The curtain had finally fallen.The audience was long gone.Above, the skies of Death's domain flickered like a broken screen before dissolving into dead silence.
Ethan stood before the scar, swaying like a discarded shadow.He knew he couldn't last much longer—his body, his soul, his memories, all ripped apart and used as patchwork to seal the Void.
This wasn't some noble "heroic act."If anything, the shape of a hero was exactly this: half-transparent, barely standing, like a forgotten file rotting in an archive.
"So I'm just the final patch, huh?" he whispered, voice like a suppressed laugh. "The program of the world bugs out, so they slap a random idiot on it as duct tape… real professional."
The air gave no reply. Only the echo of silence.
He lowered his gaze, watching his hands unravel.His fingers thinned into paper; his palms cracked, spilling letters and symbols that wriggled like parasites. They gnawed at him, trying to rewrite him into an annotation no one would ever read.
"Brilliant," he sneered. "Humans die and become energy. Souls recycled like biofuel. And now I'm about to be zipped up into a compressed file. This isn't a world—it's a cosmic recycling bin."
His memories warped.He saw his mother's smile morph into the teeth of a corpse.He saw his comrades' faces stiffen into theater masks.And finally, he saw Karl.
For one fleeting second, Karl's eyes regained clarity—like a dying screen flashing its final light."Go. I'll finish this for you." His voice came muffled, like through thick glass.
Ethan froze—then laughed."Heh… You bastard. In the end, you're still the one doing the harvesting."
They locked eyes.No words were needed. Both knew the Void demanded a vessel, and only one of them could remain.So Ethan chose himself.
He slowly lifted his head toward the closing sky.Both Death's realm and the human world seemed to wait, holding their breath.Every soul, every shade, every echo paused—like an audience at the end of a grotesque comedy, waiting for the final line.
"So this is the ending," Ethan rasped, his voice a cracked gramophone.He paused. His lips curled into a bitter smile.
There was no relief, no glory, no pride in that grin.Only absurdity. Only mockery.Because he finally understood: sacrifice was nothing but the world buying a cheap ticket to watch a play. The audience claps, the director bows out—and the actor is left forever in the dark backstage.
"So it turns out—this whole thing, from start to finish—was just a farce we humans wrote and performed ourselves."He laughed under his breath.
The laughter echoed, then faded.His body collapsed into fragments, flowing into the black scar.The final shard hit the ground with a sharp clink, like a door shutting tight.
Death's realm was silent.Even the human world held its breath in unison.All sound vanished, leaving only his final laugh, replaying endlessly in memory.
No one could forget it.Because that laugh wasn't for the Void—it was for the whole damn world.
The curtain dropped. The actor exited. The audience had nothing to say.The laughter of sacrifice became the last line of this absurd play.