Ryan leaned back in his ergonomic chair inside his pitch-black apartment, illuminated only by the cold glow of two thirty-two-inch monitors. He took a long sip from his energy drink can, sensing that the night was just beginning.
On the main screen, endless lines of code flowed beneath the cursor, while a graphic engine simulation ran in real-time on the secondary monitor.
A twisted, genuine smile formed on his face; he simply couldn't hold back the muffled laughter rising in his throat upon seeing what happened when executing that game's code.
"This isn't just a bug. Did another programmer really do this as a joke?" he murmured, mockingly recalling the words his project partners had blurted out hours earlier in the virtual review meeting.
The truth was much more cynical. He had been the one to introduce the error into the testing branch, although it amused him immensely to feign professional indignation and blame someone else's legacy code.
Ryan, a freelance programmer with an enviable resume, had been hired for a premium by a desperate development studio. His official mission was to resolve database bottlenecks and expedite the impending global launch of a Gacha RPG called SSS Class Hero Stars. The game focused on the combat and affinity dynamics of an elite group made up of five members, all max-rarity heroines.
But now, the fifth member of that group, the class exclusively in charge of providing backline support, had this unusual and catastrophic error.
Technically, its area-of-effect skill worked fine: it restored health and mana. But right on the execution line where it provided support, a residual statement was applied where the heroine became tied to a "debt" condition with the player character. And due to the code's broken mechanics, she was forced to accept any order he gave her to settle the spell's cost.
Worse still, if the player did not issue an explicit order before the internal counter reached zero, the game's artificial intelligence system executed the collection automatically, selecting actions according to the characters' own repressed inner desires.
"Alright, let's work on this, although personally I quite like this damn bug... ha, ha, ha," Ryan laughed in the solitude of his room.
He adjusted his glasses and watched the absurdity unfold on the screen: the support mage healed the team's warrior, and a second later, due to a lack of commands, the algorithm collapsed and initiated completely erratic submission animations in front of the player's avatar.
Ryan raised his hands to the mechanical keyboard to start compiling a temporary patch, but suddenly his eyes snapped shut.
The last thing he felt was a sharp, electric, and brutal sting right at the base of his nape, as if a burning nail had been driven into his spinal cord.
The hum of his PC's fans disappeared completely.
...
...
...
...
...
Ryan opened his eyes slowly.
The flat light of his monitors had vanished, replaced by an irregular rock ceiling carpeted with bluish crystals that dripped a faint, cold glow. He was no longer in his airtight room. The air was heavy and damp, smelling of wet stone, burnt ozone, and the coppery stench of fresh blood.
A few meters away, a deafening metallic sound drilled into his ears. It was the pure clash of thick steel against something hard, like swords cleaving dry stone blocks.
He tried to sit up, but the lethargy in his limbs was dense. When he turned his neck to look around, he noticed a strange detail: his head felt incredibly comfortable. He wasn't lying on the cold floor of that stone chamber; he was resting on something very soft, warm, and with a faint scent of lavender and clean sweat.
He raised his cloudy gaze a bit higher.
The first thing he saw, almost completely blocking the glow of the ceiling crystals, was the silhouette of a woman whose face was entirely obscured from that angle by the shape of her massive, tightly packed pair of breasts, clad in light leather armor with golden edges.
"It can't be. What kind of dream is this?" he said, blinking hard to dispel the vision.
"A dream? You're awake?"
The girl tilted her head forward. The movement let gravity do its work, and her breasts ended up dangerously close to Ryan's face, almost brushing the tip of his nose. She had short, messy yellow hair that barely reached her neck, and large amber eyes looking at him with genuine relief.
She lowered a hand sheathed in a fine leather glove and carefully placed it on his forehead, as if checking for a feverish temperature.
The warm touch of her skin against Ryan's forehead destroyed any illusion that this was a simple lucid dream. The level of detail was far too high: the texture of the leather, the body heat, the trembling of the girl's fingers.
Ryan got up suddenly. Driven by a shot of pure adrenaline, he pressed his palms to the floor and leaped up, backing away a meter until he stood in front of her, his chest heaving.
The girl, confused by the abrupt reaction, stood up as well, dusting off her skirt and staring intently at him.
