Year 347 Post-Collision
The Forgotten Graveyard stretched for miles beneath a sky that couldn't decide what color it wanted to be. Purple bled into gold, then snapped to black, then back to blue—a symptom of three different realities trying to occupy the same atmospheric space. Most people didn't notice anymore. When you lived in a world where the laws of physics were more like guidelines that gods argued over, you stopped looking up.
At the center of the graveyard sat a round table that hadn't existed an hour ago and wouldn't exist an hour from now. Around it sat five beings who could individually end civilizations if they got bored enough on a Tuesday.
Rimuru Tempest, Demon Lord and founder of the Jura-Tempest Federation, lounged in his chair with the kind of ease that came from having so many defensive abilities that assassination attempts felt like mosquito bites. His slime body had settled into his preferred humanoid form—androgynous, blue-haired, and radiating the sort of casual power that made veteran warriors break out in cold sweat. He was currently eating. Always eating. A spread of foods from six different culinary traditions sat in front of him, and he worked through them with the dedication of someone who'd spent his first life as an overworked salaryman who lived on convenience store meals.
"I'm just saying," Rimuru said around a mouthful of something that was either a dumpling or a small bread roll, "the economic summit next month is going to be a shitshow if we don't establish currency conversion rates. I've got merchants from the MMO cities trying to pay in 'verbal contracts that alter reality,' and my people don't know how to put that on a balance sheet."
Ainz Ooal Gown, the Overlord of Nazarick, sat perfectly still in a way that suggested he wasn't actually bored, just... existentially patient. His skeletal form was draped in robes that cost more than small kingdoms, and his empty eye sockets burned with eldritch fire that occasionally flickered with what might have been exasperation. Being an undead Sorcerer King meant he didn't technically need to breathe, but if he could have sighed, he would have.
"Currency conversion," Ainz said in a voice like a crypt door opening, "is the least of our concerns. Three of my border outposts reported reality fractures last week. Not dungeon breaks. Not monster surges. The fabric of space folded inside out and showed us what was on the other side." He paused. "It was screaming."
"Was it though?" Subaru Natsuki asked from his seat, and his voice carried the kind of exhaustion that came from dying a thousand times and remembering every single one. He looked... relatively normal compared to the others. Black hair, sharp eyes, the build of someone who'd been forced to learn swordsmanship because his special ability was "die and try again." But there was something in his posture—too still, too aware, like a man standing on ice that might crack at any moment. "Was it actually screaming, or did we just interpret the sound that way because our brains can't process what dimensional collapse actually sounds like?"
Ainz's eye-flames flickered. "Does it matter?"
"It matters if the screaming is a symptom or a cause," Subaru said. "If reality is breaking because something is trying to break it, that's different from reality just... coming apart at the seams because too many impossibilities got shoved into one space."
"Dark," Rimuru said cheerfully, still eating.
"You've died how many times now?" asked Tanya von Degurechaff, and her voice was pleasant in the way a loaded gun was pleasant—technically neutral until it went off. She sat with military precision, her small frame belying the fact that she was one of the world's most dangerous aerial mages and a tactical genius who'd been reincarnated into a world of war by a self-proclaimed God she openly despised. Her golden eyes were cold and calculating. "I lost count after four hundred."
"I stopped counting at eight hundred," Subaru said flatly. "And before you ask—yes, they all still hurt. No, I'm not okay. Yes, I'm functional. Moving on."
The fifth figure at the table hadn't spoken yet. Kazuma Satou looked profoundly out of place among world-ending powers, which was fitting because his entire existence was an accident. He'd been a shut-in NEET who died in a humiliating way, got reincarnated with a useless goddess, and through sheer spite, luck, and strategic cowardice, had somehow accumulated enough power and influence to sit at this table without immediately being vaporized. He wore adventurer's gear that looked expensive but practical, and his expression suggested he was wondering if he could leave early without anyone noticing.
"Can we talk about the Grail War?" Kazuma said. "Because last I checked, there were supposed to be seven Servants per War, and the one brewing in the Coastal Reach has fourteen. Somebody's cheating."
"Everybody's cheating," Rimuru said.
"Yes, but this cheating is different," Kazuma insisted. "One of the Servants isn't a Servant. Or—it is a Servant, but it's not dead. It's still alive. It's just... showing up anyway."
That got everyone's attention.
Ainz leaned forward slightly, which was the undead equivalent of sitting bolt upright in alarm. "Explain."
"One of the Grail nodes in the southeast tried to start a War," Kazuma said. "Standard setup—seven Masters, seven Servants, one wish. Except when the summoning happened, something answered the call that wasn't in the Throne of Heroes. Something that's still walking around in the world, alive and hungry, just... decided to show up because it felt like it."
"And the Grail accepted it?" Tanya asked sharply.
"The Grail wrote a new class for it," Kazuma said. "Calamity-Class. That's never existed before."
