WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 302

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The Gear in My Head

Maximilien quietly steadied his breathing. In his mind, he chewed over what I had said, and with his body, he wrestled his broken frame back under control. The gears inside him, which had fallen into total disarray, slowly began fitting back into place.

His joints creaked as they resumed working. Blood returned to his head. His reason, hazy as fog, flickered as it fought to regain its light.

'I was trying to become a god?'

Maximilien snorted, then winced from the impact. He was in such bad shape that even his own breath could hurt him.

Even in that wrecked condition, his thinking did not stop. Click, clack. The gear at the center of Maximilien's head turned slowly.

'I have never believed in gods. From the moment I was born without both arms, I never once leaned on what I could not see. Prosthetic arms held me up, and alchemy led me forward. No god ever looked after me. It was only me.'

No matter how deadly the crisis, his brain kept running. That was not a matter of will. It was a matter of function.

Because Maximilien had embedded gears in his own head.

The tiny machine he named Thought Gear did not think for him, despite the name. If anything, it was closer to whipping the brain.

It force-fed blood into his head and pressed down on his brain. It cut off the parts screaming with fatigue, then stitched emotion and reason together whenever needed.

So even when exhausted, hungry, or in pain, his brain did not dull. Fear, rage, confusion, none of it could interfere with his thinking. Even if the Beast King howled, his body moved, and he ignored even the princess's authority. If needed, he acted, even if it bordered on taboo.

Maximilien had earned that right.

The right to move only by his own will, regardless of fate or limits.

'...You're wrong, Human King. I have no need to become a god.'

"Because I am already the god of my own life!"

Maximilien acted on that right. Following his own will, he thrust out a prosthetic arm with its grotesque frame exposed.

"I only wanted to give a chance, that is all! To others who lacked that right! A chance to become masters of themselves!"

Even with a body in shambles, Innate Arcane could still be used as long as the will remained. Maximilien focused, and the halted gears all started turning at once.

The Steel Beetle broke its long silence and twisted its body. I had been suppressing it up to now, but once I stepped back, nothing remained to hold it down. Even the King of Dogs had been overpowered by force, and that giant war machine creaked as it tried to unleash the strength it had yet to spend...

That was all.

"The word qualification sounds nice, but aren't you twisting it way too much in your favor? To sum it up, you were trying to drive gears into other people's bodies, right?"

I shrugged.

The Steel Beetle's stretch stopped at a creak. If a machine could suffer full-body paralysis, it would look exactly like that. The Steel Beetle convulsed in pain without ever getting to use that enormous power.

Maximilien tried again and again to move the Steel Beetle, but he failed every time. The exoskeleton around the Steel Beetle would not move at all.

"I just gave a normal reaction to that. If someone says they'll drive gears into your body, who would stay still? You'd resist with everything you had. And it wouldn't be just fear."

I pointed at the Steel Beetle so Maximilien could see clearly. Between the huge gears that made up the exoskeleton, very small gears were wedged in.

Two interlocking gears turn fine. Then what if you insert one more so it touches both of those gears at once? What happens if all three interlock with each other?

They do not turn at all.

If one gear turns clockwise, the meshed gear must turn counterclockwise. That's the basic principle of gears. But if there is one more gear interlocked with both of those, then that gear would have to turn clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time.

A contradiction.

"Look at the Steel Beetle. If an odd number of gears forms a loop, it locks up like that. Gears become useless from something this simple. You might use it, but others can't. No, they won't."

"Urgh...!"

"Give up now. You have no moves left."

A moment ago, he still had gears to throw. He still had mana to use alchemy. He still had protective gear to defend his body.

At least, he did before he got hit by Historia's Gunblade Grand Intent. Now he was nothing but a walking corpse with prosthetic arms.

I walked toward him, step by step, after he had lost all means of resistance. A few gears were scattered nearby, but that amount was no real threat. In the end, gears only had value when linked together.

He had no way to stop me. Most people would be crushed by his prosthetic arms alone, but his opponent was me. If my hand touched his body, I would use his Innate Arcane to spin every gear inside him in reverse, including the Thought Gear.

Maximilien lowered his head as if he had given up and staggered.

Two steps left. That was all the distance between us. With two steps left before death, Maximilien grabbed his right arm with his left. The prosthetic arm shook violently. At first glance, it looked like fear.

"No! I will not stop!"

No, that was impossible. The vibration was a death rattle just before failure. Crunch. The joint connecting right arm and shoulder came loose, and his left arm finally tore out the right arm that had been his lifelong rival.

Maximilien gripped even his own torn-off arm as a weapon and swung it with a desperate shout.

