Ryder does not die.

Kitty's bullet flies true for a split second before Jake is there, swinging his bigass battle axe in its path. There's a tiny CLINK as his axe blade hits her bullet. By the time the harmless projectile rolls to a stop on the ground, Jake's returned the halberd to its customary casual position over his shoulder.

"Cool it, Kitty," Jake says offhandedly, as if smacking bullets out of midair with a halberd is just another everyday occurrence and holy-crap he-just-hit-a-bullet-after-she-shot-it-at-me. "It's the kid's first day; cut him some slack."

Kitty reluctantly returns her firearm to its concealed sheath behind her back and folds her arms across her chest. "Happy?"

Jake nods and turns towards Ryder. "You okay there, man?"

"Death Eaters. Coming to reap our souls. Because we're not-dead." Saying the words out loud doesn't make them anymore believable, Ryder thinks.

Sam draws a finger across his throat. "Just like that. Though really, it could be anywhere on your body. Just as long as they slice your head or torso in half."

"We're not alive either," Kitty adds. Ryder gawks at the frying pan suddenly resting in her lap—where the hell did that come from? "Remember?"

Ryder's head is nodding frantically before he can even tell it to. "Yeah, I get that."

"But we don't planning on dying—again—any time soon," Sam crows. "And that's why we're different then everybody else here: we even have our own uniforms." Sam poses proudly, showing off the black suit jacket. "We're the Not-Dead Battlefront!"

It's as if Kitty has suddenly gained the power of teleportation just so she can zoom across the room and smash Sam's face in with her frying pan, amidst groans of "Seriously?" and "Laaame," and "No, we're too awesome for not-dead," and "Stupid, all of you are so stupid."

"Com'on, guys!" Sam whines, reforming his dented face. "Anybody have a better idea?"

"Almost Dead Battlefront!"

"Turning In Our Graves Battlefront!"

"Unicorns United Battlefront!"

"Hell's Gate Battlefront!"

"Like Hell I'm Dead Battlefront!"

"This is so stupid," Tina scoffs.

"Aw hell to da no," a new voice declares, drawing Ryder's attention back to the clamor of argument. Who Ryder assumes to be Lady-Brittany squeezes past Brittany and bustles into the center of the room. "We be the Afterlife Battlefront, y'all. Discussion ended, cuz we have more pressing matters: Meow-Brittany's sixth sense is acting up. She's been running around in front of the cafeteria all day."

"I see it, Adams," Tina calls from her dark corner of the room. She presses her back against the wall and, to Ryder's amazement, just seems to dissolve out of sight.

What.

How.

But—

"She does that all the time," Blaine murmurs into Ryder's ear. "Com'on, let's go."

"Go do what?" Ryder asks in bewilderment as the surrounding students ready their weapons. Sam pulls open a safe and starts throwing firearms out to his friends, who accept them without a word and dart out through the door and around the large stone hammer still hanging in the hallway outside. "Is somebody's sixth sense really that important?" he calls after Blaine.

The guy pauses for a second. "When it comes to Sugar," he says after ensuring Brittany isn't in the room, "Going crazy means we have trouble coming."

"Or that fish balls are being served for dinner," Sam adds helpfully. "Catch!"

By reflex, Ryder catches the tiny handgun thrown his way. It's just a lump of metal without biosensor synchronizers—nothing that tracks targets, nothing that senses surrounding lifeforms, not even anything that gives him feedback on his own heart rate or breathing patterns. It's just a lump of metal that makes him do everything by himself.

"I can't use this!" Ryder protests honestly, trying to pass the weapon back to the blonde. "Sam, I—"

Sam is suddenly there, his hands enclosing around Ryder's, folding Ryder's own fingers around the pistol. "Ryder, this is very real," Sam says seriously, his hands warm around Ryder's, staring deep into Ryder's eyes. "Those Reapers are coming to kill us, and if they succeed, we aren't coming back. We need you, Ryder. I need you. I need your strength, your stamina, your power, your muscles—"

"Uh, sorry man, but I, um, don't exactly swing that way."

The glimmering light behind Sam's heartfelt green eyes pops as he frantically backpedals a couple steps. "Ah, no! Nonono, hahaha, I totally didn't mean it like that!"

Both boys look awkwardly at the ceiling, the floor, the couch, anywhere but each other. The room is devoid of the noisy students and the awkwardness just hangs heavy in the air, slowly suffocating them—

"Yeah, sure. I'll join your Whatever Battlefront," Ryder blurts sheepishly, just to fill the awkward silence with something. "Not like I have anything else to do as a not-dead somebody."

"Great!" Sam cries. "Okay, let's go!" And with that, he's so frantic to escape the awkwardness that he settles for jumping straight through the nearest window.

There's got to be something wrong with psychics here, Ryder speculates, as Sam practically floats down five stories to land directly on top of Blaine. Blaine yells at him, but both pick themselves off the ground and brush dust off their shoulders before continuing to run past Brody's bloody form, which is slowly peeling itself off the concrete.

Ryder looks down at the weapon in his hands. Waking up in an unfamiliar world without a clue as to how he got there, dying twice and coming back to life twice, and… and flying. Somewhere in that mess of memories, there's flying. And pain.

Both in his body and in his heart.

Ryder shakes off the memories as he runs towards the stone hammer—and remembers the staircase with the squeaky stair and its spears. Five floors of anti-Reaper death traps… and nobody thought to stay behind and guide him down…

Ryder takes a glance at the window Sam had sailed through earlier and decides, sure, why the hell not.

YOLO has nothing on this.