Chapter 1: Manholes, Nephilim and Bonus Groceries.
Walking across the Kroger parking lot with a trolley full of groceries that mostly consisted of liquor and canned food. Like any other night, I assumed I’d fulfill the bare minimum amount of housekeeping I could while listening to socialist podcasts in my bare-bones apartment. Afterward, I would heat some canned soup on the gas stove, throw in some raw vegetables to give it some nutrition, and then play 5 hours of video games with my online friends before going back to work in the morning at the foundry.
Not an ideal situation but I was happy enough, I had more than 3 close friends and I’d read enough depressing surveys to know that made me an outlier for my age. I was lucky in other ways too, I wasn’t addicted to heroin, research chemicals, or TikTok and I’d managed to get in the door on real estate in the sweet spot before everything exploded in price and then interest rates had done the same and locked everyone in and out of the market.
Sure, I didn’t go out anymore except to my friend’s house on the weekend for Dungeons and Dragons. Sure I no longer felt any drive to do anything with my spare time and even if I did I couldn’t afford to go out with interest rates devouring 70% of my wages in mortgage payments and yeah, I guess I had become so incredibly disillusioned with capitalism that I had no hopes for a future free of exploitation but as I said, I was happy enough. Or I supposed so anyway.
I was contemplating my place in the world and wondering about that odd, all-pervading detachment I felt when suddenly the world dropped out from under me as a section of parking lot crumbled away beneath my feet, and then I was falling, not tumbling head over heels, just dropping like a rock as rushing air plastered back my hair. I could hear howling winds and saw crackling arcs of lighting all around me as I fell through an ethereal void of roiling energy. After a short while of this interminable tumbling I could no longer believe I was still just falling through a decaying piece of infrastructure and my stupid brain figured out that I wasn’t dealing with any normal sinkhole. For starters there was no sky or parking lot above me anymore, just those chaotic waves of energy lancing through immaterial void. Through all of this I was absurdly still holding onto the trolley handles. Huh, that was strange, my shopping was unmoved, the cans and bottles weren’t flying up and out of the basket. Instead they stayed perfectly still where I had placed them. “This must be a dream” I muttered as wind streamed past my face but my groceries still acted as if they were glued to the cart, I couldn’t see a bottom to the void and wondered if I would just fall helplessly until I starved. Then I started to think about alternatives because I seemed to have a lot of time to torment myself with hypotheticals. What if I’d suffered a mental break, maybe this was my padded cell, or a coma and I was just waiting for the plug to be pulled. Or maybe it was real and I would be devoured by some cosmic deity that dwelled in this strange paradimensional void or whatever It was.
I didn’t have to wait too long, I probably only fell for about 3 minutes before my velocity began to decrease and 30 seconds later I had decelerated to a full stop, now I was floating in the endless void. Waiting for something new to happen. Waiting it turned out for an immensely powerful voice to emerge from the aether and announce “Do not be afraid Mortal, I am the Nephilim and I come to you in peace”
My heart jumped as adrenalin surged through my body and my hair stood on end, In that terrible instant I felt sure that I would be driven mad or die of fright if I saw the speaker of those words, I had a vague understanding of the Nephilim as ancient malformed giants of eldritch/Biblical origin that a mortal figure could not safely behold. But then I saw the Nephilim and he really wasn’t as bad as I would have guessed. Yeah, he was more like a single massive organ covered in slime and tar; beating, writhing, and pulsing to an unknowable rhythm than any conception of rational humanoid form that I had possessed beforehand. But on the other hand, that rugose and squamous exterior had an honest characteristic that I found refreshing after years of humiliating encounters with the soulless and bloody-minded bureaucrats who ran the steel factory.
“Congratulations mortal. You died” The voice of the Nephilim was a quaking, ruinous thing that left me feeling as if I’d been punched in the gut with the full weight of my passing. In a psychic instant, I fully saw all the ways I had impacted the world and even how my untimely death would shape it going forward.
