The bus clipped the side of a boulder and barreled through slush, then snow, then the guard raid before it was stopped by jagged rocks at the bottom of the ravine.

Invisible to mere mortals, latent systems kicked into action before the bus had finished rolling. They diligently set the souls aside with precise soul tongs, handling minds and souls frozen in the moment of death.

To most of those students, there was a blip of the terror as the bus plowed through a guardrail and while they were in freefall, then they were an instant later calmly standing in a white space, wearing class uniforms, baseball jerseys, casual clothes, and in one case a set of basic leather armor... whatever their minds considered their default appearance.

The main feature in the white expanse was the first thing they noticed besides taking a moment to look at themselves. A few at a time raised their head to see before them a benevolent looking Goddess with closed eyes. Looking elsewhere from the sheer white robed figure towering over them. they would see then the entire class 2-A. All of whom were all supposed to be on that bus. In theory, a student would look up and only see similar students. Emphasis on theory.

No batch of requests is perfect, which was why there was also an old lady with a prosthetic leg, a man in a business suit and dark circles under his eyes, a tough looking woman in a flight suit, and a cyborg with chrome limbs and digitally enhanced black eyes.

One might assume, given a certain passing familiarity with system integration and reincarnation, that the cyborg is the problem, the fly in the ointment, the monkey wrench, the odd man out who was going to wreck some fantasy world. In some other timeline, perhaps he did use his liquid cooled super computer brain to overturn the expected outcome of this summoning.

But no, even he was looking in confusion at the twelve foot tall figure in a broad hat with ornate robes, who in turn was looking around at confusion at the tiny crowd of students who tugged at some long forgotten memories in his head. He noted there was also rather attractive, if under dressed, twenty foot tall goddess who had her eyes closed, and next to her some little demi-god secretary with spectacles sitting at a desk piled in papers who, in his mind, had the distinct look on her face of a woman who had just stepped in a very large pile of dog shit.

The tall figure looked over at the students, most still in various stages of shock. He politely raised his hand. “I think there has been a small mistake.” When there was no response, Falenti, the Adept Prime and ruler of the entire universe (for six weeks) just shrugged.

Perhaps more explanation is in order. Class 2-A.

They were set aside because Observers liked to tag entire groups of students, usually claiming an entire school to once a year to update room by room in the chance that any class all perished at once. When that happened, the grouping made for that class would be set aside until the entire tag was dead or re-classified, then forwarded to another universe where someone would pay some essence to take the souls and use them as a N class fish-out-of-water group reincarnation. It also meant you could pick out any good solo or small groups reincarnation targets in a batch, but there's plenty of examples of all the ways that can turn out.

It is a system that is meant to be used by active and attentive deities to help them fix things while avoiding self-incarnation or re-mortality by being too direct. There are plenty of good examples where things go fine with N grade tags, stories about middle of the bell curve cases where you have a few standout students who get a harem of colorful locals, maybe invent magic guns, sometimes wear eyepatches and often wear capes, then defeat the overwhelming evil and settle down, or more rarely 'pay out' to be tossed back living into the modern world. N is a safer bet then M or L, which usually has more 'grit' thrown in. Maybe a few too many adults as the teacher and bus driver got tagged, or it's from the delinquent high school and instead of diligently training to defeat the demon king, there is a non-negligible chance they might try to join him instead. Some of the girls might smoke cigarettes while wearing long skirts, and just tell the priestess urging them to fight evil 'EH?' instead of doing their job. The whole process becomes like pulling teeth with a low L.

The ratings went up with letters, so Z Class would something like a tagged class of child space-wizards who knew how to handle a laser sword right out of the box but were also very, very, very trusting. Anyway, an N rating was good, not great or exceptional. Any teenage group from a nation of kids who played table top or video games in a system-light world usually was L to O. The standard example of A, the lowest rank, was a mass of crystallized necromancer kings who had existed in a low power system. With that example, their crystal only shattered after ten thousand years of rule because they were bored of being undead. Too smart, too powerful, extremely destructive, and worst of all system fluent enough to take a low grade baseline and twist it into loops. Such a group wasn't even fit to sabotage another god's work because they would figure out who really summoned them and come back around on them. Even if it took millennia to do so.

