NOVEL NEXT Chapter 1: Great Reset.
Chapter 1: Great Reset.
The end of the world… Have you ever thought about it? Well, I haven’t. Not even once… Why am I bringing this up? I’ll get to that in a second, hold your horses!
Anyway, my name is Celia. I might be getting ahead of myself but, before I died, I was a 32 year old teacher. Yeah, I died, and so did a lot of other people. Just give me a few more minutes, I am in the process of dying…
Or have I already died?… Even if I did, I can at least narrate my last thoughts. So, I was a teacher, at a very high class college. No. I never had a relationship with anyone.
If I think back to it, I was always a lesbian. But that wasn’t why I never dated anyone. I just never felt like dating. Ah, what am I even talking about now?…
Right… so, before the year of 2028 could come to a close, the world ended… And it ended with a *bang!* as well. It was just a normal day like always. I was just helping out a student with some of their assignments. That was when the world shook.
I do wish that the world would have ended just then. Like, if it just exploded for some reason. But, no. Beings from other worlds hopped into ours. Seemingly, they were God’s, Goddesses, and demons. As to why they came to this world, no one knows.
The death of this world wasn’t quick at all. Though I say that, I do not actually know if it ended completely. It was an apocalypse sure, but that doesn’t mean that the world couldn’t come back from the brink.
As for how I died, after those beings showed up, the worse sides of humanity reared their ugly heads. For ten years, it was a daily struggle for food and water.
So? What grandiose way did I die? Did I get killed by some asshole just looking to steal some food and water from me? Oh, what about one of those beings getting angry at me? No, none of that. At least, not directly…
I ended up doing something that you wouldn’t ever expect a college teacher to be able to do, I turned the college that I worked at, into a fort. In only two years, it became one of the last bastions of hope for Japan. Ah, I forgot to mention that I lived in Japan… Oops?
The reason why isn’t important, I was born in America, but I moved to Japan, since they treat and pay their teachers far better than my home country.
Ah, right, my fort. So, I ran that place like a fine oiled machine. There were already decent sized farms on campus, and there were pretty well made workshops as well. These facilities were what made my place last so damn long.
Those higher beings usually ignored us completely, so we only had to worry about our fellow humans most of the time. Though, in the past few years, creatures straight out of a fantasy game started showing up. Mostly harmless ones, like slimes.
So… what happened, and why did I end up dying? Was it betrayal from my trusted allies? Was it from a raid? Enough beating around the bush, I died from a Goddess going on a rampage…
None of our weapons could hope to do any damage to her at all. Nor our knives, or firearms that we made. I still have no idea why that asshole of a Goddess showed up, and decided to ruin this place that I worked so hard to create...
Ah, I can open my eyes, so I guess that I am not dead just yet. Which really sucks… Considering how much pain that I am in at the moment…
Looking around, I could see the destruction of a decent portion of my life’s work… Bodies and debris were strewn about the place, like a fucked up kids party…
As for me, oh God… I am missing my left arm, and two of my legs. Yeah, good idea me! Attack the Goddess head on! That would surely end well… Well, it surely did NOT end well for me. I think that all I achieved in that assault, was to piss her off further…
There is no way for me to make it out of this mess, so I guess I should just ruminate on this entire situation. After five years since those beings showed up, the world was pretty messed up, to say the least.
About a year ago, we lost all communication with the other remaining settlements across the world. Despite what happened, the internet was still usable. As for what happened to the others, I guess that I will never find out…
Maybe it was that Goddess that destroyed them? It’s hard to say. Thinking about her, it was a Goddess who is known around Japan, so it would have been weird for her to fuck up a different country.
Man… that is a LOT of blood coming out of me… Hm… if only my mind wasn’t becoming useless due to the blood loss, I could perhaps figure out how much of my blood is on the floor now…
Even with a muddled mind, I think that I maybe have just a few more minutes before I finally die. Even though the world was over, people would still make things. It fucking sucks that I will never be able to finish that Yuri novel that I started reading a while back…
Games are pretty hard to make, so our only real source of entertainment these days, were written media. Hey, did you know? If someone flips enough switches, everything stored on the internet can easily be erased. Cool, right?
No. Not cool at all… We did manage to get the internet back up and running, but most of the data was lost. The backup storage servers that tons of companies owned, had some data left on them. But it was mostly useless data, like corporate records and the like.
Either no data hoarder of entertainment survived, or they just didn’t care to let people have access to their data, I don’t really know. There was SOME useful data that was saved, such as survival guides, oddly.
So, yeah. Everyone had to start from scratch. It took two years before a social media site was able to be made. Before that, communication was very difficult.
Well. I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. Seeing as most likely the world is over for us tiny humans… Ah, I can feel it… My consciousness is slowly slipping away…
I never thought that I would die like this… Frankly, I also never knew that dying could feel so peaceful… My brain most likely realizes that this is the end, and isn’t sending any pain signals throughout my body any more.
In my last moments, I wonder if I have any regrets? None that I can think of right now, with my thoughts slowing down to a crawl…
And just like that, I died…
Or, shouldn’t I have died by now? There was clearly no way for me to survive that… Am I in heaven or hell? With the fact that God’s and Goddesses exist, maybe the afterlife exists as well?
Something… is wrong. I can see, but, it’s not like how you see through your eyes… I try to “look” around, and I am horrified at the realization of my new situation… Why the fuck am I now a cell!?