Chapter 29: George Yossarian: Aki Kurasagi
Agony! Pure agony! My body felt like it was just squeezed and stretched, and my head felt like it had just rolled out of a washing machine, bumping on its way out.
I felt burning pain in my lungs as if I had just inhaled something no human should. I tried to open my eyes, but it was too bright.
I tried to move, but everything below my neck was paralyzed.
It felt like even my ears and eyes were bleeding, but this pain was dwarfed by the headache.
Was this another of my nightmares? I didn't think so; it was way worse.
It was a good couple of minutes before the pain dulled enough for me to open my eyes and the paralysis waned. Even then, I could only lift myself with a bit of struggle. My vision was still blurry though.
"Huh?" I heard a beautiful female voice echoing."Ակի Կուսուրագի, բարի գալուստ հետմահու կյանք։ Ցավոք, դուք մահացել եք։ Ձեր կյանքը, թեև կարճ էր, այժմ ավարտվել է։" As she spoke with a slightly confused tone, I sensed the pain waned and left my body completely as if I had been injected with the strongest painkillers.
“What, sorry I don’t understand you?” The language sounded familiar, but I still couldn't understand what she was saying.
"Aki Kusuragi, welcome to the afterlife. Unfortunately, you have died. Your life, though it was short, is now over." she switched to English.
I looked around. I was amongst dense clouds; it felt surreal. I saw countless blue stars shining bright in a purple sky. Where was I?
My breath was uneven as I was trying to remember what happened before, but every time I did, my brain hurt as if my head was being squeezed again.
Something bad had just happened, but what? Why was this woman referring to me as Aki whatever? I was George, not some Japanese named Aki. Was that even a male name? I looked at myself; I was one hundred percent the same person. I was wearing my best three-piece suit.
"I am Noritz, the goddess of death and rebirth, here to guide you through your resurrection into another world." My eyes finally adjusted properly.
In front of me was a woman who looked like an angel drawn from a painting by a Renaissance artist. She sat at an ivory table looking at some documents on a tablet, and then at me as if checking something.
When did I manage to die? I instinctively searched for my notebook in the hidden pocket of my suit. It was there, so I opened the last filled page and read its contents. I had a gun tucked in my trousers.
“Why do I have a gun!?”
The goddess was talking to me, but I wasn't looking at her, only listening. All my attention was on recovering my last memories on planet Earth.
When I read the last entry it all clicked into place, I remembered everything and the gun suddenly made sense.
I smiled, lampooning the situation I had gotten myself into. I never laughed so hard in my own head. If I could print this story, it would be the most-read article in the history of humankind. I guessed that would be impossible now.
"Are you listening to me?" The goddess's tone sharpened, her patience clearly wearing thin.
I sat on the edge of her table, facing her. "Look, sweetheart, as you might have guessed, I am not Aki Kusuragi. I am George, George Yossarian, and I am most certainly not dead." I winked, channeling my best James Bond impression, hoping it would work on her.
She raised her head and our eyes met. Her lips were pursed as she slightly clenched her fists. "And how much do you know, George Yossarian?"
"I guess I know something I shouldn't. Where should I start from?" I smiled at her gently. I knew I was not drugged, in intelligence agencies they teach you how to figure such things out and all my checks were negative.
There was only one option remaining to explain everything I was seeing now and it was absurdly funny and ridiculously hilarious. Ryu was indeed not human. He was indeed taking suicidal people and trafficking them here. He loved these types of stories so much, he printed them in Japan. Considering his actions led to huge outages of electricity, that he had a crematorium, hired professional bodyguards, and was surveillancing quite a big part of the town this was a ludicrous business.
I found an interstellar or interdimensional trafficking ring, and it had someone who claimed to be a god, and someone who claimed to be a dragon.
What next? Aliens? My internal giggling was deafeningly loud, I tried to hide it but some of it was making me silently chuckle under my nose.
I ran another check on myself to see if I was hallucinating. I wasn’t. I was abnormally calm from the moment I felt the pain-killing effect, but fine otherwise. The cloud material I sensed was physics-defying. Now, I had to question things I thought I knew about the world if I wanted to survive this encounter.
