Maybe I wasn't paying attention. Maybe I had been reading too much isekai fiction and had, subconsciously, decided to try my luck. I knew intellectually it was ridiculous, but hey, maybe you could only read so much of that garbage before you started to internalize it, just a bit.
Whatever the actual reason, the truck did hit me. I saw it out of the corner of my eye a few seconds before it hit me. I didn't move, and it never stopped moving.
Frankly, it hurt more than I thought it would.
On the plus side, it was over pretty quickly too. My eyes had been open until the very last second, which is why it was such a surprise to me that I then had to open them again.
I took in my surroundings with what I deemed an admirable degree of calm, considering I was floating suspended over a pit with gusting flames, creeping tentacles, and the ugliest, most misshapen faces that may or may not have once been human.
"Didn't think I was that bad a guy," I said absently.
"What makes you think it's a question of morals?" a voice asked. I looked up, and immediately wished that I hadn't. Floating a few dozen feet above me was a a beholder. Yeah, full on Dungeons and Dungeons style flying eyeball, except this one had six fluffy wings protruding out from the eye instead of the typical horrifying eye-stalks.
An ascended beholder? I wracked my brain for everything I knew about the aberration.
Insane, xenophobic aberrations that warred on themselves only slightly less frequently than they did other races. Perfect.
"I really don't know why I said something that stupid. You're right, I have no reason to think that morals had anything to do with it," I said, deciding to go the obsequious route on the off chance that this beholder was slightly less homicidal than the rest of its peers.
"I'm not going to hurt you. You're already dead, after all," the beholder said, a slight tinge of annoyance in its voice.
"Ah, I was wondering about that," I said. "Nothing really hurts, but I guess the pit of horrors down there should've tipped me off."
"It does for most people," the beholder agreed.
There was a short pause. "Soo......." I said.
"Oh, right. I'm not normally the one introducing people to this, but you're a bit of a special case." The beholder cleared his...throat. "My name is Uriel. I am an angel. I have been sent here to offer you another retry."
The eye, Uriel if he was to be believed, looked at me expectantly.
"Uriel. Bible-style Uriel." I said.
"Yes. The very same actually."
A delusional beholder. Mildly blasphemous, but I could work with that, I thought, ignoring the monster's sigh (and how was it making all of these noises with just an eyeball and some wings?).
"Retry? Special case?" I asked. It seemed safer to stick to short questions.
"Yes. You died. And what's worse, you did it to yourself. Which, honestly, is unusual, even for you."
"I don't recall this ever happening before," I said politely, as if it was some trivial fact the aberration had overlooked.
"Of course not. You still have a human's mindset since you haven't ascended yet. If you remembered all of your past attempts, if they can really be called that, you would go totally be insane and poof. There goes your chance at ascending to the next level," Uriel, as I decided to call him since he almost certainly was reading my mind, flapped his wings a bit, as if to punctuate his point.
"I think I'm getting the picture," I said musingly.
"Really? Usually it takes people longer."
"Humanity is an experiment by some higher beings which has several stages, of which Earth is only one, probably an earlier one, and we're given retries until we have enough 'points' to ascend to the next level. We accumulate points through various acts on Earth, probably impressive ones if its a point based system, and since I'm dangling over a pit of eldritch horrors I have to assume I did not accumulate a great number of points," I said. I would've made a few grand gestures with my hands, but, on trying, I realized I was totally paralyzed from the neck down. Which, at this point, just seemed par for the course.
"No points, actually. You've had some bad runs, to be sure, but this is actually the first time you've died with no points. Even toddlers usually end up with a few points," Uriel said.
"I didn't learn to walk until I was three," I admitted.
"Fascinating," Uriel said, in a tone that made me realize that he was genuinely interested in how someone could be as much of a screw-up as I was.
I would've puffed my chest out in pride, but, you know, paralyzed.
"How many points do I need to ascend?" I asked. "Just so I know for next time."
"Not many. A few thousand. Most people get that much by their third or fourth try. Certainly keeps us busy coming up with new souls," Uriel said, the eye shaking as he chuckled.
"I assume I've been at it a bit longer. Special case and all."
"Oh yes."
"A lot longer?"
"Oh my yes."
"Enjoying this?"
"Immensely. It's been a while since we last spoke. You called me an abomination beyond description and vowed that your next life would be your last."
"Long time ago?"
"Over a thousand years," Uriel said, with glee. "They call you the eternal sucker upstairs."
I nodded. That seemed about right. "Is it a luck thing, or...?"
"Oh not at all. Everyone gets lucky eventually," Uriel said. "You managed to botch those lives in truly spectacular fashion."
I couldn't help but be curious. "For example?"
"Most spectacularly, you were a well respected general during the American Civil War. Had more points than you had ever managed to accumulate, and it wasn't even close."
