Chapter 44: The Tin Knight and The City of Clockwork (3)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 44: The Tin Knight and The City of Clockwork (3)
The funds were extorted from the alchemist Franka, who treated her winged monkeys like children.
The payment was received for looting the labyrinth's treasures and selling them to the Halder Company. (Or, to be precise, a portion of it.)
Dorothea’s financial resources were quite plentiful, so the transaction proceeded without a hitch.
“Alright, first I need to examine the interior, so have the doll lie down on that workbench. The sword and shield are dangerous, so put them down to the side.”
At the man’s words, Dorothea looked at you with a ‘You heard him, right?’ expression, and you silently lay down on the workbench.
“Oho?”
The man’s eyebrows shot up as he expressed his admiration.
“Its intelligence is quite high, isn’t it? It can move based on situational judgment alone, without a specific command from its master?”
“High intelligence? What a joke. He’s just an idiot.”
[The ‘Tin Knight’ protests that your assessment is too harsh!]
You voiced your complaint, but Dorothea didn’t even pretend to listen.
You felt wronged.
You were just living faithfully to your desires of the moment!
“Hmm, I wonder how the circuits are configured. This might take some time, so if your legs get tired, feel free to sit down somewhere nearby. No, please, have a seat.”
She’d noticed it for a while now, but the man’s manner of speaking was rather inconsistent.
He maintained the minimum level of courtesy expected of a shop owner, but it felt like his true self would pop out every now and then.
Dorothea scanned her surroundings but didn’t take a seat.
It seemed there were no chairs to her liking.
The man’s light humming and the clanking sounds of him disassembling you echoed in harmony.
The situation was similar to getting a check-up at a hospital, but with no sense of touch or pain, there was little tension or realism.
“Hah… The technique itself is certainly old-fashioned, but the level of craftsmanship is no joke. This wasn't made by one person. Several top-tier engineers from different fields must have worked on this. If I’d shown this to that dead old geezer, his eyes would have popped out of his head.”
“Can you fix it?”
“For now, the internal mana circuits seem doable with the materials and equipment I have. More importantly, this needs to be fixed immediately. To use a building as an analogy, it's like a water pipe that's covered in countless scratches and cracks. It's leaking even when it's just sitting there, and if you increase the water pressure, the cracks will get bigger too. If you'd left it like this, it would have gone ‘BOOM!’ and exploded sooner or later.”
[The ‘Tin Knight’ shudders, a chill running down his spine!]
You were terrified, but the repairman couldn't hear you, and Dorothea seemed completely uninterested. You felt so alone.
“Can’t the self-repair function fix that?”
“Hmm. In human terms, the self-repair function works on things like skin, muscles, and bones. This part is more like an internal organ.”
“What about the other things? Can you increase its mana capacity, or make it so I can supply mana remotely, like with other magic dolls?”
“Well. The mana tank is usually a jewel. The one this doll has is already ridiculously large, you know? It must have worn down and shrunk over the years, but if it’s still this big, I can’t imagine how large it was in its prime. Anyway, it’ll be hard to find anything bigger. Money is one issue, but jewels like that are usually used as accessories by the nobility, so there’s simply none on the market for this kind of use.”
“And remote supply?”
“For that, it’d be faster to just build a new one. Well, if you really want to do it, rather than messing with the existing body, it’d be better to just transfer the artificial soul from this doll to a new one…”
The repairman’s voice trailed off.
His mouth, which had been chattering away cheerfully, clamped shut, and his eyes widened.
Questioning.
Shock.
Denial.
And then, fury.
Exuding a murderous aura, the repairman abandoned his work and strode toward Dorothea.
You tried to get up, but having been disassembled, you couldn’t move an inch.
The man’s hand shot out toward Dorothea’s neck, then stopped abruptly.
It seemed he had intended to grab her by the collar, but the design of Dorothea’s clothes made that a rather difficult task.
The man’s outstretched hand hovered awkwardly for a moment before he lowered it toward the ground with an irritated motion.
“Hey, what is that? You obviously didn’t make it, so where the hell did you get something like that?”
