V – 00002.2 – My Growing Your Pain.

After spending a solid hour... or 4 prodding my teeth every other second and licking at the insides of them obsessively until my tongue grew raw. Glancing down at my mutations, I saw several new options had populated the list regarding my teeth.

“No more putting this off, brother; we have to go back.” My shoulders slumped as the words left my mouth, and I picked myself up from the floor. Gathering my things took no time at all—a few blades and a bag, along with my mask and some fresh clothes.

“We’ve got a blood debt to collect,” I said as I began my march towards the city. The hatred I’d made a routine of suppressing surged fourth as I focused myself towards my enemies. The people would learn terror and despair.

Once I broke out of the tree line, I began jogging, pumping my legs hard and kicking off the dirt. My 'slow’ jog carried me over the clearing that separated the city from me quickly; jumping over the metal barricade between the main road and the field, I landed softly on the asphalt, my calloused feet taking the impact with ease and a soft clacking sound as my claws tapped the floor, and I dropped my pace to a walk.

Striding across the road, I found it was almost completely desolate as I entered the city proper; the thin crowds I encountered previously were nowhere to be seen. Although the city had gained a troubling new decoration, a reapers scythe was graffiti’d on several of the walls leading into the town.

I spat on the floor as I passed by one of the scythes, and almost like an omen, my system screen opened, warning me that my Parasite ability, 3 sense points, and instinct skill had been disabled as Selfish Gene went inactive.

Pain riddled my guts; however, expecting it made it far easier to ignore this time around, as I forced myself deeper into the city on pure will alone. Immutable and mutagen followed soon after, but the last one is where I had to stop and take a break. I leaned against the wall and began panting as burning hot insects writhed under my skin, and I read the warning that trait eater had been deactivated.

Taking a few minutes to myself, I heaved and recovered before bending at the waist and puking thick viscous stomach acid all over the pavement. “Holy shit… This is the fucking worst.”

Leaning against the wall and sucking on air, I took another few minutes to really get my strength back, and that’s when I heard someone shouting at me as my senses were still adjusting themselves and my brain was shaking off the disorientation of losing 3 points in sense.

Straightening myself, I waved away at whoever was making the noise like they were a notification in a VR game, and when they kept making noise, I finally shouted back, “Fuck off.”

That seemed to finally get their attention as they started walking towards me faster, and I finally got enough dominance over my senses to really make out what they were saying.

“What the fuck did you say to me, you cunt? Get the fuck over here; I don’t give a shit if you’re sick.” I heard as he finished his sentence.

Turning and facing the man shouting at me, I was confronted with a twenty-something-year-old looking man, with a patchy beard and a crowbar in his hands and a can of spray paint stuffed in his pocket, and taking his visage in as well at putting the pieces together that he was the one making these pictures, and I snarled, revealing my sharp, oversized teeth.

He stopped dead in his tracks as I turned and curled my lips back, giving him a good look at me in all my glory. Barefoot with long, sharp claws protruding off my fingers and toes, massively built, and long wolfish fangs unlocking with strings of saliva connecting them as I opened my mouth.

He spoke again as I violently twisted my head, my eyes locked on him, and my neck bent and cracked. “Wha... What the fuck are you?” He managed to barely whisper as his eyes widened and he stepped away from me, and at that moment, like a wolf seeing his prey run, my instincts screamed in my head to attack.

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I leaned forward, posturing my body and coiling my muscles in preparation for a violent lunge, and then I leapt forward. The man threw his arms up in a futile attempt to block me, and I grabbed his crowbar mid-swing and yanked it away. Lifting my newly acquired weapon high and grabbing the man’s arm with my free hand.

I slammed the crowbar down with brutal force; the curved tip dug into his shoulder and smashed through his weak bones. I lifted my foot and kicked him with all my might square in the chest while yanking on the crowbar and tore a chunk of his collarbone free of his body as he rocketed away from me, flipping over himself and sagging on the ground, a broken unconscious body on borrowed time.

I wasn’t done by a long shot. Walking forward at a leisurely pace, I was pleased to note I hadn’t lost anymore mutations, which confirmed the theory I’d had rattling around in the back of my head that whatever this disease was didn’t seem to be able to attack my normal mutations, just the ones based on my damaged DNA.

“Maybe that’s why I got sick all the time? I always felt like my immune system was doing a fucking atrocious job.”

I raised my crowbar high and slammed it into the man’s knee, digging the tip into his skin and heaving, ripping out his knee cap. “You know... that’s actually pretty fucking plausible, and I guess it still is doing a shitjob.”

