It was odd how horrible things can seem like blessings in disguise from the changing perspective of time. Adversity, growth, developing as a person changes us and let us see what had been horrible wasn’t, not really. My death had been pathetic and sad and made more so with the mockery of it on the nightly news. I’ll admit, hit by a bakery van while drunkenly checking out porn on a phone while crossing the street? Yeah, it was a bit funny. Still, with time and distance…

No, it was still horrible.

My death had been the final nail in the coffin on a life lived with failure because I refused to try, more comfortable with failure than success. My second life had forced me to succeed or face eternal slavery. It was staggering the perspective shift that comes from waking up inside a gem while a pimple-faced teenage wizard rubs your facets - no arms, legs, or a face to scream with. Even the fact that I discovered that splattered wizard tasted delicious? Still, not the lowest point in my new life.

Blackmail ‘bargain’ by a pint-sized goddess? Nope. Still not the lowest.

My new dungeon’s challenges overcome (in a pathetically easy manner, mind you!) by a primitive lizard lady? Nope, a bit of my pride bruised, but I was practically immune to it after my first life.

Threatened by an insane teenage paladin sent on a religious extermination quest? Ha! Practically a day in the park!

Being outsmarted in my dealings by a super-secret, immortal, dragon lady super-mage who runs the magician’s college (and the orphanage in the disguise of a plump matron)? Hardly a moment of concern.

No. The new lowest point was being strong-armed by a chubby little man who looked like a cross between a carpenter and accountant. While naked, of course.

“Well? What did you do to my system? Your damn soul is all twisted up and mixed in. I’m going to have to cut you out of it!” the balding man said, his hand clenching down even tighter on my shoulder.

I’d had a body for less than thirty seconds, and already someone was working to rip a piece of it off. Worse, somehow, this god forgot that he was keeping me frozen. I was also just slightly concerned about the talk of cutting bits of my soul out like it was peanut butter stuck in a kid’s hair.

Behind Denda, a swirling mass of inky shadows formed from the ground, rising into a pillar of darkness. Compressing downward, a body formed from the shadows, arms reaching around to hold Denda close. Blinking owlishly, the man crushing my shoulder glanced over. With only that glance, the shadow was frozen as it surrounded the diminutive goddess. Grunting a sound of annoyance, the man reached into his overalls and grabbed the jagged crystal. With a one handed flick of the crystal, he released my shoulder, returning my ability to move and speak.

The crystal blocked essence users from entering. It was clear and obvious. As obvious as the nose on my face, more obvious even, I could only see so much of my nose. The new lines of force restricting the dimensions were clear to me from every angle without effort. It wouldn’t stop me. I could practically skip through the holes his little magic device left. It barely blocked any of the primary three dimensions. It had almost no hold on either of the temporal directions (not that I could move along them, but it was still sloppy). His toy left all the non-traditional directions unblocked. He hadn’t built a house and left the door unlocked; he had made a house with only three walls!

…and I had no clue how I knew any of that.

“There, better,” he said while proudly stuffing the crystal back into his pocket.

Patting his pocket, his eyes went wide when he noticed Denda’s daggers that had been scissoring toward his back. Bending down, he came close, eyes running over Denda’s form in an oddly detached way, before he pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket and stared at her blades.

Tapping one of the knives gently, he began to mutter to himself as he hovered over the little goddess and her shadowy husband.

I would like to pretend that at this point, I made a brilliant decision. Maybe a bit of wisdom breaking through my befuddled mind, some elaborate plan formed, and I then jumped into action. No. That didn’t happen. My mind was still bouncing between manic excitement and crushing depression. The wild joy I experienced in the gathering place of the gods dived into depression from once again being captured. These wild emotional mood swings were evening out, the bounces from one extreme to another less pronounced. Sadly, the next swing wasn’t back toward excitement. I would have gladly enjoyed more celebratory naked air-to-groin thrusting. No, I went from sad and concerned for Denda to insane rage. Absolute murder flashed through my mind and was followed with an attempt at just that.

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I grabbed the barred dimensions, the ones blocked by the bald man’s crystal, and twisted them around into a blade of sheering force. He could exist on either side of the edge, but no part of him could stand the dividing line. Screaming in rage, I launched the contorted ripple of the world at the little man. My infinitely thin line of dimensional instability whistled through the air as it cut downward. My only desire was to split him in half from the tip of his bald head to his clunky leather boots. The moment I released my attack, I felt my essence bleed away. Exhaustion grabbed hold of me and pulled, a wave of black almost dragging me in to sleep before I released the conduit of energy bleeding into my invisible blade.

