Su Yu's knees drew inward by two inches.
Just as Elysia's high heels stepped onto the carpet for the fourth time, he summoned every ounce of strength to adjust his sitting posture, pushing the swivel chair forward by half a body's length so that his entire lower half sank completely into the shadow of the desk.
The desktop was solid wood, thick enough, and there was a panel in front extending all the way down to the floor.
From Elysia's angle, all she could see was Su Yu's upper half—a young man sitting in a chair, sweat beading on his forehead, his face pale.
"Su Yu, you look so awful."
Elysia walked right up to the opposite side of the desk.
She set the Starbucks in her hand down on the corner of the desk, then patted herself a bit, fishing out a neatly folded handkerchief from her little handbag.
The handkerchief was a pale pink, with a tiny cherry blossom embroidered on the corner. Su Yu remembered this handkerchief—it was the present he himself had given Elysia for her birthday before.
She leaned over and pressed the handkerchief directly against Su Yu's forehead.
An extremely pleasant fragrance washed over him.
It wasn't perfume—it was the scent Elysia carried naturally, like a spring flower garden mixed with morning dew, sweet and fresh.
The fabric of the handkerchief was soft, carrying the lingering warmth of her body heat, so fragrant it made his mind spin.
"Did you not sleep well last night?" Elysia tilted her head, dabbing the handkerchief lightly twice against Su Yu's temple. "Oh right, oh right, speaking of last night, that thing I mentioned when I called you on the phone—you still remember, right?"
Su Yu's Adam's apple rolled once.
"Wh… what thing?"
"It's about Himeko~" Elysia withdrew the handkerchief, pulled a chair over herself, and sat down across the desk, propping her chin in both hands. "Her dad wants her to find a boyfriend, doesn't he? I think you two actually suit each other quite well. Teacher Himeko may talk all fierce and prickly, but she's actually a really good person—"
Beneath the desk, Eden's movements halted.
She knelt on the carpet, her knees already a little numb.
Su Yu's fly was still open, and her right hand was loosely cupped around him.
Elysia's voice drifted down from above the desktop overhead, every word crisp and clear.
Finding Su Yu a girlfriend?
Himeko?
Eden's eyes narrowed.
That pair of hands kneeling in the dim space beneath the desk tightened once more.
The five fingers of her right hand were long, slender, and fair, the nails painted a dark gold in the same color scheme as her dress, glinting with fine, scattered light under the single sliver of illumination.
Her ring finger and middle finger pressed together, the pads sliding slowly upward along the most sensitive ridge.
A thin layer of sweat seeped from her palm because of the continuous motion, making every glide all the more slick.
She would absolutely not allow this man, on her home turf, to be so distracted as to listen to another woman's name.
Su Yu's spine suddenly arched up.
His ten fingers clamped down on the chair's armrests, nails nearly digging into the leather.
The rhythm beneath the desk suddenly changed, becoming faster, denser, with no transition whatsoever.
Eden was angry—very angry, quite angry indeed.
Su Yu's brain was screaming: hell, this was absolute hell!
"Su Yu? Are you listening?" Elysia's face leaned in a little closer. "I'm talking about Himeko. What do you think?"
"I, I think—"
The hand beneath the desk gave a twist.
Su Yu's voice caught in his throat, turning into a muffled, breathy sound.
He bit down hard on his back molars, forcibly shoving back down the current that surged up from his tailbone.
"You think?"
"I think… now isn't really the right time." Su Yu's voice squeezed out from between his teeth. "Work's too busy, no time to think about these things."
"Aiya, being busy with work isn't an excuse~" Elysia refused to let it go. "Look at you, all day long you only know how to make games, make games. You don't even have a single person around to take care of you. Even though Kiana lives at your place, she is, after all, your little junior sister. You can't make your little junior sister take care of you for a lifetime, right?"
Below the desktop.
Eden's gaze shifted away from Su Yu's waist and abdomen, tilting two inches to the right.
From this angle, she could see Elysia's feet.
A pair of feet wearing pink-and-white thin-strapped sandals were right there on the other side of the desk, less than half a meter away from Eden.
The nails on all ten toes were painted cherry-blossom pink, the exact same color as the flower embroidered on her handkerchief.
The thin straps of the sandals crisscrossed from the instep up over the ankle, leaving faint pressure marks.
As she sat, her right foot tilted up slightly, the heel lifting off the ground, exposing the ball of her foot where the skin had flushed faintly red from walking.
Her toes curled gently and then stretched out within the confines of the sandals, as if keeping time with the rhythm of her speech.
The air was suffused with that sweet, fresh floral scent she carried, mingled with the faint aroma given off by the sandals' leather warmed by her body heat, growing especially thick in this sealed space beneath the desk.
