Atone for your sins

“Come on! Another time?”, asked the first voice.

The second voice remained silent, but I felt like I heard a quiet sob in the background.

“If you don’t want me here, send me back!”, I shouted at the voice.

“Not possible. You are already dead in this world. Sending you back would mean actively killing you.”, replied the first voice.

This had been the first life that actually had seemed to work out. I knew that it was mostly my fault that it had ended, but it was me or many innocent people. Did I have another choice?

Now I was pretty sure there was a sob in the dark void around me.

“Is everything ok?”, I asked into the darkness.

“Don’t worry about me.”, replied the second voice.

“You don’t seem fine.”

“I was rooting for ‘Casta’ and you threw it away!”, she sobbed.

“What is ‘Casta’?”

“You know ‘Casta’ or ‘Shosey’. I even made a couple name for you already!”

“Excuse me, what?”, I asked, not understanding what she meant.

“Forget it!”, she sobbed.

“Can’t you send me into a less murderous world for once?”, I asked.

“You have to atone for what you have done!”, said the second voice, now sounding angry.

“H-Hey what do you mean?!”

I was shot another time into the shining bright light.

“No! No, no, no, no, no! Wait!”, I screamed but it was too late.

I flew through the light and fell directly into a huge amount of water and sank into it.

What was this? A river? A lake? At least no desert this time.

But my relief quickly turned into consternation as I reached the surface. I was thrown into the middle of an ocean.

“Come on!”, I shouted to my invisible spectators.

My fifth life was starting out great.

Whatever the second voice meant before she sent me here, I must have upset her more than I should have. If I ever met her again, I would need to apologize, even if only to not have two mystical beings up against me.

Looking around, our next meeting probably wouldn’t be too far in the future. I was swimming in the middle of a large amount of water, likely an ocean, with no land in sight and nothing to hold on to. So the only thing I could do was swim until my forces left me or somebody found and saved me. I still had my items from my previous life. Only they were of little use to me. My clothes became heavy as they got soaked with water and pulled me into the deep, the little money as well. The notebook was likely to get soaked and its contents unreadable and the pot of ink was likely to swim inside my bag.

The only thing that was useful to me was the revolver. If I shot with it, somebody might hear it, assuming of course somebody was close enough to hear anything I did.

“I hope there are no sharks here.”, I mumbled to myself before starting to swim in a direction that felt correct to me.

If things had been different and my arrival in this new world would have been less, let’s call it potentially deadly, I would have felt a deep sense of loss upon having lost my life together with the people of old branch town. The only comfort I had was the thought that we had saved the villagers at least and more so without any significant losses.

The voices could just, for once, put me into a deadly boring, normal world of modern standards. Not dying was far easier if you didn’t have to deal with ghosts, bandits, pirates or whatever.

By now I felt ridiculous for having been afraid of my boss or losing my job back then. New opportunities would arise as soon as one just started to look out for them. If only I had realized this years ago. Maybe I would still live my first life. Maybe my life would have gone differently. The last time was already a fairly good try, if I had to be honest. I had been respected. An honorable member of society. Without any additional superpowers or cheat-skills. Just by finally starting to act, instead of only thinking about doing something.

“Just keep swimming. You don’t have time to pity yourself right now.”, I said to myself.

The water around me had a deep shade of blue that turned into an almost threatening shade of black if I had a look at the abyss I was trying to avoid sinking into.

“I got it…. I really did!.... and I’m sorry! Please don’t let me drown here!”, I spoke to the heavens while spitting out saltwater that had been washed into my mouth by the constant tiny waves around me.

I needed something to hold on to. Something that would carry me. But there was nothing except for water.

The time passed endlessly. There was no way of telling how far I had come or how long it had taken but even with my energy-saving way of swimming my forces started to fade, and my clothes felt more and more heavy, like an anchor pulling me down.

“I wonder what this guy is up to.”

The words reached my ears, but it took some moments to realize what it could mean to me if somebody spoke around here.

I looked around. Nobody. Again ghosts?

“I don’t think that he will manage it, if he just keeps staring into space.”, said another voice. They sounded strangely coarse. Definitely not the two voices I knew too well from the void.

Two birds passed above my head and flew in a direction right to me.

Birds! Where there were birds, there was land! And where there was land, there were people who could be talked to!

I turned into the direction the birds had left into. But there was no land to be seen. Maybe the whole thing was something like a mirage? Did there exist mirages on the ocean?  In the end it didn’t even matter. Swimming in this or that direction was just a way of feeling not entirely useless while slowly reaching a point that would leave me with too little strength to avoid drowning.

“It was my death. Does she think I wouldn’t have preferred to continue my life as it was?”, I asked myself.

“Obviously. Who would like to die? Yes, I accepted it as a possibility, but it was my decision. Only mine. Does it deserve to be killed off instantly to just try to save the people around you?”

I needed a break. I turned myself around and tried to float on the surface by spreading my arms and legs aside. It worked. It wasn’t completely effortless but fine enough to give my arms some rest for a moment at least.

Now with my ears being covered by water the sounds I could hear drastically changed. Firstly, everything I heard felt strangely far away, then obviously there was the sound of the waves splashing against my body, but then I heard something else. The sound started like the sound of a whale, only far deeper. Then the long stretched deep growling suddenly stopped and turned into a clipped growling that stopped and started with increasing speed. After having created an atmosphere that certainly did not make you want to stay inside the same ocean as whoever created this sound, it stopped shortly before making a sound like a cut-off tree that had been standing in a forest for hundreds of years before giving in to the power of a three-month-old chainsaw.

My break was over before it had really started. Land. There had to be some kind of land in this damn world.

“Come on! You can’t let me die here like this!”

That was when I saw it. Somewhere in the distance, there was a rise in the outline of the horizon. It was far away, but it was my only chance. I swam as fast as I could, then slower because the distance was still far greater than I had anticipated.

As night fell upon the world I swam just into the direction that seemed like the one where I had lost sight of the landmass.

When I finally arrived, I crawled away from the water onto dry sand and immediately fell flat on the ground, where I passed out from exhaustion.