My 4 friends, who I loved dearly; would have one less person to help them in Rainbow six siege or Apex Legends. My beloved parents would be able to sadly shake their heads and pretend I could have done something with my life if I had lived and of course my hated, wretched boss could immediately replace me with another low-skill member of the Lumpenprole to use up and spit out. I felt a pang of melancholy. Damn, if only I’d had more time then I could have disappointed so many more people, failed to please so many more women and generally drifted through life in a discomfiting malaise as I achieved the bare minimum with my remaining years.
“Hang on, how did I die? Last I remember I was walking home with my shopping and feeling fine” There was a terrible, heavy moment of silence as I hung suspended in the void with nothing but a cart of groceries between me and the viscerally organic being that pulsed and oozed in front of me. I felt atavistic terror creep up on me as the thing seemed suddenly to be making a judgement, deliberating on whether to condemn, devour or destroy my very human soul, but thankfully that was just my good old human paranoia and it merely spoke once more. “You stepped into an open manhole and broke your neck. Straight into the afterlife for processing, although we decided to let you keep the groceries, you did pay for them after all. Even if you were going to steal the trolley” The last barb made me bristle indignantly and incredibly I almost defended my actions but I found the words caught in my throat, how could I justify anything to this ancient and physically terrible thing.
“Do not worry human, I see your every sin and shameful thought but I wish you no harm, for you have been judged by the Archon and found worthy of continuation.” I blinked and was surprised to find that I could see perfectly through closed eyelids in this strange purgatory which I had found myself. “ What is Continuation?” I inquired politely as black slime pooled and dripped from the organ into the void below. “Continuation of your mortal essence, from one reality into the next, into an earned afterlife of your choosing or into a new attempt at earning a better afterlife for yourself. My name is Agramon by the way, Agramon of the Rot-Fleshed Pit” The Nephilim paused deliberately and definitely judgementally before adding. “Thanks for asking” There was no change in that dreadful monotone of executioner-solemnity but I found myself chuckling nervously. “Oh sorry Agramon, I’m Jack. Jack Wells.” A dollop of indescribably brackish fluid-tar silently squirted from the Nephilim’s wet flesh and I knew that not only was it laughing at me, it was laughing in a good-natured fashion. “I never tire of mortals, every day on the job shows me something new, even after 120 billion of you have passed through my office. Tell me human, which afterlife or reincarnation would you like?” In my mind, I saw two options, although saw was the wrong word. It was more like someone had sewn a hole in my skull without anaesthetic and then just jammed the concepts into my screaming mind. Option one: Wageslave heaven.
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Prerequisite: earn between 15 000 and 50 001 dollars per year at any point in life.
Description. Eternal servitude to those in higher tiers of heavenly rest.
Option two: Low level Isekai
Reincarnation with present inventory in alternate world with simulatory physics and rules based upon video gaming experiences.
Prerequisite: Play between 500 to 2000 hours of any single video game.
“That’s it, that’s all I get to pick from?” I tried not to sound bitterly disappointed but the Nephilim could read my every thought and feeling. “Hey now Jack don’t blame me, if you’d just put in a bit more effort you could have hit the next tier and had some better options to pick from” I felt my fists ball up. “Fuck you, you glorified Blood-bag, I did everything right. I saved every fucking cent I could and even had a goddamn apartment of my own, I had the best job I could get in my shithole town and…” The Nephilim cut me off, not with a bloodcurdling roar or display of eldritch might but a simple sentence that was as cutting as it was true. “I meant the gaming, if you’d put down the Ark survival evolved and kept going at the Rainbow Six Siege then you could have easily hit 2000 hours and been reborn as a Harem-Lord or mighty hero”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
“I’m not an idiot; human, I see every one of you who dies and so I know your generation is fucked on every single level, barely any of you will be hitting any progression milestones that aren’t gaming related. Especially because your whole world gets incinerated in a combination of nuclear and climate holocaust a couple of years from now anyway. That’s why you can’t pick reincarnation as a normal earth-mortal, there’s no point to it anymore, your people finally hit a timeline where no variation can save them, and everyone dies.” I guess I’d always known that was coming, but it wasn’t good to hear, I felt tears on my cheeks as I thought about my family, they didn’t deserve nuclear hellfire to happen to them. “Don’t worry about it Jack, your family will be fine. Don’t get me wrong they die in nuclear hellfire but then they have enough net worth to pick from a bunch of cool afterlives and I have it on good authority that they’ll pick an ethical one.”
