Chapter Fifty-Seven - Next Day

  Work the next day passed in a flash. We headed out to Boston Two, got to the courier's office, then took off and got to work.

  The day passed relatively quickly too. I rode in a side-car while Sharp worked on her Body stat by peddling the bike manually. We didn't push too hard, of course. If we were going on a gig the next day, we didn't need her to have sore muscles the entire time.

  By the time early evening rolled around Sharp was pretty tired, but the bus-ride back home was relatively quiet, and I watched out for her while she took a nap.

  When we got home, Sharp fed the cats, gave everyone the attention they deserved, and then crashed on the couch for an hour or so.

  Obviously, I didn't let her sleep the day away, even if she was tired from work. That'd be wasteful.

  She wasn't even twenty. She could burn that candle from both ends. When she hit forty or so, then yeah, she'd need that nap, but until then?

  "Yes yes, you're very tired," I said as sarcastically as I could. "Now drink your energy drink and let's get started."

  It was for her own good. Besides, if she slept too much it would throw off her sleep schedule later. It was far too easy for a self-employed person to lose track of when it was a reasonable time to sleep.

  We started with stretches, which I was unsurprisingly pretty good at. A younger body, combined with the natural flexibility of a cat, meant I could twist myself around in a knot.

  Sharp couldn't even do the splits, but we worked on it a little anyway, and it wasn't like I couldn't practice to be even more flexible. There were few situations where more flexibility wasn't desirable or useful, or at the very least rather neutral.

  Once that was done, we started training reflexes. I had an old device to train boxing with. It was a sort of heavy but soft ball on a tether with a device on the ground that made it bounce in unpredictable ways.

  Sharp tried punching it while avoiding the ball when it bounced back.

  It was very amusing to see her eat the ball in the face when she dodged too slowly.

  As for my own Reflex training, that came in the far cheaper option of some old cat toys. Did I feel rather silly, doing somersaults and kicking at a ball on a long spring with colourful feathers? Yes. Did I leave me breathing hard after a few minutes and feeling like I was far too clumsy for my own good? Also yes.

  It was all worth it, in the end.

  Reflex Has Levelled Up!

  Reflex 2 > 3

  "Level up!" I said cheerfully.

  "Oh! Me too!" Sharp said. "Reflex three! That's... not a big milestone, but it's still nice!"

  "It's a good thing. Every step in the right direction is a good one."

  Our progress had slowed down somewhat recently. Not that badly, but it was still somewhat noticeable. In the first few days when I was turned into a cat, I think I had at least one skill level every day, if not two. Now it was closer to one level up every other day.

  Nothing to scoff at. At this rate, in two or three months Sharp and I will have accumulated a half dozen more perks, and they were all exceptionally powerful.

  Which actually worried me a little.

  Sure, in the short term, for someone given this kind of system, the progression rate might be incredible if they were throwing themselves into trouble headlong. Heaps of growth in a short time, accelerated by danger and risk.

  But the problem with risk and danger was that it was like playing Russian roulette. That first click was a one in six, but the next one? And the one after? It wasn't long before death was all but guaranteed.

  So what happened to people with a similar system as what we had? I knew they existed. The world was filled with edgerunners and mages and people with exceptional talents that managed to break through the barrier of mediocrity imposed by corporatism.

  Given a year, how many perks could we unlock with minimal risk?

  Had there been others like Sharp who took the slow, careful route to incredible power until they had a strong base to jump off of?

  That evening, after Sharp and I showered and got ready for bed, after Sharp laid down and immediately konked out for the night, I found myself tip-tapping my paws on my tablet. Searching the web was a pain, and I was growing to hate autocomplete and the stupid, fiddly little correction thing that tried to fix my grammar but only made it worse.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The first few searches weren't specific enough, and then the search engine started to run out of sponsored ads and products it could push onto me. Eventually, I started to run into some interesting results.

  I tapped a link, ears twitching as I scanned over the page. It was a forum post, some seven years old, but I wasn't going to let recency bias cloud my judgement. The information I was looking for didn't factor in time as much as some other things did.

  The information was compiled by a forum user that seemed to have an obsessive interest in people with systems like Sharp's. Their ramblings gave me the impression that this person might not be entirely... normal, in their perspective, but their obsession was paying dividends for me now, so I wasn't going to complain.

  Over the course of three years of meticulous research, they'd compiled information on seven individuals who may or may not have similar systems to what Sharp had. Two were difficult to confirm, with the only proof being a few statements they made. One was... a lot harder to verify than even that. They were an individual in western China that came out of nowhere, displayed several unique and bizarre abilities, and who were chased down by their government. They put up one hell of a fight, and over the course of a week, displayed more and more strange abilities before they eventually disappeared.

  If they were like Sharp, then that was chalking up one more on the 'burn fast and hard' tally.

  Of the others, there were two that might have still been alive. The nominal CEO of a military-tech company based out of the west coast, and a European woman in charge of a biotech corporation who was a doctor before she started to gain strange skills at an alarming rate.

  Well, alarming in the grand scheme of things. One or two strange abilities per year.

  Interestingly, if I assumed that that was based on perks gained then... well, it was very possible that she'd gained a lot more than that, but that several perks weren't so easily visible.

  If that was the case, then the real question wasn't just who had systems like Sharp's, but how many of them were out there, quietly accumulating power without drawing attention?

  I flicked my tail, deep in thought. The forum user, who went by the handle GhostCompiler, had tried to contact some of these individuals. Unsurprisingly, they hadn't responded. Either they were smart enough to keep their heads down, or they were too far removed from normal society to care about an internet rando trying to catalogue them.

  Still, there were patterns. The ones who burned bright, who made big moves and used their abilities publicly, rarely lasted more than a few weeks. The ones who made it past the one-year mark? They either disappeared into corporate or government structures or built their own protective empires.

  I glanced over at Sharp's silently snoring form. We'd made it past the week mark.

  Did that mean that we were destined to go the other way?

  My own ambitions had always been rather mundane. Sure, I had a lot of money... for a single individual. I could afford to live a very comfortable life. Good insurance, a paid-off home, money in case of disasters, a nice vacation every year and multiple pets.

  I was living a nice, cushy life.

  Sharp's perks and abilities could let her do the same.

  But would she want to stop there? Would I be able to keep up with her once she set her ambitions even higher?

  Sharp and I were growing stronger, yes, but we were still small-time. If we kept progressing at a steady rate, how long until we hit the point where we were noticed? And if we were noticed, would we be able to survive it?

  I wasn't na?ve enough to think that corporations, governments, or even just other edgerunners wouldn't jump at the chance to get their hands on someone like Sharp. Or me, for that matter.

  There were more posts, mostly speculation, but a few mentioned other rumored system users. I took some notes, saving names, locations, anything that might be useful. We needed to be careful, but that didn't mean we couldn't be prepared.

  ***