Chapter One: Reverse Echo

  There was a boy, seventeen years old, sitting on a cracked sidewalk, as if the city itself breathed through its fractures.

  His hair was white as ash, his eyes bck as a bottomless abyss, with heavy shadows beneath them as if the night had taken shelter there.

  His skin was pale... not the pallor of sickness, but the pallor of someone who had seen too much.

  ---

  He sighed and said in a low voice:

  "Well... damn it. It's over."

  ---

  What was the point of going on?

  Everyone he knew was dead, he had been stripped from his homend, and now... he was being called.

  That strange call, the one that could not be escaped.

  The Call of Origin.

  A small gss orb appeared in his chest, pulsing with a heartbeat that only he could hear.

  If someone looked at him with the eyes of awareness, they would see it dancing, as if preparing to explode.

  The call had been inside him since birth, pnted in his soul like a mark of fate...

  It only awakened when the soul crossed a threshold: nearing death, facing a cosmic rift, or suffering unbearable loss.

  He had crossed them all.

  He fled from hell, but he had not survived.

  It saw him... and the Call saw him too.

  ---

  He headed toward the nearest containment center, bidding farewell to the streets, the people, and the world with a cold gnce.

  He whispered sarcastically to himself:

  "Umm... what am I even saying goodbye to? I've only been here a week..."

  Europe was destroyed.

  North America was swallowed by the rifts.

  A stupid war had broken out a hundred years ago over oil and gas.

  "Damn them... they fought over oil and gas, and now they're ashes. What good is it if you're dead?"

  ---

  He paused for a moment, pursed his lips, then said:

  "Damn... damn... damn it all. Oil? Gas? Go to—"

  A faint sound cut him off:

  "... Ahem."

  ---

  He turned and found a boy with bck hair and golden eyes, cold as the edge of a sword.

  One of the cn children... and he too was heading toward the containment center.

  "I'm not talking to you. Sorry, just thinking out loud."

  The boy gave him a bnk stare and said:

  "Be careful next time, you... it's not worth my time."

  He continued walking, leaving behind a heavy silence.

  The scruffy-haired boy muttered:

  "Damn you."

  ---

  He thought about provoking him... but decided against it.

  "I'd rather die with my teeth intact; at least I could curse the monster as it eats me."

  He chuckled lightly.

  Comedy... it was his st shield in this miserable reality.

  ---

  He entered the containment center.

  He gave his name and data to the office, and was led into a room surrounded by iron on all sides.

  He began to feel the world around him twisting, as if existence itself was struggling to breathe.

  "Alright... let's go die and get this over with.

  I'll break the record for the fastest death in the trial.