This part always sucked. Always. Especially when it involved that bitch. She always just wanted to use standard, boring tropes. Sure, she teased the heroes, acted like their best friend, and sometimes even put out. But not for me. I was the bad guy. Yadda yadda yadda.

Twenty-two seconds.

Yes, I got it, heroes thrive under pressure. I carefully swerved into the left-hand lane, turning up the truck’s heat slightly too high, and took another swig of cheap malt whiskey. I wonder if little miss perfect realized how many OTHER lives she destroyed when she pulled this shit?

Sixteen seconds.

This guy’s life was in the crapper, but he didn’t deserve this. Then again, his life being in the toilet only served to make it more realistic. The radio switched to a song I actually quite liked despite it being a bit depressing, ‘Don’t Take the Girl’ by Tim McGraw. With ten seconds left, I wouldn’t even get to enjoy it.

eight seconds.

“Okay, time to be the bad guy.” I sped up the truck slightly. I needed to be there at exactly the right moment, and because he had to be a hero, even a heartbeat earlier or later would screw things up completely. The engine raced as I tilted the liquor slightly, letting some of it splash on the floor followed by the bottle itself.

three seconds.

There she was. A sweet little girl. Desperately chasing after a balloon, in the driving rain. Who the hell comes up with these stupid stories? Why would any idiot actually buy into the idea that first, a helium balloon would stay low enough to get meaningfully chased, and second, that a picture-perfect eight-year-old would be stupid enough to try and chase it into a busy intersection?

And then, add on the dramatic pouring rain. Like a little girl would even be out in this wet hell, adorable yellow slicker or not. For just a heartbeat I considered just stepping on the gas and slamming into the girl, undoubtedly a simulacrum of the lady herself. I knew I was right when I saw her glance up in shock, a knowing smirk in her eyes as her mouth formed an ‘o’ of screaming fear.

Zero seconds.

I saw the little girl flash-sideways as she was tackled out of the way by a fifteen-year-old boy. Well, at least this time it wasn’t going to be a harem adventure. There’d probably be some weird sexual overtones, maybe a horrible girl that only abused him because she was secretly in love with him, or something like that.

Crunch. Bump, bah-bump. I could feel the squishiness when the left front tires went over the kid’s body. If meeting the grill didn’t end this life, getting rolled under a 4-ton truck’s wheels made sure he’d be taking the express train to reincarnation, namely me.

Yep, thoroughly dead. I really felt sorry for the poor bastard of a driver, who was going to wake up in a second as I steered the tractor into the side of a building. He was going to think he was drunk driving and fell asleep at the wheel, and not only would the kid’s family be wrecked at his death, but this poor shmuck’s life and probably family was ruined.

I carefully popped out of the beer-bellied man’s navel, and stepped through the door and into the street, stopping instantly and walking back to the corpse.

“Good job, Kush.” the little girl told me.

“Screw you, Crystal,” I replied. I wasn’t dressed up in robes or anything spectacular as I carefully untucked his soul from his body. His soul was still in shock, so I stripped away the brief moments of horrifying pain before I rolled it up and carefully tucked it into my belt. I may be a bad guy, but I wasn’t a sadist… who wants to live with the memory of getting bounced and then rolled over by a moving truck? The last thing this guy would probably remember in his next life was saving the little girl, and maybe a brief flash of his own reflection in the grill. PTSD sucks.

Pianos falling I could deal with. Getting gunned down? No problem, it was easy to rig a heroic death when I had minutes to act instead of heartbeats. When a hero kid wanders into a drug den to save his sister? No problem! All I had to do was set things up. As long as he saved his sister and was dead by the end, the timing didn’t really matter.

But Crystal loved the truck-kun meme. I blamed bad manga for that. And she insisted that they died doing something stupidly heroic. Not that it really mattered, a transfer was a transfer, and they were pretty much destined to be a hero no matter what kind of a loser gamma life they led. Space opera nerd that popped his pimples with a screwdriver? Guaranteed laser-sword lugging psychic knight. Dork that was scared of his own shadow? Somehow that would become the most important thing in the multiverse.

