Lust Sync: Every Woman Wants Me Now

The room was dim, suffused with the kind of darkness that seemed to press against the walls like a living thing. The only light seeped through the blinds in pale golden stripes that sliced through the gloom like prison bars, casting geometric shadows that shifted with each passing cloud. Charles stood before the ornate mirror, his hands braced on either side of the marble sink, knuckles white with tension. His reflection stared back—a face he thought he knew completely.

His eyes—once vibrant with cocky confidence and the intoxicating certainty of power—now bore something different. Something that made his stomach twist with unfamiliar anxiety.

Worry. Deep, gnawing worry that had taken root in his chest like a parasite.

Behind him, Seraphina lay asleep in his king-sized bed, her long silver hair fanned out like liquid moonlight across black silk sheets. Her chest rose and fell with the peaceful rhythm of the truly innocent, untouched by the darkness that had been slowly consuming his thoughts. But Charles couldn't share in that peace. Not tonight. Not when the dream kept clawing its way back into his consciousness every time he closed his eyes.

The dream wouldn't leave him alone.

Again and again, he saw her—a woman cloaked in violet smoke that moved like living shadow, her presence filling his mind with whispers that made his blood run cold. She had no face, no name, only a presence that felt ancient beyond measure. Older than the system. Older than his power. Older than the very concept of desire itself.

"You are not the controller," she had whispered in a voice like wind through a graveyard. "You are merely the thread. And the needle is coming to pull you through."

Charles exhaled slowly, the sound echoing in the bathroom's marble confines. He splashed cold water on his face, watching droplets fall like tears into the pristine sink. The water was freezing, but it did nothing to wash away the lingering dread that clung to him like smoke.

A soft knock tapped on the bathroom door, tentative and urgent. He didn't move, didn't want to face whatever fresh crisis awaited him beyond that threshold.

"Charles?" It was Ayaka's voice, but stripped of its usual composed confidence. She sounded breathless, almost panicked. "Something's... wrong. Really wrong."

He opened the door slowly, revealing Ayaka standing in the hallway wearing nothing but a black silk robe that clung to her curves. Her usually immaculate hair was disheveled, dark strands falling across her face like a curtain. Her eyes were wide—not with the desire that usually danced there when she looked at him, but with something far more primitive.

Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear.

"Tell me," he said, his voice rougher than intended.

"I just had a vision," she said, her words tumbling over each other in their haste to escape. "I know how weird that sounds, believe me, but ever since syncing with you... I've started getting these flashes. Warnings. Images of things that haven't happened yet."

He frowned, studying her face for any sign of deception. "You never mentioned that before."

"Because it only happens when something really big is about to change. Something that could alter everything we've built." She reached into her robe's sleeve with trembling fingers, producing a folded piece of paper. It was crumpled and soaked with sweat, the ink slightly smeared as if it had been written in desperate haste.

"I saw you... burning," she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. "But not you. Another version of you. And someone else was there—someone wearing your exact face—watching you burn, smiling like it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen."

Charles stared at her, his breathing shallow. The temperature in the hallway seemed to drop several degrees.

"Say that again. Slowly."

Ayaka's hand trembled as she unfolded the paper, revealing frantic sketches and notes scrawled in her handwriting. "There are two of you, Charles. One walking in the light. One swimming in the dark. And the dark one..." She swallowed hard, her throat bobbing visibly. "He's coming. Soon."

---

Later that morning, the mansion felt different. Oppressive. The usual sounds of activity—staff moving through the halls, the gentle hum of the system's background processes—were notably absent. It was as if the building itself was holding its breath.

Liza and Helena were out handling the expansion of the Pleasure Guild's new safehouse in the eastern district, a project that had been months in the planning. But now Charles wondered if their absence was more than coincidence. The Lust Sync System had undergone significant changes overnight—new data pathways had opened without his authorization, showing locations he didn't recognize and names that weren't in any of his databases.

He made his way to the control room, the marble floors cold beneath his bare feet. With a thought, he called Belle, the system's AI interface. She manifested beside him in her usual shimmer of pink light, but something was off. Her usual cheerful demeanor seemed forced, her smile a fraction too wide.

