"Arnar, you sure you’re not embezzling Valorant Guild funds?" I asked as the valet brought the Apollo around and handed Arnar the keys.
The car came with a built-in limiter, allowing it to operate like a regular vehicle when driven by anyone who wasn’t a trained and licensed driver.
Arnar rolled her eyes and said, "Get in."
The interior of the car was unlike anything I had ever seen on the internet or in my alternate self’s memories. Honestly, I didn’t think even my mother’s womb could have been this comfortable.
The entire cabin was lined with a high-tier formation array that ensured the safety and comfort of both the driver and passenger at all times. A person could drive as recklessly as they wanted and still walk away without so much as a scratch.
"The trick is to buy the car under a company’s name. When you get bored of it, you sell the company, effectively transferring the car to the new owner. This one had already changed hands four times before my guild bought it, so we only paid 218 million denars, along with the company, of course," Arnar explained.
She revved the engine, and the deep growl immediately filled the cabin before she sent the Apollo shooting out of the club driveway and onto the road.
"You rich people really know how to make the law work for you," I commented.
Inside the cabin, I felt like I was watching a first-person video of someone driving a supersonic car. The speed outside and the atmosphere inside simply didn’t match. If I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t even know I was sitting in a car hurtling at supersonic speeds.
With Arnar’s stats, I wasn’t worried about her psychomotor skills. It was the sheer disconnect between the speed and the smoothness of the ride that made me uneasy. It would take me a while to get used to this.
"Said the man who is selling a brand-new, fully loaded Gargoyle Heavy Tiltrotor aircraft for a third of its market price," Arnar remarked.
She slowed the car and said, "We’re here."
"Already?!"
I exclaimed, only to notice that we were slowing down for a red light. Arnar let out a soft chuckle.
"Just kidding. Though we are halfway there."
"What’s the deal with those documents you showed Mille on your phone? She thinks she hid her expression well, but I caught it. For a moment, she looked like she’d won a multi-billion-denar lottery."
Arnar asked as she waited at the red light.
I looked at Arnar as a subtle smile formed on my lips. It seemed she finally couldn’t resist.
Back in the club’s exclusive lounge, I had noticed that Arnar agreed to my terms not because she wanted the Hindinberg’s Gargoyle Heavy Tiltrotor at cost price, but because she wanted to befriend me. She had worked with Mille long enough to know that she wasn’t the type to lose her composure so easily. Whatever she had seen in those documents had to be massive to catch her off guard like that.
That observation had turned her amusement toward me into curiosity, enough for her to gamble on befriending me despite the risk of getting at odds with the Reinfields family again.
"It’s privileged information. I could tell you, but what’s in it for me?"
"I would offer to introduce you to the cute interns of my guild, but you clearly don’t need any help in that department. Lucas’s junior associate was head over heels for you," Arnar said, stepping on the gas as the light turned green. "You have money and you’re decent with women. I’m beat. You tell me what you want."
"Ahem, how about I just give it to you as a start to our friendship?"
I knew it was corny, but bear with me. Every woman was a wide-eyed girl once, and some part of it remained somewhere in her heart. Arnar was no different.
"See, you really don’t need any help in that department. If not for your above-average looks, who knows how many women’s hearts you would have broken?"
Arnar remarked with a teasing grin.
I shook my head and warned her playfully, "Hey, watch it. You’re looking at Hindenberg’s exclusive domestic retail partner for the United Archipelagos of Audora, handling their select niche portfolio of high-end weaponry and tactical vehicles."
"What?"
Arnar’s eyes widened.
The information was too much to process while driving, so she immediately switched lanes and pulled the car over to process what she had just heard.
The United Archipelagos of Audora’s Foreign Retail Tax was notoriously brutal. To sell their goods at a reasonable tax rate, foreign corporations were legally required to form a 51/49 majority joint venture with a domestic retail partner.
Hindinberg Ltd. had insanely high standards for its products, and those standards extended to its partners as well, even though the products were essentially manufactured by Hindinberg and only underwent minor assembly and testing at the domestic partner’s warehouse.
For years, Hindinberg Ltd. had failed to find a single domestic firm in the UAA that met its stringent criteria. As a result, anyone desperate enough to import their high-tier machinery had no choice but to swallow the ruinous Foreign Retail Tax.
Recognizing this economic bottleneck, I dug into the system’s consignment records with Hindinberg Ltd. To my amazement, the system had leveraged this exact regulatory loophole to deliver my loot at cost, completely bypassing the state’s punitive taxes.
However, there was a critical catch.
The contract explicitly stated that I had to establish an operational workshop and hire staff who met Hindinberg’s exacting standards within the next sixty days, or the entire distribution agreement would be rendered null and void.
The only silver lining?
Hindinberg’s Gargoyle Heavy Tiltrotor and the other restricted weapons arriving as samples, along with a dedicated team of engineers to assemble the units and train our domestic staff in their select high-end weaponry portfolio, were already fully paid for. Even if the contract collapsed in two months, those samples would still belong to me, with the obvious exception of the engineering team.
I was an ambitious man, but I knew my limits. There was simply no way I could accomplish in the next sixty days what corporate giants had failed to pull off for years. So I had zero illusions about the joint venture actually succeeding.
However, that didn’t stop me from waving the opportunity around and making a few rock-solid connections while the card was still in my hand.