The smell in the room reminded Kai of instant noodles and regretful choices.

However, that wasn’t going to stop him now. The fan was working, the chair was reclined to an angle indicating Kai’s giving up on any work-related activities, and the computer screen was glowing with the menu of Shattered Vows Online — the most sickening NTR fantasy RPG ever conceived and made into a game as well-written as it was degenerate.

Three weeks.

No progress on the main questline.

The reason wasn’t difficulty. In fact, the combat in the game was relatively easy, while the dialogue — skippable. Additionally, the world-building was impressive enough for a game meant primarily to create complications for men in a fantasy world. The problem was that to reach the interesting quests, you had to go through the grinding part. It involved doing a chain of quests which usually took about four-six hours to complete.

Kai started four different chains.

Zero completed.

It always happened when he managed to start doing something important, either he would fall asleep, get distracted or try skipping one step to jump straight to the interesting bit, thereby losing access to the quests he needed.

This night he was closer to succeeding. Daren’s route — childhood friend’s betrayal story-line — was sixty-eight percent complete. The quest indicator was glowing red, and the corrupted meter next to Lyra — her health bar — was at ninety-one percent. The heart-shaped icon representing it showed a crack symbolizing her corruption.

Vorn already appeared in the quest. The bull. Tall, arrogant, and the exact character type the author created in order to ruin a protagonist’s life in every possible way. Kai respected this kind of writing honestly. Vorn wasn’t just a muscular guy with a confident look — he was intelligent and calculating, a slow poison in Daren’s relation. **Good villain. That’s what Kai would call him, all right.**

The next step of the chain quest involved having to escort Lyra to the Ashveil Market, triggering three unique dialogue events, before following her to the Broken Crown Inn, where the scene would be unlocked. **Ready to finally see what sixty-eight percent of a playthrough had been building toward.**

Minimum forty-five minutes.

Kai stared at the quest marker.

Then at the bowl of noodles on his desk.

And back at the quest marker again.

"No way."

Kai pulled up a new tab.

Thread title: [SVO] Full Content Unlocker — Skip Grind, All Scenes, Working 2024. Forty-two pages of threads, most of them asking if it worked, some of them confirming that it did, a few warnings from mods that were conveniently overlooked by users, and a link in page three to an obscure website named something along the lines of cheatvault-x dot com that his virus scanner marked with a big red warning sign the moment the webpage loaded.

Kai clicked through it.

The name of the file was SVO_CheatEngine_vFINAL_real.exe.

The use of the real word in a file name should’ve been Kai’s first red flag, but since it was only one part of a cluster of them, he went ahead and ran the file anyway.

Antivirus warning.

Kai closed the window.

The program started. It was precisely the type of cheat engine one could expect — address field slots, value scanners, the list of the game’s variable already pre-populated. Corruption meters, quest flags, scene locks, and relationship meters. Everything laid out for easy access.

Kai accessed Lyra’s corruption meter. Set it at maximum.

Found the Broken Crown Inn scene’s lock. Switched it off.

The screen turned bright white.

Not a crash-white. Not a power surge white. No, this white had a certain depth to it, like he was looking through into something rather than at it. Kai had roughly half a second to process this fact before the light came out of the screen itself. Physically. Outside the screen. In the room.

It hit him like an electrical charge, as though every neuron in his body was suddenly misfiring, and what he felt right before everything shut down in his brain was the feeling of toppling over — not out of his seat, not onto the ground, but right into the screen, right into the game, into his computer, into the file that had sixty-eight percent completion and had been his constant source of frustration for three weeks —

He awoke on cold stone tiles.

Cobblestones beneath him, rough and gritty, smelling of horses and forge fires and flowers that didn’t seem to go with the rest of the smell.

"Shit!" Kai exclaimed as he struggled to pull himself upright and get a better look around.

There were walls made from gray stone blocks and stalls set up in rows, and the sky was a little bit too vivid for him to accept as reality — the clouds in particular moved in a strange way, reminding his subconscious that this wasn’t real no matter how vivid the image was.

And yet, it felt real enough.

Ashveil Market. The place of the escort quest. The one he had just rejected forty-five minutes ago.

A blue translucent box materialized before his eyes.

SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

Welcome, NPC Unit #4471 – Kai

Role assigned: Childhood Friend (Supporting)

Current Quest: The Slow Unraveling – Act 3

Quest Objective: Escort DAREN to LYRA’s rendezvous point at the Broken Crown Inn

Time Remaining: 4:47:33

Completion Reward: 500 EXP/Relationship Flag Unlock

Warning: Failure to complete assigned quest within time limit will result in penalty.

Kai stared at **the notification** blankly, then slowly sat back down on the cobblestones.

"Stupid fucking escort quest..." He mumbled as he realized his only option was to finish the quest properly and try to find a way out later.

He vaguely heard someone call his name — a male voice, the name Daren, the name of the main character in the game he was playing — and closed his eyes to take a breath that lasted for about thirty seconds.

The timer still counted down.