The Madman of Workshop Zero
The elevator didn't stop at B1. It simply kept descending.
B2, B3... and finally, B5.
Ding—
When the doors slid open, the faint scent of diffuser that had been lingering at the tip of my nose vanished without a trace.
In its place came the acrid bite of machine oil and a wall of heat.
And then—
Kiiiiig—! KAAANG—!
Grinder noise tore through the air, filling the entire lobby with a sound that threatened to split my eardrums.
So this is what they were hiding down here.
I'd heard the rumors, of course, but faced with the staggering ceiling height and the sheer scale of the equipment, I had to admit I was genuinely impressed.
"It is a bit noisy, I'm afraid. As you may know, there is quite a large volume of work that must be processed. And though it may seem discourteous of me to ask, I would appreciate your generous understanding. The gentleman is, shall we say... a man of very strong personality."
I had been led to the central workshop at the very bottom of the basement. Inside, amid a chaos that looked like a garbage dump fused with a laboratory, an old man stood with his back turned, absorbed in something.
A shaggy mane of white hair. A work uniform stained with grease.
But what caught the eye most was his left arm.
A prosthetic...?
Below the elbow, a dizzying tangle of multipurpose tools whirled and spun, clattering against each other in constant motion.
"Doctor. We have a guest."
The old man didn't so much as flinch at Jang Hyun-woo's voice.
"Dr. Lee! This is the gentleman the Director sent down!"
"...Is that so?"
Was he deliberately pretending not to hear? The old man rolled his eyes around with an expression that seemed to ask, Was there something like that?
Dr. Lee, the top authority of the black market... I'd only heard rumors, but seeing him in person, the stories fall short.
Word was that his skill was good enough to reach the position of research director at the Hunter Administration Bureau itself—until he was expelled for violating ethical regulations and building dangerous things.
But precisely because of that, he was a specialist in crafting things that bordered on the unorthodox, far beyond anything that met standard specifications.
Dementia-glazed eyes. A vacant, dazed expression.
Then, when he finished his work and finally turned to look at us, his expression was... surprise.
"And who might you be?"
"...?"
He wasn't talking to me. He was asking Jang Hyun-woo.
"Dr. Lee?"
"Hm? And who might you be?"
Is he actually senile...?
Just as I began wondering whether the man I was about to entrust my weapon to was in any condition to work at all—leaving Jang Hyun-woo to stammer whatever he was stammering—the old man turned to me this time.
"And who might you be?"
"I am..."
With my identity concealed, I hesitated over how to answer. Was he probing me? No—honestly, he seemed mentally scattered enough that it might just be meaningless chatter...
"No need to answer. I can already tell. Judging by your build, a desk-posted employee. Yet you're involved in field operations as well, so a support division or materials handler for this company, most likely. Something along those lines. And today, you've received a field-duty order and come down to place the order yourself."
"...!"
Astonishingly, the closest thing to an answer about my true identity that I'd heard all day had just come from this old man who looked so far gone that I'd assumed he was full of nothing but nonsense.
"Doctor. This is no time for games. The Managing Director herself has designated this job as 'top priority.'"
"Right. Figures. Otherwise you wouldn't have come all the way down to me. So—what needs doing?"
Dr. Lee muttered the words while roughly wiping down his mechanical arm with an oily rag.
"No, that's just it. The Managing Director has instructed us to spare no expense on labor costs and to give this commission the very best you have to offer."
In that instant, Dr. Lee's eyebrows twitched.
"That Na Hee-ra handed out a blank check...?"
His gaze swung back to me. Unlike before, his eyes were now brimming with genuine interest—and at the same time, a bewilderment that said he simply couldn't make sense of it.
No one knew better than Dr. Lee what kind of woman Na Hee-ra was.
A woman of ruthless calculation. A businesswoman who wouldn't waste a single coin unless there was profit in it.
And that woman had promised full support to some nameless punk like this?
Which could only mean he possessed something she had seen and he hadn't...
"Hmm... I see. So the shell looks worthless, but the kernel's solid enough, is it? Or else whoever set up the order behind the scenes is a complete pushover."
Dr. Lee snickered as he dragged a chair over and plopped himself down into it.
"Fine. With Na Hee-ra's backing, might as well hear you out. What do you want?"
He crossed his arms with brimming confidence—the posture of a man saying, name anything.
That attitude made me laugh.
I wonder what he'd say if he knew what I was actually about to ask for.
Truthfully, I was curious myself.
So, without a word to the confident old man, I pulled the item from my pocket and tossed it onto the workbench with a soft thump.
Scrrritch.
The light friction of cheap plastic split the workshop's silence.
"......"
A long stillness followed.
At the same moment—apparently realizing that this really was the thing I'd come to ask him to work on—Dr. Lee's scorching glare turned on me.
"...What is this?"
