Francis continued eating, analyzing and adjusting his movements 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 time 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 time to squeak before he was already moving to the next target.
[Sewer Larvae consumed: 412/1,000]
The sewers became 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 got the same mentality: follow orders without question. It made pulling the trigger easier.
'Time to speed up things.'
He ventured deeper, pushing himself harder.
By the twenty-hour mark, he consumed over seven hundred.
The survivors had stopped feeding entirely — they scattered the moment 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 method. His massive body would coil wide, cutting off escape routes before he struck — five, sometimes six larvae in a single pass.
Clean. Efficient. The crowded sewer grew quieter with every hour, the constant wet scraping of legs thinning to near silence.
[Sewer Larvae consumed: 999/1,000]
'One left.'
It had survived longer than the rest — a particularly cunning larvae 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 men 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 Larvae consumed: 1,000/1,000]
[Mission Complete.]
[Initiating Evolution]
Light pulsed beneath his skin, burning through flesh like flame. 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 membrane, he caught distorted shapes of the world beyond — warped pipes, dim light, still water. Then even that faded, and he lost consciousness completely.
Time ceased to mean anything.
Hours. Days. He couldn't tell. His awareness surfaced and submerged in intervals, like a man half-drowning in a dreamless sleep.
Then, at last — a crack.
He tore through the membrane 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, feeding him a seamless 360-degree view of everything around him at once. No blind spots. No angles.
'This is nice… I just need to get used to it.'
He tested his movement. 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 became 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 something broken this early. Fine. Small creatures first, then.
'I need a host. Something useful — but nothing conspicuous.'
Without wasting a moment, 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 his larvae had eaten everything, or whatever survived learned to stay far away.
Francis moved deeper.
The sewer narrowed, the smell 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 movement 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 something close to it.
The sound of the world above drifted down in fragments. Footsteps. Voices. The distant rumble of machinery.
[New Mission: Devour 10 human livers. Evolve to Category 2.]
Francis read it once. No hesitation, no guilt flickered in his eyes. He already accepted that he was a monster.
He chose this path not to be a hero, but to satisfy his own selfish goal.