He had been a quiet number before the war. Rounded edges. Dependable. The kind of digit you could put in a multiplication table and trust to come home. But then the call came, and 6 was shipped far from the clean lines of arithmetic, deep into the humid, unforgiving jungle.
The enemy was everywhere.
The 7s did not fight like civilized numbers. They did not line up neatly in equations. They slipped between the trees at odd angles. They appeared in the mist, sharp and angular, then vanished before anyone could carry the one. They left behind signs carved into bark: 7 > 6.
At first, 6 laughed it off. “It’s just psychological warfare,” he told 5.
But 5 who'd been deployed earlier, wasn't laughing.
After that, 6 began hearing them everywhere. In the rustle of fractions. In the snapping of twigs. In the long silence between subtraction problems. The 7s had mastered fear. They knew that the worst thing you could do to a number was not erase it, but make it doubt its place value.
One morning, their commanding officer, Captain 8, told them they were advancing toward Base 10.
“We go in clean,” said 8. “No remainders.”
But the jungle had other plans.
The 7s had set traps: repeating decimals, unsimplified fractions, word problems with unnecessary trains. By noon, the whole unit was disoriented. By evening, nobody knew whether they were greater than, less than, or equal to anything anymore.
6 made it back, technically.
But not really.
After the war, he tried to return to normal math. He stood in number lines. He attended group worksheets. He even tried dating 4 for a while, but whenever anyone mentioned “rounding up,” he went silent.
Then one day, at a neighborhood barbecue, a 7 walked in.
Tall. Lean. Pointed.
6 froze.
Someone said, “Hey, why is 6 afraid of 7?”
6 stared across the yard, gripping his paper plate with white knuckles.
And in a voice barely above a whisper, he said:
“Because you weren’t there, man.”