Year 2025, December 19th. Location: London.
The rain over London wasn't romantic. It was a greasy, persistent drizzle that smeared the neon of Piccadilly into bleeding watercolors and turned the pavement into a treacherous mirror of a sickly yellow sky. It was the kind of rain that seeped into bones and dreams with equal, grim indifference.
Through this liquid gloom, a young man ran. His name was Nicholas William Bond, and he was late. Profoundly, catastrophically late.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid!" he hissed at himself, each word a puff of vapor in the chill air. He clutched a battered leather messenger bag over his head, a pathetic shield against the downpour. Inside that bag: two overdue library books on media theory, a half-eaten packet of crisps, and a final notice for his rent. The weight of adult life, condensed into damp canvas and paper. "Knew I should've left when the sky looked like a used teabag. But no. Had to watch that one last clip of Tokai Teio's Satsuki Sho…"
He zigzagged through the evening crowd, a spectral figure in a dark peacoat, his movements a frantic, lanky ballet. The faces he passed were a blur of umbrellas and grim purpose—commuters dreaming of dry socks and warm pints, none of them sharing his particular, panicked calculus of time versus money versus academic probation.
He hit the kerb at a busy intersection. The pedestrian signal was a relentless, accusing red eye. Cars streamed past, their tires hissing on the wet tarmac, headlights cutting swathes through the rain.
"Right. That's it. Can't wait. Timing's for people who can afford wristwatches," he muttered, his breath coming in sharp gasps. He adjusted the bag on his shoulder, tensed his legs—pale, thin things that had seen more hours in lecture halls and in front of screens than on any track—and made a decision born of pure, unadulterated desperation.
He stepped off the kerb.
A black cab horn blared, a deafening, bovine sound of outrage. He jinked left, heart hammering against his ribs. "Okay, okay, still alive!" he yelped, a hysterical laugh bubbling in his throat. He was in the middle of the road now, a island in a river of steel and light. Almost there. The far side beckoned, a sanctuary of wet concrete.
He never saw the delivery van. It emerged from the curtain of rain and the glare of oncoming headlights not as a vehicle, but as a sudden, immense wall of grille and motion. It was doing a clean thirty in a twenty zone, the driver's eyes likely on his sat-nav, not on the foolish, sprinting silhouette.
The impact was not a dramatic, cinematic crash. It was a terrible, wet thud, a sound of physics asserting its brutal, simple law.
Nicholas's world ceased to be a sequence of events and became a series of disjointed sensory impressions. The bag flew from his grasp, its contents books, crisps, final notice exploding into the air like the confetti of a profoundly failed life.
His body left the ground. For a moment, he was airborne, a broken marionette against the grey sky. Then the road rushed up to meet him, and he skidded across its abrasive, rain-slicked surface with a sound like tearing canvas.
Silence. A strange, ringing, cotton-wool silence that swallowed the city's roar.
Huh? The thought was calm, detached. What… just did a backflip? Since when could I do a backflip?
The background noise returned first, not as sound, but as pressure—a muffled, staticky roar, like a badly tuned radio. Within it, he could pick out shreds: a woman's scream, high and thin; the blare of a car horn that didn't stop; the frantic slosh of footsteps.
Then a face loomed into his narrowing field of vision. A man, maybe mid-thirties, features blurred by rain and panic. He was kneeling on the road, his mouth moving, shouting words Nicholas couldn't parse. The smell of him cut through the metallic tang of blood—stale lager and cheap cigarettes, the signature scent of a bad decision.
"Oi! Mate! Don't move, alright? Don't you bloody move! An ambulance is coming!" the man shouted, his voice cracking. He was waving a mobile phone, its screen cracked. "Just… just hold on!"
So noisy, Nicholas thought, the words forming with glacial slowness in his mind. Just help me up, you reeking prat. I'm late. I'll walk it off. I've had worse spills on the Tube escalators.
A warmth trickled from his temple, past his ear. It had a different texture than the rain. Thicker. Slower. He managed to shift his eyes.
The camera of his consciousness, so long focused on the immediate, the mundane, the next deadline, finally pulled back. It panned out from the concerned, drunkard's face, taking in the scene.
He saw his own left arm, bent at an angle that belonged to a mannequin, not a man. He saw his legs, one still wearing a scuffed trainer, the other looking oddly flattened. And his side… his side was a confusion of dark fabric and a deep, wrong shadow. The van had caught him at 30 miles per hour. His body, a framework of academic stress and microwave meals, had been frail. Physics had been relentless.
Oh.
