Chapter Text
How long had this been going on? Four? Five? Or maybe fifty, or even hundreds? Time quickly became lost after the tenth circle.
Simon, or as the COI workers called him, "The Prisoner," was a complex character. Yes, he had made many mistakes in the past, ruining many people, following a blind faith in his ideals and his comrades. But the masterminds of the crime for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment abandoned him, making him a scapegoat, while they themselves escaped punishment. Simon valued his life and was already grateful that he had not been sentenced to death, although he should have been more grateful for the rapid extinction of humanity, in which every life is precious and worth its weight in gold. But they had taken from him the last shreds of belonging to "Eden"—the pendant with the seed of the last tree and his tattoo, the last reminder of where he grew up.
After all this, he hadn't even hoped to ever find freedom again, but one dark day, he was offered a deal: to carry out a mission on behalf of the Consolidation of Iron (COI) in exchange for his freedom. It seemed like a fair deal. Simon hadn't even realized he'd never come to terms with his imprisonment until he was told he had a chance to escape. So he accepted the deal and boarded a submarine. His mission didn't seem impossible: dive into the bloody sea and find something worthwhile, simply by following coordinates and taking photographs. But the further this mission progressed, the more horrific the finds were at the bottom of this accursed sea. And then something happened that plunged the man into despair: the COI refused to release him.
"This is more important than us. More important than you," they said.
It was inhumane and unfair! Yes, he, too, had done something wrong: by accident, driven by fear, he'd exposed the crew giving him instructions to radiation. But he didn't know! What he was damn sure of was that if he went down again, he'd die. At one point, when things were getting worse, he regretted agreeing a hundred times over and was ready to beg to be thrown back in his prison cell! But his pleas fell on deaf ears.
In a fit of despair, he kicked the computer built into his submarine, and suddenly a wiring compartment opened. Attached to the lid was a pendant with a tree seed, just like the one he had, along with a note. And so Simon learned he wasn't the first here.
And what happened to the other "discoverers" was easy to guess after hearing the audio message left by the previous "lucky one." That was the beginning of the end.
"This isn't an expedition, this is an execution."
After going through hell, the man soon died, encountering something... something inexplicable. Whatever it was, this sea was the creature's domain, and any human attempting to penetrate it would become a snack for it.
It was all over, no escape, no freedom! He had been abandoned, damn it! Again. But just at that moment, as the man resigned himself to death, his irradiated, wounded, and mutilated body floating in a sea of blood, a mysterious voice appeared in his dying consciousness and told him:
"You can't die. This is not the end."
And then the world plunged into darkness. But the story of the "Butcher" didn't end there; it was only just beginning. Dying there, alone, fighting with all his might for his life, clinging to the black box that was his last chance to clear his name, Simon didn't know then that he would end up in a time loop, fixated only on his suffering in this personal bloody hell.