Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 282. In a row

"What do you know?" The commander asked me.

I sighed, not wanting to explain anything to people first thing after waking up from a high fever.

I want a shower and to change clothes; oh, by the way, I apparently am upper-body naked.

’Henry had been shot.’ The thought suddenly hit me like a bullet itself.

Nonono, I had looked into his future, and he was alright; he was safe in the center.

Yeah, that’s right. The bullets didn’t hit him; he probably pulverized them before they even touched his shirt. And the blood he vomited was due to overuse of power from his first time teleporting, just like my fever and the puddle of blood I was in while I had been choked.

"Kenny." The same voice calling my name brought my head up instantly, as if my brain needed to confirm that it wasn’t Henry calling me.

I glared at that asshole for using my name like Henry would before I freed myself from my trance and finally answered.

"I will explain once, and only once, and I won’t answer any additional questions." I started.

"There are parallel worlds; some with humans, some similar or even identical to us, and some with monsters that are crashing together. Portals open, connecting worlds with each other."

The office guy with the birthmark turned back to the commander.

"The commander told us already."

"Ah." I nodded.

"So why did you want me to explain?"

"I asked you what you knew about me, my family, and Dr. Carell." The commander specified before motioning to the suit guys.

"I didn’t tell them about dungeons that were inhabited by humans because we hadn’t seen such worlds before, though after talking to them for a bit, I had already guessed that there were cases like this." The commander said with disapproval, leaning with crossed arms against the cave wall—even going so far as to steal Henry’s usual movements.

"Oh. So you didn’t tell them that you come from another world?" I asked the commander, and his expression soured accordingly.

When the suit guys turned back to him with terror on their faces, the commander’s face fell further.

"Don’t worry, I have been in his world; they are like us, only with better technology, though I still don’t like him." I pointed at him, simultaneously appeasing the office workers who hung on my lips as if I were their savior.

Didn’t they think my eyes were strange? Or my tattoos? They could see as much as they wanted because, again, I was only wearing white pants that were stained with dried blood.

Maybe I finally emitted something like a leader’s aura?

"What do you mean by having been to my world?" The commander this time clarified his question.

"After your disappearance, we unexpectedly came to your world, trying to find our way home. Your wife and kids were okay the last time we saw them before leaving for our real dimension," I explained, seeing his expression relax a bit.

"Enough of that. Tell me, why are you three together?" I asked the Suit Guys.

"Our company had booked an educational seminar. Mr. Izumi, Mr. Aslan, and I left late, and when we exited the building, we lost consciousness and then woke up inside a jungle, where we met... the commander." Chubby Guy explained, turning back to the stern man with a bit of hesitation.

"Where is the rest of your company?" I asked them.

"We didn’t know for sure if the others had also disappeared until you told us. We haven’t seen them since coming here." Birthmark Guy said.

"Yeah, 120 people disappeared. I saw it in the news." We saw it in the ’news lesson’ when we first arrived at the center, including the information that the office worker had disappeared a year ago. They should have been here shorter, however, given the time differences between the worlds, so I didn’t mention that fact so as not to agitate them unnecessarily.

Our group was even asked questions about how we would save these guys, and when I had flipped the coin to take a look at Henry’s nearest counterpart, I saw other suit guys here as well, so not only Chubby Guy and Birthmark should have made it into the crystal world.

"So it was really everyone..." Chubby Guy looked at his colleague in devastation.

"Where is this Mr. Aslan?" I asked them, but they just avoided my gaze, scared.

"Outside. We will go visit him soon." The commander intercepted.

I hummed, a bit curious, before I remembered the last big question I had:

"Why did you attack me? Who did you mistake me for?" Even if my crystalline counterpart was running around here somewhere, there was no way he would confuse me with a faceless figure.

"....." The commander scrutinized me.

"There was someone who looked exactly like you. It was before I met these guys." He motioned at the two sitting before me with his chin.

