"Kair!" A loud shout echoed throughout the auditorium as a student entered through the doors. His appearance was shabby, dark eyebags thoroughly visible. He had a tall and lanky physique which was fortunately covered up by puffy, oversized clothing.
Combined with his messy hair, he seemed no different than a slightly well-off homeless boy and would definitely have been mistaken as such were it not for his school bag, highlighting his status as a student.
"You are late again! What excuse do you have this time?" The teacher yelled at Kair, his face a picture of annoyance.
The auditorium had fallen silent, some snickering here and there. This had become a daily occurrence for the students of the Neuroscience [I] course, Kair's inability to arrive to class on point not surprising anyone anymore.
"My apologies, Professor Hammer. It won't happen again." Kair responded in a monotone voice, bowing his head lightly with his hair falling over and covering his face.
"Hmph" the professor harrumphed, waving his hand dismissively as he turned back around to the projected whiteboard, continuing his lecture.
Kair dejectedly walked towards an empty seat towards the back of the auditorium sitting down and turning his attention towards the lecture, yawning occasionally. He waited out the class, paying minimal attention when finally, the bell rang. Signaling the end of the lecture, Kair immediately left the auditorium.
Professor Hammer shook his head as he saw Kair leave, his facial expression oozing regret.
"What a shame. Such a talented young man, wasting it all away."
Kair was quite the 'genius' himself. Almost acing all his classes, it was safe to say that he was an academically worthy contender for receiving valedictory. Yet, it almost seemed like the boy had no ambition in him.
Not exactly oblivious to the criticism his professor constantly had been showered him with, Kair walked ahead, seemingly unbothered about his future.
Well, that wouldn't be even close to the truth.
Kair's parents had passed away when he still was extremely young.
Due to the fact that his side of the family had been ostracized by the rest due to clashing ideologies, he had been practically left all on his own. Such a young boy of barely 8 years old going through the most traumatic experience of his life right then and there... the world was a harsh one.
Deciding to at least do something worthwhile of his life, he made up his mind to study to become someone that, in the future, wouldn't ever be put in a position of such helplessness again.
Pursuing academic excellence in order to land a well-paying job, Kair worked his ass off. So much in fact, that his future prospects were looking brighter than they ever had before.
However, only later would Kair come to realize that all the effort he had put in so far would be rendered useless as of today.
At around 5 p.m., Kair's classes for the day concluded.
"Damn, what an exhausting day."
Yawning, Kair packed his things in his bag and made his way outside of the campus.
Hearing his stomach growl, he decided that paying a visit to the convenience store to pick up dinner was the best option.
"I'll maybe get some chicken and rice..." He murmured, his eyes half closed as he yawned again from tiredness.
Walking onto the crosswalk, his mind completely lost in thought, he couldn't have been prepared for the series of events that were about to unfold.
Suddenly walking across the crosswalk, he started feeling weird. Focusing on his surroundings, he found himself staring at the horrified faces of the pedestrians on the sidewalk, he himself being the only person in the middle of the road.
Without getting the chance to wonder about why this was, his view was soon soon invaded by a bright and blinding light coming from his left. When he turned around to face the source, his eyes widened and his heart nearly came to a stop.
A car was speeding towards him, the red-driver wearing the same horrified look as the pedestrians. Contrary to his expression however, the car continued speeding towards him illegally at illegally fast speeds, not slowing down in the slightest.
To Kair, in that moment, it was like time had stopped with him frozen being in place. His body felt like it was being crawled on by ants, adrenaline pumping viciously through his entire system. In that moment, random memories from across Kair's life started flashing in his vision.
This is what we would call 'life flashing before our eyes' which, according to researchers, everyone experienced right before death. Some scientists however who studied the phenomenon, had a very different take on this.
This wasn't really the brain reliving all its past memories as a tribute to the life that was about to be lost.
No, this was the brain itself combing through its recollections at a rate faster than it had computed information ever before, desperately trying to find something to help it escape the oncoming doom.
All of Kair's episodic memories indexed and stored in his temporal lobe were laid bare, with the sole intent on somehow finding a method to escape certain death.
However what happened to Kair here was something much more peculiar, as well as unprecedented. Kair's brain had simply exceeded its limits. When one experiences an overload of information, they experience a loss of memory, lack of concentration, mental fatigue and so forth.
Similarly for Kair, due to his brain inexplicably working at a much higher speed than it was meant to and experiencing said informational overload to a severity far, far beyond what the brain could handle, in between the split second where the car coming towards him was just a hair's breadth away from crushing his body, he died.
Why?
When someone exceeds natural limits set by one's own body, they face backlash. When someone sprains an ankle, twisting it far beyond what it is supposed to, it becomes inflamed, hurting for days before healing itself.
The backlash becomes worse as the severity of the overexertion increases. In this case, this backlash was so large that Kair's brain and body couldn't handle it, with his brain collapsing in on itself effectively killing him before the car could even hit him. The death was painless, the death was instantaneous; it was ironically the most peaceful death one could ever hope for.