The thought arrived not with a scream, not with tears, but with the quiet, definitive click of a final puzzle piece settling into place. It was an observation, pure and simple. An 'oh.'
I'm dying.
The certainty of it was absolute, and bizarrely peaceful. There was no bargaining, no rage against the dying of the light. There was just the data, processed by a mind used to cataloguing plot twists and character arcs. Protagonist gets isekai'd by truck-kun. Chapter One. How utterly, devastatingly cliché.
He felt a curious detachment. He was here, lying broken on the tarmac, but he was also… there. Floating slightly above it. He looked down at his hands or the idea of his hands. They were translucent, shimmering with a faint, ghostly luminescence, untouched by rain or blood.
Yeah, his spectral self nodded. Definitely not gonna make it.
And he accepted it. Not with the cold void of emotionlessness, but with a weary, wry acceptance. A small, crooked smile touched his non-corporeal lips. It was the smile of a man who'd just realized the ultimate punchline was on him.
Though… one. No, two regrets. The thoughts drifted up like bubbles in a still pond. Never got to see if Teio wins the Arima Kinen in season two. Never saw how Gojo gets out of the Prison Realm… if he gets out… And GTA 6 isn't out yet. Goddammit. I'm gonna miss the trailer. The absurdity of it almost made him laugh.
Life's a bitch. Finished the tutorial at eighteen, they said. The open world's amazing, they said. First quest outside the starter zone: "Avoid Oncoming Traffic." Failed. Game Over screen. What a rip-off.
The ambulance arrived then, its siren a piercing wail that cut through the murmuring crowd. Paramedics in hi-vis jackets moved with controlled urgency, their faces masks of professional focus. They knelt beside the ruin of Nicholas William Bond. They shone lights in unseeing eyes, felt for a pulse that was a fading, fluttery thing.
His ghost watched, hovering a few feet away. He gave a helpless, almost apologetic shake of his head at their efforts. The body on the ground still had a faint, mechanical spark the heart's last stubborn rhythms, the lungs' final, shallow draws. But the tenant, the self that had been Nick, was already packing his metaphysical bags.
He felt it then a gentle, inexorable pull. A dissolving. The shimmering edges of his spirit-form began to fray, particles of light drifting away like ash from a dying fire.
Ah, he thought. Right. Judgement time. Credits roll, and then… director's commentary?
He pondered the destination. Heaven? Hell? Some cosmic waiting room with outdated magazines? He did a quick, final audit of his nineteen years. He hadn't been a saint. He'd been selfish, often, but mainly with his own time, his own potential.
He'd been kind in small, forgettable wayshelping a lost tourist, buying a sandwich for the homeless man who sat by the library. He'd also stolen a tenner from his mum's purse when he was fourteen, and gotten into a properly messy fistfight behind the pub over a disputed football result. He'd loved his parents, but hadn't called them enough. He'd dreamed big, but acted small.
The ledger, he figured, was probably balanced on a knife's edge. But if he had to bet… the scale likely tipped towards the warmer climate. A resigned sigh escaped his non-existent lips.
Well. Eternal damnation, here I come. Hope they have good Wi-Fi.
Then came the darkness.
It wasn't frightening. It was total, velvety, and immense. A silence so complete it had weight. He floated no, existed within it. Time became meaningless. A second? A century?
Hold on, a fragment of his consciousness mused, the last ember of his analytical mind. How am I so… chill about this? Shouldn't I be screaming? Raging? Weeping for my mum? He felt no panic. Just a profound, deepening curiosity. He had no body, no lungs to scream with, no eyes to cry from. He was pure awareness adrift in a starless sea.
It was a strange feeling. The absence of sensation was a sensation. The void of self was a new kind of self. He tried to articulate it, to narrate it to himself in that internal, Noir-tinged voice he'd always used. The dame was emptiness, and she played a mean game of hard-to-get…
The thought didn't finish.
First, his voice the internal monologue that had been his constant companion faded, its echoes swallowed by the quiet. Then his memories, the vivid, messy film reel of Nicholas Bond, began to soften at the edges. The face of his mother blurred.
The taste of his favourite ketchup vanished. The triumphant swell of music from Uma Musume's final stretch runs dissolved into silence. The memories didn't hurt as they went; they simply… retired. Filed away in a cabinet that was closing forever.
He was becoming less.
Less than a person. Less than a ghost. Less than a thought.
The last to go was the regret. Not the grand, philosophical regret, but the simple, human one: I never finished the story.
Then, there was nothing.
Not darkness. Not light. Not silence.
