The KPI Death Match began not with a bang, but with a silent, digital storm of activity. Leo's two primary rivals for the General Manager position were exactly the archetypes he would have predicted.
First was Eleanor Vance, head of Market Analysis. A company veteran in her late fifties, she was a numbers purist. Her strategy was simple and direct: generate an overwhelming volume of legitimate, meticulously researched reports. She was trying to win through sheer, brute-force competence. A respectable, but fatally naive approach.
Second was Mark Jennings, the charismatic head of Product Strategy. His method was political. He immediately began a campaign of "collaborative outreach," setting up meetings, forming alliances, and ensuring his department's work was constantly visible to the executive level. He was trying to win the narrative by being the loudest voice in the room.
Leo watched them both for precisely one day. His Business Instinct skill analyzed their strategies and found them both wanting. Eleanor would produce truth, but it would be boring. Mark would produce noise, but it would be shallow. Neither understood the game they were in. The goal wasn't to produce the best work; it was to produce the best-looking KPI score.
"If you cannot win the game," Leo murmured to his empty office, "you must change the rules."
He opened his System interface and focused on his new, terrifying skill: Data Mirage (Lv. 1). He didn't want to just inflate his existing numbers. That was clumsy, the work of a common fraud. He wanted to create an entirely new metric, a Key Performance Indicator so advanced and insightful that his rivals couldn't even begin to compete with it.
He began to type, his fingers crafting the architecture of a lie. He conceived of a new metric: "Predictive Market Opportunity" (PMO). It was a complex, proprietary algorithm he was supposedly developing that didn't just analyze past performance but claimed to predict future market shifts with 90% accuracy. It was, of course, complete fiction. But it sounded exactly like the kind of high-concept, synergistic buzzword the executives would love.
Now, he needed to build the mirage. He called his team into the conference room.
"Our strategy for the next three months is changing," he announced, his voice a calm, immovable force. "We are no longer just an analysis department. We are a predictive intelligence unit. Our primary deliverable will be a weekly PMO report."
He laid out the parameters, feeding them a series of complex but ultimately meaningless variables he had just invented. He tasked Ben with building a historical data model to "validate" the algorithm's past accuracy. He tasked Anna with writing "forward-looking analyses" based on the fictional predictions. He was not asking them to lie. He was giving them a new, fabricated reality and asking them to describe it.
Ben, the cynic, looked at the complex model and saw a fascinating, if unorthodox, analytical challenge. Anna, the strategist, saw a chance to produce the kind of high-level, aggressive work she craved. They didn't question the source. Their loyalty, forged in his previous victories, was now absolute.
For the next week, Leo orchestrated the creation of the first PMO report. He used Data Mirage to sculpt the core numbers, generating a beautiful, statistically plausible illusion of a massive new market opportunity in the renewable energy sector. It was a perfect fiction, wrapped in layers of legitimate-looking analysis from his team. The report was dense, impressive, and completely untrue.
On Friday afternoon, he submitted it directly to Arthur Harrison's office, bypassing the standard channels. It was a bold, confident move designed to signal that he was operating on a different level from his rivals.
He leaned back in his chair, the city lights beginning to glitter in the twilight. His heart rate was steady, his mind a placid lake of Calm Mind (MAX). The skill suppressed any flicker of guilt or fear, leaving only the pure, cold logic of his strategy.
The first lie had been submitted to the System. Now, he just had to make it the truth.