Francis pushed forward through the dark, his four legs carrying him faster than he expected.
The sewer narrowed, then opened into a wider channel before he spotted it — a flood gutter angled upward, light bleeding through the grate above.
He squeezed through the gap, his large body barely fitting, and emerged into open air.
An alley.
He paused and took it in.
Brick buildings on both sides, fire escapes bolted to their faces in rusted zigzags.
Trash bags split open against the walls. A dumpster with its lid warped off. The smell of old cooking grease and wet cardboard. This looks like home.
The architecture. The layout. Even the texture of the neglect — it all matched the kind of city he'd spent decades operating in.
But when his eyes found a newspaper pinned against the dumpster by the wind, the text meant nothing. Not a foreign language he could place. Just symbols, unrecognizable.
Either way, it changed nothing about what he needed to do first.
Information. Then a target.
His whiskers swept the air as he scanned the alley. Decades of training didn't vanish just because he was wearing a rat's body.
If anything, the instincts translated cleanly — read the environment, identify threats, locate opportunity.
To his right, an apartment building. Three stories of weathered brick, paint peeling around every window frame, a metal drainpipe running the full height of the wall with bracket bolts spaced like ladder rungs.
Francis crossed the alley at a sprint and went straight up.
Each leap was precise — bracket to bracket, pipe joint to windowsill — until he reached the second floor and pressed himself flat against the glass.
Inside: a single-room apartment doing its best impression of a landfill.
Takeout containers stacked on a coffee table. Beer bottles arranged in loose towers across the floor.
Clothes in piles that had long since stopped being temporary. A television throwing pale light across the ceiling.
On the couch, a heavyset man lay with one arm over his face, muttering at whatever was on screen.
Don't rush. Profile first.
Francis watched.
The man's movements were slow and economical in the way that had nothing to do with discipline.
Soft through the middle. No muscle definition in his arms. The way he shifted his weight — careful, like his joints ached — suggested someone well past his physical prime and well past caring.
He muttered. He reached for a bottle. He drank.
Single occupant. Sedentary. Comfortable enough in his isolation that he's stopped hiding it.
Francis slipped through the window gap and dropped silently onto the sill.
The other rats in the apartment scattered instantly — one look at his oversized, vein-webbed frame and they were gone, squeezing into walls and under appliances. That made the sweep easier.
He moved through the space methodically, confirming what the exterior had suggested.
One toothbrush. Plates for one. No photographs. Men's clothing only, every piece of it. No sign that anyone else had been here recently — or that anyone was expected.
He lives alone. He has no one checking on him.
By the time the man finally dragged himself to the bedroom and dropped onto the mattress, Francis had already built the shape of a plan.
He started in the kitchen.
Grease coated the stovetop in a thick amber layer. Dishes had been soaking in the sink long enough to grow their own ecosystems.
Near the stove, a plastic cooking oil bottle sat with its cap loose — knocked crooked and never corrected.
Francis climbed it, gripped the slick surface with his claws, and pushed.
It hit the linoleum with a dull crack. The cap popped off, and oil spread dark and wide across the floor. He rolled it toward the bedroom.
He found a second bottle behind the takeout containers. A third in the lower cabinet.
One by one, he sent them over.
By the time he finished, the kitchen and the stretch of floor leading to the bedroom were coated with a slicky layer of oil.
Then he moved to the bed.
He studied the bottles on the floor nearby, testing each one with a careful bite — scoring the glass at the stress points without breaking them.
Set traps didn't need to be complicated. They just needed to be ready.
The man's snores filled the room. Rattling like something loose inside a machine.
Francis climbed onto the mattress and waited above the man's chest. Patient. Completely still.
His daughters' names surfaced, but he pushed them back down. Right now, all that mattered was the mission.
He kept repeating to himself that it was a necessary violence, just like when he began his vigilante days. The only difference now was that he was about to kill innocent civilians.
'I'm a sinner, and I'll gladly accept any punishment in the future. But right now, my priority is giving my girls a second chance at life.'
Soon, the man's eyes slowly open, a faint awareness returning.
Francis struck.
His teeth tore into the man's lower lip — fast and deep, ripping free a chunk of flesh before the nerve signals even reached his brain.
Blood welled instantly.
The man's eyes snapped open. For a single, disoriented moment, he couldn't process what was happening. That moment was all Francis needed.
He drove his teeth into the left eye socket. The eyeball burst under pressure, fluid spraying across the pillow.
The scream that followed wasn't a word. It was pure, unprocessed terror — the sound a person makes when their mind hasn't caught up to their body yet.
A hand swept across the man's face, grasping blindly.
Francis was already moving. He found the right ear, bit through the cartilage at its base, twisted. It came away wet.
"WHAT — HELP! SOMEBODY—"
The man rolled off the bed.
He went down hard — arms windmilling, body crashing sideways into the scored bottles beneath the bed frame. Glass exploded at every weakened point, exactly as planned.
"FUCK! WHAT THE HELL! STOP!!!"
The man thrashed, desperate for something to grab. Stinging pain from glass shards made his situation even worse.
But it wasn't enough to bring him down.
Francis dropped from the bed and put his plan into motion. He ran forward, striking at his target's face.
The remaining eye. His nose. The soft of his throat, bitten five times in intervals — not to kill outright, but to bleed.
"Help me — someone HELP—"
The man swung at his face, but Francis used his parasite form to grow multiple eyes across his rat body, dodging each attempt and striking back.
It made the man cursed in anger. He knew he was dying—and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Soon, the screaming faded, words dissolving into groans.
'Don't fight it,' Francis mused, watching his prey's movements slow. 'You're only making your suffering last longer.'
Just as the target opened his mouth for another scream, Francis lunged inside, tearing through flesh from the throat, gnawing and ripping from within before bursting out through the neck in a spray of blood and tissue.
"I… uh…ommm." the man tried to speak, but words paused in the torrent of blood filling his mouth. He clawed desperately at the jagged hole in his neck, blood spilling and pooling as he gasped in agony.
THUD!
He collapsed to the floor, barely breathing, eyes wide with horror as the very creature responsible for his death casually looked him in the eye.
There was no single word to describe what he felt—confusion, rage, and disbelief all twisted together as he tried to understand why a sewer rat would do this.