He pulled the trigger. The jet black bullet lanced through the air.

Andrew was never a sharpshooter, but he had practiced shooting thousands of bullets for this moment. On any other day, he would've knocked himself back to the ground from the rebound. Today, however, the shot was flawless.

The bullet whizzed towards the oncoming meteor.. Andrew mentally counted the seconds to impact.

Three. Two. One.

The giant charcoal-colored rock was rapidly compressed into a thin cylinder, just like how it looked when his morbidly obese cousin Lenny would guzzle down a milkshake through a straw. The process completed and it vanished into thin air leaving no trace behind. That part of the process was also just like Lenny's milkshake drinking habits. Andrew had chosen antimatter due to how it would dematerialize the asteroid like that, with no worry about it breaking into dangerous pieces or leaving behind radioactive waste.

Andrew stared at the sky as the sun was once again revealed, burning his eyes as he hastily averted his gaze downwards and cursed himself for not wearing sunglasses. Down below, he saw the street crammed with people staring like him, disbelief plastered on their faces. There had been no impact. No explosions. Nothing.

"I. . . did it? I did it! I did it!"

Andrew burst out in hysterical laughter, guffawing so hard that tears flowed from the corners of his eyes. He felt like striping naked and streaking around the city streets in celebration of the weight lifted from his shoulders after years of work.

I'm finally free. No more spending days and months inside laboratories. Andrew would actually get to see his friends and family, the people he'd neglected for so long to pursue the greater cause. He would finally be able to ditch all this nonsensical science thing to follow his dream of being a professional lottery winner.

He kneeled down, raised his head high, and screamed, "I've saved the world! Look at me, world! Look at me, gods! Get down here and acknowledge me! I am your Chosen One!"

The lights around him vanished with a swoosh, taking Andrew's elation along with them. He remembered that one time he'd wandered off during space camp and got locked a NASA vacuum chamber with all the lights off, and it felt exactly the same way. This had happened to him once before when the meteor had hit the Earth without giving him an immediate and painless death. He knew full well what was going on.

"No. No, no, no. Why is this happening again?"

The sound of glass shattering reverberated through his skull. Then a dazzling light hit Andrew's eyes, prompting him to snap them shut. When he opened them again, he saw that he was back in a shabby studio designed for college students, with only a wooden bed on which he was sitting, a desk, a wardrobe, and an unnecessarily evocative canvas print of cartoon character Boo B. Hancock posted to the wall.

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He was back in the loop again.

"Fuck!" He clasped his head. What the hell is going on? Aren't I the Chosen One? Wouldn't life go on if the meteor didn't crash into the planet? He had invented the antimatter gun and he could sell its patent rights for a huge fortune and lie on stacks of money for the rest of his life. He could've fulfilled his lifelong dreams. But why. . . why was he still stuck in the loop?

But there was something different about his time travel trip this time. There was another person in the room.

He turned to the left and looked at the woman floating in the air a meter away from him, her bare feet lazily brushing against the ground as her eyes glued to him.

She was a young woman with Eden-green eyes underneath implausibly artistic eyebrows. Plump face, creamy white skin, and wavy crimson hair drooping to her chest, she was aesthetically his type. She was dressed in an unfamiliar yet noble-looking white robe, a small beaded tiara on her head. A faint halo floated over her. She looks like a priestess from one of those cults where they sucker you in with a hot young missionary and then sacrifice you to a volcano, thought Andrew.

She was beautiful. But as beautiful as she was, she was an intruder.

"Who in the name of Mother Terrence are you?" Andrew jolted up, unwavered by her enigmatic beauty. He grabbed the prosthetic arm from his freshman science fair project and pointed it towards her. "Don't get any closer! I'm armed!"

The stranger floated forward, but Andrew kept his composure. The woman (the priestess?) kept looking at him and smiling, as if she had planned this encounter all along. She casually circled in the air, sounding bemused as she asked, "Surprised?"

"Surprise your motherfucking ass, you rude-ass interloper! At least learn to knock before walking or flying in!"

"Huh?" She blinked multiple times. "You don't find it one bit surprising that a glowing and floating woman suddenly appeared right in front of you?"

"I'm trapped in a time loop for the eighth time! Do you think there's anything in life that can shock me anymore?"

"Right."

Andrew, now that his irritation at having started the loop over again had begun subsiding, mused that perhaps the only two supernatural things he had ever seen in his life might in some way be connected. "You didn't react when I mentioned I was trapped in a time loop," he pointed out.

"W-well. . ." the woman bit her lip. "Eight isn't that big of a number, I guess."

He pointed straight at her and scolded, "You. You know about the loop. Who in the world are you?"

She fumed with anger. Her green eyes turned into a fiery crimson as she held out a Christian-looking crucifix with her right hand, except that the Greek cross on it was an X. Was she holding that the whole time? thought Andrew. He almost thought that he should have spent more time looking at the parts of her that weren't her chest, but he was too distracted by looking at her tits to complete that thought.

Fire puffed out from the cross, spraying into Andrew's face.

"What the fuck?" He jumped aside. The flame clung to his bed, but surprisingly, the bed did not burn. The woman sucked all the fire into her cross as soon as it licked on the surface of the wood.

Andrew furrowed his brows in confusion. In his seven previous loops, there wasn't a wretched witch whizzing fire into his face. Had the world repeated itself so often that it'd gone mad? Or had he broken the cycle of nature by destroying the meteor?

Oh no. The balance of the world must have been compromised. Now, not only the world could be ravaged by famine, warfare, climate change. . . but the real question was WOULD THE WINNING LOTTO TICKET NUMBERS BE THE SAME?

Andrew fell on his knees, clutching his head in misery. His dream of becoming a professional lottery winner had been shattered. Now he had to learn to survive through the hardship of not having access to millions of dollars whenever he wanted, and would have to shamefully ask his parents for a small loan of a million dollars. Andrew had always thought that a man might know of poverty, but he must know not of shame. Otherwise, he wouldn't have rented this crappy studio and used his folks' money on an actually livable apartment.

"Why are you looking so glum?" Asked the red-haired priestess. "Weren't you the one who called me down here?" Her voice was gentle, but her irises burned with fire.

"I've never called you! I don't remember screaming 'Yo, one fire-breathing bayadere* shipped to Andrew Garage, please!'"

*Google tells me that "bayadere" is Russian for "temple dancer," a word that doesn't have an English equivalent.

"Then remember harder!" She crossed her arms and said, "As soon as you destroyed the meteorite, what did you scream?"

Andrew dug up his memory. "What did I say?" Before finally realized. "I called for god."

He stared at her, wide-eyed. His lips quivered as he tried to speak up, "Y-you are. . ."

The priestess's lips curved into a triumphant smirk. "I am the Goddess."