Chapter 190: Tangible Malice

Because she really couldn’t sleep, Koharu threw off the covers and got out of bed.

Having just woken up, her brain still felt slightly feverish, making her unusually alert in the dead of night.

So she walked to the window and pushed it open.

The damp, crisp scent of grass and wood in the air rushed into the room as the girl opened the window, sweeping away the warm air and making Koharu shiver involuntarily.

The street was empty, and the distant streetlight cast a dim, lonely glow.

Koharu Miura leaned against the window frame, letting the cold wind tousle her long hair.

The last remnants of warmth from her futon were washed away by the cool night air within seconds.

Koharu Miura’s thin shoulders flinched slightly, but she didn’t retreat. Instead, she took a deeper breath of the biting air.

The cold oxygen flooded her lungs, and her sluggish, foggy brain, dulled by shock and memory loss, finally began to creak back into gear, like a precision gear doused in cold water.

She rested her hands on the windowsill, her fingertips touching the icy frame soaked in night dew.

That gaze at the station… it definitely wasn’t an illusion.

Koharu closed her eyes, trying to reconstruct the sensation of that moment in her mind.

It wasn’t the appraising, concerned look of Kondo Haruka, nor the casual glance of a passerby.

It was a malice that felt like being locked onto by an abyss. Like a venomous snake coiled in the shadows, eyeing its prey with ill intent.

Threatening Kiyono Arisa, sending those disgusting DMs to Mayumi, the group lurking by the school gate with telephoto lenses—or rather, that malice materialized by the “system”—had finally pinpointed her, an overstepping supporting character, on the platform at Sakuragicho.

Was it because she’d gotten involved with Mayumi? Or because she’d tried to interfere with Arisa’s withdrawal plotline through rationality hedging?

Koharu Miura bit her lower lip, her thoughts racing like lightning.

In this game world, she was supposed to be nothing more than a harmless, vain, decorative supporting character.

But now, she’d not only saved Kiyono Arisa but was also trying to pry at the lever of fate.

The world was rejecting her.

Or rather, this malicious patch, designed to fix the plot, had already marked her as a bug to be eliminated.

At that thought, a tangible fear welled up from the soles of her feet, rapidly eating away at her courage.

It felt like swimming in the deep sea. When you try to surface, countless icy hands grab your ankles, dragging you back into the eternal darkness.

‘Calm down.’

She snapped her eyes open and muttered a reprimand to herself in the empty night.

Fear wouldn’t solve anything. If she backed down here, if she truly followed Kondo Haruka’s suggestion to seek help from the “right person” and quit entirely, then Arisa would truly be destroyed by that anniversary performance.

And she—or rather, Koharu Miura—would rot to death in this false world.

‘I absolutely will not let that happen.’

Since she couldn’t return to reality, she had to carve a path to survival for herself, and for that ice-cold girl on the brink of hell, within this cage made of binary code.

If this malice was a manifestation of some “rule,” then following game logic, there had to be some higher will she could talk to or influence.

‘System… are you there?’

Koharu closed her eyes, held her breath, and forced all her focus to the center of her brow.

She called out loudly in her heart to the cold voice that had once sent her a warning message.

“If you’re the will of this world, if you still want to maintain so-called ‘logic,’ then come out and talk!”

“Are these physical threats against students, against me, even within the world’s script?”

But around her, there was only dead silence.

Aside from the occasional distant bark of a dog outside the window, no mechanical sound echoed in her mind.

Her attempt at communication was like throwing a stone into a bottomless dry well—not even an echo returned.

Unwilling to give up, Koharu intensified her effort, even clenching her fists.

Straining so hard made her temples throb and a dull, tight ache spread through the back of her head.

The despairing silence lasted about a minute.

Finally, heaving for breath, Koharu was forced to give up from exhaustion.

She opened her eyes tiredly; they were sore and bloodshot.

Creak.

But in that instant, as her eyes opened.

The blood that had slightly cooled from the wind suddenly felt like it had frozen solid.

She felt a sudden tightness at the back of her head, as if an invisible string had been pulled to its limit.

An unprecedented tingling sensation, strong enough to make her whole body go numb, shot from the base of her spine to the top of her head.

Right under the row of streetlights directly across the street, at the corner half-shrouded in shadow.

Stood several silhouettes.

They were of different builds—some gaunt, some burly. They didn’t talk, didn’t smoke, didn’t make any unnecessary movements.

They just stood silently at the boundary between darkness and light, all their heads tilted at the same angle—staring directly at the open window where Koharu Miura stood.

She had thought she was by the window, thinking, observing the world.

But only now did Koharu Miura realize, in terror, that she was the specimen under the spotlight, closely watched in a petri dish.

During those few minutes when she’d closed her eyes trying to contact the system, those shadows might have been there the whole time.

Koharu nearly screamed. Her instinct was to step back, close the curtains, turn off the light, and hide in her futon. The primal fear brought stinging tears to her eyes.

But just as she took a half-step back, her heel kicked a thick music theory book by the bed.

It was the book Arisa had dropped, the one she’d picked up.

In that instant, Mayumi’s tear-streaked face, Arisa’s cold “Don’t come” message, and the line from Kondo Haruka on LIME, “Don’t be a burden to others,” flashed through her mind like a lantern show.

Koharu Miura forcibly stopped herself from retreating.

The veins on the back of her hand resting on the windowsill stood out. Her nails dug deep into the gaps in the wood, until the faint sting brought her to her senses.

‘Don’t run away.’

She told herself in her mind, her voice trembling but carrying a stubborn, almost obsessive cruelty.

‘If you close the window now, if you show fear now, you lose. You’ll become that ‘weak supporting character’ they can mold at will.’

She held back the tears in her eyes, not even wiping away the cold wetness.

Instead, she took a small step forward, exposing her upper body more clearly in the fading light of the streetlamp, right in the sight of those shadows.

She looked down at the shadows across the street.

What lurked inside them was unreasonable malice, twisted rules, a monster called the System Patch.

‘Is this the best you can do?’

Koharu clenched her fists tightly. Though her legs were still trembling slightly, though her heart felt like it was about to burst, a strange, defiant fighting spirit—utterly inappropriate for a “green tea supporting character”—blazed in her amber eyes.

‘Since you want to watch, then watch your fill. I’ll stand at this window and watch you, you things that can’t bear the light, turn to ash in the sun when the truth comes out.’

It wasn’t just for her own survival.

She was also going to drag Kiyono Arisa—that girl abandoned by the whole world, so clumsy she only knew how to “self-destruct” to protect her friends—out of this unfair, clinging malice.