The courtroom's air suddenly twitched, as if someone had sneezed behind their backs. Then the judge's face—stitched together from the fragments of the dead—began to crack, and what fell off wasn't skin but shards of whispering glass.
"Order—order!" The judge raised his gavel. Though made of iron, it produced the pitiful clack of a plastic toy, which only made the uproar louder.
In the jury box, some ghosts were yawning, others were brawling with each other. The hollow eyes in the gallery no longer stared in unison; instead, they spun around here and there, like a movie theater audience suddenly bored of a bad film, scrolling their phones instead.
"Verdict… continue… or cancel?" one floating eyeball asked in a mechanical tone.
"I object!" one of the survivors shouted. "You—you things aren't even legal!"
"Legal?" The judge chuckled, a noise like rusty scissors grinding together."Kid, being alive isn't legal here. And you want to talk about legality?"
The room froze—then erupted into grotesque laughter. The laughter was laced with sobbing; a few ghosts even laughed so hard they bit themselves into pieces.
Ethan tried to speak, but instead of words, slips of paper spilled from his mouth: I am guilty.I am innocent.Please re-enter your password.
He reached for one, but the judge's face collapsed completely, raining down shards that turned into thousands of verdict sheets, whirling through the chamber like confetti.
"Run! This thing's collapsing!" someone screamed.
Sure enough, the bench split apart like a stale cookie. From inside the wood poured not sawdust but a swarm of black tendrils, whipping around to snatch anyone who hadn't signed their papers.
The jury dissolved into chaos:
One ghost screamed, "He must be sentenced to death!"Another yelled, "Wait, I take it back—he's actually not so bad!"A third ghost stood, bowed to the gallery, and announced: "Thank you for tuning in to The Void Tribunal. See you next episode!"
Gritting his teeth, Ethan bolted from his seat, the survivors stumbling after him. As they sprinted through the aisles, the walls flickered like a broken projector: one moment a cathedral, then a bathroom, then an oversized interrogation form plastered with their names and fabricated crimes.
"You can't escape!" the shattered judge's voice pursued them, ragged like tearing paper."The court is the Void, and the Void is your epitaph!"
But before the words could echo, the ceiling split open with a thunderous crack, revealing an endless abyss. Files, evidence, eyes, laughter—all poured downward in a catastrophic flood.
The survivors stumbled through the collapsing doors, only to find no hallway beyond—just a maze folding in on itself. The passages twisted like drunken scribbles, looping back into their own dead ends.
"Is this… the corpse of the trial?" someone gasped.
"Forget the corpse—just run!" Ethan roared.
They were trapped in a giant jack-in-the-box of absurdity. Walls crumbled while massive hands popped out of nowhere, shoving stamped verdict slips into their faces, all reading the same:"Crime: Escaping. Sentence: Death."
At last, Ethan shoved open a door that was half-melting into paper, dragging the others through. Behind them, the Void Tribunal collapsed into a pinpoint of darkness—like a theater bowing out with its final, ridiculous curtain.
And in that instant, Ethan laughed.Because he realized—they hadn't been condemned guilty.They'd been condemned to death by boredom.
And that, surely, was the most absurd verdict of all.