"You will start from the beginning, in all the details, we have time." My Bond impression definitely wasn't working on her, but for some reason, she exhaled loudly and stopped clenching her fists, as if accepting reality.
"As you wish, Goddess Noritz. Everything started after I ran into some troubles a few months ago…” I already found out when fucked around someone who called himself a dragon, so I wasn’t planning to try out my luck with an interstellar/interdimensional trafficking ring. I needed to be careful with whatever information I was giving though…
“Wait.” She stopped me.
Noritz sat in front of her desk doing some kind of work I was unable to see. Her expression and the movements of her eyes told me she was reading something and moving things with her hand gestures. It looked like she had a screen in front of her that I could not see.
“You will tell everything you know, but we will start in fifteen human minutes. I have some work to finish.” the goddess was slightly annoyed of anything else, so I decided to take a seat on one of the clouds that was around chair size. It felt like a very cushioned chair. The most cushioned chair I had ever sat on in my life. I looked at the sky while I patiently waited. I paid attention to the stars and to the mesmerising clouds which were incomparable to any material I have touched in my life.
The constellations were not from either the north or south hemisphere though, and stars were slowly moving, making me question if they really were stars and not some kind of a dome with special effect on them.
Around two minutes in, while I tried to decipher the logic behind the star movement and collect my thoughts, Noritz stood up. As I pondered how to get back home from this situation I'd gotten myself into, she walked towards the place where I woke up. I followed her. This time I could see that under the clouds that made the floor was the same ritual circle I saw in the crematorium. At least it looked very similar.
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A small crystal was forming in front of my eyes right in the middle of it. Noritz took it and put it somewhere in her clothes.
I felt strange. The crystal fascinated me. I felt like I have seen it somewhere before, but I couldn’t recall it.
“Stay where you are and don’t talk. I will make the place you stand in see through, so the summoned one won’t see you.” Noritz sounded completely unemotional as I nodded.
A body appeared in the circle while I blinked. It was the deal-looking boy I saw in the circle. I could now look at him better. His clothes were the same funeral garbs, but next to him laid some casual ones. Jeans with a white bloodstained shirt, as if the wearer was stabbed in his lungs with a knife.
Noritz waved her hand and his clothes changed. He was now in the bloodstained shirt and his funeral outfit had disintegrated. I jotted down in my notebook: ‘They resorted to stabbings when they figured out someone was on their tail. A truck is not the only way that can possibly explain why one of the blackouts was not accompanied by any accidents.’
The circle glowing under the clouds cracked like glass and vanished. I was planning to jot it down too, but I heard Noritz making a ‘Tsk’ sound and pursing her lips when she saw it happen. I deduced it wasn’t planned.
Aki was slowly getting less and less pale, and when he started to open his eyes Noritz began.
"Ակի Կուսուրագի, բարի գալուստ հետմահու կյանք։ Ցավոք, դուք մահացել եք։ Ձեր կյանքը, թեև կարճ էր, այժմ ավարտվել է։" she told him as he sat up. The first two words were his name. Now I could pay more attention to the language.
Phonetics made it sound like an Indo-European language. The closest it was to Armenian, Persian, or Greek, but I hadn’t learned any of them, despite Armenian being my ancestral language.
“What, I am dead? Where am I? What happened?” Aki was talking Japanese but I figured out he understood what the goddess was saying.
He was around 160 with long black hair and a slight frame. He touched his side where his T-shirt was bloodied and had a hole.
Noritz left him a few seconds to think and get rid of confusion.
“I’M GETTING ISEKAIED RIGHT!?” He almost shouted at her in excitement.
I looked with disbelief. How the hell was this his reaction? Tom's idea of a suicide cult wasn't as far-fetched as I initially believed.
She glanced at me and to my surprise she switched to Japanese, which I was quite good at.
“Yes, I am Noritz, the goddess of death and rebirth, here to guide you through your resurrection into another world.” She made a dramatic pause. “You are standing between worlds. On a crossroad. But Heaven or Hell is not something destined for you just yet.”
Aki interjected as he stood up with “Cool! Awesome!” he was smiling.
