As the hands pulled Sai Haizen into the void, a piercing light erupted on the other side. That was where they were taking him—the destination of his soul—but he couldn't see it yet. His vision was entirely choked by the grotesque, grey fingers.
The scent of the hands was strange; they smelled of cold ash, dry and ancient, but never of rot. He felt a surge of unease. This wasn't death as he had imagined it. As they finally breached the light, the hands didn't set him down. They threw him.
When Sai Haizen finally forced his eyes open, he never expected to see this. Where am I?
His eyes snapped wide. He wasn't on a floor or in an afterlife. He was in the sky, approximately 30,000 feet in the air. As he tumbled, he could still see a fading glimpse of the portal closing above him. Through the shrinking rift, he saw his own body lying on the stage, becoming a tiny, motionless dot in a world he no longer belonged to.
"HEY, WAIT!" he roared, his fingers clawing at the empty air, trying to grasp a portal that was already out of reach. The rift vanished.
Click. Sai clicked his tongue in a habit of nervous frustration. "Shit!! Now what!?" His limbs were trembling, vibrating from the sheer adrenaline and the freezing bite of the atmosphere. He was a God of the Stage, a master of control, but here, he was nothing.
"Shouting isn't going to help..." he muttered through gritted teeth, trying to force his brain to work. "Crap! Crap! I don't know what to do!!!" The realization hit him like a physical blow. He panicked, flailing in the empty air. He had no parachute, no safety gear, only his leather jacket and his own terrified soul.
His eyes stung, blurring with tears as the violent gale lashed against his face. He squeezed them shut for a moment, trying to blink away the moisture, but the sheer force of the wind made it feel like his eyelids were being peeled back by invisible hooks.
"Damn it! I died and now this!..." he hissed into the wind. He tried to steady his heart, his defiance from the arena flickering back to life. "I'm not going to die here." You think you had me goo—"
His boast was cut short.
A massive shadow erupted from behind a thick bank of clouds. A dragon swept through the mist, its scales shimmering like obsidian. It circled closer, eyes locked onto the defenseless human falling through the sky, clearly marking him as a mid-air snack.
"Ahhh, shit! NOW WHAT?!"
As the dragon lunged, Sai instinctively squeezed his eyes shut and threw his arms over his face. He braced for the crunch of bone, the hot, wet snap of teeth that would end his second life before it even began. He waited for the end.
The world was a roar of white noise.
As the beast's shadow flickered away, Sai forced his eyes open against the biting gale. A surge of relief was immediately swallowed by a stinging, salt-laced confusion. How? Why am I still breathing? He glared at the receding silhouette of the dragon, his voice a ragged whisper lost to the roar of the atmosphere.
"What, am I not tasty enough for you? Is that it?!"
The bravado vanished the moment he looked down. Below him, the world was a blurred, spinning mosaic of endless emerald canopy and a single, deep indigo eye: a massive lagoon buried in the heart of the forest. It was a beautiful sight, and at this velocity, it was a death sentence.
"Crap! Think, Sai... think!" He hissed through grit teeth. "From this height, that water isn't a landing pad. It's a granite floor. But if it's deep enough... if I hit it just right..."
A spark flared in the back of his panicked mind. A memory of a weekend trip, a plane door opening, and the terrifying rush of a jump he'd mastered in a single afternoon. The lessons. Focus on the lessons.
Abandoning his flailing, Sai forced his muscles to override the instinct to scream. He snapped his limbs outward, fighting the chaotic air currents. He arched his back with a sharp, disciplined crack, pushing his hips toward the abyss while his arms and legs formed a wide, rigid 'X'.
He wasn't just falling anymore; he was piloting. He adjusted his palms, feeling the invisible pressure of the air like the resistance of a heavy guitar string. He used every ounce of his fast-learning intuition to "catch" the wind, stabilizing his terminal velocity into a high-stakes glide toward that dark blue circle.
"Just like the simulation," he hissed through grit teeth. The water below was no longer a surface; it was a rising indigo slab, a dark mirror reflecting his own end. "Enter like a needle, or die like a bug. Here goes nothing..."
With a violent snap, Sai streamlined his body into a vertical spear. He stared down at the rushing surface, his pupils blown wide, tracking the distance until the last possible second. Then, he clamped his mouth shut, tucked his chin, and squeezed his eyes into a tight, defensive grimace, bracing every fiber of his being for the collision.
In that final inch, the world fractured. His life didn't flash before his eyes; it was peeled away. For a heartbeat, the phantom roar of four million fans echoed in the void, but as the water rushed to meet him, their cheers sounded hollow—like the dying feedback of a broken amp. He wasn't a legend anymore. He was just a body, falling through the cracks of a world that didn't know his name
"I'm not going to die here!" he roared in his mind, the thought a jagged blade of pure defiance.
A micro-second before the strike, the air didn't just move. It tore. A single, jagged frequency ripped through the silence, sounding like the sky itself was being unzipped. There was no magic, no glow; just a sudden, violent distortion in the space between his feet and the surface.
Then, the impact.
The collision didn't feel like water. It felt like a detonating bomb. The air was punched out of his lungs in a single, silent gasp as the liquid darkness swallowed him whole. The world didn't just fade; it vanished. The vision blackened instantly as the deceleration snapped his consciousness like a glass filament, plunging his mind into a deep, crushing quiet that not even his memories could follow.
An hour passed. The slow, mercury-heavy pulse of the lagoon eventually pushed his limp form onto the pale, mossy bank.
