“I’m tellin' ya! Those fucks don’t stand a chance. We don’t even need the fuckin’ fleet, give me two good men and a breaching pod. Just point us at the flagship and one lil trip through the void... it’s over.”

“HA! Sounds like a good way to collect some plasma. You realize they will melt that breaching pod to a lump of molten titanium before you ever got close. You fucking included!”

“Then I’ll take one of the spook's breaching pods, fucking things are stealth and it’s not like they’re using them.”

“That sounds like a good way to get killed by a spook.”

Sergeant William Remington sat around as his squadmates bantered about the upcoming engagement. The brass had gotten word that the Ivonians had sent a fleet across the DMZ and they were being sent to chase the frogs back to their swampy homeworld. That is to say, the 4th task force of the second fleet. Odds were his unit wouldn’t be called up and would just stay passengers on the Valkyrie, the Munich class destroyer they were assigned to. At least until boarding action was required to take any disabled enemy vessels.

“Alright, lock it up!” Sergeant Remington stood along with his squadmates as Master Sergeant Anya Yakonva walked into the room. The attractive, 157 cm tall woman drew everyone's attention. Not because of her looks but because of her rank and reputation. She was dangerous and they all knew she had a quick fuse. They stood at attention as she inspected each of them momentarily.

“We’re breaking out of warp- Got a problem Sergeant!”

"Aaagh," Sergeant Remington suddenly had intense pain in his head. He’d had headaches before of course. This was different and through the pain wondered if he was experiencing a migraine for the first time. He groaned as he pushed through the intense pain and opened his eyes again to see the Master Sergeant standing right in front of him.

“I just asked you a question sergeant! Do you have a-” Master Sergeant Yakonva stopped and stared at him while he winced from the throbbing pain. She looked blurry to him and he realized his left eye wouldn’t open all the way. She turned and face Sergeant Kung, “Get him to fucking medbay, now!”

Sergeant Remington took a step and the world started going dark. He could feel multiple arms grab him as he fell. The cold metal deck gently touched his face as the world around him disappeared.

**********

“Fucking three of you?!” Ramiel exclaimed as he accepted his next soul and three of them showed up. 'Why the hell did that happen? Are they testing me or was that bitch messing with me? It's not like there's a quota, time didn’t even exist here! She's crossing the line.'

Ramiel blinked and teleported himself directly to her office. He stared at his boss’ semi-corporeal form. His boss sighed and put down what she was working on and looked up. They stared at each other for a moment before Ramiel opened his mouth to speak.

“Fucking three-” he stopped as his location was back in the soul repository. He blinked again and was back in front of his boss, then the repository, then his boss. It quickly reached the point where he moved so quickly between the dark repository and the brightly lit office above that it was like a strobe light in his eyes. He grew more and more frustrated because she wouldn’t even let him speak!

And she wondered why he told the mortals on Erda that the goddess of death, Hel herself, was an evil, cold bitch that consumed souls and smelled of rot! ...Then again maybe she’d actually let him speak if he hadn’t done that. She used to let him voice his complaints fully before she rebuffed him and sent him back. He struck the idea from his mind, he wasn’t going to blame himself.

“Alright, let’s get this over with,” Ramiel said curtly then realized his mistake and mentally snapped his fingers at the first wisp of ether in front of him, “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

“I’m dead?” it asked. It cheered Ramiel up slightly that at least one was a soul that realized their predicament. He grabbed the stack of papers on his desk as he hopped up to sit on it.

‘Yeesh, heart ripped out by a werewolf,’ he thought. The celestial being didn’t have a heart but he could still feel pain and imagined it wasn’t a pleasant way to go.

“Is this… Hel? I thought I’d go to Valhal?” the soul asked.

“You wish to go to Valhal?” Ramiel asked, cursing the idiot that named that as some sort of paradise for those that died an honorable death. Wait… he was the idiot… It was a planet! Nothing really special, it was similar to the world the soul had just come from but with more magic and a system.

He noted a ‘nod’ from the soul and immediately got to work pulling memories from the soul and a minute later whisked it away to Valhal. He left a few vague memories, some knowledge of sword fighting, and the entire medical knowledge of a surgeon he had stored in his desk for the fun of it. Battle healer, maybe a paladin of sorts, why not?

He usually enjoyed mix-matching memories of souls before sending them off. It was one of the only ways he could entertain himself, though it didn’t improve his mood much at that moment. He looked at the next soul's paperwork and set it aside after seeing the scrolling text indicating that the person wasn’t quite dead yet. A look at the last one revealed the same. He unmuted both of them and immediately started speaking, so they couldn't start asking dumb questions.

“Okay, you’re not dead. So here’s what we’re going to do. William Remington, Ronald Tempest… I’m sending you back to your bodies. Ronald, there’s a pool of water fifty feet ahead of you, drink some and lay in the water to cool off. I don’t want to see you back here right away because of heatstroke. William, they’re injecting you with nanites that are already fixing the aneurysm,” Ramiel said and before they could speak, he moved to pull the memories of the conversation. He paused and looked at the collection of memories, skills, and personality traits from the previous soul along with his stash of interesting traits. After a moment he started tossing pieces into the two souls. Ronald got a slightly pompous attitude and a noble constitution with a desire to be a hero but a near-crippling foot fetish. William ended up with knowledge on how to build stone walls, vague concepts of making things, a thing for blonde women, and a hatred of snakes and snake meat. Once he was done he whisked them away as well.

Ramiel sighed and sat on his desk again. He waited for the next soul to appear but none did and all of a sudden he was in his boss's office again. She glared at him with black eyes as her form shifted between a physical entity and a being of radiating energy. It reminded him that she was far more powerful than him. She pointed to the side and two projections appeared.

One depicted a man laying on his stomach wearing dirty clothes and a revolver on his hip. His lips were dry and cracked and his eyes sunken. The man looked around a nearly barren landscape with wide eyes.

The other was a man in a dark gray uniform sitting on a metal table with a large glass syringe still stuck in his arm. He too looked around wildly and a moment later reached for his hip but was confused when the item he was reaching for, a revolver, wasn’t there.

Ramiel’s own incorporeal eyes went wide, “Well fuck.”

He’d sent them back to the wrong bodies… If it wasn’t for the goddess of death trying to burn a hole in the side of his head… no, she wasn’t trying. He was pretty sure she could actually do that... If it wasn’t for her hostile look, he might have been ecstatic at the situation. A fucking marine that's trained to operate in space in the body of a gunslinger in a world that was like the wild west with magic and shit! And on the other side a no-nonsense gunslinger with a new hero complex jumping in on an interplanetary war!

Ramiel looked at his boss as she glared at him a moment longer but she sighed and waved him away. He blinked back to the soul repository to see five new souls waiting on him. He drooped his shoulders and looked up in the rough direction of Hel’s office.

“Hel’s tai-” He started to say aloud, completely forgetting that while his thoughts were his alone, he was in her domain. She could hear him and he was suddenly looking at her again “-nt… is nice...Er, not my business… I’m sure it is ni- Oh shit!”

Her eyes started to do what could only be described as the opposite of glowing. They became pits of pure darkness and started pulling in the light around them. Ramiel, the God of Mischief whose punishment for an ancient transgression was to sort souls, blinked away... and back. The strobe light effect began to replay in reverse as he tried to escape the very pissed off, very dangerous, and very sexy in a dominatrix kind of way, Goddess of Death.