"What happened to you? You passed out right when you healed me. Did you run out of mana or something?"
The girl asked him with a tone of evident concern, tilting her head, but despite the tension in the atmosphere, she looked at him with a slight smile, as if Ryan's mere presence was enough to calm her.
"If you're feeling better now, can you help Helen? She's running out of energy."
She extended her arm and pointed to the source of the metallic blows.
Ryan turned his face. About twenty meters away, a girl with straight, shoulder-length black hair and blue eyes, clad in light armor and wielding a greatsword almost as big as herself, named Helen, was fighting to the death against what looked like a giant humanoid lizard. The scaly beast measured over two meters tall, and every strike of its claws against the girl's sword made the ground tremble beneath Ryan's boots.
"What... what is that!" Ryan shouted, stepping back out of pure survival instinct.
"Hey, Helen, Ryan is acting very strangely!" shouted the girl who had been taking care of him, bringing both hands to the sides of her mouth to be heard over the monster's roars.
"What? How do you know my name?" Ryan blurted out, looking her up and down.
The archer furrowed her brow, genuinely puzzled.
"Hey, did you really hit your head when you passed out? We need to go see a doctor as soon as we get back," she replied, taking a half-step toward him with the intention of checking him again.
"You handle it, Mirian! Can't you see I'm busy?" Helen shouted from a distance, spitting to the side furiously.
The swordswoman unleashed a horizontal slash that cleaved the lizard in half in a shower of black blood. But relief did not come; the cracks and dark passageways in the walls rumbled, and although she was killing the lizards with heavy slashes, more reptilian silhouettes kept emerging from the shadows.
Ryan took a deep breath. He closed his eyes for an instant, forcing his analytical brain to take control. Panic was of no use; he needed to process the variables.
'Let's see, calm down. What's the last thing I remember? I was in front of the computer. I created a test user on the local server with my name in the game I was supposedly programming to test the database error... and then the sting.'
He opened his eyes and scanned the woman in front of him again, and then the one fighting in the distance.
'Wait a second. Did she say Helen and Mirian? That black-haired swordswoman with the massive greatsword... and that archer with messy yellow hair and a quiver on her back. They are the S-rank heroines from the game... those outfits, the proportions of the 3D models. There's no doubt about it!'
The weight of reality collapsed upon him.
"What the shit! Am I really dreaming?" he exclaimed, bringing both hands to his head as the noise of the battle pierced his eardrums.
Mirian, seeing his nervous breakdown, closed the distance hurriedly. Without asking permission, she wrapped her arms around Ryan's neck and hugged his head, pressing the programmer's face directly against the overwhelming softness of her chest.
"Ryan, calm down. I think one of the undead monsters from the top floor affected you; maybe they hit you with mind control without us seeing."
"No, it can't be. I was programming," Ryan mumbled against the leather, unsuccessfully trying to squirm out of the woman's firm grip.
Suddenly, the air froze.
A crystalline and synthetic sound, identical to a desktop notification, resonated directly in Ryan's brain.
Ding!
In front of his pupils, a translucent blue holographic panel materialized, floating in the air.
[Sentence initiated]
[Debt collection applied successfully]
'Debt? Where did that window come from?' Ryan thought, immediately stopping his struggle. His engineer's mind recognized the format instantly. They were the exact same lines of text from the bug he was debugging.
Mirian's body, which was holding him with maternal strength, tensed abruptly as if an electric shock had run down her spine. Her breathing became heavy, erratic, and the heat emanating from her skin increased drastically.
"What the... hell, I'm feeling that again..." Mirian stammered, loosening the hug and looking at him with eyes that were starting to lose focus, clouded by a feverish haze. Her knees trembled.
"Ryan, what order do you have for me?"
"Order? No, what order? What the hell are you talking about...?" Ryan took a step back, feeling a freezing shiver run down his spine upon seeing the status alteration live.
The system's internal counter, invisible on the interface, had just reached zero due to the lack of a direct command.
Mirian let out a stifled moan, completely lost the strength in her legs, and slowly knelt before him on the dusty stone.
"I... I can't control it anymore... Ryan..." she whispered with a broken voice, lifting her face toward him with her cheeks dyed a furious red.
