My Netori Life With System: Stealing Milfs And Virgins

Chapter 327: 327. Two Minutes of Genuine Terror, Resolved by a Wine Glass Heist

Ellie’s gaze was a laser, fixed intensely on Stanley’s face. She wasn’t just looking at him; she was searching for a sign of life, a twitch of a muscle, a flicker of an eyelid, anything to prove that the man before her hadn’t been hollowed out from the inside.

Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone.

"He doesn’t drink," she whispered.

It wasn’t a statement of fact; it was a desperate plea to the universe, a fragile hypothesis she was casting out into the heavy air, needing the silence to confirm or deny it. Her voice was so thin it felt as though the slightest breeze might shatter it into a thousand jagged pieces.

Mike’s eyes remained hard, his body coiled like a spring, his massive muscles tensed for a violence that hadn’t yet arrived. He didn’t look at her; his focus was a predatory sweep of the room, calculating the threat.

"He drank tonight," Mike said.

His voice was a low, gravelly rumble, a heavy anchor in the rising tide of dread. It wasn’t a guess; it was a verdict.

He could smell the fermented, cloying scent of the wine hanging in the stagnant air, a scent that felt wrong, like the smell of something sweet beginning to rot.

Beside them, Haruka made a sound. It wasn’t a laugh, and it certainly wasn’t a sob.

It was a choked, strangled noise, the sound of a person fighting a losing battle against a hysterical outburst in a room where silence was the only law.

It was the sound of respiratory distress, a frantic, shallow hitching in her throat as she struggled to contain the sheer, absurd terror rising within her. She clamped both hands over her mouth, her knuckles white, her eyes wide and shimmering with a frantic, intelligent panic.

She looked at Mike, her gaze pleading for him to tell her she was wrong, even as her instincts screamed the truth.

’This is impossible,’ Haruka thought, her mind racing through a thousand terrifying scenarios. ’They’re too still. It’s like they’ve been... extinguished. Like someone reached in and turned off the lights behind their eyes.’

Suddenly, the stillness was violated.

Ren, sprawled in his drunken, precarious stupor, shifted. The movement was sudden, a violent twitch of a limb that sent the wine glass on his chest wobbling precariously.

A single, dark droplet of red liquid escaped the rim, looking like a bead of blood as it spilled onto his shirt. As he moved, he muttered something in Japanese, a sharp, clipped string of syllables, delivered with the absolute, unshakeable authority of a man settling a heated debate in the depths of a dream.

The cadence was definitive. It was the voice of a man who was certain, even in his unconscious state.

Haruka’s hands flew back to her mouth, pressing so hard her lips nearly disappeared into her palms. The tension in the archway reached a breaking point; the air felt as though it were vibrating with the sheer impossibility of the moment.

Mike’s head snapped toward Ren, his eyes narrowing into slits of pure, focused intensity. The air in the room seemed to thicken, becoming heavy with the scent of wine and the looming threat of the unknown.

"What did he say?" Mike demanded.

The question was a command, his voice dropping an octave, vibrating with an edge of primal suspicion.

Haruka hesitated, her eyes darting between the sleeping men and the massive, looming silhouette of Mike. She lowered her hands just enough to let the words escape, her voice a ghostly, trembling thread of sound.

"He said... ’the gradient is obviously wrong.’"

Then, as if the mere act of speaking had exposed her to a predator, her hands flew back up, sealing her mouth once more, leaving the words to hang in the air like a death sentence.

Mike stared at the tableau, his eyes traveling from the precarious, wobbling wine glass perched on Ren’s chest to the third bottle standing sentinel on the table. It was a silent witness to a conversation that had clearly spiraled out of control, a deep dive into the cerebral that had evidently bled into a heavy, wine-soaked stupor somewhere between nine and midnight.

The sheer absurdity of it, the idea of these two men, usually so composed, being utterly leveled by a discussion on technicalities, hit him with a strange, jarring force.

The corner of his mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile of joy, but the specific, lopsided movement of a man who found the universe’s sudden, ridiculous pivots genuinely, unexpectedly funny.

It was the laugh of a conqueror finding humor in the unexpected vulnerability of his peers.

’Unbelievable,’ Mike thought, a low hum of amusement vibrating in his chest. ’The great thinkers, brought to their knees by a bottle and a theory.’

The heavy tension in the room began to bleed out, replaced by a domestic, almost tender rhythm. Ellie moved away from the archway, her footsteps soft on the carpet as she approached the shelving unit near the far wall.

It was a sturdy, lived-in piece of furniture, the kind of unit that held the accumulated warmth of a home. She returned a moment later, clutching two blankets, one large and heavy, the other smaller and lighter.

With a grace born of long-standing habit, she draped the large blanket over Stanley. She did it with practiced, tender care, smoothing the fabric over his slumped shoulders as if she were tucking in a child, or perhaps a wounded soldier.

She moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had performed this exact ritual a thousand times before, though the circumstances tonight were vastly different, far more surreal. Once Stanley was covered, she paused, her gaze flickering toward Ren and then toward Haruka.

Haruka, seemingly having reclaimed her composure from the brink of a panic attack, stepped forward. She took the smaller blanket from Ellie, her movements precise and focused.

There was a surgical quality to her actions as she began to arrange it over Ren. She reached down, her fingers moving with the extreme, trembling delicacy of a bomb technician during a high-stakes field operation, as she extracted the wine glass from Ren’s limp hand.

’Don’t spill... don’t wake him... don’t break the spell,’ she thought, her breath held tight in her lungs.

The glass came free. Ren didn’t so much as stir; his breathing remained deep and rhythmic, oblivious to the theft.

Not a single drop of the dark crimson liquid escaped the rim. As she set the glass down on the coffee table with a muted clink, a sense of profound, quiet satisfaction washed over her face, the look of a mission successfully completed under pressure.

"Stanley never gets like this," Ellie said, her voice dropping to a soft, melodic register.

The disbelief had evaporated, replaced by a warmer, more intimate observation. She stood over him, her eyes softening in a way that was rare and startling.

Mike watched her. He had seen Ellie in many states—fierce, commanding, lustful, and composed—but this was different.

This was one of the most unguarded, vulnerable expressions he had ever seen on her face, a raw glimpse into the part of her that cared for the quiet rhythms of their lives.

"He found something to talk about," Mike said, his voice a low, knowing rumble.

He looked at the sleeping man, seeing the peace in his stillness. "He was going to stay in it."

"He was going to chase the thought until it swallowed him whole."

"Ren does that to people," Haruka added quietly, her voice tinged with a weary, affectionate sort of exasperation.

She leaned back slightly, watching the rise and fall of Ren’s chest beneath the blanket. "He has this... this magnetic quality... He makes you feel like the topic you care about is the most vital, most fascinating thing anyone has ever raised in human history."

"And then, before you realize it, you’re four glasses in, and you’ve been dissecting the intricacies of urban drainage systems for two goddamn hours."

A small, genuine chuckle escaped Ellie.

"Three bottles in," she corrected softly, glancing at the evidence on the table.

Mike nodded, the absurdity of the entire night finally settling into a comfortable, shared understanding.

"Drainage gradients specifically," Mike said.