Pfft!
A razor-sharp blade punched straight through the guy's throat. Thick red blood poured down the edge, mixed with a shitload of tiny bubbles because the windpipe was fucked.
Even with that, the parasite didn't drop dead right away.
"What, you wanna throw hands?" Ivan didn't look anything like the drunk asshole from a minute ago. His right arm was already buried deep in the parasite's neck. One twitch and he'd slice the head clean off.
Ivan turned to face the thing and said with a sharp French edge, "You better not fucking move, or I'll kill you."
"You... you're a parasite too," the man rasped, voice raw and shredded. He pulled his tentacles back, but his face was already twisting from the blood loss, ugly and wrong. The hate rolling off him was impossible to hide now.
Ivan caught the unstable vibe through the reflection on the ground. The parasite was losing its shit.
"Here's a little gift. No need to thank me."
Ivan yanked out a syringe loaded with pesticide and jammed it straight into the parasite's body.
"What the fuck is this?"
The parasite glanced down at the needle sticking out of its waist.
"Guess," Ivan said.
The second he finished, he ripped his right arm free, shaped his left arm into a half-meter blade of raw flesh and bone, and backed the fuck up fast, both arms up like shields. Just like he expected, the parasite's attack came screaming right after, slamming into his crossed blades with a wet crunch.
That close was way too risky.
Even though he'd already stuck the needle in, the smart move was still to put some distance between them.
Up that close, Ivan's speed couldn't match the parasite's. If the thing panicked and went full berserk, he'd be screwed. So he kept retreating, creating space.
"How's the body feeling?" Ivan stood under the moonlight, blood blades dangling toward the grass, staring at the parasite.
He wasn't here just to kill it. He needed it alive long enough to meet the conditions for analysis.
The parasite couldn't even make a sound anymore. The liquid was racing through its veins, wrecking everything. The host body's organs were shutting down fast. The only shot it had now was to ditch this corpse and jump to a new one if it wanted any chance to survive.
The parasite looked at Ivan one last time. In the end, the raw need to live won over the urge to kill.
It clamped a hand over its ruined neck and bolted toward the edge of the park, legs pumping like crazy.
Ivan didn't even let the parasite get five steps.
A sharp pain exploded in its right leg. The limb hit the ground with a wet slap as Ivan's blade sliced clean through it.
The parasite lost balance and face-planted hard into the dirt. When it lifted its head, those dead-fish eyes stared up at him, screaming one thing loud and clear: there was no fucking way it was ever merging with Ivan.
"Come on, don't be so fucking stiff," Ivan said, flashing that smooth villain smile straight out of some dark movie or anime. "We can team up, strong with strong. Together we'd be the most powerful parasite this shithole world has ever seen."
He stepped closer, eyes narrowed, still smiling like a polite psychopath, and held out his right hand.
"Live or die. Your choice."
The parasite's survival instinct finally beat out its pride.
It squirmed out of the ruined body, a wet, wriggling mass of flesh that crawled straight into Ivan's open palm. The second it tried to burrow in and take over, five fingers turned into razor blades and crushed it like a goddamn grape.
"If I label you as my enemy," Ivan said with a soft laugh, "then killing you with a lie doesn't make me a bastard, right?"
He shook the bloody chunks off his hand, then crouched beside the corpse. Using the dead guy's own shirt, he carefully wiped his fingers clean like he was polishing silver after dinner.
[Transfer Talent Fusion in progress. Current progress: 5%. (Cannot perform next analysis until full fusion is complete.)]
Just unlocked the fusion condition and it was already at five percent. Looked like talent transfer fused faster than talent shapeshifting.
Nice.
After that, Ivan started testing the new ability right away.
Under his control, one of his fingers detached smoothly, no blood, nothing. The index finger twitched twice on the ground, then slowly stretched out, trying to form the shape of a small dagger. It never finished. The cells ran out of juice and it went limp.
"Guess it's locked in now. Can't reattach it," Ivan muttered. "If I want to push this shit to its full potential, I need that super physique. No fucking delay."
He picked up the severed finger with care and slipped it into his pocket. Good little souvenir.
As for when the missing finger would grow back, Ivan figured it'd take at least three or four days.
His body just couldn't compare to Shinichi's.
That guy had been enhanced by a parasite, plus Migi was backing him up. That's why he could regrow an entire arm in a day.
And even that wasn't a real arm.
His right arm was basically Migi itself.
As long as Migi didn't die or bail, the arm would keep coming back.
On the other side of the park, a bunch of figures gathered at the mouth of a dark alley.
They were all different heights, men and women, some looking way too old, others barely out of their teens. A real fucking mix.
They were all parasites from the area.
A minute ago they'd picked up Tanaka's killing intent and figured the bastard had finally found tonight's meal. None of them expected his brainwaves to just vanish—gone for real, the kind of sudden cutoff that only means one thing: the parasite is dead.
"He wasn't killed by another parasite," one of them said. "I'm not picking up any second set of brainwaves in that zone."
"Could it be the cops?" asked a teenage parasite still wearing a blood-stained soccer jersey.
Most of them had fresh red blood smeared across their faces, necks, and clothes. They'd clearly just finished feeding or were still in the middle of it.
"Let's go check it out. If it's police, hold off on killing for now."
Their figures melted into the moonlight and disappeared.
At the same time, Ivan Greevs was finally sitting in the back of a taxi he'd had to practically beg for. Taxis were fucking rare out here, especially after midnight. Killing the parasite had been easier than flagging this ride down.
He stared out the window, city lights sliding past.
Then something in his peripheral vision made his scalp crawl.
Dozens of parasites, every shape and size, were sprinting toward the park he'd just left. Their heads were split wide open, skulls peeled back like grotesque flowers, bodies moving in that twisted, unnatural way. It looked like a hundred demons marching through the night.
"Tanaka's death must've cut his brainwaves. That's what tipped the others off," Ivan thought, piecing it together instantly.
He let out a low breath, genuinely glad his luck had held. He'd missed that horde by pure seconds.
If he'd been even one minute slower, those dozens of parasites would've turned him into fucking mincemeat.
___
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Read 12 Advance Chapters—P@t- Captain69