The man woke up and screamed briefly for just a moment until I heaved back on the iron bar and his knee cap ripped out of his leg, and he passed out again.

Reaching down, I grabbed his collar and lifted him up before twisting my head sideways and opening my jaws wide, snapping them shut over the man’s throat. I ripped his throat out and spat it on the ground. The taste of fermented grape was completely absent as my mouth filled with iron.

“You know… not the taste I’m used to, but not so terrible.” I said as I acknowledged my kill notice and the quest counter update confirming what I already knew.

I kept ahold of the man’s body as I began walking through the streets back towards the factory that held the reapers, planning on sending another message.

You know it’s pretty fucked up how a few mutations and a couple levels can change you. I might be able to handle this in a few hours, at this rate.

I chuckled softly as I approached the old factory and caught myself as I almost just walked straight in. “That’s a little arrogant even for me.”

Taking a detour, I walked up to the abandoned building I perched on before to taunt the reapers, and approaching the front entrance, I quickly had to duck back behind the bend in the building.

Barely ten feet from me and around a corner are two men with handguns stuffed down their pants. Guess even these fucking jackals can learn from their mistakes.

I leaned down and silently dropped the corpse I’d been dragging with me and prepared for my next attack.

Alright, time to do something you haven’t done in years, Viktor. Plan ahead.

Eat a dick.

Yeah, yeah, just saying you don’t have parasite to lean on if you get hurt; you can’t heal until you get out of the city, and you have to be in decent enough shape to catch prey after that.

I peered around the corner and measured the distance in my head again.

Yeah, a good ten feet... Fuck me, I really lack any kind of ability to range or close distance.

I looked down at the mutilated corpse.

Sorry, bro, it’s got to happen. I thought towards the corpse as I picked it up again and positioned it over my body. I turned the corner and sprinted forward, hammering the concrete as hard as I could as I pushed myself to my top speed even as I could hear them firing at me and my reckless death sprint being slowed as bullets slammed into the body that was shielding me.

Slamming hard into one of the guards, smashing the corpse into the closest man as I collided with them, I knocked him down into the ground as I dropped the body and leapt forward, tackling the second man. A bullet whizzed past my ear and tore a piece of my ear off.

I leaned back and interlocked my fingers before smacking my hands down on the man. I slashed at his throat with a twist as I used the momentum of my movement to throw myself up to my feet and crouched down before leaping across the short distance that separated me and my downed target, and I fell upon him with my knee stretched out.

A terrible crunching of bone filled the air as my knee, with all my considerable weight behind it, fell several feet through the air and into his skull. Making what remained of his head resemble a bowl of spaghetti that someone dropped.

I groaned as the adrenaline started fading my body now that the dust... and fragments of bone settled, a burning pain filled my ear and my leg, the joint in my knee was badly dislocated, and my knee cap pushed sideways.

I leaned back and stretched my leg out, placing my palms on each side of my severely displaced kneecap. I pulled twisted and snapped it back in place with a practiced hand and stifled the shout that attempted to follow the oddly comforting and familiar pain.

Who would have fucking thought, I’ve been bitten, shot, and fucked up so much recently I started actually missing the joint pain.

Pulling myself to my feet, I grabbed the belts of my three John Doe’s and laced them together, wrapping them around their necks like one long piece of leather with three victims, and I began hauling them inside the building and up the stairs to the roof.

“Holy shit, these assholes are heavy.”

"Yeah, that’s the problem, not that you’re trying to carry nearly six hundred pounds of cunt uphill.”

I dragged them all the way up to the roof and threw a few curses and insults at the corpses for the love of sugary slop I was certain they held; I dropped the leathery rope I was using to carry them and rotated my arm while massaging my shoulder a little.

“As a great man once said, you fucked around; now it’s time to find the fuck out.”

You cannot quote yourself, you fucking homunculus, and you certainly can’t refer to yourself as a great man. Responded one of the voices in my mind.

I wrapped the end of the belt chain around the roof tops fire escape railing and heaved the three bodies up and over the railing.

With one final push, the first went, and the other two followed quickly after.

Their bodies entered a short free fall before a sudden stop snapped all their necks like a Jacob’s ladder, leaving them hanging, blood covered and dead-eyed, necks snapped and staring towards the reapers factory.

It took seconds for shouts to ring out, and I pulled the silver wolf mask out and laid it over my face.

“Let the FUCKENING BEGIN.”