I wanted to ask him if he was fine. I assumed there would be some other reaction from learning that you have died, but Aki proved me wrong.
Noritz continued. “You were chosen. You will be summoned to another world to become a hero. Here, I will grant you a divine boon. A blessing that will aid you in your new life. Aside from that, unlike locals and your previous self, you will improve and develop much faster, your magical abilities will be on par with strong mages with you having to put in only a fraction of the effort compared to them.”
“Yeah! That’s how I like it!” Aki interjected again “Is that a skill, class, system, or equipment?” The boy sounded too agitated for my personal taste.
“Classes as you earthlings perceive them don’t exist in that world. Treat it like an ability or you can ask for bound equipment.”
Before Aki could ask he looked down and started to read the thin air in front of him.
“A bow that can kill a demon lord! Sounds awesome, but tedious. Super memory is interesting, but kinda meh. Can I come up with something?” He looked up at Noritz.
Noritz nodded.
I remembered the book called "To Another World with the Bow that Can Kill the Demon Lord". Now I was regretting that I had not read it, it was most likely printed by Ryu’s corporation. But why?
“Can I be a necromancer, making my defeated enemies fight for me like undead?” Aki was still reading through the thin air.
I looked at Noritz. Her face was now displaying full hatred and disgust towards the teenager. Her voice though sounded calm. “That would not be possible.” I made a mental note; the goddess of death and rebirth didn’t like necromancers.
When Aki looked at her face I deduced that he could neither see her expression nor her face at all.
“Something that could force a woman in front of me to get dominated by my will, like mind control? To make all women want me and obey me? Like turning them into my puppets!” Aki sounded enthusiastic. I could see how thirsty he was looking at Noritz’s body.
Noritz on the other hand bit her lip, and not in a sexual manner, her fist was clenched behind her back so hard I could swear that she was about to murder this future rapist in a very violent manner.
“I would suggest you try something from the list. Because things that you are asking for are not possible.” her voice was the same though.
Aki was contemplating “What if I can just take people’s senses, nah, manifest atomic weapons, well that will be boring…”
I concluded that Aki couldn’t see her face at all. Also, he couldn't see common sense. Telling a woman that you want rapist powers from her was… disgusting, and if he believed her to be a goddess why was he sure he stop his ‘reincarnation’ process.
“Okay, what about power that would allow me to drink the blood of people or eat their flash to take their magical powers and make them mine? That should work!”
Noritz looked at me, sitting a couple of meters away.
“If you wouldn’t have been a zero, I would have killed this guy and sent you instead.” Her tone didn’t indicate that she was angry at all, but I could sense hostility.
Aki didn’t react to this. For one reason or another, he couldn’t hear it. I shrugged while continuing to take notes.
“That should work young hero,” she said calmly.
“And I want retractable fangs, so I can bite better!”
“That’s easy to add.” Noritz moved her hand where she put the crystal and now as I saw it for the second time I could swear it looked familiar somehow.
Aki smiled, and I could see his fangs extending like he was from a teenage drama vampire show. I thought he was an average kid who tried to kill himself with sleeping pills, but he was a danger not only to himself but to the people around him as well. His face looked very punchable at that moment.
“Everyone is waiting for you.” Noritz declared and waved her hand, making the menace to society disappear into thin air.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked her.
“Half of them are like that.” She responded coldly.
“That’s messed up, to be honest. I am glad that necromantic powers or rapist powers are outside this ‘boon’ scope. Would have been a disaster!”
“They were not outside the boon’s possibilities. I didn’t want to make them for him.” Noritz smiled a bit, she was quite cute for that brief moment.
“Oh. Well. I hope he won’t wreak havoc with knockoff vampire powers.”
“You will get through the same portal. So keep your hopes up.” My jaw dropped slightly.
“Well, at least I have a gun in case he will try to suck out people’s blood.” I checked the gun, it was a Glock 17 law-enforcement specific.
“Before I send you out of here too, I'd like to know what you have learned.” She was way more polite than before, maybe because I looked good in comparison.
“Of course. But before that, what is a Zero?”