SOS CH 24: DEVOURING (Patreon)

The faint echoes of running and hurried steps filled the hallways of the spaceship.  Someone was running away, with all their might.

The sounds of the steps were buried by the blaring alarms that resounded all over the ships and the sounds of gunshots and small explosions.

All those sounds mixed together to create a symphony of death and chaos. A symphony that Phaeia did her best to ignore even as she ran for dear life, her eyes filled with horror as the image she witnessed continued to haunt her mind.

This was not possible.

This should not be possible.

HOW WAS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?

Such thoughts continued to move around in her mind but all of them were silenced by one simple reality. An instinct that was embedded in most living creatures.

Survival.

Her mind, brilliant as it was and her instincts, even as slow as they were, came to the same conclusion.

Run!

Flee!

Leave the ship!

Those were her only chances of survival. Only by leaving as fast as possible could she hope to not get brutally killed.

Ugh~!

Nausea came to her as the image replayed in her mind again.

Phaeia was a pirate. Though not a frontline soldier, she had witnessed many crimes, some of them really sickening. She thought she had built up enough resistance but clearly, she had thought wrong.

They all had underestimated Noah.

He was not some simple native with no power to retaliate. He was a monster.

Purely and simply a monster.

[Gha!!!]

[Shoot him! Shoot him!]

[My face! Argh!!]

More and more cries filled her ears. She wished she could simply cut the communication but if she did she would be lost with no means of knowing even what was happening.

Could she even escape at this rate? The pirate group was being decimated as if they were a bunch of sheep sent to a wolf. Her armor was not equipped for high jump, there were no hoovers and no mecha.

What could she do?

Her mind drifted to two options, hiding or trying to find a way.

She gritted her teeth. If she wanted to survive, she needed to do it. Changing her direction, Phaeia started running toward the place where the healing pods were placed. She had to do her best.

____________________

Meanwhile, on Noah's sigh, the fight was slowly coming to an end. The place where the fight had taken place was bathed in blood of all colors, giving an appearance that would chill the bones.

Limbs in armor or without could be seen everywhere and pieces of organ and flesh could be seen everywhere. The corpses of the pirates, some who still had their eyes opened in disbelief, or agony littered the ground.

In reality. Calling this fight was nothing but an overstatement as what happened was more akin to a pure massacre of the like that could only be possible when someone overwhelmingly stronger was fighting a group of weaker people.

Standing in the middle of this bloodbath, Noah was holding the neck of the last pirates with his right hand. Because of the difference in sizes, the pirate could not be lifted high. But it did not matter much as his neck was about to be crushed and his eyes were rolling around because of the lack of air.

“Hum…Their sensation of pain is similar to humans. The heart, brain, and lack of blood are also fatal weaknesses. Finally, they do breathe as well. Is it a similarity to carbon-based life forms? Or simply because they are mammals?”

“Please…”

The pirate forced the words to come out despite the force around his throat but Noah had no care for him. His eyes shone with an eerie golden light as he continued to murmur the different points he noticed during his fight, causing even more despair to form over the face of the pirate.

During the short fight or the short massacre that happened, uncaring for the wounds he received, the young-looking boy proceeded to methodically and surgically destroy each of them in the most varied ways possible.

Pullings their skins, piercing their skills, blowing a hole in their chests, cutting their limbs, crushing them to pieces.

Fighting him had been akin to having the first place for a horror show.

But for the man, the most horrifying thing was not simply the way he killed them. But rather the look in his eyes.

As a pirate, he had seen many crazy bastards. People who took a sick sadistic pleasure in seeing other people suffer and beg for their lives before slowly dying.

Those people were normal. As crazy as they may be, he was able to understand them.

But this boy…

“Hum, you have something to say?”

Noah released the hand that was around his throat, allowing him to breathe.

Cough~ Cough~

Up to this day, he had never realized how painful and precious being able to breathe could be. Tears formed around the corner of his eyes as he kneeled down before slowly looking up.

Through the blur of his tears, the smile on Noah’s face seemed…Almost devilish.