Nothing.
And from that absolute, terminal nothing, a new point of light ignited. Not a judgement. Not a heaven. Not a hell.
A wish.
A dying, geeky, profoundly human wish, carrying the faint, fading signature of a soul named Nicholas: Superpowers… and a chance to pat Tokai Teio's head…
The light consumed the nothing.
And somewhere else, in a different world, under a different rain, a broken body that was not his own drew a sudden, ragged, and impossible breath.
The transition was not a journey. It was an unraveling.
Nicholas or the ghost of him, the echo, the afterimage ceased to fall and began to drift. This was a different medium from the void. If the nothing had been a silent vacuum, this was a dense, psychic plasma. An ocean where thoughts were the water, and the water was made of shattered glass and tangled wires.
Sensations, not his own, flooded the space where his consciousness was rapidly dissolving.
Voices. Not one, not a chorus, but a million overlapping transmissions from a million broken radios. A man's baritone shout in guttural German, clipped and furious. A woman's gentle, lilting song in Japanese, a melody about wind and wings. A child's sob. A roar of an engine. The whisper of pages turning. A weather report. A prayer. A curse. All of them bleeding into one another, a cacophony of existence that had no beginning and no end.
Names. They hissed and snapped around him like static electricity. "Michael…" "Jaeger…" "Special Grade…" "Trainer…" "MJ.." "Teio…" "Brother.." "Son..💔" "Child.." "bombaclat" "Where is your sword.." "Six seeeveeen.." "labubu.." "im gay.." "kiss me.." "Nicholas…" His own name was in there, a faint, fading blip in the storm. They weren't being called to him; they were simply there, as fundamental to this place as atoms.
He had no brain, no skull to contain the pressure, but he felt it a maddening, itching screaming at the core of his fading self. It was the scream of too much information, of stories without context, of lives glimpsed in a strobe light. It was data for a god, and he was a corrupted flash drive.
He couldn't "see." But perception in this place wasn't about eyes. It was about knowing. And he knew he was a shape—a fragile, falling white droplet, a teardrop of spent consciousness. He was plummeting through a stream.
But the stream was wrong. It wasn't water. It was possibility itself, rendered into a shimmering, twisting braid of light and shadow. It existed in dimensions his mind couldn't hold. He'd glimpse it as a simple river one moment countless branching tributaries representing choices, yes or no, left or right.
Then it would fold, and he'd perceive it as a vast, three-dimensional lattice, a cosmic neural network where every glowing node was a lifetime.
Then it would flatten into a roaring, two-dimensional sheet of pure potential, a mad god's comic book page. Fifth, fourth, thirdthe dimensions shifted not around him, but through him, and each shift scraped another layer of "Nicholas" away, leaving only the raw, bewildered query of What is happening?
This was the backstage of reality. The place where the scripts were written before the actors were born. And then, something on the bank of the impossible stream noticed the falling droplet.
It approached. It did not walk, for it had no need of legs in a place without ground. It manifested a point of observation, a locus of attention.
To Nicholas's disintegrating perception, it took a form he could almost comprehend a humanoid silhouette of pure, soft light, featureless yet radiating a quiet, ancient amusement. It was neither tall nor short, old nor young. It simply was, with the solidity of a forgotten law of physics.
A tendril of that light an arm, a thought, a whim reached out and caught him.
The psychic noise, the dimensional screaming, the chaos of the stream… it all muted, softened by a factor of infinity. He was held in a field of perfect, focused quiet. The entity gazed at the tiny, flickering orb of Nicholas-Bond-who-was.
Curious. The word wasn't a sound. It was the environment adjusting to a new fact. The light around him pulsed with gentle intrigue. A bypass. A stowaway on the narrative current. How… noisy. How singular. You are not one of the usual cast.
It inspected him. This was not a search through memories; it was a gentle unfolding. The entity viewed the brief, messy life of Nicholas William Bond the rainy streets, the rent notices, the media trivia, the final, wry acceptance as one might examine a peculiar, slightly tragic, but beautifully detailed postage stamp from a country that no longer existed.
Ah. A spectator. The entity's amusement deepened, a warmth that felt like starlight. A consumer of tales. And at the end, you wished for a better story. Not for wealth, not for power… but for a role within one. How… poignant. How useful.
The entity's gaze shifted from Nicholas, looking out across the swirling, multidimensional stream. Its attention settled on a specific, throbbing thread of narrative one that was frayed and dark at one end, ending in a splash of crimson and regret in a rain-soaked Japanese forest. A story about a boy named Michael, burdened with a technique of will, who died alone killing a mountain god.
