[https://i.imgur.com/beG8xx6.jpg]

“Are you sure he was the one we were looking for?”

“Of course he’s the one. What are the odds some other American guy named Sebastian showed up right when predicted?”

“I don’t know, I’m with Ilse. I don’t think he is. He was supposed to be immortal.”

“One or not, I liked him. He was cute.”

“He still is. You can use his body.”

“No. Osiris might take him over. I don’t want to get eaten.”

“What? Ew, you’re sick. Americans are so weird. I obviously meant after Osiris brings him back. And don’t pretend like you wouldn’t enjoy getting eaten by him.”

Sebastian had no idea what was going on, where he was, or how he’d gotten here.

He was on his back. Yet again. Staring up into the canopy of a tree.

He sat up and looked around. He was a little ways down a road from a group of people, though close enough to still hear their conversation, echoing off the apartment buildings lining either side of the road.

The tree’s canopy cast a shadow over him, so he didn’t think any could see him. Not that any were looking in his direction.

There were seven of them, huddled in a circle, looking down at something.

Even from this distance, he could see they were all dressed rather strangely. An after-Halloween party? The Dutch weren’t big on that holiday, but some did celebrate it. Or maybe it was that Dutch version of Halloween, which happened in early November. But Sebastian had heard that was just for kids.

Two of them—one guy and one girl—were wearing colorful outfits so form-fitting they may as well have been painted on, capes fluttering in the breeze behind them like superheroes.

Another of the guys was barefoot and shirtless, wearing only a pair of what looked like brown leather pants and holding a large knife stained red with blood.

That little detail made Sebastian uneasy. Not just the blood. There was something about it… The last thing Sebastian remembered was talking to a girl, an American…

The memory came back to him and Sebastian suddenly realized she was in the group, standing next to the man with the knife.

She was the one who had called to him from the balcony. Olivia, she’d said her name was. But she looked different now.

Her black hair no longer framed her face, but was pulled back in a ponytail. Her frilly dress had been replaced by a black leather or vinyl tube top, tight black pants of the same material—which looked far too warm even for the now more temperate day—and chunky boots with a good two- or three-inch sole.

The third and final girl didn’t seem to be wearing anything at all, but there was a kind of haze over her body. It didn’t cover her exactly, but blurred her, made it hard to make out any features, including her face, which he could only see the side of as he was almost directly behind her.

The two remaining males were dressed the most normal of the group, though still not normally. One was wearing what looked like motorcycle gear, sans helmet, and the other a bathrobe and slippers.

“Let’s get his cards,” the hazy girl said.

She knelt down, allowing Sebastian to get a look at what the group was huddled around.

He suddenly felt sick. The thing that held their attention was a body. It lay there on the street, unmoving. Dead.

And not just any body. One he recognized. One he knew intimately.

His body.

He had… died?

No, he had been killed.

He remembered now.

Barely. The brief feeling of a knife piercing his skull and then… Nothing.

And yet, he was alive.

Anubis hadn’t led him astray. For Sebastian, death was no longer the end.

The card had worked.

But it was also what had gotten him killed, if he was interpreting their conversation correctly. They’d been specifically on the lookout for him.

Bad luck for him that he’d run right into their grasp.

Or maybe it wasn’t chance. Maybe he’d somehow been unconsciously guided here, the aberration intentionally placed outside their apartment.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Unless it isn’t their apartment, he suddenly thought. They’d murdered him, what was a little home invasion? Perhaps they’d set up here, knowing there was an aberration outside and that he would be looking for them.

But how could they know so much about him? Was the System, Osiris, telling them? Spying on him?

Not in real-time at least, because they didn’t know he was watching them now.

And they were talking about him like he was dead.

In a way, he was. His body was right there to prove it.

He wondered how long he’d been gone for. Enough for the American girl, Olivia, to change and the group to make it down from the second floor and outside. So perhaps a minute if they rushed?

Had he been dead for an entire minute? He had no memory of it.

Or did he? There was something, some sensation, vague like a half-remembered dream.

“Hurry up before Osiris takes it,” the shirtless guy with the knife urged.

“What are you so worried about?” Olivia asked. “We’re Vassals. We’re protected.”

“I’d rather not test that,” the shirtless guy responded. He tapped the hazy girl kneeling by Sebastian’s corpse with his foot. “Come on Sanne, take his cards.”

In a panic, Sebastian looked down at himself, expecting to find a naked, ethereal body. But his clothes were there, intact, and his body looked normal. He shoved his hands into his pockets and was relieved when he found the cards still there.

Had they duplicated? A hidden benefit of his ability?

But when he pulled the cards out, his heart sunk all over again.

The guy in the motorcycle gear swore in Dutch, taking a step back. It was one of the few Dutch words Sebastian knew.

The superhero girl let out a little cry of surprise and stumbled into her male counterpart.

“What’d you do?” Shirtless asked the naked hazy girl, Sanne.

