Bzzt-
Something on the table started vibrating loudly. My hangover-soaked head throbbed in time with it.
"Ugh... what now...."
I barely managed to turn my head toward the table.
It was Valeria's terminal.
The first time it had rung since the contract renewal.
I shot upright. The headache followed me up and slammed the back of my skull, but that was the least of my problems right now.
"R-Rita! The terminal! Godmother's terminal!"
Rita, who'd vanished into the back, came rushing out. I switched the terminal on.
[ Engineer Commission ]
[ Client : Nina (Black Dog Boss) ]
My breath caught on the very first line.
The boss of Black Dog.
Yesterday, the boss of the Mantis Crew had come to visit.
And the very next day, the boss of Black Dog, the Mantis Crew's sworn enemy, was sending in a commission.
What was this, playing both sides of the gang war?
Serena and Rex alone were tiring enough, and I wondered whether taking this on too wasn't getting way too dangerous.
But the moment I saw the next line, I shot to my feet without even meaning to.
[ Pay : 10,000,000 credits ]
Ten million.
Ten million.
Ten million.
Ten million. Ten million. Ten million. Ten million.
Even after paying off the six million I owed Rayden, four million would still be left over.
How many months of Rita's salary was that, how many weeks of building rent? The calculator in my head was running red-hot.
"B-boss. They didn't put one zero too many on that, did they?"
Rita had pressed up beside me without my noticing, her nose practically against the screen.
"If they did, I'll go find Godmother and take it up with her myself."
Stay calm. In this business, a ten-million job always comes with a ten-million reason.
Only then did the rest of the lines register.
[ Type : Visit (Today 22:00, Client Only) ]
[ Details : Prosthetic Repair (Made by Gordon) ]
[ Risk Level : Low (However, a confidentiality clause applies) ]
[ It's Gordon's piece. All of Gordon's old disciples threw in the towel. When I mentioned there was an engineer carrying the old Titan Garage sign, they got interested. Well then, prove it. - V ]
What? And it's Gordon's work, on top of that?
The moment I'd read that far, I pressed the accept button hard.
"Aaaaaaaagh! Boss!! What are you doing?!"
"Hm? I accepted the commission."
"It says Gordon's other disciples all failed!"
"Yes. So it does."
"If you take this and can't pull it off, it'll leave a stain on Valeria's reputation!"
"Then I'll just have to pull it off."
"Is it really that easy?"
It probably wasn't. But what could I do? On top of ten million, I'd get to examine one of the old man's early works with my own eyes.
When a chance to score big comes up, you take it.
I went on to read the rest of the commission's clauses.
Client only. Confidentiality clause.
A gang boss, coming alone with not a single subordinate. It meant this was something she had to hide even from her own people.
That was the ten-million reason. The repair fee, plus hush money.
"...But I never knew Gordon made a prosthetic for the Black Dog boss."
Rita, who'd been huffing for a good while, lowered her voice.
"I was with Gordon for so long, and I've never heard a word about it."
"Then it must have been from before you came along."
"...I guess so. When Gordon took down the sign, he cut off every old customer completely. So that's why it went to Godmother."
The idea that there was a version of Gordon she didn't know seemed to sit strangely with Rita.
"Boss. Can I... tell the old man about this?"
Rita was Gordon's person to begin with. Coming to this garage had been his order, and the way the old man knew my situation like some kind of psychic was probably thanks to her.
"It's a customer secret."
"Even from the old man?"
"Even from the old man. You saw the confidentiality clause."
The confidentiality clause. There was no way it carved out an exception for the old man.
Rita bit her lip, then nodded.
"...Got it. My boss is Dex now, after all."
"Then until 22:00...."
I threw myself back onto the sofa.
"Let's start with a hangover cure."
* * *
[ Current Time: 09:52 PM ]
The garage was quieter than usual.
The workbench had been cleared off, and the prosthetic procedure table had gotten a wipe-down. Zino and Grail had been checked over one more time.
"Boss, are you nervous?"
"A ten-million customer who's also the boss of Black Dog? Of course I am."
A woman who'd worn a prosthetic Gordon built all the way to the top of a gang. What kind of person could she be?
"Big bro, your heart got faster."
"Zino."
"I know. I'll zip it when the customer comes."
