Chapter Four: The Sixth Teammate

The public result also awarded Echo the win. Their score jumped to six hundred, and viewership passed twenty million. Gu Chen removed his headset to hear reporters cheering outside. Zhou Heng dropped to his knees, blood running between the fingers pressed over his ears. Among millions of signals, he had heard a narrow-band message absent from the broadcast. “The same sentence repeating for five years,” he gasped. “Skyvault Node awaiting survivor retrieval.” On the wall, their sixth teammate silently deleted the recording.