Gematrail — Echo Observer — Lævateinn Chapter 5: Echo03 – Dripping Breath

Read chapter 5 of Gematrail — Echo Observer — Lævateinn by ⛰️ Mt.Kongou_Ragnarok on NovelPedia.

↓↓↓ Click here ↓↓↓ 📀 the soundtrack and theme songs 💿 🎶🎧 Spotify 🎧🎶 track Num : 5 / 6 “…Hey.” Outside the windows, rain was hammering the world white. The droplets struck the glass in relentless volleys, and the vibration traveled through the old house’s timber frame in a low, continuous tremor. Lately, he had reached something that might generously be called a working arrangement with Yui. She still issued regular warnings — don’t go trying to charm anyone, you hear me — but the edge in them had softened, slightly, into something more like habit than hostility. Am I really that much of a threat to people? At school, the transfer student novelty hadn’t worn off. He still got cornered occasionally — Is it true you’re going out with Amana? — and had to answer as he’d been coached: We’re childhood friends. Been together since forever. His classmates would groan with theatrical envy. Man, you’ve got it made. But the words reached him through some kind of membrane, arriving slightly muffled, slightly wrong. Every time laughter broke out around him, he was left with the sensation of standing a half-step outside the frame. His immediate world: Amana and Yui, both childhood friends. Student council president Shouko. And— “Hey — are you even listening?” —Mika. His family’s younger sister, who had just transferred to the same school. Their father had been away on an extended work posting, and Mika, who had always been closest to him, had gone through the transfer paperwork and come to stay. “Yeah, sorry. I was somewhere else.” He sank back into the living room sofa with a vague sound of complaint. Golden Week, and the weather had committed to being as uncooperative as possible — rain driving down without pause. He’d been trading messages with Amana on RIME, but she was buried in housework; Yui was at her part-time job. He’d learned, through an offhand complaint from Yui some weeks back, that theirs was a single-parent household. Their mother was gone. Amana had taken over — managing the cooking, the cleaning, coaxing their father away from the bottle with a patient, inexhaustible competence that apparently never showed its seams. Yui had said it with a particular kind of bitterness, back then: “My sister has been holding that man together for years. I’ve never once seen her admit she was tired. That’s why — when I see some guy who can’t look after himself sitting there needing to be taken care of — it makes me angry. Because all I can see is my sister wearing herself down all over again.” He set the remote down quietly. The comedian on the screen mugged and shouted. Yui’s set expression superimposed itself over the image in his mind, and the sharpness of her habitual hostility toward him suddenly made a different kind of sense. She hadn’t been looking at him. She’d been looking at someone behind him. He channel-surfed without conviction, watching nothing. The room held the smell of old tatami and damp timber. Cold from the rain-cooled air seeped upward through the soles of his bare feet. The comedian’s shrill laughter floated in the middle distance, oddly disconnected from the space it occupied. To any outside observer, he was just a bored high school student killing time. Mika had given up suppressing her yawns and was sprawled across the sofa, tapping the toe of one foot against a cushion in an irregular, lethargic rhythm. “God, I’m so bored. ” He wondered how the silence outside looked to her — someone who’d grown up in the city. The school had been digitized; daily life hadn’t quite caught up. Beyond the window, deep forest disappeared into mist. The rain-heavy branches of the weeping willows dragged and dripped with each sluggish gust of wind. The whole sky sat low, as if the world had been wrapped in wet cloth. Out here, even the Serei devices ran at reduced capacity — spotty signal, sluggish response. For anything beyond coursework, it was usually faster to just use your own hands. Mika’s city friends had described what