Hank pondered a moment.
“From a scientific standpoint, yes, that is indeed the case.”
Charles Xavier, both delighted and gratified, said, “Logan will be overjoyed.
Oh, Logan is ‘Wolverine,’ the one who pushed my wheelchair earlier.
You’ve already met him, Angela.
We should tell him this good news as soon as possible.”
“Wait—” Angela cut in instinctively.
“Charles, are you sure Mr. Logan will be happy about this? A ‘relative’ he’s never met suddenly appearing out of nowhere? And besides—have the two of you forgotten that I come from another world entirely?!”
Exactly—that was the biggest problem of all!
She wasn’t even from this world.
How could she possibly have a relative in it?!
Wouldn’t Wolverine just assume she was some con artist who’d shown up to scam him out of an inheritance???
(This misunderstanding was cleared up soon enough, of course—what fortune did Wolverine have to divide up in the first place?)
Charles and Hank’s excited expressions froze.
They glanced at each other, and soon both regained their composure.
Charles Xavier said with a smile, “According to the theory of parallel worlds, the ‘same person’ may exist across different worlds.”
Angela blanked for a moment, then caught on to what he was implying.
“Charles, you mean—perhaps a ‘Wolverine’ exists in my world too, and the two of us are blood relations there. Is that it?”
Charles Xavier nodded outright.
“It’s the most reasonable explanation, isn’t it?”
Angela thought about it and decided not to ask the obvious question—”Then where is the me of this world?”—because, going by the timeline, “Angela Ziegler” had been born in 2039, while this world was only at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
“All right… I’ll accept that assumption. But could you give me a little time? I’d rather not be rushed into meeting Mr. Logan only for us both to end up uncomfortable. Perhaps you could hint at the news to him first—if he isn’t pleased, I don’t want to put him in a difficult position.”
A distant relative who had been separated for years, never met, not even known to exist, suddenly turning up—that sort of thing didn’t always make for a happy occasion.
Charles Xavier nodded with complete understanding.
“I see. I’ll try sounding Logan out. A great deal has happened today—you’re probably in need of some rest.”
Angela nodded at once.
“I’m sorry. I really do need some time to take all of this in.”
And so the three of them ended their conversation there, with Hank warmly inviting Angela to drop by the lab again whenever she had the time.
Qi An received the treatment of an honored guest, escorted to her room personally by the master of the manor.
She shut the door, flopped onto the bed, stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling, and couldn’t hold back a long sigh.
“What on earth is going on…”
The heavy curtains blocked out the light completely, leaving the whole room wrapped in darkness and silence.
No longer forcing herself to smile, Qi An let a lost, bewildered look settle over her face in the dark.
She’d thought she would die.
The explosives she had set with her own hands, detonated with her own hands—the entire Overwatch Headquarters would be reduced to nothing, and there was no way she could have survived a blast like that. Read this novel at novelping . com for the best experience.
Yet, somehow, she hadn’t died.
Instead she’d crossed over into another world—and in this world she’d even “found a relative of her own.”
How absurd.
How laughable.
This body didn’t belong to “Qi An,” so how could this body’s “relative” be her relative?
At most, they were a relative of “Angela Ziegler.”
She was nothing but a wandering ghost adrift in space and time.
Twenty-four years.
From her first crossing over to the dissolution of Overwatch.
She had spent longer in the world of Overwatch than she had in her original life.
Her memories of the “original world” had long since blurred—the comfortable, repetitive routines of peacetime were easily painted over by the far more vivid memories of war, of blood and fire.
After years as stark and intense as those, how could her very self have stayed unchanged?
Did she want to go home?
But where even was “home”?
Did that home still belong to her?
Would that world still welcome someone who might draw a gun at any moment and fight an enemy to the bloody end, someone who could look upon death without batting an eye?
The Qi An of now was no longer the Qi An of the past.
Admit it: it was precisely because she’d realized she could never go back to that first home as “Qi An” that, once she lost Overwatch—the “home” that had given her somewhere to belong—she had impulsively chosen death.
And yet she had lived—in a way she herself had never expected.
Qi An raised her right hand and rested it lightly over her face, the back of it covering her eyes, and in the darkness she wept quietly.
If she had never started playing that game, Overwatch, in the first place—would none of this have happened to her?
Soundlessly, she spoke the tagline that had once moved her, the game’s promotional line from back then.
“The world could always use more heroes.”
It was the music that played when the game Overwatch booted up.
A blood-stirring rallying call, and the logo of the Overwatch organization appeared dead center in Qi An’s field of vision.
Qi An stared, slack-jawed.
A system voice sounded in her ear.
(Overwatch System fully charged.
Now initializing.)
(First-time startup.
Checking version.
Current version is not the latest.
Now loading update package.
Estimated update time: three hours.)
(Update contents: version update, hero update, hero ability adjustments, map update, loot box item update, shop update.)
(Dear user, we wish you a pleasant day.)
The Overwatch update screen materialized before Qi An’s eyes, a progress bar crawling along the bottom—looking exactly like the game.
Qi An reached out and tapped “Hide Display” in the top-right corner.
The update screen, which had taken up most of her vision, instantly shrank into the bottom-left, and the “character portrait frame, status bar, and ability icons” that had flickered in and out before were hidden as well, as if they’d never existed.
She tapped the update screen open again, and those icons reappeared.
After trying it several times over, Qi An lowered her hand, dazed, and stared blankly as the progress bar inched from 5% all the way up to 15%.
So, after twenty-four years since crossing over, after countless life-or-death crises, after one massive explosion—this “system,” her suspected cheat, had only now “finished charging”?
What kind of system even was this, and what energy had it been charging on?
An answer surfaced in Qi An’s mind.
Why had a blast powerful enough to level an entire city failed to kill her?
Because the energy of the explosion had been absorbed by “something.”
And that “something” was, without a doubt, the “Overwatch System.”
What was she supposed to call this?
A cheat that had shown up years too late??
Hey, buddy, don’t you think you’re running just a little behind schedule???
Overwatch System: Updating…