Chapter 2: The Eye of Omnipotence

A red light glimmered inside the machine.

Just as I was about to sit up and examine it more closely…

The door slid open.

The hospital room door opened and cut off my view.

A nurse in a white coat stood there.

Chart in hand, she came to my bedside.

“Patient, are you feeling more alert?”

I nodded blankly.

With practiced hands, she flipped my eyelids and checked my pupil reflex.

The penlight moved back and forth in front of my eyes.

“Do you know where you are?”

“…A hospital, isn’t it?”

“Your name and date of birth?”

“Baek Geonwoo. May 5, 1984.”

“Good, you’re lucid. Any dizziness or nausea?”

“Except for a little ringing in my head… I’m fine.”

She checked my blood pressure and temperature, then wrote something on the chart.

“The CT shows no signs of brain hemorrhage, but the impact was strong, so concussion symptoms will last a few days. You must not push yourself.”

After saying that, she checked the IV flow and left.

The room grew quiet again.

I turned my head to look at the infusion pump from before.

“…”

I can’t see it.

The vivid red light and the parts inside the machine were gone.

Now I could only see the old plastic casing.

Did I imagine it?

Then again, I hit my head hard enough to see things.

I smiled bitterly.

Then it happened.

Knock, knock.

The door opened again with a knock.

The moment I saw who entered, I instinctively tried to sit up.

“Chief.”

It was Department Head Song.

He held a thick document envelope.

His expression was dark and stiff.

“Don’t get up. Stay lying down.”

Song waved his hand and sat in the side chair.

He was silent for a while.

He just looked between my bandaged head and the IV line.

An awkward silence hung in the room.

“How are you feeling?”

“Just a little dizzy. Otherwise fine.”

“That’s a relief. A huge relief. Assistant Manager Jung was crying outside that it was his fault for setting the ladder wrong, so I sent him back to the company.”

“You did right. I fell because of the wind. It wasn’t Assistant Manager Jung’s fault.”

“I know.”

Song rubbed his face once and placed the envelope on the table.

Thud.

It sounded unusually loud.

“The company put some thought into this. This is a single room. The company covers everything until you’re discharged. It’ll be quiet and good.”

“…I see.”

“Thankfully you weren’t badly hurt. They said if you need workers’ compensation, they’ll handle it properly. Don’t worry about that either.”

I probably just have a simple concussion.

Rest a few days, shake it off, and return to the site.

The single room, the workers’ compensation talk, it was all just for show.

I thought that and looked at the envelope.

Song noticed, sighed deeply.

“Section Chief Baek.”

“Yes.”

“This is a voluntary retirement application.”

I expected it.

But hearing it directly had a different weight.

My heart dropped again.

“The terms are… good. No, frankly, they’re exceptional. You’ll get statutory severance, of course. On top of that, the special consolation pay is set at thirty-six months of your monthly base salary.”

Thirty-six months.

Three years of salary in a lump sum.

Add severance and it was a sum in the hundreds of millions of won.

Enough to pay off all my loans and still have plenty left, maybe even enough to aim for a small commercial space.

The company had opened its wallet with purpose.

They meant to slap me with money and send me out.

“And this is something I looked into on my own. You know Taesung Precision, our partner company? A research director position opened there.”

“…Taesung Precision?”

“Yeah. Their president said you’d be welcome. Go there, take the research director title, and live comfortably doing management. They agreed to match your salary as much as possible.”

From section chief at a big company to an executive at a partner firm.

It looked like a promotion, but it was exile.

Not developing cutting-edge tech, but managing production from drawings sent down by headquarters.

A death sentence for my life as an engineer.

“The doctor says you can be discharged after a few days. I know it’s not a major injury. But Section Chief Baek… even if you get discharged and come back, I can’t promise your position will still be there.”

“…”

“If you miss this voluntary retirement window, the next step is forced resignation. When that happens, there’s no consolation pay, nothing. You know our company’s rules.”

It was a fact.

Leave now and I’d walk out with a lump sum and an executive title.

Hold out and get marked, and I’d leave with nothing.

“In the end…”

My mouth tasted bitter.

“You’re telling me to make the decision you mentioned this morning. Take the money and quietly step away.”

