1.
A week later, in the evening.
We were just lazing around in the room.
“How’s it going?”
“Ugh...!”
To be exact, we weren’t just playing around. The moment Silver Wolf escaped LV.0, she gained the ability to wield Ether Editing.
It was like one of those overly specific proper nouns that games always throw at you.
If you were to ask, “What the hell is that, you nerd?” this would be the answer.
By attempting Ether Editing—the manipulation of reality using a substance called ether that exists within Punk Road—miracles become possible.
Conjuring fire out of thin air, suddenly dropping a hunk of metal from above, or strengthening one's own body.
In other words, it was an ability akin to superpowers.
A miracle that turned the impossible into the possible.
At least, that’s how I described it.
It was one of Punk Road’s unique laws, a place where the line between virtuality and reality was blurred.
If you still don’t get it, here is the three-line summary:
Ether = Mana
Ether Editing = Magic
Hacker = Wizard
See? Crystal clear.
“...Why did heaven birth me and Silver Wolf in the same world?!”
“There he goes again.”
Adrian Servet.
Just how talentless was this bastard?
I was LV.9.
Silver Wolf was LV.1.
The gap wasn’t so huge as to be absurd, but it was still a significant difference. Especially when you considered that the threshold for even attempting Ether Editing was LV.10.
In other words, the fact that Silver Wolf could use Ether Editing at a mere LV.1 was what was strange.
And Adrian Servet, who was LV.9 yet couldn’t even sense ether, was an idiot.
Those two facts were settled.
“Status window...”
Ah, I’m in a bad mood. Maybe I should do a little gacha?
If I pull a five-star here, I can totally turn my life around.
[Pardon-Me-Please Coupon]
- Grade: ★☆☆☆☆
- First Effect: When you make a mistake, if you present this coupon and bow your head, the other party will briefly consider whether to forgive you. However, they will only consider it. They will not actually forgive you.
- Source: Destruction
- Note: Single-use. Use it wisely depending on the situation. The other party will not forgive you anyway.
“Son of a bitch...”
My luck had crashed straight into the basement.
I pulled a Temporal Prism, and somehow every single one of them was still one-star?
I wasn’t this unlucky even when I did gacha back in Korea!
This is rigged. There had to be some mastermind somewhere, cackling while watching me fail.
“Silver Wolf, this machine is bullying me. Hack it with Ether Editing or something...!”
“...Is that really something you should be saying to someone who can’t even make a proper metal ball right now?”
A blue metal sphere rolled across the table.
She was trying her best to edit it with a serious expression, but it didn’t seem to be going the way she wanted.
Ether Editing was a path each person walked individually.
In other words, it was often shaped by imagination.
What you usually thought about, the goals you held—everything changed depending on those factors.
So, what was our Silver Wolf aiming for?
Simple. Just think about what Silver Wolf always did.
Games.
And all kinds of creative works, too.
That metal sphere was originally supposed to become a Pac-Man wearing sunglasses, but she’d failed and was now just trying to master the basic sphere first.
Even making a ball didn’t seem easy, as it was still a little lumpy.
“...This is annoying.”
“It’s only been a week since you started. If you succeeded at everything all at once, I’d have to open the window and jump out.”
An idiot who couldn’t even sense ether.
That was me.
When I asked people around me, they all said they could at least feel that something called ether existed.
The problem for them was that they couldn’t control it.
But who was I?
I was the owner of a status window, someone who had possessed a body and regressed.
And yet I couldn’t use Ether Editing, something everyone else could at least feel and handle?
Does that make any damn sense?!
“Silver Wolf, put your clothes on.”
“We’re going out?”
“Yeah, it’s about time we went to work.”
I wasn’t going to Scrap Mountain anymore.
The efficiency just wasn’t there.
Even if we went, we’d come back empty-handed every time if we couldn’t find anything good, and even when we did, there was no steady income—profits bounced around like Bitcoin.
Only day laborers and homeless people went to Scrap Mountain to scavenge scrap.
But now, that wasn’t us anymore.
“Hey there, how’ve you been?”
“...You were alive? I hadn’t heard from you in ten days, so I thought you were dead.”
“I’m still too young to die.”
The pawnshop owner we always sold things to.
I used to work through this guy’s referral service.
“Any jobs worth taking?”
“...There’s always work.”
Fixers were just parts, too.
Parts that rolled around beneath Scrap Mountain and Neon City, holding everything up from below.
Of course, there were tiers from Class 1 to Class 9...
Even the difference between Class 9 and Class 7 was night and day.
For reference, I’d asked whether there was anything like a special title.
He said there wasn’t.
I wanted a badass title like Black Silence or Blue Reverberation too, but... if they don’t exist, what can I do?
Class 9 meant a complete beginner or a newbie.
Class 8 meant an ordinary person who had adapted to fixer work.
From Class 7 onward, you were either someone who could use Ether Editing or someone who had undergone augmentation procedures.
I was Class 8.
