The road to work was completely gridlocked.

  The border between the 'Gray District,' the 7th Department's patrol zone, and 'Sky City,' the residential area for the upper class. There, the 'Archeon Magic Academy' loomed like a massive fortress wall. Spire piercing the heavens, wrapped in a faint mana barrier. It was the only sanctuary in this rainy, smog-filled city that maintained a clear, blue sky.

  “Ah, seriously. It’s always a madhouse when it's time for those academy brats to go to school.”

  Tom, gripping the steering wheel, honked the horn and grumbled. The road was a sea of luxury limousines heading to the academy, trailed by escort droids.

  In this world, magic is a privilege of the chosen. Scientific technology can be learned with money and effort. Cybernetic prosthetics and high-performance AI can be bought if you have the cash.

  But mana sensitivity is determined at birth. A lottery ticket etched into your DNA, or perhaps your soul. The students of the academy were the chosen elites born holding those winning tickets.

  “Move! I said move! My magi-tech engine is overheating!”

  A loud shout erupted from the intersection ahead. Traffic was completely paralyzed.

  “What's going on? An accident?”

  Tom pulled the car over to the shoulder. Ren stepped out and looked ahead.

  A silver sports car was stopped dead in the middle of the road. Thick black smoke billowed from the hood, and a male student in a school uniform was kicking the car and screaming.

  “You stupid piece of junk! How dare you reject my mana?”

  Blue lightning crackled from the student's fingertips. He was trying to forcefully jump-start the engine with magic. However, the machine wouldn't budge; instead, the mana clashed, causing sparks to fly. The ordinary drivers nearby, intimidated by an angry mage, didn't dare intervene and just watched nervously.

  “Let's go take a look.” Ren took the lead. “Ah, hey! That's an academy student. Messing with them is a headache.” Tom followed reluctantly, looking dismayed.

  The scene was a mess. The sports car was the latest ‘Mana Hybrid’ model. An expensive toy that combined the pinnacle of mechanical engineering with magical efficiency.

  “Student. You're blocking the road.” Ren approached and spoke in a low voice.

  The student whipped around. The academy badge pinned to his chest gleamed.

  “You think I don't know that?! What am I supposed to do when this heap of scrap metal won't listen! Call a mechanic! Now!” “We'll call a tow truck.” “A tow? Hook my car up to one of those filthy trucks? Don't make me laugh! I can fix it. The mana circuit is just a little tangled, that's all.”

  The student prepared to chant a spell again. The ambient mana vibrated unstably.

  Ren didn't hide his furrowed brow. If that idiot forcefully injected mana, the engine block would explode. Then this traffic jam would last for another two hours. That was unacceptable.

  Ren walked toward the car.

  “Don't touch it! Who do you think you are, some lowly patrol cop...!”

  The student raised a hand to stop him. But Ren, without a word, popped the hood open. Whoosh— a blast of intense heat poured out. The complex interior, a tangle of magic circuits and mechanical parts, was revealed. Just as the student had said, the mana circuit was overloaded. But the cause wasn't magical.

  ‘The cooling valve is stuck.’

  A basic mechanical failure. Mages were always like this. They obsessed over mystical power, yet neglected the principles of the machines that served as vessels for that power.

  While the student stopped chanting and stared blankly, Ren thrust his gloved hand deep inside. Scalding steam brushed against his glove, but he didn't care. He didn't touch the mana circuit. He just found the manual cooling valve stuck in the corner.

  Screeech.

  He forcefully turned the valve with his grip strength.

  Hssssssss—!

  The compressed cooling gas vented out, chilling the overheated engine. The glowing red light of the mana stone stabilized.

  “Huh?” The student's eyes widened.

  Ren slammed the hood shut.

  “Start the engine.” “W-What... What did you do...?”

  The student, with a suspicious glare, sat in the driver's seat and pressed the start button.

  Vroooom.

  Like a lie, the engine purred smoothly.

  “……Why did that work?”

  The student looked utterly baffled. Something his noble magic couldn't fix was solved by turning a single valve. He seemed reluctant to admit that a machine operated on its own principles, rather than just being an accessory for magic.

  “Get going. Traffic is backing up behind you.”

