Ground Zero Workspace
The place Go Jin-tae—or rather, the old man who went by Gordon—led me to was a desolate, out-of-the-way stretch even by Ground Zero standards.
The thought crossed my mind, briefly, that I might follow him all the way out here only to have my guts ripped out and be found as a corpse in some alley. Then I remembered what world this was.
In a setting where every last organ can be swapped for a high-performance corporate product, who'd have any use for the insides of a scrawny wreck like me?
After walking for quite some time, Gordon stopped in front of a dilapidated building that looked like it had been abandoned for decades.
Whatever this was, it sure didn't look like the workshop of an old master draped in mega-corp hardware.
"Sir... where is this?"
The entrance was sealed shut behind a brutally thick, outdated alloy door.
"Used to be my hideout. Warehouse, too. Long time ago."
The old man jerked his chin at the heavy alloy door.
"Security lock's been completely busted. Hasn't opened in years. You get this door open without damaging it, and I'll let you use the place."
My eyes lit up.
A heavyweight like the old man would have no shortage of formidable technicians in his actual workshop. That was one of the things you had to watch for when you threw in with someone that big—the jealousy and spite of a big shot's people. I'd been turning over how to handle myself when I inevitably ran into them.
And instead, he was offering me a space of my own?
This was the best possible outcome: getting something out of a relationship with a heavyweight without anyone on the outside catching wind of it.
"That's a pretty light condition, all things considered. Do I really just have to open the door?"
"I don't much care for guys who are all talk. Show me."
At that, I stepped forward without another word. I'd already scored points. I wasn't about to lose them by running my mouth again.
A glance with the naked eye was enough. Years of disuse had left the door heavily rusted. I set my hand against the keyhole.
To look inside with the Demon Eye of Spell Breaking, I first had to feed in Mana Threads—plain ones, with no properties assigned.
I sent the threads unwinding into the mechanism, then opened the Demon Eye. Beyond the thick iron, the guts of the broken lock began to resolve as if a scan were painting them into the air in front of me.
I had no idea what he'd been keeping in here, but it was a fairly elaborate lock. There had been a mana-based door lock as well—already dead, from the look of it.
Ugh...
A sharp sting flared near my heart. I'd burned through a lot of mana today relative to what this body could currently handle. The limit was coming up fast.
But if this was a test from a man like him, I had to pass it. This was no place to start whining.
Rusted through. The internal gears have seized completely.
Still reading the structure, I assigned a property to the mana threads.
Heat welled up from my heart, thick and close, and sweat started to bead on my skin. Almost there. I was not quitting now.
The one thing that mattered: the door could not take even a hint of damage. That meant fine control.
I moved the threads slowly, stripping rust without scoring the gears. The internals weren't all metal, either. There were plastic components in places, and sections bound with something like fiber—security material, probably. I had to ease the threads around those and take only the rust.
The superheated mana threads peeled the corrosion off the gears cleanly. For the last step, I used telekinesis to force the gears to mesh and turn.
Click.
A light, crisp scrape of metal—and the heavy alloy door that had been sealed for years slid open.
"It's done... sir..."
"So you're not all talk after all. As promised, from now on this building is yo— hey. You. You all right?"
Ah, hell... mana overflow?
My vision lurched hard. The area around my heart went hot, as if a red-hot iron were searing it from the inside. In a handful of minutes, I had wrung more mana out of this frail body than it could possibly take.
There was a thud. My consciousness went black.
The first time Go Jin-tae saw Seol Gyehyeon was at the Ash Chimney Night Market in Ground Zero.
Black hair, black eyes. East Asian.
Physical traits you almost never saw in Ground Zero, the lowest tier of Gaon Mega City. A bloodline you'd expect to find in Middle City at the very least—or in the mega-corp districts of the Upper Layer.
And yet.
Born too weak. Won't last long down here.
A scrawny orphan kicked to the streets the moment he came of age, out of one of those relief shelters the corporations ran as a fig leaf. That was as far as Go Jin-tae's assessment went, and he watched the kid on that basis. At first, the boy was nothing more than a diversion—something to look at while he smoked a cigar at his leisure.
But what the kid did, even in that short span, was entertaining.
Assembling the cardboard lying around into a halfway decent stall had been amusing enough on its own. The technique he used on his customers was stranger still: a handful of low-grade spells, combined with real precision and put to work like maintenance tools.
That was not the kind of skill or craft you expected to see in a district like this.
And then came the part that was actually interesting.
A gang member put the squeeze on him, and the kid fired right back without so much as batting an eye. In a body that looked like one hit would snap his bones.
Not bad for a brat who just came of age.
Interesting enough that Go Jin-tae had been ready to take him as an apprentice—and the kid didn't want that either. Wanted to be hired as an independent technician instead.
It was a proposal that was half wordplay, but watching the brat work his brain so he wouldn't lose the staring contest was so absurd it was genuinely fascinating.
And now.
That same brat had opened a security door Go Jin-tae had designed himself years ago—without a single tool, using nothing but technique—and then promptly collapsed.
"Hey. You. You all right? Wake up! Hey!"
He'd looked weak, sure. Go Jin-tae clicked his tongue and went to the boy on the floor, then set his prosthetic hand on Seol Gyehyeon's body to check his condition.
Mana left the prosthetic, swept through the kid once, and came back. In the returning sense—a precise scan of vital signs and mana circuits—Go Jin-tae's eyes narrowed.
This brat's body is a complete wreck. So he wasn't born weak after all...
