We moved in sync, our muffled footsteps swallowed by the heavy industrial floor as effectively as the shadows consud the light.
The digital overlay in my vision flickered—a jagged neon wirefra of corridors and ventilation shafts pulsing in rhythmic synchronization with the tracker’s signal.
I could feel the cold, predatory hum of the Share-Lock at the base of my brain, a phantom limb connecting my rising adrenaline to her relentless, calculating focus. Ahead, the air grew noticeably colder, thick with the scent of recycled oxygen and high-voltage static.
We were approaching the threshold of the Admin sectors, the place where the simulation’s architecture stripped away its narrative pretenses.
We weren’t just participants anymore; we were a deliberate glitch in their perfect, libido-fueled machine, and I could feel the core system beginning to shudder as it recalibrated around our presence.
The tension almost settled into sothing stable—until a voice broke it.
"H-hi..."
A faint, almost imperceptible voice calling us from behind.
As we (yes, we) turned behind, I saw a shy girl fidgeting her hair.
She had vibrant red hair, tied back into a braided bun that fell into a ponytail.
Her eyes were downcast, looking everywhere but at us. I instinctively checked the terminal on my watch device downloaded from my laptop.
Then, my fingers hovering over the keys.
xANoHoshi.
She was at the top of the failed list.
0n1Ghost’s partner. Also the one who scread the loudest before Round 1 began.
A rape victim. Once, and could’ve been twice.
According to the logs, the experint went south for them. The "libido" aspect had triggered sothing violent in her partner. He didn’t just fail; he broke the rules.
He forced it. Now he was gone, dragged off for "punishnt," and she was left here.
"You’re the girl from the first list," I said. My voice felt too loud in the empty hall.
She flinched, her fingers tightening around a strand of red hair.
"I... I saw you. You’re the ones who survived."
"Barely," Velvet replied, her voice back to that deadpan, starlet tone.
She didn’t lower her guard. "
Why are you following us, A? Or should I ask how you’re even standing?"
A looked at the floor. The skin on her wrist was raw, the Share-Lock device gone.
"I’m alone," she whispered. "The system... it doesn’t know what to do with . Since my partner is being punished, I’m just ’residue.’ I don’t exist in the current trial."
Her tremble in every word was visible.
I looked at Velvet.
Is she a trap? I thought through the link.
Probably, Velvet’s mind echoed back.
But she has no watch device. No teletry.
She’s invisible. That makes her a shield.
I looked back at A. She looked smaller than she did on the player radar.
It was hard to believe the Admin would just let soone like her wander around.
"Did you see the girl? The one with violet hair?" I asked.
A nodded slowly. "She opened my door. She told if I stayed in the room, I’d be deleted with the rest of the failed data. She told to find the ’Hacker.’"
I felt a chill. I was moving pieces again.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I don’t want to die," A said, her voice finally gaining a sliver of strength.
"I want to see what they’re doing to him. To everyone who failed."
I paused, looking at the dark corridor leading to the Admin sector. We had a tracker on Mayo, a detective in my head, and now a failed "residue" player who shouldn’t exist.
"Fine," I muttered, turning back toward the Admin sector.
"Just stay behind us. And don’t make any noise."
"I’m good at that," she whispered.
We continued our march, now with a third shadow following closely behind.
in the front, Velvet right behind , and A trailing a few steps back.
The silence was deafening.
The only sound was the heavy thud of our boots against the grated tal floor. The Admin sector didn’t bother with the faux-hotel aesthetics of the upper levels. There was no wallpaper here. No spring beds or Share-Lock sync terminals disguised as nightstands.
It was just exposed pipes, raw concrete, and the relentless hum of server cooling fans.
I kept my eyes on the laptop screen. Velvet’s tracker—the one she managed to stick on Mayo’s boot—was a blinking white dot on a black grid. It was descending.
"She’s heading towards sub-level three," I whispered, though I didn’t need to.
"I can see it," Velvet replied through the Share-Lock. Her ntal voice was crisp.
"Focus on the periter. The system should have flagged us by now."
