Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 391; Worms

AN: I will experiment with a semicolon in the titles after the Chapternumber and in front of the title to hint that the following Chapter contains disturbing scenes. I will try and see if I remember to do that in the future as well—so we have in this Chapter, which contains such scenes, ’391; Worms’ as the title instead of the usual format ’391. Worms’

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"Yes, yes, I got it; you decide whether you feel weak or not." I felt his forehead to check his temperature and breathed a sigh of relief.

"Let’s go?" I let the cigarette in my hand disappear while Henry placed his head sideways on my knees.

"I’ll go first; I will teleport inside the tunnel to the same spot we had been in before," he said without looking at me.

"Okay, make sure you are wrapped in the shadow energy when you arrive in addition to the shield."

"You mean the power of destruction?" He turned his head to glance at me before he looked away again.

"Yeah, I even used that cringy name inside the tunnel, and yet you still snitched on me. I won’t call it that ever again."

He chuckled deeply, his fur shaking a bit.

"I noticed; it was an honor."

He squeezed my legs again.

"Three, two... one." And he disappeared.

It really is a bit lonely if a person or puppy disappears right before one’s eyes. Makes the room feel empty and cold all of a sudden.

I jumped up and instantly teleported after him.

When I appeared inside the tunnel, I found that Henry was alright, with a shield surrounding us.

Yet outside the shield were about two hundred or so ferret-like rats that threw themselves against it in an attempt to come in.

"What in the world? Why are there still some left? Did you get bitten?"

"No. Because of that, I wanted to come first." Henry acidified them instantly, not letting the shield waver for one second.

"Yes, yes, you are right." I looked at each side of the tunnel and flipped the coin in my mind to use it as a compass while thinking, ’Bring me to their nest.’

I doubt that the government would accept these ferret-like things as rats because they looked so different from what they had demanded, so there was no need to touch them.

We were here for only one purpose, which was not to work towards my freedom but to eliminate danger for humanity... again.

Fuck, this is all we do all day.

"Left," I said after I saw a few arms remove themselves from the woman on the coin.

"Let’s go." Henry hugged my neck and moved while dragging me with him.

I wanted to ask him if the shield could be used while walking, but that was unnecessary.

There was no gap between the shield and the ground as it moved with us.

As if lightly pushing a sandcastle over the ground, there were crystals left behind as we moved forward, but they would instantly disappear, while the size or sturdiness of the shield didn’t lessen.

"I really want that power."

"Repairing your mind was more important." Henry looked forward stoically as if that weren’t even worth a thought.

"I know," I sighed.

"And, you have me to shield you." Glancing at me, he gave me a blinding grin.

Damn, so good-looking.

"True." I chuckled and grabbed his wrist that dangled over my shoulder.

After about a hundred meters, we came to an intersection, so I flipped the coin.

Two intersections later, the woman on the coin was nearly fully visible; that was how many hands had removed themselves from her.

Finally, when I could see her face, and her lips suddenly turned into a smirk, I stopped in my steps. Well, I would have even without the coin.

The smell was fucking overwhelming. If I thought that everywhere inside these tunnels was the overwhelming smell of blood and decay, then no, I was taught differently; it came from here, as it smelled most disgustingly.

On our right was a recessed door that was opened a gape—not enough for us to look inside, but wide enough for something small to come out.

I exchanged a look with Henry, feeling that something would jump out any second.

Yet the little time we stood there was enough for the sound from the inside to travel to us.

A soft twirling, a light gnawing.

Damn it.

I somehow don’t want to go inside.

Could the fucking door not be left open for the inside view to hit us straight on?

I conjured up a hockey stick I used to play with on roller skates as a kid and tried to open the door.

I thought I would bump against the shield that had now shrunk to be closer to our bodies, but the hockey stick went through it as if Henry just had to allow it.

The door was made of iron, so I didn’t succeed the first time in pulling it open, but I didn’t want either of us to take a step forward without knowing what was inside.

Eventually, Henry pulled me back into his embrace when I nearly got the hockey stick hooked on the wheel-like doorknob and pulled the door a big part wider open.