The traces were unmistakable. Someone had deliberately shattered his dantian and his heart.
The dantian was gone—destroyed beyond any hope of recovery. The heart had a hole punched through it, mana leaking out in a steady trickle.
And in that state, he had been repairing equipment, then overdrawn the mana in his heart to pass the test Go Jin-tae had set him. That was what had dropped him.
Unusual magic. A ruined heart and dantian.
At minimum, a child of an Upper Layer mega-corp.
Go Jin-tae had seen enough of Gaon Mega City for the kid's circumstances to assemble themselves without effort. The dirty power struggles between the city's corporations. The bloody factional infighting inside them. An unfortunate orphan who'd gotten caught in that filth, his dantian and heart destroyed, and been thrown away.
Driven from the mega-corps' fighting pit, tumbled all the way down to the lowest garbage dump in the city—and still this brat was clawing to survive, venom in his eyes, using every skill he had left.
"Sharp instincts, plenty of guts, and a story to go with it."
The corner of Go Jin-tae's mouth lifted. For the first time in a long while, it felt like he'd found someone truly interesting.
"...Nnh."
How long had I been out? When I opened my eyes, there was a thick smell of dust and a dull ache deep in my chest. I tried to sit up and found I could barely move a finger. I was empty.
"You're awake, brat."
A blunt voice from the dark.
I turned my head. Old man Gordon was sitting in a chair, smoking a cigar.
"That heart of yours is a wreck. Mana circuits are a complete mess. You really squeezed that much mana out of a body like that?"
True to form for a genuine heavyweight of a technician. He'd gotten a rough read on my condition while I was out.
"When the man who hired you is standing right there, you finish the job. Don't you think?"
"Body's a disaster, but the mouth still works just fine, huh."
He said it, then tossed the silver tube in his hand at me.
"Eat it. You were already a scrawny little thing, and now you're starving on top of it. You were this close to kicking it."
What landed on my chest was a high-calorie compressed ration.
I popped the cap in a hurry and squeezed the paste into my mouth. A horrific taste flooded in, but I chewed and swallowed anyway. I wanted to live.
I gagged. Forced it down with a wet swallow.
Unlike the taste, once the high-calorie sludge hit my stomach, the pain there began to ease. I might actually survive this.
"Hah..."
I caught my breath, pushed myself up, and looked around.
What I could see of the interior was not in good shape. The space was wide enough, but there was no proper workbench, and no tools to speak of.
What there was: scrap metal that looked used and discarded, wrecked machine parts, dusty empty cans, and garbage piled up like a mountain. A perfect junkyard.
"Sir, I didn't exactly request the deluxe interior package."
Gordon huffed a short laugh at that and stood.
"You wanted to be hired, not taken as my apprentice. Cleaning the boss's space is your job, isn't it?"
Unassailable logic.
"If the boss says so, then that's what I'll do. Yes, sir."
"While you're at it, I've got one more job for you. Use that skill of yours and make me something that can turn a profit before I get back."
"When will you be back?"
"Whenever I feel like it. Could be tomorrow. Could be the day after."
With that, he left the junkyard without waiting for an answer and without looking back.
Hell of a temperament on this employer.
But what was I going to do about it? If he said jump, I jumped.
The place was cluttered with junk, but it was a lot bigger than I'd expected. Once I got it fully cleaned out, it would make a decent workshop.
"Ha. Fine. Let's give it a shot."
I'd said let's give it a shot. Actually starting work right now was another matter.
The same way I could check a holographic citizen ID, looking at my wrist brought a hologram up in front of my eyes—a clock.
I'd wanted to go out for the minimum in food and supplies, but it was far too late. On top of that, I had just fainted from mana overflow and only just come around.
Going out on the streets at this hour, in this condition, would be asking for trouble.
I was going to be living here, possibly for a while. I started walking the space, getting a feel for it.
He said he used to use it as a hideout and a warehouse, didn't he?
Nobody had been in or out for the past few years—that much was certain. Old junk and scrap parts were piled everywhere. Probably a warehouse where the old man had stashed components from a workshop somewhere nearby.
But there was also a lot of household trash scattered around that didn't fit that picture.
Traces of it having been used as a hideout, then.
Whatever the circumstances, someone had holed up here for a long time, then left, and the place had been abandoned as-is.
That's why the door was so thick. That's why the security was so good.
There were stairs. More space on the upper floor, then...
That was when the crack of gunfire carried in from somewhere far off, along with intermittent screams.
Typical of this goddamn Fusion Punk world. A fight had broken out somewhere on a nearby street.
I used the building key Gordon had given me and locked the entrance. The moment the door shut, the noise from outside cut off all at once.
It was late. I decided to find a place to rest. An inner door opened onto a small room.
A mattress and a wardrobe. Sleeping quarters, once.
I shook the dust off the mattress as best I could and lay down on it.
I closed my eyes. Sleep was not going to come easily.
Thoughts kept rising, and my head started to tangle.
I should've quit when my ex told me to stop playing this game.
The gunfight from outside came back to me. Unlike the world I'd lived in, the streets here were genuinely dangerous.
If I'd slept on the street tonight, I could've gotten caught in a fight like that.
Or worse—I might have become a fugitive before I even made it to sleep, after killing a low-ranking Black Dog grunt and running.
Looked at that way, lying on a mattress in a locked room—garbage and all—might have been an enormous stroke of luck.
I turned those thoughts over, and the tension drained out of me. A heavy fatigue poured down over my body.
Slowly, I slipped away to the far side of consciousness.