After bidding farewell to Fujiwara-san and returning to his tent in the Tracen Academy flowerbeds, Mizuno wasted no time pulling out his Training Equipment: From Building Treadmills to Building Children's Toys manual and a pile of spare parts, diving straight into a special modification project for his wheelchair.
A standard hand-cranked wheelchair really was slow—if you could outpace a normal pedestrian, you were already thanking your lucky stars. But nobody ever said Mizuno couldn't stick a nuclear engine on it!
Just like most racers tinker with their cars for speed, grip, and cornering, Mizuno could trick out his wheelchair into a racing wheelchair too. As luck would have it, Training Equipment: From Building Treadmills to Building Children's Toys included examples of toy four-wheel drive car mods. All Mizuno had to do was study them, make a few mental leaps, and adapt the spirit of toy customization to his own racing chair.
Goal was set, now it's time for action!
Mizuno sat on the ground, tearing apart his longtime companion over and over without a hint of regret, then reassembling it to get familiar with its guts, before carefully installing all the extra components for a racing upgrade.
Even with Symboli Rudolf and Tokai Teio buzzing around him all day, pestering him for attention—those little hands practically pawing at him—Mizuno ignored them completely, pouring his full focus into assembling the wheelchair.
From morning to night, the tent surrounded by sunflowers rang with the clang of metalwork and the sizzle of welding. There was hardly a moment's rest.
After a day and a night of tireless work, Mizuno's first-generation racing wheelchair was officially complete!
Sporting a pair of dark circles, Mizuno inspected the "supercar" he'd built with his own hands, nodding with satisfaction.
All the add-ons made it bulkier than before, and it definitely looked a lot more high-tech.
Of course, Mizuno couldn't actually get his hands on a nuclear engine, so he settled for mounting a nitro engine on the back, with a few bottles of liquid nitrogen stashed under the seat for fuel.
To keep himself from flying out when braking at high speeds, he thoughtfully added a safety belt.
But the key modification—the one that actually let Mizuno be a driver—was the mini-desk with a keyboard welded right onto the front of the chair.
Most of the keys had been trimmed away, leaving just the arrow keys on the right and the Shift and Ctrl keys on the left.
The arrow keys controlled forward, back, and turning. Shift was for braking. Ctrl was the throttle—press it, and the nitro engine would kick in, letting the wheelchair accelerate to double normal speed!
This keyboard-controlled setup perfectly solved the problem of his disabled legs not being able to press a gas pedal!
Nitro boost or keyboard movement—the inspiration for all this came from an old game Mizuno used to play called QQ Speed.
Mizuno was an old pro at QQ Speed, totally at home with keyboard racing controls. Now he'd turned his wheelchair into the same kind of machine; all that changed was switching from third-person to first-person view—he ought to be able to call forth his old neighborhood racing god skills.
Too bad real-life drifting wasn't so easy. That was all about the driver's skill—you couldn't just hit a single key and make it happen. Otherwise, he could be sliding everywhere with a Shift key alone, but instead, he had to settle for making it a brake.
Of course, to see if it really worked, Mizuno would need to take it for a real spin.
"Heave-ho." Mizuno climbed excitedly into the chair, caressing the keyboard with a soft smile.
"Since you're the first generation, I'll call you Feiyan One."
Sure, a name like that might sound like it was destined to crash and burn, but at least it was a ground vehicle—he probably wouldn't end up wrecked beyond recognition.
Dash! Go!
Mizuno gripped the keyboard, rocketing out of the tent in his wheelchair, spinning wild laps around the open ground in the flowerbeds to test out its performance.
After some time getting a feel for it, Mizuno basically had the handling of his new ride down.
But the space was so cramped that he didn't dare try the nitro boost or practice drifting—one wrong move and he'd be plowing straight into someone's prized flowers, and that would be a whole mess to clean up.
How did he know? Well...
Just now, he'd gotten carried away, lost in the rush, and wasn't watching the road—one careless moment and the front wheel jammed on a dirt ridge, slamming him to a halt.
And since he'd forgotten to wear the safety belt, the inertia flung Mizuno straight out of the chair, sending him flying into the field, flattening a patch of sunflowers that had just been watered.
Looking up at Air Groove, who was standing there with a watering can and an unmistakably sour expression, Mizuno could only scratch the back of his head in embarrassment as he sprawled at her feet.
"Heh... can we make peace?"