Subaru made a small sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. "Of course it did. Why wouldn't it? What's one more impossible thing?"
"The issue," Kazuma continued, "is that whoever this Calamity is, it's not fighting for the Grail. It's fighting for its Master. And the Master is..." He hesitated. "Nobody. Some kid nobody's ever heard of. No lineage, no training, no records. Just a random boy who somehow got one of the world's oldest predators to kneel."
Rimuru stopped eating.
Ainz's eye-flames went very, very still.
Tanya's expression sharpened into something dangerous.
Subaru looked like he was trying to decide whether to laugh or start running.
"A Calamity-Class Servant," Ainz said slowly, "serving a nobody."
"That's what I'm hearing," Kazuma confirmed.
"And which Calamity are we talking about?" Rimuru asked quietly.
Kazuma pulled out a crumpled report and squinted at it. "Witnesses described it as 'abyssal,' 'oceanic,' 'makes you forget how to breathe.' One survivor said it felt like the bottom of the world was looking at him." He glanced up. "Does that narrow it down?"
Subaru's face went pale. "Leviathan."
"The Leviathan?" Tanya demanded.
"If there are multiple Leviathans running around," Subaru said, "we have bigger problems than I thought."
Ainz was silent for a long moment. Then: "If the Leviathan has chosen a Master, that Master is not a 'nobody.' He may appear to be a nobody. But something about him caught her attention. And things that catch the attention of primordial calamities do not stay small."
"Should we be worried?" Kazuma asked.
"We should be paying attention," Tanya said. "If he destabilizes a region—"
"He already is," Kazuma interrupted. "Word is he's been pulling demi-humans and monsters out of execution lines. Claiming them under his protection. The Church is furious. They're calling it theft of holy assets."
Rimuru's expression shifted into something colder. "Is he."
"Don't get any ideas," Tanya warned. "We don't need you starting a diplomatic incident because some kid is doing what you did ten years ago."
"I'm not starting anything," Rimuru said. "But if the Church is branding people as 'assets' again, I'm going to have opinions."
"Opinions later," Ainz said. "Intelligence now. We need to know who this boy is, what he wants, and whether he's going to be a problem."
"Or an opportunity," Subaru muttered.
They all looked at him.
Subaru shrugged. "I'm just saying—if someone's pulling off the impossible and pissing off the Church while they do it, maybe they're not the enemy."
"Or," Tanya countered, "they're a rogue element with no allegiances and no sense of scale, which makes them more dangerous than an enemy."
The table fell into silence.
Rimuru went back to eating, but his eyes were distant.
Ainz stared at nothing, running calculations behind those burning sockets.
Tanya made a note in a small leather book, her handwriting crisp and efficient.
Subaru looked at the sky, watching it flicker between colors, and wondered which timeline he was in and whether it mattered anymore.
Kazuma just looked tired.
"Meeting adjourned?" Kazuma asked hopefully.
"Meeting adjourned," Ainz confirmed.
One by one, they vanished—teleported, gated, or simply stopped existing in that location. The table dissolved. The graveyard returned to being empty.
And somewhere far to the southeast, in a place where the ocean met the sky and both of them were wrong, a boy who didn't exist in any of their files was about to be born for the second time.
Chicago, Illinois – October 28th, 2025
Rajah Williams was going to die over a phone full of music nobody wanted to hear.
He knew this with absolute certainty in the three seconds between the gun coming up and the trigger being pulled. It was a weird, crystalline moment of clarity—the kind you only get when your brain realizes the story's over and starts running credits early.
The man in the ski mask was yelling something. Rajah wasn't listening. He was thinking about how fucking stupid this was.
He'd been walking home from the convenience store, bag of chips in one hand, phone in the other, earbuds in, half-watching some trashy isekai anime where the protagonist had just discovered he could punch gods or whatever. Standard power fantasy shit. Rajah watched a lot of those. He told himself it was ironic. It wasn't ironic. He just liked seeing people escape into better lives, even if those lives were animated and poorly written.
The guy had come out of nowhere. Hoodie, mask, gun, the whole cliché. "Phone and wallet, now!"
Rajah's wallet had twelve dollars and a CTA card. His phone had two hundred and thirty-seven voice memos of him freestyling over YouTube beats at two in the morning, trying to convince himself he wasn't wasting his life.
He should have just handed it over.
He didn't.
"Man, come on," Rajah heard himself say, and his voice sounded so tired. "It's not even a new model."
"I don't give a fuck, hand it—"
"I got all my music on here," Rajah continued, and he didn't know why he was still talking. "I'm not—look, you can have the wallet, but I need the—"
The gun went off.
It was louder than he expected. Louder than in movies. It sounded like the world breaking.
Rajah stumbled back, hit the brick wall behind him, slid down. His hands went to his chest automatically, came away red. Huh. So that's what getting shot feels like. Felt like... pressure. Like something too big had tried to fit inside his ribs and gave up halfway.
