See more on my P@treon.
[email protected]/Dreamerlord Just replace @ with a
******
Sarah gave one last approving nod, her expression steady as always.
"Then I'll leave it to you," she said calmly.
Ethan nodded " Okay then I leave the Company in your care then, don't disturb me here"
She rolled her eyes and left the lab, steps quiet, controlled, professional—just like always.
The moment the door hissed shut behind her, Ethan turned around and stared at the far side of the lab.
Five cars sat on the polished floor like a private showroom:
Two Rolls-Royce Phantoms
—one obsidian black, one a smooth silver-grey.
A blue Lamborghini Murciélago LP640.
A pristine Porsche 911 GT3.
And a Pagani Zonda F Roadster gleaming like artwork.
All of them had come with the mansion—perks of inheriting a billionaire's estate, apparently.
Ethan walked between them slowly, hands in his pockets.
"…Now which one should I convert first?" he muttered. "Which one gets guns, armor, or some stupid sci-fi tricks?"
He stopped in front of the silver-grey Phantom.
He tapped the hood thoughtfully.
"…Yeah. You'll do nicely."
A grin crawled across his face.
"Let's make the world's first Rolls-Royce combat limousine."
"Time to change you completely," he mumbled as he stared down at it, already thinking through the reverse-engineering process—what to remove, what would end up dead weight later, what to reinforce, and how to fit the new systems inside and around everything.
The first step, he decided, wasn't adding armor or upgrading the engine. It was the weapons. A proper flagship needed a proper bite.
He turned toward the table where prototype gear was laid out. "Smart weapons first…"
His hand reached for the HJKE-11, the first smart handgun he had ever designed. A sleek, matte-black frame, reinforced internals, and a tiny glowing indicator on the side showing its onboard AI was on standby.
The HJKE-11 wasn't a normal gun.
It fired bullet-sized micro-missiles.
Yes—missiles.
Each round had its own micro-reactive engine, homing chip, and composite casing. Tuned right, the projectile hit faster, harder, and far more precisely than any traditional bullet. In raw impact damage, it matched—and sometimes surpassed—standard high-caliber rounds.
And best of all?
Within a thirty-meter range, he didn't even have to aim. Past that distance it worked like a traditional weapon—point, aim, shoot—but inside that close radius, the smart-tracking did everything for him.
"Of course I'm not going to load handgun rounds into the car," he muttered. "If anything, it'll need rifle and sniper rounds—more power, more range."
The HJKE-11 was something he had put together over the last week, and it had become his reference point for every new weapon system he wanted to build.
"Now… what's left is to make the smartlink," he murmured.
In the game, smartlinks needed a hand implant. But now that the tech was real, he didn't need to carve open his body. He could just integrate the interface into smart goggles… or even smart lenses.
"Let's go with lenses first. Plus, I can load tons of functions into them," he said, already imagining the overlays and targeting HUD.
In the Arasaka tech records he'd studied, there were countless experimental lenses—though he remembered that, later in the old timeline, those lenses were basically replaced by full eye-implant cyberware. Implants offered more functions, more precision, more everything.
But he wasn't a fan of hacking up his body or replacing organs just to get flashy tech.
So he decided: lenses now, and if he ever needed more functions, he'd just design some custom high-tech shades to boost them.
"Yeah," he said with a small grin. "That's much better than replacing my body parts."
He clapped his hands once. Time for the next big step.
"And to make things faster… let's build the Arasaka Replicator," he muttered.
The Arasaka Replicator wasn't just a 3D printer. It was the 3D printer—a full-scale fabrication system. Something that could manufacture almost anything Arasaka had blueprints for. Guns, armor, drones, cyber-tech components…
Even entire cars if he pushed it.
"Perfect for customizing my Rolls-Royce," he said, already imagining the modules and weapon mounts.
The Replicator would handle everything—from forging alloy frames to assembling microchips—down to the smallest internal components. All it needed were raw materials, power, and the coded schematics.
He moved to the center of the lab and cleared a space.
"Okay… time to build the machine that builds everything."
Ethan stepped back, mentally drafting the blueprint for the Replicator.
This wasn't simple tech. The Arasaka Replicator was future tech—something that only appeared in 2059 in the original timeline. Even Marvel-style advancements wouldn't bring it around until maybe 2030.
But this world was still in 2006.
He was decades ahead of schedule.
"Which means," he muttered, rubbing his temples, "I have to build every single component from scratch… and I can't rely on existing SHIELD-era tech because half of it won't even exist for years."
Thus began the grind.
The next three months were brutal.
He worked day and night soldering, shaping alloy plates by hand, reverse-engineering half-finished prototypes, and building micro-assembly arrays one painful step at a time.
He had to create:
Material actuators
micro-field stabilizers
atom-layer welding nozzles
nano-chip engravers
and many many more
All tech that the world simply didn't have yet.
And worse—every time he needed a part that didn't exist, he had to invent that part first, then build the machine that would build the actual part he originally needed.
It was tech recursion hell.
Three full months, and he finally sat on his chair, exhausted, staring at a pile of equipment.
"Great," he groaned. "So what did I get after all that?"
Not much.
After three months of non-stop work, he had completed barely twenty percent of what the Replicator actually needed to be fully built and operational.
Thinking about that number made his soul hurt.
"I didn't even get anything good from the monthly gacha…" he muttered while taking a miserable bite of his pizza slice. He honestly felt like crying.
Because in the last three months, the gacha rewards had been… underwhelming.
Month 1:
Quadra Type-66 Bullet – cool, but nothing he urgently needed.
Month 2:
Mizutani Shion Targa MZT – a great car, sure, but still just a car.
Month 3 (this month):
Rasetsu – the iconic tech sniper rifle from Cyberpunk 2077.
Useful? Yes.
What he needed to finish the Replicator? Not even close.
At some point he finally looked at the System window and asked, completely exhausted:
"Why am I only getting stuff from the Cyberpunk universe? Seriously, why?"
The System simply shrugged—in its own emotionless way.
[Host's luck determines selection.]
He stared at that message for a solid five seconds.
"…I see. Bad luck. Wonderful."
After a moment of sulking, he sighed and accepted the truth.
"Fine… Cyberpunk universe it is. I'll take whatever I can get."
He pushed the empty pizza box aside and stood up, stretching his back.
"Twenty percent done," he muttered. "Eighty to go."