Steampunk Era: Mad Abield

Laiyale looked at the full-length mirror in the clothing store, where a middle-aged man with a stubble appeared somewhat weary, his pale face adorned with a bright red, bulbous nose. "Sir, you really ought to drink less," the half-human old lady functioning as the store manager advised while she draped a shawl over his ’daughter,’ appraising Laiyale’s profile in the mirror.

"Sorry, Madam, sometimes a man can’t help himself," Laiyale let out a sigh as he said this—he and his companion Clover had been dodging in and out of the shadows over the past week, barely managing to escape Naples and reach Rongma.

The whole affair had started half a month earlier when Laiyale got involved with ancient beings who gave him a mission to retrieve an ancient part from a ruin in the Eastern Wasteland.

It was a difficult task, but the ancient beings said that if Laiyale could accomplish it, he would be rewarded, and Laiyale asked if he could get a new body for Clover, since she was frail and sickly, and he had always wanted to help her back at the orphanage.

However, until the orphanage was breached by bandits, he had been unable to provide any real help; the only thing he could do was escape with Clover using his newly awakened Transcendent power.

With no real talent, Laiyale could only wander from place to place with Clover, fleeing from the Eastern Kingdom to the north of Farole, then following the railway southwards to Naples.

Keen to help Clover, to let her regain her health, Laiyale took on the mission, then turned his attention to the automatons in an ancient building in Naples.

Although his Illusion Technique was ineffective against machinery, Laiyale had learned from a young age how to dismantle ancient machines—the orphanage would gather mechs from ancient battlefields, dismantle them, and then sell the parts to different organizations.

Laiyale was sure that there were indeed parts he needed on the mechanical bodies in the ancient buildings of Naples.