"Just a few more adjustments." Rukiyo mumbled, her sunken and soulless eyes staring at her computer screen.
"You really need to take a break." A coworker of hers said, his own face is not far from the state of Rukiyo's. "We can't let go of ourselves just because the team leader asked us to do this."
She has been working four nights in a row, just to finish the damn project that the marketing team had failed to save, but her team leader decided to become a saint and told them that Rukiyo can salvage most of it.
And Rukiyo? Oh, she's quite the pushover.
"I'll be done with this section tonight." She turned her attention to her coworker for a short moment. "By the time you clock in later, you can get right into it."
The said coworker stared at Rukiyo, his eyebrows furrowing in worry. "Whatever you say, Miss Asakane.. But seriously, take a damn break for me, will you? I don't want to spot a corpse on this desk early in the morning."
She hated leaving any work unfinished, she disliked rushing through the deadline of an unfinished work, and she despised people who can't do their job.
In short, she hates the marketing team that was responsible for this failure of a project, but it's not like she can just waltz right out of the office with him and say fuck it.
"I'll try." Rukiyo dismissed his worry and turned back to her computer.
The coworker could only let out a sigh and merely dropped a blanket over her head before he left the room, closing the door tight and secure behind him.
When Rukiyo was sure that her colleague had left the premises, she couldn't stop herself from cussing out those who were responsible for the project she's currently trying to save.
"They were the ones who wanted to change the damn shampoo, but they can't do a proper job to see through the damn commercial?" Rukiyo grumbled under her breath, her fingers pressing down on keyboard keys.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
The rhythmic tapping of the mechanical keyboard echoed in the room, and she was quite lucky that no one is sleeping in the office right now.
Rukiyo is not the only one who had pushed an all night to salvage the goddamn project.
Some of her coworkers tried to help her, but they weren't able to pull three nights in a row without a wink of sleep— like the coworker that stayed late with her, but had to leave because he couldn't do it.
The only reason why she could pull an all-nighter like this was because of her insomnia, and because of her high school days of staying up late.
She remembered not sleeping for two straight nights because her favorite game at the time had a new update and she was excited to play it, so when it came out, she got too immersed in the game and had forgotten to take a break.
If it weren't for her mother screaming at her to eat every six hours, then she probably would have died back then.
She was my savior.. I mean, she still is, but she's not here anymore. Rukiyo thought, her fingers freezing in the middle of tapping as her mother's smiling face crossed her mind.
She let out a sigh and rubbed her temples, not feeling motivated enough to continue working any longer.
"I guess taking a short break isn't a bad idea." She murmured and pulled her swivel chair out of her cubicle, the wheels carding softly against the floor and smoothly sliding away from its previous spot.
Rukiyo stood up, her hand reaching out to the back of her chair to stabilize herself, but her fingers failed to grab onto it.
The office worker could only let out a gasp when she felt herself plummeting to the floor and she tried to stop herself from falling, she really did, but her body reaction was slower than usual because of exhaustion.
Oh, fuck, no— Rukiyo cussed in her mind, her black eyes widening in horror before she crashed into the floor with a loud thud.
A sharp and searing pain came crashing into her skull, which quickly crawled down to her spine.
The pain was throbbing, right at the middle part of her head and it wasn't a nice sensation to feel when a person had literally just fell off their chair.
Rukiyo slowly sat up, or at least tried to, but the only thing that moved in her body was her chest, and it was barely heaving to give her the oxygen she badly needed.
Speaking of which, Rukiyo couldn't feel her legs and arms anymore.
"What.." Rukiyo groaned, the pain on her head traveling down at an unexpected speed and quickly shutting her up, preventing her from speaking any further.
She felt a little scared, it was her first time to fall off her chair and feel like this.
She couldn't move, she couldn't speak, and all she did was moan and groan in pain— actually, she can't even moan and groan because the pain would just shut her up in an instant.
As if wanting to worsen the state of her misery, the unfinished document on her computer screen suddenly turned blue.
Rukiyo immediately felt her blood run cold at the sight of the blue screen.
My hard work! Rukiyo wanted to cry out, her heart beat pounding loudly against her ears as she stared helplessly at the computer screen.
Her hard work, along with her co-workers', went down the drain, just like that.
If she wasn't feeling any anguish before, then she's feeling it right now, quite strongly and intensely at that, and it felt like she was being torn apart as she stared longer at the screen.
She doesn't know what to do and could only just let her eyes flutter close.
Unfortunately, when Rukiyo forced her own eyes to open again, she was awestruck at the sight of her surroundings.