BECOMING MID(NIGHT)-Chapter 58: Phase 45 - Bureaucracy Was Teaching Me

The door to the rehabilitation room didn’t just open; it groaned.

It was a heavy, mechanical complaint that vibrated through the bones of my wrist, a low-frequency hum that felt like a hardware error manifesting in the physical world. I didn’t blame it. I felt like a pile of unoptimized junk as I stepped into the hallway, my boots heavy and my internal fans redlining.

I was a Root User who had somehow lost her administrative permissions, and the building seemed just as annoyed as I was that we were still trying to execute a movement script in this state.

The objective was simple, burned into the corner of my vision like a persistent HUD element: Navigate to the goddamn Apartment and take my fucking V-Card.

But my hardware was failing. And my OS was glitching.

Too much.

I glanced at my right wrist, where the holographic watch was pulsing a rhythmic, ghostly cerulean. The GPS map hovered there in a shivering blue light, marking the 100-meter trek to our "hotel-alike" apartment’s room.

Every time my thumb brushed the sensors to zoom or pan the map, a surge of muscle memory hit me—a ghost of the eighteen-hour sessions I used to pull back home.

It felt exactly like the UI of those tactical FPS games I used to dominate for breakfast, the ones I played in the dark while the rest of the world slept.

Back then, I was surrounded by the blue light of three monitors and a graveyard of...

Well, you know.

Empty energy drinks, my own tired and bagged eyes staring back at me in the reflection of the glass. I was used to that kind of exhaustion—the digital kind, where your brain is sharp but your eyelids are "lidded" and heavy with the weight of a thousand matches.

Back then, "Mayo" was a ghost in the machine.

In a digital space, I was untouchable. No one could ever trace nor beat me.

I could hack a high-level server or wipe a rival squad without ever having to worry about the physics of my own lungs or the lactic acid in my calves.

I joined this madness of the programming world because I thought I could gamify reality—that I could apply my logic, my code, and my routing to a physical world.

I thought I could patch the bugs of human existence.

Instead, bureaucracy was teaching me a brutal lesson: you can’t just ’Alt+F4’ out of physical exhaustion. There is no "God Mode" for a body that hasn’t slept and has just been pushed to its absolute metabolic limit.

And here I am now, dragged into even a merciless hell of a survival game.

My calves felt like they’d been injected with wet cement.

It hurts. My thighs... 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Every step onto that industrial hallway carpet was a tactical marathon, a pulse of dull, rhythmic ache that timed itself to the thud of my heart in my ears.

The red carpet itself felt like a poorly rendered asset, its texture too thick, its friction too high, dragging at the rubber soles of my sneakers as if the floor were trying to pull me down into the sub-strata of the building.

And the jeans. God, I fucking hated these jeans.

In the real world, Mayo is a creature of oversized black hoodies, goth and loose threads—a ghost who hides in the baggy comfort of the dark.

A "Rat Gamer" doesn’t care about aesthetics nor appearance; we care about utility and minimal friction. But here, I was trapped in this coarse, salt-crusted denim.

It was a restrictive, abrasive cage, stiffened by sweat and the drying remnants of our intimacy. It wasn’t just clothing; it was a constant, localized DDoS attack on my nervous system.

The fabric grated against the raw, hypersensitive skin of my inner thighs with every agonizing stride, a localized fire that made my breath hitch in the back of my throat.

The fact that I actually cared about the chafing—that I was bothered by the "un-cool," limping gait I was forced into—felt like a total system’s ruins.

I was a programmer who now couldn’t even optimize her own walk.

I was a hacker who currently had been defeated by a pair of pants.

And it’s now soaking wet. Fuck.

The hallway stretched out, 100 meters of flickering fluorescent purgatory.

Every ten meters felt like a new level, a new set of obstacles.

The air was stagnant, smelling of vacuumed dust and the faint, ionizing scent of the building’s aging electrical grid. I kept my eyes on the cerulean glow of the watch, using it as a tether to reality. Ninety meters. Eighty-five.

"You’re lagging, Midnight" Kyouya’s voice came from behind me, a low, gravelly thread that cut through the ringing in my ears.

"Shut the fuck up," I muttered, not looking back.

"I’m not. Just... recalibrating."

But well, I wasn’t recalibrating. Instead, I was crashing out.

I could feel the heat radiating off Kyouya, the warm, salt-heavy scent of him (or her, whatever) acting as VelvetVice, her female persona who had become a constant reminder of that intense session we’d just finished in the rehab room.

It’s unbelievable that my cum actually smells like that in the air...

It was a human scent, messy and unoptimized, and it felt like a target painted on both of our backs. In this state, I was a broken firewall.

My reaction times were bogged down by the leaden weight in my joints; my focus was blurred by a lingering dopamine fog that I couldn’t clear.

Ten meters from the door, my security alert finally tripped.

Nope, it wasn’t a glitch in the HUD. It was a breach in the physical air.

A sharp, metallic tang cut through the dust—a predatory perfume, cold and floral, mixed with an ozone-heavy aroma that absolutely did not belong in our sanctuary.

It was the scent of an unauthorized user.

I stopped like I was dead in a game halfway.

My heart battered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I snapped my hand out, catching the cold, hard frame of the alcove to keep from toppling over. My vision swam for a second, the blue light of the watch blurring into a jagged smear.

"Wait," I whispered, my voice a fractured rasp. "Don’t open it yet."