The dark doesn't last.
That's the first thing I notice.
Not where I am or what's happening or any of the larger questions that probably deserve immediate attention, just that the dark I closed my eyes into on a gym floor in Tokyo is gone, and something else is here instead.
White.
Not bright, not blinding, just white, in every direction, the kind of total and textureless white that your eyes don't know what to do with because there's nothing to focus on.
No walls. No ceiling. No horizon. I'm standing on something solid but I can't see what it is and after a moment I stop trying to figure it out because it doesn't seem like the most pressing issue.
I look down at myself.
Gym clothes. Chalk still on my hands.
I actually almost laugh at that. Not quite, but almost.
There is something so specific and so absurd about arriving wherever this is still wearing my belt and my wrist wraps, chalk ground into the creases of my palms, that it bypasses whatever I was expecting to feel and lands somewhere closer to bewildered.
I died. That much is clear.
The sequence of events is not complicated: bar, chest, floor, dark, here. What here is, that I don't know.
I stand very still and wait, because standing still and waiting is what you do when you don't have enough information yet and acting on nothing is worse than acting on something.
I don't have to wait long.
"You look like you're doing maths."
I turn toward the voice.
There's a man sitting backwards on a folding chair, the cheap white plastic kind, the sort that gets stacked in storage rooms and dragged out for school events and community meetings.
He has his arms folded over the top of the backrest and a cup of instant ramen in one hand, and he is holding it with the complete relaxed confidence of someone who has never spilled anything in his life and doesn't intend to start now.
He looks somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, which probably means nothing.
His clothes are completely ordinary, the kind of shirt and trousers you'd walk past a hundred times without registering.
He looks like someone's unremarkable uncle, if their unremarkable uncle happened to be sitting in the middle of an infinite white void eating ramen.
He's watching me with the calm, faintly entertained expression of someone who has seen this exact scene before and still finds it mildly interesting.
I look at him. He looks at me.
He slurps his ramen.
"You died," he says.
Not unkindly. Just factually. The way you'd say your package has arrived or it's going to rain later.
"Yeah," I say. "I know."
"Overtraining." He points at me with his chopsticks.
"You had the data, man. You wrote the spreadsheets yourself. You knew what deload weeks were for, you understood the research, and then you went and loaded two-forty on a Tuesday in February anyway."
He pauses. "Your heart just said no. Firmly and finally said no."
I open my mouth. Close it again.
There's genuinely nothing to argue with there.
"Are you God?" I ask.
"No."
"Are you a god?"
He does a little side-to-side motion with his head.
"Somewhere in that neighbourhood. Think of me as the person who deals with the edge cases. The situations that don't fit neatly into the standard processing."
He looks at me with something that isn't quite a smile but is related to one.
"You're an edge case. Most people who end up here don't already have a destination in mind."
Something in my chest, or whatever I have instead of a chest right now, goes very still.
He raises an eyebrow. "Yeah. I know about all of it." He stirs his ramen. "The forums. The wikis. The three-AM power scaling discussions. The way you'd have a training session and then spend an hour reading light novel analysis instead of sleeping, which, to be clear, was also not helping with the overtraining thing."
"It was research," I say, and immediately regret it because it sounds even worse out loud than it did in my head.
"Sure," he says, not unkindly. "Here's the situation, Gym Brain."
He sets his ramen down on absolutely nothing, it just sits there, suspended in the white, and I make a conscious decision not to examine that too closely.
"You died earlier than you were supposed to. That earns you something. Three wishes, you pick the world, you make the requests, I send you off."
He looks at me steadily. "But you already know all that. And you already know exactly what you want. So let's just skip to it."
I take a breath.
"High School DxD," I say.
The silence that follows is not shocked, I don't think this person does shocked, but it has a particular quality.
He looks at me for a long moment, ramen forgotten, with the expression of someone genuinely taking stock of what they're dealing with.