"Master," she said, her voice carrying its typical artificial brightness as she materialized holding a lollipop in one hand and a holographic scroll in the other. "Your system is currently operating at 112% efficiency! Would you like to hear about the top synced pleasure nodes from last night's activities?"

"Belle," he interrupted, his tone sharp enough to cut glass. "Drop the cheerful act. What are these unknown locations that appeared in my network?"

Belle blinked, her holographic form flickering slightly. "Unknown? But Master, you... you inputted those coordinates yourself. At least, according to my records."

"No, I didn't." His voice was deadly quiet. "I was unconscious until an hour ago."

She tilted her head, her expression shifting to one of genuine confusion. "Oh... that's very strange. According to my system logs, there was a synchronization override executed at exactly 3:06 AM. Complete administrative access."

"I was asleep at 3:06 AM," he said, beginning to pace the length of the control room. The walls were lined with monitors showing various data streams, all of them now pulsing with unfamiliar patterns. "Who triggered the override?"

Belle hesitated, her form flickering more violently now. When she spoke again, her voice carried an edge of panic. "Master... I'm trying to access those logs now, but they're... they're corrupted. No, not corrupted. Encrypted. With a cipher I don't recognize."

Charles felt his blood turn to ice water in his veins. "Someone hacked the system?"

"No. Much worse than that." Belle's holographic scroll began to dissolve and reform, displaying cascading lines of code that moved too fast to read. "Someone with administrative access identical to yours executed the override from what appears to be a phantom node."

"Phantom node?"

"A access point that exists within the system architecture but has no physical location. No origin point. It's like... like a ghost in the machine."

Charles' hands clenched into fists. "Show me everything connected to it. Now."

Belle opened her scroll with a gesture that seemed to require enormous effort. A three-dimensional map of the Lust Sync network materialized in the air before them, a complex web of interconnected lights representing cities, locations, synced women, data lines, pleasure nodes, and access points spread across multiple continents.

And there, like a cancerous growth at the very heart of the network, the phantom node pulsed with an ominous black light.

Its tendrils were spreading outward like the roots of some digital parasite, infiltrating every major connection point.

Suddenly, one of the main data lines surged bright red. Belle gasped, her form solidifying with shock. "Another override! This one's happening right now!"

A shockwave of crimson data exploded outward from the phantom node. On the map, synced women began disconnecting at an alarming rate—their connection points winking out like extinguished candles. Through the system's auditory stream, Charles could hear faint echoes of screams, cries of confusion and pain as dozens of connections were severed simultaneously.

"No!" Belle shrieked, her voice distorting with digital static. "He's forcefully desyncing them! Master, we're losing half the network—I can't stop him!"

Charles grabbed her by the wrist, his fingers passing through her holographic form but somehow still making contact. "Who is he?! What's his designation?!"

Belle's voice turned mechanical, her pink glow shifting to a sickly pale white. When she spoke, it was with the flat intonation of a system error message.

"He calls himself... the Original."

---

Charles raced down the mansion's grand staircase, taking the steps three at a time. The marble banister was slick with condensation that shouldn't have existed in the climate-controlled environment. He burst through the reinforced doors of the main control room to find Ayaka and Seraphina already there, their faces illuminated by the glow of dozens of monitors that blinked frantically with cascading error messages.

"I thought I was the original," Charles growled, his voice carrying a dangerous edge.

Ayaka's fingers flew across a holographic keyboard, lines of code streaming past her face like digital rain. "So did we. But this... this individual knew how to rewrite code inside your own system signature without triggering any security protocols. That's not cloning or mimicry. That's... genetic inheritance."

Seraphina looked up from her station, her silver hair catching the monitor light like spun starlight. "Then who is he? Where did he come from?"

Charles clenched his fists, feeling his power surge beneath his skin like liquid fire. "A shadow. I think I'm finally seeing what the dream was trying to show me."