Okay, yes. Or we’ll do it like this.

I let the hockey stick disappear, feeling as if I had just tarnished my honor as a brave man.

The door was opened a good bit, and we looked inside a room with fucking many pipes, something like a control room maybe, I don’t know.

From where we stood, there was ’just’ a dark liquid on the floor, but the damn gnawing had become louder, and the smell intensified.

On a torsohill-scale I would give the smell two torsohills—if that meant it smelled better or worse than one torsohill was for everyone to decide by themselves.

Henry pulled me behind himself and started going forward while still holding onto my wrist.

When I entered a huge room behind him and turned to my side, I saw the first corpse on the floor, under a bunch of pipes the thickness of a thigh.

But the corpse was moving, and I needed a moment to understand what the fuck I was seeing.

It was a bundle of very thin worms, all, I don’t know, compressed into a human figure.

Even a dark jumpsuit covered them.

I looked at the corpse that was beside the man on the floor.

A ’man,’ also in a dark jumpsuit, leaned against bigger pipes that served as a wall, but he looked fuller; he looked more human; the worms on him were thicker.

"What the fuck?" I whispered.

"Look at that." Henry whispered back and pulled me in front of him, hugging me tightly and burying his head in my neck. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

There were more corpses; this room was FULL of them.

Had these been workers that had been locked inside this place together with the rats?

Each of these corpses squirmed and moved slightly, as the worms of different thicknesses twirled in a body-shaped form.

Then I saw quite a few ferret-like rats eating at these fucking human-shaped worms, apparently gnawing on the human bones beneath as well.

"They use the corpses as soil." Henry mumbled before kissing my neck.

I shuddered.

"My counterpart ate worms that lived underground in his world." What the fuck.

I scrunched up my face, feeling disgusted to death.

"Why do the rats look so different from upstairs, and why are most of them pink and even some brown? Because they used the humans as fertilizer instead of eating them?"

"Probably. We don’t know how long this part was closed off. So they didn’t eat humans but used them differently? There is no earth here in these tunnels."

Perhaps a pink rat made it inside this tunnel sequence. This pink rat bit a human who turned into a zombie, and he remained a zombie long enough to serve as soil for the worms that were harvested by the rats.

Eating humans lets rats mutate.

Eating worms born from humans let them mutate even fucking faster.

The only fucking reason why there were not a million worm corpses upstairs was that the rats had enough humans to attack and eat; there was no need to use this newly discovered soil, and zombies would somehow get discovered and probably killed by the military.

Or because the population of dark-skinned rats was still overwhelming, which meant the mutation was fast but not as fast as the ones of pink rats that solely fed on zombies.

Why the fuck had nobody noticed what was going on down here? Maybe the pink rats originally came from exactly this room full of wormy corpses and not upstairs; maybe it was discovered fast, and they sealed this sequence, but a few made it upstairs.

"I don’t even want to know. Can you get rid of every single thing squirming in here?" I asked while covering my mouth and nose because I got paranoid that some worm would enter, I don’t know, by jumping through the air across the room or something.

"Mhm, I did wait for you to ask." Planting one final kiss on my skin, shadowy energy spread from Henry’s hand, filling the room and acidifying everything living within it.

A few seconds later, the room was cleaned up; a part of the floor corroded as well, but I saw nothing that moved left.

I didn’t see an open portal or something, and when I flipped the coin, no arms were removed, and I was prevented from seeing the creepy smirk of the Coin Woman.

"Let’s go; I need a long shower." I scratched my hair, feeling itchy all over.

I turned around and sidestepped Henry while grabbing his wrist to hurry the fuck out of here when I saw the inside of the thick iron door and halted.

The iron was riddled with scratch marks, dents, and blood—all in all, with desperate attempts to open it.

Signs that reeked of agony and the will to live.

Fuck... Not a pretty sight, as it was far too easy to picture oneself in that role.

I stared at it while thinking of something.

"If all the people had been locked inside this room by the military, government, coworkers, or whoever, why was the door open when we came?"