I could sort of understand why Crystal insisted on heroes though. Because when they pulled something stupid and died, even if they were compulsive gamers with zero skills, they still believed that they deserved a reward for a bit of last-second courage after a lifetime of cowardice and missed opportunities. Willing suspension of disbelief for the lucky jerk chosen to save the world. Occasionally it was a girl, but that was pretty rare, mostly because girls tended to get their life together faster as teenagers and were unlikely to do some sort of suicidally heroic thing like throw themselves in front of a truck to save an idiot child or dog, although cats sometimes caught them.

Unless someone was dying of cancer or about to kick the bucket some other way, suicides never got transposed. They had some other, much worse destination in mind, and like real heroes and monsters, we couldn’t touch their souls. A ‘sacrifice’, like someone who willingly threw down their life to save others, wasn’t considered a suicide, even if he intended to die. Good dodge.

And no, before you ask, I have no idea if there was a big ‘G’ god. I thought so, tons of stuff just wouldn’t work, otherwise, but I had never met him, or her, and neither had anyone else I’d ever met. Once a soul was out of our grasp, it was gone to who knows where, and that includes the gods that died and moved on. Some of the dead gods stuck around for a while screwing things up spectacularly, but then we needed another hero.

Plenty of gods had promised to come back and tell us what was up after death, the ones that didn’t linger, but so far, none had kept that promise, and they probably couldn’t.

There were obviously little G gods, tons of them, and lots of worlds got them. Crystal was one, but she was high enough up the chain that she had lots of worlds that kissed her butt. I wouldn’t disagree that it was a fine butt, worth kissing, but I would never know.

Being an embodiment sucked. All work, no play. I started feeding the soul into the revitalizer a bit at a time, carefully. These kids, and sometimes adults, were as much a victim as the poor truck driver I’d possessed and didn’t deserve their souls getting mangled by being careless with their rebirth. And now they got to go play Trick Monkey for the deific entertainment alternative network, DEAN.

Billions of gods tuned in. Sure, the heroes always won, and some poor stupid demon lord wound up getting taken down a peg or two, but your working-class deity was a huge fan of the hero’s journey, they snorted it like glue. Only the details mattered, and the exact same story played out in fifty different genres was just as entertaining as the first one. Despite claims to the contrary, most deities were basically shallow, simpleminded idiots that did NOT get bored spending eternity doing the same damned thing, and if they did somehow get bored, they just reincarnated and tossed away their old names and memories to do the same job with a clean slate.

But oh, no. Embodiments were eternal. Embodiments of what? You ask. Beats me. I knew that there were a few of us floating around, doing the suck-ass jobs that no one else wanted or could do. We were technically a lot more powerful than any god, with none of the restrictions, but none of the benefits, either. No worshipers, no presence, I couldn’t even make an avatar and go knock up some mortal princess. Sure, I could possess some mortal, but that took ninety percent of the fun out of it and generally gave the mortal a really bad day.

I looked at the screen. Lucas Yamato. Great, another Japanese American taken before their time. And with a portentous name like Yamato, his original destiny was probably something amazing before I was forced to shorten it prematurely. I wonder if he would have invented interstellar spaceflight. Maybe became a great diplomat who stopped World War Five. He looked like a pretty healthy 15-year-old. At least with the complete losers, you knew nothing better would have come along, but looking at his intelligent and inquisitive soul, he could have had real potential.

Okay. Where was he going… huh. Brave sending a Japanese American kid to a Daoist wuxia world. Huh. Good. He was getting the language pack, at least. Those wuxia worlds were a bitch because they took in a lot of heroes and few of them actually won. Crystal probably cut a deal with one of the great demons. Typical goddess of light and love, she couldn’t wait to get her hands dirty sending some poor kid into a suicide situation. If he lived long enough, she might even make an avatar to boink his mortal brains out.

