The World Right Now (1)
"Hey! Shin Ido! You done fixing that generator over there yet? We've gotta deliver it to the client today! How many times do I have to tell you to stop dragging your feet?"
"Yes, Foreman! I'm almost finished swapping out the parts. Just need to balance the motor shaft and run a quick test, so give me ten minutes!"
"Good grief. Working with a slowpoke like you is going to burst my blood vessels one of these days. I'll die of high blood pressure before my time!"
"Sorry, sir! I'll pick up the pace and have it ready before delivery time, no matter what!"
"Tsk, you always talk a good game! Watch your fingers, kid."
Man, this is so damn boring.
Day after day, the same dull, suffocating routine dragged on. Enduring an endless barrage of scolding and petty complaints, all I could do was silently tighten greasy bolts with my monkey wrench, turning it without pause. How did my life end up like this...?
There was a time when even someone like me had a shining future, back when I was training as a competitive rifle shooter in my youth. But a tragedy straight out of a cheap melodrama derailed everything. Ten years ago, my mother and father were riding a bus that overturned in a sudden torrential downpour. Without family to support me, pursuing competitive shooting was an impossible dream. From then on, my life followed a painfully predictable track. To survive in the immediate present, abandoning my dreams and working as a factory tech—a plain old gongdori—was the only practical path.
Now, at twenty-three, my bank account always scraped rock bottom, and unpaid utility bills piled up in the mailbox like a noose tightening around my neck. In this suffocating reality of poverty, the only thing I could do was hole up in this run-down repair shop, turning like another disposable cog in the machine.
That was when it happened.
RUUUUMBLE! CRASH!
"What the hell? Hey! Shin Ido, the ground just shook like crazy, didn't it? That... that's an earthquake, isn't it...!?"
"Whoa, hold on! That shaking is insane! Foreman, we need to get outside right now!"
RUMBLE!
Before the words could fully leave my mouth, a deafening roar tore through the air as if the very sky were caving in. The entire factory structure shuddered violently, and heavy steel tools rattling on the high shelves came crashing down onto the concrete floor in a chaotic avalanche. It was a tremor far beyond anything I had ever experienced in my life. Every hair on my arms stood on end, and my stomach churned with primal dread.
...What the shit is happening?!
In that split second, one thing became crystal clear to me: dirt-poor as I was, I really didn't want to die.
SKREEEEEECH—!
"Huh? What the..."
A blinding flash seared across my vision. The workshop around me warped into grotesque, jagged distortions, and a translucent, azure holographic window coalesced sharply in midair right before my eyes.
A dimensional collision has occurred. The unknown dark dimension, The Abyss, has begun merging with Earth.
◈ Description: To prevent the extinction of humanity and promote survival, latent talents within random individuals are forcibly awakened.
◈ Trait: Mechanical Engineering has awakened and been imprinted onto your psyche.
"Aaaaargh! My head—my head!"
"Hey! Shin Ido! What... what's wrong with you all of a sudden? Did a piece of scrap hit you in the skull?!"
I collapsed onto the cold cement floor, thrashing and screaming as agony tore through my cranium. The foreman stared at me in sheer panic, his face drained of color.
"D-damn it, this is bad! Hey! Just lie there for a second! I'm going to get the others!"
The foreman sprinted out of the workshop. The moment I was left alone, the blinding migraine squeezing my brain miraculously began to recede, almost as though the system deliberately waited until no one was watching to let the awakening finish.
"Gasp... huff... Holy shit, I thought I was dead."
Once the throbbing subsided to a dull ache, I lay flat on my back, staring numbly at the corrugated iron ceiling. The chill creeping up from the concrete floor slowly cleared the fog from my senses. An incomprehensible deluge of mechanical principles and foundational engineering data had cascaded through my mind like a bursting dam. It was a mental battering I never wanted to experience again.
While I was still catching my breath, another chime rang out in my head.
◈ Benefit Granted: The Midnight Gallery has opened. All Awakened individuals are granted access.
◈ Notice: An initial allocation of 10 Points (10P) has been granted, allowing you to read and write posts. Additional points can be acquired by slaying Abyss Species that appear at night.
"...What the hell is all this?"
