Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other 1 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Definitely not Dio

Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other

Chapter 1

-VB-

I grimaced.

Even after knowing - and trying my best to warn others about it for years on end - that Golden Morning was coming, the experience of it was wholly different.

Great Britain went up in smokes in Scion’s opening strike, right? The web novel never described in detail just how thick the air became with smoke. Debris littered the ocean and the coast. Flashes of light turned night into day randomly for a single instant across many instances.

And yet, I found myself here, helping others get away from the horror of Earth Bet.

Right now, I was at one of the “gate” sites where they were moving refugees fleeing the fighting, the Golden Morning, to Earth Gimel. As a volunteer, I would not go through unless there was an emergency on this side of the gate.

I guided people through the portal with my hand gestures.

“I-Is it safe?”

I turned and saw a couple looking up at me. I was tall in this life as I was in my last.

“It is,” I replied tiredly. “People, capes and regular, have gone through it regularly.”

“I-If you say so,” the woman replied before her chubbier boyfriend (husband?) corralled her through. They crossed the luminescent boundary without an issue.

“Ah!”

I turned around and saw a young woman push an elderly woman out of the way with her backpack, making it look like she had no idea she was doing it.

I gritted my teeth. If I had my way, then people like her would be forced to stay behind. Instead, I just walked up to her. She looked surprised that I was coming over.

I raised my hand and slapped her.

She jolted and stumbled back. She slowly raised a hand up to her face, dramatically, and I knew what kind of a bitch she was.

“Get moving,” I said before I tapped on my shoulder-slung 3-D printed submachinegun. “Make trouble like this again and I will not hesitate to ensure no one else gets troubled.”

She seemed to get it and moved along.

I grunted before moving over to the still-struggling elderly woman and knelt next to her. I only just noticed that there was a kid next to her. Her grandson?

“Come on, let’s get you moving,” I said as I tried to help her back up.

“I’m sorry you had to step in,” the Hispanic woman mumbled. She sounded tired. She would be; she carried a load half as heavy as she was and must have been doing so for hours on end like most of the refugees.

“I volunteered for this,” I grunted after I got her up and patted her on the shoulder. I looked at the kid. “Next time some bitch pulls that kind of bullshit on your family, you better step up and be the family man, kid. Not a lot of people will do what I did,” I grunted again before moving along.

I looked around. There was a dense stream of people chugging along through the nearly twelve-feet by eight-feet portal in what used to be a prosperous street here in New York City.

“HAHAHAHA!”

“KYAAAAH!”

Oh no.

Grimacing, I turned away from the portal and toward the sound of the fearful screams and the Villainous™ laughter. Pulling out my gun, I quickly ran toward it.

I wished there were heroes who could handle this but there weren’t any heroes around here.

After a minute of running alongside the now panicking crowd, I saw the villain.

A chill ran down my spine when I saw who it was.

Dressed in bones and rags, this was the Teeth. The infamous anarchistic gang was the perfectly average bandit troupe. They pillaged, killed, raped, burned, and extorted. They did as they pleased and fought to the death.

Even with their leader sealed underneath the lake in Brockton Bay, they were still powerful, widespread, and murderous.

I was just a regular human.

I wasn’t going to survive this if I fought.

… but did it matter?

My family ignored me because I was a “conspiracy theorist.” My friends abandoned me after getting tired of me. I barely made a living in Earth Bet’s ever-downtrodden economy. I knew for a fact that Earth Gimel wasn’t going to be much better.

Life in this universe sucked. If everyone thought the Golden Morning was the apocalypse, then, oof, they were in for a ride once the Titan Crisis came around.

So why not go out heroically? At least the Teeth were known for killing quickly in their bid to find their next victim. Why continue to suffer the living?

‘So why not trade my life for a dozen more?’

There were more than two dozen Teeth raiders, and all of them were so focused on going after the unprotected refugees that they’d let their guard down.

I didn’t even bother getting the Teeth’s attention.