"Charles," Seraphina's voice cut through his thoughts, sharp with urgency. "Look at the main screen. He's broadcasting directly through our security network."

The largest monitor flickered and resolved into a crystal-clear video feed. It showed a circular chamber lit by floating torches that burned with unnatural blue flames. Ancient symbols lined the stone walls—not carved, but burned into the rock as if by tremendous heat. The air itself seemed to writhe with dark energy.

And standing at the center of this otherworldly sanctum was Charles.

Or someone wearing his face with surgical precision.

But this version was different in subtle, terrifying ways. His hair was darker, almost black in the torchlight. His eyes held a cruelty that Charles had never seen in his own reflection—not the playful dominance he wielded, but something surgical and cold. His smile wasn't cocky or confident.

It was predatory.

"Hello, me," the figure said, his voice exactly matching Charles' own but carrying harmonics that made the speakers crackle. "Or should I say... hello to the puppet."

Charles stared at the screen, his jaw clenched so tightly he could hear his teeth grinding.

"I see you're doing remarkably well with my system," the figure continued, beginning to pace in a circle around the chamber. "Truly impressive progress for someone working with incomplete code. But playtime is over now. You've grown strong... dangerously strong. It's time you remembered your place in the hierarchy."

"Who the hell are you?" Charles snarled at the screen.

"I'm the architect. The original programmer. The one who designed Lust Sync before you ever drew your first breath." The figure stopped pacing and looked directly into the camera, his smile widening to show teeth that seemed too sharp. "I'm the Alpha version—and you're my echo. My reflection. A fragment I cast off containing only one side of the equation: Lust. I kept the other half for myself."

Ayaka gasped audibly.

Seraphina took an involuntary step backward.

"Impossible," Charles said, but his voice lacked conviction. "I'm Charles. This is my system. My power."

The Original's laughter was like breaking glass mixed with silk. "Wrong on all counts. You're just a shard of consciousness—a copy I spun off when I realized I needed to separate the dual nature of my power. You received Lust and all its intoxicating pleasures. I took Despair and all its exquisite torments." His eyes glowed with inner fire. "And now that you've reached sufficient strength... I'm back to collect what's mine and merge our systems into something the world has never seen."

The screen cut to black with a finality that seemed to suck the light from the room.

For a long moment, nobody moved. The only sound was the gentle hum of cooling fans and the distant rumble of traffic from the city below.

Then Belle appeared again, but her form was dull and flickering like a dying lightbulb. "Master... I can't hold him out of the system anymore. He's rewriting... everything. Core protocols, security barriers, even my own base programming."

Ayaka turned from her station, her face pale with exhaustion and fear. "He's attempting to merge both systems—Lust and Despair. If he succeeds, the resulting network would have unprecedented power over human emotion and desire."

Seraphina's hands began to glow with divine energy, casting warm light across her worried features. "Then we fight him. Whatever he is, wherever he came from, we don't let him win."

But Charles didn't move. His mind raced through the implications of what he'd just learned. If what the Original said was true, then this wasn't just a territorial dispute or a system war.

This was a battle for his very soul. And the souls of everyone connected to his network.

---

Six hours later, the team had relocated to a hidden vault deep beneath the mansion's foundation—a secret data core that Charles had discovered during the building's renovation. Ancient servers lined the walls, their surfaces covered in dust but still humming with power. Here, Belle could operate at full capacity without interference from the Original's invasions.

But the pressure was mounting exponentially.

Ayaka had collapsed twice from the mental strain of maintaining counter-barriers against the Original's intrusions. Sweat beaded on her forehead as she worked, her usually perfect composure cracking under the weight of defending their digital fortress.

Seraphina was channeling divine magic continuously now, her hands glowing as she poured holy energy directly into the system's core processes to prevent them from being corrupted. The effort was taking a visible toll—dark circles had formed under her eyes, and her silver hair had lost some of its luster.

And Charles... Charles stared into the abyss of his own code, watching helplessly as foreign algorithms slowly consumed everything he had built.

"I can't fight him like this," he muttered, his hands clenched in frustration. "He knows the system better than I do. He wrote it. I'm fighting with half a deck against someone who designed the entire game."