Time remaining until nightfall: 05:45:00
"What kind of crazy bullshit is this? Impending nightfall...? Are monsters going to show up or something? And Midnight Gallery? What is that supposed to be? Argh, my head!"
Trembling, I reached into the empty air and tentatively tapped the "Gallery" tab on the floating blue interface. A message board materialized, looking eerily similar to the online forums I browsed every night after clocking out. Thousands of new posts were flooding in with terrifying speed, threatening to paralyze my vision.
Is this weird blue system window floating in front of my eyes only visible to me? Am I the only one going crazy?
"...This is actually real."
Pushing myself up from the cold floor, I vigorously brushed the grit and grease from my work coveralls. Footsteps came pounding down the corridor, accompanied by ragged panting.
"Hey! Ido! Are you feeling any better?"
"Yes, Foreman! But honestly, I think I need to take a half-day off. My head is still ringing like a bell."
"What? Have you lost your mind? We're right up against the delivery deadline and you want a half-day? Are you kidding me right now? ...Is what I'd normally say, but the whole city is in absolute chaos after that quake. We can't get any work done today anyway. Just go. You were writhing on the floor like a dying fish earlier—are you really okay? Don't go wandering off anywhere, head straight to a clinic and get checked out, got it?"
"Understood, sir! Foreman, you should pack up and head home as soon as you can too!"
Leaving the foreman's shouts behind, I slung my beat-up backpack over one shoulder and bolted from the shop, sprinting toward the factory parking lot. If that floating countdown was telling the truth, there wasn't a second to lose.
The only place where I can hole up right now, the only place where I might survive whatever's coming... There's only one spot on Earth. The building my parents left behind!
VROOOOM!
My truck rumbled up the winding incline of a rundown hillside shantytown. It was a bleak, impoverished hillside neighborhood where urban redevelopment had ground to a halt years ago, supposedly because the terrain was too steep to be profitable. Directly across from the aging apartment complex stood a weathered commercial block that had weathered decades of neglect. One particular shopfront bore a sun-bleached sign: Ido Hardware Store. It had remained shuttered ever since my parents passed away.
"Phew... Completely rusted over. Will this thing even open?"
SCREEECH! CLANG!
Heaving with all my strength, I hauled the rusted steel shutter upward and threw myself inside.
"First things first. I need to reinforce this entrance with heavy steel plates."
I reversed my old Porter truck—my father's legacy and my only means of transportation—flush against the hardware store's doorway, wedging it in tight as a crude barricade. Inside the dim, suffocating interior, untouched for years and blanketed in thick dust, lay a chaotic wasteland of unsold scrap iron, oxidized hand tools, and mysterious mechanical components. In the past, I would have seen it as nothing more than a pile of foul-smelling junk to sell off for pocket change at a scrapyard. But viewing it now through the lens of my newly awakened Mechanical Engineering trait, the heap looked entirely different.
I closed my eyes and focused, willing the technical blueprints and structural concepts to surface in my thoughts. Faint, ghostly schematics flickered across my mental canvas, but the critical details remained frustratingly out of focus.
"Damn it... Why cram all this junk into my head if I can't even read the schematics?"
Anxiety gnawed at my ribs.
"Come on! Give me something—anything I can actually build!"
Whether in response to my desperation or sheer luck, a set of rudimentary blueprints snapped into razor-sharp focus.
"Yes! It's here! ...Let's see. Matching what I have on hand... If I take this industrial pneumatic nail tacker, boost the electric drill motor to maximum output, and couple the drive train..."
Like a man possessed, I scooped up armfuls of cold steel tools from the floor and tore them down with frantic speed. To supply the custom ammunition my newly designed weapon required, I grabbed a small pipe cutter and began slicing pieces of thick construction rebar, grinding and sharpening them down into dozens of heavy, archaic nails. Sharp metal burrs gouged my fingertips, leaving streaks of crimson along the steel, but I was so consumed by the work that I barely registered the sting. Sweat poured down my face in sheets.
The mechanical principles forced into my consciousness guided my hands with uncanny, almost magical precision. Under my touch, the clunky, utilitarian construction tool steadily morphed into a menacing, heavy-duty killing machine.
◈ A high-precision weapon forged by your own hands. Pulling the trigger ruthlessly drives five thick, heavy rebar nails per second into the target, puncturing flesh and inflicting massive hemorrhage.
