Chapter 71: Phase 57 - I’m A Pro Player Here
The silence in the room was not empty.
It was heavy, compressed, and intensely observational. Every exhale I pushed out felt like it was being cataloged by the damp, peeling walls. I sat on the edge of the rusted bed frame, the springs groaning faintly beneath my weight.
The matte-black laptop rested heavily on my thighs, its screen casting a pale, unearthly blue glow across my chest. My left hand was occupied with the watch strapped to my wrist. The metal casing was burning hot against my skin, a physical manifestation of a system on the verge of a catastrophic redline.
Velvet stood just a few feet away.
The Share-Lock connecting our nervous systems was humming with her skepticism. It wasn’t a loud broadcast, but a steady, cold pressure at the base of my skull. She was watching me attempt something that defied the fundamental architecture of our confinement, her eyes tracking my every micro-movement.
"I’m not going to doubt your talent," she said, her voice cutting through the heavy air with surgical, measured precision. "But are you sure?"
I didn’t look up from the terminal. The glare of the screen reflected in my eyes as I monitored the cascading lines of hexadecimal code. "Yes."
The single word was flat, betraying none of the internal friction I was currently fighting.
"I see," she murmured, stepping slightly closer. The wooden floorboards creaked under her heavy boots. "I never expected you to go actually this far..."
I exhaled slowly, my right hand hovering over the execution key while my left remained rigidly positioned near the watch. The heat radiating from the device was becoming severe. "Well, love. Save that for later."
Her silhouette shifted in my peripheral vision. She crossed her arms, a defensive posture that the Share-Lock immediately translated into a spike of guarded curiosity.
"Why is that?"
My fingers were already on the watch strapped to my wrist—applying light pressure, almost affectionate, tracing the seam of the heated metal.
The interface flickered faintly beneath my touch like something half-asleep, struggling to wake up under the weight of a corrupted kernel. I needed a biometric spike to mask the manual bypass I was about to execute. I needed a distraction that the system’s behavioral graph would categorize as an organic anomaly.
"Because, well, love..."
I moved before she could process the sudden shift in my posture. I leaned forward, closing the short distance between us, grabbed the collar of her jacket, and kissed her.
The watch emitted a soft, irregular pulse—once. Twice.
Like it reacted to the proximity change. The hardware was instantly overwhelmed by the sudden, violent synchronization of our heartbeats, the biometric sensors scrambling to record the surge of adrenaline that the Share-Lock fed directly from her chest into mine.
I pulled back, my eyes locking onto hers. Her expression was a complex map of shock, but underneath it, the analytical gears were already turning. I used the millisecond of system confusion to push the first data-packet into the watch’s firmware.
"You underestimated me a bit too much," I whispered, holding her gaze.
She blinked, the "Starlet" mask slipping for just a fraction of a second to reveal the cold, calculating Detective beneath. "It’s not about that. I wasn’t serious."
A breath passed between us. Then a pause.
The air in the room felt suspended, caught between the gravity of the hack and the lingering static of the physical contact. Her eyes flicked downward—not at my face, but at the device I was subtly manipulating on my wrist. She saw the interface struggling, the code fragmenting as I forced the logic gates open.
"Yet your mind wondered whether it was possible," I noted, a smirk tugging at the corner of my mouth. I could feel a wave of smug realization transmitted through the Share-Lock. She knew exactly what I had just used her for, and I didn’t care.
I broke the eye contact, leaning back slightly and focusing intensely on the glowing screen. "Okay. Maybe I start hating this Share-Lock feature bullshit."
My thumb pressed firmly into the side seam of the watch. I needed to force a hard reset before the system flagged the biometric anomaly as a security breach. A micro-vibration responded beneath my skin—sharp, jagged, and entirely out of sync.
Wrong timing.
I felt the feedback loop hit. It wasn’t an electrical shock, but a behavioral correction—a burst of localized neural pressure that made my vision blur. I gripped the edge of the laptop to keep my hands from shaking. She watched my jaw clench, her own expression shifting from shock to a clinical, observant distance.
The Share-Lock bled my physical discomfort across the tether, feeding it into her.
"Now you feel a little portion of my pain," I said quietly, my voice tight as I fought to keep the terminal stable. "Or let’s say 1% of it."
She looked at me, her eyes narrowing as she processed the data I was unintentionally broadcasting. "Wait, that low?"
"Yes," I replied, forcing my eyes back to the screen as a new layer of diagnostics began to scroll. "I’m the girl here after all, Kyou-chan."
I could feel her flinch at the nickname, a sharp little needle of a moniker that I used to remind her who was actually steering this sinking ship.
"You really called me that..." she muttered, but there was no time for her to dwell on the ego check.
The watch was redlining. The heat was becoming unbearable, the smell of singed synthetic fabric rising from the strap. I had to bypass the logic gate now, or the hardware would detonate.
A faint glitch-click came from the watch as I forced it into a reboot cycle by manually interrupting its contact relay. It was barely visible, like a stutter in reality, a skipped frame in the rendering of the room.
The system screamed in protest, throwing up a wall of error codes:
// FORCING KERNEL REBOOT
// TARGET: SHARELOCK_CORE_0x04
// INTERRUPTING AUTHENTICATION HANDSHAKE...
fn force_sync_interrupt(pulse_delta: f32) -> Result<(), Error> {
if pulse_delta > THRESHOLD_MAX {
// BIOS SPIKE DETECTED - EXPLOITING BUFFER
unsafe {
let kernel_ptr = 0xDEADBEEF as *mut u32;
*kernel_ptr = 0x0; // FORCE COLD RESET
}
Ok(())
} else {
Err(Error::SyncMaintained)
}
}
I looked up at her, my patience wearing dangerously thin.
