Trudging helplessly for half an hour, Adam was close to the forsaken factory in the south. Closer to the Chasm.

He threw his tuxedo to some bushes to rid himself from a few hundred milligrams of weight. With so many wrong decisions plaguing every corner of his mind, he forcibly shut them all off. In the hopes that he could avoid irrational thoughts.

According to the patterns of the Vicilian hellscape, he predicted that he might encounter another clone of himself anywhere and anytime by now.

He had no wish to meet himself, but he was curious to know the exact chain of events that preceded the moment when he himself was struck by a temporary memory loss. Who dared to knock his consciousness out?

His mind hungered for answers, but the only dishes on the menu were clues.

The sun was sipping on his sweat, while the faint fog hugged him more passionately than any of his wives ever did. Flanked by the branchless trees, the highway cut straight into the horizon. The confines of the gas canister factory loomed beside the road with the likeness of an abandoned nuclear research facility.

‘Why is my fate like this? What have I ever done? Who are the damnable authorities? I guess I’ll never know.’

The environment was eerily silent the further he moved away from the bustling urban areas of the town.

No vehicles ever ran outside, save for travelling within the arbitrary boundaries of the main central location littered with buildings. His was the only one registered from a different land. Vicilian license plates strangely didn’t raise any information when Adam tried scouring his memories for clues. After all, he was supposedly ‘blessed’ with an artificially-trained brain fit for being one of the best detectives in the world.

Or so he was expected to believe.

Adam stopped walking, taking a moment to inspect his hands. The same limbs and organic tools he had committed great crimes with, in a town initialized with none. Crimes against humanity, nonetheless.

Turning his attention back on what was ahead, his brown eyes blinked twice.

His own reflection stood near the gates of the factory compound, locked in a powerful, yet soundless, gaze. ‘Well, well, well. Who is that? Another Jucas?’

Both the Jucas detectives reached for their guns, but unlike his doppelganger, Adam attempted to aim for the first strike. He knew that his older self was not a monster that he is now. But unlike attacking any other person, seeing himself in the third person seemed to disturb and distract him.

“Hands in the air!” Adam pointed his gun at the replica of his own flesh and blood.

“After you,” the clone calmly replied. His hand was still buried in the pocket. “I do not know who you are, but you certainly baffle me with that look on your —”

A bullet pierced through the back of his clone’s skull.

“What the!” Adam dropped his gun, disbelieving his own eyes and hands. The resonance of the Colt 0.45 upon impact with the asphalt of the ground accurately confirmed that he had not pulled the trigger yet; the current magazine was still full.

His twin brother stooped forward limply, falling upon Adam’s arms.

“B-brother!” the words of sympathy automatically poured out of the surviving detective’s mouth. For the first time in his conscious memory, Adam was not the culprit for the murder. Was he really dead? Was it a real bullet?

Another bullet whistled past his shoulder, nearly grazing past his tuxedo. The sound frequencies matched that of a 0.338 Lapua Magnum caliber.

His hawk-like vision began a hardcore game of ‘I, Spy With My Eye’ to locate the unknown third party trying to assassinate him, while simultaneously rushing towards the forest for cover.

He dropped the other Jucas on the road to save himself first.

Positioning himself behind a tree, his gifted mind subconsciously calculated the trajectory of the last two projectiles he had witnessed. Tracing them imaginatively back to their source, he found a cleverly camouflaged sniper firing from the other side of the road, hidden deep within the trees.

Adam ducked to dodged another bullet. This time, he was able to hear the gunshot.

‘What in the 99 names of God is happening? Who’s that daredevil attempting to try his luck at angering and attacking me?’ he squinted his eyes to make out the approximate shape of the weapon that other person was making use of. ‘Using a Barrett M98B sniper rifle, too? Luck be cursed! That fellow’s a specialist. Where’s he or she from?’

From the direction of the Chasm, two noises startled the silence.

Adam rolled and dived to another tree, repositioning himself to a better vantage point. Closer to the highway. Closer to the aggressive opponent.

A convoy of black heavily-armored SWAT vans (or what seemed like them) sped along. One of them pressed on their brakes right near his hiding spot. In the sky, he caught a glimpse of a Boeing C-17 Globemaster aircraft.

‘Oh God,’ Adam couldn’t figure out anything now. He certainly didn’t like the looks of the incoming vehicles. ‘These must be the Authorities, then.’

He realized that he had committed the biggest blunder of his career by dropping his only ranged weapon. He equipped himself with his decoy pistol, armed with only a handful of coins.

“APA-7” was printed in a large stencil font on the sides of the van.

Four armed men got out of the back of the van, followed by two more from the driver’s and shotgun seat.

The size of their guns fired a whole set of darts at Adam’s balloon of courage, massacring it to bits and pieces. Luckily, a second balloon constructed out of the skin of the first, was still alive – hope.

“Adam Jucas,” one of the soldiers called out. “You have five seconds. Utter your last words. You’re being eliminated for disrupting the natural rules of this experiment. The Authority of Psychological Assets, Department 7, Human Sociology, demands your immediate execution under the orders of Lucifer Doestoevsky.”

‘Doestoevsky? Freakin’ fu—'

Adam’s sixth sense helped him dive aside to save himself from another M98B bullet, only to accidentally jump into the line of sight of the road.

Thinking fast, Adam’s neurons reached full swing, calculating multiple possibilities of the soldiers’ attack patterns while also identifying the depth and structural integrity of the armor they were wearing.

His coins would barely put a scratch on them.

But the right momentum would.

Roleplaying as an athlete throwing a hammer, Adam spun around fiercely before firing a coin at the soldier who had volunteered to announce his death warrant.

The centripetal force conversion of the ejected coin sent it zooming straight at the military-grade vest, piercing right through it, and lodging itself into the concrete flesh of Michael’s factory’s boundary walls.

‘What am I thinking? What a fool I am!’ the detective sighed, still continuing his revolutionary rotations relying on rigid physics. ‘One down, five to go. Physics may defend me, but probability will not.’

Not a blink was wasted.

The APA guards opened fire.