Okay wuxia world… tutorial dojo number three should work, guise of a crusty old kung-fu master with a ridiculous haircut. No worries about cross-cultural screw-ups, this kid was as ignorant American as Barney Fife.

I carefully rebuilt his roots. He was going for Wuxia hero, and with cultivation system number five, Crystal occasionally messed intros up badly, probably because she was a goddess of light and love sending some ignorant good guy on a mission that would be better served by a cold-blooded professional killer.

I sometimes hated my job, especially the messy parts, but prepping a new hero was one of my few pleasures. He had to have an affinity for light, of course, since this was Crystal’s project, but the kid was genius range and a wannabe scientist. A little force affinity and he would be set for screwing with Chin Lau’s ‘stable’ technology base. Chin Lau didn’t even let his mortals discover steel for like ten thousand years, and Lucas here should be quite a shock.

Chin Lau chattered constantly about stability and tradition, but I knew the truth… he was lazy. He didn’t want to deal with space travel or invent new aliens. Hell, he didn’t have anything but humans or Oni in his spheres… not even friggin’ elves. He deserved to have a kid invent lightsabers or something.

Oops! I almost goofed. Crystal had a note that she wanted to deal with him personally. She couldn’t seduce a kid that young, but in a few years I knew she’d be giving him the horizontal mambo. I nixed the old fart kung-fu master, sent her the tutorial number, and re-routed Lucas’ new body to the appropriate address. Screwing that one up would get another complaint lodged against me.

At least he wasn’t going to a system world with character creation. Those were nightmares, especially since every single hero thought he was the second coming of Kirk and could cheat the system with class and race or mini-maxing. They couldn’t, of course, but every system had intentional back doors specifically for portal heroes, and leading them by the nose to one was exhausting. Last week I had a guy who honestly thought that being a half-troll berserk would let him regenerate through the berserk fallout, and I had to give him a couple of special traits specifically so he wouldn’t get killed, since trolls were like pringles for other adventurers… you can’t eat just one. Dumbass.

I ignored the thank-you note from Crystal. She kept trying to charm me even though she knew I disliked her, she gave me a ton more work than any other multiverse god and kept insisting I use old-fashioned bullshit tricks. She probably did it specifically to irk me. I also got a special hit memo from the DEAN council.

ARCHANGEL KUSHIEL

Aww, crap. I hated it when they used my old title. That meant some sort of gigantic death and destruction gig, an absolute millennia worth of work. At least when they called me Thanatos or the Grim Reaper it meant more personal jobs. Kushiel usually meant wiping out an entire city or something. No fun. I didn’t even like that name, I was not Jewish, and I had never been born, let alone born as one of the chosen.

You have been requested by the Deific Entertainment Alternative Network council to attend a special session. This meeting requires mandatory attendance on 3.23.12.12.1787.263.

I wondered if they wanted the stoic armored bit with the wings. No. effing way. I was dressed casually, just a floating bit of darkness, and planned on staying that way. The meeting was two days ago, so I guessed they didn’t like the way it went. On the plus side, a two-day overlap meant a short vacation. I would have to remember that after this meeting I was off duty until I caught up with myself, because meeting yourself, especially when you don’t remember it, is the definition of awkward.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Not like paradox or anything, that was a problem for mortals and gods, not embodiments, but propagating your own memory as you made it was sort of embarrassing, like forgetting where you put your tie and then realizing you were wearing it the whole time. Tachyos had to do that all the time, and I didn’t envy him at all, he sorta never remembered anything because he was never sure exactly when he was, and you might have met him next week for drinks he thought were last week.

