This is a Beta Test?! - A Literally Broken System

How many deaths had it been since we started? How long have we been progging this one fight? Time seemed to all blur together the more we died. And the more we tried to progress, the more mechanics this boss just pulled out of her hot ass. Sure, we made some headway into clearing the fight, but it just never seemed to end.

This woman... This Vesper... Just how many more mechanics did she have to throw at us?

"This is insane..." Guidance whispered out, her tone starting to sound more hollowed out than determined. "Why in the world is this fight so long?"

I shook my head at her frustration. Being the good boyfriend that I was, I simply went ahead and rubbed her shoulders for a bit. She visibly slackened at my touch, a look of appreciation on her face as she turned around.

"Thanks, Moriya," she weakly smiled. "Though I'm sure you're just as tired as I am right now."

"Perhaps," I chuckled. "Still, you look like you need the pampering more than I do."

I smiled as I began giving her a shoulder rub. Putting a bit of pressure on her joints, her moans sounded more suggestive than I would've liked even as I continued. Moving onto her back, I put my skills to use, giving her a bit of reprieve from all of the thinking she had done for the fight.

"That feels nice..." she sighed. "Can we take a seat? It's not like we'll be leaving this instance anytime soon."

"Sure."

With my hands still doing wonders on her back, we both went to our usual spot in the arena. A slab of solid rock made for a poor seat or bed, but that was the best thing we had in this place whenever we took a break.

"So, we wiped at around 33%," I told her, hoping that the news' impact would be lessened by my massaging skills. "We've made some good progress, don't you think?"

"Not good enough for my tastes," she grumbled even as I felt her body shiver underneath my fingertips. "At the rate we're going, we'll have around a few more hours of progging ahead of us. Sure, our bodies don't feel too tired from all the repetition, but my head's starting to hurt just trying to remember everything this b1tch is trying to throw at us."

I could only nod in agreement. Vesper had proven to be the most mechanically packed boss we've ever encountered to date. With our total pull time coming up to an average of around ten minutes and counting, her fight was shaping up to be a marathon of skill and endurance. After that [DEPLOYED] debuff got solved, it got replaced by yet another debuff. Then another, then one more, all in five percent intervals in terms of her overall health. What's worse, they all had different ways of solving them mechanically if we wanted to survive. For [DEPLOYED], the key was that we had to stick together. For the next debuff after that, we had to deal enough damage to the boss for the woman to resolve the debuff herself.

With each iteration, the insanity only grew. One debuff after another came and went, and the trial-and-error experience went from somewhat entertaining to downright exhausting. Even now, we were once again stuck in some random debuff that somehow had us stuck in position while we waited for something to happen. All the while, the boss just stood in the middle of the arena staring at us like we had the solution to her newest puzzle.

Like, woman, we have no idea what you can do!

"Tell me about it," I sighed in commiseration. "Should we take a break then? We wouldn't be able to think straight with us this stressed out about it."

She shrugged, "We might as well. I don't think we should, but my brain's too fried to even care at the moment."

And just like that, the tension in our bodies seemingly evaporated as we went ahead and laid down on the slab of stone we were sitting at. With Guidance laying beside me, we found ourselves looking up at the dark sky, the pillar of light beside it somehow making for a decent view as hues of light and dark seamlessly blended together into a subtle gradient.

"Think you're gonna get some sleep or something?" I asked.

"Unlikely. I feel like I'm about to keel over, but something's stopping me from even falling asleep on my feet like I would've been if I was still back in the old world," she absently remarked. "I've gone through work crunches for the company I work for, and that usually lasted for weeks on end during the final stretch of a project."

"So it's just overtime on steroids then."

"More than that," she weakly scoffed. "We only got two to three hours of sleep per day, and we usually slept on our desks just so we wouldn't waste too much time away from work. And before you go ahead and be mad for me, I'm telling you now that it's all normal in my line of work. I know it sounds like hell, and it is, but that's just the nature of working on software."

I frowned at her anecdote. As much as I wanted to voice out my protests, I'll honor her wishes and avoid it. Still, hearing about it did make me upset. After all, I already balked at 16-hour hospital shifts, and to hear that she usually went longer than that? It honestly sounded like an unhealthy career path. Also...

"Isn't that illegal to the labor code or something?" I pointed out. "You're not even in a critical industry like healthcare."

"Well, I think the only reason it works is that a project didn't usually need that much attention during the production process," she explained, her words taking on a wistful tone. "For the rest of the year, we'd just work the usual nine-to-five plugging at our work. Depending on our efficiency, we probably won't even need to go into crunch time and need to work that extreme. Unfortunately, it seems destined for any project to get into that one week of pure crunch just one week before launch."

"Sounds like you work in video games or something," I joked.

"I might as well be. Well, not counting this one," she scoffed. "My professional job was, well... I really shouldn't tell due to NDA, but those things aren't binding anymore, are they?"

I chuckled. "I don't think any of the laws we used to follow will affect us period."

"That they are," she giggled. "Now I'm starting to think about breaking some laws."

"What do you even get to break?" I jokingly asked. "I don't think the stuff that we'd want to break would even work here. Jaywalking? Driving under the influence? Stealing?"

"Hey, I wouldn't steal even if it wasn't against the law," she pouted. "I was thinking more along the lines of pirating and drinking."

I turned to her, blinking. "Drinking? Why would you be worried about that? How old are you?"

Instead of replying, Guidance simply turned to me and whispered, "That's a secret."

"Guidance, you can't keep that a secret from me," I sighed. "Are you secretly underage this whole time?"

This time, she narrowed her eyes at me. "Moriya, if I was underaged, I wouldn't be working in a professional setting."

I paused. Well, I got that already, but I still wanted to ask just to make sure. Also, "Then why did you say you want to break drinking laws? The only laws that even pertain to that are underage drinking and all the driving stuff."

"I don't know," she shrugged. "Maybe I actually want to drink some of the harder stuff. Moonshine I've heard packs a mean punch, and that's illegal."

I blinked at this new revelation of hers. It wasn't bad per se, but at least it wasn't as bad as her wanting to do heinous crimes or being underaged. "Huh... I didn't know you were an alcoholic."

"No, I'm not," she quickly rebutted. "I just like my alcohol tasty and flavorful."

"And for them to pack a punch?" I quipped.

"That's part of the drinking experience!" she defended, sitting up beside me. "What kind of alcohol won't pack a punch? It needs to be smooth, but some of them need to just burn for the full experience."

I raised an eyebrow as I sat up beside her. Looking her in the eye, the passion showing through her gaze told me that she wouldn't budge on the issue. She really thought that she wasn't an alcoholic somehow despite just telling me that she wanted to try out drinks so high in alcoholic content that they were illegal.

"You really think that, huh," I smiled.

"Of course," she huffed with pride. "I'm more of a sommelier than anything. Wines and all that are my jam."

"Well, that's one more thing I now know about you," I chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind for the future. In the meantime, think we can have another crack at this boss?"

Guidance scoffed. "If you say it like that, we might as well go ahead. Besides, how else will you give me some gifts if we're stuck here?"

I rolled my eyes at her. It was that easy to read, huh...

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