Sara felt like a stuffed soft toy having its insides pulled out by a toddler. It wasn’t exactly painful, just very uncomfortable.

She opened her eyes and found herself surrounded by snow and rock. White flakes of ice swirled through the clear sky as clouds drifted around her feet.

Something told her to look up.

At the mountain’s peak, perched a magnificent dragon with its head held up to the heavens. It looked like a white obelisk. Sunlight shattered against its shining scales, casting the world into color.

“Wow,” said Sara. “Who’d have thought the gate of the afterlife is guarded by a rainbow dragon?”

The dragon didn’t respond. Its eyes were slits of red cut from a marble face.

“I have waited for you, Sara.”

The ground shook with the dragon’s words. They seemed to come from every direction.

“Really?" said Sara. "I think I missed the invitation.” Her bravado surprised even herself. That was entirely something Yuzuru would say, but Sara had to admit she wore the attitude well.

Being dead can do that to a girl.

“I am Eris,” said the dragon. “I am Yato. What you call God, some say Ruin. You are not the first to stand before me, but you may be my last.”

The air was cold, absent. Sara couldn’t see her breath fog even though ice was beginning to stick to her skin.

“I’ve never been hit on by a dragon before,” she said, and thought she saw a glint in the dragon’s blood-red eyes.

A gust of sudden wind blew Sara off her feet. She tumbled into the sky, screaming but no air was there to carry her voice. All she heard was the dragon’s great roar.

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“Answer me, Sara. Are you worthy?”

Sara felt her stomach rising to her throat. Blood thumped against her ears. Her heart stuttered with the feeling one got from standing too close to a bass speaker.

“Of what?” she shouted, forcing the words from the vacuum inside her.

The sky vanished. Clouds turned into opened eyes, spewing electricity from their crackling pupils.

Sara opened hers and saw her life flashing past. All the good memories, the bad, the downright painful. She saw her parent’s plans for her future, her coach’s gross advances, her brother’s cold shoulder. The images zipped past like road signs on a highway, too brief for any to have impact but together, weaved a life not quite happy, not entirely sad.

Not quite how she remembered.

The dragon stood on its hind legs, wings cracking open with a sonorous boom, blocking out the entire world with its stark white form.

“Are you worthy of facing your own calamity, Sara? Or will you pass the mantle and return to the dead world whence you came?”

Return.

Sara couldn’t believe it. Was this a choice for her to go home? Back to her reality? She wanted it so badly it hurt, more than being crushed into the cold void. She opened her mouth to say it. But she couldn’t.

No. She didn’t want to.

Wind stopped. Sara fell back onto the snow. She looked up at the dragon, a cut-out against the black sky. Across this dark canvas streaked a network of glowing veins, pulsating with the same energy that ran inside Sara’s own body.

“I’m staying,” she managed to say.

The dragon opened its jaws wide, a single syllable exploding out. “Why?”

Sara took a deep breath to settle the pounding in her ears. Her head spun like the inside of a dryer, and with each frantic heartbeat, she felt the world shifting under her feet, as if about to slip away at any second. She raised a finger at the dragon. “I’ve watched enough games to know what you are. You’re the End Game, the Boss, the Last Level. You’re the reason I’m here, that any of us are brought here for.”

The dragon answered with lightning.

Sara smiled, ignoring the scalding flashes crashing past her face. “And I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to kill a god.”

Thunder cracked the world open. The mountains fell into darkness, bringing Sara with them. She fell, not screaming but smiling, because just as the fissure closed over her, she saw that the dragon’s lips were pulled back as well.

“I'll be waiting here,” it said.

The last thing Sara was aware of before everything went silent, was the cheery sound of her table pinging with a new point.

> New Attribute Point Gained.

>

> Chaos Control: 1