That was the weird part. We had crossed the physical threshold into the Admin zone three minutes ago. No alarms. No automated defense chanisms.
No Ga Master voice booming from the speakers to tell us we broke a rule.
I glanced over my shoulder.
A was walking with her head down, her hands clasped tightly in front of her chest. She stepped exactly where Velvet stepped, as if straying from the path would cause the floor to collapse.
"It’s her," I thought, projecting it to Velvet.
"Explain."
"A. The system already registered her and her partner as ’Failed’ and processed their removal. To the Admin sensors, she’s basically a used toy."
I typed a few commands into the terminal, pulling up the local network traffic.
"Look at this."
"Because we’re standing right next to her, the system’s error-correction protocol is masking our signatures too. It thinks the sensor is glitching, not that there are intruders."
Velvet didn’t physically react, but the Share-Lock fed a sharp wave of approval.
"So she isn’t just a liability. But also a walking cloaking device."
"Basically. Assuming she doesn’t do anything to force the system to manually verify her."
I stopped. The corridor dead-ended into a massive, steel blast door.
There was no keypad. No card reader. Just a smooth, featureless surface and a single cara lens staring down at us from the ceiling.
A red light on the cara pulsed. It was scanning.
"Don’t move," Velvet commanded, both aloud and in my head.
We froze. A sucked in a sharp breath but clamped her mouth shut. She was trembling. The red light washed over my face, then Velvet’s, and finally settled on A.
"Scanning..." a robotic, genderless voice echoed from a hidden speaker.
It didn’t sound like the Ga Master. It was purely chanical.
"Anomaly detected. Unregistered entity in Sector 4."
"Oh shit," I muttered.
I dropped to one knee, resting the laptop on my thigh.
My fingers flew across the keyboard.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
Velvet asked, stepping slightly in front of to block the cara’s direct line of sight.
"I need to inject a false confirmation packet," I said, pulling up the command prompt.
"The system sees her as an anomaly, but it hasn’t categorized her as a threat yet."
It’s checking its master logs to figure out what to do with a deleted file that’s still taking up physical space.
A watched type. "He... he used to do that," she whispered.
I didn’t stop typing, but I glanced at her. "Your partner? Ghost-san?"
She nodded slowly. Her eyes looked hollow.
"He was smart. He knew how to break things. That’s why we were supposed to be a great pair. The system thought our skills would complent each other."
"He was the brute force. I was the..."
She trailed off, her fingers instinctively reaching for her raw, empty wrist.
"The trifle," Velvet finished for her. It wasn’t a question.
A didn’t reply. She just kept staring at the screen.
"The Libido Experint wasn’t just about sex,"
I said, hitting ’Enter’ on a line of code to stall the cara’s query.
"They paired us up based on opposing variables. They wanted to see if primal instincts could force a flawless data-link between incompatible nodes."
"But it didn’t work for them," Velvet noted through the link, her tone clinical.
"He tried to force the synchronization physically."
I felt sick.
The data I had pulled earlier didn’t give explicit details, but the error logs for 0n1Ghost were filled with ’Forced Override’ and ’Biological Trauma’ flags.
The system required mutual consent to establish a stable Share-Lock.
When A couldn’t—or wouldn’t—sync with him, he resorted to violence.
And the sickest part?
The system didn’t punish him for the rape. It punished him because the resulting sync rate was too unstable. It was a failure of the tric, not a failure of morality.
Sothing twisted in my stomach. I ignored it
How disgusting.
"Done," I said, hitting the final key.
The red light on the cara blinked green. The heavy steel door hissed, the locking chanisms disengaging with a loud clank.
"Identity verified. Welco, Maintenance Drone 404," the robotic voice announced.
"Drone? Huh?" Velvet raised an eyebrow.
"It was the easiest clearance," I shrugged, standing up.
"I just wrapped our three IDs into a single maintenance packet."
"That’s... clever. Probably."
The door slid open, revealing a large, dimly lit observation deck.
The temperature dropped another ten degrees.
The air slled strongly of antiseptic and copper.
I didn’t care about the cold.
I cared about what was waiting—
for all three of us.
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