In a dimly lit room, the sound of typing and knuckle cracking echoed at regular intervals. The room wasn't big, with a single bed and a table, offering just enough space for the tenant to walk.

Kurt worked on his project, or, rather, to be more precise, his team's project, which was due in just two days.

"BAM"

He suddenly slammed his hand on the table, startling the other guy who typed something on his laptop.

"sigh"

"Bro... You alright?"

Kenji, Kurt's friend and one of his teammates for the project, asked. He knew that the project was due in a couple of days, but they were still getting errors while running specific functions of their application. Their other teammate, Phil, 'coincidentally' got an important issue at home he had to handle, so he informed them and went home just a day before, having not responded yet.

"I knew that son of a b*tch wouldn't do his part," Kurt cursed.

"... well, there's nothing we can do now. All 'cause of that cursed professor Mallick for forcing him upon us. We should've refused then and there itself!"

Originally, it had only been the two of them, but then came Mallick, their class tutor, asking them to add another guy who had been on long leave and did not have a pair, to which they reluctantly agreed. But now that they looked back at it, they understood their fault. They dug the grave, unaware that it was for themselves.

In fact, they asked nothing from Phil, knowing it might turn out like this. But that guy used some honeyed words to let him have some work so that he could 'contribute' to the project. Again, they dug the grave, unaware that it was for themselves.

"Did it get any better?" Kenji asked.

"...no, I got a few more errors when I found the previous one," Kurt answered in a quiet voice, embarrassed.

After all, the dildo called Consequences rarely comes lubed.

It was known to them that Phil hadn't completed his part just a few days ago, but Kurt hadn't wanted to do it himself and wanted Phil to do it, even if it meant forcing him like a parent watching over their kid doing homework.

Alas, he hadn't expected Phil to pull something like this out of his ass at the end. The work Phil needed to have done hadn't been a crucial part of the project, but now that they had deployed the whole application, they faced issues that should've been rectified during testing (which they hadn't intended to do from the very beginning).

"... it's my fault; I shouldn't have challenged you to watch Naruto at that point in time," Kenji said ruefully.

Kurt had been a Bleach fanboy, and Kenji, a Naruto fanatic. So, their usual fights were about which was better among the big 3. Kenji had watched both, but Kurt had only watched a few episodes of Naruto. So, Kenji challenged Kurt to watch the entire Naruto series before judging, and that happened right before the week of Phil's asspull. Kurt hadn't bothered with that and let Kenji take on Phil's work while continuing to watch Naruto until Kenji realized that he couldn't complete the task on his own.

"Even if you had accepted to let me help, we still might not have completed this by now," Kurt said.

Kurt saw that the error wasn't a serious problem, but he didn't want to rely on his luck that the professor during the review wouldn't touch upon this specific functionality. That's why he put in so much work.

"So, how was Naruto until you watched it? SURELY better than Bleach, wasn't it?"

"I only watched till old man Hogoromo gave them power to defeat Madara. So far, it's fine. I wouldn't say better than Bleach. Bleach is goated. Ichigoat is still better!"

Kenji scoffed.

"As if! Base Naruto can whoop Ichigo's ass."

"Talking about power scaling, are we now? Then—"

Their trash-talking ensued for a quarter of an hour until they realized how screwed they were if they couldn't complete the project on time and get back to work.

Around 2:00 AM

"Tch"

Kurt clicked his tongue in annoyance as another exception was thrown at his face. He took a deep breath, stood up, did some stretches, and went to his bag, rummaging through it to find any snacks. He found the box of cookies Phil had given him when he joined the team.

He took it and settled back in his seat. Kenji had fallen asleep about an hour ago. Kurt scrolled through the code and reached the section where the error had been shown while munching on some cookies vigorously. They hadn't had time to have dinner because of this, so he had been literally starving.

When he finished half the bowl, he stopped and gulped a few mouthfuls of water.

"Let me leave the remaining for Ken in case he wakes up in the middle of the night," Kurt thought as he closed the cookie box and placed it on the table, behind his laptop.

Time passed slowly, and Kurt still hadn't found a solution to the error. Suddenly, he felt uncomfortable. He didn't mind it at first, but slowly he started to sweat a lot, and his chest felt heavy. By the time he understood that he was having a heart attack, he couldn't make any noise, and as he heaved heavily, he felt like something had been lifting him before he lost consciousness.