Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other 12 (Patreon)

A/N: been busy. Sorry for the late posts.

Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other

Chapter 12

-VB-

Alan Marris

The first non-Worm verse world, as in worlds not touched by the shards, we landed on was a low danger, low hostility, medieval non-deviate, and stable world.

We actually made a classification system about the worlds we would visit in the future, and there were five parts to this.

Danger level, hostility level, tech level, deviance level, and finally stability. Out of these categories, deviance was a matter of whether the world we visited had its course clearly deviated. For example, if we stumbled into Sanderan Empire from GATE: Thus the JSDF Fought There, which was possible since I found myself reincarnation in Worm, then that world would have high deviance due to constant meddling of their gods and introduction of 21st Century Earth through the gate.

Highschool DxD would be Extremely Dangerous, Severely Hostile, 21st Century Tech, High Deviance, and, surprisingly, a very stable world. This would be the worst kind of world for us to stumble upon because we had little to no counter to many of the dangers found in such worlds.

On the other hand, we would be perfectly happy with Star Wars, which would be a Moderately Dangerous, Moderately Hostile, High Tech, Low Deviance, and Unstable galaxy. We would be happy to run into Star Wars because there was just a lot of worlds out there, a lot of tech for us to salvage and research, and … well, an infinitely respawning, infinitely - if slowly - growing manpower would be more than enough to hold a number of worlds via chokehold of strategic resources and/or giant fuck-off warships we were sure we could build if we just had the materials and blueprints.

So, yes, we had a categorization system in place.

And the first non-Worm world was proving to be … what we had hoped for: a world free of competition and a large pool of manpower we could “hire” for our purposes.

We just didn’t expect it to be a literal medieval-era Earth. This Earth, however, was not familiar to us as Earth Bet had been. For all of its similarities, this really just looked like Earth in its 1000’s. Hell, our explorers, who found ourselves in the Middle East, specifically the Southern Caucasus, and found it under the rule of the Eastern Roman Empire. Yup, the city of Kars stood as the bulwark against the Eastern Roman Empire’s eastern frontier in the Armenian Highlands, named such - until Turkey changed it - for the Armenian people who live there. Their kingdoms, international struggles, wars, and culture…

Couldn’t care much about that. All I saw was a border region between three to four powers where people running from war could find refuge under our protection.

And they would be my workers. My miners. My soldiers.

… It would be very easy to become a god-king with his immortal warriors.

-VB-

The second world we visited was a little bit more familiar.

It was Japan on another Earth!

But it was also a Japan dreamt up by its dystopian artists. There was yellow smog everywhere, people walked around in more civilianized gas masks, cars looked about the same, buildings looked taller and even more dull and imposing than before…

Life just did not look great here.

We left the site of our arrival, literally in the middle of the sidewalk in one of the busy roads but so jampacked filled with people that no one noticed the portal, and spread out into the city in pairs. A quick “persuasion” to get some NEET to let us use his computer in a rundown apartment got us the information we needed.

This was an Earth run by corporations, where nations took a back seat, and corporate powers fought a constant cold war among each other as countries did during the Cold War. Their rise to power, however, had been paved by the countries themselves when they descended into corruption and eventually self-destruction. This was a world that developed prosthetics in an ever-escalating cycle to compete with each other. A world that nuked itself. A world that ruined itself.

And you know something?

There was a city called Night City in California in a renamed country called NUSA.

I knew exactly where I was.

Cyberpunk 2077 but in 2070.

A world with powerful technology that we could copy, plenty of empty spaces for us to build ourselves up, and so many people who lived and died without anyone caring about them but their money. A world that forgot that money wasn’t everything.

…It was perfect.