The office was a graveyard lit by monitors.
Rows of dual screens glowed with error logs, asset renders, and half-broken builds.
"Shader pipeline failed again," Saito muttered two desks over.
"I swear, if we push this build and it crashes on Series X one more time—"
"Then the publisher pulls the milestone payment," someone else said without looking up. "So fix it."
A silence settled between us. Keys clacked, mice clicked. Nobody wasted breath unless they had to.
I leaned forward, squinting at the log on my own screen.
The memory leak we'd been chasing for three days was still bleeding through like a knife wound.
Every time I thought I'd patched it, the damn thing slipped somewhere else in the codebase.
Jin Watanabe, senior systems programmer.
I thought bitterly.
Six years in the industry. Trapped by his own garbage collector.
My hands hovered over the keyboard, wrists stiff from hours of typing.
The cursor blinked like it was mocking me. I forced another line into the abyss, hit compile, and listened to the cooling fans roar when the CPU spiked.
Error.
Same as before.
"Goddammit," I whispered under my breath.
Why the fuck it ain't fixing.
Slam!
In the corner, Tanaka slammed his fist on his desk.
"Jenkins timed out again!" he barked. "Who the hell queued a full build at this hour?"
"Not me," Yumi said automatically, though she didn't look away from her screen.
"Check the logs."
It's been like this this since the last week.
Accusations, denials, a system limping along under too much weight.
We were supposed to be professionals, the best in the country.
But crunch stripped all that away. At 4 AM, we weren't developers anymore. We were just meat puppets wired to keyboards.
Sigh!
I rubbed my temples. Vision doubled for a second, lines of code sliding over each other like bad textures. I blinked hard, shook my head.
The pressure in my chest was back, tighter this time.
I tried to ignore it, focused on the numbers scrolling across the screen.
Just one more patch. Just one more fix. Then I can breathe.
The office around me was a low drone of fans, keyboards, and muffled swearing. The kind of sound you stop noticing until it's gone.
And then—
My hands froze.
My chest clenched, hard. The cursor on my screen blinked once, twice… and then stopped.
I couldn't breathe.
"Argh," I groaned.
And the last thing I saw was a sea of red errors blurring into static as I pitched forward, my forehead hitting the desk with a hollow thud.
No one noticed. Or if they did, they didn't say anything.
Another developer collapsing in crunch wasn't news.
To them, it was like just a regular Tuesday.
But me...
The fuck... Where Am I?
Thoughts formed in my mind, as I stood amid an endless span of darkness. Saito, Tanaka, Yuki... and others.
They're gone.
No one was here. Expect me and this empty, hollow darkness.
I tried moving my limbs, but—
Something dark crept under my skin, as I realized, I don't have skin anymore.
As I couldn't feel touch or hear anything.
The only thing I can do now is just think.
I thought maybe this was due to my fatigue.
But...
Before I could dwell further.
My consciousness seemed to return.
I expected to wake in the hospital. Maybe hooked up to an IV, maybe with some HR manager muttering about overwork policies while secretly calculating how quickly they could replace me.
But when my eyes opened, I wasn't staring at fluorescent lights.
Huh?
I blinked.
The ceiling above me was wood. Dark beams, rough-hewn, nothing like the prefab panels of the office.
The air smelled… clean. Not like dust-clogged fans or burnt plastic, but herbs, faintly bitter with an edge that made my nose wrinkle.
Then suddenly, a voice cut through the haze.
"Oh, you're awake."
A woman—whom I never met in my life—leaned over me, her features were pale in the morning light filtering through a small window. Her hair was pinned back in a way that made her look both severe and delicate.
In her hands, she cradled a steaming cup like it was precious.
I blinked, my throat dry.
"...Where—"
"You collapsed yesterday," she said, her voice was soft and measured. "Your condition is worsening. Drink this. It will help."
She pressed the rim of the cup toward my lips.
And that was when it happened.
Some texts materialized infront of me.
For a heartbeat, I thought I was just hallucinating.
[StatusEffect.Poison]
[ Damage: 5hp/hr]
My chest tightened.
What the?
I didn't move. Didn't flinch. Just stared at the text until my eyes blurred.
The woman's expression flickered with concern, or maybe impatience.
"It will help with your illness, dear," she said again.
Illness?
I just sat still. Mind still processing. There were too many questions.
First of all, where am I? How did I get here? Who is this woman? And WHY THE HELL IS THIS TEXT SHOWING POISON!
But, I didn't voiced them and just made myself swallow air.
"Thank you."
My hand shook as I took the cup.
Then I blinked.
They're lighter, smaller and paler than originally what were supposed to be.
My mind began reeling again.
How can this be?
But I pushed that thoughts aside. Right now, there was another pressing matter.
I tilted the cup as if to drink, then jerked my head a little. The liquid splashed across my chin and soaked into the rough blanket.
"Cough! Sorry, I-cough!"
Her eyes narrowed. Barely. Just a fraction of a second. If I hadn't been watching for it, I might have missed it. "You okay?" She said, but made no move to help me.
Then I turned and set the cup down on the nightstand. And wiped my mouth.
Outside, I remained calm.
But inside, my thoughts spun faster than any compiler.
I leaned back against the rough pillow, pretending to drift back toward sleep.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her lips press into a thin line before she stood, smoothing her dress.
"I'll return later," she said, and walked out.
The door clicked shut.
Only then I exhaled, long and slow, staring at the floating text still hanging where the cup had been.
[StatusEffect.Poison]
[Damage: 5hp/hr]
I whispered to myself, voice barely audible. "The hell kind of thing did I wake up in?"