Eden stared at that pair of feet for three seconds.
The hem of Elysia's skirt swayed lightly with the motion of her crossed legs, the pink-and-white fabric like the wings of a butterfly.
She breathed in Elysia's fragrance.
That sweet, fresh, utterly non-threatening scent belonging to her very best friend was continuously seeping down from above the desk, mixing with the perfume lingering on her own body.
Her fingers quickened their pace.
This sensation was even more intense than the adrenaline of two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour on a mountain road.
Elysia was right overhead, just half a meter away, using the most innocent face in the entire world to wipe away Su Yu's sweat, to fret over Su Yu's lifelong happiness.
Eden, with an almost greedy gaze, looked up at Su Yu's face with its tightly clenched jaw.
This sense of immorality—keeping her dear best friend completely in the dark while wantonly tormenting the man she cared about right in front of her—dyed Eden's face a flushed, excited crimson.
It was more intoxicating than any strong liquor in the world.
"Su Yu, you're sweating again."
Elysia's voice came from above.
Su Yu heard the sound of chair legs scraping across the carpet.
Elysia had stood up, one hand braced on the desktop.
She bent down, and the handkerchief once again pressed against Su Yu's forehead.
This distance was far too close.
Elysia's face was right in front of his.
Her eyelashes were very long; when she blinked, they cast a small fan-shaped shadow.
Her eyes were that extremely pure pink-purple, and within them was reflected Su Yu's silhouette.
"Do you have a fever? Should I go buy you some medicine?"
As she said this, her body leaned forward a little.
The neckline of her dress loosened downward with the motion of her bending, revealing the patch of fair skin below her collarbone, and deeper still, a contour outlined by the edge of lace.
Su Yu's gaze slid down an inch beyond his control, utterly defenseless; the allure radiating from the girl, scattering like falling petals, made it impossible for him to tear his eyes away.
With her cheerful breathing and the rhythm of her speech, it trembled faintly directly below Su Yu's line of sight, giving off a tempting fragrance sweet as a juicy peach, mingled with body heat.
Had this been before, he might have been able to rely on his reason to play the role of the unmoved Liuxia Hui.
But that filter belonging to the "pure-hearted, melancholy young man" and the "two-dimensional waifu supremacist" had already, just last night, been shattered to pieces by a woman in an almost violent manner.
This was a change from 0 to 1.
At that very same moment, the "top-tier hacker" beneath the desk precisely yanked the power cord from his main unit's cooling fan.
Su Yu's CPU instantly spiked to 100 degrees, his entire person going rigid like an NPC clipping through a model and crashing.
His jaw clenched until it creaked, and a faint, mournful whine like an overloaded, burned-out fan escaped from his throat.
"Hm? What did you say?"
Elysia tilted her head, like a guide NPC whose correct dialogue branch hadn't been triggered.
"N-nothing… the network lagged."
Su Yu's voice seemed to carry a fatal 460ms of latency.
He felt his progress bar had been forcibly dragged to the critical point, and the hacker beneath the desk had no sense of fair play at all—chaining her combos without giving him even a chance to use a crowd-control-break skill.
And Elysia's face was right before his eyes, that sweet, fresh fragrance laced with the residual warmth of the handkerchief, like some kind of defense-ignoring mental-attack DEBUFF, launching a frenzied DDoS attack against his firewall.
He was about to give out. If he was forced into "game over" right in front of Elysia, his career as a game producer could be declared shut down for good. At a time like this, he could only, could only—
"Elysia—"
Nuwa's voice, like a system announcement that suddenly popped up full-screen, blasted over from outside the office.
"Ellie, come quick! I can't figure out this UI color scheme! Griseo insists on using the color she tuned herself, but I've combed through the entire palette and can't find this code!"
Elysia straightened up and, in passing, stuffed the handkerchief into Su Yu's hand.
"Aiya, coming, coming~"
She took two steps toward the door, then glanced back at Su Yu.
"You rest up nicely while you're AFK, okay? I'll come grind affection points with you again later~"
She turned around, her long pink hair sweeping up into a perfect physics-engine arc, and disappeared beyond the glass door.
The door closed.
Su Yu's last firewall declared a total, full-line collapse.
Elysia's handkerchief became his physical-layer mute button.
That sweet, fresh floral scent completely sealed off his mouth and nose, every breath stacking on the burden of uploading data.
And the offensive beneath the desk activated berserk mode the instant the door shut, that hand speed rivaling a StarCraft pro player madly racking up APM, as if to thoroughly wipe the RAM clean out of this main unit of his.
Su Yu's waist sprang up off the chair, as if some forced launch-into-the-air judgment had been triggered.