The ring on his finger glowed as the dimensional ripple bent and bounced around him. His defense was even cruder than his cage, only taking into account the three primary dimensions. It was so pathetic that it actually forced the attack around him, burning so much energy the ring glowed from the waste! Flinching at the sound of the dimensional blade cutting through the air, he looked around in surprise. When his eyes landed on me again, he blinked a few more times, then set his mouth into a deep frown and stomped back to my hunched and exhausted form.

Pointing his finger at me, he shouted like I was a recalcitrant dog, “No!”

All I could do was lie on the floor of my core room and stare as I was scolded by someone that resembled the handyman from my apartment in my first life. Coughing, I tried to sit up, but when a tall woman formed from a flash of light, I collapsed and watched from my prone state.

“Uh, high Sandy!” the man said, his voice breaking slightly as he practically simpered at the tall woman bathed in light.

“It’s Sandra - Goddess of Life and Creation!” the newcomer said, her voice shaking the world even as it came out with gentle and sweet notes.

Nodding quickly, the handyman smiled at her, his hands fluttering in front of himself. Eventually, his hands came to rest together in front of himself.

“Right, Sandy, yeah. Um, what are you doing here?” he asked.

Despite my distress, the exhaustion from my ill-fated attack, and the sudden emotional shift, I still managed to open my mouth and insert my newly formed foot.

“Ugggh! Now there are two of them!” I moaned.

Leaning to look around the small man, Sandra - Goddess of Life and Creation, aka ‘Sandy’, quirked an eyebrow as her eyes landed on my hunched naked form.

“Darius, what are you doing?” The newcomer asked. Her voice saccharine sweet and unnerving to any man who had lived with a woman before.

Apparently, Darius was oblivious to the tone because he rocked back and forth on his clunky shoes. He held his hands together in front of himself, a sweet smile of joy on his face as he gazed at the overly large glowing woman.

“Sandy! The system broke in your world, so I came to fix it. His soul is all mixed up in the soul of my system. I’m going to cut him out. Do you want to see my new system? I built a new model! I could upgrade this one to the new model!” Darius said, his sentences jumping from one subject to the next without seeming connection.

Sandra waited patiently for Darius to finish, pausing slightly longer than seemed appropriate before she answered.

“Darius, our agreement said that you were not allowed to modify my world without my approval, nor remove any nascent gods or goddesses,” she began. In response, Darius frowned then shook his head.

“Section four, paragraph three, subsection c, says that I can return for emergency repairs. My system alerted me to errors, and so I came to fix them.”

Sandra smiled at Darius with a long-suffering sigh, then tapped a finger on her lips silently as she looked around. She stared at me, leaning around Darius as she did so, then at the frozen pair of Denda and her husband Beld. After her quick perusal of the frozen gods, she leaned over my crystal core, squinting through the dimensional tunnel where my dungeon magic poured into the world.

“He isn’t messing with the tunnel to the world with overflowing magic, is he? He hasn’t intentionally damaged anything. Your device is still working correctly, yes?” Sandra asked, her voice still shaking the world even as the dimensions remained fixed and unchanging. An odd effect to the way my new perception showed me the world.

Frowning, looking like he was trying to chew on something distasteful. Darius unclenched his locked together hands, then wiped them across his overall’s multiple times worriedly.

“No, the system is still working. But he is interacting with it, and he shouldn’t. He will mess it up eventually. I want to fix it because it isn’t working the way it should, and I’ve made a better version!” Darius said, his voice coming out quickly in a long stream of consciousness.

“Well, then Section four, um,” Sandra started.

Darius nodded quickly and said, “Paragraph three, subsection c: Concerning emergency repairs.”

“Right, paragraph three, subsection c. It doesn’t apply because your system isn’t actually broken. So you would be breaking your agreement if you did anything,” Sandra said.

Darius blinked slowly, his hands wandering across the tools on his belt and hanging from his pocket, his eyes staring into space. When his movements slowed, he seemed to come back to himself and look at Sandra for a bit, then he abruptly nodded.

“Right. I’m going to go now,” Darius said, his hand tapping a quick pattern on a stone tablet he seemingly pulled from thin air. Then he faced me where I was lying on the ground, his blank look shifting to one of anger.

“Don’t break my things!” Darius said, his voice laced with barely contained anger before he nodded and disappeared.

While I remained on the ground, naked, Sandra’s light show slowly faded. The seven-foot-tall, gently glowing woman in a red dress gave me a smirk while the two gods slowly unthawed from their frozen position.

Exhausted, confused, naked, and disoriented from being suddenly corporeal, I could only bring myself to ask a single critical question.

“What the fuck just happened?”