BECOMING MID(NIGHT)-Chapter 59: Phase 46 - Can I Help You?

Kyouya’s shadow loomed beside me, his breathing just as heavy and unoptimized as mine. I could feel the tension in his frame, the way his "Partner-in-Crime" instincts were trying to override his own fatigue.

"What the fuck? Why?"

"Someone’s coming," I muttered.

My gamer-brain was basically screaming "ENEMY AHEAD!"

But my hardware was too busy throbbing to provide yet another tactical response.

Simulating assumptions, perhaps.

Velvet’s voice was a low, breathless thread behind us. She was leaning into the wall, her own exhaustion palpable in the way her weight shifted.

"Who might that be?"

"I don’t know," I said, my hand trembling near the blue light of the watch.

I tried to pull up the apartment’s local security feed, but my fingers were too clumsy, the interface too slick with sweat. I mean, I couldn’t help it.

Those were too far from dry.

"Wait, we should run then," Velvet urged.

I felt her fingers graze the sleeve of my jacket, a desperate, anchoring touch.

"What are we waiting for? Let’s go. Quick."

Are you out of your mind?

"How? Jumping to the stairs?" I snapped.

That joke was the only firewall I had left to protect my ego from the reality of our vulnerability. I was a programmer who couldn’t even optimize her own walk, a hacker being defeated by a pair of soaking wet pants, and now I was being spawn-camped.

Meanwhile, she looked confused.

No, clueless even. Her cocky head gesture was asking for clarity.

A slow tilt that made her blonde hair shift like liquidated gold.

Under the dying buzz of the hallway lights. It was sickeningly perfect.

While I was a glitching, salt-burned mess, she was a 4K render in a world of static.

"Are you not tired?"

"Of what?" she breathed, tilting her head with that mock-innocence that usually drove me crazy.

I was too damn tired for a long answer.

I didn’t want to be your average male protagonist.

I just wanted to be back in front of a terminal in an oversized hoodie, away from the eyes of the world and the weight of this body.

"Sex? What else? I’m trying my best not to feel the ache in my legs right now, and now you want me to sprint? What are you? A clueless idiot?"

Velvet rolled her eyes, a slow, theatrical motion that made me want to smack her. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"Now I wonder who’s the girl here actually."

That sentence truly stung.

In a server room, I was the one who held the encryption keys. I was the one who dictated the terms. Yet out here, currently limping in salt-crusted jeans, I felt like a low-level mob caught in a high-level raid.

"Heh, are you saying I should act like you, tough guy?"

"Nope. Not necessarily," she countered, her voice dropping into that teasing register.

"Just at least show that hentai protagonist side of you again, love."

I felt a surge of genuine fury—the sharp, hot spike of adrenaline you get when someone executes a DDoS attack on your favorite site just as you’re about to finish a project. I glared at her, my teeth gritted, my "Mayo" temper flaring through the "Midnight" mask.

"Do you really want to get smacked or what? You idiot."

"No, wait. I’m serious, Mayo—" She caught herself, her eyes widening as she realized she’d used my real name—alias—in the field.

"I mean, Midnight-san."

I rolled my eyes, unable to believe she would still break her own rules after all this time. But the banter died in our throats before it could turn into a real fight.

The "glitch" manifested in the flesh.

A woman emerged from the shadows of the alcove near our door.

I recognized her instantly—the neighbor from the room across the hall.

But seeing her now, without a door between us, was a total system shock.

She was a visual distortion, a piece of high-end software running on a legacy server. Her hair was a cascading waterfall of silver and violet, shimmering with an unnatural, inner light that made the hallway’s flickering amber lamps look like low-res trash.

It fell over her shoulders with a fluidity that didn’t seem to follow the laws of physics.

Her eyes were the most terrifying part—a piercing, arctic blue, fixed with a predatory, unblinking stillness that seemed to see right through the layers of my salt-crusted denim to the very code of my soul.

Then there was the body.

She had a marble-carved hourglass figure that felt like it was rendered in a higher resolution than the rest of the world. Her curves were too sharp, her presence too still.

She didn’t breathe; she just existed. As she stepped into the cerulean glow of my GPS, I saw the markings. Faint, silver-etched spirals coiled up her pale arms like sleeping snakes, catching the blue light and pulsing with a life of their own.

She stood there, a beautiful predator blocking the path to our sanctuary, and the metallic scent of her perfume filled my lungs until it tasted like copper on the back of my tongue.

The hallway light flickered one last time, a long, drawn-out zzzt, and for a heartbeat, we were plunged into total darkness. In that second, the ozone-heavy scent intensified, a suffocating vacuum that made me feel like I was choking on silver. When the light buzzed back to life, she hadn’t moved an inch, but the distance between us felt shorter, the air between us tighter.

I was trapped—a hacker in a hero’s skin, my legs burning with the debt of the last hour, facing a silver-haired ghost who looked like she’d been waiting for me to fail.

"Oh, hello there."

"Can I help you?" the woman asked. Her voice wasn’t human. It was a perfect, synthesized chime that resonated in the hollow spaces of my chest.

I gripped the watch on my wrist, my knuckles white. My hardware was failing, my permissions were revoked, and I was pretty sure we were about to be deleted.