"You don't lose in the Silent War. You vanish."
---
The dormitory's silence stretched long into the morning.
Kayaks stared at the ceiling above his bunk—once painted with constellations, now cracked, rusted. Something was changing the Playhouse. It aged. Decayed. As if it mirrored the contestants inside it.
> "Six gone in two days," Eli muttered, tossing a roll of data scrolls onto the common table. "That's not a game. That's a purge."
> "No announcement, no scoreboard, no lights. Just… gone," Lena added, arms folded.
Kayaks looked to them both, then toward Merris, who sat on the sill, more withdrawn since the Trait Market. The loss of his moral compass left his decisions sharper, colder.
> "We need answers. And we won't get them staying here."
He pulled out the sealed strip from Mila's bunk—a final, coded message she had scribbled before vanishing. One line glowed faintly:
> **"Echo well. They listen from below."**
---
Few knew of the Echo Archives. It was a buried hall, hidden behind the memory walls that shifted randomly with time. Eli had decrypted the route after tracking the spatial inconsistencies caused by Mila's disappearance.
The moment the team passed into the Archives, the air thickened.
Rows of memory pods floated in midair—spherical orbs glowing with flickering images, locked memories of the eliminated, discarded, or erased.
> "This is where they store us," Lena whispered.
> "Our lives, our thoughts... our edits," Merris said, staring into one that held an image of a crying girl he didn't recognize. But her eyes looked familiar.
Eli accessed one of the orbs—the memory log titled **#57 – Mila Tern.**
Static. Then voices.
> **"System Override. Mila Tern tagged 'Unbound Dreamer.' Error. Classification exceeds trait limit."**
> **"Initiating Soft Erasure."**
Kayaks clenched his fists.
> "She wasn't eliminated for failing a game. She was too powerful."
> "No," Lena said slowly, piecing it together. "She was too *pure*. A threat to the system's control."
---
They left the Archives with one conclusion: the system was correcting anomalies—players like Mila, whose presence created ripples.
That night, they found **the Whisper Room**, a chamber discovered by accident when Merris walked through a wall of static by following a droning hum only he could hear.
Inside, a god's symbol glowed faintly: a burning hourglass—**Nulla.**
> "Decay itself," Lena murmured. "Why here?"
The walls whispered. Literally. Thousands of overlapping voices formed fragments.
Kayaks placed his palm on the wall and asked, **"What is the Silent War?"**
Silence, then:
> **"A war without soldiers. Played in shadows. Only the forgotten win."**
> "What the hell does that mean?" Merris muttered.
A new voice answered—sharper. Human.
> "It means you're losing."
They turned.
A girl in a sleeveless tunic stepped from the corner shadows. Ash-colored hair, a tattoo of a mask on her wrist.
> "Name's Iris. Been playing since Day 1. Hidden factions. Secret trials. You're late to the war."
> "You part of it?" Kayaks asked.
> "Was. Until they erased my team."
She tossed a scrap of fabric toward him—Mila's.
> "They're rewriting the Playhouse," Iris said. "Wiping people out. Not just physically. But from *memory*."
Eli paled. "That's why I couldn't find logs on the others. They're not just dead. They've been **unwritten.**"
---
Kayaks stood before the table in the common hall, scanning the crude map they'd drawn of the Playhouse over the weeks—sections they'd mapped, ones that no longer existed, ones that changed.
> "We need to split up," he said.
> "No," Lena protested.
> "If we stay together, we're easy to monitor. We scatter, gather info, find others like Iris."
They agreed reluctantly.
* Eli would infiltrate the Game Engine Core.
* Merris and Iris would search the Wailing Hall—where players once reported hearing the "voice of the old gods."
* Lena and Kayaks would head to the Hollow Garden—a place said to host dreams of those long gone.
-
At first glance, the Hollow Garden looked beautiful. Silver grass, floating willow trees, dream-light swaying in the air like pollen.
But the moment they entered, something felt… off.
> "Don't breathe too deeply," Kayaks said instinctively.
Lena nodded. Then gasped.
Across the meadow, a child walked.
It was Mila.
> "No," Lena whispered, backing up.
> "It's a memory echo," Kayaks said, voice thick. "Or a trap."
The child turned. Her eyes hollowed into infinite darkness. Then spoke in multiple voices.
> "You are seen. You are next. The game *never* ends."
Then she burst into smoke.
A *scar* opened in the ground—revealing rows of glowing spheres beneath. Just like the ones in the Echo Archives. Except these were different.
Each one had a name scratched out.
Unwritten.
---
Kayaks stepped back. His shadow stretched unnaturally long, despite no sun.
"It's not just Silent War," he said quietly. "It's a culling."
*End of Chapter 6**