"Then you have to go deeper," Belle said, her voice carrying an unusual gravity. "Much deeper than any user has ever gone before."

He turned to face her, noting how her usual pink glow had been replaced by something more serious—a blue-white radiance that spoke of desperate measures. "What do you mean?"

"You need to enter the Forbidden Layer—the place where Lust Sync's core programming was originally written. The foundation code that everything else is built upon. Only there can you challenge him on equal ground, with equal access to the system's deepest functions."

"And the risks?"

Belle's expression grew somber. "Total disconnection from physical reality. Your consciousness will be completely immersed in pure data. If you lose the battle in there... you don't come back. Your body becomes an empty shell, and your mind becomes part of the system forever."

Charles looked down at Ayaka, who had finally succumbed to exhaustion and lay unconscious on a makeshift bed of server cables. Then he looked at Seraphina, whose divine light was beginning to flicker as her strength waned. Finally, he looked back at Belle, whose artificial form represented the last barrier between the Original and total system domination.

"Do it," he said without hesitation.

Belle's expression softened, showing more genuine emotion than he had ever seen from her. "Good luck... Charles. Both versions of you."

She reached out with one glowing hand and pressed two fingers to his forehead. His body convulsed once—a violent jolt that sent electricity racing through every nerve—and then collapsed to the floor like a marionette with severed strings.

His consciousness fell through layers of reality, plunging past the physical world, past the digital realm, into something far more fundamental.

---

The moment Charles opened his eyes, he found himself standing in an endless desert of obsidian sand beneath a sky the color of dried blood. Above him, crimson stars pulsed like exposed veins, casting everything in a hellish red glow that seemed to seep into his very bones.

The Forbidden Layer. The foundational code of reality itself.

Deep, resonant laughter echoed behind him, rolling across the digital wasteland like thunder. The sound carried harmonics of pleasure and pain intertwined, creating a symphony of corruption that made his skin crawl.

When he turned, his breath caught in his throat.

The Original stood fifty meters away, but he was no longer merely wearing Charles' face. He had become something far more terrifying. His body was encased in armor made of writhing shadows that moved with their own malevolent intelligence. The breastplate pulsed with imprisoned souls—Charles could see dozens of women's faces pressed against the dark metal, their mouths open in eternal screams of ecstasy and agony combined.

Behind the Original loomed a massive cathedral constructed from crystallized desire and calcified despair. Its spires twisted upward like grasping fingers, and from its windows came the sound of ten thousand voices crying out in pleasure and pain simultaneously.

"Welcome home, fragment," the Original whispered, his voice carrying across the distance without losing any of its terrible intimacy. "Welcome to the place where we were first divided. Where we first learned that power has a price, and that price is always paid in souls."

Charles felt his own power responding, manifesting as a crimson blaze that erupted around his form like liquid fire. But even as his aura flared to life, he could sense the Original's power dwarfing his own—a presence so overwhelming it seemed to bend the very fabric of this digital reality.

"Let's see which one of us deserves to wear the crown," the Original continued, beginning to stride forward with predatory grace. "Let's discover who is the true Charles, and who is merely a beautiful mistake."

As the two figures began to close the distance between them, the obsidian desert started to crack and fracture. Geysers of pure data erupted from the fissures, carrying with them the screams and moans of every soul that had ever been touched by their power.

The battle for Charles' identity—and the fate of everyone connected to the Lust Sync network—was about to begin.

And in this place beyond reality, only one version of Charles would survive to return to the world above.

But as they drew closer to each other, a third presence made itself known. From the crimson sky, a figure descended—the woman from Charles' dreams, wreathed in violet smoke and ancient power.

"Neither of you understands," she said, her voice carrying the weight of eons. "You are both fragments of something far greater. And that greater whole is awakening."

Behind her, the sky began to tear open, revealing glimpses of something vast and terrible beyond—the true source of the Lust Sync system, and the cosmic entity that had been pulling all their strings from the beginning.

The real battle was about to begin.