8.There is a god damn lion over there

Dwax wasn't hurt by Dong Jun's previous remarks. It was true that he was a street rat.

Dong Jun put Dwax's blood into her gene-harvesting organ. She then wolfed down some canned food in a hurry. She was going to go through a fever for some time after this.

"I've already locked my genome to edits outside of my own harvesting organ. With this, I will be able to walk outside. I didn't expect to have this so quickly. By the way, Dwax. Your genome is permanently closed to outside edits too. If you didn't have both naked molerat genes and that lock, you would've been in the same boat as those two."

Whenever Dwax tried to get a job, he was fired after getting injected with things and then tested. He now understood why he had been getting fired from all those jobs all those times. They failed to take control of Dwax's genome and threw a hissy fit. The bastards. The pain of the years of starvation he has been through bubbled up as a deep, thick rage. Worse yet, all those who did this to him were dead. There was no one to take this profound rage out of.

Kahara put her hands on Dwax's back.

"Are you alright? You look shaken."

Dwax quickly snapped out of it. He couldn't just give in to his emotions here. He remembered something important.

"Dong Jun, push something into your toilet when you're not using it." Hearing Dwax say that, Kahara vigorously nodded. Her painful memories had surfaced."

Dong Jun was befuddled.

"Why?"

Kahara told her what happened when she tried to do her business in the apartment in the shopping district. Dong Jun was shaken with terror when she heard what happened to Kahara that fateful day.

"Man, that would've sucked. Luckily for me, our toilets aren't connected to the sewer system. It's connected to an algae farm. The big prism on top of the building gathers the light into the small opening. It's a marvel of engineering. The path that light takes within it is programmable through electrical intervention. The algae get light the whole day."

Dong Jun had bought this apartment for a pretty penny, and she loved to brag about it. The brag fell on deaf ears since she was talking to two renters and a hobo. She rolled her eyes and excused herself; she wanted to rest and finish her metamorphosis.

Since there was already an apartment that had been broken into, the trio decided to crash there. Dwax excused himself and threw Kahara's ex-lover out of the balcony. He wiped all the disgusting things clean as best he could. He cleaned everywhere except the spot where the man was. That probably caused the chemical composure of the tiles on the ground. No amount of cleaning products could clean up the smudge. He had aired the place out and gotten rid of the stench.

Kahara threw herself on the couch.

"Ah, this is nice."

Warrow yelled,

"Do me! Do me! Throw me too!"

Kahara picked Warrow up and threw him onto the couch. Warrow yelled a pillow-muffled yell.

"Fuck yeah!"

Kahara ran to the mini-fridge. The fridge's light illuminated her feline eyes.

"Score! Ha ha! SCORE!"

There were a series of alcoholic beverages in beautiful, sparkly glasses. She picked them up one by one and placed them on the marble furniture. Flipped upside down by Dwax, Warrow started celebrating too.

"Oh sh*t, look at all those beauties!"

Without further fanfare, Kahara took a swig.

"Ahh, good stuff."

The demonic-looking person lying on the couch shook his head violently.

"Pour some into my mouth! I want it! I want it!"

She took some alcohol and some fruit juice and poured them into Warrow's mouth simultaneously. She had created a cocktail in his mouth. She gave the dumbfounded Dwax a glass too.

"Drink it."

Dwax, inexperienced in drinking, downed the whole glass in one swing. Kahara watched in amusement as Dwax's face went red at a noticeable speed.

"Oh my god, what did you do? Drink slowly. It's not going anywhere."

She went back to the kitchen to search for something else.

" Oh, man. Why didn't this guy have anything to eat with all this alcohol? Does that make sense to you? A decent person would have at least had some potato chips. Dwax, we gotta go to the market and pick up some chips. The alcohol tastes bad when you drink it by itself."

Dwax picked up his axe and told her he was ready. It was just a hundred-meter walk. No big deal. They made their way to the market, and when they were returning, Kahara tugged on Dwax's shirt in fear.

They both bolted toward the plaza door, and the lion in the distance bolted after them. If it were just Dwax, he wouldn't have noticed the lion before it got too close. Sure, he would be able to catch its every movement in minute detail, but that doesn't mean he could've reacted to its attacks with the same swiftness. He would've been mauled.

The giant lion slammed itself against the narrow door. It pushed its paw in to try and grab something. It growled a terrible low growl as it put its eyes near the door to see what was going on inside. By that time, the duo had already made their way up the stairs and to the third floor.

The lion started pacing back and forth. After it understood that it had let its prey escape, it gave up. It was hungry; it couldn't waste more time on escaped prey. It walked away and started eating a rotting corpse out of desperation.

Kahara started laughing.

"Well, that sobered me up real quick."

Dwax smiled to not let Kahara feel bad, but deep within he was in no mood to laugh.

"We are trapped in this building. I'm going up to notify Jun. You go tell Warrow what's happening." He stopped for a second and said,

"Give me a bag of chips."

They split.

"Hey Jun! Are you in there?"

Jun opened the covers of her glass wall.

"What? Can't you see that I'm going through a metamorphosis? Why do you guys insist on bothering me?"

Dwax rolled his eyes and said,

"Look out of the widow."

Jun raised her eyebrow and made her way to the window. She put her hands on the window glass in excitement once she realized what she was looking at.

"Oh shit! Look at the size of that thing. That's a big boy."

Dwax couldn't understand her excitement. Perhaps she couldn't understand their situation well. Seeing his confused face, Jun explained her relaxed attitude.

"That thing over there is designed by morons if designed at all. A lion is a warm-blooded animal. That means, at that size, it is slowly cooking itself alive. That poor thing is not long for this world. We can wait it out or give it a heat stroke one way or another. Wait. Let me check tomorrow's weather forecast!"

She booted up her computer and didn't realize what she was doing after the computer failed to pull up weather data.

"Oh yeah, the world has ended. Haha, I forgot." Her face was beet red. The fever had taken proper hold of her. She was sweating profusely.

"Dwax I'm bored. Talk to me."

Dwax was put on the spot. He didn't know what to say. Jun sat on a bar stool near the glass wall.

"I tried to reach people over the internet, but all I could reach were bots. It was bastards all the way up back then. It turns out that everyone I didn't personally know on the internet was a large language model AI designed to either nudge my thinking in a certain direction or sell me something."

Dwax was having a hard time relating. However, he could see that it was important for her. He gave her a standardized answer.

"That's really something."

Jun sighed.

"I used to have a lot of internet friends. Now that I think about it, were they even real? Isn't it cruel, Dwax? Isn't it cruel to trick people into thinking they are loved?"

Dwax knitted his brows.

"When somebody fucks you over in your work life or somewhere else if you tried to talk to people on the internet about it, would you end up talking to people or would you end up talking to bots?"

After hearing that question she realized something. Jun was three times more upset than before after that. A drunk and a fever patient were bonding over their mutual distrust of authority. On another floor of the building, Kahara and Warrow were having a different conversation.

" Pour more of the good stuff into my mouth. I can't take this news sober. A giant lion, you say? Fuck me. Just what I wanted as a cripple. Bravo. Bravo. Thanks life. Whenever I'm feeling cheerful, you know just the thing to bring me down. Pour some more Kahara. God knows I need it."

Warrow was a good drinking buddy. Kahara didn't forget to feed him potato chips every now and then.