It was pretty good for pranks though, and never really got old when you agreed with something he never said that was completely opposite to what he usually said, and you KNEW he’d be scouring the next ten thousand years to figure out why he said it. Paybacks were a bitch, though, when he rearranged things so that my old crush turned out to be Dionysus in disguise, and sorry, I am straight. Or at least I would be if I were capable of things like sex.

Remember that benefits thing? That’s one I missed out on, and based on the memories I absorbed doing my job, I really miss not having it. Heck, I probably even identified as male because almost all of the heroes were male. The idea of a Lady Death was pretty cool when it came to comic book art, but I couldn’t get behind it in the day-to-day job.

You know that not understanding embodiment thing? Well, it was true. I mean, technically I was the embodiment of death, but it’s not like I understood it. I never died myself. Embodiments get replaced occasionally, but I’d been doing this job for a few thousand years, plus a few years for time swaps, and maybe a couple thousand in null-time that don’t really count. As far as I know, there was never a time when I didn’t exist, and since I couldn’t exactly die, there would never be an afterlife.

I probably would be replaced eventually, but I had no idea when or how, mostly a new embodiment just showed up and nobody noticed but us. It wasn’t like we had a physical body or dental records. Tachyos got replaced a thousand years ago, or maybe a thousand years from now, and none of us noticed for at least a hundred years until I realized his voice was deeper and that he now identified as male.

I don’t remember anything from before I existed, and I don’t know what happens afterward, so except for heroes, the occasional resurrection, and specialty jobs like wiping out a city, I didn’t really get death. Death happened to other people with or without my help, and my only real superpower, other than, you know, the stuff all embodiments of a concept can do, was to help make death meaningful.

Like having someone reborn on a different world as a hero, or making a statement with a bunch of ‘he just suddenly died’ at the same time, or resurrecting an avatar three days after he was stapled to a coat rack. That last was a weird one, and I don’t remember the details, but it came from an unknown number and had to be repeated on just about every Earth that had humans. That was one of the reasons I thought that maybe there was a big ‘G’ god wandering around, because I got that order thousands of times, and the DEAN management wasn’t involved.

That job was actually pretty cool. I mean, he was a really decent dude, magic water walking or not, and he always thanked me personally for bringing him back. I mean, it sucked to have to stab him while he was stapled, but every single time he offered forgiveness despite knowing full well I knew exactly what I was doing, and had been given orders to do so. Awesome guy.

***

I back-shifted. Sure, I could have taken my time, but they get grumpy when you don’t respond immediately to a mandatory memo, even if they don’t remember the time break, they call it ‘stealing company time’. Like time can be stolen. Not even Tachyos can do that, but I bet it would be cool if he could.

When I ghosted into the council chamber, Jove glared at me. Yes, god’s council chamber. Ostentatious. Tacky. Lots of gold. Thousands of bodyguards, flying dragons, griffons, and golden-winged angels. Trite, ostentatious, and boring.

“Tachyos! You’re late!”

Antonius tilted slightly sideways on his throne. “Tachyos couldn’t make it to this time stream, sir, he’s in the middle of the temporal collapse thing we are filming in slow-mo for the disaster channel. This is Kushiel.”

Jove shrugged, “They all look the same to me. Why aren’t you in uniform? You look like the dead, son.”

I looked down at my ghostly form, the black robe and skeletal hands, and said “It was casual Friday.”

“Well, fix it!”

I sighed and blew the energy to attain my celestial form. All silver armor and wings and muscles for days. No dick, of course, some movie a few decades past had gotten popular and it was eliminated from the uniform. Not that I could have used it, of course, and I considered going back and killing the people responsible, but it appeared on a thousand Earths, and like killing Hitler, someone would probably have just made the movie anyway. In the universes where Hitler got hit by a bus while trying to walk to art school, Goddard was way worse of a monster than Hitler could have dreamed, and unlike the Fuhrer, he was actually competent.

Jove blew out his breath. “Better. Always wear your uniform in the council chambers, even on casual Fridays. I mean, what if someone came in here while you were looking like the Grim Reaper?”