Song shut his mouth.

“What good timing. Is my injury an opportunity for the company?”

“Section Chief Baek.”

“If I’d come to work fine and held my seat, pushing me out would’ve been awkward. With me lying here, it’s the perfect time to pressure me.”

My voice sank calm.

I didn’t even have the energy to get angry.

“I can work, Chief. Give me a few days and my head will be fine.”

“I know.”

Song couldn’t avoid my gaze and lowered his head.

“I’m sorry. I tried to stop it. But… the decision came from above. Ground Equipment has no future now… If we can’t cut staff this time, the whole department could be dissolved.”

Ground Equipment has no future.

Those words stuck in my chest.

The technologies I’d clung to with my life were now, in their eyes, worthless scrap metal.

No, bad inventory that needed to be cleared out fast.

“Give me a little more time to think.”

“All right. Rest well. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Song left the room like he was fleeing.

I leaned my head weakly against the bed headboard.

It was too sweet to refuse and too miserable to accept.

The amount was exactly like the dilemma of my life.

What should I do?

After Song left, I stayed awake all night.

Money or pride.

Turning over a question with no answer in a hospital bed made my stomach churn.

“I want to be discharged.”

The next morning, I told the doctor on rounds.

The doctor jumped and tried to stop me, but couldn’t break my stubbornness.

Before I checked out, my attending doctor quietly called me over.

“The MRI reading came out a little late, so I’m telling you now…”

The doctor pointed at my brain image on the monitor.

A black-and-white image of tangled blood vessels.

“Here, near the temporal lobe, there’s a tiny vascular malformation. There’s also a small swollen area.”

“…Is it serious?”

“No. The immediate risk of bleeding is low. It’s unclear whether it came from the impact or was congenital… For now, we should watch it. If your vision blurs or you see anything strange, come in right away.”

See anything strange.

I smiled bitterly and left the exam room.

I remembered the red light I’d seen in the infusion pump yesterday, but that wasn’t important now.

Coming home, only silence greeted me.

An empty studio apartment.

On the table, a cup noodle container left from days ago had dried and shriveled.

I dropped onto the bed.

The envelope Song left was still in my bag.

Thirty-six months of consolation pay.

If I accepted it, my fifteen years as an engineer would end here.

But if I refused?

I might be thrown out empty-handed.

Still no answer.

I spent another day worrying like that.

The next morning, my eyes opened out of habit.

Without thinking, I followed my fifteen-year routine, washed up, and opened the closet.

Whether it turned out well or not, I had to go to work.

That thought filled my head.

And in that situation, I worried.

Should I wear a suit, or work clothes?

But my hands went to the gray work jacket anyway.

I’d worn it for fifteen years.

It felt like part of my body now.

Today might be my last day going to work, so I wanted to leave in clothes that meant something to me.

“…Let’s go.”

I left the front door.

My place was a twenty-minute walk from the company.

I walked those twenty minutes, passed the main gate, and entered the Ground Equipment Division building.

The lobby air was heavy.

As I mixed in with employees arriving for work, I felt stinging stares.

Everyone seemed to glance at me and whisper.

‘Ruthless bastard. Crawled back already to get more money.’

‘Look at him, perfectly fine. It was fake illness after all.’

I thought I heard those voices.

I bit my lip hard and got in the elevator.

Third floor.

Where our task force office was.

My footsteps echoed unusually loud the whole way down the hall.

To get to the office, I had to pass a long corridor.

At the end of that corridor was a space enclosed by glass walls.

The so-called graveyard.

A materials storage room where the composite armor prototypes our task force failed to develop over the past three years were piled up.

Traces of twenty billion won in research funding gone up in smoke.

Looking at it only hurt my stomach, so normally I’d turn my head and walk past.

But this time.

“…Huh?”

I had to stop in front of it.

Beyond the glass, strange colors rose like heat haze over armor plates from different production periods.

Some were clumped in deep red.

Others cut off like paint that had stopped flowing.

“What… is this?”

I walked toward the glass like I was possessed.

Up close, I saw more.

The armor plates did not merely glow.

They seemed to emit light from some consistent cause.

The one in the front row.

The TP-A model, discarded last year after it broke during testing.

Its left corner was burning an especially deep red.

