Ruho's feet hit the water first.
For a fraction of a second, maybe a tenth of a second, his brain registered the sensation of contact. Cold. Wet. Hard.
Wait. Hard?
Then physics caught up with biology and everything went to absolute shit.
The impact traveled up his legs like a shockwave of pure agony. His ankles exploded—that was the only word for it, exploded—the bones shattering into what felt like a thousand pieces as the water refused to give way beneath him. His shins followed immediately after, the tibias snapping like dry twigs, the sound muffled by the roar of water but somehow still audible inside his own head as a wet cracking noise that would haunt him forever. His knees buckled inward at angles knees were never meant to bend, ligaments tearing, cartilage pulverizing, and the pain was so instantaneous and so complete that his brain couldn't even process it as pain yet, just as wrongness, as every nerve ending in his lower body screaming that something catastrophic had happened.
But he was still moving. Still had momentum. Still had all that velocity he'd built up during his ten-kilometer fall, and the water wasn't done with him yet.
His femurs shattered next, the impact racing up his thighs as his body tried to decelerate from terminal velocity to zero in the space of maybe two meters. The bones didn't just break—they fragmented, splintering into jagged pieces that tore through muscle and tissue. His hips dislocated with a sensation like someone had grabbed his pelvis and twisted it ninety degrees to the left. The pain was starting to register now, coming in waves that made his vision white out, made every thought disappear except for the singular awareness that his body was being destroyed.
His torso hit the water and his diaphragm, that thin sheet of muscle responsible for breathing, just gave up. The impact punched every molecule of air out of his lungs in one violent exhale, but worse than that, the muscle itself tore. Not a small tear. A catastrophic rupture that left him unable to draw breath, unable to do anything except feel his chest seize up in confusion and panic.
His ribs went next. Not all at once, but in a horrible cascading sequence. The first three on his left side snapped inward, one of them punching straight through his lung with a sensation like being stabbed from the inside. The right side followed, four ribs cracking, two of them fragmenting into pieces that tore through intercostal muscle and scraped against organs that were never meant to experience that kind of trauma. His sternum cracked down the middle with a sound like breaking a wooden board over your knee.
And then his neck.
The whiplash was biblical. His head, still moving at terminal velocity, suddenly had a body that had stopped—or at least slowed down considerably—and the disconnect between the two was instant and brutal. His cervical vertebrae compressed, the discs between them bulging and rupturing, the ligaments stretching and tearing. His head snapped back so hard he felt something pop at the base of his skull, felt his vision blur and double as his brain rattled around inside his cranium like a marble in a tin can.
The pain was everything now. Not sharp, not dull, just omnipresent. A totality of agony that consumed every single nerve in his body, that made breathing impossible and thinking impossible and existing impossible. He wanted to scream but he had no air. He wanted to black out but his body wouldn't let him, keeping him conscious for every single second of this nightmare.
He was still moving. Sinking now. The impact had driven him deep into the lake, the momentum carrying him down into the dark blue water even as his shattered body tried and failed to do anything about it. Bubbles streamed past his face—his own air, escaping from his ruined lungs. The sunlight above was getting dimmer, more distant. The pressure on his ears was increasing.
Ten meters down. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.
His body finally hit some kind of equilibrium at around fifty meters, the last of his velocity bleeding away, the water pressure and his body's natural buoyancy finding a balance. For a moment he just hung there in the water, suspended in the dark, his broken limbs floating at weird angles around him, his torn diaphragm trying and failing to draw breath, his vision starting to tunnel.
And then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, he started to rise.
It took forever. Or maybe it took seconds. Time had stopped meaning anything. All that existed was the pain and the desperate, clawing need for air and the feeling of his body slowly ascending through the water like a corpse floating to the surface. Which, he realized with the detached clarity that comes with severe trauma, was basically what he was. A corpse that just hadn't finished dying yet.
His head broke the surface and his ruined diaphragm spasmed, trying to pull in air, failing, trying again. He managed maybe half a breath, just enough to keep his brain from shutting down completely, but nowhere near enough to actually function. He floated there, face-up in the water, staring at the brilliant blue sky above him, and tried to understand how his afterlife had gone this wrong this quickly.
Azirel's voice appeared in his head, and for the first time since Ruho had met him, the trainee god sounded genuinely uncomfortable.
"So, uh. Yeah. I forgot to mention something."