“I AM the Grim Reaper.”

Jove was a god, the king of his own pantheon, literally one of the most powerful pantheons in all of the universes. I knew perfectly well that his confusing me for Tachyos was an affectation. Likely the guy knew exactly how I would show up, and even knew exactly how this particular meeting would go before I ever set foot in the room. Who needs Cassandra’s curse when you have an IQ in the thousands?

He shrugged, “Anyway. We want you for a special assignment. System apocalypse, pay-per-view.”

Seriously? That was a crapton of work. “What percentage?”

“Seventy-five Percent”

“You are kidding, we are gonna kill four billion people? Is this a done deal, or can we mediate? That’s a chop job. You don’t even need me, and a system apocalypse is bad numbers anyway. Last time we barely got three points.”

He smiled sadly, “We actually do need you. Let’s take a walk.” he said, standing up.

***

Gods. By walk, he meant a flight through one of his paradises that hadn’t hit downfall status yet. Obviously, we didn’t meet the initial lifeforms. Can you imagine the psychological damage some poor early sapients would get from stumbling across a thirty-foot golden god with a twelve-foot angel of death flying along next to him while they were still trying to figure out how to make fire? Oh wait, that sort of thing tended to happen pretty regularly. Paradise sucks.

“I am going to level with you,” he said. “The temporal collapse that has Tachyos distracted? It’s an OLD galaxy. Their big guy is over a hundred billion years old, that’s why they let it get into an entropic death state.”

“Ouch.”

He nodded, “Yup. Most of the local gods are at least a billion years old, and most of them don’t have any worshipers left, and haven’t for a very long time, with all the radiation from stars going nova and all that. That’s why you weren’t even alerted. Suns going nova doesn’t exactly lead to meaningful deaths. So we are left with a couple of thousand senile, kind of stupid, unemployed, and homeless gods without a worshiper between them.”

“Can’t they go to work for a new galaxy?”

He gave me ‘the look’. “Would you hire some old-guard corporate officers who are way past retirement age and managed to run their last business into the ground through incompetence and laziness?”

I shook my head slowly. Hell, I wouldn’t even hire myself, to be honest. I only kept doing my job because I had no other options. It’s not like there were retirement communities that specialized in purely spiritual entities. It was hard enough to find a laptop that accepted spectral input like the one in my revitalize lab. I used to have to rebuild all the souls by hand.

He smiled, “So… DEAN managed to get the lot on a special contract. They are all going mortal. No memories, of course, but that’s why we are doing the special event. They are going to get caught up and need revitalizing, and one of our mortal sub-networks is running it as a hostile takeover. They need your deft touch to make sure that the new heroes only catch a hint of their prior godhood after the world is converted.”

I shook my head, “That’s pretty rotten. First off, what about the billions of mortals? Most of those deaths are going to be ignominious. Mom gets her head bit off by an ogre or something, or the whole family wakes up infested with zombie worms. Is the usual isekai crew going to be involved?”

He nodded, “They are the best, after all.”

I smacked my head with my hand. “No. I won’t do it. Let Crystal’s people handle it, like you said, they are the best.”

“Huh?”

I shook my head, “I told you last time. Yes, I am the embodiment of death. Do you need a special target’s death to be meaningful? Well, that’s when I show up. I even got caught up in the whole portal hero thing, but I have ethics and professional standards. If I go rebuilding all these guys, well, they were suck gods. Half of them will turn into worse abominations than the apocalypse creates.”

“It might help your numbers temporarily, I know we are falling against GODS network, but you have always been on your own when a planet blows up or a sun goes nova or something. I know full well that the bottom line is important, but this is worse than even one of those elder god dipshits would pull. And the whole seventy-five percent thing? I’m not stupid, that’s just a cop-out to get me involved instead of just letting Disaster or Tragedy handle it.”

