Francis continued eating, analyzing and adjusting his movents to be as fast and efficient as possible.
While the other larvae retreated into cracks and pipes to rest, he kept grinding.
No breaks. No hesitation. The sewers had rules, and he already figured out the only one that mattered.
Eat. Grow. Repeat.
By the ti he reached two feet in length, the eggs in the area were depleted.
He struck without warning — lunging into a cluster of smaller worms crowded around a freshly cracked shell.
They barely had ti to squeak before he was already moving to the next target.
[Sewer Larva consud: 412/1,000]
The sewers beca his hunting ground, and he used his intelligence to dominate anything that dared enter his territory. He was so focused on his mission that he didn’t even think about how he had ended up in this situation.
In his operator days, he maintained the sa ntality: follow orders without question. It made pulling the trigger easier.
’Ti to speed up things.’
He ventured deeper, pushing himself harder.
By the twenty-hour mark, he consud over seven hundred.
The survivors had stopped feeding entirely — they scattered the mont they caught his outline, squeaking frantic warnings to each other through the dark.
’Run all you want,’ Francis muttered, cornering another cluster against a rusted pipe. ’You’re only prolonging your suffering.’
He developed a thod. His massive body would coil wide, cutting off escape routes before he struck — five, sotis six larvae in a single pass.
Clean. Efficient. The crowded sewer grew quieter with each passing hour.
[Sewer Larva consud: 999/1,000]
’One left.’
It had survived longer than the rest — a particularly cunning larva that had retreated into the deepest, narrowest pipe in the entire sewer. Too tight for Francis to follow. Too dark to see inside.
So he waited.
He settled his body across the pipe’s entrance and went still. No rushing. No frustration. He spent years hunting n who thought patience was a virtue they owned. They were always wrong.
When hunger finally drove it out, Francis closed his jaw before it hit the ground.
[Sewer Larva consud: 1,000/1,000]
[Mission Complete.]
[Initiating Evolution]
Light pulsed beneath his skin, burning through flesh like fla. The sensation was like his body dissolving in a bathtub of acid.
Suddenly, his flesh softened, liquefied, and flowed around him in thin ribbons of tissue. The dissolved mass rose and hardened, sealing him inside a cocoon pressed against the sewer wall.
Through the translucent mbrane, he caught distorted shapes of the world beyond — warped pipes, dim light, still water. Then even that faded, and he lost consciousness completely.
Ti ceased to an anything.
Hours. Days. He couldn’t tell. His awareness surfaced and subrged in intervals, like a man half-drowning in a dreamless sleep.
Then, at last — a crack.
He tore through the mbrane and spilled out into open air.
’...Small.’
His new body was the size of a ping-pong ball — compact, spherical, dense.
Multiple eyes covered his surface in a ring, giving him a seamless 360-degree view. The world didn’t just beco clear—it revealed every direction at once..
’This is nice... I just need to get used to it.’
He tested his movent. One push off the stone and he launched forward, angling off the curve of a pipe and rebounding toward the far wall. Fast. Precise.
’I lost the raw power. But this—" He bounced again, reading the trajectory before he landed. ’—This has its own advantages.’
Although his worm body was large, in an actual fight it beca a liability. A smaller body would allow him to pass through tight spaces and escape more easily when facing unexpected threats.
[DING!]
[Evolution Complete: Parasite — Category 1]
[Restriction: Current level limits infestation to small creatures only.]
He half-expected that. The system wasn’t going to hand him sothing broken this early. Fine. Small creatures first, then.
’I need a host. Sothing useful — but nothing conspicuous.’
Without wasting a mont, he rolled forward, his ring of eyes scanning every crack and shadow in the sewer.
The place was almost empty—no rats, no cockroaches. Either the larvae had eaten everything, or whatever survived learned to stay far away.
Francis moved deeper.
The sewer narrowed, the sll thickening as he pushed further from the main canal. Then — a faint rustle. The dry crinkle of paper being disturbed.
He went still.
A rat was nosing through a pile of discarded wrappers near a drainage gap, completely absorbed in its scavenging. Large for its kind. Healthy. Alert — but not alert enough.
Francis calculated in silence. Distance. Arc.
The rat’s whisker-twitch cycle, the rhythm of its breathing.
’Now.’
He launched. One powerful, perfectly-angled bounce — silent through the air.
The rat’s head snapped up a half-second too late. He made contact and his body dissolved on impact, spreading across the animal’s fur like dark ink soaking into cloth.
"EKKK! EKKKK!" The rat squeaked. It thrashed, clawing at the stone, spinning in tight circles.
But his parasitic form had already moved past the fur, past the skin, threading through muscle and nerve, burrowing through the bones.
Veins pulsed violently beneath its skin as the rodent crumpled to the ground, lifeless at first glance.
Suddenly, dark veins rose visibly beneath the stretched skin, and its eyes burned a steady, deep red. An unexpected side effect.
It twitched like a rabid animal before rising and settling into the floor.
’So this is how rats see the world.’
The sensation was difficult to describe. Not control — more like inhabiting. Like pulling on a coat that had already learned the shape of his body.
’Let’s test this.’ He ran a short circuit along the pipe wall, feeling each movent click into place.
’Remarkable,’ he thought. ’Like I’ve lived in this body my whole life.’
He stopped at the edge of the drainage gap and looked out.
Beyond the sewer’s mouth, dim grey light filtered down from above — street level, or sothing close to it.
The sound of the world above drifted down in fragnts. Footsteps. Voices. The distant rumble of machinery.
[New Mission: Devour 10 human livers. Evolve to Category 2.]
Francis read it once. No hesitation. He already accepted that he was a monster.
He chose this path not to be a hero, but to satisfy his own selfish goal.
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