The body's face was tilted up toward him, its empty eyes staring into his, its mouth moving in shapes that formed words he could not hear.
"I… it… hurts…" it seemed to say, the sound not heard but felt, scraping against his mind.
The grip tightened.
"Why… did you live… when we… died…?"
They were watching him.
Skulls, rotten bodies, and discarded remains scattered across the endless ocean all turned toward him in complete silence, their hollow gaze fixed as if something inside them had finally awakened.
Yuuta felt a coldness sink into him that had nothing to do with the water, a pressure that wrapped around his thoughts and made his breath feel distant and wrong.
Slowly, the realization settled in him that they were not looking at his body at all, but at something deeper, something they were all waiting to take from him.
His soul.
And beneath the stillness of that endless, watching sea, something even darker began to stir.
The hand still held.
