Sirius sprinted through the hallway like a man escaping a battlefield.
His shoes slapped against the polished floor, each step faster than the last, each breath more desperate. His keys jingled wildly at his hip. His messenger bag bounced against his back. His entire soul focused on one singular objective.
"Come on—come on—COME ON—!"
He fumbled with the doorknob, shoved his apartment door open, and bolted inside, almost tripping over his own socks on the floor. He didn't even bother turning on the lights. Muscle memory guided him straight into the bathroom.
He slammed the door shut, dropped his bag, ripped down his pants, and aimed his rear toward salvation.
"Finally—"
His heel caught the edge of the bathmat.
He slipped.
Sirius flailed.
The world spun.
BANG!
His skull collided with the porcelain toilet seat with a sickening sound.
CRACK!!
Pain exploded across his vision. White, sharp, blinding, and then immediately began to fade. He felt warmth pooling under his head. His breathing stuttered. His limbs twitched once, then went numb.
"Oh… god…" he whispered, struggling to move. He couldn't even feel his fingers. "Not like this…"
He tried to laugh. It came out as a wet choke.
"I only wanted… five minutes of peace…"
The bathroom lights flickered in his fading sight. His heartbeat slowed. Something cold crept through his veins.
He was dying.
On a toilet!
He tried again to laugh. Because what else could he do? However, blackness was already swallowing the edges of his vision.
As the world dimmed, something strange happened.
Sirius heard voices.
Not from the hallway. Not from neighbors. Not from reality.
They were everywhere. Around him. Inside him.
Deep and echoing, like whispers through a cavern.
"Rise… rise… rise…"
"Oh great lord, hear us…"
"Return to us, eternal one…"
"We offer everything… our blood… our lives… our devotion…"
His pulse weakened. His vision collapsed to a tunnel.
"What… the hell…?"
"Oh divine tyrant… resurrect… resurrect… resurrect…"
"I think… you have the wrong guy…" he muttered.
Everything went dark. Silence.
Cold.
Weightlessness.
Then came a sensation.
Woooong…
A distant thrum.
A pull, like gravity, dragging him downward, inward, through some narrow funnel of existence.
Sirius felt his consciousness stretch, then compress, then stretch again. Something ancient brushed against him, memories that weren't his, fragments of spells he'd never cast, emotions that didn't belong to him.
Something was pulling him into a body.
Something dead.
Pain returned—not human pain, not flesh-and-blood pain, but a cold burn spreading through bone and mana.
A heartbeat… but not his.
Then his body jolted.
He inhaled sharply, though he didn't actually breathe.
His eyes snapped open.
He saw darkness, wooden beams overhead, faint candlelight flickering along cracked walls carved with uneven runes.
He sat upright in a single violent motion, like a corpse rejecting the coffin lid.
A dozen people screamed.
"Eeeek—!!"
"He lives!"
"Lord Sirius rises!"
Sirius blinked.
Then blinked again.
…Nothing. He couldn't blink. He had eyelids.
He lifted his hand.
A complete skeletal hand.
The villagers fell to their knees in worshipful terror.
"H-Hail the Eternal Tyrant!"
"Hail our God-King!"
"Forgive us if the summoning took longer than expected! We did not doubt you for a moment!"
"Please do not smite us!" A lot of them pleaded with him on their knees.
Sirius stared and they stared back.
He stared harder.
They bowed harder.
Slowly, very slowly, he rotated his wrist and looked at his skeletal fingers. There were delicate runes etched into the bones. Perfectly carved. Someone must've done it while this body was dead.
He touched his jawbone. Cold. Smooth.
His robes, tattered velvet and black silk, hung elegantly over his bony frame.
His voice, when he finally spoke, was a low, echoing resonance. Calm. Cold. Undeniably powerful.
"…Explain."
The villagers froze. Then one woman, trembling violently, stepped forward.
"O-Oh G-Great Lich King Sirius, our undying ruler… we never d-d-doubted your might, but after your battle—" she gulped "—after you fell… we could not accept it. So we brought your body back to our village shrine. We offered our blood… our devotion… and attempted the Ritual of Eternal Return."
'Lich King?' He had read enough fantasy lores to know what a lich was. It was no wonder he was made of bones and only bones.
Sirius narrowed his empty eye sockets.
Internally, he was screaming. 'My name might be Sirius but I am the wrong one! I just died in the toilet!'
But externally?
He maintained perfect composure.
"…Continue," he commanded. He couldn't afford to scare these people
She nodded frantically. "W-We attempted the ritual for seven nights. But nothing happened. We thought perhaps… Perhaps the runes were wrong. Or our sacrifices were insufficient."
Another villager chimed in, weeping, "But behold! You rose! You returned to us! Our one true god could never fall!"
Sirius slowly tilted his skull upward. 'God?'
He was a guy who slipped on a bathmat.
Still… This situation was dangerous. They expected someone powerful. Someone tyrannical. Someone divine.
He could not disappoint them. Or they might panic and in their panic, they might kill him. Or they might draw unwanted attention to him before he could even understand what the hell happened.
He needed information. A plan. A cover.
And given the body he was in?
Pretending to be a terrifying undead overlord wasn't the worst strategy.
Sirius rose from the slab. His robes flowed dramatically, as if an unseen wind obeyed his presence. The villagers gasped in collective awe.
He stepped forward. Each footstep echoed with soft magical resonance. His bones glowed faintly blue, mana swirling through them like starlight.
He wasn't sure if that was normal. Or if this body was just showing off.
But it worked.
One by one, villagers pressed their foreheads to the ground.
"So what you mean," Sirius said, letting a cold and regal tone slip into his voice, "is that my… previous vessel was destroyed."
They nodded rapidly.
"And you restored me with your ritual."
More nodding.
"And you expect me to continue ruling as your god."
All of them shouted in unison. "YES, LORD SIRIUS!"
Sirius internally sighed. 'Fantastic.'
A cult.
He turned away from them and examined the small shrine room. Candles placed in a circle. Badly drawn runes. A crudely carved skeletal idol. Offerings of dried flowers, old bones, and… was that a chicken leg?
Pathetic.
But workable.
He lifted his hand, channeling mana instinctively, only for power to roar through him like a tidal wave.
Brrrrrrrr…
His hand jerked upward in shock. Energy crackled around his fingers uncontrollably.
The villagers shrieked in awe. "HE HAS SUMMONED THE FLAME OF JUDGMENT!"
"HE HAS PREPARED A DIVINE MIRACLE!"
"PLEASE DO NOT INCINERATE US, GREAT LORD!"
Sirius quickly lowered his hand before he leveled the entire village by accident. "…This will take some getting used to," he murmured.
He needed to learn how to control this mana. Needed to study the world. Needed to figure out how he died, how he got here, who this original Lich was, and how much trouble he'd inherited.
But for now?
He needed to survive.
He turned back to the villagers.
"Rise," he commanded, voice like winter steel. "Your god has returned. And there is much work to be done."
They erupted in cheers.
Sirius watched them, quiet and calculating.
'Alright,' he thought grimly. 'Let's see where this ridiculous new life takes me…'