WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 295

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The World Made of Gears - 2

Maximilien was born in the Lesser States.

It was a nation where everything in the world had been falsified through alchemy. Even a pebble rolling along the roadside was an artificial object made by someone. A land haunted by golden madness was both a blessing and a curse. People lived crushed beneath gold.

Nature, formed by Mother Earth over hundreds of millions of years, was covered over by human traces in less than a century. In that country, where even lush, ripened crops carried metal poison, humans were used as materials too.

Thanks to being born in the Lesser States, Maximilien survived.

Maximilien had no arms. Neither he nor his parents were particularly surprised. If you were born without arms, you would not even know why limbs were supposed to number four. And the Lesser States was a strange country where one in three births produced a malformed child to begin with.

If something was lacking in the Lesser States, they filled the gap with alchemy. Even if that something was an undergrown child’s arms. His parents, reasonably skilled alchemists, decided to make prosthetic arms for him.

Far more zealously than their skill justified.

In the Lesser States, one in three was also born with madness. Maximilien’s parents were in that category. From childhood, Maximilien endured every kind of modification under their feverish attention.

Was it love, obsession, or the mindset of a scholar burning with the will to conquer a difficult problem?

Either way, after his parents’ tireless efforts and endless suffering, Maximilien awakened to alchemy. With that knowledge, he made his own prosthetic arms.

Wearing gearwork prosthetics, he wandered the Lesser States and quickly became famous.

No matter how skilled an alchemist was, it was hard to implement every function needed on the spot. But Maximilien, whose body was practically one with gears, could build sturdy mechanisms even from poor materials. People were enthralled by his work, built from entirely different designs.

Alchemy was honest. Under the law of equivalent exchange, no matter how desperately you tried to cut costs, you could never exceed the absolute amount of alchemic value. Anyone clinging to existing methods could not compete with Maximilien.

With that edge, Maximilien all but raked in money across the Lesser States. In a nation where alchemic value was truth itself, money was power. With enormous capital, he founded a company and rose as a new force in the Lesser States...

Until the Golden Palace rejected him.

Once the order came down, the jackals swarmed. Maximilien was an excellent alchemist and no stranger to combat, but the Lesser States was the nation of alchemy. No miracle makes the scale tip the other way when the opposite pan is heavier.

After a long pursuit, Maximilien had to flee across the border.

Then one day, he heard that his parents were looking for him. They were clearly being held hostage. Ignoring it would have been rational, but to Maximilien, his parents were both teachers and benefactors. He could not leave them to die. So he returned to the Lesser States of his own will.

Under heavy surveillance, Maximilien met his parents and took a gear out of his pocket.

They said that in every three births in the Lesser States, one was malformed, one was mad, and one was a genius.

Sometimes all three were born at once.

Maximilien despised his parents’ incompetence and irritable tempers with a passion. Failing an experiment and taking it out on your own child was something he could never understand. Still, aside from that, he loved his family in his own way.

In the Lesser States, if something was lacking, they filled it with alchemy. Just as his parents had done with Maximilien’s arms, Maximilien tried to “fix” his parents’ heads.

His parents could no longer get angry. If you could not think, you could not become angry.

Unlike his parents, Maximilien did not shift the blame for failure. He calmly admitted that he had been lacking, put everything in order, and left.

***

Right before a sharp saw blade tore me apart, a brown shadow dropped beside me like a meteor. Azzy, who had been hiding until now. Against gears, the King of Dogs could vent her rage without restraint, and she leaped fiercely at the blade.

“Woof woof!”

Even Azzy was not dumb enough to sink her teeth into a sharp blade. Her target was not the blade, but the shaft connected to it. She plunged straight into the Steel Beetle, bit down on the rotating axle, and shook her head violently. She was trying to rip it out.

“Mmph! Mmphmmphmmphmmph!”

Then she screamed while hanging from it.

Size was not always proportional to strength, but the Steel Beetle demonstrated the pure difference in weight class with brutal clarity. Azzy spun round and round with the blade.

