Echo stood motionless, his eyes locked with the entity's. The words that had just escaped his lips felt as if they had come from someone else. The sheer weight of his request, the raw desperation in his voice, hung heavy in the air like a storm on the verge of breaking.
"Kill me," Echo repeated, his voice hoarse but steady. "Send me to a new world. I want to live a new life. A new page. This life—this existence—it means nothing to me anymore."
There was a sharp, painful tug deep within his chest as the words left him. The battle raging inside him, the internal war of truth versus power, had been too much to bear. The revelation that everything he had fought for, everything he had bled for, might be nothing more than an experiment, a system designed for an unknown purpose—it was too much. The very ground beneath him felt unsteady, as though the world itself might collapse under the weight of the truth.
