Gematrail — Echo Observer — Lævateinn Chapter 6: Echo04 – The Baptism of Strings

Read chapter 6 of Gematrail — Echo Observer — Lævateinn by ⛰️ Mt.Kongou_Ragnarok on NovelPedia.

↓↓↓ Click here ↓↓↓ 📀 the soundtrack and theme songs 💿 🎶🎧 Spotify 🎧🎶 track Num : 7 / 8 He was, by preference, unaffiliated. No clubs. No commitments. That had been the plan. Then the student council president had cornered him — repeatedly — with the phrase it affects your academic record , and the plan had quietly collapsed. He was going to have to join something. Mika had joined the swim team and invited him along. He’d declined. Water was simply not something he could manage. Even a shower hitting his shoulders produced it — a slow tightening deep in his lungs, like something contracting around the lining. Once, during a pool session at school, he’d stepped into the water and his breathing had simply stopped. Cold iron forced down his throat. He’d woken up staring at a white hospital ceiling. “It can’t be helped,” Mika had said, lips pushed into a small pout of genuine sympathy. “You really can’t stay in the pool for long, can you.” She’d been helping him work through the list of options anyway. Since that incident , something about her had quieted — slightly, in a way she wouldn’t acknowledge. “What about sports generally? Is that out?” “Not exactly…” The records said he’d completed a thirty-six kilometer marathon in his first year of high school. On paper, he had exceptional physical endurance. In practice, he wanted to do as little as possible. And there was the pain — occasional, unprovoked, like something raking the deepest tissue of his lungs from the inside. X-rays showed nothing. Every scan came back clean. But staring at those black-and-white images, a cold nausea moved through him that had nothing to do with medical anxiety. There. In the deepest chamber of the lung. Something moved in the image — or seemed to. A dark, adhesive crawling, like fingers made of necrotic flesh pressing against the bronchial lining from the inside. Pulsing. Climbing slowly toward the throat. The sensation of a creature incubating in a cage it had not yet outgrown — waiting, patient, inevitable. His skin rose all at once. The doctor had told him to avoid strenuous exertion. He’d chosen table tennis for his PE elective rather than kendo or judo, and felt no regret about it. “What about music, then?” “…I’ve been told I have an ear for it.” He looked down and shook his head slightly. The image of every face in an auditorium turning toward him at once made a cold sweat prickle across his skin. He’d walked past the brass ensemble practice once and stopped without meaning to — the sound of the instruments vibrating the corridor windows, dust hanging golden in the afternoon light, students stationed at the center of something loud and alive. He could not picture himself there. “Tea ceremony?” “No strong objections, but it doesn’t go anywhere.” “…Archery?” Something settled in his chest at the word. Quietly, without fanfare. Archery. No running. No team dynamics. No performing for a crowd. Quiet, taut, and solitary in a way that felt — correct. He picked up the enrollment form on the spot, wrote Archery Club in the club field, and submitted it before he could change his mind. “You must be Yuki. Welcome.” The faculty advisor had a mild, open face and extended his hand warmly. He led Yuki to the dojo, which shared a wall with the kendo hall. The moment the sliding door was drawn back, warm air pressed against his face — the particular heat of a room that had been breathing exertion all afternoon. From the adjacent hall: the dry percussion of bamboo meeting bamboo. Sweat, timber, and old leather cured into practice armor over years of use. The floorboards had absorbed the evening light and gone a deep amber, and the whole space seemed to expand and contract around its own heartbeat. “There’s one student who cross-trains with both clubs,” the advisor said. “I’ve left instruction to her. Three times a week is fine for now.” A loaner keikogi was pressed into his hands. The thick cloth caught against his fingers. He stood there, uncertain of h