His left hand desperately covered his mouth, biting down on the handkerchief with his teeth to slap a "forced mute" on himself; his right hand clawed desperately at the armrest, to keep his body model from clipping through anything due to the excessive trembling.
His entire being was like he was going through some cyber-dimensional electromagnetic storm.
Above was Miss Pink Elf's "magic attack," below was the master of the Golden Courtyard's "physical deliverance."
Two utterly different high-risk data streams collided violently within his brain, the system completely crashing. Blue-screened.
All reason, shame, and fear were, in that instant, washed away spotlessly clean by the "one-click junk cleanup" command.
This "data formatting" went on for a long while.
So long that Su Yu felt his consciousness had already been uploaded to the cloud.
When the overloaded fan finally settled down, he slumped in the chair, gasping in great gulps of air, feeling as though he'd been wrung dry into a wreck with only 1KB remaining.
The handkerchief slipped, falling onto his lap.
He lowered his head.
Eden knelt beneath the desk, like a top-tier pro gamer who had just solo-cleared a dungeon on the highest difficulty, tilting her face up to look at him.
Her lips were slightly parted, her throat rolling up and down once.
Then, she swallowed down the freshly-dropped "top-tier experience potion," not letting a single drop go to waste.
She used the pad of her thumb to wipe the "code" from her chin, and then, as if savoring some hidden menu of a peerless vintage, gracefully and naturally slipped her fingertip between her lips and teeth, completing the "data recovery."
Su Yu stared at this scene, his just-rebooted brain plunging into a system hang once more.
That Eden—that lofty, aloof Eden, that top-tier SSR whom countless players had whaled their accounts dry yet still couldn't pull—was actually doing this kind of cache-clearing work beneath the desk, and doing it so skillfully and so elegantly!
That motion, that gaze—every bit of it was wildly provoking Su Yu's system warning.
Right after, he felt a change in his own hardware.
The physique remodeled by the enhancement serum displayed, at a time like this, a despair-inducing "zero CD (no cooldown)" mechanism.
Su Yu, who just moments ago had been afflicted with the "extremely weakened" status, watched with his own eyes as his rock-bottom mana bar instantly refilled to full at a cheat-like speed.
Not only did it refill, it even popped up once more an enormous, red warning box—
[System Notice: Phase Two Berserk State has been triggered.]
Eden had clearly noticed too.
She crawled out from under the desk and stood up.
Her dark-gold skirt hem was dotted with carpet lint; she patted it off casually a couple of times, then walked over to Su Yu's side and bent down.
Her warm lips pressed against the rim of his ear.
"Well done, good little brother."
Her teeth nipped lightly at his earlobe, her muffled voice leaking out from between them.
"Next up is big sister's reward time."
Before Su Yu could even react, Eden's hand pressed down on his shoulder and shoved him off the chair.
His back slammed onto the carpet beneath the desk.
The space under the desk was wider than he had imagined.
Overhead was the underside of the solid wood desktop, to the left and right were the desk legs, and directly in front was that panel extending down to the floor.
The air was suffused with the perfume Eden had left behind, mingled with the scent left by that absurd affair just now.
Eden did not lie down with him.
She sat down on that very swivel chair Su Yu had been sitting in, and crossed her legs.
Then, a bare foot extended down from the chair.
Before he could even catch his breath, a fair, tender, flawless foot, painted with dark-red nail polish, stepped onto Su Yu's body with an undeniable force, and Su Yu's breathing stalled right there—
At some point she had already kicked off her high heels.
Her bare right foot dangled down from the edge of the swivel chair, the arc of the instep extending all the way from ankle to toe tips, the skin a porcelain white one shade lighter than her legs.
It was a pair of feet that could be called works of art.
The arch rose high, forming a graceful and arrogant bridge.
The five toes were round and translucent, the nails coated in a dark red like dried-up blood.
The skin in the crevices between her toes was the softest part of the entire foot, flushed faintly red from being cooped up in shoes all afternoon, giving off a warm aroma blending leather lining and body lotion.
Su Yu drew in a sharp breath of cold air.
Looking up from this angle, he could see Eden's crossed legs, those legs of golden proportions, with red marks still lingering on her knees from kneeling just now.
Eden's toes slowly curled against his body, then stretched out.
Just now the entire underside of the desk had been full of the wanton, intense scent Eden had left behind.
This sense of being doubly conquered—in physical space and in line of sight—made Su Yu's blood boil once again.
She lowered her head and gave him a glance.
From Su Yu's perspective looking up, Eden's face was cut in half by the edge of the desktop, revealing only her chin and those eyes laced with a smile.
"Feels good?"
Su Yu opened his mouth, but no sound came out at all—he could no longer speak.
Eden's foot began to move.
Su Yu's fingers grabbed onto the desk leg.
