The Ultimate Devourer

Fellow cannibals

After one day of getting my body used to the forms of swordsmanship, I decided to go back to rest after I bid farewell to Shira for the day.

My sleep was just like a baby's, soft and long until the rays of dawn hit me in the face and woke me up.

But that wasn't the only thing that woke me up, I could hear some knocks at the door of the house, and when I got up and opened it, I saw Aratas's tall body waiting for me.

He looked down at me and said:

"You have to meet your new comrades on the battlefield. It has also been a few days since you rested. Do you feel like you can eat more?"

I looked down at my stabilized hands and thought for a few seconds before nodding. I was looking forward to completing the set of basic swordsmanship.

And to see my new comrades, which I will most likely have to make contingency plans against, just in case the hunger will betray them on the battlefield, and they would attack "allied" troops.

We went back into the Church, then took the long corridor to the dungeons below.

The first things I saw when we entered the dungeons were four other teens around my age or one year younger, three boys and one girl.

The boys were rather weak, having bony bodies, and smudged faces that made them look like they came out of a chimney. Respectively, the boys had, dark, brown, and white hair.

The sole girl wasn't in a better condition than the boys when it came to her body, hers was just hidden behind a plain baggy cloth that covered her body while theirs was there to see as they wore no shirt and only some ripped pants, but with my improved senses, I could see how weak she was. Her dark yellow hair also looked like a bird's nest.

This was a rather sad setup, four orphans? Well, it made sense to be orphans. They would be easier to control once they became fanatics of the Church, and seeing how they were being given 'goodwill' they would surely try to repay it for the remainder of their lives.

I knew some of those psychological. After all, one of them was used on me so I can become a bandit.

I shook my head and said:

"Before we can start, I have a favor to ask."

Aratas looked down at me, surprised by my words, and he asked:

"Favor, what kind of favor?"

I glanced at the orphans silently before I responded:

"My mother has been sold eight years ago. I'm not sure if she is alive or not. Could you put the Church's men to search for her?"

Aratas nodded and said:

"A simple thing, slaves go through the Church's examinations and channels before they are given to the buyer, we even have a ledger that records such things. If you know that it happened eight years ago, it's rather easy to find."

I nodded back and shook my head before saying:

"Then we can move on."

Aratas glanced toward the four orphans and waved his hand before saying:

"Today you will get to eat your fill, but don't eat too much or you will get sick."

He glanced at me before saying:

"You can eat at most three of the items before you will stop for a few days. Do you understand?"

The children nodded hastily as they wouldn't want to miss a meal. Regardless of the delay between the next one and this one.

We went further into the dungeon before we reached the last place where I had eaten. The next jail towards the last one where I ate was filled with a few convicts.

They were all rather scared when they saw me, as they knew what happened and how I survived that liquidation of my body.

And they didn't particularly want to be eaten. Regardless if they lost their will to live or not, I'm pretty sure the way they wanted to be going out wasn't to be eaten.

However, Aratas didn't care about the way they wanted to die, nor did I.

He ripped the jail bars open before he looked at me and said:

"You should be the one taking care of these 'meals', for starters, the other four are too weak to start these pseudo training."

I nodded and decided to make myself look good in front of my future squad mates. I killed all six men in one fell swoop, using my sword to decapitate or stab them in the heart, giving all of them a quick death.

I feasted on one of them before I felt the imbalance from before coming right back, so I stopped going further. I looked at their nauseated, but also hungry expressions.

Aratas was smart, taking these hungry street urchins to eat these men.

If he took some of the ones that were doing rather decently, they would have second thoughts about eating human meat.

But these kids must have thought about cannibalization before. They just didn't have the strength to act upon it.

But now that all of this fresh meat was in front of them, they couldn't help but ignore their nausea before they started eating, feasting on the flesh of their fellow men.

They ate, and the changes started happening immediately, just like me, their eyes turned, their teeth sharpened and slowly elongated before their hair turned the same color as their eyes.

The changes were immediate, and so was the pain accompanying them.

The corpses were gone, leaving only some blood on the floor below that was almost scrapped clean by the four trashing teens on the floor.

Their bodies regained some proportion from their previously bony side, but they still were on the skinny level.

I could see the changes in their bodies happen in live time, and examining them made me think about my changes, they should be growing a second heart at this time.

However, it looked like some of them couldn't endure the pain from the changes and they fainted, two of the boys fainted, the one with brown hair, and the one with dark, and before Aratas could do anything, they transformed into pools of mangled flesh and blood.

The transformation needed an awakened mind for it to happen, or else the energy from the eaten experts would go crazy haywire into the body and destroy them in seconds.

Going overboard was one way of destroying your body, but the other was being unable to withstand the changes and fainting.

I shook my head and looked at the remaining boy and girl duo, they were gritting their teeth as they held on, and soon enough, the pain receded.

Their bodies were full of cold sweat as they got up on two wobbly feet before they looked at me with a scared expression, wondering how I was able to withstand the pain and transformation from eating a fellow human, considering their other two companions ended up dead.

I looked down at the pools of mangled flesh and blood and asked Aratas:

"What are we doing with these two?"

Aratas glanced down uninterested before responding:

"We shouldn't waste anything, should we?"

He glanced towards the other two before saying:

"He went through two of these phases before his body was unable to hold on anymore, each of you should eat one pile of flesh. This is your third and final meal for a few days."

The two new cannibals looked at each other and saw the uncertainty in their eyes. Eating strangers that had already been killed by someone else was one thing, but eating the remains of the people that you had been with for years?

I looked back at Aratas and shook my head. Did he gather people that knew each other? The seemingly gentle but strong paladin had a cruel side to him, which made me even more alert against the Church.

I should be thinking twice about what I should do from now on before I was strong enough to cross them.