A protagonist has fallen before his arc could truly begin, the entity mused, its thoughts the soft clicks of a cosmic editor making notes. A waste of a compelling premise. The will to shape reality… left unshaped. The potential for drama, for growth, for spectacle… cut short. An unsatisfactory draft.
Then, its light fell upon another thread, thin and abruptly severed on a London street. Nicholas's thread. A story of passive consumption, ending with a meta-fictional sigh.
Two incomplete narratives. The entity's form shimmered with creative possibility. It reached out, not with hands, but with intention. From the air of non-air, it plucked.
Two fundamental strings of existence became visible. One was the color of resolved steel and bitter resolve the "Michael" thread. The other was the color of flickering screen-light and wistful longing the "Nicholas" thread. The entity took them, and with the effortless grace of a master weaver, it began to intertwine them.
It started with the broken end of Michael's story. The entity touched the point of his death, the special grade curse, the fading breath in the battered shrine. It did not reverse it. It honored it. It allowed that ending to stand the heroic sacrifice, the fulfilled duty.
Then, it took the severed end of Nicholas's thread the longing for more, the geek's prayer for entry into the story and spliced it into the moment just after Michael's final heartbeat.
A soul for a body, the entity narrated its own work, the tone clinical yet fascinated. A spectator's desire for a protagonist's script. The will is already there, in the technique, in the lineage… but the driver lacked context. Lacked… appreciation. Let us add a fan's perspective. Let us add the meta-commentary. Let us see what happens when a narrative-aware consciousness inherits a narrative-defined power.
The threads wove tighter. Memories that were not memories the feel of Cursed Energy, the weight of a jujutsu legacy, the grim taste of a sorcerer's duty began to bleed into the essence of Nicholas.
In return, the ghost of Michael's stern, duty-bound psyche received an infusion of something utterly alien: pop culture references, a propensity for fourth-wall gags, an unshakable, foundational love for the very concept of "cool superpowers."
The entity stepped back, observing its handiwork. A new, composite thread now existed, strong and vibrant, pulsing with unique potential. It was a story rebooted. A second draft with a brand new narrative voice.
The final piece, the entity whispered.
It turned its attention back to the tiny, confused orb it still held the core "Nicholas," who had witnessed this cosmic editing session as a bewildered audience of one.
Inside the orb, a frantic, silent monologue was spooling out, the last gasp of a mind trying to process the unprocessable.
Okay. Okayokayokay. I'm a raindrop. That's a… space-ghost-god? It's reading my diary. My mental diary. Which is mostly memes and anime OP lyrics. This is embarrassing. Is it going to judge my browser history? Oh god, it's looking at other raindrops. That one looks… really intense. And sad. Did it just… grab two bits of cosmic string and start knitting? WHAT IS IT KNITTING? IS THAT ME? IT'S USING ME AS YARN! I AM BEING USED AS PROPHETIC YARN BY A BEING OF LIGHT! THIS WAS NOT IN THE AFTERLIFE PAMPHLET!
The entity's amusement became a soft, echoing chuckle that vibrated through the foundation of the stream.
Do not fret, little noise, its thought-voice intoned, not unkindly. You wished for a story. I am granting you a leading role. You will have your superpowers. You will have your world of wonders and terrors. You will even, the entity's light glinted with something like shared, divine humor, get a chance to pat the head of a certain horse-girl. Consider it… a bonus scene.
But every good story needs conflict. Every hero needs a crucible. You are not replacing Michael Hanz Jaeger. You are completing him. he died in pain, bearing a burden you cannot yet comprehend...You will inherit that pain. You will inherit that duty. The price for your entry into the narrative… is the narrative itself.
Are you ready to stop watching, Nicholas William Bond, and start doing?
Before the orb could even form a coherent protest which would have been a psychic scream of "ABSOLUTELY NOT, SEND ME BACK TO THE VOID!" the entity opened its hand of light.
The newly woven, composite thread of "Michael-Nicholas" flashed with irresistible gravity. The orb that was Nicholas was drawn down, not into the chaotic stream, but into the specific, waiting, newly-minted storyline.
He fell toward the world where jujutsu sorcerers fought curses in the shadows, and where idols raced under the sun, blissfully unaware of the monsters their fears could birth.
The last thing he perceived was the entity, its silhouette already turning away, its attention drifting to other threads, other stories, in the infinite stream.
Its final, echoing thought followed him down, a director's note to a new actor: Make it entertaining.