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"Aww shit. Here we go again."
That's the last thing I spoke, before I felt my eyes getting puffed up and almost popping out of my sockets.
I heard my ribs getting broken before I felt the bumper breaking them. Crack-crack-crack-crack — like someone snapping chopsticks in rapid succession, except the chopsticks were my bones and the someone was a two-ton metal death machine. The fuck kind of logic is that?
My eyes popped out. Literally. Just... pop. Like champagne corks at a wedding I'd never attend. And here's the kicker — I could still see. Both eyeballs dangling by their optic nerves like the world's worst yo-yos, giving me a split-screen view: one eye watching the car's grille getting very intimate with my chest, the other getting a fantastic angle of my own horrified face.
Thanks, biology. Really appreciate the 4K stereo vision of my own death.
My hands got ripped off from my shoulders as I was smashed between a wall on my back and a fucking sedan on my front. The tearing sound was wet and meaty — like pulling apart an overcooked rotisserie chicken, except I was the chicken and there was way more screaming. My arms pinwheeled away in opposite directions, still making little grasping motions. One landed in a nearby bush. The other slapped some poor pedestrian in the face.
Sorry dude. Didn't mean to give you a hand.
The pressure was immense. My sternum crunched inward with a sound like stepping on a bag of chips, and I felt my spine doing things spines definitely weren't designed to do. Things were squishing. Things that should never squish. My ribcage folded like a broken accordion, and I swear I felt my lungs squeeze out of the gaps like toothpaste.
Blood sprayed everywhere in an artistic arc — Jackson Pollock would've been proud. It painted the car hood, the wall, the horrified onlookers. A fine mist of my own internal fluids created a little rainbow in the afternoon sun.
At least I'm going out pretty.
My legs were still attached, which seemed unfair given the state of everything else. They twitched uselessly, my nervous system firing random signals like a computer blue-screening. My left foot kicked the car's tire.
Take that, you mechanical bastard.
Through my dangling eyeballs, I watched my intestines start making an appearance they definitely weren't invited to make. They unspooled like the world's grossest party streamer, and somewhere in my fading consciousness, I thought: I should've skipped that burrito for lunch.
The driver was screaming. I was gurgling. The crowd was gasping.
And all I could think was: Man, Truck-kun really let himself go. This isn't even a truck. This is Sedan-san. I'm getting isekai'd by the bargain bin option.
Everything started going fuzzy — well, fuzzier than having your eyes literally outside your skull allows. The pain was everywhere and nowhere, like my nerve endings couldn't decide which catastrophic injury to report first and just gave up.
So this is it, huh? Death by budget transportation.
As darkness crept in from the edges (all four edges, thanks to the double vision), my last coherent thought was:
I better get some crazy cheat skills for this.
Darkness.
Not the "oh it's nighttime" darkness. Not even the "power outage" darkness. This was the void. The kind of nothing that makes you question if you ever existed in the first place. No up, no down, no sense of time. Just... me. Floating. Thinking. Going slowly insane.
I didn't know how long I'd been here. Could've been seconds. Could've been centuries. Time didn't mean shit when you're a disembodied consciousness doing the cosmic equivalent of treading water.
Then I felt it.
Eyes.
Don't ask me how the fuck I felt eyes on me when I didn't have a body, didn't have nerves, didn't have anything except apparently an annoying persistence of self-awareness. But I felt them. Watching. Judging. Like that creepy feeling you get when someone's staring at you on the subway, except multiplied by infinity and wrapped in existential dread.
Before I could even process that disturbing revelation, I was yanked.
Pulled like a fish on a hook, dragged through the nothing toward... something. The sensation was violating in ways I didn't have words for. If I'd had a stomach, I would've puked.
"RYAN NIGHT, YOU ARE HERE?"
The voice boomed through every particle of my non-existent being. It was loud. Like, unnecessarily loud. The kind of loud that makes you want to cover your ears and tell someone to use their inside voice.
I tried covering my ears but—oh right. I didn't have hands. Because I was a fucking soul. 🙂
Then I saw him. Or... perceived him? However the hell souls see things. He was smiling at me, this massive presence of smugness and divine authority. I could see the smile somehow even though I didn't have eyes, which was already pissing me off.
Fuck it. If I'm already dead, might as well speedrun this cliché.
"So..." I finally spoke—thought?—whatever. "You're some god. And I died before my time, and you want to give me wishes. And reincarnate me?"
The god went completely still.
Then he laughed.
Not a polite chuckle. Not even a hearty guffaw. This motherfucker howled like I'd just told the funniest joke in the multiverse. He was slapping his knee—or the cosmic equivalent—tears probably streaming down his divine face.
"WHAT SORT OF CHEAP NOVELS DO YOU READ TO GET SUCH A PLOT LINE?" He wheezed between laughs. "SINCE WHEN DO GODS MAKE MISTAKES, MORTAL?"
My non-existent heart sank.
"Fuck. So I have no second chance, heh."
"Oh, that's where you're wrong, Night." The god's smile turned sharp. "I plan to give you a second chance. But not because you were killed before your time. You died at exactly the right destined time. No take-backs on that. I just find it... sad to see you die. I guess."
He paused, and his expression shifted into something petty and mean.
"You—an orphan, an arrogant bastard, a foul-mouthed fucker—"
I didn't expect that sort of outburst from a literal god. The divine equivalent of a Twitter rant.
"You might not remember this, bitch," he continued, voice dripping with millennia-old spite, "but you urinated on the grounds of my holy temple. I couldn't forget that shame."
My soul-brain stuttered. Then the memory hit me like a second car.
Oh no.
Oh fuck no.
I screamed—or whatever souls do when they're horrified. "BUT I WAS THREE AT THAT TIME. WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?"
"Oh yes." His smile was pure vindictive satisfaction. "You were three. But doesn't matter."
He raised his hand, divine energy crackling around it.
"Fuck you."
Then he punched me.
A god. Punched my soul.
I went flying backward through the void like a cosmic baseball, spinning, tumbling, screaming obscenities that would make a sailor weep. The darkness rushed past me—or I rushed past it—and then suddenly—
THUMP.
I landed on something soft.
I had... weight? Sensation? I flexed and
felt fingers. I had hands. I had a body. A physical, actual, tangible body.
What the absolute fuck is happening?