Dorothea narrowed her eyes.
Even with a large man looming over her and threatening her, she showed no sign of fear.
“That’s no way to treat a customer. And what does that have to do with the repairs?”
“Cut the crap and just answer my question!”
“Explain why first.”
“Wow, you really…!”
The man’s fists trembled, but unable to bring himself to swing them, he roared instead.
“—That’s not an artificial soul, it’s a human soul! And one made by shoving a living person right inside!”
Dorothea’s eyes flew open.
Just as her lips parted to say something, the sound of a creaking hinge filled the air as someone else entered the workshop.
“Brother! I told you to lock the reception desk door when I’m in the workshop! What if someone steals something from the… shop…?”
A girl with brown hair, a shade redder than the repairman’s but otherwise similar in appearance, stopped mid-sentence as she took in the scene.
That is, the scene of the shop owner looming over Dorothea, his face contorted in a scowl as he yelled at her.
Unlike the man, who had gone through the stages of questioning, shock, denial, and fury, the girl’s emotional progression was much simpler.
1. Bafflement.
2. Okay, I get it. Die.
“You… you bastard—!!”
Whipping out a monkey wrench from her hip, the girl charged at the repairman with terrifying force.
“Wait, hey, that’s not—Gack! Gaaack!”
Sputtering blood. A rising scream.
The bloody action scene unfolding in a workshop in the back alleys of the City of Clockwork finally came to an end about ten minutes later.
*
“I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I knew my brother was an idiot, but I never thought he was a piece of trash who thinks with his lower body instead of his brain! I’ll beat some sense into him, I swear, so please, just this once, forgive him!”
As the girl bowed her head repeatedly in apology, Dorothea wore an indescribable expression.
Generally, a perpetrator’s family member saying, ‘I’ll teach them a lesson, so please let it go this one time,’ was known to have a reliability rating that scraped the bottom of the barrel… but well.
Twitch, twitch.
Watching the repairman writhing like a caterpillar on the floor, it seemed that, for this girl at least, the words ‘beat some sense into him’ held a fair amount of credibility.
In fact, from Dorothea’s perspective, it looked like he had been beaten a little too much.
It would be a problem for Dorothea, too, if the only decent repairman she’d managed to find disappeared.
“…That’s enough. I wasn’t harmed, and thanks to this, I learned something.”
As she said the words ‘learned something,’ Dorothea glanced at the Tin Knight.
A human soul?
If asked whether she had ever suspected it, the answer was, of course, yes.
The overly dramatic emotional expressions, the high intelligence—all of it was proof of the Tin Knight’s extraordinary nature.
But Dorothea had never seriously considered the possibility.
The very act of inserting a human soul into a doll places a considerable burden on the soul itself. If decades, or even centuries, have passed in that state, there’s no way it could have held up. The soul would have degraded and perished, or even if it did endure, its mind couldn’t possibly be intact… hmm.
Dorothea flinched at her own thought.
That’s right. Come to think of it, the Tin Knight’s mind wasn’t the least bit intact!
No one with a sane mind would act like that. I see, so that’s what it was.
Dorothea let out a low groan.
Thinking of it that way, it seemed to fit.
Above all, now that she had directly witnessed the soul, which was usually hidden beneath the armor in its vessel, she couldn’t deny it.
Dorothea looked at the Tin Knight with a slightly pitying gaze.
She had just thought he was a weirdo, but it turned out he was a patient.
From now on, she should be a little more considerate…
[The ‘Tin Knight’ points out that for someone to stare so intently at his exposed insides, you're surprisingly lewd!]
Clang!!
Dorothea’s staff mercilessly struck the face of the Tin Knight lying on the workbench.
“Eek!”
The girl next to her jumped in surprise.
She seemed to have mistaken it as Dorothea venting her anger toward her brother, but at that moment, Dorothea couldn’t care less.
“For now, finish whatever repairs you can as quickly as possible. And by any chance, do you do blacksmithing here too?”
