The white void vanished like someone had flipped a light switch, and suddenly Ruho was falling.
Not falling like tripping over your own feet. Not falling like missing a step on the stairs. Falling like a meteor, like a stone dropped from the edge of space, like every nightmare about plummeting he'd ever had except this time it was real and he was very much awake and very much screaming.
The wind hit him like a physical wall, roaring in his ears so loud he couldn't even hear his own voice. His stomach lurched up into his throat, his arms pinwheeled uselessly, and his eyes watered from the sheer force of air rushing past his face. The sky above him was a brilliant blue, the kind of blue that would've been beautiful if he wasn't currently experiencing what had to be the worst ten seconds of his afterlife.
Wait. Afterlife. He had a body again.
Through the absolute pants-shitting terror of free-falling through the atmosphere, Ruho managed to look down at himself. He had hands. Actual hands, with fingers and fingernails and everything. He was wearing clothes—nice clothes, actually. Blue cargo pants, baggy as hell, with way too many pockets, the kind of tactical streetwear that cost money he'd never had when he was alive. The fabric whipped and snapped in the wind as he tumbled through the air like a ragdoll thrown from a skyscraper.
He had legs. He could feel them. He wiggled his toes in what felt like actual boots, good ones, not the falling-apart sneakers he'd died in. He had a body. A real, physical body that could feel things.
A body that was currently falling to its death from what had to be ten kilometers up.
"AZIREL!" Ruho screamed into the rushing wind, his voice barely audible over the roar of his descent. "AZIREL, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! WHAT THE HELL! YOU COULDN'T JUST SPAWN ME ON THE GROUND LIKE A NORMAL PERSON?"
The trainee god's voice appeared in his head, casual as ever, like they were having a conversation over coffee instead of during Ruho's terminal velocity plummet toward the surface. "Can't break physics, dude. Conservation of energy and all that. You needed to enter this world somehow, and dropping you from orbit is the only way that makes sense with the laws of thermodynamics."
"I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THERMODYNAMICS!" Ruho shrieked, spinning in the air as he tried and failed to control his fall. His cargo pants flapped around his legs, the wind threatening to rip them clean off. "I'M GONNA DIE AGAIN! YOU BROUGHT ME BACK JUST TO KILL ME!"
"Relax," Azirel said, and Ruho could practically hear the eye-roll in his voice. "You're falling toward the Zabris Lake. You'll hit water, not ground. You'll be fine."
Water. Lake. Okay. That was something. Ruho twisted mid-air, trying to orient himself, trying to see where he was going. Below him, maybe a kilometer down—or was it two? Distance was impossible to judge when you were moving this fast—he could see it. A massive body of water, stretching out in every direction, deep blue and glittering in the sunlight. The shore was visible as a distant brown line, with what looked like forests beyond that, and mountains in the far distance, and—
Wait.
The lake was huge. Like, way too huge. And the shore seemed really, really far away. And now that he was looking at it, the mountains in the distance didn't look right. They were massive, the kind of scale that didn't make sense, like someone had built them wrong.
"Azirel," Ruho said, his voice tight with the kind of calm that comes right before you absolutely lose your shit. "How big is this planet?"
There was a pause. A suspicious pause.
"It's, uh. It's pretty big," Azirel said.
"How. Big."
"So you know the sun, right? The star that Earth orbits?"
Ruho felt something in his chest clench. "Yeah?"
"This planet is about 1.8 times that size."
For a moment, Ruho forgot he was falling. His brain just completely stopped processing the whole terminal velocity situation because it was too busy trying to comprehend what Azirel had just said. "I'm sorry, what the fuck did you just say?"
"The planet is 1.8 times the size of the sun," Azirel repeated, like this was a completely normal thing to say. "Give or take a few thousand kilometers."
"WHY?!" Ruho screamed, his voice cracking. "WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MAKE A PLANET THE SIZE OF THE SUN?! THAT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE! THE GRAVITY ALONE SHOULD—"
"Magic," Azirel interrupted. "I'm a god, remember? I can make the physics work however I want. And I wanted to go big. Really big. World-building, you know? Go big or go home."
"That's not world-building, that's insane! That's—you can't just—" Ruho sputtered, still falling, the wind still screaming past him. "You're telling me you made a planet the size of the fucking sun because you felt like it?!"
"I mean, One Piece did it," Azirel said defensively.
