At first it sounded muffled, but it echoed, clear and steady.

"No, {{username}}. You are not allowed to die."

Something grabbed you by the throat, and you struggled uselessly. In that empty space where none of your screams felt like screams, with your entire being falling and decaying to give way to darkness, something reached out and shoved you back hard, to grab you before you could succumb.

As if water were flowing through you, you struggled to breathe.

When you were born, the war had ended around you, and death hung in the air afterward. In the midst of it all, you were alive. Again.

"What the hell?"

You, frankly, had lost count of how many times you had been revived. The pattern was this: Bam would face another enemy, be it Jahad, FUG, or your own dead father, and would engage them because, of course, why couldn't they? Then you would lose your life on the battlefield, because a mere regular in the sea of raging monsters, high up in the tower, had no place in that great struggle for power. Your life would flash before your eyes, sometimes with your name etched in the powerful agony of Bam's voice, and then you would collapse in exhaustion.

Then you would come back to life again, as was happening now.

You sat up and looked around. A high-ranking figure, an ancient being like Rak, had murdered you this time. You should have been doomed. Not even the firefish had the power to bring you back to life, but now.

Now.

With the silent air of death surrounding you, something else had also changed. You thought you heard a voice, almost muffled as if underwater, almost unrecognizable if it weren't the only presence at that moment.

The voice sounded powerful.

Is that what revived me?

You turned your attention to the flank. The wound had completely disappeared. Unbelievable.

"Pocket: Visible Mode," you muttered, hoping to contact one of your allies. The familiar black orb didn't manifest beside you as it should have. You swallowed hard.

When you looked up again, you gasped loudly and fell flat on your butt.

"Hello," a familiar man greeted unceremoniously, his expression too soft to the point of being frantic. He hovered inches from your face, crouched low, scaring the hell out of you.

"Bam—?" No. It wasn't quite Bam, but someone almost identical. He had those familiar golden eyes you adored so much, the height and build, the distinct shape of his lips, but other features were too out of place to be mistaken for your best friend's. His dark hair, for example, framed his face with longer strands and a long tail over his shoulder. And the whites of his eyes were completely black.

The longer you stared at him, the more the differences became apparent. His eyes were a little colder, lacking the wide-eyed, innocent expression Bam naturally possessed, and they seemed too manic to belong to a precious wave controller. He wore a black robe with a silver line at the neckline, and the sleeves covered only his upper arms. Each movement of his wrists made a cluster of jeweled bracelets vibrate against each other, the only traces of vibration other than his eyes.

The man blinked. "I peeked into your memories and transformed myself into a composite of your most beloved person."