“Uh, ah, yes! But we’re not on the level of a professional weaponsmith. It’s just enough to supplement our workshop jobs.”
“Then cover the head of my staff with some metal. So I can use it as a blunt weapon.”
The girl swallowed the thought, ‘But it looks like you're already using it as a blunt weapon just fine.’
To have provoked such a terrifying customer.
She was now certain that her damn brother had well and truly lost his mind.
*
The man’s name was Smith.
The woman’s name was Sinc.
Smith, his face covered in bandages and patches, apologized to Dorothea with an awkward expression.
“Uh, sorry about that. I saw what a piece of trash he’d been and just lost my temper.”
“An apology accompanied by an excuse is the worst kind, brother.”
“You’re not one to talk, you started beating him without even listening to the full story—no, it’s nothing.”
Sinc’s eyes blazed with fire, while Smith averted his gaze, breaking out in a cold sweat.
Dorothea asked the pair of repairman siblings, whose bond was so… profound (?).
“Is the work all finished?”
“The internal mana circuits are. It won’t leak every time you draw out mana like before. However, it was impossible to replicate all the circuits, so the situation might be a little different from when this doll was first made.”
“Well, you know how there are two types of blood vessels? Thick, sturdy ones and thin, fragile ones. Most magic dolls only have the thick kind, but this doll… this knight, had the thin ones as well. They’re all severed and blocked now, with only traces remaining.”
Sinc answered, and Smith added a supplementary explanation.
“You can’t replicate those fine, detailed circuits?”
“We can’t.”
“We can’t right now.”
This time, their answers were similar yet different.
Smith frowned.
“Hey, if you can’t, you can’t. What’s with this ‘right now’? How pathetic.”
Sinc grumbled in rebuttal.
“We could totally do it if we were in Grandpa’s old workshop instead of this back-alley hovel!”
“And what good would that do? Ahem. It would be best for you to pretend you didn’t hear that. Yes, that would be best.”
Smith continued his explanation with a sullen look.
“In the first place, there’s no use for such detailed circuits. The reason the latest magic dolls only have thick mana circuits is because that’s all they need.”
“So it’s a useless organ?”
“That’s what happens when you build complex machines. You think something is necessary, but later find out it runs just fine without it. Or conversely, you think something is unnecessary, but it turns out to be essential. That’s how you make improvements. Well, in the case of that knight, he was made so long ago, I suspect they were just trying to imitate the human body as closely as possible.”
Dorothea crossed her arms, lost in thought.
…This feels like a pretty poor outcome compared to what I was hoping for.
Remote supply was impossible without getting a whole new doll.
Increasing mana capacity was impossible without a jewel to act as a tank.
The only success was improving the mana circuits, and even that was left with some lingering uncertainty.
Dorothea stared at the two of them.
From their talk about their grandfather’s workshop, they clearly had some kind of backstory, but given the atmosphere, it didn’t seem like they would share it easily.
Even if they did, it was doubtful whether it was the kind of problem Dorothea could solve.
“So if I can just find a suitable jewel, the capacity problem can be fixed, right?”
“That’s right, but it’s not just about size.”
“I can at least tell whether it can hold a lot of mana or not. I’ll bring one if I see something suitable.”
After bidding them farewell, Dorothea opened the shop’s main door and stepped outside.
Just as she was about to walk away, a duo who looked as if they were about to enter the shop came into her view.
One was a girl who appeared to be around Dorothea’s age.
She had shining blonde hair and blue eyes, and wore a white dress that didn’t suit the dark alleyway.
Protecting her was a knight clad in matching pure white armor.
No.
A magic doll.
[The ‘Tin Knight’s’ eyes gleam at the appearance of a Player 2 color scheme!]
Black and white.
A dull metallic sheen that brought battlefields to mind, and a brilliant metallic sheen that looked fit for a parade at the center of a crowd.
Dorothea realized something.
It was an insight born not of logic, but of intuition.
And it seemed the girl before her had reached the same conclusion.
The girl smiled and offered a greeting.
“I am Gale Elilaz, apprentice to the Witch of the North. Might you be… a witch?”