  Ren dusted off his hands. The student looked back and forth between Ren and his car, then, with a flushed face, slammed on the gas pedal.

  “H-Hmph! The mana flow was just about to normalize anyway! Don't get any wrong ideas!”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  The sports car roared off into the distance. There was no 'thank you.' Ren hadn't expected one in the first place.

  “Whoa... Ren. What did you just do? Did you use magic?” Tom, who had been watching from behind, approached. “The valve was stuck.” “The valve? You fixed that expensive car just by turning a valve?” “Machines are all the same. Expensive or cheap.”

  Ren headed back to the patrol car. The traffic was starting to clear. Tom still tilted his head in amazement, but to Ren, it was just a common occurrence.

  Mages always wanted to fly, but they often forgot that if a screw on an airplane comes loose, it crashes. That gap in their arrogance. That was the space where ordinary(?) people like Ren could breathe.

  “Get in. We have to finish patrolling our sector before lunch.” Ren said, opening the car door.

  His voice was indifferent, but Tom climbed into the passenger seat without a word of complaint. Amidst the cold city air, Ren quietly clicked back into the cogs of his daily routine.

  Lunchtime.

  Parking the patrol car in a shaded corner of the park, Ren unwrapped his sandwich. A convenience store ‘Synthetic Ham and Egg Sandwich.’ It tasted like chewing paper, but he took a bite without complaining.

  Next to him, Tom was munching on fries, still not shutting up about the incident earlier.

  “No, seriously, it's fascinating. You know how stuck-up those Academy brats are, right? You should have seen his face. Peeling out of there looking like he'd chewed on a lemon—wow. Felt like ten years of indigestion just vanished.”

  Instead of replying, Ren cracked open a can of cola.

  Psssh. The sound of bursting carbonation momentarily cut off Tom's chatter.

  “Anyway, Ren. Have you ever seriously considered learning how to tinker with machines? Like when you fixed my device the other day. Your intuition is insane.” “Not interested.” “What a waste. Such a waste. You could double your salary if you transferred to the technical division.”

  Ren turned his gaze out the window. Beyond the clearing sky, he could see the lower structures of ‘Sky City’ floating above the clouds. The blue radiance emitted by its anti-gravity engines illuminated the city below like an artificial sun.

  Double salary, a technical job. None of that meant anything.

  If Ren—or rather, his original self—so desired, he could drag that entire Sky City down to the ground. Conversely, he could turn this dreary Gray District into a city of gold.

  The laws of this world, the flow of mana, the chains of causality. Almost everything was within his grasp.

  Except for a few things. And one of them was returning home.

  Ren tossed the last piece of his sandwich into his mouth.

  Three years ago. Right after falling into this world, he had tried everything he could. He had torn space to open dimensional rifts and twisted the axis of spacetime to reverse-engineer the origin of existence. He had even interfered with the realm of concepts to reach the divine entities presiding over this world.

  The result was silence.

  Like a system message reading ‘Access Denied,’ only the path back was thoroughly blocked. It wasn't a matter of the magnitude of his power. It simply wasn't possible.

  If he couldn't leave, he had no choice but to stay. And if he was going to stay, it would be in the quietest, most inconspicuous place possible. It was contradictory, but that was the only peace he had found.

  “Huh? Hey, Ren. Look over there. What's that?” Tom suddenly yelled, pressing his face against the window.

  Ren's gaze shifted to the old fountain in the center of the park.

  Space was shimmering. Like the heat haze rising from hot asphalt, the air above the fountain twisted bizarrely, and a black fissure began to form.

  ‘Dimensional Tremor.’

  A phenomenon that occasionally occurred in areas with unstable mana concentrations. If left alone, it would turn into a ‘Gate,’ spewing out magical beasts or becoming a black hole that swallowed the surrounding space.

  “W-Wait! Isn't that the precursor to a Gate? We need to call HQ for backup...!”

  Tom frantically grabbed the radio. Ren silently opened his door and stepped out.

  “Hey! Ren! Where are you going! It's dangerous!” “Bathroom.” “What? Are you crazy! Is a bathroom break really an emergency right now?!”

  Leaving Tom's screams behind, Ren walked toward the fountain. There were a few office workers in the park eating lunch, but no one had noticed the microscopic fissure yet.