I had no special power and couldn’t use Ether Editing.
Just an ordinary Class 8 fixer, more or less.
As long as you had fixer credentials, you could take jobs, but you couldn’t get the good ones.
The obviously sweet, easy money jobs were all snatched up by larger offices or by offices trusted by Corporations.
We had to settle for being the subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor.
That meant taking the jobs people usually wanted to avoid.
“Give me the backlog first.”
“...As always, you won’t be picky about the requests?”
“Yeah.”
That was the reason I could save money quickly.
I had once gone to a gambling den, gambled once, got cleaned out, and then had to claw my way back up again.
“We have to do even jobs like this?!”
“We do...! You think I want to be doing this?!”
“Ughhh...!”
“Pride doesn’t put food on the table. Just do it like you always do!”
“I’ve never done work like this before...!”
Illegal dumping of industrial wastewater that looked like it would melt you on contact and kill you.
Silver Wolf made every face imaginable and hated it, but there was nothing to be done.
You needed results to earn recognition, and you needed recognition to get good jobs.
You couldn’t just start with the high-paying stuff from the beginning.
Especially since I’d taken a bit of a break from work because of Silver Wolf. There were plenty of Class 8 fixers who could replace me, so I had to build up my record from scratch again.
“Silver Wolf, that’s the guy, right?”
“...Yeah, he looks exactly like the photo.”
“The metal ball.”
“Ready.”
What Silver Wolf could make right now was a heavy, lumpy metal ball that might as well have been a rock. You might wonder what the hell you were supposed to use a metal ball like that for.
“Ah, got him.”
“Aaaagh!!!”
We used it in the old-fashioned way humanity had used for ages.
A sling—in other words, a slingshot.
Simple stone-throwing.
It was the method humans had used since ancient times to kill beasts and people larger than themselves.
How else had David killed Goliath?
A slingshot, which amplified the force several times beyond a normal thrown rock, would shatter anything the moment it hit.
“You son of a bitch...!”
“Who told you to take the job and then skip out on the fee? You’re a crazy bastard.”
We brought the hatchet down and then followed it with a clean slash.
Once a metal ball hit you squarely, it became hard to make any proper judgment.
“Die a little more nicely!”
“P-please, spare me...!”
“Die! Die! Die!”
I hacked at his neck several times with the hatchet, cutting him down.
Blood got all over my hands, sticky and wet, but I didn’t care.
Silver Wolf was frowning as she watched; she still wasn’t used to it.
It couldn't be helped.
Even I, born and raised in Korea, took a full month to get used to these rules.
It was only natural that Silver Wolf, still small and young and cute, would struggle with it.
We handled the piled-up requests in every way we could.
There was no time to be picky.
“Kahh, now that you’re here, I can finally breathe a little easier.”
“You should be grateful. There’s nobody like me.”
The toad-like pawnshop owner wiped his sweat with a handkerchief.
What I was doing was the kind of job fixers avoided, but from the broker’s point of view, it still had to be done.
Requests piling up without being resolved was bad for reputation, after all.
“Now that we’ve cleared the backlog, got anything better?”
“I’ve got a security post for you.”
“...Where?”
“Where else? There’s nothing else in Scrap Mountain besides the gambling den.”
Fuck.
That was the hardest thing to endure.
I barely managed to resist the urge to rush inside and start playing poker right then and there.
My hands kept shaking, so Silver Wolf asked me worriedly what was wrong.
“Wow...”
“See? It pays way better, right?”
The income was much better than scavenging at Scrap Mountain.
Other guys often worked in teams of four, but since it was just the two of us, we each got a much bigger share.
Silver Wolf was a ranged dealer, and I was a melee dealer.
It was a completely busted comp with nothing but damage, but honestly, it worked pretty well.
First, Silver Wolf would use the sling she prepared to throw a rock and hit the target, and then I’d rush in. After that, Silver Wolf would keep sniping from afar while I handled close combat and bought time.
Even if we got lucky and managed to bring down someone who needed to die...
There was one really bad incident.
“Shit, my teeth...! That fucking hurts!!!”
“Ah, Adrian! Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean to hit you!”
I got hit by the sling Silver Wolf threw by accident.
Wow, it hurt so much that tears almost sprang out right away.
Now I understood why people who got hit would jump around and roll on the ground.
When I got home and checked, there was a huge blue bruise.
Maybe Adrian’s body really was that sturdy.
It didn’t seem like any bones were broken, but I had to put on a pain patch and take the day off.
On top of that, Silver Wolf felt so, so sorry that she was even about to cry.
So I told her that if she was sorry, she should wear that outfit again.
“Mmm... It’s warm and the texture feels very nice. 100 points.”
“Seriously, ugh, I don’t even know anymore...”
“Even your embarrassed expression gets 120 points. You pass.”
Silver Wolf was in my arms, her face flushed so red it looked like she might explode any second.
Ah, even the pain from getting hit disappears when I look at Silver Wolf.
As expected, cute is best.
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