Gulp.
"Holy shit. It actually worked? I made this...?"
The mechanical knowledge implanted in my head wasn't some fever dream; it produced tangible, lethal results. Inspecting the weapon's bulk and its use of sharpened rebar stakes instead of standard collated nails, it felt less like modern hardware and more like an engineering concept lifted from an alternate medieval era.
"It's like a repeating crossbow from the Middle Ages, but motorized..."
Running my thumb over the cold, heavy barrel, a wild cocktail of heart-pounding exhilaration and bone-chilling dread surged through my veins.
"Is something really coming? Do I actually have to fight? Ah, screw it, stop thinking! Just keep moving!"
My father had a saying he used to repeat like a mantra: Where there's a will, there's a way. Whenever life had pushed me into a corner, those words had been my anchor, keeping me moving forward no matter how grim things looked.
Treating every second as precious, I wrapped thick spools of barbed wire around the hardware store's ground-floor windows, welding them solidly to the iron bars. Then, tearing apart dozens of old flashlights, I wired their reflectors to a high-capacity lead-acid battery, rigging a jury-built searchlight that bathed the narrow entryway in a blinding, high-output beam.
Click.
Time marched on without the slightest regard for my frantic preparations. The crimson digits hovering in midair clicked down to their final second and froze: 00:00:00.
BONG... BONG...
The chilling, hollow chime of a massive, unseen grandfather clock echoed through the air.
"The sun... it set completely. What happens now?"
As if all light and warmth had been sheared from reality, a suffocating, pitch-black gloom smothered the landscape. A wet, foul black fog began seeping up from the cracked asphalt, crawling across the ground and devouring the world like an open grave.
Hands shaking, I summoned the Midnight Gallery once more to check on the outside world, only to realize the nightmare had already begun.
"Aaaagh! Someone help me!" A bloodcurdling scream tore through the night outside.
"What... what the hell is that?!"
Shuddering violently, I tapped open the freshest thread on the board.
Whatever you do, don't open your windows or doors! Kill every single light in your house and don't make a sound! My neighbor just stepped out into the hallway because he heard a noise, and I heard him getting torn to shreds by some monster! Holy shit, I'm throwing up, this is insane!
These horrors are happening right outside my shutter? In real time? Jesus Christ! Monsters are lurking in that black fog, hunting us down?
Swallowing dryly, I gripped the handle of my newly forged tacker gun until my knuckles turned white, holding my breath so tightly that even my racing heartbeat felt deafening.
"Wait... Didn't that post say to turn off all the lights...?"
The realization struck me like a bucket of ice water.
SKRRRRRR! CRUNCH!
The sickening sound of metal screeching against pavement echoed outside. My Porter truck, parked heavy and square across the entrance, was shoved aside like an empty cardboard box.
"Damn it! You idiot! Why did you turn on a searchlight?!"
There was no taking it back now. A bone-chilling screech scraped along the iron shutter—sharp claws raking across sheet metal, producing a shriek like nails dragged across a blackboard.
"F-fuck off!! Get the hell away from that shutter right now, or I'll blow your damn head off!"
My desperate roar did nothing to deter it. Under monstrous, impossible brute force, the lower corner of the steel shutter buckled, peeling upward like wet parchment.
"Fine. Since the light's already on, let's see your ugly face!"
Through the torn gap in the metal, a massive limb forced its way inside. It wasn't covered in beastly fur, nor did it look like human flesh; it was a writhing mass of solid, oily black shadow, an abhorrent appendage belonging to an unfathomable predator.
"Ugh! That stench!"
A foul, putrid odor of rotting corpses flooded the workshop alongside tendrils of the black fog, suffocating the air as the beast hauled its bulk inward.
"Come and get it, you bastard!"
TH-TH-TH-TH-THUMP!
Screaming with every ounce of fury and terror in my lungs, I squeezed the trigger of the modified Crude Tacker, aiming directly at the grotesque shape thrusting through the crumpled shutter.
A deafening roar shattered the room as blinding muzzle flares erupted. A relentless storm of thick rebar nails tore through the air, screaming straight into the monster's skull.
"SKREEEEEEEEEEK!"