  Ren walked slowly, his hands in his pockets. The crack was growing larger, spitting purple sparks. For an ordinary mage, it would be a phenomenon they could barely stop by erecting a barrier, chanting a spell, and pouring out mana stones.

  Ren stopped in front of the fountain. Stifling a yawn, he lightly tapped a paving stone on the ground with the toe of his combat boot.

  Just one. Out of thousands of paving stones, he nudged the single one that was infinitesimally misaligned back into place.

  It was by no means a meaningless kick. It was a correction of the coordinate values supporting this space. In gaming terms, it was a patch to fix a bug in a twisted physics engine.

  Thud—.

  The ground let out a microscopic tremor. And like a lie, the black fissure that was trying to tear through the air smoothly slid shut. Like a zipper closing, the shimmering space instantly regained stability, and the flying sparks turned into water droplets and fell back into the fountain.

  “…….”

  Ren turned back around as if nothing had happened. When he returned to the car, Tom was pale, screaming into the radio.

  “R-Requesting backup! Current location: District 13, Central Park! Signs of a Gate... Huh?”

  Tom trailed off, his mouth hanging open. Looking out the window, the fountain was peacefully spouting water. Not only that, pigeons had flown down and were drinking from it.

  “W-What the? It's gone?” Tom rubbed his eyes.

  Ren, having opened the door and gotten in, fastened his seatbelt and said nonchalantly.

  “What is.” “No, seriously. I swear there was something black and swirly over there just a second ago...” “Light refraction. It can look like that when sunlight bounces off the water droplets from the fountain. You think I said I was going to the bathroom for nothing?” “I-Is that so? You're saying I just saw things? Refraction can look that scary?”

  Tom scratched his head. He doubted his own eyes, but Ren's attitude was so unbothered that he couldn't argue.

  “Drive. We're late for the afternoon patrol.” “A-Alright. Geez. Did I really hallucinate that...?”

  With a disturbed expression, Tom started the engine. The car glided back onto the road. Ren leaned his head against the seatback.

  “Put on a song.” Ren was the first to speak up for once. “Huh? What's gotten into you? You, asking for music?”

  Excited, Tom turned the radio dial. An upbeat City Pop track began to play. Ren closed his eyes. If he couldn't return to his hometown, listening to this noisy music for now wasn't so bad.

  *

  6 PM.

  Central Station during rush hour was nothing short of a hellscape. The platform, twenty stories underground, was packed with the heat and noise radiating from millions of Arc City's citizens.

  “Don't push! Stop pushing!” “Are you gonna move, or do you want a taste of my mechanical arm?”

  Commuters on their way home were more ferocious than magical beasts. Tom was being swept away by the crowd, crumpled like a piece of paper.

  “Aaargh! Ren! Save me! I'm gonna be crushed to death!”

  Reading the flow of the crowd, Ren slipped through smoothly like flowing water and stood next to a pillar. It was a miracle—the crowd subtly parted exactly where he walked, like Moses parting the Red Sea. Of course, it wasn't a miracle; it was thanks to the cognitive field of ‘Do Not Approach’ that Ren was subconsciously emitting.

  “Just hold on tight.” Ren said apathetically.

  Right then.

  WEE-WOO—! BEEEEEP—!

  A piercing alarm echoed throughout the entire station.

  [Warning. Signs of terrorism detected. Citizens, please evacuate immediately.]

  Simultaneously with the announcement, the center of the platform cleared out. People screamed and scrambled to the edges. Standing alone in the empty center was a man. He was a man completely wrapped in red mana tubes that looked like sticks of dynamite.

  “I'll kill you all! You dogs of Sky City! Feel my pain!”

  A textbook anti-social terrorist. A red light flashed on the detonator he was clutching.

  “Dammit! A suicide bomber!”

  Pale with terror, Tom drew his pistol. But his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't even aim properly.

  “Freeze! D-Drop the detonator right now!” “Stay back! Take one more step, and we're all going to hell together!”

  The terrorist screeched. The concentration in the mana tubes was crossing the critical point. With that amount, this entire underground station would collapse. Thousands of casualties, at minimum. A breaking news catastrophe had just erupted.

  ‘This just got annoying.’

  Ren swallowed a sigh.