He 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 body barely fit as he forced his way through.
'An alley.'
Pausing for a moment, he took it all 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 were piled on the coffee table, while empty beer bottles were scattered across the floor.
Clothes lay in messy heaps around the room, and the television cast a pale light across the ceiling.
On the couch, a heavy looking 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, a sign of his unhealthy or sedentary lifestyle.
Scratching his stomach, the target reached for a bottle of beer.
'Time to move in.' 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.
He moved through the space, mapping the area.
By the time the target finally dragged himself into the bedroom and fell onto the mattress, Francis had already formed a plan.
'I need to kill him fast and make sure he doesn't get the chance to run.'
Studying the beer bottles on the floor, he tested each one with a careful bite, scoring the glass at its stress points without breaking it, then rolling them.
Set traps didn't need to be complicated. They just needed to be ready.
About three minutes later, the set up was complete.
The man's snores filled the room. Rattling like something loose inside a machine.
Francis climbed onto the mattress and waited above the chest area.
Midway through the wait, the names and faces of his daughters suddenly surfaced, but he pushed them down.
Right now, all that mattered was the mission.
He kept repeating to himself that this 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.'
Francis struck.
His teeth drove into the side of the neck, right over the carotid area, fast and deep.
Blood spilled at once, but he didn't stop there.
'Not enough.'
He drove his teeth into the left eye socket. The eyeball burst under pressure, fluid spraying across the pillow.
The man rolled off the bed and screamed, "Help—!"
THUD!
He went down hard — arms windmilling — and hit the floor where the scored bottles were waiting.
crack! crack! crack!
Glass exploded at every weak point.
"HELP! SOMEBODY—"
The glass dealt a lot of damage, but it wasn't enough to bring the target down completely.
Fortunately, he had already accounted for the possibility that humans in this world were more durable and prepared for it.
The man randomly swung at his own face.
Francis countered, several eyes opening across his rat body. He tracked every movement at once and slipped past each strike, avoiding them all.
Just as the target opened his mouth for another scream, Francis lunged inside, gnawing and ripping from within before bursting out through the neck in a spray of blood and tissue.
'Don't fight it,' Francis watched his prey drown in its own blood. 'You're only making your suffering last longer.'
THUD!
The victim completely collapsed to the floor, barely breathing.
There was no single word to describe what the man felt—confusion, fear, pain and disbelief all twisted together as he tried to comprehend why a sewer rat would do this.