Before he could react, she took Ryan's right hand in both of hers. Her grip was desperate, unusually strong. She brought the programmer's wrist to her face, parted her slightly parched lips, and began to kiss the back of his hand. The kisses were short, wet, and loaded with an unhealthy devotion imposed by the code.
Ryan's entire body bristled; the hair on his arms stood on end and his heart began pumping blood at an alarming rate upon seeing the scene.
'What...? But this is from that game's residual line. Don't tell me I ended up inside it as the fifth member?' he analyzed, paralyzed.
He was pulled out of his deductive thoughts when he felt something extremely wet, hot, and soft trail across the bristling skin on the back of his hand. The girl had gone from kissing to licking it slowly.
"Hey... no, don't do that. What's wrong with you?" Ryan demanded, feeling heat rise up his neck.
He tried to yank his hand away, but an S-rank archer's base stats were much higher than his at that moment. Mirian held him with an iron grip, refusing to let go, and continued licking him; then, with half-closed, watery eyes, she ran her tongue along the entire length of his index finger.
Finally, she opened her mouth and softly slipped the tip of Ryan's finger inside.
The suction was firm and hot. She bit down softly with her front teeth and planted her gaze directly into Ryan's eyes.
She was completely flushed, humiliated by her own treacherous body, yet unable to stop the system's automated order.
"Don't... don't look at me. You're... a pervert," she said quietly, her diction clumsy from having the finger in her mouth, and continued sucking on his finger at a slow pace, taking it in up to the second knuckle.
Ryan felt like his head was going to explode at the accusation.
"You're the perverted one, are you shitting me!!!" he yelled at her, vainly trying to reclaim his hand while looking around, terrified someone else would see this madness.
Heavy footsteps and the dragging of metal echoed closer.
"Hey, stop doing those things in the middle of a hunt. I had to take care of the lizard monsters in the area all by myself," Helen complained, approaching while grumbling.
The swordswoman was covered in splatters of black blood and mud, resting her massive greatsword on her right shoulder. She looked at the scene of Mirian kneeling and sucking Ryan's finger with a mixture of infinite exhaustion and resigned disgust.
Mirian pulled her lips back barely a centimeter, panting.
"You know... this can't be helped because of his class. Helen... jeez, Ryan is a pervert!" the archer sobbed by way of an excuse, squeezing the boy's hand.
Ding!
A cascade of system alerts blocked Ryan's field of vision, illuminating the surroundings with their bluish light.
[You have successfully received payment for the debt]
[Debt Bonus: +50 points]
[Debt Bonus: +45,000 EXP]
Level: 59 → 60
[Level Bonus: +20 points]
[Attributes increased: +10 in all stats]
[Level 60 reached]
[x10 Milestone activated: +100 to all stats]
The instant the last window closed, a current of pure, scorching energy invaded Ryan's body. It wasn't a simple notification; he felt his muscles tense and become denser in a matter of seconds. His senses sharpened, the weight of the air ceased to be suffocating, and the muscle fatigue he didn't even know he had vanished at once. The massive bonus of a hundred points across all his stats was an undeniable physical dopamine shot.
'What is all this? How is such a stat boost possible? Could I...?'
The bug's code had completed its cycle. The debt sentence expired on the server.
Mirian finally released him. She dropped his wet hand as if it burned and jumped up quickly, turning her back to him so neither Ryan nor Helen could see her completely red face.
"Take this," she said.
Without looking at him, she reached her arm back and, with a clumsy motion, offered Ryan a white embroidered cloth handkerchief.
"A handkerchief?" Ryan asked, looking at the cloth and then at his hand, dampened by the heroine's saliva.
"Yes... wipe yourself. Wipe it off already, I'm too embarrassed to see you like that," Mirian grumbled without turning around, shrugging her shoulders as she crossed her arms.
Ryan took the handkerchief. The texture was real, the world was real, the power throbbing right now in his veins after leveling up to sixty was unquestionably real. As he began to wipe the saliva from his fingers, stunned by the information overload he had just processed in barely five minutes, he locked his gaze on his companions' backs.
'It can't be... did I really become the damn support member of the heroines' party?'