Mira didn't weep when I told her that. I'd prepared for that, half-expected that, and instead she just went very still on the call. Like people do when a piece of news confirms something they'd already privately decided was true months ago and had been waiting, dreading, to have it said out loud by someone else.He's still aware." She repeated it like she needed to hear it come out of her own mouth to believe it. "Not gone. Aware."That's what the fragment said. "I heard it only once, maybe ten seconds, before whatever's running the System noticed it and shut it down."Will you call him again?""I don't know. Then I equipped the fragment 3 more times and got nothing. Shhh. Doesn't work more than once maybe. Maybe it needs to be recharged. "Maybe whatever is using the System's voice is more careful now that it knows I can hear through it.
We five sat with that for a long moment — six of us, actually, if you counted Mira, who had become as much a part of this as anyone actually enrolled for the Trials at this point."Okay." Sana's practical steadiness did more to hold the room together than anything else could have. We got three days. We had a fragment that spoke to Ken one time. We have a company that's been quietly erasing missing players ever since this began. What's the real plan here? That's just following the original itinerary and hoping for the best, because 'walk into the feeding ground anyway' isn't a plan."It may have to be, I said slowly, hating how true it sounded as I said it. And backing out doesn't help anyone in there now. If Mira's brother and four other people are really still conscious inside whatever's running this world, just walking away means no one with any information ever goes looking again."So we go in with the plan to survive *and* find them," Dario said. Not just clean the stage. Both."Both," I agreed.
Tommy was serious. For the second time in as many weeks. And uncharacteristically so. He leaned forward. "If this thing has been eating people to keep the world running 'at scale', like the voice said — what happens to it if we don't feed it what it wants? What if a whole party walks in determined to lose no one?"
No one had an answer to that. It wasn't the kind of question the game had ever trained us to ask, tutorial videos and starter guides built entirely around leveling and loot and none of them built for the possibility that the world itself might be hungry.
Alex finally broke the silence, quieter than his usual self, the joking nearly gone from his voice. We should inform someone. Press. Authorities. "Anyone out of this game who could really stop a Final Stage before it even started.""I've done that for eight months," Mira said. "Every outlet, every regulator whose contact information I could find. Nobody wants to be the story that brings down a billion dollar company over something that, on its face, sounds exactly like a conspiracy theory. I've logs. I have a brother in a coma with no medical explanation. It's never been enough." ""Then it must be us," I said. "Three days. "We go in with what we've got, we look for whoever's still in there the second we're inside and we get out, all of us together, no exceptions.
**"Confirm Attendance Final Stage. Party Vote.
This time I didn't have to say it out loud. The votes came in almost instantly, five yeses piling up in the window, no hesitation at all, like the decision had been made the instant Dario found that first matching phrase in an old chat log.
"Three days. One last time I put on the Warden's Fragment before logging out that nite, I held my breath and listened.
Nothing. " The silence, the same cold silence it had kept since the fountain.
But just as I reached to unequip it there was one last flicker on my HUD, faint and brief and gone before I could be sure I hadn't imagined it.
**"...still here. fast."**
*Next time...*