Chapter 3: The Hidden Route, the Rogue Maid, and the 2AM Poll That Changed Destiny

  Being a reincarnated vilin in a dating sim is kind of like being the only sober person at a rave—you’re fully aware of how unhinged things are, and yet powerless to stop the glowsticks from flying.

  Especially when the DJ is Twitch Chat.

  And tonight, they voted to unlock a hidden route. One that wasn’t in the base game. One that I, a hardcore Hearts of Fantasia pyer, had never even heard of.

  Here’s how it happened.

  It started innocently enough.

  I was reviewing estate finances in the study—Lucien apparently owned five vineyards, two magical research bs, and a haunted furniture store—when the lights flickered.

  Then the orb appeared. Twitch Chat.

  “LUCIIIIIIEN”“WAKE UP, BESTIE”“WE FOUND A SECRET ROUTE”

  I frowned. “Secret what now?”

  “UNUSED CODE”“DEV LEFT IT IN THE GAME FILES”“It’s time… to meet her.”

  And then the world glitched.

  Literally glitched.

  For a split second, the room pixeted. My tea cup turned into a fish. My chair rotated 90 degrees. I heard a Minecraft vilger sound.

  And when the glitch passed, a girl was standing in the room.

  Dark hair. Dusty maid uniform. Tired eyes. And a giant mechanical key sticking out of her back like she was part wind-up doll, part steampunk horror movie.

  “Oh no,” I breathed. “Chat. What did you do?”

  “MAID ROUTE UNLOCKED”“SHE’S A BUGGED CHARACTER”“MEET CODE NAME: GLITCH-CHAN”

  The girl blinked at me. “Designation: MAID-404. Error: Identity not found. Do you require assistance, Master?”

  In the original game, there were six love interests. None of them were this girl. I would’ve remembered a maid with code leaking from her eyes and a voice that glitched every third word.

  But Chat said she was part of unused code.

  Some secret character, maybe hidden by the developers. A character that was never meant to be seen.

  And now she was in my study. Holding a tray of cookies. One of which had a glowing red aura.

  “…Are these cursed?” I asked.

  She tilted her head. “Emotion detection failure. Try again ter.”

  “HE’S GONNA ROMANCE THE NPC”“MAID ROUTE IS REAL”“This is peak content”

  I sighed. I should’ve known better than to ask questions.

  Chat, in their infinite wisdom, named her “404-Chan.”

  They also voted to make her my personal maid for the week.

  Which is how, the next morning, I found myself at breakfast with a girl who made static noises every time she walked, and who insisted on buttering my toast in binary.

  “ERROR: YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY”“MAID-404 BEST WAIFU”“Let’s break the entire game, boys”

  Surprisingly, 404-Chan didn’t stab me, poison my tea, or turn into a demon. In fact… she was kind of helpful?

  She knew how to bypass locked doors. She read ancient grimoires in seconds. She repaired magical relics faster than my engineers.

  And she called me “Master Protocol.” Which, in a weird way, was fttering.

  But of course, nothing in this world stayed stable for long.

  That night, I heard a scream from the east wing.

  I ran down the corridor—cloak billowing, boots thudding, fully ready to deliver a heroic one-liner—and burst into the library.

  There, I found Ren (the protagonist), standing on top of a table, filing a candlestick like a weapon. Around him, a swarm of possessed books fpped like demonic pigeons.

  “THEY’RE READING ME TO DEATH!” he shouted.

  “Lol”“Why’d you open the forbidden tome???”“Chat made me do it”

  And, sure enough, the floating orb pulsed.

  “HE ROLLED A NAT 1 ON LORE CHECK”“We told him to read the spellbook marked ‘Don’t Open’”“Oopsie~”

  404-Chan stood nearby, holding a fire extinguisher. She looked at me.

  “Situation: escating. Deploy countermeasure?”

  I nodded. “Extinguish the knowledge.”

  She bsted the books with magic foam.

