Nathan floated in the noetic space between life and death. For all that death was only a transient, temporary state when it came to any Reborn, whether a Millionborn or a Two-Lifer, it was still real in the moment and in the anticipation of that moment; his endocrine system had shorted out at the near-instantly lethal damage, and he had been made subject to a flood of endorphins—hence the description of his state as floating, for emotionally and with regards to the physical cognitive substrate of his neurology and neuroactive biochemical state he was on what could only be described as Cloud Nine.
It was a timeless moment of communing with the fundamental nature of the universe, or at least that is what it seemed like to him. There was music just out of reach, a murmured conversation of it barely quiet enough that the words could not be made out, but close enough to intrude on his awareness in its chords and rhythms; it teased at him, tantalized, taunted. He drifted closer in the numinous haze, setting aside the joyful contentment of the biological haze and reaching for the music, though of course neither of those things was true. His shift in attention and in mental activity was biological, as a result of his continued reliance on the brain for doing all of his thinking, and a term such as “reaching” had nothing to do with the reality of his situation.
Still, it serves as a useful abstraction with which to communicate things fundamentally alien to the conscious human experience, dealing as they do with the underlying mechanisms of our bodies in a way that is not engaged with first-hand.
There was a shape to the music, to the conversations, to the symphony of his audiovisual experiential inputs. It was fractal and geometric, constructed of colors which did not exist—in a far more fundamental way than magenta, which exists in every way other than the most technical.
It was, in a word, nonsense. And Nathan knew it to be.
I’m having a near death experience, he thought to himself mildly. That’s new; last couple of deaths, I died too fast, I guess. It seemed to him to be a perfectly reasonable thing to have happened to him. He’d lucked out tremendously in his conversations with Bo and gotten the chance to sit in peace, eat incredibly good popcorn, and watch a fight far beyond his ability to fully comprehend. This, then—an ignominious death as collateral damage to the too-close sound and light of a lightning superbolt deployed at a range of approximately zero, along with its magical components and, most critically, the death of a false avatar of a God—felt to Nathan as simply the equal and opposite side of the coin.
I feel like this is proper, he observed to himself in an extended fit of self-awareness and introspection. Like it’s the equal and opposite side of the coin from dying as collateral damage from… well, maybe from the spell? That doesn’t seem right though. How much does a lightning bolt actually do? What’s the level at which the raw sound and light from a lightning bolt? Well, I mean, from anything. The amount of light that it takes to, like, actually kill someone is basically mu, the question is invalid, you aren’t killing them with the light or doing anything past permanently blinding them. And yes the lightning bolt leaves a spectacular temperature column but it’s so narrow that there’s actually almost no thermal energy imparted, and the light itself isn’t going to, like, flash-burn me to death. Even the thunderclap isn’t all that likely to be lethal, though I guess that’s the least unlikely thing. So why am I dying? Wait, how long do I have available to think about this? Because I don’t usually nerdsnipe myself quite this hard, but I know that cognition isn’t actually instantaneous, so shouldn’t I have died already?
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Unbeknownst to Nathan, he was the subject of an active conversation between the two women whom he’d joined up with. He would never learn the specifics of that conversation, and only to an unconscious degree would he ever realize the conversation ever happened. But it most likely covered such topics as they felt inconvenient or socially awkward to discuss with him conscious and present—in particular, the disposition of his life or death.
A decision was, most likely, made. And so his story within the Eternal Endless Multi-Dimensional Megadungeon continued for a time.
I wonder what I should spend my interlife points on, he mused, having run out of any basis to continue with his brief tangent about the lethality of lightning bolts. I obviously need faster perception and perceptual processing. But how much will that help me if I can’t move faster in order to respond to the inputs? And I don’t have metaphysical perceptions, which might be not just really useful but which might combo with the language thing I got; and speaking of which, the language thing seems like absolute bullshit levels of overpowered. I wonder why I got an initial powerup that’s so strong?
Wait, that feels like… tingling. Like pins and needles. Ow, ow, ow. Ow, ow, ow!
With a sound almost but not entirely unlike slime glopping, Nathan’s auditory senses reassembled and began reporting inputs from the material world rather than the hallucinated world of his near-death. A moment later, he went crashing—figuratively, dear Reader; even though interpreting that literally would be difficult, it is best not to assume these things go without saying—back into his body’s proprioception and his sense of embodiment.
“That fucked you up pretty bad,” Tanya observed from somewhere to Nathan’s left. “Kinda funny. Didn’t expect it, didn’t expect you to survive it.”
“The lightning bolt blinded and deafened you,” Honeydew chimed in brightly. “It also gave you a bad case of brain hemorrhage from the sheer volume of the sound, which I promise was accidental. But those saved you from most of the psychic and soul damage of the antipattern unraveling, which I completely didn’t expect!”
“Those hurt.” Tanya’s voice gave an ungrudging admission of that fact. “A lot. You lucked out.”
“Anyway, I sort of put you in a psychic healing cocoon and channeled the negative energy into a nexal conversion framework, which by the way I’m hoping you’ll read the runes of and let me know what they say? It’s one of the ones that I don’t use a whole lot, and I don’t know how to modulate—”
“Nerd.”
“So,” Honeydew added with the tones of someone who’d just been lovingly, brutally, and savagely called out by her partner, “I’m going to invert the cocoon into itself. You’ll be fine! Probably.”
And with that, she gave Nathan another tally mark on the enumeration of times that his choice to invest into anti-trauma superpowers paid off in spades.