Gematrail — Echo Observer — Lævateinn Chapter 2: Echo00 – The Cry from the Abyss

Read chapter 2 of Gematrail — Echo Observer — Lævateinn by ⛰️ Mt.Kongou_Ragnarok on NovelPedia.

↓↓↓ Click here ↓↓↓ 📀 the soundtrack and theme songs 💿 🎶🎧 Spotify 🎧🎶 track Num : 1 (opening) / 2 (Echo 00) Drowning. Sinking. Sinking, sinking… Deep in his ears, a dull percussion burst — the muffled pop of water closing over him. The sensation of being dragged toward the floor of the abyss coiled around his body like a soaked rope, cinching tighter with every fathom. Pitiless darkness bled through the cracks in his skin, leeching away the last of his warmth, and icy water seeped into the marrow of his lungs. The limbs that had once dreamed of glory now lay sprawled across a cold floor, motionless as stone. There was no resistance left in him. Only the iron bite of the restraints against his skin confirmed what he already knew: that even the freedom to end his own life had been stripped away — that he was a prisoner with no end to his sentence. A scorching pain tore through his fingertips. The damp, metallic reek of blood stung his nostrils. This is a cage. Overhead, a fluorescent tube flickered and buzzed, its erratic white pulse scraping against his eardrums with every spasm of light. Current surged through the restraints again and again, burning the nerves raw. Somewhere beneath the smell of electricity, he caught the faint, acrid whisper of scorched flesh. His back teeth ground together until they groaned. He did not make a sound. The scream that had climbed all the way up his throat — he swallowed it back down, along with the iron taste of blood. The moment he surrendered to this absurdity, he could feel it: a premonition of something cracking deep inside his skull, sharp and final, like a fault line giving way. His molars clenched until they threatened to shatter. The judge raised his gavel with the detachment of a man signing a form. “The accused is found guilty of high treason against the state. The sentence is death.” Before the hammer could fall, a voice erupted from the gallery. A man lurched forward over the railing, his face contorted. — Guilty? Obviously. This piece of trash was broken from the start. The crowd around him caught the spark and ignited. — The evidence is thin. Death is too much. The roar and the murmur fused into a thick, humid heat that pressed against his back. In his ears, a phantom sound — the slow sizzle of flesh cooking — hissed beneath the noise of the courtroom. His nails bit into his palms. A thick, lukewarm trickle found the gaps between his fingers and dripped to the floor. No one was looking at him. Every gaze in that room was angled somewhere else entirely. At the faces of neighbors. At public opinion. At the preservation of their own positions, their own futures. Every voice raised in that chamber was raised in defense of the self. The crack of the gavel, the hurled obscenities — they had long since dissolved into meaningless static. This is not justice. This is disposal. He laughed. A dry, fractured sound from a parched throat. The corner of his cracked lips split open, and the taste of iron spread across his tongue. Betrayed — by his family, by the teacher who had shaped him, and by the very society that now stamped the word criminal across his name. Within this senseless chain of hatred, he had never come to hate humanity. He had simply gazed at the world with a heart far too unguarded for what the world actually was. And what that gaze had revealed was a vision of devastation: a future in which society’s rot seeped into his own soul, and he became the very force that dragged the people he loved into hell. The end of despair. The harder he acknowledged his own weakness and fought to break free of this reality, the more elegantly the system’s trap closed around him. Every cry for justice, in time, inverted into something indistinguishable from evil. History had rehearsed this ending before. The fall of glory. A script humanity never stopped performing, because humanity never learned. When he finally confirmed that the crowd had gone completely still, the light drained from his