The time between Kair noticing the car coming towards him and his death was difficult to describe. On one hand, it felt like it was a lifetime before he truly died. On the other, time couldn't have been passing any slower.
All he could think about was the car, its headlights blinding him and the terrified look the driver was wearing. It was as if he had slipped into a flow state, uncaring for the impending doom, as all he did, and could do, was observe.
Then he lost consciousness, a moment second before the car rammed into him, breaking all his bones. His ribs caved in, piercing his lungs as they spurted blood. His spine cracked, broke and ripped through his skin, gleaming white bones protruding from his back. His face was rammed against the hood of the vehicle, breaking his skull and turning it into a mush of brain matter and bones, liquids squeezing out of it like a water balloon with holes.
His arms and legs bent out of shape, shattering on impact. His foot flew off of his ankles, being brutally sliced off by the car's bumper. The shoe, still tied tightly to the foot, landed in front of a pedestrian who, after a moment of stupor, fainted from horror seeing the foot-covering drenched in blood with flesh poking out of it.
The moment of impact was loud, degrading the driver's drugged mental state even more, leading him to lose control and crash the car into a large concrete wall. Due to this, he also died a fraction of a second after impact, the force thoroughly crushing his body.
The sudden deceleration caused him to experience an insane g-force, also granting him an instantaneous and painless passing although filled with horror and gore, yet still leaving him in a comparatively better state than Kair.
The car meanwhile also took Kair's corpse along with it, ramming it between the wall and the car, mutilating it even more and disfiguring any and every part of his body that still could have been considered to be relatively intact.
As the final act, the car caught on fire, the fuel tank sparking and exploding in flames whilst burning the remains of the driver's and Kair's corpses along with it.
All of this happened so fast that everyone at the scene stood frozen for half a moment, before screaming and rushing away, some calling the police, some grabbing their loved ones and some fleeing the scene.
The stench of fuel and blood began to fill the air, the foul combination causing everyone still present to hurriedly clamp their hands over their noses.
The accident luckily did not fatally injure anyone other than Kair and the driver; only one person in the area suffered a second-degree burn from the heat given off by the explosion of the vehicle.
The police, the fire department and ambulances arrived at the site five minutes later with the entire city square being evacuated temporarily to avoid any more unforeseen injuries.
Meanwhile Kair, or rather his consciousness, was floating a void.
Instead of having a body of flesh, he was now wholly ethereal. Pulses of red, blue and green alternated through ghastly 'body'.
After who knows how long, Kair finally showed signs of waking up. Opening his eyes groggily, he sat up, disoriented.
'Where am I?'
Noticing the never-ending, pitch-black darkness surrounding him and most of all his ethereal self, he froze.
'Huh? Did I die?'
As if on cue, the vague recollections that he had of his death resurfaced again. Witnessing the event, a shiver went down his 'spine'.
Of course, all he saw was the point until his brain was still active. Silently thanking himself for dying before he could experience any of the gruesomeness of when the car actually hit him, he slipped into thought.
All in all, Kair was taking literally dying quite well. Especially for someone who didn't believe in the existence of things like souls.
Being a student studying neuroscience, it was safe to say that Kair had a more scientifical view on life, especially the death that lay beyond. Firmly believing that there was nothing after death, Kair had lived his life wholly disregarding the other possibility that the world seemed to believe in.
However, all of his previous beliefs were being thrown out the window. I mean, how else could he still be 'alive' after almost certainly dying? Heaven and earth had to exist, right?
After an indefinite time of just sitting their, contemplating his life thus far, he collected himself. Pushing all the sadness, rage, fear and relief away he decided to get up and start moving. After all, what was the purpose of regret and emotions when he was already dead?
Standing up, not thinking much about what surface he was currently on, he began to walk. He didn't really know where to. In this void, what was there to even explore or see?
'Void?'
Kair chuckled, which really was just an opening of his ethereal 'mouth'.
'Right, the Void.'
Kair had been, along with a genius student, an accomplished author. So accomplished in fact that one of his widely famous light novels, 'Chaos', had been securely staying in the top tens for years.
It had been an extremely unique take on the entire fantasy genre. As well as having both a female and a male protagonists, the book was quite a hit with a large number of readers.
Obviously, since this was Kair's best novel with a few hundred chapters, it'd be firmly engraved into his memory. For this exact reason, Kair felt a bit weirded out right now.
"The Void I'm in looks suspiciously similar to the 'Dark Zone' in my novel, doesn't it? Not that pitch-blackness is only constrained to my novel, but still... also, what's up with my soul? It looks exactly like what I had in mind when describing consciousnesses when writing 'Chaos'..." Kair mused.
However, before he could continue his thoughts a blinding light flashed in the darkness, sending tremors through the space he was standing on. It rocked the entire area, his ethereal representation fluttering from the force.
BOOM!