Chapter 160: The Corridor of Silence
The air in the Corridor of Silence felt heavy, almost liquid. As Aki and his team stepped onto the pale, colorless floor, the sound of their footsteps was swallowed instantly by the void. There were no neon lights here, no pulsing data streams—only an endless, monochromatic expanse that felt like the inside of an unwritten page.
"Keep your thoughts focused," Von whispered, his voice barely audible even to himself. "This server reacts to vibration. In the Silence, your greatest weapon is your loudest enemy."
Rena hovered her hand over her staff, but she didn't dare ignite her magic. Sai gripped his shield so tightly his knuckles turned white. They could feel a presence—something vast and ancient—watching them from the mist.
From the fog emerged the Void Sentinel. It was a towering titan of smooth, faceless marble. It had no eyes, but in the center of its chest was a large, glowing sensory organ that pulsed with every heartbeat in the room. This was the system's ultimate censor, designed to erase any data that made too much 'noise' in the grid.
Without warning, the Sentinel moved. It didn't run; it simply glided across the floor with terrifying speed. Its hand, shaped like a massive blade, swung toward Sai. The warrior raised his shield just in time, but the impact was silent and devastating. Sai was launched backward, crashing into the misty walls without a single sound.
Aki stepped forward. He knew that physical combat was useless here. He pulled out the Platinum Pen, but he didn't write in the air where the light would crackle. Instead, he knelt and began to etch words directly into the floor.
He wrote with precision: "The void cannot claim what it cannot hear."
As the ink touched the surface, a field of absolute stillness radiated from Aki. The Sentinel froze. Its sensory organ pulsed wildly, trying to locate the source of the disruption, but Aki had written himself out of the acoustic spectrum.
Rena watched in amazement as Aki continued to write, his movements fluid and calm. He described a world of shadows and echoes, a place where reality was defined by thought rather than sound. With every sentence, the Sentinel's marble skin began to hairline fracture.
The Titan let out a silent scream, a ripple in the air that distorted the vision of everyone in the room. It lunged at Aki, but Aki didn't flinch. He stood up and traced one final, massive word in the air, moving the pen so slowly that it made no sound at all.
[ERASE]
The word glowed with a dull, cold light. It touched the Sentinel's chest, and the titan began to dissolve. It didn't explode; it simply turned into fine, grey sand that drifted away into the void.
The Corridor began to shake. At the far end, a massive obsidian gate groaned open, revealing a world of fire and iron.
"We've cleared the Silence," Aki said, his voice returning to normal as the server's constraints lifted. "But the next floor... that's where the real nightmare begins."
Von looked at the gate, then at Aki. "You've grown, Aki. You aren't just surviving the system anymore. You're rewriting it."
The team walked toward the gate, ready to face the Server of Ash.