Chapter 66

That was just how the Dwarves were as a race.

They were the kind who completely ignored the painstaking theories and laws built up through the endless toil and wandering of countless scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.

All they had was a sense.

For example, if they thought, ‘I want to make something like this!’, they didn’t particularly need blueprints.

They would just gather whatever materials were lying around, hammer away as they pleased, and somehow cobble together something that looked plausible. They were, by nature, a race of born back-alley tinkerers.

‘No wonder Miyu would hate them.’

Miyu was also a genius blessed by heaven, but her knowledge was always based on human theory.

Even the flashes of brilliance that sometimes lit up in her head could be unraveled into teachable knowledge that anyone else could learn.

But Dwarves were different.

As expected from beings of [Arcane], they would mash together incomprehensible crafting methods, inexplicable materials, and a slapdash mindset, like rolling eraser crumbs in their palms, and somehow end up with a proper result.

That “impossible to explain” quality must have felt like a massive betrayal to Miyu, who had long held an admiration for the blacksmith race of Dwarves.

Who knew how much time had passed?

When we first met them, Miyu couldn’t even open her mouth in front of the Dwarves, like a rabbit cornered by a predator. But now, she was outright raising her voice and bickering furiously with one.

“Like! I! Said! Foreign substances must never get into the electric circuitss!”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying! Which is why I’m washing it with water right now!”

“If water touches it, it’ll break!”

“If it’s dirty, you have to wash it! Isn’t that common sense? Huh!? Don’t tell me city humans are a filthy, uncivilized race without the concept of washing?!”

“A sub-race that lives in a junkyard is calling us dirty?! Ugh! I can’t talk to you at all!”

“You’re the one who’s not making sense! Bah, hand it over!”

“Ah!”

The Dwarf suddenly snatched the LCD pad from Miyu’s hands. He dunked it into a jar of water in the corner of the workshop and began scrubbing it with a loud splish splosh.

It was an old-generation all-in-one computer Miyu had been carrying for a long time, smudged with her fingerprints, scratched up, and admittedly a bit dirty.

In a way, it was her “beloved electronic device(?)”, but now she had not only been robbed of it, she was about to see it forcibly drowned.

Miyu screamed in near hysteria.

“Uwaaaah! No! Nooo!”

“Hohoho! There, there. Doesn’t it feel refreshing to wash? Hoho!”

“It’s not even waterproof! What’s refreshing about this?! It’s refreshing in the sense that all the data’s about to be wiped out!”

It was almost like watching a fight between a caveman and a modern human—though the funny part was the result.

“No…! My paaad…!”

“Quit whining and just try turning it on!”

“You scrubbed it like crazy, of course the water seeped in and broke it! You can’t even find this model anymore… Wait, huh?”

Amazingly, even though the pad was soaked through, it worked perfectly fine. And that wasn’t all.

“W-why did the performance improve?! And why is there some mysterious OS installed just from dunking it in water?!”

“Hoho, maybe after a good wash, your friend wanted to make a fresh start too!”

“Uwaaaah! This makes no sense!”

And so, their argument continued.

The topics varied.

For example, whether a cracked LED display should be fixed by hitting it with a hammer.

“I’m telling you, this is a delicate device! Hitting it with a hammer won’t fix it, it’ll just break it more!”

“Nonsense! Everyone knows machines get fixed when you hit them! What kind of engineer doesn’t know that?!”

“Grrr! You’re the last person I want to hear that from!”

“Heeyah!”

“Aaah! I told you not to—wha—why is it actually fixed?!”

Or what tools and materials were needed for making special alloys.

“No, you’ll only get junk metal out of a furnace like this! Who in this day and age uses a furnace you have to blow into with your mouth?! And why are you putting in beard hair as an impurity?!”

“You know nothing! Beards are prickly, are they not?”

“And so?!”

“That’s why you get nice, rough-textured iron! Hmph, how long must I demonstrate this to such a rookie?!”

“What kind of nonsense logic is that?! Fine, prove it!”

“Heeeyah! Heeeyah!”

“!?!?!? Uwaaaah! What kind of trickery does it take to produce superalloy crystals that only form above 1800°C in a furnace like this?!”

Or engines that were theoretically impossible.

“Do you understand?! By the laws of thermodynamics, perpetual motion—‘infinite power’—is impossible! Even if it looks like the nanomachines in the body output way more power than the input energy, that’s actually because—!”

“Ho, would you believe it if I showed you?”

“W-what did you say?!”

“Look! Cats always land on their feet! And bread with jam always lands jam-side down. So if you attach the two together like this…!”

“Forget that ridiculous theory—where did you even get a cat?! I thought they were extinct?!”

“Never mind the details, just watch! Heeeyah!”

“Why the hell is this actually working?!”

Well, to cut to the chase—

The Dwarf won.

There’s a saying that a man who’s read a lot of books will lose an argument to a man who’s never read any.

This was a little different, but in the end, Miyu, armed with logic and theory, was defeated by the Dwarf’s illogic and back-alley reasoning.

Eventually, Miyu trudged back to me, shoulders slumped, after losing her verbal battle. Her eyes were more hollow than I’d ever seen, and the blue glow in them had taken on a gloomy aura.

“Aaron…”

“What is it?”

“Please erase that fake engineer from existence… That thing should be wiped off the face of the Earth… no, from the entire universe…”

“Endure it.”

Miyu, you lost. Just admit it.

