A Wild Scheme (1)
“Huh?! Really?!”
Seo Hyun sprang to her feet, her eyes wide with sheer disbelief.
“Yes, that’s right. Mind you, I’m literally just a grease monkey tinkering with Mechanical Engineering, not some legendary blacksmith, so I can’t guarantee what kind of weapon will come out of it.”
“Good heavens, even so, that’s incredible! That means we’ll actually hold a weapon in our hands capable of putting down those monsters immune to physical attacks!”
Her fists clenched tight, her voice quivering with exhilaration. For someone who had been trapped on the desperate brink with no hope in sight, suddenly seeing a path forward made her unbridled joy entirely natural.
“So, with that in mind, I’ve cooked up a pretty wild plan to rescue your sister. Care to hear it?”
“I’m on board no matter what! Even if you told me to leap into a sea of fire, Ido, I’d gladly take the lead, so please, tell me!”
“I wouldn’t dream of giving such a gruesome order. All right, listen closely.”
I leaned in close over the dining table and began whispering the details of the crazy stunt we were about to pull.
“M-My goodness… How in the world did you even come up with something like that?”
“Well? Gets your blood pumping more than you expected, doesn’t it?”
“…It certainly looks like our best shot at pulling this off. Is that why you want to forge weapons out of those cores?”
“Pretty much. Though I won’t know for sure until I start hammering away. In any case, I’ll go get some work done as planned!”
While Seo Hyun bustled around the living room packing clothes and gathering the gear needed for our mission, I carried the portable workbench I’d retrieved from the truck into my room.
“First, let’s take stock of the materials I’ve got.”
I inverted my pant pockets, tumbling the murky, darkly gleaming black cores onto the workbench. Over the course of staking my life against the Abyss species, I had slain four of them in total—and rolling across the surface were exactly four cores.
“One core per Abyss species. A hundred percent drop rate so far.”
To find a way to process them, I waved my hand through the air, summoning the translucent blue system window. Flipping past the topic tabs of the Abyss Gallery, I cautiously tapped the Mechanics Board—a space only visible to my eyes. Recklessly searching for forbidden words like Cthulhu had triggered that miserable penalty last time, so I played it safe this go-around, entering only the keyword ‘Abyss species.’
Tapping on the virtual keyboard, I drafted an inquiry.
I managed to take down something called an Abyss species, and it seems to be around Twilight-grade? The drop is called a Twilight-grade Core. Does anyone know what this is? How do you process and use it?
After submitting the post, I waited briefly until an alert pinged with a familiar handle.
“A seriously foul god?”
I choked on a breath, stunned by the sheer cosmic horror filtering across the forum. What kind of nameless, bastard alien god crawls down onto our Earth, devours people, and plunges everything into this nightmare?
“If that thing ever showed up in front of me, I’d grab it by the collar and drive a railroad spike right between its eyes!”
Fury flared unchecked within me toward the entity that had ripped away our everyday lives. Suppressing the boiling wrath, my trembling hands clattered against the virtual keys once more.
A heavy silence descended over the board as MarriedToMachines apparently set to work drafting a massive write-up. I sat there biting my lip, anxiously awaiting the single sliver of salvation he might offer.
Ping!
With a sharp chime, the system window flashed brilliantly.
The data flooded the screen like a cascading waterfall, containing knowledge so vast, alien, and bizarre that my mind struggled to take it all in at once.
“Ugh! There’s so much text my eyes are about to pop out.”
Boiled down to the basics, these fragments of that deranged god served as cosmic scavengers, gnawing away at dimensions. As I scrolled through the documentation, the frown on my brow deepened. There was a strict hierarchy even among these fragments, and the cores I held belonged to the lowest tier imaginable: the Twilight-grade.
“Still, the silver lining is that anything crafted from fragments of a given rank can at least exert lethal interference against monsters of that same rank, right?”
In other words, forging weapons out of these Twilight-grade cores would allow me to thoroughly dismantle those reeking shadow-beasts that tried to tear up my truck last night.
“The real question is, how the hell do I carve and shape something this hard?”
Reaching the final lines of the document, the core principle of processing dawned on me, and I slapped my knee in realization.
“Yes! Awesome! The processing method is way simpler than I thought?!”
It turned out I could work the material by applying the exact same magnitude of force used to fell the beast in the first place. As for its application, all I had to do was create a medium through which the core-forged components made contact with the surface of an Abyss species.
Just like the power I used to convert mana into light, I could heat the core to hone an edge or shave it down into ammunition. The parts treated with the processed core would then deal fatal damage to the creatures—behaving much like an ore that reacts exclusively to its own kind.
What would count…? Ah, matchsticks?
“I definitely saw some stashed away in the living room.”
With that, I had secured a wealth of valuable resources from the machine-loving vet. Now that I grasped the fundamentals, it was time to dive straight into fabrication.
“In that case, if I dial the range and refractive index of the laser pointer to the absolute limit, I should be able to treat it like an industrial laser cutter capable of slicing through steel plates, carving the core with precision.”
Detailed schematics and processing workflows began interlocking in my mind like madly spinning gears. Naturally, with my current knowledge of Mechanical Engineering, I couldn’t forge some legendary sword out of high fantasy. All my hands and this makeshift workbench could produce right now were rounds for the Tacker Gun, awls, and mechanical tools like spanners.
“So what if it’s not a flashy longsword?”
Clamping a core securely onto the bench, a mad grin spread across my lips.
“If action movies taught me anything, there’s no better conversation piece than power tools, right?”
The time had come to show this ruined world that on a blood-soaked battlefield, humble industrial tools could become the most dependable, vicious weapons of all.
Without hesitation, I overhauled the laser pointer and began shearing into the core’s surface with lethal precision.
Sssssssss—!
Burning mana boiled up through my body, surging through my fingertips and channeling directly into the laser cutter. Crimson sparks erupted violently from the face of the black core.
“A little more… The edge needs to be even sharper!”
Sweat drenched my clothes until the fabric clung tightly to my skin, but I didn’t even notice. I threw myself into the process like a man possessed, pouring every scrap of my focus and mana into the fabrication. Even if my fingers split and blistered from the heat, I had to finish these weapons before marching right into the monsters’ den.
Clang! Clack!
How long had passed? The deafening whir of machinery that filled the room suddenly ground to a halt.
“Haah! Haha! Done… It’s done—!!”
My triumphant roar shattered the quiet, piercing right through the closed door and echoing through the living room. Startled by the commotion, Seo Hyun hurried over, cracking the door open to peek in with concern written across her face.
“Ido? What’s the matter? Are you finished with your work?”
Pushing the protective goggles up on my sweat-slicked face, I shot her a cocky, confident grin.
“Ah! Kept you waiting, didn’t I? Finished way faster than I expected, though.”
“That’s a relief. But good heavens, what on earth were you making in here to scream like that?”
“Haha, I’ll show off the finished goods on our way to the destination.”
Before her eyes could wander, I swiftly swept the finished implements—each pulsing with an eerie aura—off the makeshift bench and into my duffel bag. Zipping it shut with a crisp pull, I met Seo Hyun’s gaze with unwavering resolve.
“All right, let’s gear up and head out. We’ve got a little sister to save.”