The same smile, the same gentle affable tone. But those eyes, those coldly glancing at him, examining him, dissecting him like watching a frog or mice on the dissection table.

There was no joy in torturing them. No happiness in beating them. No sadness over being betrayed by them.

A smile that was not a smile. A smile that was nothing more than a copy of what should be a smile.

It had taken a while to understand but as the scream of pain of his companion filled his ears, he realized one thing.

From the very beginning, Noah was not even looking at them as living beings of the same level.

He was not even looking down on them.

Perhaps in his eyes, they were nothing more than pebbles on the ground whose only worth was providing him information.

Now finally able to speak, the man asked feebly, his voice laced with despair,

“What kind of monster are you?”

What else could this be than a monster?

“How can you be so strong?”

This did not make sense. None of this made sense. He had seen powerful people in his life. Beings who could erase continents from the map in minutes or cosmic beasts who could swallow entire entire planets.

Entities, so powerful their mere names shook the galaxy as no one dared to cross them.

But all those people had something in common. The usage of Dark Matters and extremely powerful Frame at their disposal.

How could someone with nothing above the normal level of Dark matter in a body could actually be so powerful?

He waited, hoping against all hope that he would receive an answer. At least one answer before dying.

Sadly, what he heard was nothing like he expected.

Smiling quietly, Noah caressed his head, like a man would pat the head of a pet.

“Then let me ask you…Why are you so weak?”

“Hah…”

No more words escaped from him as the hand that was on his head clenched slightly, causing the upper part of his head to completely get crushed under this vice-like grip.

“Oh…He has red blood, huh.”

Noah stood up and looked at the pieces of skulls, blood, and brain matter that were all over his hand.

“His brain seems to be relatively larger than what normal humans have. Interesting.”

He looked around, wanting to try a few more tests but stopped when he realized that no one else was moving anymore.

“Hum? Either my memory is playing more or there should have been one more person?”

— The Cyclops.

“Ah…You are right.”

He sighed and started grimacing as he looked at his clothes once again. The clothes were completely ruined. Not only because of all the blood and flesh but also because of the various-sized holes that were the result of either guns or swords and other such weapons.

Unsurprisingly, the clothes that had been offered to him gave little in terms of actual protection. Perhaps the legend that said the less armor covered, the more defense it gave was not only for women?

Chuckling in his mind, Noah moved and rotated his shoulder slightly.

“My regeneration speed increased slightly. Not only that, I have been feeling like all my senses are coming back alive.”

Noah grinned. Perhaps this was the feeling of fighting actual intelligent people? It was quite the experience.

“Anyway. I initially planned to end that woman at first but I got distracted. But I guess this is good as well.”

He looked around at all the mutilated bodies. The smile that was on his face became slightly more genuine when it landed on the last one he killed.

“A monster, huh…”

Noah did not deny those words. Be it in mind or body, he had long since left the confines of what could be called humans.

He knew and understood that more than anyone else. But clearly, the words of the man had managed to upset him slightly.

This was good. As contradictory as this may seem, this anger actually made him happy.

“I guess I am not completely a monster yet, then?”

He whistled a little and began pilling the corpses close to each other, uncaring of whether they wore their armor or not.

It wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

“Phew…Now I guess it’s your turn.”

—Finally!

The right part of Noah wiggled slightly. Ink black substance spread from his right sclera, dyeing it nearly entirely black, leaving only his pupils with a deep scarlet, before moving down to his right arm.

The Dark substance continued to gather and wiggle until it finally transformed into a gigantic black claw with a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. This was soon followed by dozens of bloodshot crimson eyes opening one after another over the entire arms rolling and looking everywhere before all stopping in the direction of the corpses.

“Bon appétit.”

With a broken French accent, a gruesome feast started, bones, flesh, armor, weapons, and the like all devoured down to the latest bit.

Watching all this and ignoring the revulsing sight of the dozen eyes moving around, the slurpings and gurgling sounds that were being produced, as corpses were being chewed up like nothing, Noah chuckled and scratched his head awkwardly with his left hand before shrugging.

“Yep. Definitely not a monster at all.”