LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL-Chapter 145: You Will Pay In Threes

The dawn was rising, and a baker who had just opened his bakery to begin his morning activities paused when he thought he heard a scream, but after a while, he could no longer hear anything, and he shrugged before continuing on with his activities. Unknown to him, the alley beside his shop was the ground zero of the beginning of madness.

Inside the alley, the rapist was still screaming, and perhaps if what he was feeling was pain, then his screams may have been less pathetic; instead, he was feeling something moving inside him, something cold and hungry, something that had no business being in a human body.

It slithered through his veins, curled around his organs, and nested in his bones. Whatever this thing was, it had no intentions of being gentle, and although there was pain, there was also the profound horror that something was inside his body and reaching places that nothing ever should.

In one profound moment of realization, the man realized what it truly meant to be violated, to feel true helplessness as something that was uniquely yours was taken, and twisted in a manner that deviated from your desires. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

The eyes of the man grew red and haunted, and he wished he could beg, threaten, but most of all, he wished he could die... but he could do nothing but scream as the yellow-eyed boy watched him with calm and curiosity, savoring every moment of his screams as if they were the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

"One," he counted, and a faint spark of horror emerged in the heart of the rapist as he remembered that the child said he would take something from him in threes.

This realization came to pass as the rapist’s left arm went numb, and before his disbelieving eyes, it began to change. The skin darkened as if he had been dipped in black oil before it thickened.

He flinched as a loud cracking sound began to emerge from his arm as they began splitting along seams that wept black fluid. Bones cracked and reformed, growing longer in shapes that were not meant to be inside the body of a man, and his hand on the other end of his extended limb curled into a claw... then kept curling, as his fingers fused, becoming something else entirely.

"Two."

His right leg began to turn black as the same transformation swept across it, but faster now, more eager, as if whatever was inside him was rapidly learning and adapting to the process of changing bodies. The leg bent backward at the knee, then bent again, joint multiplying. The foot split, became two feet, each with too many toes, each tipped with glistening black nails.

The rapist was beyond screaming now. Everything that was happening to him, he could feel, and by now, the pain of what he was experiencing should have made him pass out, but something inside his brain had been switched off, and he could not flee from the horror and the pain.

Luckily, it seemed that although his mind was being prevented from fading, he must have reached his limit as his mind began to mercifully shut down, and he could feel the last of his sanity retreating to somewhere safe, somewhere this was not happening.

Then the boy leaned close, his breath warm against the rapist’s ear, and he whispered.

"Three."

The mind of the rapist suddenly gained great clarity, as he felt the changes beginning to slow down and stop... was it over?

The rapist hung there, half-transformed, a thing that was no longer man but not yet monster. He had one remaining eye that was still human, and that eye stared at the boy with an expression that held nothing but pleading and fear. He had planned for this day for weeks, but nothing would have told him that this was how the day was going to end.

The boy stepped back and admired his work.

"There," he said, satisfied. "Now you are almost ready, but there is still one important part missing."

The rapist tried to speak, to beg, to promise anything, but what came out was a wet gurgle, but the boy was no longer looking at him, but at the ravaged woman lying down on the road. Her eyes were closed now, the tear had dried on her cheek, and she was gone. Who knew the last thing her eyes saw before she perished?

The boy’s smile faded; for the first time, something like sadness entered his yellow eyes.

"Ah, you took a very valuable resource from me, but you should be able to repay me back in many threes in the future... many, many threes."

The boy walked back to her, knelt, and gently closed her eyes with his small hand.

"I’m sorry, Mother," he whispered. "You could not be of much use to me as I would have liked," then he placed his other hand over her stomach, "But you still have something that could still be of use."

Saying this, he pushed his hand into the woman’s stomach and dug around before bringing out part of her internal organs. The organs were warm, and he brought them up to his nose to smell them before he blew a breath upon them, and they began to wiggle and transform.

Before long, the organs in his hand had fused into a single solid mass that resembled a black orb that seemed to swallow the light of the morning sun.

The boy grew pale and nearly collapsed to the ground. Whatever he had just created had nearly drained everything out of him, and he stood as if he was about to collapse for several hours. Oddly, no one entered this alley, even though a few feet away, people were passing by, and the sound of life and the bustle of the city were in full force.

If someone were observant, they would have seen a distraught man passing by this alley, and he had already passed dozens of times; his eyes were filled with panic, and he kept calling the names of his wife and child.

Hours passed and evening arrived, a day had just rolled by, and finally the weakness of the boy vanished as it seemed as if the growing darkness fed the child an odd sense of vitality, and he stood up straight and walked over to the rapist, who should have been insane by now, but the boy had given him the gift of clarity, and he would never run mad, never sleep, and he could only stand in one place and watch everything happen.

Reaching the half-transformed thing, the boy shoved the black orb into the rapist’s stomach, and instantly his stomach began to swell dramatically until it was three times bigger than his body. This caused his spine to bend into a C shape as the back of his head rested on the ground, and his weight became so heavy that he was permanently stuck to the ground, as his legs and arms became useless appendages.

The stomach of the rapist continued to swell, not as drastically as before, but this swelling was unstoppable. The rapist was not aware that tentacles had burst out of his stomach and reached for the body of the woman before dragging it into an opening at the side of the massive stomach.