I did a double take when I recognized the angel’s pearlescent suit coat and pants, hazel eyes, and that unmistakable weird hat resting over his trimmed chestnut hair.

“Oh thank God,” I said with a sigh of relief. “I almost thought I was never going to… Okay John, you can stop grinning now. I’m not that happy to see you!”

With a casual gesture and that same cheesy grin plastered across his face, he motioned for me to take a seat in the empty chair across the table.

An overwhelming sense of déjà vu washed over me when I sat down facing him. With the same starless void surrounding us, this really was almost exactly like the first time we met—except John looked a little taller now. No, if the chairs were the same height, that must have been because I was a bit shorter in this new female body.

And there was something else I noticed…

“This chair feels different for some reason,” I blurted out. “It’s not as painfully cold on my butt now. Wait, I’m not naked this time! Does that mean you only make guys strip down here?! That’s sexist as hell!”

John raised an eyebrow, giving me a once-over. “Do you really want to lose the clothes right now?”

“Ugh, just forget it…”

At any rate, if I really was meeting him like this, that could only mean one thing.

“I’m dead again, aren’t I?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you to not take drugs from strangers?”

“That is not funny right now, man!”

John chuckled anyway. “Couldn’t help it. And yes; you, my friend, are… sort of dead.”

“Sort of?”

He took a deep breath, sitting up straighter in his chair. “Let me put it to you this way: with your soul separated from your body like this, your pulse is getting weaker by the minute. If you don’t return soon enough, your heart will stop beating. Then it’s lights out for good. Right now, you are kinda on the boundary.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

It almost looked like it pained him to frown in response. “It’s not pretty back there,” he said dourly. John fell quiet for an uncomfortable moment before continuing. “Anyways, since your case here was a bit of an accident, it just so happens that I can give your ‘soul’ a little nudge either way.”

Either way? “Does that mean you can send me back, or… I can actually restart somewhere else? Like, a new reincarnation to another world?”

He nodded, still frowning. I was about to ask why, but putting this surprising turn of events aside, I had far more important considerations at the moment.

This meant I could actually leave this weird world for good and start over! If I remembered correctly, John had told me during our first meeting that there should be some kind of futuristic world I could go to. I might actually find a world with real toilet paper, and working air condition, and androids, and who knew what else! I could even get another chance at ‘character creation’ and… start over as a guy again.

Huh? I would have thought that idea would be exciting, and yet for some reason… that idea felt even weirder to me. Did I really want that? Had I gotten too used to life in this body, life as a girl, and how I had spent all that time like this with my party?

Shit, the party… A sudden tightness gripped my chest, threatening to take my breath away. With everything that had happened since I blacked out in the cave, I almost forgot about them. Alice, and Viela, and Titania, and even Freya… As deranged as this new world seemed to me, and even as frustrating and perverted as they could all be, if I left now… I would probably never see any of them again.

For some reason, that thought scared me more than anything else.

As if reading my mind, John chuckled again, interrupting my train of thought with a fresh grin. “You aren’t seriously thinking about going back to that world full of ‘weirdos and perverts,’ are you?”

“So what if I am!” I shot back. “How am I supposed to just leave them all like this without saying goodbye? Not that this would be any damn time to say goodbye in the first place! And you know what, they all look up to me as our party’s leader, too! Oh, and I even kind of, um… got married or something, and turned into a fox girl?”

I fidgeted in my seat and looked away, unable to keep my cheeks from getting redder. The awkward memories of my time after my soul bond with Viela came floating to the front of my mind.

“I can’t be stuck as a fox girl forever though,” I went on. “I mean, I think I can shift back and forth now, but… my mind gets all fuzzy thinking of what happened when I was in the astral plane around my soul. And the Divine Gift you gave me, I need to be able to control that, too! Didn’t that make all this soul sensing crap damn near impossible for me?”

John scratched the back of his head. “Well, you know, maybe I wasn’t expecting you would be ‘tying the knot’ with a soul bond back when I hooked you up with that Gift. There’s all kinds of ways to play the game, but truth be told, a Divine Gift like yours makes it practically ‘hard mode’ for the whole soul perception thing.”

“Hard mode? Hold up, I thought you said this wasn’t a game?”

He flashed me a cheesy grin. “Eh, call it a metaphor. ‘The game of life’ and all that jazz.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t sweat it, kiddo,” he chuckled. “I can make it up to you. As far as your soul sensing is concerned, you are probably good to go, but I can make it certainly.”

John held out his hand for me to shake. I warily eyed his offer, yet I couldn’t see any angle he was playing to trick me. For once, maybe he was actually going to make himself useful here.

Sighing, I reached out to accept, bracing myself for whatever was about to happen. The instant I grabbed his hand, I felt my consciousness blasting away at the speed of light.

“FUCK!”