He asked at last, with no small reluctance.
What lay before him was a hobby knife at the absolute cheapest price point, coated with a magic stone. No—through Dr. Lee's eyes, it probably looked no different from a two-thousand-won utility blade from a stationery shop.
To him, it was likely something close to garbage.
Still, it stung a little, I'll admit, to have a man who was half-mad by anyone's standards looking at me like I was the crazy one.
As someone who had been in this industry, I had agonized over and handpicked the weapon that best suited the way I fought.
"I'd like you to reinforce this, please."
Dr. Lee narrowed his eyes—then burst out laughing, as if the sheer audacity had left him speechless.
"Ha! Look here, young man. Are you making fun of me?"
The mechanical arm rattled and clattered, letting out a loud, threatening racket.
"The great Na Hee-ra hands you a blank check. You could ask for an aXen battle suit straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster and it wouldn't be enough—and instead you ride all the way down here to have a toy knife sharpened?"
His anger was understandable.
After all, it was the equivalent of asking a three-star Michelin chef to boil cup ramen.
Some might even call it an insult.
"Are you saying you can't do it?"
"I'm saying it isn't worth doing! Take this thing to a neighborhood stationery store where it belongs!"
Just as Dr. Lee flapped his hand at me, waving me toward the door—
I silently opened my bag.
And peeling back the wrappings I had cradled around it like a treasure chest, I placed the 'real' item on the workbench.
Thud.
The heavy stone landed with a muffled weight.
Shrrrm—
A chilling ring echoed through the air, as if the atmosphere of the workshop itself had been lightly sliced open.
"......"
Dr. Lee's mouth, mid-tirade, dropped open and froze.
The threatening whir of the mechanical arm spun to a halt, and his eyes locked onto the magic stone.
A cool current drifting within a glow of blue light.
It was no ordinary mana. Even at a glance, Dr. Lee would have recognized it for what it was: a mineral in which a formless Concept had been made flesh.
"This is... don't tell me—"
"A magic stone carrying the concept attribute of Sharpness."
"Ha-ha...! So that's how it is."
And then Dr. Lee finally cried out in realization, in sheer wonder—before turning to look at me with eyes full of delight.
"I don't know what you were hoping to see from me, but you were testing me, weren't you! Kwa-hahaha! You absolute madman."
He said it as if the word were endearing, but it seemed a misunderstanding had taken root somewhere.
"Which is why I'd like you to grind this magic stone into that knife."
"..."
Dr. Lee's movements froze solid all over again.
***
A spasm ran along the corner of Dr. Lee's mouth.
He'd lived his whole life hearing people call him insane. And yet, staring at the man in the pressed suit before him, he found himself thinking he might actually be the more well-adjusted of the two.
Embedding a concept-carrying magic stone—one so rare you might lay eyes on one once in a lifetime, if ever—into something that was essentially a dime-store utility blade?
Hunters were full of lunatics, sure, but still...
Those eyes behind the mask. That casual, offhand manner.
One look and you can tell. This guy's not right in the head.
And yet... maybe it was precisely because Dr. Lee himself wasn't quite normal either.
This is interesting.
In place of anger, a strange curiosity welled up in him—a sense of transgression, like committing something forbidden. An illicit thrill at the thought of smearing a national-treasure-grade treasure onto a bargain-bin cutter.
Objects like this were the stuff of national research projects—development rooms at major corporations collaborating with the Hunter Administration Bureau, industry luminaries putting their heads together for years.
And he was going to process it here, in this grimy, oil-stenched black market basement, with this pathetic knife as the medium...
"...Heh heh."
If the Bureau ever found out, they'd foam at the mouth and collapse on the spot.
He couldn't help himself.
A material that existed nowhere else in the world. And a commission so deranged it amounted to asking him to turn a priceless artifact into dung.
Something he had never done, never even imagined doing—and a strange hunger stirred awake inside him.
"Alright. Let's see what we can do."
It wasn't as though Dr. Lee was taking a loss, anyway—he'd get the experience of working a concept magic stone for the first time in his life, and collect payment from Na Hee-ra on top of it.
With a determined expression, he cranked the dial on his mechanical arm, rough and impatient.
Clack! Clunk-clack!
A laser cutter for precision work slid out from the arm's tip, and mana-control units around the workbench hummed to life, unfolding with a low, resonant drone.
"I take no responsibility for the outcome. Don't come crying to me later."
The work began at once.
The heart of the process was simple to state: guide the flow of the concept sealed in the magic stone without damaging it, and lay it over the blade of the knife.
Weeeeeeeng—!
A red high-output laser slashed through the air.
At a precisely calculated angle, in the instant it was about to kiss the magic stone's surface—
Shhhk—!
"...!"
Dr. Lee recoiled backward in shock.
It didn't connect...
