Dying wasn't so bad. This time he had a family to bid him goodbye. And it was as his hand grew cold in his daughter's grasp and he breathed his last breath that he remembered his duty wasn't over.

He closed his eyes...

And when he opened them again, he found himself in the familiar chamber of the Halls of the Resting Dead. Rising from the stone slab his spirit had been resting upon, he made his way down the same hall he always made his way down, to the Chamber of Judgment.

Normally the Chamber of Judgment was where the Lord of Life and Death would wait for a new soul to enter, before judging them for their actions in life, and determining where they would best be suited to go next; be it a pleasant afterlife, a painful one, or to simply be reborn and try again until their fate could be decided. But when he reached the end of the hall, it wasn't the Lord of Life and Death waiting for him.

It was never the Lord of Life and Death waiting for him.

"You're back." She said, folding her arms across her chest as though she had waited a lifetime for him. Technically she did wait a full lifetime for his return, and she looked a little miffed by this fact.

"I am." He replied.

"Well you certainly took your time. I thought I would grow old and die waiting for you here. Did you have fun starting up a little farm in the middle of nowhere after killing the Ninety-Ninth?" She huffed.

He couldn't help but flash her a grin.

"Potato farming isn't much." He replied.

"But you certainly had fun with it while I was sitting here handling all manners of divine paperwork to clear your next reincarnation." She groused.

"Ooooh paperwork. So scary." He teased. "I'd rather be handling some bureaucratic red tape than fighting for a hundred lifetimes, but here we are. You the bureaucrat, and me the warrior."

Her eyebrow twitched. Teasing her was too easy and too fun, and he couldn't help but flash a catty little grin at her exasperation.

"Anyway." She said.

"Anyway." He said.

They both turned to face the great mural on the wall; a display of countless worlds and lives that he had lived, fought, and died in. He heard the mural changed for each person, though usually only depicted a single lifetime. His spanned centuries of lives that he had been reborn for, a world saved for each time he reincarnated.

"You've been busy." She muttered. He nodded.

"You keep me busy. Not like I have much of a choice in the matter until I kill the hundredth demon king or whatever." He said, shrugging.

She nodded and turned away from the mural, and he turned to follow her.

"So." She said, resting her hands on her hips. It was her way of saying that it was time to get down to business, as she smoothed out her tunic.

Her name was Galatea. She was the Goddess of light, life, and reincarnation. And technically she was doing all the other gods a huge favor by pulling every string she possibly could, in order to send the same hero through countless worlds and lives.

It was the gods last gambit against Dommon, the god of chaos and destruction, she had told him long ago. Apparently they tried going to war with him in ages past and he proved to be too powerful for all their combined might, so they were forced to make a wager with him, instead. The wager was that they could pick one hundred heroes to defeat one hundred of his champions.

Stolen novel; please report.

Unfortunately for the hero, he was the only one that Galatea was able to summon when she pulled off the ritual to yank him from another world.

The ritual involved getting hit by a truck and it was especially painful.

"Soooo." He prompted her to continue.

Unlike her, his name had been lost to time. He didn't even get to keep it or remember it after he was hit by the Summoning Truck. His name was whatever his parents decided to name him in each new rebirth he was born into, and sometimes he hated it.

Like the time his father in life number 37 thought it would be hilarious to name him 'Pathetic Baby-Man'.

'It will toughen him up!' The man said. And he never hated any one person or life as much as he did that particular one.

One benefit, he learned though to being reborn as many times as he had, was his ability to retain his skills, training, and knowledge from each prior life. That was a lifesaver for more than one occasion, and by now with ninety-nine lives under his belt he was something of a one-man army. Or one-woman army, in the lives where he was born a woman. The split of male lives to female was almost half, actually.

But Galatea cleared her throat, indicating he should pay some serious attention, so he did.

"You're going up against Demon Lord number one hundred... I can't stress enough how important this is. So far you've managed to do an amazing job of taking out the other ninety nine but this one is in a league of his own- an entirely different class." Galatea said gravely.

"It's going to take all your training, skills, and lifetimes of knowledge combined to take him out, because he will not make it easy for you. His monsters are the most cunning, his skill with magic and the blade are unrivaled..."

"Yeah, well so are my skill with magic and the blade." The hero pointed out.

She shot him a stern glance.

"This one might give you a run for your money, from what I've seen of him." Galatea said. "Anyway let's get you kitted out for your next lifetime... You'll have twenty five years to beat this one before he covers the world in darkness, death, etcetera and so forth." She said, turning to walk down the doorway into the next hall.

He followed her into the Hall of Reincarnation. Despite the name it was pretty bland, just stone walls with no decoration. But he wasn't here for the sights and he knew it as they walked side by side.

"This time you're going to be the only child of a widow; her husband left for a war that devastated much of the world, and never came back." She said, rummaging over the clipboard that was suddenly in her hand.

"Okay." He said without fuss. He knew once a new fate was already made for him, it would be set in stone by Galatea and there would be little he could do about it. But then something she asked next surprised him.

"Do you want to be a boy or a girl?"

The hero quirked his brow curiously. It would seem that his final life wasn't as hard set as he thought it was going to be if she gave him this option for the first time in all of ever.

"I get a choice now?"

She nodded.

"You've been doing this long enough, I thought I could tweak things for you- as a small favor for your last job."

He considered his options. There was no overt physical benefit to either sex, he had learned. Neither was better over the other at any particular combat oriented skill. Social interactions, on the other hand, certainly changed, yes, but he learned to navigate those on a per-world basis, as each world had a different set of ideals than the last. Some were more liberal, meritocratic, and egalitarian, while others were sexist shitholes in both directions.

"... What about race?" He suddenly considered. "I've been nothing but a bland, boring, basic, human for ninety-nine lives, surrounded by elves and dwarves and other D&D and Tolkien bullshit."

"You can be anything you want this time around." Galatea said, opening up a new door of decision paralysis as he paused in his tracks.

"Ugh, character generation is hard." He groused. Galatea scowled.

"How do you think I feel, doing it for you, each time?" She asked.

"I feel like you kind of made the easy choice leaning into 'Human' and 'uses a sword' ninety nine times over." He replied.

"... Are you calling me basic?" She asked, narrowing her eyes.

"You're the one that said it, not me." He said, teasing.

"I could make you a human with a sword again." She pointed out.

He raised his hands in defeat, and she huffed indignantly.

"So what's it going to be?" She prodded, glowering.

The hero pursed his lips in thought for a moment.

"Female." He said. "... And I want cat ears and a tail." He added after a beat of thought.

She stared at him, incredulous.

"Are... Are you toying with me?" Galatea asked.

The hero shook his head.

"I wanna be a catgirl."