Plagiarism Is the Mother of Creation
If the mastery of fire had been the spark that propelled human evolution, then the Industrial Revolution was the next great pivot. By transforming fire from mere thermal energy into kinetic energy, humanity vaulted forward in a single bound. And if the new power humans gained after the Gates opened—the supernatural abilities they wielded against the monsters—could be called “fire,” then the next turning point was the invention of the Fetus Engine.
The Fetus Engine had begun as research into amplifying an Awakener’s abilities. Back then, every country on Earth was pouring resources into the same effort. Yet none of them achieved any truly revolutionary boost. No matter how exquisite the magic stones used as catalysts, the output never exceeded a multiple of the user’s original power. That was the hard limit of a body built from bone and flesh.
Then someone asked a simple question: if the human body had a ceiling on how much power it could hold, what if they poured that power into a top-grade magic stone core instead—something with far greater capacity—and simply let humans draw the amplified force out of it?
The experiment was a partial success. They managed to contain and amplify the ability through the core, but controlling the power proved impossible. No matter how strong the force locked inside the stone, if it couldn’t actually be used, it was worthless.
The genius Korean mage-engineer who turned that incomplete paradigm into the Fetus Engine had a different idea. She decided humans didn’t need to wield the power directly at all. Build a steel skeleton, thread it with nerve-like conduits linked to the magic stone core, and let a human pilot control the whole thing from the outside.
The real problem was the control interface. Weapons that bypassed human limits by storing power in magic stone cores had existed before her, but they had only ever been used for crude, single-purpose tasks. Humans simply had no reliable way to command a core holding massive amounts of supernatural energy.
To solve that, she turned to the one organ in the human body capable of containing another living being: the female uterus. That was how the Fetus Engine was born. The name itself—fetus—came from that very concept.
Thanks to the Fetus Engine, humanity could now pilot colossal steel god-machines dozens or even hundreds of times larger and stronger than any human body. These machines were christened Giganoids.
The road to their perfection wasn’t smooth. The existing elite Hunters—those with overwhelming personal power—hated the technology. After all, a single Fetus-equipped Giganoid could crush monsters that once required organized S-rank raid teams. Their own value was suddenly plummeting.
On top of that, only women could operate a Fetus Engine. That was inevitable; the entire system had been modeled on the female uterus. Male Awakeners, who could never pilot one, naturally resisted the change.
That backlash faded once the engine’s drawbacks became public knowledge. The female pilot’s mental energy was drained almost to its limit just by moving the Giganoid, making actual combat nearly impossible for her. That meant each pilot required a combat partner who could synchronize with her, issue commands, and carry out the real fighting. Biologically, men achieved far higher synchronization rates with women. And the Giganoid’s combat effectiveness varied wildly depending on the male partner’s skill.
Once those facts came out, the high-rankers and male Awakeners had nothing left to complain about.
And so humanity began to fight the monsters pouring from the Gates using their steel colossi—the Giganoids.
…That was the setting of this novel.
“Isn’t this just plagiarism?”
In short, a woman and a man pair up to pilot a giant robot. I’d seen that premise plenty of times. The Five Star Stories, that Zeoraimer project, Darling in the Franxx… the list went on. When you thought about it, there were actually quite a few works like that. The fact that so many existed probably meant they had all managed to skirt the plagiarism line. So maybe this one was just barely on the safe side of the law.
Besides, there was that old saying—plagiarism is the mother of creation.
“Sigh. That damn author.”
Cursing the writer’s painfully obvious lack of imagination, I slung my bag over my shoulder. The mirror showed a guy with a shaggy blonde cut, deeply tanned skin, and one ear absolutely cluttered with piercings—the perfect picture of a delinquent. This was the so-called Geum Taeyang.
It wasn’t my original face. This was the world inside a novel, and I had become one of its characters.