Countless images and emotions flickered in my mind, like I was watching a thousand lifetimes on a thousand different worlds come and go in the blink of an eye. Birth and life and death and birth and life and death, the cycle repeating over and over faster and faster… My cycle.

The slideshow of my previous lives shrunk within the boundaries of my soul, my vision zooming out until I could glimpse every shining surface of it, all shrinking away faster. Faster.

One soul in the infinite astral cosmos, then a million, billion, trillion flickering souls, all of them impossibly far away and yet… and yet they were all…!

All at once, the vision came to a screeching halt. I found myself gasping for breath, my hands clutched around my stomach, fighting back the urge to vomit. After all that, I was still seated across that unusually bright table from a certain cheesy bastard.

“What the hell was that?” I asked him. “What did you just show me?!”

John scratched his head again, a little more awkwardly this time. “Whoops, I might’ve gone a little overboard there. So anyways, like I said… You’re good to go now.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what that was! Hey, wait!”

But he didn’t wait. John tapped his fingers on the table three times, and the column of light illuminating him grew brighter and brighter.

“What the fuck, man!”

He gave me a shrug and one last cheesy grin. “Time’s running out. I’d feel awful keeping you away from your friends for a second longer. I told you from the start: you’re gonna fit in just fine here, you’ll see!”

“You can’t just show me a bunch of crazy shit like that and not explain! Hey, are you listening to me?! You know what? Screw you, John! You can shove your cheesy one-liners up your—”

***

When the blinding light faded and my consciousness finally returned to me, I instantly knew I was back in the cave where this all began. Except now, even with my eyes closed shut… there were way too many things wrong with everything I noticed inside and around me.

The weirdest irony was that for the first time in my life, I actually felt like I had gotten hit by a truck.

My whole body ached worse than that time I completely ran out of mana and could hardly even walk. It was a duller, stiffer pain that gripped me now compared to then, but at the moment, I couldn’t move a finger if I wanted to. My limbs felt like heavy lead weights, I could only manage to take shallow breaths, and all my strength had been sapped from me. Even opening my eyelids took a concerted effort. Moving my head was out of the question, but at least my eyes could look around.

Damn, being disconnected from my body that long had seriously taken its toll on me…

It wasn’t any later than noontime when I drank that weird Soul Seeker potion. Now, the dusky rays of twilight painted what little sky I could see outside the cave, although the warm colors of sunset still looked a bit cloudy and blended together.

How long was I gone for? And the others…!

One by one, all my senses came slowly drifting back to me. I had thought I was still lying down on my bedroll, but now I realized someone was raising my upper body off the ground.

A shallow breath caught in my throat when I looked up and saw Alice kneeling beside me, holding my torso in her arms. Tears streaked down her wet cheeks and fell off her chin, dripping down onto my chest.

“I’m sorry Beryl,” Alice cried, sobbing between short gasps for air. “I’m so sorry… I know I was being selfish, I know that! But I never wanted this to happen to you! So you can’t go, Beryl. Please, you can’t! There’s still so many things I haven’t told you yet, and, and… I don’t want to do this without you!”

She broke down into more tears, burying her head in my shoulder.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a half-naked girl with a long, snowy tail putting her arms around Alice. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love,” Freya said. “We can get through this together.”

At the very bottom of my line of sight, I could just barely see the last two party members facing off.

“What the hell were you thinking?!” Titania shouted, hefting the sharp tip of her lance at Viela. “You killed her! I should fucking impale you for that!”

Viela crossed her arms under her breasts. “I’m not in the mood, and I don’t know you that well,” she said with a sigh. “It’s like I keep telling you: just have a little faith in her. If anyone can do it, Beryl can find a way back.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake… it’s like I’m watching my own funeral here! They all think I’m dead, and the only one who believes in me is the fox spirit who sort of killed me in the first place!

I tried lifting a hand again, but it was no use. My body lay helpless in Alice’s arms, her tears still gradually soaking my top. Yet with each shallow breath, I could almost feel a trickle of strength returning to my body. It wasn’t much, but at least I could move my tongue and open my mouth a bit.

I heard another breathless sob from Alice, another word of comfort from Freya, another shout from Titania… I even felt the thick fur of a snow leopard cub rubbing her head on my hand, like she was trying to fluff me back to life.

There was only so much of this I could take.

I gathered up every scrap of strength I could muster and shouted as hard as I could, “I’m still here, damn it!”

My voice came out in a raspy croak… but that was more than enough.

“Beryl?”

Alice lifted her head, her tear-stained eyes staring at me in disbelief like she was seeing a ghost.

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” I whispered with a smile.

“Beryl!”

I gasped when she buried her head over my chest, crying and hugging me tighter and tighter like she never wanted to let me go.

“Beryl, you came back, you really came back…!”

My vision blurred, and I felt a warm, wet sensation trickle down my face. I’m… Am I crying now?

Why am I crying?