[ Current Time: 09:59 PM ]
Right when the clock hit 9:59.
Creeeak-
The door opened, and a woman walked in.
Click, click. The heels of her shoes rang out at intervals as even as if measured with a ruler.
She was small. Compared to the Queen Mantis who'd nearly filled this same doorframe yesterday, she was maybe half the size.
Yet the moment that small woman crossed the threshold, the atmosphere in the garage changed.
In a game, her name and health bar would have popped up over her head about now, with a boss-entrance cutscene.
A pure white suit that nobody in Ground Zero would ever wear. Sleeves without a speck of dust. White gloves on her hands to match the suit. Beneath neatly cut short black hair, something glinted faintly behind her ear.
Black hair and black eyes, but she wasn't a pureblood.
Her looks were plainly those of a mixed-blood. Even so, the black hair and black eyes suited her well enough that she gave off an air of refinement.
At first glance she looked a little past thirty.
Small frame, flawless face. But those weren't thirty-year-old eyes. They were the eyes of an older person, someone who'd seen far more than that.
When those eyes turned on me, my heart nearly stopped.
It was, how to put it, a feeling that standing where she stood, she could take my life in an instant.
As if she'd felt the same thing, Rita's hand rose to her throat, then stopped short of pressing the button. It looked like she'd barely held herself back.
The woman didn't spare Rita a single glance. She made one slow circuit of the garage, then turned back toward the door she'd just come through and said briefly,
"The sign's still the same. Even though the location and the inside have all changed."
...The sign?
This woman knew Titan from before that sign ever hung here.
I felt Rita swallow a breath beside me.
"Welcome. I'm Dex, the owner of Titan Garage."
"I know."
It was the answer of someone who had no intention of asking my name.
The woman sat in the chair in front of the workbench. Only then did she glance at Rita standing beside me.
"And her?"
"My assistant. She keeps her mouth shut."
"Fine, whatever."
The woman set one arm on the workbench.
"The wire acts up sometimes."
Wire?
"How to put it. It's much duller than it used to be. It feels like it doesn't move how I want it to. Sometimes it shoots off somewhere completely random."
On the workbench, a finger twitched once.
"Gordon's disciples, all three of them, have had their hands on this arm. Three times, they told me they'd fixed it. And it's still the same."
The woman pulled at the tip of each glove finger, one by one.
Shff.
When the glove slid off, a slender prosthetic hand was revealed. A ring sat on every knuckle of every finger. Too neatly spaced to be decoration.
'A weapon, then. Pull a ring with the other hand, and a sharp thread comes out.'
One look was enough to tell it was a different class from the junk lying around Ground Zero these days. Not one joint, not one seam had anything extra on it.
Two small characters were engraved on the inside of the wrist.
Titan.
The same lettering as the neon sign hanging outside the garage.
My fingertips itched. If it hadn't been a customer's property, I'd have wanted to pry it open right then and there.
"I'll take a look."
I pulled down my safety goggles.
[Spellbreaker's Magic Eye] lit up the inside of the prosthetic hand. What once would have required filling it with mana thread to see was now simply visible.
Narrow wire channels ran densely from each ring all the way to the inside of the elbow. Winders, ejection ports, tension regulators. Nothing was out of place anywhere.
'What is this? Something's off. Maybe because three people already got their hands on it.'
This time, like before, I fed mana thread into the arm and tried the Eye's trait, <Lingering Trace>.
With Lingering Trace, I could check the marks of whoever had recently tampered with a prosthetic. The drawbacks were that it was hard without mana thread's assistance, as before, and traces that were old or deliberately hidden were difficult to make out.
The spots other hands had passed through. The marks of someone opening this arm, tearing it down, swapping parts, and closing it back up were smeared all over it like stains. Three different sets of habits. Probably Gordon's disciples.
One had replaced the winders wholesale, another had swapped out every ejection port for new ones. The last had even torn open the nerve connection and stuck it back on.
All three had touched every place that could possibly be at fault in the arm. They'd probably worked from the guess that this part must be the problem, though I couldn't tell why.
Of course they had. There wasn't a single broken part.
No matter how long I stared, there was nothing. I ran the Eye one more time. Still nothing.
The woman's black eyes were on me.
"...Customer."
I raised my goggles as I spoke.
"Your prosthetic hand is perfectly fine."
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