"Silence!"
The monstrous judge, stitched together from fragments of the dead, raised its hand—half a peasant woman's veiny wrist, half a baby's pudgy palm, with gray liquid dripping from the seam. When it slammed the gavel, the sound it made was like a dented brass pot clanging out of tune.
All the hollow eyes in the audience blinked in unison, as though nodding their approval.
"Now, the defendants' crimes shall be read!" the judge declared, its voice shifting between old carpenter and babbling toddler, every word itching the mind with dissonance.
A corpse in an Investigator's Bureau uniform stumbled forward in chains—today's stand-in clerk. It fished some blood-soaked papers from a file and droned flatly:
"The defendants, during the chaos of the wastelands, failed to abide by the order of the Void, and unlawfully… remained alive."
For a moment, silence. Then, muffled chuckles rippled through the hall. The audience's countless hollow eyes trembled, whispering in unison: "Alive? Alive? Hahaha—alive!"
The judge nodded solemnly, tapping its desk. "Indeed. The charge is… being alive."
—That's it?
Eileen coughed, her voice absurdly loud in the dead air: "Wait, did I mishear that? Our crime is that we're not dead enough yet?"
From the jury box came creaks. Their dead relatives sat there stiff as mannequins—some pale-faced with empty sockets, some missing half a skull, all frozen in their final expressions. They now raised their chins solemnly, like saints taking an oath.
A torso-less cousin grinned: "Your being alive is the greatest insult to us, the already dead."
A charred comrade sighed: "The world was meant for the Void. But you linger like freeloaders nibbling cold hors d'oeuvres after the party's over."
"Yes!" the corpse-clerk nodded gravely. "Within the order of the Void, the living are the gravest illegality."
The protagonist scratched his head, baffled: "So you're just slapping charges on us? Breathing a crime? Blinking, also a crime? What if I take a shit right now—would that count as treason?"
The audience roared with hysterical laughter. The hollow eyes convulsed as though applauding. Some even leaked blobs of void-matter, plopping onto the floor like tears.
The judge raised a hand for order. "This court is sacred—no mockery permitted."
It paused, then smiled with stitched mouths, stretching tongues from unknown throats: "But you are right. Breathing, blinking, shitting—yes, all crimes. Because such things mean you persist in the absurd game of 'being human.' The Void demands only one thing—silence."
Eileen rolled her eyes: "This judge must've moonlighted as a philosophy lecturer."
Another teammate snorted: "Nah. Sounds more like an improv comic at a cheap theater."
Sure enough, the further the trial went, the more it felt like a grotesque skit.
The clerk rattled off "evidence":"Yesterday, the accused ate one slice of bread. Crime: resisting hunger.This morning, breathed three times. Crime: resisting the Void.This afternoon, heartbeat seventy-eight times. Crime: illegally manufacturing noise."
The hollow-eyed audience twitched in blissful applause.
The judge gravely summed up: "Thus, every act of your existence is an unforgivable felony. To cling to life is the world's greatest threat."
The courtroom fell silent—silence thicker than death.
The protagonist finally burst into laughter: "So we're innocent only if we're dead? That's your logic? This trial is more absurd than my neighbor's wedding!"
The judge's eyes gleamed with delight. It pressed a skeletal finger onto a bell.
Ding-a-ling!
"The trial officially begins!"
All at once, the hollow eyes widened like a thousand bulbs flicking on. The court itself transformed into a colossal stage machine, grinding awake.
The jurors chanted in monotone: "Their crime… is being alive."
A black curtain drifted down, dust like ash snowing through the hall. The next act of this absurd trial was already eager to begin.