Chapter 9: The Butcher of District VII
Lucius
District Seven was a corpse that hadn't stopped breathing.
Condemned buildings lined streets that city maintenance had forgotten decades ago. Windows gaped like empty eye sockets. Graffiti covered every surface—territorial markers, gang signs, desperate pleas in languages I didn't recognize. The living humans who remained clustered in fortified apartments, emerging only during daylight hours.
The Lycans owned the night.
Blood Appraisal painted the district in crimson numbers. Every warehouse, every subway entrance, every abandoned factory pulsed with signatures: [ 40 BP ], [ 55 BP ], [ 72 BP ]. Lycans in human form, hiding in plain sight, waiting for prey to wander into range.
I didn't wander. I studied.
Three nights of observation before the first kill. Mapping patrol routes. Identifying pack hierarchy. Learning which Lycans traveled alone and which moved in groups.
The system helped. Blood Appraisal tracked movement patterns, flagged isolated targets, calculated optimal approach vectors. Combined with meta-knowledge from the films—Lycan transformation took three seconds, silver rounds to the brain were instantly fatal, wolfsbane slowed regeneration—I had advantages no fledgling should possess.
The first target was a beta Lycan guarding a condemned warehouse.
I approached from upwind, using Enhanced Reflexes to time my movements between his scanning patterns. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
He turned at five feet, instinct screaming danger—
Two rounds through his skull before the transformation could begin.
[ BP ACQUIRED: 52 ]
[ MEMORY SIPHON ACTIVATED ]
Fragments flooded in. Pack structure. Raze's commands. A warehouse on Dohány Street where supplies were cached. Names of other Lycans—useful for future targeting.
I drained the corpse efficiently, took both ears as trophies—Death Dealer tradition, proof of kills—and vanished into the district's shadows.
Day Four
Seven kills. Seven sets of ears drying in my safehouse.
The pattern was surgical. Target isolation. Approach timing. Silver rounds to disable, feeding to drain. No witnesses. No survivors.
Blood Appraisal helped me find them. Memory Siphon showed me their secrets. Enhanced Reflexes let me strike before they could transform.
[ BP ACQUIRED: 48 ]
[ BP ACQUIRED: 65 ]
[ BP ACQUIRED: 41 ]
Each kill made the next one easier. Not just practically—emotionally. The first Lycan had still registered as a person, a being with thoughts and memories. By kill seven, they were just BP walking around in convenient packages.
[ HUMANITY SCORE: 64/100 ]
"Eight points in four days. The system really does track everything."
I dismissed the notification. Humanity scores mattered less than survival. Less than power.
Day Six
Eleven kills total. The other Death Dealers had started whispering.
"The Butcher of District Seven," someone called me in the mess hall. Not my choice of nickname, but accurate enough. Eleven Lycans in six days exceeded veteran averages. Exceeded reasonable expectation for a fledgling in the deadliest territory.
Kraven had summoned me twice for "progress reports." Both times, his questions probed for weakness—how was I achieving such results? Who was helping me? What advantage did I possess that justified this impossible efficiency?
I'd answered with careful half-truths. Surgeon's precision. Pattern recognition. Lucky targeting. Nothing that revealed the system, the meta-knowledge, the predator mentality that had taken root where my conscience used to live.
He didn't believe me. But he couldn't prove otherwise.
[ CURRENT BP: 434/500 ]
The number glowed in my peripheral vision. Four hundred thirty-four points. Enough for multiple upgrades. Enough to push toward the next threshold.
"Enhanced Strength would help in close combat. Enhanced Reflexes Lv.2 would make me even faster. Regeneration would keep me alive when things went wrong."
The temptation was overwhelming. Power, right there, waiting to be claimed.
I started buying.
[ ENHANCED STRENGTH LV.1 - COST: 20 BP ]
[ ACQUIRING... ]
Fire rippled through my muscles. The same burning transformation as Enhanced Reflexes, but deeper—tissue rebuilding, fiber density increasing, raw physical capability expanding beyond human limits.
[ ENHANCED REFLEXES LV.2 - COST: 30 BP ]
[ ACQUIRING... ]
Nerve pathways optimizing. Reaction time sharpening. The world slowing further as my processing speed increased.