This utterly absurd "reward" played out inside the office, while the chattering sounds of Elysia and Nuwa excitedly discussing things kept drifting in from outside.
That excessively fair, tender foot pinched up Elysia's handkerchief that had just fallen to the floor, then draped the handkerchief over Su Yu's face, the sole pressing down. Elysia's fragrance, mixed with the scent on Eden's body, surged into his mouth and nose from every angle; that thin fabric could not block the heat of that sole at all.
"Hehe, this is Ellie's handkerchief, you know~ She probably never dreamed even in her wildest dreams that the handkerchief she handed over out of genuine concern would end up being used by her dear Su Yu to do this kind of thing—"
Eden lowered her voice, but those words were perfectly clear right at Su Yu's ear.
"If she found out, how do you think she'd feel?"
Eden's voice and the all-pervading fragrance on Elysia's handkerchief formed the most lethal poison. Su Yu felt his entire brain was screaming, his reason already long since fused into shutdown—but Eden had no intention of letting him off.
She exerted a slight pressure, sliding across Su Yu's face through Ellie's handkerchief, and Su Yu felt his entire face sinking into a maddening whirlpool of fragrance.
"Ellie, I'm sorry—"
Miss Pink Elf's smiling face resurfaced in his mind—the gentle motions just now of caring for him, of wiping away the beads of sweat on his forehead, and the pink-and-white fabric carelessly exposed by the curve of her bending over.
And her most trusted, and also most beloved, dear best friend Eden was right in front of him, doing such a thing.
A near-shattered sob escaped from Su Yu's mouth.
And just as this new wave of pleasure was about to climb to its peak—the office door was pushed open.
"You're looking for—"
A stiff female voice with an obvious pause came from the doorway.
"You're looking for me? Where's Su Yu?"
Sirin stood in the doorway.
She deliberately kept more than three meters of distance from the desk, her two golden eyes warily scanning the room.
From her angle, all she could see was Eden sitting on the swivel chair, with documents and a computer spread out on the desk.
Su Yu was not within her line of sight.
Su Yu lay beneath the desk, and the instant he heard that voice, his originally fused reason instantly recovered, his whole body as if doused through and through with ice water.
——Kiana?!
He wanted to get up.
Every single nerve in him was commanding him to immediately crawl out from under the desk.
But Eden's foot did not stop—she had no intention whatsoever of letting Su Yu off, and instead meant to carry this lethal punishment through to the very end.
Not only did it not stop, but the moment he tried to struggle, she precisely hooked her toes around Su Yu, the force just right to nail him in place.
Su Yu instantly lost all his strength, able only to gape his mouth wide open like a dying fish, yet not daring to make even the faintest, slightest sound.
He didn't dare make a sound.
If Kiana heard his voice coming out from under the desk, if she walked over and saw this scene—
Then everything would be over.
A perfect, flawless smile surfaced on Eden's face.
"Su Yu went to the restroom."
Her voice was steady, her tone natural.
"Before he gets back, let's have a chat first."
Eden turned the chair to face Sirin's direction.
Her upper half sat upright in the chair, her posture elegant, both hands folded on her knees.
And beneath the chair, her right foot still rested on Su Yu's body, the toes curling, stretching, and grinding down in a slow, rhythmic manner.
"Kiana, Su Yu has already told you, hasn't he?"
Eden's smile was warm and friendly.
"From today on, I'm an ally to you and Su Yu."
Su Yu lay beneath the desk, staring at the underside of the desktop overhead.
Eden's voice drifted down from above, forming a maddening contrast with the movements of her foot.
There wasn't a single flaw in her tone, every word landing just right, as if she were conducting a perfectly ordinary business negotiation.
And her toes were tracing circles on his body.
Listening to the elegant, smile-laced voice coming from overhead, while feeling the foot below ceaselessly pushing him toward the abyss, Su Yu felt a wave of intense dizziness.
This woman—how on earth did she manage to do this kind of thing with her foot while still keeping such a perfect smile on her face?
Sirin stood in the doorway, her golden pupils glinting under the fluorescent lights.
She did not reply immediately.
Eden sat on the swivel chair, legs crossed, her smile proper.
Documents and a laptop were spread across the desk; everything looked perfectly ordinary.
But Sirin's nostrils had caught something.
Even though she was incredibly weak right now, her five senses were, compared to an ordinary person's, on an entirely different level.
So she keenly discovered it—discovered the thing that this seemingly flawless woman had hidden beneath her foot.
There was a scent in the air she had never smelled before.
Not perfume, not coffee, but something more primal—a sweet, fishy aroma carrying body heat.
And beneath that scent, she heard the sound of breathing.
Extremely shallow breathing, deliberately suppressed.
Coming from under the desk, coming from beneath Eden's foot.
——Su Yu was down there.
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