Like a blocked blood vessel, energy pooled there as if about to burst.

That’s…

That model cracked from the left corner every time during impact tests.

We thought it was a design mistake and responded by increasing the overall thickness.

In the end, it only got heavier and was judged a failure.

But now I understood.

Thickness was not the problem.

The bolt hole position… was cutting through the principal stress line?

The red clump was abnormally concentrated stress.

We had drilled a bolt hole right in the middle of the path where force should flow under impact.

The energy had nowhere to go, swirled around the hole, and tore the material apart.

Beside the red mass, I saw a faint blue line.

It was like it was telling me the answer.

Move it just a little to the right.

Drill just slightly off to the side.

Then the bolt wouldn’t be swept up in the stress wave.

The impact load could flow smoothly along the blue line.

No need to tear up the structure.

Just changing one hole position would dramatically raise this armor’s durability.

I swallowed hard and shifted my gaze.

This time, the TP-B model made two years ago.

It had been discarded after delamination from a bonding defect.

Broken yellow lines appeared across its surface.

Overlapping phantom images filled the gaps.

“The adhesive pattern… was the diagonal layout the fatal mistake?”

The diagonal pattern was fast for production but had a fatal weakness.

It couldn’t withstand the horizontal shear force generated on impact.

Like firewood splitting along the grain, the crack ran all the way along the adhesive line in an instant.

It should have been a grid.

The yellow lines would weave tightly in a lattice, like the character for a well.

The adhesive should have been applied in crossing horizontal and vertical lines.

Then the adhesive lines themselves would become a huge breakwater.

When impact came, cracks couldn’t spread to the next cell and would be trapped.

It would block the path for force to escape and make the whole material hold together as one piece.

During the research, we did countless tests and buried ourselves in endless paperwork and simulations to solve problems.

A problem we couldn’t even imagine then was now clear before my eyes.

If that was real…

If I wasn’t hallucinating and instead got some kind of ability when I hurt my head…?

I took my hand off the glass and walked on.

My heart pounded like it would burst, but I kept my face neutral.

The door slid open.

The moment I opened the task force office door and stepped in.

“…”

As if by agreement, the office noise vanished all at once.

The employees who had been gathered in small groups drinking coffee or meeting all turned their eyes to me.

Their faces showed surprise and discomfort, with some confusion mixed in.

I didn’t need to see how I looked in their eyes.

Department Head Song broke the suffocating silence.

“Hah…”

Song, who had been sitting at his desk, let out a deep sigh and stood.

He gestured at the employees around him.

“Everyone get back to work. Seen enough?”

Only then did the employees shrink back and look away.

Song approached me with a stiff face.

“Section Chief Baek. Come see me for a moment.”

Song tried to take my arm and head to the break room at the end of the hall.

He probably meant it was awkward to talk inside the office.

But I stood there and didn’t move.

“Chief.”

“Let’s talk outside. Why are you here? I told you to rest. Are you really going to make this uncomfortable for both of us?”

His voice mixed awkwardness with regret.

A reprimand: take the money and leave quietly.

Why come and make things precarious?

Normally I’d have bowed under that pressure, but not now.

“Let me check just one thing.”

“What?”

“Where is TP-C now?”

Song’s brow furrowed at the word.

“Why bring that up now? We put it in the measurement room for the accident investigation. But why are you looking for it?”

“There’s something I need to check.”

“What can you check in your condition? And what difference does seeing it now make? The project is already on the line…”

“It makes a difference.”

I cut him off and spoke firmly.

“I just need to check one thing. I’ll explain why after I see it.”

“…Hah, good grief.”

Song pressed his forehead as if dumbfounded.

His glare was sharp, but I met it without backing down.

A moment later, Song roughly swept his hair back and turned.

“Follow me.”

He walked ahead down the corridor.

Across from the office was Measurement Room 1, accessible only by security card.

It was a controlled area for detailed analysis of prototypes involved in accidents and defective products.

Beep.

Song tapped his tag, and the heavy steel door opened.

A smell of disinfectant and cool air rushed out.

Inside, a black object sat alone on the inspection table.

The one that had knocked me to the floor two days ago.

The one our department’s life depended on.

TP-C was there.

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