BECOMING MID(NIGHT)-Chapter 60: Phase 47 - Everything Was Public Now

The hallway was a flicker of fluorescent hums and stagnant air that tasted like ionized dust. I leaned my weight against the cold industrial paint of the alcove, trying to find a center of gravity that didn’t involve the failing hardware of my legs. My calves were heavy, a dull, rhythmic throb settling into the bone that felt like a background process hogging all my system resources.

Every shift of my weight sent a spike of data to my brain—pain, friction, exhaustion—reminding me that I was no longer a ghost in the machine.

I was a meat-suit in a high-gravity environment.

The damp denim of my jeans felt like a second, unwanted skin.

It was coarse, restrictive, and salt-crusted from the sweat of our session, the fabric grating against the raw heat of my inner thighs with every minor movement.

In the dark of a server room, under the sanctuary of an oversized black hoodie, I could handle the world. I could route around any obstacle. But out here, exposed to the clinical glare of the ceiling lights and the lingering, heavy scent of our intimacy, I felt uncalibrated.

I was a programmer who couldn’t even manage the basic physics of a walk down a corridor. I was a hacker being defeated by a pair of pants.

Beside me, VelvetVice was a constant, radiating heat-sink.

I could hear her breathing—a slightly uneven thread of sound that matched the jitter in my own chest. We were a mess of high-tension output and physical exhaustion, and the most terrifying realization wasn’t the pain; it was the fact that we were currently being watched.

The girl standing ten centimeters away didn’t move. She was a visual distortion, a high-poly render in a low-res hallway. Her hair was a bright, metallic blonde that seemed to soak up the dim light, shifting like liquidated gold as she held her head with a cocky tilt.

She was waiting for me to catch up to the conversation, her eyes tracking my labored breathing with a predatory patience.

"Are you looking for something?"

I asked. My voice was a dry rasp, stripped of its usual bite.

"You are one of our neighbors, right?"

She nodded, her expression shifting into a mask of rehearsed innocence that set off every internal firewall I had left.

"Yes. I was just looking for my briefcase."

She paused, her eyes lingering on the way I was hovering near the wall, my knuckles white against the paint.

"It got stolen."

What a bullshit.

I didn’t buy it.

My gamer-brain was already screaming ’Enemy Ahead.’ This sector was a locked loop, a high-security environment where doors didn’t just pop open for casual thieves. It felt like a social hack—a clumsy bit of bait designed to see how we’d react when our defenses were down.

"Wait," Velvet whispered, leaning in so close I could feel the ghost of her breath against my ear, a warm reminder of the heat we’d just shared.

"Do you both know each other?"

"Shut up," I muttered, my temper fraying.

"We just talked before. Brief exchange. Nothing special."

"I mean, you both seem—"

"Oh, are you VelvetVice?" the neighbor interrupted. Her gaze snapped to Velvet with a sharp, terrifying interest.

"The girl who challenged Aku no Kuma?"

Velvet stiffened for a heartbeat. I felt the tension ripple through her arm.

Then, she smoothed her expression into that practiced, effortless smile.

There he goes. Ugh, what a starlet.

Even when we were dripping wet and vibrating with fatigue, she couldn’t help but lean into the spotlight.

"Uh, yes. Nice to meet you," Velvet said, actually nodding back.

I rolled my eyes, the motion making the dull ache behind my sockets flare.

Even in a survival game, the lure of the audience was a bug Velvet couldn’t patch.

I felt her eyes on me a second later, sensing my irritation.

"What? I was just facing that woman," Velvet said, her tone defensive.

I stayed silent. Arguing required bandwidth I simply didn’t have. My internal fans were already redlining just trying to keep me upright.

"Anyway," the blonde girl continued, her smile widening into something that felt like a victory.

"You both have become quite a hot topic right now."

I looked at her, then at Velvet, who offered nothing but a non-judgmental shrug.

The idea of being a hot topic in a hell of a place like this usually meant a target was being painted on your back in neon colors.

"Wait... how?" I asked.

"Oh, you didn’t know? There was this new network app launch after the first round."

She reached into her jacket and pulled out a phone, turning the screen toward us. The UI was aggressive—deep obsidians and neon blues, with a stylized logo that looked more like a corporate branding exercise than a social tool.