Before the laser could even touch the stone, it struck 'something' in empty space and refracted, lancing off to hit something entirely unrelated.
KA-ji-jik.
The steel plate sitting beside the workbench slid apart in utter silence, sliced clean through like tofu.
The refraction had been the result of the crazed Sharpness grazing the passing beam—a blade that cut even light itself.
"Damn it all..."
Thick veins bulged on Dr. Lee's forehead. Cold sweat traced a line down his grease-stained cheeks.
Physical tools, energy-based tools—it made no difference. Everything that approached got severed.
He couldn't even fix the stone in place. No—the mana particles were raging wild on their own, so there was no approach angle to be had at all.
This equipment... this facility... it's not enough, is it?
The difficulty was enough to make him click his tongue.
Back in his days at the Administration Bureau's research lab, he would have used a 'mana suppression field' generator to forcibly smother the magic stone's power before working on it.
But this place had no equipment like that.
Nowhere did—outside of that place. Which meant he had to rely on nothing but his own senses and skill, on the equipment built into his arm...
No openings at all.
He was grinding his teeth, adjusting his lens, desperately hunting for the smallest gap—
"The angle."
when the voice of the lunatic who'd placed this deranged commission cut in out of nowhere.
"What?"
"You need to enter at 13.5 degrees, not 15. Don't try to bore straight through—follow the grain of the Sharpness as it bleeds out of the stone."
A scoff escaped him before he could stop it.
The man sounded like he was just throwing out words because he was impatient. If it were really that simple, the government would have long since made craft technique a national industry and poured money into it.
"Ha, so now this kid is lecturing Confucius at Confucius's own front door? The machines can't even measure it precisely, and you're telling me you can see the grain with the naked eye—"
"Three millimeters down, on the right. The mana density there just thinned. Aim for it."
"...You little—!"
What the hell would you know? The curse climbed all the way up his throat—
"Now!"
and at the man's bark, before he even realized what he was doing, reflexively, his mechanical arm darted to the exact point the man had called.
...What the hell did I just do. I can't even see that.
He stabbed the laser in beneath the coordinates the man had marked.
And in that instant—
Sssshhh—
"...!"
Dr. Lee's eyes went round as saucers.
The magic stone that had been raging in every direction, rejecting all approach only moments ago, was now accepting the laser without resistance.
As if someone had opened the floodgates of a dam.
The blade of light that had sliced through even steel now seeped gently into the stone's core.
"How... how is this—"
"Don't stop. You need to sync it with the cutter blade now. Mana circuit junction—spiral from the left."
The instructions kept coming, astonishingly precise.
"...You think I wouldn't know something that basic?"
Grumbling all the while—but at some point, Dr. Lee was already following those instructions perfectly.
"Hold there for half a second. Once the internal pressure stabilizes, then inject."
It was staggering.
It felt like standing in a hopelessly sealed maze while someone peeled back the fog before his eyes and showed him nothing but the correct answer.
The sparking eruptions settled. The trembling resonance faded away.
What on earth was it that those eyes were seeing?
In that stillness, which bordered on awe, he had no idea how much time had passed.
By the time he noticed, only a deep, tranquil silence hung over the workshop.
"It... worked."
On the workbench, a single object pulsed with a soft blue glow.
The difference in appearance from the original cutter knife was negligible.
But its presence belonged to another dimension entirely.
By Administration Bureau standards, a national treasure. On the black market, top-class. And beyond that...
One look and it made your skin prickle, as if you might be cut. This was no mere weapon.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lee was wiping his face dry with one hand, staring blankly at the client he'd taken for a lunatic.
"Just who... are you?"
Without a single instrument, guided purely by the naked eye, the man had assisted this procedure to near perfection.
But instead of answering, the man picked up the finished piece from the workbench.
Click-clack.
Maybe it was the familiar grip. As the blade ratcheted up with a soft scraping sound, an air-splitting pressure rolled across the room—as if even the dust in the air was being cleaved apart.
Shwick—
Then he drew it in a light, casual arc across the magic-stone-coated plate armor he'd brought the stone in with.
TAAANG—!
Like a heated blade slicing through butter. No—beyond that. As if it split before the edge even touched it.
Only after the man had silently halved the plate armor into two clean pieces did he finally speak, sounding satisfied.
"You've been in this business long enough to know better than to ask a man his hidden identity."
"...Ah. Haha."
Fair point.
But the feeling of completing something insane together with him—and that eye of his was the real deal. That was why, even accepting all of it, he'd been curious.
Of course, it was also true that he couldn't very well press further.
Dr. Lee's gaze drifted to the cleanly severed plate armor resting on the bench.
A man who would wield things like that, from now on.
If he moved in the shadows, he'd stay there. If he moved in the light, Dr. Lee would be reading about it on the news.
Really, he thought, there may never have been any need to ask at all.