He glared at me, “Have you seen what Tragedy does to a rebuild? Antiheroes are great in small doses, but the big numbers don’t come from broken killers. They want innocence, growth, sex, and idealism, not a zombie apocalypse. We’ve tried that before, and the numbers just aren’t there. Zombie horror is a fad, but dragons? Dragon legends last forever.”

I shook my head. “Ugh. You have no idea of the billions of ways this could go wrong. You should have Tragedy do it. This is right up his alley.”

He shrugged, “Actually I do know all the billions of ways it could go bad. IQ over a thousand, remember? Tragedy’s on retainer for the post-apocalypse. But he can’t do the initial event. You know what they say, one dead child is a tragedy.”

“And a million dead children is a statistic. Yeah, I know. I still won’t do it. I mean, yeah, DEAN is a corporation, and you need to cut a few throats, but this is flat-out evil. No.”

He sighed and spoke quietly, “I knew you were going to say that. I could make you do it.”

I chuckled, “How, by threatening me? Not even you can kill me. Death, remember? Not even you are immune. And fire me? It’s not like I get paid. GODS would snatch me up in a heartbeat, and then who would you have to deal with all of Crystal’s little pornographic hero stories, Tachyos?”

He scowled, “Hey, Crystal’s one of our best producers. She knows what the gods want. The men’s harem stories are just a sideline to her main anime heroes shtick.”

I grinned, “Not to mention she’s sleeping with you.”

He sighed. “Office gossip bullshit. The board is in agreement on this. It’s a little risky, but if this takes off, we knock GODS off the pitch for millennia and dominate our market share. What’s the risk? A few billion souls that’ll be dead in a hundred years anyway.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I thought that outside of the DEAN thing, you were supposed to be one of the light gods. That sounds a hell of a lot like something a Demon Lord would say.”

He shrugged, “Racism isn’t cool. Demons are our customers too, and two of our board members are demon lords.”

I shook my head, “Still not going to do it.”

“Is that your final answer?”

I nodded, “Yep. I told you last time, and you agreed, and that was only a fifty percent casualty apocalypse.”

He sighed, “And that’s why the numbers were so bad last time. A system apocalypse that isn’t an apocalypse isn’t worth watching. I knew you were going to say that, I just hoped that for once you were wrong. But I should always remember to count on embodiments to be assholes where extra work is involved. Do you know exactly how embodiments are replaced?”

I shrugged, “The old one checks out. Why?”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that. See, it’s impossible to kill an embodiment. But if one gets uppity and stops doing their job effectively, well, they need to be removed so a new one can form.”

“I AM doing my job effectively, I just won’t turn it into a joke, or a bad horror story. My job has always sucked, but I try to do the best job I can. Don’t fear the reaper, right?”

He nodded, “Well, you can’t hurt, kill, punish, or change an embodiment, but you CAN reward them. There’s only one real reward you can give an embodiment, though… Money is useless, nothing to spend it on. Women? Heh. Food? A parking space? Power? They already have all the power they need.”

I shrugged, “Vacation time helps.”

He nodded, “And what do you do on your vacation? Oh, right. The same thing you do in your job. Fly around, observe, and maybe help a few deaths become meaningful. You don’t even know what a vacation IS except ignoring your assignment board.”

I should probably feel fear at his tone, but fear really wasn’t part of the Grim Reaper’s makeup. The whole board working together DID have enough power to do some shitty stuff, like banish me to the outlands, hell, or New Jersey for a while, but then they’d be stuck without a Kushiel, and Crystal and the other gods that built their careers on portal hero stories would pitch a fit.

He shrugged, “I hate doing it, despite your soft streak you have grown into your job extremely well over the last few millennia. So I am rewarding you for all your hard work and ingenuity.” He held up his hand, and I could see the energy patterns for all twelve of the board members, the heads of the pantheons of twelve of the most powerful universes in existence. What the hell?

“You have earned your reward, MORTALITY!”

Aww, damn.