F-NET

It looked expensive.

It looked intentional.

It was the kind of app that didn’t just facilitate conversation; it harvested lives. And we hadn’t been given the login credentials.

"And how are we getting that spotlight exactly?" Velvet asked.

I could hear the underlying jitter in her voice—the sound of someone realizing they’d lost control of their own data.

"Oh, about that..."

The girl tapped a notification on the feed.

The air left my lungs. It felt like Iwas finally crushing my ribcage. Beside me, Velvet went perfectly still, her hand catching the sleeve of my jacket in a white-knuckled grip.

How the fuck...

It was a video. It was us.

The angle was high, a wide-lens shot from the corner of the rehab room that we had never noticed. It was a high-bitrate stream of our most private moment, the session we’d just finished, played back with a clinical, detached clarity.

But it was censored.

Strategic blurs and pixelated bars cut through the frames, obscuring the explicit details while leaving the raw, rhythmic intensity of the act fully visible. It wasn’t just a leak; it was content.

It had been edited, curated, and pushed to a platform for an audience.

Someone had been sitting behind an admin console, watching the heat signatures and the movement logs, and they’d decided to turn our vulnerability into a public broadcast. To a hacker, this was the ultimate doxxing.

The realization hit me harder than the physical exhaustion. We weren’t just players in a game; we were assets being harvested for engagement.

"Wait. How did you get this?"

Kyouya’s voice was stone cold. The VelvetVice persona didn’t just slip; it evaporated, leaving behind the jagged edges of a man who realized his sanctuary had been breached.

He stood there, shoulders squared, his eyes fixed on the screen with a look of pure, frigid calculation. I could feel the shift in the air—the transition from a confused neighborly chat to a high-stakes security breach.

The girl didn’t flinch.

She just kept that cocky tilt to her head, watching us process the fact that our privacy had been deleted in real-time.

"It’s the most trending clip on the app," she said, her voice devoid of empathy.

"The #MidnightXVelvetVice has beckme a very high-spec pairing ship for any couple."

I looked at the screen again.

The pixelated bars flickered over our bodies.

I thought about the bureaucracy of pain, and the salt-crusted jeans that were currently burning my skin.

I thought about how I wanted to ’Alt+F4’ out of this entire reality.

"Who are you?" I rasped, my hand trembling against the wall.

She smiled, a slow, liquidated gold shimmer in the dim light.

"Just a neighbor, Midnight-san."

"Or should I say your real one?"

The hint of my alias hit like a system crash. My heart hammered against my ribs, a hardware error I couldn’t ignore.

She had root access. She knew the names we used in the dark.

"You’re not looking for a briefcase,"

Kyouya said with his detective instinct, his voice dropping an octave, becoming the predatory weight I’d felt in the rehab room.

"I found what I was looking for," she replied, pocketing the phone.

"I just wanted to see if the ’Hot Topic’ looked as hot as they do in this clip."

She turned, her heels clicking on the industrial carpet—a sound that felt like a countdown.

"See you at the next round," she called back, not looking at us.

"And oh,"

"Try to patch those bugs, Midnight. You’re lagging a lot and we laughed about that."

I watched her walk away, my breath hitching in my throat. I looked at Kyouya, whose face was a mask of unreadable granite. We were standing ten meters from our room, our "save checkpoint," but the sanctuary was gone.

The walls were suddenly made of glass, and the entire world had just watched us break.

"Kyouya," I whispered, the name feeling heavy in my mouth.

"I know," he said, not moving.

"I know. Stop saying anything meaningless."

The hallway hummed, the flickering lights casting long, jagged shadows behind us. We were ghosts with heavier footprints now, and the silence of the corridor felt louder than any siren. We were no longer untouchable. We were just data.

"Let’s go," I said, forcing my legs to move, ignoring the raw fire in my thighs.

"Before the next upload."

We dragged our broken, unoptimized bodies toward the door, two players who had just realized the game was being played on a server we didn’t control.

"Open the door."

As we entered the room, the "V-Card" was still safe in the bag, but the cost of the session had just gone up.

Everything was public now.

And the big one was still watching.