But it hadn’t been her, it had been Sebastian’s own action.

Because the thing he’d realized when he pulled out the cards from his pocket, was that he wasn’t pulling them out of his pocket, but of the pocket of the corpse he’d left behind.

“Look at this!” Sanne shouted in excitement as she picked up the cards that had mysteriously popped out of the corpse’s pockets. “Two cards already,” she said, studying them. “Blaze of Creation. I like the sound of that. Second one’s weird. What’s a sovereign of Gelandar?” She grunted. “I still don’t understand why they’re in English for me.”

“Because you want to be American,” Olivia said.

“I think it’s some System thing,” the shirtless guy answered. “Like a rank or something.”

“The ranks are F through S.”

“The cultivators have different ranks,” Shirtless pointed out. “That one we killed was Wolf.”

“She died easier than a real wolf would have.”

“We have powers now. A real wolf would die just as easily.”

“I think Ilse was right,” the superhero guy said. “Those are good cards, definitely from shrines, but nothing crazy. Nothing that would make him immortal.”

“He’s obviously not immortal,” Sanne said, getting to her feet. “He’s dead. And these weren’t inside of him. I don’t feel any in his deck. I don’t feel a deck at all. He hasn’t used an initiator.”

“That’s weird,” Olivia said.

“Maybe his power was from that other being,” superhero girl suggested. “The one that slowed the transfiguration. Caused this whole mess.” She gestured around, indicating—Sebastian assumed—the fusion, though there was little sign of it in the immediate vicinity.

“We’ll figure it out later,” the guy in the robe said. “Let’s get his body inside and wait for our Scion.”

“I’ll handle the signal!” superhero girl said excitedly.

Sebastian needed to do something. He couldn’t just let them steal his cards. Or his corpse, for that matter.

His corpse. Which existed along with him.

This was a strange new world.

“Grab under his arms,” the guy with the knife said, stowing the weapon in a holster on his belt and picking up Sebastian’s feet.

“Figures you’d take the feet,” Sanne said.

“You’re stronger than me now, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.”

Do something, Sebastian urged himself.

But he didn’t know what.

Sanne went to put the cards in her pocket, realized she didn’t have any since she wasn’t wearing any clothes, sighed, tossed them onto the torso of Sebastian’s corpse, and grabbed under the arms.

Wait, hadn’t his Death Is Not the End ability had another effect besides coming back to life? One he’d just accidentally activated when he’d pulled out his other two cards?

A phantom, he thought, remembering the card’s description. The ability to control the body that was killed.

Another realization he had was that if the cards weren’t real, neither were the clothes he appeared to be wearing, the real ones still on his corpse.

Though it looked and even felt like he was wearing clothes, he wasn’t. They were an illusion.

As he stared down at himself, his clothes faded and he became aware of what had caused the illusion: a split perception. He could see and feel, to an extent, even without trying, that which his corpse did.

He wasn’t the one wearing clothes, his corpse was, and it was because of this merged perspective that it had appeared he was dressed. But now, he had unmerged his focus and could see reality.

And it wasn’t just perception, but control as well. He could move not only his phantom, but anything it was touching. He could do this somehow directly, rather than causing his phantom to move. But not accidentally. Shifting around, breathing; none of this caused the clothes on his corpse to shift. The group gathered around it would have noticed that. Only active intention, like when he took the cards out of his pocket.

Which meant…

Show me the Death Is Not the End description, he mentally instructed.

He wasn’t sure the request would work. But having absorbed the card into his heart, he didn’t know of another way to get a look at it.

To his surprise, instead of a description, the card floated out of his chest and into his hand. Strangely, it had weight now. Though he could hold it easily, it felt incredibly heavy, yet somehow insubstantial, like it was a mere projection.

The System had said the card couldn’t be removed, which made him think a projection was exactly what it was.

He focused on the card to bring up its description and quickly read through it to confirm it could do what he wanted.

He let go of the card and it snapped back into his chest, then he turned his attention to the group. The group of murderers.

Even though they’d killed him, what he had in mind disgusted him on more than one level. It seemed so wrong, both the method and the result. Just thinking of it made him queasy.

“Naar de deur,” Sanne, who was holding Sebastian’s upper half, grunted to Olivia, who was closest to the door leading into the apartment building.

“Still don’t speak Dutch.”

“The door, Olivia. Open the door. That was obvious.”

“That was obvious,” Olivia mocked the hazy girl, but opened the door, and the group began to head inside.

Sebastian was out of time, and he had no other good options.

He nodded once to himself, deciding. This was a new, dangerous world, and if he didn’t adapt, he wouldn’t survive.

So he took his first step in that evolution.

He focused on the guy with the knife, who was carrying Sebastian’s corpse’s feet. It was in a holster. No clasp. Anyone could pull it out.

Sebastian took a calming breath, then split his perception, and became two.