I pulled my 3-D printed submachinegun up, took aim, and fired.

The first two raiders died, their close proximity giving me the chance to put bullets through their barely protected heads in only one burst of my SMG. The third died from my second burst, but I also clipped one of the fleeing civilians.

When the fourth went down to holes along her chest and head, the closest five raiders finally noticed me and fired back.

I quickly rolled behind a car and winced when I felt broken glass on my arms. Ignoring that in favor of not dying by bullet fire, I quickly got back up and attacked.

The civilians had, by this point, all dispersed in one way or another. And the few who were taken hostage to be used as meat shields?

Well, sorry, but I’m neither trained nor concerned about ethics.

Besides, it’s a quicker death this way, right? That’s a mercy compared to this world’s dismal future, right?

I fired.

Bullets pierced through clothes, flesh, and armor alike, and the raider and the hostage went down.

The other raiders looked surprised.

Yes, you fucks. Hostages don’t work with me!

Seeing that they had fewer options, they just charged while firing their guns at me. Some of them, the smart ones, went for barricades to hide behind.

But one of them was a fucking cape!

He looked just like the other raiders except he had his lower face covered with a bandana and had a deer skull “helmet.” He charged at me, his limbs growing longer and thinner but no less powerful if the cracked asphalts underneath his paws indicated anything.

Cursing, I rolled away from the car… and then stopped myself mid-roll as the Changer was also in the middle of turning…

And I fired. Straight into his face.

The first bullet bounced off the helmet.

The second struck his jaw.

The third and fourth shattered his helmet.

And that’s all of the chances I had before one of his limbs lashed out and struck me right i nthe stomach. I lost all of the air in my lungs and flew away.

I tumbled, rolled, and crashed into something.

I laid there, utterly weak and unable to move. Everything felt fractured if not broken.

Ah. This was it.

I tried to get up.

I couldn’t.

The Teeth Changer prowled up to me with hate in his eyes.

This was it.

I was going to die.

… Heh.

I stared up at the Changer, or as much as I could with half of my face planted in the sizzling summer asphalt. At a time like this when I should be thinking about ways to survive, I could only think about how my life had gone this time.

I had lived a useless life… and I think … I think I hated and regretted that more than dying like this.

The Changer glared down at me but now he had this self-satisfied smirk of a predator toying with his prey.

Well, shit, you think you won, huh?

I couldn’t get up because my spine was broken, not my arm.

I raised my right arm, still holding onto the gun, and fired. The surprised cape didn’t have a chance to respond before a dozen bullets haphazardly shredded into his throat. He gurgled as he grasped at his neck while stumbling backward.

Heh. Fuck you.

… I felt my body grow cold and two twin snakes dance in the sky at the corner of my eyes, and I had this odd thought.

[Destination]...

I don’t think Triggering this late will save my ass. Just my luck, right? After over three decades of living on Earth Bet, I triggered only after I was at Death’s door.

-VB-

Light.

If I died and saw the light, then I would be thinking that I was going to heaven or something. Or eternal rest.

Instead, even though I had died, I found myself only irritated by the light.

And then … I opened my eyes.

What the fuck?

I slowly sat up with a body that didn’t complain at all, even though I vaguely remembered fucking dying from having my spine broken in multiple places and internally and externally bleeding everywhere.

I looked around and saw myself naked on a beach.

With a hot bar in my vision that had a rock and a torch.

This scene - the hot bar with a rock and a torch, the blue skies, a naked body, and a beach - looked and felt way too fucking familiar.

I’m supposed to be dead.

After looking around, I saw a tree not too far off from the coast, walked up to it, nervously raised the rock… and smashed it against the tree’s bark.

I screamed when I got a visual notifications that I now had +8 Wood.

Of all the powers I got, I got one power that turned me into a subpar Gamer with an immortality quirk.

Rust.

Worse, I looked to my left and saw a billboard right next to an abandoned highway.

Welcome to Brockton Bay, New Hampshire!

I was still on Earth Bet.

Fuck.