The last thing Julien Fabre ever saw was a sidewalk rushing up to meet him.
He would spend what remained of his consciousness, roughly four tenths of a second, though he wasn't in a position to measure it, trying to process the sheer indignity of the moment. He hadn't been hit by a car. He hadn't fallen from a great height. He had been walking home from the bakery, a warm baguette tucked under one arm, congratulating himself on beating the rain, when his sneaker came down on something small and slick lying in the middle of the wet pavement.
An earthworm. Flushed out by the morning storm, stranded and glistening on the concrete, utterly indifferent to the fact that it was about to end a man's life.
His foot shot out from under him like the ground itself had turned traitor. There was a moment of pure, weightless disbelief, arms pinwheeling, baguette sailing off into the gutter, and then the back of his skull met the curb with a sound he mercifully didn't get to hear.
And that, as far as Julien understood it, was the entire story of his death.
He expected darkness. He expected nothing at all. What he got instead was light, vast and formless, the color of old gold, and a woman standing in the middle of it who looked, for all the world, like she was trying very hard not to laugh.
"You," she said, "were not supposed to die today."
Julien discovered he no longer had a mouth in any conventional sense, only the vague impression of wanting one. The woman, and he understood, somehow, without being told, that woman was an inadequate word for what she was, pressed a hand to her lips. Her shoulders were already shaking.
"I do apologize," she said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. "It's only that I've been doing this a very long time, and I don't believe I've ever processed a soul who died slipping on a worm." A fresh wave of laughter escaped her, echoing through the golden nothing around them. Then something in her expression shifted, and the laughter sharpened into something closer to delight. "Oh. Oh, that's exquisite. Julien Fabre, would you like to know something amusing? The worm."
He would very much have liked her to get to the point.
"The one beneath your shoe," she went on, savoring it, "hadn't finished its business here either. Complete coincidence, I assure you, the sort the universe produces perhaps once in a millennium. Two souls, dislodged in the same careless instant, on the same stretch of pavement." Her smile widened into something almost fond. "It only seems fitting that I use the vacancy."
The cold that uncoiled in the pit of whatever passed for Julien's stomach now had nothing to do with dying.
"Since your death falls outside the natural order," she continued, "the debt is mine to settle. A fresh body, a second chance, the usual arrangement." She waved a hand, and the light rippled like water. "I'll admit I was in a hurry finalizing the paperwork. Something about the numbers didn't sit right, but honestly, for a worm, who's counting?"
He didn't get the chance to ask what that meant. The light didn't so much fade as pour into him, filling every part of what he was until there was no room left for thought, only sensation. Stretching. Compressing. A wrongness so total it erased the concept of a body having ever been any other shape. Somewhere very far away, he thought he heard her voice again, oddly hurried now, muttering about decimal points and oh well, it hardly matters before the dark swallowed everything.
Consciousness returned to Julien in pieces, and none of the pieces made sense.
There was no light. Not darkness the way a closed eyelid was dark, but the total absence of the concept of sight, nothing for a mind built on twenty two years of human vision to grab onto. He tried to blink. Nothing happened, because he no longer possessed an eyelid, or an eye, or a face to put one on.
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What he had instead was everything. His body, if it could still be called that, seemed to feel the world at once, the way a hand pressed flat against a table feels the grain of the wood. Long. Segmented. Soft in a way that should have terrified him and somehow, distantly, didn't, because terror required a nervous system arranged the way his old one had been, and this one apparently had other priorities.
I'm a fucking earthworm, he thought, with a clarity that felt entirely too calm for the situation.
He tried to think it through methodically, the way he might have once approached a physics problem he didn't want to fail. No eyes. No ears, as far as he could tell. No limbs. He dredged up everything he'd ever half listened to about earthworms in a middle school biology class, delivered by a teacher whose name he could no longer remember, and which now might be the only thing standing between him and a very short second life. Five hearts, maybe. Breathes through its skin. Moves by expanding and contracting segments, no bones, no muscle in the way he understood muscle.
He tried it. Something rippled through the length of him, an alien, boneless contraction that pushed his body a fraction of an inch forward through what he now understood, with growing dread, was packed soil. Cool and damp and impossibly heavy, pressing in from every direction like the world's most literal grave.
I died in dirt, he thought, with the particular hysteria of a man discovering his punishment fit the crime with poetic precision, and I've been reborn in more of it.
Then, without warning, something unfolded across his awareness that had no business existing in a body without eyes.
[SYSTEM]
Species: Earthworm
Level: 1
STR: 1
VIT: 2
DEF: 1
CRITICAL HIT RATE: 100%
Julien stared at it, in whatever way a creature with no eyes could be said to stare.
...That's it?
One point of strength. He had reincarnated into a worm, and somehow the universe had still found a way to insult him.
He didn't get long to sit with that thought. The pulse came again, the one he'd first mistaken for sound, radiating outward from his body and returning with an impression of near and hollow and, this time, moving. Something was closing on his position through the packed earth, unhurried, patient, far too large to be anything he wanted to meet.
He had no time to decide what to do. His body decided for him.
It happened before he understood it was happening, a single violent contraction that hurled the front of him forward through the soil toward the thing he could feel but not see, faster and more precise than a creature with no muscles and no conscious idea of how to move had any right to manage. Later, he would try to explain it to himself and fail. It hadn't felt like reflex. It had felt like obedience, as though some line of code buried far beneath his awareness had simply reached down and used him.
A flicker crossed his senses too fast to read, gone before he could ask it to stay.
MISS.
The word landed in his mind with an almost comic flatness, and for one absurd instant Julien felt something that could only be described as personally offended. A hundred percent critical hit rate, apparently, had never promised he could actually hit anything.
The pulse in the dark did not slow down.
He lunged again, blind and desperate, no strategy to speak of, nothing but the same borrowed instinct steering him toward the shape he could feel bearing down on him. This time something connected, a jolt that ran the length of his body like a plucked wire.
HIT. CRITICAL!
Damage ×10
Something screamed, high and wet and furious, somewhere very close in the dark, and Julien felt the impact travel back through his own body like a struck bell. One measly point of strength had no business doing what he'd just felt happen. Ten times nothing was still supposed to be nothing.
It hadn't been.
A second notice bloomed at the edge of his mind before the first had finished fading, and this one made something in him go very still.
[Warning: Critical damage exceeds target's remaining vitality.]
[Excess damage recorded.]
Julien had no throat to scream with, no fists to raise, no way to know for certain whether the thing hunting him was dead or simply wounded and worse for it. All he had was a soft, blind, boneless body three inches long, buried in the floor of a monster's den, a strike rate he couldn't yet trust, and the growing, uneasy suspicion that whatever he'd just killed had paid him with more than its life.