So normally, an N class tag is a good, solid bet. Usually a TPK bus or plane or boat or 'dragon attacking a track meet' situation. Any God or Goddess was willing to take the small gamble that a few of the tagged students would not only survive the start-up period of being thrust into 'adventure', but make good on saving the world. It didn't hurt either they'd rack up some followers as champions of the deity showed off. That was a nice warm link of faith for a few millennium while also giving your aligned royalty some help with new genetics that didn't result in club feet as often.

When you used group tags, mind you, you often got adults too. Usually a teacher. Sometimes a few adults if it was a senior class or the person was never fitted into another tag. So no gods or goddesses using the system were surprised to see maybe a few elderly folks who rolled the dice well and avoided falling off cliffs, crashing airplanes, getting stalked by volcanoes, or getting stabbed while thinking 'Is this really how I die, getting stabbed?' These individuals usually looked all four ways for run-away trucks when crossing the road, sidewalk, train tracks, and when generally anywhere a truck could get at you.

The harvesters and trucks have a sort of grudge, but that's a whole other can of worms.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The problem that started this is really that tags were rated off the majority of contents before they were finished, or to be more blunt: dead. In a normal situation, one would take the tag and consider cutting a few of the oddballs out. In a normal situation, a group tag that had been sitting idle for far too long in it's home universe would be a sign that there was something seriously wrong with it and that it needed be checked and reclassified. In a normal situation, someone would actually look at the souls and notice one was, while about the right size for a human, was too perfectly smooth and too bright. A soul like a compressed globe of pure light, rather then a misty floating tenuous thing.

This chain of failures is what lead to Falenti looking at class mates he had nearly entirely forgotten about. In Falneti's defense, he hadn't thought of them on a geologic scale of time. He was waiting for the Goddess to notice him and perhaps pull him aside, offer him a role as some sort of god-in-training, maybe drag him into hell or dissolve him into the void.

“I wonder if I could take over hell?” He mused to himself. He refocused on the Goddess.

She had not stopped monolouging, nor looked at him. As she kept talking for a few more seconds his eyes narrowed as he realized that, indeed, the deity before him was giving the kids a plea to take mortal forms again as heroes... in her sleep. He usually did not care about respect so he would have found it amusing except it rankled him to see someone doing their job poorly. He had a small streak in him that wanted to step in and 'do it right' that he had often needed to tap down on.

He met the eyes of the secretary and saw the demi-god hold up her hands, telling him without words that it was, in fact, a cosmic mistake. Well, crap.

Could he opt out? Falenti had died because he had been ready to die. He had ruled the (an) entire universe for more then a month, yes, to cover his former pupil's vacations three times, but with even a single moment his most absurd ambitions had been met and so he had decided to die in a pretty good way, essentially jumping on a universe-ending grenade some clueless fanatic had been trying to use to kill his entire faction. He had even been to his own funeral, being a time traveler, and had said his proper goodbyes before stepping backwards a few weeks to meet his fate, using a trick timeline splint to steal the moment of glory a second before another time mage. Whatever rival he beat out was probably stomping their own distinctive hat as they had to go find a different meaningful death to retire themselves on.

His split mind was paying enough attention to the Goddess while he ruminated to catch the pitch was getting to the 'pitch'. She was telling them of a world being consumed by a relentless dungeon, and dying kingdoms in need of brave heroes. Pretty standard stuff from books and shows and holocubes. Fun... if you didn't do all that already.

The secretary was looking between her sleep-talking goddess boss and him, clearly considering if she should wake the titan, before she motioned Falenti over. Falenti moved in a few different dimensions to avoid bowling over confused school kids, and crouched as the demi-goddess was seated and not quite as tall as he was.

“Sir, there's been a mistake!” She hissed at him over her artifact and paper strewn desk, likely loud enough that everyone in the white void heard her.

Falenti just waved her concern away. “It's fine. I'll manaburn myself to death making a pocket universe. It won't harm anyone and whoever your sending us to will have a nicely furnished safe room, and these kids will get have their little adventure and character arcs and somesuch.”

“No, you won't be able to! She's going to...” A mental lock stopped her. Falenti wanted to roll his eyes as the woman tested a phrase in her head. “When you get in you won't be able to do that!”

Falenti hoped she could give him more information but The Goddess had finished talking and yawned, then waved her hand.

A moment later, 20 relatively normal Japanese high school students, a one-legged grandmother, a test pilot, a cyborg, and the thrice ruler of the (an) entire universe went hurtling through the system to the goddesses pet planet.

This is the story of the first batch of souls to ever earn an A- Rating.