"He tried to kill me. Repeatedly, and without a reason."

Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Now I could guess which of my depraved counterparts was running around in the vicinity. I would put my money on Kenny2 because I knew that he wasn’t dead, or I had long received his memories. Or, some entirely new counterpart because Kenny3 was in prison for Henrietta2’s murder inside my world.

Wait... shouldn’t the commander know Kenny3, as he was a serial killer who had broken out of prison? Why would he say that someone looking like me had attacked him without a reason and that he didn’t know him?

"Don’t you know a criminal called Kennith Howard? From your world?" I asked him directly.

"Mhm. But I neither thought before nor think now that either of you two is him." The commander nodded.

"Why?" 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

He chuckled.

"Because I got notice about our Kennith Howard being caught by Dr. Carell’s institution before I left to clear the dungeon. After my team and I entered the portal, it miraculously closed, and we were trapped. There is no way that our Kennith Howard could have entered it as well."

"...Criminal?" The chubby guy looked at me unsurely, but I ignored him.

I thought a bit but still didn’t get it. In the commander’s world, there was no concept of counterparts, so why was he so easily convinced that there were people who looked the same yet were not the same person or some form of corruption?

"A branch of the DA was already secretly investigating Dr. Carell and his theories, which had started to make less sense as time went on." The commander explained, as if he could read my thoughts.

Ah. Okay, that will make it easier to convince him to stop attacking worlds with humans, preferably even other peaceful worlds. And Dr. Carell’s death probably wouldn’t feel like that much of a loss for the commander, though I don’t intend to tell him anyway.

"Good to know. Describe the worlds you crossed until you met the two office workers," I commanded him, and he broke into an angry grin at my demeanor.

"As you wish. The first dungeon we cleared out was a barren land, with nearly no occupants in it, besides sandworm monsters. That was the place we ended up trapped in. We wandered around until we found an adjoining dungeon that had melted together with the one we were in—a little village with semi-modern buildings. There my team had been eradicated by ghost monsters." He went silent for a few seconds, clearly fighting with the loss of his men.

Hearing about these two worlds, though the earthworms didn’t ring a bell, the rest, however, did.

"After that, I entered a large black forest with four-legged monsters. Then there was a dungeon made of trash, followed by a world made of pink rocks, then a dungeon full of dark thorns with big insects in them; after that was a jungle, where I met these two office workers and Mr. Aslan." He again motioned at the two Suit Guys.

Ah, right, the mysterious Mr. Aslan had been together with Birthmark and Chubby Guy. But what really struck me was that I again recognized two worlds from the view he mentioned.

I already knew that you could cross the worlds even without forcefully opening the portals, as a few of them had randomly melted together, like with the Little City World and Deer-Monster World, like the Deer-Monster World and the Trash World.

Now I had confirmed that the parallel worlds were really moving in a row, and I had a few more worlds to put on the list, including one or two that were prior to the first world that had crashed with ours—which was the Little City World.

And the Little City World had originally not even crashed into ours; the portal had only opened because of Henrietta. The first world that had crashed into ours by itself was the Deer-Monster World, devouring the whole South District of my city.

But if the parallel worlds moved in a row, showing up one after the other to crash into our world, then where was the Commander’s world in this picture? Not only was it a bit self-centered to think that our world would be the center of this universe, with the other worlds moving in a circle around us, but the commander’s world had also experienced worlds that crashed into them, and it had been far more than ours.

If the commander’s world was in this queue of worlds, then only two worlds should be able to crash into them: the one in front of them and the one behind them. But that wasn’t the case.

"Together we crossed two more dungeons that, luckily, were not dangerous and relatively small, until we arrived here."

"In the barren earthworm land, was there a giant?" I asked the commander, who seemed stunned by my question.

"Yes, in the barren land... It was either a corpse or a sculpture. Though he couldn’t be destroyed, he wasn’t alive; we tested it."

Well, you were...

wrong.