The report is finished. The night hasn't broken, yet he has already been crushed into silence by this life.

  Fujiwara Naoki finally saved the last slide of his presentation at exactly 4:56 AM.

  He stared blankly as the "Save Complete" indicator light on the monitor flickered. For a fleeting second, his vision blurred. His dry eyes felt as if they were rubbing against sandpaper; he couldn't help but press against his brow, letting out a deep, heavy sigh.

  The presentation was finally complete—this set of materials for the Monday 9:00 AM project proposal meeting had been his entire life for the past week.

  Focusing during the day was impossible; he could only push through the progress at night. His days were swallowed by meetings and revising slides, followed by more meetings to handle the "supplementary suggestions" his supervisor would drop on him at the last minute. He had to scour through competitor research, review what the clients had said in previous meetings, and finally, integrate all of the company’s remaining resources on his own...

  The only time he actually had to write was always after midnight. For the past few days, he had left the office around 3:00 AM, surrounded by other overtime workers who looked more like the living dead than people.

  "Five days... what I made over these five days wasn't a presentation. It was something I bought with my own life," he murmured. His voice was so raspy it was almost inaudible, as if the long nights had worn away his very vocal cords.

  It felt as if molten lead had been poured into his spine, dragging it down inch by inch. He raised a hand to rub his shoulders, feeling muscles so tense they seemed fused directly to his bones. The laptop’s fan was still whirring and buzzing; the air in the meeting room had long since grown so stagnant it was hard to breathe.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Only a few motion-sensor lights remained active across the entire office floor. Outside, the sky was still dark and the city was asleep, but the company was still awake. What remained awake were the air conditioners, the computers, the exhaust fans—and the office workers like him who shouldn't have been awake.

  Fujiwara Naoki closed his laptop, his movements slow and sluggish. His head throbbed with a dull ache, and his stomach cramped—dinner had been a cold convenience store rice ball at 9:00 PM, washed down with a can of energy drink. He had even forgotten to drink water.

  He stood up, his steps wobbling. He realized he had been sitting for so long that his legs had gone numb. Lacking the energy to even return to his own desk, he could only drag his heavy body toward the breakroom at the end of the hallway.

  The breakroom was empty, arranged in the same familiar way: an old grey sofa, an unstable air purifier, a "No Long Stays" warning sign peeling off the wall, and a blanket that had been shared by an unknown number of people.

  He laid his jacket over the sofa to use as a pillow, not caring if the blanket still held the scent of the previous exhausted worker. He was too tired to care.

  The moment he lay down, the sofa let out a low, weary groan, as if it too were buckle under the weight. His eyelids were heavy, and his breathing began to slow.

  "Finally... it’s over," he thought, closing his eyes.

  There were less than three hours left before the morning meeting, but at this moment, he only wanted a brief escape from it all.

  The crushing pressure, the tone of his supervisor, the KPI deadlines, and all those unreasonable things he had no choice but to accept—

  For now, all of it was shut out by this cheap sofa, the faint hum of the air conditioner, and these few minutes of quiet, isolated from the office by the darkness of the night.

  He just wanted to steal a tiny bit of time... time to belong to himself as a human being.