"ONE PIECE?! ONE PIECE IS YOUR JUSTIFICATION?!" Ruho would've thrown something if he had anything to throw. "That's a manga! A fictional manga! You can't just use that as an excuse to make a planet that's physically impossible!"
"It's not impossible if I made it possible," Azirel countered. "That's literally how being a god works. I decide the rules."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard and I died jerking off!" Ruho shouted back. The lake was getting closer now. He could see waves on the surface, actual individual waves, and the shore was becoming more defined. Still way too far away, but at least he could see it properly now. "You made a planet the size of the sun for what? To make yourself feel cool? To flex your god powers?"
"I made it because I wanted a world with lots of space for different continents and cultures and biomes," Azirel said, his voice taking on a defensive tone. "I wanted room for everything. Flying islands, underground civilizations, ocean kingdoms, sky cities, all of it. You can't fit all that on a normal-sized planet. I needed space. So I made space."
"By making a planet ONE POINT EIGHT TIMES THE SIZE OF THE SUN!"
"You're being really hung up on this," Azirel muttered.
Ruho took a deep breath—which was hard to do while falling at terminal velocity—and tried to calm down. Okay. Fine. The planet was absurdly, impossibly large. Whatever. He could deal with that later. Right now he needed to focus on not dying. Again.
"Okay," he said, his voice strained. "Okay. Fine. Planet's huge. I get it. So this lake I'm falling toward. How big is it?"
Another pause. Another very suspicious pause.
"Azirel," Ruho said slowly. "How big is the lake?"
"It's uh. It's a pretty decent size."
"Give me a number."
"Do you really need a specific—"
"GIVE ME A FUCKING NUMBER!"
"One hundred and two thousand square kilometers," Azirel said quickly.
Ruho's mind tried to process that. Failed. Tried again. "That's—that's bigger than South Korea. That's bigger than multiple countries. That's not a lake, that's a fucking inland sea!"
"Technically it's still classified as a lake because it's—"
"I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TECHNICAL CLASSIFICATION!" Ruho screamed. The water was maybe five hundred meters below him now. He could see the surface clearly, could see the sunlight reflecting off it, could see what looked like whitecaps in the distance. "Please, please tell me I'm at least falling near the shore. Please tell me I'm not going to land in the middle of this thing."
The pause that followed was the longest yet.
"Azirel."
"You're about eight kilometers from shore," the trainee god said quietly.
"Eight. Kilometers."
"Give or take a few hundred meters."
"Eight kilometers from shore. In a lake that's over a hundred thousand square kilometers. On a planet that's almost twice the size of the sun." Ruho laughed, a high-pitched, slightly unhinged sound that got lost in the wind. "Of course. Of course that's where I'm landing. Why would I land somewhere convenient? Why would anything about this make sense?"
"Look, I didn't have precise control over your entry point," Azirel said defensively. "I got you in the lake. That's the important part. You could've landed in the desert or a volcano or something way worse."
"A volcano?! You have volcanoes on this thing?!"
"It's a geologically active planet, of course there's—you know what, we can talk about this later. You're about to hit the water."
Ruho looked down. Azirel was right. The surface of the lake was rushing up at him with terrifying speed. He could see individual waves now, could see the deep blue of what had to be very, very deep water, could see his own reflection getting bigger and bigger as he plummeted toward it.
"Oh shit," he said.
"Oh shit is right," Azirel agreed. "Try to keep your body straight when you hit. Feet first if you can manage it. And hold your breath."
"THAT'S YOUR ADVICE?! HOLD MY BREATH?!"
"What do you want me to say? Good luck?"
"I WANT YOU TO SAVE ME!"
"Can't interfere once you've entered the world. Those are the rules. You're on your own now, buddy."
The water was fifty meters away. Forty. Thirty. Ruho could see the texture of the surface now, could see the way the sunlight played across the ripples, could see what looked like fish darting away from his rapidly approaching shadow. He straightened his body on instinct, pointing his feet down, squeezing his eyes shut because there was no way he could watch this happen.
Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
He took the deepest breath his lungs could hold.
Five meters.
"FUCK YOU, AZIREL!" he screamed one last time.
And then the surface of Zabris Lake rushed up to meet him, the water dark and vast and completely uncaring about the fact that he was about to hit it at over two hundred kilometers per hour, and Ruho had just enough time to think this is gonna hurt so fucking bad before—