Fierce War GB

Novel Synopsis

Zou Tunan isn't sure when he became a machine.

Maybe it was the day she opened his casing to repair him.

No one had ever touched the port that had been sealed at the factory, not in his entire life. Even he hadn't known it could be connected. She used that port, and the control system of the entire machine stopped belonging to him.

The needles on the instrument panel began to jump wildly. Every safety valve failed at once, and the core temperature soared past the red line.

He tried to hit the emergency stop, but the button didn't respond. He tried to cut the power, but her commands bypassed all his permissions and went straight into the base system.

He was an operator. He used to control the machine, but now he had become the machine, a part being adjusted under someone else's hands.

His body ran on its own, reaching a limit he had never reached before. For the few seconds when his consciousness went offline, the machine stopped responding to any of his commands. It decided its own speed and its own output.

He shook violently under the administrator's hands. One by one, the mounting bolts flew off. Every safety mechanism disengaged, and in the end he lay there like a heap of disassembled parts.

I have to leave, he thought.

He could endure being hit, being controlled, even handing over all his money. But not this. Having an administrator take control of the machine and turn him into a complete weakling in the midst of that loss of control was worse than being killed.

So he ran.

Later, he found out that running was no use.

That machine no longer recognized any other operator. It only responded to that program, the code the administrator had written into it. Anyone else couldn't even read it. He tried several times, but the machine didn't budge. The instrument panel stayed dark, the tachometer remained at zero, and he couldn't even start it.

He crouched outside the residential complex where she had just moved, watching her walk out side by side with another man. There was a relaxed ease in her expression that he had never seen before.

His machine suddenly started again. Just seeing her lit up every instrument panel, the tachometer shot into the red zone on its own, and the engine began to rev without moving, shaking his ribs with pain.

She walked over, glanced at him, and said, "You need a haircut."

Then she swiped her keycard to enter the building without looking back.

He crouched beneath a streetlight and looked up at the windows of the building. He pressed a hand to his chest. His heart pounded wildly beneath his palm, every beat seeming to threaten to burst through his ribs.

It was just like the last time, when she had taken his hand and pressed it against his chest so he could feel it for himself. The machine had just finished its first round of adjustments, and he was still shaking. She had pressed his palm against the spot where his heartbeat was strongest and asked if he could feel it.

He had felt it. Just like now, the whole system was out of control, and every reading was flashing an alarm.

He suddenly understood.

She had repaired him from a piece of junk on the verge of breaking down into a machine that could run again. Now her access permissions were the only ones stored in the system. No one else could even enter the startup password correctly.

He hadn't come back to ask her to take him back. He had come to request after-sales service.

"You can't just stop halfway through fixing it and leave it like this, can you?"

He said it to the lit-up window in a voice only he could hear. No matter what, he wouldn't give up. Even if it meant becoming the other man... No, relationships were a matter of who came first, and he wasn't the other man.

[Reading Guide]

1. Neither lead is a virgin. The male lead is emotionally stuck on the female lead, and he's the other man.

Theme: Always remain calm and objective.