Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 26: Chapter #26: The Quiet House

[Winter holds our hands tightly in its frozen grip. Over the last few days, countless people have frozen to death in the streets. The only silver lining is the sharp drop in crime; even the most desperate looters can’t survive the freezing temperatures outside.]

[The temperature is continuing to plummet. Scavenging for firewood in the besieged city of Pogoren has become nearly impossible. People have started burning everything they can get their hands on.]

In the game’s brutal trading economy, the onset of winter marked the absolute peak of inflation. The price of wood skyrocketed. A single piece of scrap wood could now be traded for two premium cigarettes.

At this exact moment in the siege, military-grade bullets were functionally equivalent to a plank of wood. The kind of scrap wood you used to see lying around everywhere before the bombs fell.

Silver had already abruptly ended his live broadcast. He sat alone in his dark room, staring at the grayscale game screen, before finally tilting his head back and squeezing his eyes shut.

The harsh glow of the monitor pierced through his thin eyelids, making his head spin. He had only been playing the game for three hours, but the sheer emotional weight of the experience made it feel like three grueling years.

His mind kept drifting back to the moment he sent Roman to massacre the military outpost. Amidst the slaughter, he had found a piece of scavenged loot that wasn’t food or ammo. It was a letter.

[Page 1]

[Mom, you told me I wanted to join the army for the thrill of it. Let me tell you something. Last week, the unit caught a girl who joined the rebels. A sniper. The captain said she had killed quite a few of our brothers, so the squad decided they were going to "play" with her. They dragged her out into the woods, tied her to a tree, and strapped her with explosives.]

[They cut the fuse incredibly long. Long enough for her to sit there and recall her entire life before it reached the detonator.]

[Page 2]

[Ten minutes later, she blew up. Do you know what the worst part was? It wasn’t the blood or the guts scattered everywhere. It was her expression right before the blast. Seeing the look on her face... it hit me like a sledgehammer to the skull.]

[I don’t think I’ll ever be able to scrub that sight from my brain for the rest of my life. You asked if I wanted to go to the army for some excitement, didn’t you? Let me tell you, there is absolutely nothing fun about this place, Mom. There is only death and dust here.]

When Silver read that letter on stream, his mental state had completely shattered.

Even though he wasn’t the one who had murdered the sniper girl, the suffocating, inescapable tragedy of the war weighed on his chest like an anvil.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Silver opened a new tab in his browser. He desperately wanted to know if there were other, better endings to the game, but he physically couldn’t bring himself to launch his own save file again.

He typed This War of Mine into the search bar. Instantly, a massive wall of videos populated the screen—VODs, fan edits, and highlight reels from dozens of different content creators who had just finished their own grueling runs.

He clicked on a VOD from a female streamer named Ruby.

Unlike Silver’s ruthless, hyper-lethal run, Ruby was playing with extreme, almost paralyzing caution.

In the video, Ruby finally managed to scrounge together enough scrap to craft a saw blade. She carefully sawed through a locked iron gate in a ruined house, navigating into the basement to pry open a heavy wooden cabinet. But when the loot menu popped up, the items inside were flagged with a stark, red warning: [Private Property].

Silver sat at his desk, silently smoking a cigarette as he watched. The video had a massive view count, but the usually chaotic stream chat replay was shockingly sparse.

The supplies inside that cabinet were incredibly rich. Even though it belonged to someone else, there was a massive stockpile of real, life-saving food sitting right there for the taking.

On screen, Ruby stared at the glaring red warning text that took up almost half her monitor. She froze for several long seconds. Then, she let out a heavy, defeated sigh, closed the inventory menu, and walked away without taking a single can.

Silver didn’t say a word. The chat replay remained dead silent.

But in that exact moment, it felt as though everyone watching across different time zones had let out the exact same heavy sigh.

Later in the video, Ruby attempted to scavenge a different location. Finding the front gate padlocked, she used a crowbar to smash it open. The noise immediately drew a group of hostile survivors who rushed out to beat her to death. Terrified, she sprinted out of the map, surviving the night but returning to her shelter completely empty-handed.

But her refusal to steal from others did not mean the war would show her the same kindness.

Her shelter was raided on the very first night. Violent looters broke in, severely wounding her survivors and stealing all their hard-earned tools and food.

Terrified of being robbed again, she spent the next day forcing her scavengers to carry all their most valuable supplies in their backpacks, leaving nothing of value in the base stash. But when her scavenger returned the following morning, they found the shelter had been completely ransacked again. The looters had stripped the place bare; they hadn’t even left a broken screw behind.

But in a twisted way, having absolutely nothing left made her survivors lighter. One person was full, so the whole family wasn’t hungry.