I felt relief, I felt relief because the creature made me feel relieved. I asked what an ethical afterlife would entail and the creature rotated and leaked more bloody-oil as it explained.
“No slaves, just a garden paradise to tend to by themselves like Adam and Eve did that one time. You’ve got good family Jack, genuinely decent folks” I choked back sentimentality. “Thanks, man, that means a lot” More pulsing, more blood, and some bile-sludge too. “I don’t think I need to tell you but don’t go with the Wageslave heaven. Pick the Isekai Jack, it’s a pretty good one, better than you had back home anyway” I nodded appreciatively and everything went black as my decision took effect.
When I regained consciousness, I was facedown in lush green grass and birds were tweeting cheerily, even more unusual to my city dwelling sensibilities was my general condition. I felt ok, better in fact, my body felt invigorated as if I’d had a good night’s sleep and a break from body-destroying labor. It was incredible. I stood up and stretched, wanting to soak in the glory of my surroundings for a moment. Alas, when I got to my feet I saw my trolley full of groceries rolling downhill a few metres away from me, I was on a hill of golden flowers and verdant green, below me was a meadow and beyond that I saw forest stretching off to the horizon and watched over by a mountain with wisps of smoke drifting lazily from the chimmneys of a quaint mountain town and fortified chateau. I wanted to revel in the beauty but I was forced to chase a stolen shopping trolley downhill into a trickling creekbed that had once carved a great furrow through the landscape. I wasn’t fast enough and the trolley upended on the smooth stones that lined the creek before I could grab hold of it.
Cans scattered everywhere and I swore loudly before dropping to my knees in the crystal clear water and fishing them out one at a time, churning up mud with every frustrated, groping foray into the water. After a couple of minutes I had everything back in its place and now had mud and creek water soaking me to the waist after I had to wade in to retrieve a bottle of Sailor Jerry that was seemingly hunting for his missing ship. The bottle began to change in my hand, the glass became slightly cloudier and the label became more like parchment than plastic. I looked over at my other groceries and saw they were all changing to suit this new world, immediately I learnt some things about my new existence as all plastic products were replaced by glass, parchment or leather depending on what they needed to do. It was bizarre, watching reality be rewritten around me and I was suddenly struck by a very liberating thought.
“Holy shit! I don’t have to go to work tomorrow”.
I was instantly buoyed by this idea, sure I had no idea where I was and if this really was a video game-style world then I would have to hope the system was randomised because if it was based on my own gaming preferences then I would likely be faced with pain and horror in the From Soft sense or trapped in the hellish world of Rainbow Six Siege where everybody was a souped-up teamkilling cop rather than inundated with free loot and easy levels like in the nice, comfy village-building games my ex-girlfriend had played.
“Oh well, beats the alternative”.
I smiled to myself and began to push my trolley, apparently, the Nephilim hadn’t been a dream or dying hallucination, even if it was rapidly fading into one, already I could only remember a few things about the limbo I had experienced, and anything concrete I focused on slipped away as fluidly as a greased frog. “10 cans lentils, 10 cans tuna, one loaf of bread, a bottle of rum and a firelighter for the gas stove” I murmured remembering what I’d purchased.
But apparently Agramon was a lot cooler than I’d thought he was because that’s not all that was in the cart. My trolley now had one of those mini bottles of fireball whisky, an entire sledgehammer, a wooden-handled survival knife and a hatchet mounted on the side of the cart. Plus I had at least 30 more cans of lentils than I had actually bought. Sadly the bread was fucked from the water, it had been one of those nice loaves in the paper bags instead of the plastic and hadn’t mutated to be waterproof, instead it was just soggy bread wrapped in thin, soaked-through paper. I forgot about the bread that certainly hadn’t been cheap and whistled appreciatively instead. I had some free stuff after all and things were looking much brighter than they had before I broke my neck.