  Ren tumbled off the table. The books dissolved into sad little ash piles. And I realized something horrifying:

  Chat was trying to speedrun chaos now.

  They weren’t just influencing Ren’s romance choices—they were rewriting the game’s structure in real time.

  And I was stuck in the middle of their sandbox experiment.

  After we got Ren to bed (wrapped in four bnkets and a tinfoil hat “for anti-book purposes”), I sat down with 404-Chan in the garden.

  “Why are you here?” I asked her.

  She looked up at the stars, eyes flickering with soft glitch-light. “System Error. Timeline: unstable. Oracle input: overexposed. Data integrity: compromised.”

  “…You’re saying Twitch Chat is breaking the game?”

  She nodded once.

  “Every choice. Every vote. It was never meant to be like this.”

  I stared at her.

  A cut character. A hidden maid. A living fragment of code that shouldn’t exist.

  And yet she was real. Self-aware. Just like me.

  We were both anomalies in this digital fairy tale.

  That’s when I heard the bell.

  A shrill, metallic ringing from deep beneath the estate.

  404-Chan stood immediately. “System detected: Route divergence. A new event has begun.”

  I stood too. “Where?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Instead, she glitched out of existence—vanishing in a flurry of static—and I was alone.

  Until the voice came.

  “DUKE LUCIEN!”

  A thunderous voice echoed through the halls. It shook the gss. Rattled the stones.

  And then the floor cracked open.

  A glowing ptform rose from beneath the garden. Atop it stood a man—no, a knight. Cd in silver-gold armor, holding a sword made of literal lightning.

  He pointed at me.

  “YOU HAVE BEEN CHALLENGED TO A TRIAL BY CODE!”

  “OMG IT’S THE DELETED PALADIN ROUTE”“They unsealed EX-KNIGHT.exe”“Chat voted for this at 2am lol”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  Of course they did.

  The knight leapt down, bde sizzling. “Lucien Arclight, you have exploited narrative loopholes. Befriended broken code. Gained sentience beyond your script.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “LUCIEN W”“Padin gonna get patched”

  “This world cannot handle your divergence,” the knight intoned. “Therefore, I shall reset you.”

  He raised his sword.

  Time slowed.

  And in that moment, I remembered every final boss fight I ever pyed. Every line of code I ever tweaked. Every time I screamed at a screen because a character I liked died to plot armor.

  Not today.

  “404!” I shouted.

  She reappeared beside me instantly, hand glowing with debug code.

  “Activate override,” I said. “Inject false route tag: Royal Picnic Ending.”

  She blinked. “That event... does not exist.”

  “It does now.”

  She grinned.

  Then snapped her fingers.

  The sky turned pink. The battle music stopped. A picnic bnket materialized under the knight’s feet.

  He stumbled, confused, as a teapot and sandwiches appeared in his arms.

  “What… what is this sorcery?!”

  “Twitch Chat demanded a filler episode,” I said smoothly. “And you, sir knight, have been invited to tea.”

  “LOOOOOOL”“Filler arc saved his life again”“Lucien is becoming a GOD”

  The knight sat down involuntarily. 404 served him a sandwich.

  And just like that, the fight… was over.

  That night, I y in bed staring at the ceiling.

  Twitch Chat was changing the world, bit by bit. Unlocking characters, routes, and corrupted data. And somehow, I was keeping up.

  Barely.

  404-Chan sat beside the bed, idly scrolling debug strings through her eyes.

  “You are adapting,” she said.

  “I’m surviving.”

  She tilted her head. “Most code does not try this hard.”

  “Yeah, well…” I sighed. “I’m not code. I’m the guy who used to rage-quit this game at 3AM because Lucien’s death scene was unskippable.”

  “TRUE STORY”“Now you are the unskippable content”

  I ughed bitterly.

  They were right.

  I was no longer the vilin.

  I was the content.

  And I was going to turn this broken story into my own route—glitches, memes, and all.

  To be continued...