Of course, she would never admit defeat, but the fact that she’d come to me twice now to request an assassination was already a loss by decision.

“So, what are you going to do about the report?”

“…”

Miyu couldn’t answer.

There was no way she could say she’d been disappointed because the Dwarves turned out to be far bigger back-alley tinkerers than she’d imagined, especially after dragging me all the way here for her request.

“I… I’ll figure something out somehow…”

“Alright.”

Even knowing she was lying, I decided to let it slide.

And unlike Miyu’s assumption, the real reason I came here wasn’t only to help her write her midterm report.

Sure, her report assignment had been the trigger, but the moment I heard the word “Dwarf,” a plan for “that time” had come to mind.

I’d already enjoyed the rare sight of Miyu genuinely angry, so it felt about time to get to the main point.

Being in a place like this for too long didn’t exactly feel pleasant.

“Dwarf.”

“Hmm? Why are you calling me?”

“I want to commission you to make a module.”

The moment I said that—

Hans and Miyu, the two engineers, showed completely opposite reactions.

“What’s that? Puhahahaha! So even the Crown Prince of the city has recognized my genius, huh!”

“W-why though? A-Aaron, d-don’t tell me you don’t need me anymore? Do you feel like my skills are losing to that back-alley race?!”

Miyu seemed genuinely shocked.

It was the first time I’d seen such an expression, and it was amusing enough that I considered teasing her a little more—but I decided against it. She looked like she might actually cry, so I quietly told her the truth instead.

[Miyu.]

[Yeess…?]

[Check the things the Dwarf made earlier. They should be just about to reach their expiration date.]

[Expiration dateee…?]

Making sure the Dwarf couldn’t hear, I used voice chat to tell her.

Tilting her head in confusion, she cautiously began checking the items Hans had worked on one by one.

And then she was horrified.

[W-what happened?!]

First was Miyu’s old electronic pad.

After being washed in water, it had seemed to run better for a while, but when she pressed the power button now, it stuttered a bit before shutting off entirely.

Next was the cracked LED display.

She’d thought it had been fixed with a hammer, but for some reason, the screen had shrunk.

It had gone beyond “rollable” or “foldable” into a completely deformed shape, now utterly useless as a display.

And the special alloy?

The one made in the primitive furnace was already rusting red, crumbling at the slightest touch.

Lastly, the perpetual motion engine.

Needless to say, the engine that had been running so enthusiastically had already stopped. For reasons unknown, the jam-covered bread had turned into castella, and the cat was vomiting repeatedly on the floor, probably from motion sickness.

[W-what exactly happened…?]

Seeing her confusion, I smirked and replied—

[That’s just how Dwarf-made stuff is.]

Yes, most products that went through a Dwarf’s hands had a screw loose somewhere.

At first, they’d seem to have decent performance or effects, but before long, they would either break down or turn into something strange.

To be precise, this tended to happen in areas with low mana concentration—but in villages where Dwarves lived, their back-alley products would supposedly work just fine.

[There was even a company that once tried to use Dwarves for mass production.]

Naturally, the result was failure.

The Dwarven manufacturing method was so eccentric that the production line couldn’t be stabilized, and the final products were so unsuitable for city use that the project was scrapped entirely.

[So no, I don’t think your skills are inferior to a Dwarf’s in the slightest. If anything, I’d prefer to avoid their products whenever possible.]

[T-then why the commission…?]

[Just watch quietly.]

After that short exchange, I turned back to Hans.

“To be precise, I want you to ‘replicate’ a module. Can you do it?”

“Replicate? You mean make an identical copy?”

“That’s right.”

I temporarily removed one module from the socket at the back of my neck and held it out for the Dwarf to see.

“I want you to replicate these. Appearance, performance, every spec exactly the same.”

“Oh-ho…”

The Dwarf looked at the module I presented with interest.

But when he reached out to touch it, I stopped him first.

[Notification]

Lv.5 Arcane Module [Cloud Spider] has been unequipped.

Lv.5 Arcane Module [Techblade] has been unequipped.

Do you know how expensive these are?

If he touched them and broke them, it would be a disaster.

I wasn’t joking—seriously.

“I’d like you to replicate it without touching it.”

“Then I can’t show my full performance!”

“That’s fine. All I want is something that can temporarily produce a similar effect.”

As long as it was indistinguishable at a glance, undetectable by external measurement, and couldn’t be recognized as a fake during initial use, that would be enough.

“Hm? So you’re telling me to make a knockoff of these?”

“That’s right. I’ll pay well.”

“I refuse! I am the greatest engineer among Dwarves, a genius! How could I make something that isn’t an ‘original,’ but a ‘knockoff’?!”

“Can’t do it?”

That one line was enough.

To provoke a Dwarf’s pride.

“…What did you just say?”

“I asked if you can’t do it.”

“Of course I can!”

Hans pounded his chest with a thump! and growled—

“I’ll show you! Just how much of a genius among geniuses, a Dwarf among Dwarves I am!”

And then, getting excited on his own, Hans dashed into the inner workshop.

I wondered if he’d really be okay without even keeping a reference sample, but as I watched him quietly, Miyu seemed to realize something and asked me—

“Aaron… this commission is…”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Miyu already knew my plan.

The reason I’d asked the Dwarf to replicate the two strongest modules I had—

[Cloud Spider] and [Techblade]—

“…is to prepare for defeating ‘me.’”

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