This Chapter Contains One (1) Fatal Insect

You ever have one of those days where everything feels… narratively significant?

Yeah. That was me this morning.

5:47 am. Barely light out. The kind of light that hasn't fully committed to being light yet — more of a suggestion, a rough draft of a morning that the sun clearly hadn't proofread. I cracked my front door open and a single beam of it hit me directly in the face like the universe had been waiting behind the door with a flashlight.

I stood there blinking like an idiot for a solid four seconds.

All that just to venture out to buy a DLC. Physical media. At 5:47 in the morning.

Yes I know it's incredibly gross that I skipped brushing my teeth, and yes I know I'm pissing away my morning waititng for the store to open when i could've pressed the download button from the comfort of my room.

Don't give me that look!

Okay look. 

In my defence: GameOn+ is literally eight minutes from my house. 

I scouted it. 

I did my research — Ramblr posts, Tangent threads, the whole thing. Fate of War: The Covenant of Gundehar DLC was dropping on physical the same day as digital, limited regional stock, and I'd seen enough memes about scalpers camping electronics sections to know that if I wasn't there early I was paying triple on resale by noon.

I'm not insane. I'm strategic.

I'm also, for the record, Takumi Sato. 

17 years old. 

Average grades. 

Average face. 

Peak invisible-to-girls status. If I was in a pay-to-win game, the player controlling me must be flat broke — like, starting account, zero recharges, grinding the tutorial dungeon at 3am flat broke.

I'm the kind of guy you see in the background of a—

Actually, I'll stop there. I promised myself no more sulking before 8am.

Today's meant to be great, anyway. I could feel it. 

Something about the specific quality of that morning light, the air, even obnoxious as it was, felt like a sign. 

The kind of stillness that happens before something good. The whole street to myself. Concrete still cool. Convenience store shutters half-up down the block. A vending machine humming to itself on the corner like it was the only other soul awake in the city.

Which it basically was.

I should mention — I don't look like someone who leaves the house at 5:47am for a video game.

Surely nobody was going to clock me as a guy who had been awake for two hours reading Tangent threads about physical media scalpers and fantasising about pulling a five-star demon girl with abs from the new Fate of War banner?

Right?

She'd have, like. A really good design. Probably tragic backstory. Cool weapon. The abs are important, obviously, for gameplay purposes, I just think the character design is—

Anyway.

I was eight minutes from GameOn+, humming the Fate of War opening theme under my breath like the enormous loser that I am, when I heard it.

A buzz.

High-pitched. Getting closer. Closing in with a kind of deliberate energy that, in retrospect, should have been my first clue that something had it out for me specifically.

Bzzzzzzz—

I turned my head.

The wasp turned with me.

It flew directly into my eye — my actual eye, the one I was using to look at it — and stung me. 

Then, apparently unsatisfied, it stung me again. And again. In what I can only describe as a committed, professional, almost personal attack on my eye specifically.

What an opportune time to discover I'm terribly, deathly allergic to wasps.

I froze. Which was the wrong move. My body had opinions about what was happening and it was expressing them loudly through my nervous system, and I processed approximately none of it in time to do anything useful, and then my knees had a meeting without me and decided to table the whole standing-up initiative indefinitely.

The collapse. The stupid, undignified collapse.

Then the sputters of what could only generously be called a last breath.

I didn't even make it to GameOn+.

I was three blocks away.

Three.

Then: black.

Not a white void. 

No sexy angels.

No trumped up brass fanfare.

No warm light at the end of a tunnel that every near-death experience guy on the internet describes in his fourteen-minute video essay. 

Just black, and the brief, humiliating realisation that I had died because of a wasp with a bad temper and zero sense of spatial awareness.

I didn't even get to buy the game.

Somewhere in the black, I narrowed my eyes at something glowing in a god-awful serif font:

✦ You Have Died. ✦

Slain By: Wasp 

Age: 17 

Status: Flatlined

Great.

Didn't even die a hero. Didn't go out doing something interesting or meaningful or at minimum photogenic. Just a guy who got his life ended by an insect on the way to a game shop at six in the morning, wearing yesterday's tracksuit, humming an opening theme, thinking about a gacha character's abs.

This is the afterlife, huh.

So now what?

Am I just supposed to wander around in the dark aimlessly? Because I already did that for years when I was alive — insomnia's a hell of a condition, trust me, I know dark and aimless intimately — and if the afterlife is just that but permanent, I have some feedback.

"Hey!" I shouted into the nothing. "Isn't there supposed to be a fanfare or something? Hello!?"

I waited a good beat and a half.

Nothing.

Crap.