Sai's world returned in a violent surge of brine and burning oxygen. He jolted back into consciousness, retching violet-tinted water onto the shore. His lungs screamed as they fought to reinflate. He stayed there for a long time, face pressed into the damp, silver grit, until the frantic ringing in his brain finally quieted.
Once his vision stabilized, he pushed himself up on shaking arms and looked around in awe.
The place was... surreal. Places like this were near impossible in his world. This wasn't a coast; it was a hidden eye in the center of an emerald nightmare. The lagoon was a cathedral of indigo, its water a deep, unnatural violet that didn't ripple like Earthly lakes. It moved with a heavy, thick grace.
The forest loomed over the water, trunks twisted like braided muscle rising hundreds of feet into the air. Iridescent, fan-shaped leaves blocked out the sky. There was no wind, yet the forest vibrated with a low, rhythmic hum that Sai could feel in his marrow.
He looked up at the sky with a grim expression, staring toward the heights from which he had fallen.
"I will make sure that I get my revenge and return to my world!" he shouted. His voice echoed, swallowed quickly by the dense canopy. But for now...
"This feels weird..." he whispered, his voice cracking in the humid air.
He began to check his body, hands shaking as they ran over his ribs. He remembered the bone-shattering force of the impact. He had expected to find jagged fractures or a body broken beyond repair. But as he peeled back his torn, salt-crusted sleeve, he froze.
"I thought I had a lot of fractures. I'm sure of that," he muttered, eyes wide as he stared at his pristine palms. "But... somehow, not a single injury is on my body. Not a scratch."
He stood up experimentally, bracing for agony, but his legs held him with an alien strength. He felt reinforced. The "Guitar King" of Earth was gone. Whatever was standing in the middle of this forest now was something else entirely. He was a blank page, standing in a world made of color and weight he didn't yet understand.
Sighing, he realized he had nothing left. His guitar was gone, leaving him with only his torn outfit in the middle of nowhere. Only God knows where I am. Wait... does the God I know even exist here? Enough with that. That isn't the main concern.
"For now, I'll go this wa—"
CRACK.
Somewhere deep in the forest, a branch snapped. It wasn't the sound of a falling limb; it was the rhythmic weight of something waking up.
"Now what!!"
Sai froze. "Who's that!"
The reinforced feeling in his muscles turned into a cold, electric tension. From the curtain of braided trees, a massive shape detached itself from the shadows. It didn't walk; it shifted, its footsteps heavy enough to make the teal water ripple in perfect circles. It was a titan of wood and bone, its body a jagged landscape of dark timber and stone draped in weeping willow-like vines. It had no face, only a vertical rift in its head that glowed with the intensity of a dying star.
It emitted a low-frequency hum that vibrated the air so hard Sai's teeth ached. It was the forest's heartbeat. And it was looking right at him.
Survival instinct, raw and prehistoric, overrode his shock. Sai didn't think about his persona. He just ran.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!! What is that thing!!!"
He ran fast. Running away from his problems was the one thing he was truly good at, but the Guardian was impossible to stop. He dove into the dense treeline, the braided trunks blurring past him. He looked back, thinking for a second he might have lost it.
"Panting... looks like I lost him. But don't relax now. I know how this works. You think you're in the clear, but the thing you're running from does something unexpected. I must be caref—"
CRUNCH.
The loud sound of the Guardian wasn't fast, but it was unstoppable. Every stride sounded like a tree trunk being snapped in half.
"Just as I expected!"
Sai's lungs burned, but there was no stopping. The forest was a labyrinth. Iridescent leaves slapped his face. "Ouch!" Roots seemed to rise up specifically to trip him. He stumbled, hitting the ground hard. "Shit!" He scrambled back up and kept running.
He was trapped between the crushing weight of a god-like beast and a forest that didn't want him there. Suddenly, he saw a very bright light in the distance.
"That must be the exit!"
He burst through a thicket of glowing ferns, gasping for breath, and skidded to a halt at the edge of a steep ravine.
Dead end.
"Oh FUCK! I KNEW IT!! IT'S ALWAYS THIS! A RAVINE!"
The hum of the Guardian grew louder. Teal light reflected off the trees behind him. Sai spun around, back to the cliff, and snatched up a heavy stick, raising it as if it were a sword.
"Stay back!" he choked out, the words feeling pathetic in the face of the towering titan.
The Guardian raised a massive fist, ready to crush the intruder into the moss. Sai's body betrayed him, trembling so hard the stick nearly fell from his hands. Then, a voice drifted from the shadows to his left, calm, gravelly, and entirely alien.
"Vaka terfuryuka aspid, shagit pawad terika vatu."
Sai's heart hammered against his ribs. Huh? What is she saying!? He looked at the shadow, then back at the towering titan. He didn't know the words, but he felt the weight behind them. Based on the way she's standing... I think she's telling me not to move.
Sai forced his muscles to lock. He suppressed the urge to scream, regulating his breath into a jagged, silent rhythm. To his shock, the Guardian paused. The glowing rift in its head dimmed, and the titan slowly began to back away, melting back into the emerald nightmare of the forest.
Sai's eyes widened, his mouth hanging open. "So... that's how it's done, huh?"
The adrenaline vanished instantly. His reinforced legs turned to water, and his vision swirled into a dark vortex. As he collapsed toward the moss, a figure stepped out of the gloom, looking down at him with cold, observant eyes.
"Oi, Gepa raka? Tili matum."
Before Sai could even wonder what those words meant, the world went black.
To be continued...