Ruho would've told him to fuck off, but he couldn't breathe well enough to project thoughts coherently.
"Water," Azirel continued, his tone awkward and sheepish, "acts like concrete when you hit it at high velocity. It's a surface tension thing. And the energy produced during free fall. Basic physics, really. Should've warned you about that before you hit. My bad."
Ruho floated. Bled internally. Tried to breathe. Failed mostly.
"Looking at the damage report now," Azirel said, and Ruho could hear him scrolling through something, reading data. "Okay, wow. So, uh. You broke forty-two bones. Forty-two. That's actually impressive in the worst way. Fifteen of those are complete fractures, meaning the bones are in multiple pieces. Both legs are completely shattered—we're talking fragments here, not clean breaks. Your pelvis is dislocated and cracked in three places. You've got eight broken ribs, two of which punctured your left lung. Your sternum is fractured. Three vertebrae in your neck are compressed. Your diaphragm is torn. You've got internal bleeding in like, six different places. Honestly, it's kind of amazing you're still alive right now."
Ruho tried to say something. Tried to tell Azirel exactly where he could shove his damage report. What came out was a wet gurgling sound and a stream of bubbles.
"I know you're probably trying to cuss me out right now," Azirel said, his tone apologetic. "And yeah, you have every right to be pissed. This is kind of on me. I should've given you a parachute or something. Or maybe spawned you closer to the surface. Or literally done anything different than what I did. But hey, you're not dead! That's something, right?"
Ruho's vision was starting to fade around the edges. The pain was still there, still overwhelming, but it was getting distant now, like it was happening to someone else. He tried to take another breath, managed to get maybe a quarter of what he needed, and felt his consciousness starting to slip away like water through his broken fingers.
"Oh shit, you're passing out," Azirel said. "Okay, uh. Try to stay calm. Don't fight it. Your body needs to shut down for a bit to deal with all this trauma. I'll, uh. I'll make sure you don't drown."
The last thing Ruho was aware of before the darkness took him was the gentle sensation of floating, the warmth of the sun on his face, and the distant sound of waves lapping against a shore he couldn't see.
Then nothing.
6:07 AM
Ruho woke up choking.
Not choking on water. Choking on blood. His own blood, thick and metallic in his mouth, filling his throat as he tried to draw breath. He coughed, or tried to, the motion sending fresh spikes of agony through his broken ribs, and felt warm liquid spill from his lips onto—
Sand. He was on sand.
He opened his eyes and immediately regretted it. The sunlight was too bright, the sky too blue, everything too sharp and real and painful. He was lying on his back on a beach, the sound of waves gentle in the background, his body screaming at him in about forty-two different voices that he was very much not okay.
"Oh good, you're awake," Azirel's voice said in his head. "I was starting to worry you might not make it. Well, I wasn't that worried. I mean, you're technically already dead, so dying again would just send you back to me and we'd have to start over, which would be annoying but not the end of the world. Still, good that you made it."
Ruho tried to speak. Coughed up more blood instead. Tried again. Managed to croak out something that might've been words in another language but definitely wasn't in this one.
"Right, the internal bleeding," Azirel said. "Yeah, that's still happening. Your left lung is still punctured, you've got blood pooling in your abdominal cavity, and your liver took some damage too. The good news is I can help with that! The bad news is I can't help directly because there are rules about divine intervention and I'm already pushing it by bringing you here in the first place."
A bottle appeared in the sand next to Ruho's head. Just materialized out of thin air, a small glass vial filled with something that glowed a faint red color, like someone had liquified a sunset and trapped it in a container.
"What I can do," Azirel continued, "is customize the world and place items. That's technically allowed under my trainee god privileges. So I just spawned a healing potion right next to you. Grab it and take three sips. Not four. Definitely not four. Four will kill you. But three should fix you right up."
Ruho stared at the bottle. Tried to process what Azirel had just said. Failed because his brain was still mostly focused on the whole internal bleeding situation.
"Wait," he managed to rasp out, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. "What?"
"Three sips," Azirel repeated slowly, like he was talking to a child. "Not four. Four is too much. Your mana capacity isn't high enough to handle a full dose. You'd overload and die. Again. Which would be really inconvenient for both of us."
Ruho blinked. Coughed. Tasted more blood. "The fuck," he wheezed, each word an exercise in agony, "is a mana?"