"Right," he says finally. "Okay. So you want to reincarnate into a world where fallen angels kill teenagers for sport, where actual Satan has a desk job, where the apocalypse has been attempted multiple times and is probably being rescheduled as we speak."
He pauses. "As a human."
"I know the plot," I say.
"You know the plot." He repeats it slowly, like he's tasting it. Then something shifts in his face, not approval exactly, but a kind of recognition.
"Alright. You've thought about the wishes too, haven't you."
"Yes."
"Then let's hear them."
And here's the thing, I had. Not as a serious plan, not as something I'd ever expected to actually use, but somewhere between the forum threads and the late nights and the hours between training sets when my brain needed somewhere to go, I had thought about it properly. What would actually matter. What would make the difference between surviving that world and not.
"First," I say. "A Sacred Gear. Longinus-class. And I want to design it myself."
He picks his ramen back up, settles in. "Go on then."
I tell him about Null Sovereign. All of it, the nullification field, how the range works, how the stamina cost scales against whoever is caught inside it.
The Echo Mirror, the 72-hour recording window, the one-time playback.
The Balance Breaker, Sovereign Form, Absolute Null, the selective erasure, the full-body manifestation that costs more than I probably understand right now.
The silver gauntlet. The open eye on the back of the hand.
He listens the whole way through without interrupting once.
When I stop talking he's quiet for a moment, and I can't tell if he's thinking or waiting.
"You did your homework," he says. There's something in it that might be approval. It might just be acknowledgement.
With him I'm not sure there's a difference.
"Second," I say. "Appraisal Eye. On demand, I don't want it running all the time, I want to choose when I use it. I look at someone, I activate it, I get a full readout. Numbers and a short analysis.
Nothing visible on the outside, no glowing eyes, no tells, nothing anyone can detect."
"Don't be weird about it," he says immediately.
"I won't be."
"Everyone says that," he says, with the weary certainty of someone with a lot of data on the subject.
"Third," I say. "Ten times training multiplier. Passive, always running. Every hour of genuine training counts as ten. Genuine, it has to be real effort, not going through the motions." I pause.
"And it can't contribute to overtraining. If I'm at the limit it stops counting. Hard cap, non-negotiable."
The silence this time is the longest one yet.
He looks at me over his ramen cup with an expression I genuinely cannot read, it's somewhere between amused and something more complicated than amused.
"Just so I understand," he says, very carefully.
"You are a man who died, today, of overtraining." He lets that sit for a second.
"And your third wish is a training multiplier."
"With a hard cap," I say. "I learn from experience."
"Do you," he says. Not a question. He holds my gaze for a moment longer and then something settles in his face, a decision made, quietly, without announcement, and he nods.
"Full memories," he says, before I can bring it up. "Everything from this life, intact. That's standard, already included."
He picks up his ramen. "One last thing." His voice is different now, not serious exactly, but the lightness has stepped back slightly, and what's underneath it is something more direct.
"It's not going to be an easy start. Before the story you know kicks off, before any of the parts you've read about, there's a beginning.
And it's going to be hard." He meets my eyes properly, no remove, no slight amusement acting as a buffer.
"You're going to go through it alone. Just so you know."
I look at him. I think about asking what he means. I decide I'd rather find out when I get there.
"I'll manage," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he raises his ramen cup, just slightly, just once, a small and unhurried gesture that is the most genuine thing he has done since I arrived.
"Good luck, Gym Brain." A pause, and then quieter, with something underneath it I don't have a word for: "Second time around, make it count."
The white doesn't fade. Doesn't blur or shift or do anything cinematic.
It just stops.
Dark.
Then, from somewhere that feels both very far away and immediately close,
A voice.
Warm. Bright. The kind of voice that fills a room without trying. Laughing at something, mid-sentence, like I've walked in on the best part of a conversation.
I have never heard this voice before in my life.
I will spend the next seven years listening to it every single day, and I will not understand what I have until it's gone.
But that comes later.
Right now, I'm here.