Watson, Little China.
Wearing a set of home loungewear, Kai sat lazily on the balcony with a cup of warm water in hand, basking in the gentle and comfortable morning sunlight.
With no desire to work and an active field assignment as an excuse, he had not gone back to report to Arasaka Tower for two straight days.
Rare paid slacking was hard-earned free time. There was no point in going back just to sit in an office. Counterintel would keep running just fine without him.
As deputy director, he spent far more time out on field work than sitting behind a desk.
Before being transferred back to Arasaka Tower, the department had managed perfectly well without him.
Kai was very clear about his place inside Arasaka.
At the end of the day, he was just a salaried worker.
If he really wanted to put a finer point on it, then at most he was just a salaried worker with a little influence and a little authority.
Arasaka Tower was not going to stop turning just because one person was absent.
Even holding the deputy director post in two departments did not make him the top person in either one. There was no need to work himself to death for the whole department or chase performance targets and KPIs.
"You can't get too immersed in the role. Arasaka belongs to the Arasakas. What does that have to do with me, Kai?"
Kai took a sip of warm water. The heat spread through his chest and lungs, easing a fair amount of the exhaustion that had built up over the last few days.
In truth, in Arasaka Tower, and even in all of Night City, there were very few people who could control their working hours as freely as Kai could.
Corps did not keep idle employees around. Every year, the major giants of Night City rolled out new policies to motivate their workers into giving more.
This year, Arasaka had introduced a new Twenty-Year Loyalty Program. Any employee who remained with the company for twenty years would gain access to Arasaka's newest cyberware technology.
Militech managed to combine product promotion and employee incentives in one move. Employees buying Militech-made weapons could get a fifty percent discount, though the newest models were not included.
Biotechnica publicly announced that its annual paid leave had been increased to six days, and countless corpos were already deeply grateful for it.
Night Corp, meanwhile, had reduced mandatory work hours to only eighty per week, which was practically considered humane by local standards.
Most corporate employees lived in a state much closer to Carter Smith, formerly an Arasaka Grade G4 employee.
Busy all day, every day, to the point where even going home for a birthday required picking the right time slot.
Kai knew perfectly well that he had not reached his current position by warming a seat in an Arasaka Tower office.
Now that he had climbed into M-rank management, his mentality had become much calmer.
As for Special Ops, he still had not gone over to report in.
That department was still one big mess, and it was far too early to take over now.
A new official always had three fires to light, and the first one should be to suppress the culture in Special Ops a bit.
Since Special Ops was the department Susan had built her career on, Kai could guess with his toes that those corpos were just waiting to throw attitude in his face.
The department had already sent him multiple invitations asking him to report to his office there.
Kai ignored every one of them.
Arthur had contacted him too, though that had only been about routine work matters he could easily pass down to his subordinates.
Little Michiko had been quiet these past two days. No personal guards had come to invite him, and she had not proactively contacted him to ask about progress either.
As for retaliating against Militech, he had a rough direction in mind, though nothing was certain yet.
Militech had been using retired soldiers for cyberware experiments, leading to cyberpsychos going out of control.
That line could be dug into, but it still was not sharp enough. He needed to wait for a better moment.
After thinking it over for a while, Kai pushed the company nonsense out of his mind and pulled up the system panel instead.
[Life Points: 1]
[Fusion Ability: Indomitable (Rare)]
Looking at the system panel that only he could see, Kai's interest rose again.
When he had first seen the system panel, it really had felt like an unexpected gift.
Life Simulation, talent extraction, Life Point enhancement, every aspect of it had felt like an all-new version.
But after a few days, he had gradually begun noticing some of its issues.
In his previous life, he had gone down the netrunner build route, stacking attributes through kills and jobs, growing stronger day after day.
Fully loaded legendary cyberware across his whole body, paired with maxed stats, had basically made him the kind of monster who could get anyone "pregnant" just by glaring at them.
Life Simulation was completely different.
It allowed him to grow stronger without cyberware, while keeping the original body intact.
It completely eliminated the risks of cyberpsychosis, electronic intrusion, AI brain-burn attacks, cyberware overheating, and other side effects.
The only flaw was that its growth rate was limited.
There were quite a few potential simulation targets, but until the timing was right, the simulation options stayed gray and unusable, meaning he could not start a new Life Simulation or gain new talents.
His first talent, Indomitable, had only come from changing David's life after the car crash and then simulating the result.
At first, Kai had not looked too deeply into Indomitable. Improved stamina recovery had not seemed especially remarkable.
But after those night runs with Lucy the other day, he realized Indomitable was not nearly that simple.
The reason was obvious.
After meeting at the agreed place, the two of them had started their nightly run.
Kai quickly found that it was extremely hard to match Lucy's pace. Without sports-enhancement cyberware, he had to sprint with everything he had just to barely keep up.
During the run, Kai could only sustain an all-out sprint for a few dozen seconds before his lungs and heart needed time to recover.
So their "night run" had basically turned into Lucy leading in front while Kai desperately chased after her from behind.
Sprint for a while.
Recover for a while.
Then sprint again with everything he had.
Repeating that cycle over and over, he had barely managed to finish the full seawall route.
Even though his stamina already surpassed that of ordinary people by a large margin, and even though his sprint time was impressive, he still fell short compared to Lucy.
He remembered it clearly.
When Lucy reached the end of the route, she had simply lit a cigarette and waited there in silence by the seawall.
By the time Kai arrived, breathing hard and completely exhausted, she had casually asked him one question.
"Can't do it anymore?"
Kai had immediately pulled up the system panel and spent one Life Point to upgrade the talent Indomitable.
From [Indomitable (Fine)] to [Indomitable (Rare)]
Even though he already understood Indomitable, the sharp power of its rare-tier version had still amazed him.
As far as Kai was concerned, recovery was the foundation of combat.
Rare-tier Indomitable not only rapidly restored physical endurance and strengthened the function of the heart, lungs, and internal organs.
More terrifying still, it continuously nourished and repaired the muscle fibers torn during intense exercise, essentially giving him a twenty-four-hour passive health-and-stamina regeneration buff.
For the first time in a long while, he felt surging power flooding through his muscles, skin, and bones.
The blood flowing through his veins began to feel as though it were boiling.
One by one, his muscle cells greedily absorbed the oxygen they pulled in.
His exhausted muscles quickly began regaining vitality.
The painful burning sensation in his chest gradually faded and vanished along with his breathing.
Even after sprinting for dozens of kilometers, he had recovered most of his strength in just a few breaths.
During the second night run the two of them did together, Kai felt far more at ease. He could maintain high-speed running for much longer, and for most of the run he was able to stay right on Lucy's pace.
At first, Lucy had deliberately slowed down a little.
But once she realized Kai could fully keep up, she stopped slowing down or resting midway.
Kai realized the talent's effect did not stop there. If he kept strengthening and upgrading it later, it would likely produce even more powerful effects.
Just as Kai was thinking all this over, the smart assistant notified him that Jack Wells was calling.
(End of Chapter)
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