[ NIGHT VISION LV.1 - COST: 15 BP ]
[ ACQUIRING... ]
Eyes burning, restructuring, darkness becoming irrelevant as new receptors activated.
[ REGENERATION LV.1 - COST: 25 BP ]
[ ACQUIRING... ]
Healing protocols upgrading. Cellular repair accelerating. Damage that would have taken hours to fix now resolving in minutes.
Four upgrades in forty-eight hours. Four transformations stacked on top of each other.
The system had warned me.
[ CAUTION: RAPID SEQUENTIAL UPGRADES MAY TRIGGER EVOLUTION SICKNESS ]
[ RECOMMENDED INTERVAL BETWEEN PURCHASES: 72 HOURS MINIMUM ]
I'd ignored the warning. Too hungry for power. Too confident in my ability to handle consequences.
The sickness hit at hour thirty-six.
Fever first—burning from inside, temperature spiking beyond anything natural. Then muscle spasms, uncontrollable, throwing me against safehouse walls with bone-cracking force. Then vomiting—blood, mostly, spraying across dirty concrete as my digestive system rebelled against changes it couldn't process.
[ EVOLUTION SICKNESS DETECTED ]
[ SEVERITY: MODERATE ]
[ DURATION: 24 HOURS ESTIMATED ]
[ COMBAT EFFECTIVENESS: -60% ]
[ BP EXPENDITURE: DISABLED ]
I crawled to the safehouse corner, curled into a fetal position, and shook through the worst of it. Six hours of fever. Three hours of spasms. Twelve hours of aching, bone-deep exhaustion as my body integrated changes that should have been spread across weeks.
System notifications scrolled through the agony:
[ BONE DENSITY INCREASING: 12% ]
[ MUSCLE FIBER RESTRUCTURING: COMPLETE ]
[ NEURAL PATHWAY OPTIMIZATION: 78%... 84%... 91%... ]
[ OCULAR ENHANCEMENT: INTEGRATED ]
[ REGENERATION PROTOCOLS: ACTIVE ]
At hour twenty-three, the fever broke.
I stood slowly, testing rebuilt limbs. Stronger. Faster. Sharper. The darkness was irrelevant now—Night Vision painted every shadow in perfect detail. My muscles responded with power that would have been impossible a week ago.
"Worth it. Barely. But worth it."
[ CURRENT BP: 344/500 ]
[ ABILITIES ACTIVE: ]
[ - ENHANCED STRENGTH LV.1 ]
[ - ENHANCED REFLEXES LV.2 ]
[ - NIGHT VISION LV.1 ]
[ - REGENERATION LV.1 ]
[ COMBAT EFFECTIVENESS: RECOVERING (87%) ]
The safehouse was a condemned apartment three blocks from prime Lycan territory. I'd chosen it for defensibility—single entrance, good sightlines, escape route through the basement. Standard surgical planning applied to tactical positioning.
Blood Appraisal pinged something new.
[ WARNING: MULTIPLE SIGNATURES APPROACHING ]
[ TARGET 1: LYCAN (ALPHA CLASS) - 238 BP ]
[ TARGET 2-4: LYCAN (SOLDIER CLASS) - 55-68 BP EACH ]
[ ETA: 4 HOURS ]
Raze.
The Alpha had finally noticed someone was decimating his pack. Eleven kills in six days. Enough to demand retaliation. Enough to bring the pack leader himself into the hunt.
I checked my weapons. Dual Berettas, 115 rounds remaining. Silver dagger. Combat coat. Enhanced abilities still integrating but functional.
Four hours until an Alpha Lycan and three soldiers arrived to kill me.
The old me—the surgeon, the human—would have run. Fled the safehouse, abandoned the territory, reported to Kraven and requested backup.
The new me grinned through bloody teeth.
"Alphas are worth 150+ BP minimum. Soldiers add another 180. If I kill them all..."
The math was beautiful. Dangerous, but beautiful.
I started preparing the kill zone. Furniture repositioned as barriers. Sightlines cleared for maximum firing coverage. The basement escape route rigged with tripwires—not to kill, but to slow pursuit if things went wrong.
Raze wanted revenge.
I wanted his blood points.
One of us was going to be disappointed.
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