153 Has Something to Discuss with Slider

"Hey, Mr. Kenichi Shiro, I didn't provoke you, did I? Hey, hey, hey, Mr. Kenichi Kazuya, talk some sense into Kenichi Shiro over the comms! He's injured and bleeding, yet he's still chasing me around trying to chop me up. That's obviously not right, is it? Has he gone into Cyberpsychosis or something?"

After Kenichi Kazuya went from shock to delight, from delight to alarm, and from alarm to decisively hanging up the call, Carl—who had spent quite a while being chased down and hacked at by the stone-faced Kenichi Shiro—finally got a chance to catch her breath.

It wasn't because Kenichi Shiro was tired. One of Carl's subordinates had called. Something had genuinely come up.

"Honestly, all I did was hear you say you wanted me to look after Haruko. You didn't even need to say that—I would've looked after her anyway, since Haruko and I are friends. Did you really have to treat something like that as your last words? I think it would've been cooler, Mr. Kenichi Shiro, if you wrote one of those death poems Sengoku warlords used to make. If you can't write one, I can help you. Not to brag, but I'm actually somewhat gifted when it comes to liter—"

Under Kenichi Shiro's dangerous stare, Carl shut her mouth. At his gesture, she obediently accepted the call.

Better not provoke Kenichi Shiro, who for some reason seemed to have hit male menopause. She had been legitimately sent out on company business and had no time to have heart-to-heart talks with this old man who kept acting inexplicably strange.

Reflecting that she really had become a little less respectful toward the elderly after joining the company—and that the company truly corrupted people—Carl answered the call from her subordinates, who had long since become frantic with