'If I lack, I fill it. If it breaks, I fix it. If it is poor, I improve it. If it is impossible, I make it possible! I do not stop!'

Who would expect someone to rip off his own arm and swing it? It was a quick-draw strike that slipped through a gap in awareness. No matter how badly injured, Maximilien was a powerhouse who had reached the Six Generals. The speed of that swing, pivoting on his own arm, was enormous. The gears mounted on the prosthetic clacked together as if trying to bite into me.

But I was a mind reader. The more carefully calculated the move, the more clearly I read it.

Instead of dodging the incoming left arm, I reached out to meet it. Compared to his prosthetic arm, my hand was painfully slow, but speed is relative anyway. My fingers touched first before it could hit my face. Prosthetic and hand crossed, and a gear caught on the tip of my nail.

The battle that had dragged on endlessly ended there. Maximilien's body stopped dead, as if pinned inside a photograph.

Inertia carried his prosthetic arm to my cheek, but that was it. Feeling that cold touch against my skin, I muttered,

"...I was going to reverse every gear and break them, but somehow you still managed to stop the gears in that moment."

Just as I could stop spinning gears, he could do the same. The moment Maximilien sensed the gears in his body malfunctioning, he stopped every movement.

It was the best response he could make. That still did not change the outcome.

"Even so, with gears spread through your whole body, you still can't move. At best, you buy a few seconds before you die."

As expected, strength drained out of his body. Once he stopped the gears, his body could no longer hold itself up.

I had no intention of mocking that. If anything, I wanted to applaud him for squeezing out every possible move to the end. But if I let go of this hand, he would move again, so I made clapping sounds with my mouth instead.

"Clap clap clap. You're really incredible. I'm not mocking you or patronizing you, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You were truly incredible to the very end, and straightforward too."

Objectively speaking, it made no sense for me to lose.

Beyond wearing prosthetic arms, Maximilien had packed his body full of gears to reinforce himself. That made him absurdly durable, and he could move on equal footing with generals trained in energy. Maybe explaining that was annoying, so he dressed it up by saying he was an energy practitioner who had mastered Geon-Gon-Gam-Ri, and that his gear-dominating ability was Ri.

Anyway, because of that, I started under conditions so favorable it was almost unfair: one touch meant victory. Having Azzy and Historia as powerful allies was a bonus.

No matter how weak I was and how he was one of the Six Generals, this battlefield was not just tilted, it was completely flipped over. The only reason this absurdly unfavorable fight had gone this far was Maximilien's skill.

"Your direction was just too far off. Someone who reaches the Demon God naturally changes other humans, they do not struggle against them. But you tried to struggle against every other human. Even by fighting a proxy war with me."

With one hand still gripping his prosthetic arm, I drew a card with the other. Diamond 1, Multipurpose Skewer. I used my little remaining mana for alchemic conversion. A familiar weight filled my palm.

I gripped the skewer in reverse and raised it to Maximilien's head level. His thoughts had nearly stopped, yet his red, bloodshot eyes still unconsciously tracked the tip. Even then, life instinctively guarded itself from death.

"Goodbye, Maximilien. I'll only affirm your wish. I'll remember the dream that could not come true. Even if I cannot grant it, I'll preserve the fact that such a wish existed, written in one corner of a columbarium. The Human King acknowledges you. Maximilien, you were no god, but you were a warrior who was never cowardly."

After offering that short condolence, I moved my hand. The skewer drove toward his temple.

Thunk. I felt the hard sensation of digging into something...

I tilted my head. I had clearly aimed for his head, but the skewer was stabbing something else.

A tree had grown there.

At some point, a tree had burst up through the concrete floor and blocked my skewer, gently swaying its branches.

Everything was so still that for a second it felt like the tree had always been there, and I had simply failed to notice it before swinging.

No way.

This was the military state. The headquarters of the military state, where the ground was covered in concrete and every useless tree, not even fit for firewood, had been cut down long ago. In this land where concrete replaced soil and brick replaced wood, there was no way a tree should exist.

And even if one did, very few kinds could break through concrete this thick. Even if it were that kind, there was no way it could grow to a person's height in just seconds.

This was definitely an artificial phenomenon. Someone had made a tree grow to protect Maximilien. Whether that should even be possible was another matter.

But who?

"I beg your pardon, my king."

The answer came from underground.

At first it was a sprout. Then a sapling. A few seconds later, what had been a sprout stood before me as a giant full-grown tree.

It was the stillest explosion in the world. That natural explosive, with green smoke and brown flames, swallowed me in the blink of an eye.

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