The guy in the mask was already running. Didn't even take the phone. It clattered onto the pavement next to Rajah, screen cracked but still glowing. The isekai was still playing. The protagonist was screaming about friendship or willpower or some shit.
Rajah tried to laugh. It came out as a wet cough.
I'm really dying over my shitty songs.
His vision was going dark at the edges, that classic tunnel-vision thing. He could still see his phone, though. Could see the anime character winning, because of course he was winning. Main characters didn't die on random streets in Chicago with twelve dollars in their wallet and dreams nobody asked for.
I never even got to be famous.
Another cough. More red. His hands were shaking.
He'd spent twenty years being nobody. Rajah Williams, mediocre student, mediocre rapper, mediocre everything. His mom called him "baby" because she loved him. His friends called him "Sunny" because of that one track he'd made sophomore year that actually slapped. He called himself a waste of space because late at night when he couldn't sleep, that's what the voice in his head sounded like.
And now he was dying on a sidewalk because he couldn't let go of a phone full of evidence that he existed.
This is so fucking stupid.
The darkness was closing in. The phone screen flickered. The protagonist was still screaming about something—never giving up, probably. That's what they always screamed about.
Rajah's last thought before the black swallowed him whole was: Names have power. Nobody knows my real name. I'm just Sunny. Just another nobody who wanted to matter.
Then: nothing.
Then: everything.
He opened his eyes to pressure.
Not the pressure of dying—that was over. This was different. This was the pressure of weight, of depth, of existence itself trying to compact him into a singularity. His tiny, soft, newborn body tried to scream and couldn't. His lungs wouldn't move. His heart stuttered, stopped, stuttered again.
I'm a baby, some distant part of him realized with dreamlike absurdity. I'm a fucking baby and I'm drowning.
The water around him—if it was water—was wrong. Too thick. Too alive. It moved with intention, with hunger, with something that felt like breathing.
And then he felt it.
Attention.
Something impossibly vast turned its gaze on him, and Rajah's brand-new infant soul nearly shattered under the weight of being seen.
She was old. Older than the world. Older than the concept of "old." She was the abyss that predators feared, the depth where light went to die, the floor beneath every floor. She was pressure and hunger and sovereignty and cold, patient certainty.
She was the Leviathan.
And she was looking at him—this tiny, drowning, reborn thing—like he was the most interesting meal she'd encountered in a millennium.
His soul did something it absolutely should not have been able to do.
It bit back.
Not with power. Not with skill. With pure, animal refusal to disappear again. His consciousness—still half-Rajah, half-newborn, all desperation—reached out with nothing but instinct and stole the tiniest fragment of her presence. Just enough to make his heart beat. Just enough to pull one breath into lungs that had already given up.
It was the smallest theft in the history of theft.
It was also the greatest blasphemy she'd witnessed in centuries.
The Leviathan didn't kill him.
She laughed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration that rewrote the pressure around him, a frequency that said: You dared.
And then she wrapped herself around him like a trench, like a grave, like a mother, and claimed.
Abyssal script burned into his infant skin. A sigil carved itself into the space where his heart was still learning to beat. And two truths became law:
You are mine.
You do not end unless I allow it.
The water—the abyss—the her—pulled back just enough for him to breathe.
Rajah-who-was-now-someone-else gasped his first breath in his second life.
And deep in the violated code of his reborn soul, something new flickered to life:
[AETERNUM ARCHIVE: INITIALIZED]
[ENTRY RECORDED: Abyssal Density (Fragment) – Rank F-]
[CONTINUITY DEBT ACCRUED: 0.01%]
He couldn't read it. Couldn't understand it yet. Could barely think through the hurricane of sensation and newness and terror.
But somewhere in the back of his fragmenting mind, in the place where Rajah Williams had spent twenty years memorizing anime tropes and rap lyrics and every piece of media he'd consumed while trying to escape his own life, a thought formed:
Oh.
Oh no.
I'm in one of those stories.
The Leviathan's presence condensed around him, a living pressure that should have crushed him but instead felt like... gravity. Like weight. Like being held.
Mine, she said again, and this time it sounded almost... fond.
Rajah—no, not Rajah anymore, he couldn't use that name, names had power here, he could feel it—tried to cry and found he didn't have the strength.
Instead, he just floated in the abyss, held by something that could erase nations, and thought about shitty anime swords and YouTube beats and all the trashy, beautiful, ridiculous media he'd absorbed in his first life.
[ARCHIVE DETECTED: Previous Life Memories Accessible]
[MEDIA CATALOG: 10,000+ Hours]
[CONCEPTUAL DATABASE: Fragmented]
[WARNING: Initial Output Rank – F- to E-]
[Current Status: Pathetic]
Yeah. That sounded about right.
Welcome to hell, Sunny.
Welcome to the second chance you never asked for.
Try not to drown.