Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 332. Skyscrapers

Soon we didn’t need to run anymore and fell into a walking pace.

"There are skyscrapers." Henry pointed out, and it was true.

Beyond the forest and the light fog around us, there were skyscrapers, something like a city.

The body in my arms shivered, and I patted her back, thinking she was scared, but when I touched her, I noticed that her back was cold.

Taking a look at Henrietta, who dangled from Henry’s shoulder in front of me, her wet hair that was doused with the solution in the capsule she had lain in had a slight frosty sheen over it.

"Is it getting colder?" I asked Henry and saw my breath come out in a cloud.

"It seems like it." Henry turned to me.

"Are you cold?"

"Nah. You?" I asked while trying to open my jacket, but I couldn’t pull the zipper down with how tightly the kid held onto me.

"No." Henry eyed the child I was carrying with disregard.

"You have to let go, and I will close my jacket over you." I told the kid, and she finally loosened her ironclad grip.

I did as I told her, opening my jacket, but I couldn’t close it with her in it, as I couldn’t use both of my hands, one holding onto the machine gun together with the branch.

Henry stepped closer and put his gun between his legs to close my jacket over her back with an unhappy grimace.

"Where is your coat?" I asked him.

"You flung it away after you conjured up clothing." He answered.

"Ah. True." I eyed the skyscrapers in the distance.

"I don’t have a good feeling about these."

"Mhm." Henry, knowing that my feeling had always been right, put Henrietta on the ground—better said, he was closer to throwing her—before he shook her.

She didn’t show any inclination to wake up.

"She isn’t dead, is she?" That couldn’t be; how the fuck were we to go home without her?

"No." Henry said with assurance, nevertheless feeling for her pulse just to make sure.

"Maybe drugged." He shrugged.

"I can feel the temperature drop, but I don’t want to go to the skyscrapers. Let’s take a turn." Now I was starting to feel a little chilly as well; the temperature dropped fast.

Behind us was the direction we had come from; now I pointed to our right, where no skyscrapers were.

Henry hummed and threw Henrietta over his shoulder again. He took the lead as we continued our walk.

Not long after, we found that in the distance were... skyscrapers emerging.

Well... maybe the skyscrapers were just everywhere in that rough direction, or...

"Ghost city?" I asked Henry.

"A modern ghost city?" Henry asked back.

"If we have no choice, then let’s go there." The temperature was dropping with each second, and although I didn’t think Henry and I would freeze to death, it was something else with the girl and Henrietta.

Regarding taking another direction... we didn’t have many more choices left, because every other direction would lead us back closer to the camp, and if the soldiers found us, everything would have been for naught.

"Maybe the ghosts there are chill." I chuckled to myself, and after two seconds of silence, Henry looked back at me and broke into laughter.

"Do you think the bone dragon was from this world?" I asked because he was having a bit too much fun laughing at me.

"You mean because we only ever found one counterpart species per world?" Henry instantly caught on to what I wanted to say, continuing to go forward.

If the dragon was from this world, it would heighten the chance that the black skyscrapers were safe territory.

Damn. I can’t remember the last time I felt this cold.

"Yeah. Isn’t it strange? Why don’t these worlds have more species?" You could categorize our planet into humans, animals, and plants. But between the human and animal categories were always hundreds or thousands of subcategories, like animal-mammals—but there are not only cows that are mammals; there are also dogs and other stuff.

"You are right... Makes it easier for us; I wonder why?"

"I have had a theory for a while. What if these worlds that collided with ours had been of low level? The fact that they have monsters that do not necessarily want to cross portals and attack humans, and the fact that portals open only twice a year, each time with monsters that are somehow defeatable, while at the same time giving us the possibility to level up... Is something helping us by regulating this?" I took a few steps forward to go beside Henry and looked at him.

"You forget the giant. He was definitely not low-level." He said, glancing at me sideways while clenching his jaw.

"Yeah, but the giant spotted me while he was resting inside the Shadow World. It wasn’t that a world where giants lived had crashed into ours."

"True. Do you know how I teleport?" Henry asked me after contemplating a bit.

"No."

"I let the shadowy energy dissolve my body and then fly in a dissolved state to the place I want to be. I return to my real form not because I can somehow put myself together, but because an outside force is doing it."

"Doesn’t that hurt like hell?" I asked him, and he looked at me with a grin.

"Are you worried?"

I again raised my arms, with the gun and branch in them, asking him speechlessly if he wanted to fight.

"You don’t know? Do you need to hear me say it?"

"It doesn’t hurt." He chuckled.

"But I could imagine the same force giving out ’low level’ words."

"Yeah, the natural law; I thought about it too. As if even the apocalypse worked after a principle that made sure somebody would be able to survive." I looked up; the skyscrapers came closer, and they were apparently pitch black.

Fantastic.

"Mhm. And that somebody would be us." He said with absolute conviction.

True, if we made it this far, it would be a pity to die quietly.

If we were to go, it had to be with a bang, and that only after living through all the additional years we received through the giant’s blood.

The little one in my arms shivered, and I patted her back again with my free hand. It would have been easier to let go of the branch that I held in one hand together with the machine gun, but it was full of blood, and I was too paranoid to leave it along the way.

When we reached the end of the forest and found a street in front of us, I was shivering as well, while Henry’s body trembled every now and then.

The girl in my arms was ice cold, and her pulse had slowed. Although she should be unconscious, her grip on me didn’t lessen a bit.

Henry put his sister down and shook her again, even tried to slap her awake, but it didn’t work.

"Haaaa." He sighed in annoyance and put her over his shoulder again.

"We have guns..." He murmured as if he wanted to assure himself before he thought of something and looked at me.

"How about you try shooting the collar off my neck?"

"Not a chance. If I wanted to take the risk, I would break the collar with my hands, like with her." I motioned with my chin to the girl.

But the electricity part made me hesitate.

Like, what if the collar had an emergency process to shoot out a voltage high enough to kill a superstrong monster if someone tried to tamper with it?

"Let’s go." I stepped on the black asphalt that had started at the end of the forest. This didn’t seem to be a transition between two worlds, for that the cut was too clean.

Henry followed up to walk beside me while holding his gun, ready to shoot whatever.

However, on the black street and around the black skyscrapers, there was not a single person.

We also couldn’t hear anything, besides the roaring of the ice-cold wind that rushed in between the buildings.

I pointed at the first skyscraper directly to the right after going down the street for a bit.

"Let’s go inside."