Her shelter was completely stripped to the bone. It couldn’t even be called a home anymore—there were massive, gaping holes in the walls letting the freezing wind in. The raids continued almost every night, but the looters never took anything, simply because there was nothing left to take.

Sometimes, Ruby would send a character out to scavenge, only for them to get chased off by armed thugs, forcing them to flee without grabbing a single scrap. Other times, they would stumble across a pristine stash of food, see the [Private Property] tag, and quietly walk away in the dark.

The game’s system text would coldly summarize the night: [Returned home safely, but empty-handed.]

Watching her painfully moral playthrough, Silver couldn’t help but let out a bitter, sad laugh. He wondered if the looters who kept breaking into her empty house went back to their own starving families and said: ’I’m sorry, I couldn’t find anything tonight. I know you’re disappointed, but I’ll try harder tomorrow.’

Ruby’s run didn’t end with a dramatic, bloody firefight. Her characters simply starved, grew deeply depressed, and eventually abandoned the shelter one by one.

Her game officially ended on a Game Over screen the exact day the harsh winter finally arrived.

The video wasn’t incredibly long, but as the final grayscale screen faded out, the comment section finally began to populate.

[GamerDad88: honestly? that was a really good run.]

[LoreMaster: it’s better to just die than become a monster. who actually survives a war anyway?]

[voidwalker_gg: if I have to rob an innocent person to live, I’d rather just starve. the guilt later on is suffocating.]

[Salty_Tears: she kept her humanity at least T_T]

Reading the comments, an overwhelming consensus emerged. Everyone watching firmly believed that Ruby dying in the cold, dark ruins right before winter was actually a good thing.

It was better this way. In a game this relentlessly cruel, maybe starving to death with your morals intact was the only true ’perfect’ ending.

If you resorted to murder and theft just to see the ceasefire, could you really call it a happy ending?

Silver reached for his keyboard and typed a single comment into the void: [This is the best gameplay video I have ever seen.]

He had absolutely zero desire to watch his own VOD. He had cleared the game, sure. But he had only survived by throwing away his conscience and relying on pure, sociopathic defense mechanics.

He backed out of Ruby’s video and refreshed the main search page. Instantly, a new video dominated the top of the algorithm, sitting at over ten million views.

The title read: [Gaming Restricted Area! The Quiet House!]

Silver’s breath hitched in his throat. His heart skipped a beat.

He remembered that exact location from his own run. But why was the community calling it a ’Restricted Area’?

With trembling fingers, he clicked the thumbnail.

In the video, a popular gaming blogger was controlling his character, fully armed with an assault rifle and a fire axe, kicking down the door of the Quiet House. Living inside was a frail, elderly couple. They were completely unarmed and utterly incapable of stopping the player from doing whatever he wanted.

The blogger sprinted straight past them, ignoring their terrified pleas as he began ripping apart their cabinets.

He ransacked the upstairs bedroom. The old man didn’t follow him up; he just stood at the bottom of the stairs, helplessly shouting, "Put it down! Please, don’t steal from us, you thief!"

Silver remembered this scene perfectly. It was exactly what he had experienced during his own run.

And just like the blogger, Silver had ruthlessly taken every last scrap of food and medicine without a second thought.

But unlike Silver, who had never returned to the house, the blogger in the video came back to the Quiet House a few days later to finish looting the rest of the map.

As the video cut to the blogger returning, the guy laughed jokingly into his microphone. ’The loot in this place is super fat, guys. Easy supplies for a few days.’

But this time, when the character kicked the door open, the house was dead silent. There was no frail old man staggering to the stairs to yell at him.

The atmosphere was so incredibly bleak you could practically smell the rotting flesh through the monitor.

Lying together on the upstairs bed were two emaciated corpses.

They had starved to death.

"Fuck me..."

Silver clutched his chest, the air entirely leaving his lungs. The text from the sniper girl’s letter violently flashed through his mind again.

[War is not fun at all. There is only death and dust here.]

Silver reached over and completely killed the power to his computer. The monitors went pitch black. He slammed his fist down onto his desk, his throat so tight he physically couldn’t speak.

In a modern war, civilians had absolutely nowhere to run. If they hid in their homes, rogue soldiers or desperate scavengers would kick the doors down and slaughter their entire families.

If they tried to flee the city, snipers mounted on the rooftops would pick them off one by one for sport.

If they waited for international rescue, they were just waiting to be butchered.

If they tried to hoard food to outlast the siege... what happened when the siege lasted five years? The shelf life of a pack of instant ramen was only two years.

What do you eat for the remaining three years?

Your pets.

And then, your neighbors.

— — — — —

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