“Azzy. Even with your strength, that won’t work.”

Humans were not strong. Objectively speaking, compared to other beasts, there was nothing physically superior about their bodies. Thin skin, blunt nails, fragile bones. It was a wonder they survived at all.

But humanity’s true strength was the ability to borrow strength from elsewhere.

They skinned other animals and wrapped themselves in that hide. They split stone and pulled horns to use as claws. They cut wood and twisted fiber to replace a frame of bones. Because that borrowed strength was not truly theirs, they could use it recklessly. If a tool broke, they could just make another.

By using tools, humans became rulers of the earth.

The Steel Beetle, built through greedy use of axle-and-wheel principles, multiplied force hundreds and thousands of times over. Before that violence of numbers, even the King of Dogs could not endure.

Ah, except for the Human King.

I reached toward the falling blade with Azzy dangling from it. My hand covered the side of the blade that could rip apart everything in the world in a single stroke.

By natural law, my hand should have been shredded.

Clack.

The meeting between the blade and me ended with a quiet sound. The saw that had raged like an angry storm went still the moment it touched my hand.

“Mwoong...”

I heard Azzy’s dumb cry as she dangled with an iron bar clenched in her mouth. In the silence, Maximilien spoke.

“So your provocation was not baseless. You can even control the Steel Beetle.”

“If you can do it, I can too.”

Unlike an automatic carriage powered by a thunderwheel, the Steel Beetle moved only through Maximilien’s power. Rolling wheels, spinning blades, even the joints linking the gears, all of it was under his authority.

So I, who used the same power, could exert the same level of control.

Maximilien flicked his finger. Each motion looked like he was scratching the air with his nail, and each time, the Steel Beetle twitched. It tried to slip free of my hand and move according to its true owner’s will.

But as long as I held it, it did not move. Because I was moving in the exact opposite direction of Maximilien.

‘They’re counteracting each other. I can’t fully seize control. So that’s the limit... I’ve got a chance.’

Tch. He caught on fast.

I had provoked him this far; it would have been nice if he lost his reason. But maybe because he had jammed gears into his own head, his emotions and reason moved separately.

“Isn’t it pathetic to get angry after I hit a nerve?”

“I am not angry. You do have the right to say that to me.”

Don’t lie. You’re angry. You’re just clinging to reason by spinning the thought gears in your head as hard as you can.

“You attacked me without a word, and you say you’re not angry. I don’t find that very trustworthy.”

“What choice did I have? You have no intention of coming with me. But I need you. Since our views do not mesh, we have no choice but to see which will is stronger.”

“Even if you drag me off, I can just refuse to cooperate.”

“You may refuse. But what about the Human King?”

That would be a problem too.

I was the Human King, and even if I regained my power, my personality would not twist and my temperament would not change.

Still, there was a reason I could not help feeling threatened. Humans had a record of driving out their own king, and...

“Perhaps the King of Sin may be more cooperative.”

No matter how I thought about it, the King of Sin the regressor claimed to have seen in the future had to be the Human King.

I was human. I was a beast. Beasts did not do things that destroyed the world. No, they could not in the first place. A beast was part of the world too.

To destroy the world, you first had to commit suicide, but if you committed suicide, you could not destroy the world. What kind of contradiction was that?

Yet they pulled it off. Impressive, you human bastards.

“I do not fully understand what goes on inside the lord of all creatures either. In truth, I never needed to. My goal was only to meet the Human King, and nothing else. But... if you refuse to acknowledge me, then I must seek another way!”

Maximilien raised his right arm.

Gears crawled out from somewhere and rolled over his body. Without needing assembly, each gear moved to its proper place on its own. Steel meshed together with heavy clicks. In an instant, a massive steel arm was complete.

Maximilien swung that steel arm at me. I shouted.

“You said you were taking me!”

“Do not worry. Even if your limbs are ruined, I will fix them.”

“I don’t need that!”

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